Death of the Self; Rebirth of Ego

User avatar
Golnax
Posts: 1498
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2016 7:00 pm

Death of the Self; Rebirth of Ego

Post by Golnax » Sat May 29, 2021 3:53 am

Chapter 1

War had changed Aimi Kaguya.

The change wasn't such that he suffered from trauma, waking screaming in the night over what had happened to him or the things he had done. It did not change his beliefs on the use of power or how to exert ones' own will upon the world around them. No, War had changed Aimi Kaguya's vocation from that of a shinobi, a soldier, a leader of armies... to a bureaucrat. Being the Daimyo of a nation, it seemed, was mostly about making decisions and filling out paperwork.

Aimi Kaguya sat at a desk that many in the five greater nations would consider makeshift at best. Low to the ground and made of bamboo primarily with twine and wood supporting it, it was just one of many examples of the lack of progression that Gold Country had as compared to the rest of the world. Carpentry, it seemed, took a backseat when things such as survival, war and starvation were front and center in your life. It was not the craftsmanship of the table that bothered Aimi though. What bothered him was the mountain of papers that were in front of him and on all sides! Every day he was being bombarded with requests, legality issues between the formerly separate nations that needed to be resolved, divisions of labor disputes and all manner of complaints seemingly coming from every citizen of his nation!

The Daimyo of Gold Country sat with one hand clutched in his long white hair while the other tapped a pen against the bamboo table and he stared down at the words written before him, words that just blurred together at this point. He found himself reconsidering this position he had put himself in and asking the question of this is truly what he wanted? In his mind he had had a clear image of what it was that he wanted this nation to be. A country as modern and as powerful as any of the Great Nations that he himself had hailed from. He had lived in their comforts his entire life - electricity, cooking from restaurants, well oiled machines of government that ran all of the invisible machinations that made life possible in the shinobi world - but he had never thought about their make up, their structure, how they had come to be. He realized, now, sitting there and staring down at words that meant nothing to him anymore and this was how it was done and that he was ill suited for the task. The sun bore down hot on his pale, pinking skin. Flies buzzed around his sweaty body. Aimi was far too hot but the early afternoon sun had shifted the shade that he had been sitting in all morning.

Aimi closed his eyes and sat the pen down to try and clear his head. He did this often as of late. Some of the only times that he wasn't staring at paper or closing his eyes to try and recenter himself was the scant couple of hours each day that he took to himself to teach those who would learn the ways of chakra. Even this was only of so much help however. Teaching was slow and, just as he had underestimated the work it took to prop up a nation from nothing, he had underestimated the institution that was a shinobi academy and the efficiency that it had earned over generations on how to teach the shinobi arts! Never before had he attempted to teach people who had absolutely no concept of what chakra was and, frankly, it was a difficult concept to translate! It all seemed so easy in his mind, and with some it had been easier than others - he had managed to teach his soldiers some basic but effective fire jutsu during the war after all and some samurai chakra control to an extent - but the fundamentals of the nature of chakra and how to mold and utilize it to students both young and old? All by himself? It was nearly as impossible of a task as setting the wheels in motion to build a nation from the ground up, again, on his own! As such, while rewarding in a personal sense, teaching held little in the way of relaxation for Aimi Kaguya these days.

Finally with a frustrated grunt Aimi leaned back and dropped the pen on the paper in front of him. He'd been at this for weeks now, sitting in the makeshift village of Kusagakure and trying his best to modernize it with what knowledge he had of how the technology that ran the outside world worked and it was all just so much! For one of the first times in his life he felt genuinely overwhelmed and paralyzed! And there wasn't a raiton user to be seen within hundreds of miles of him!! Standing up in a huff from his seat on the ground, Aimi swatted the flies that buzzed around him out of the air and turned to walk away from the whole thing if only for a little while. He needed space. He needed time. He needed quiet!

Quiet was something that was perhaps the most difficult thing to come across these days for him. Between the constant scratching of pen to paper, the sounds of construction all around him, the talking and shouting of the citizens of Gold and all manner of industrialization it was, quite frankly, impossible to find silence these days. He had long since gotten used to sleeping through the noise around him but even so he would always wake up to more of it. His people worked diligently through the night in shifts, proving themselves to be every bit as hard working and hardy as their isolated cultures would make anyone. He strode quickly through the makeshift streets of Kusagakure, paths through the grass that had been trodden down and flattened over the weeks of human feet trampling back and forth, back and forth. Everything in Kusagakure was makeshift. The tables, the roads, the buildings, all makeshift! Stepping stones towards what would, hopefully, with any luck, become a major metropolis like any capital found in the Great Nations. But as it was? Makeshift roads. Makeshift tables.

Aimi strode past people without looking at them or speaking. Many of them bowed their heads or hailed him as he passed but he ignored them all. Aimi was on a fast track to nowhere where, hopefully, he could find some silence for a while. With every greeting he got his head sunk a little lower as if to try and physically distance himself from the rest of the world around him by keeping the people around him out of his field of vision. It didn't take him long to get to the borders of Kusagakure where the "roads" became a little less trodden and spread out in all directions that formed the beginnings of highways that lead from village to village, landmark to landmark, to mines and other avenues required for the building of a nation... oh, the mines! The gold mines in the north and south comprised perhaps a quarter of the paperwork that he had to fill out all on their own! For weeks he'd been haggling with representatives from Wind when necessary and dealing with the logistics of running a gold mine which he had completely, absolutely, positively zero experience with in literally any capacity, shape or form! Aimi was tired of mines and people and bureaucracy! He took a path trodden by no one but him. He took to the skies and flew away from Kusagakure, his bone-feather wings beating hard against the air and carrying him away from all of the noise and people and problems! He just needed space!

He didn't stop flying until he could no longer see Kusagakure or any other settlement in any direction, until all that was around him was grass and nature, until he was isolated and alone. He landed in a field of dark green grass as high up as his waist and took in a deep breath, closing his eyes and just relishing the quiet. The hum of the breeze, the whistling of the grass, even the buzzing of insects. It was all so quiet in comparison to the hustle and bustle of the growing Kusagakure that he just took it all in, standing still and silent and blind to all else around him but the quiet. He needed this. Just for a little while... yes, just the quiet, just to be alone. When he returned he would get back to his paperwork and helping construction, yes. He would have political advisors from the north (for the ones from the south were a touch... aggressive and basic in tactics) help him to sort through the growing mountain of legislation and find a balance between tribal law and the various forms of politics that pervaded his nation so that they could all be a single, unified country truly. Yes, he would do all of that and more, all that was required of him and the office of Daimyo... but now he just needed the quiet, the isolation. Aimi needed just a few hours of alone time to himself, no reading or talking or making decisions, then he could get right back to it all. Yes, just a few scant hours. Just some time alone, some quiet...

"What do we have here? Some sort of living beefcake? Because I am STARVING!" It came from nowhere and was followed by an infernal cackling that was at once hollow and sounding as if it came from many voices. The words forced Aimi to snap his eyes open and look around, startled. There should have been no one there! He had looked from the sky and picked this spot specifically so that he'd be alone! Who would dare interrupt this quiet by speaking? Those were his first thoughts, anyways, before Aimi even realized that he had been startled by the sound of the voice he was irritated by it. Bewilderment gave way to bemusement as he looked around and... there was no one there. Nothing. Nothing around him for miles except grass and the occasional tree off in the distance. So where was that laughing coming from?

An answer seemingly came a few meters away from him as movement caught his eye. A head rising up from the grass. Not a human head, no, a canine head with a slick, slender snout and face, huge pointed ears and milky white eyes. Aimi gazed on the animal and genuinely considered for a moment that it had just spoken but... no. The laughter had turned to devilish giggling by now and the dog wasn't moving. No, not a dog. A jackal. A blind jackal. He'd been told about these and had even seen them occasionally off in the distance or heard them at night. He knew them to be a pack animal that was revered by the people in the south where Kusagakure had been settled. If it wasn't laughing, though, then who...?

His answer came as the jackal slowly sank back into the grass and moved away. As Aimi watched it descend into the green waves below a tree became visible from behind it that its' head had been obscuring before way off in the distance. And next to this tree was a... person. At least Aimi thought it was a person. They were so far away that it was difficult to tell and the grass obscured half of their body, but to him it looked like the dark shape of a person underneath the shade of the tree and leaning against the trunk, shoulders rising and falling in time with the chortling he still heard. This person was the source of the laughter and the interruption to his quiet? But... then again...

How was he hearing them from so far away?

Aimi watched as the figure pushed themselves by the shoulder off of the tree and turned to walk behind its' thin trunk before outright vanishing from his sight as they did not emerge from the other side of the tree. The laughing had cut itself off and Aimi was again alone or seemingly alone at least. Any resemblance of relaxation he had managed to get in his moments of quiet was gone now, replaced by an all too familiar tension as his body tensed up and his mind raced to analyze the situation he was in. Did he fight? Was this person even there to fight? Was this genjutsu? Some other form of illusion? So many questions, none with answers, racing too fast in his stressed mind to be properly considered before the next shoved it aside and demanded an answer of its' own. He stood practically paralyzed when the voice returned again, this time nearly directly over his shoulder.

"Well!" the voice spoke. It was a husky sort of voice, deep and thick of accent as if the mouth that formed the words was malformed. The words were almost garbled and that deep, hollow tone was tinged with the sound of many voices just underneath the surface like bubbles rising to the surface of water. It spoke again and, despite everything about Aimi Kaguya being who he was, he did not move until after the words had been spoken, still staring off in the distance at the tree as if in a trance, yet he heard the thing speak directly into his ear as though sensually whispering to him... and it was whispering... a joke?

"At least we'll know where the blind shinobi are! They won't be hard!"


More of that insane laughter followed and Aimi Kaguya whipped around to find himself facing some unknown entity. What he had thought to be a person from far away was very clearly not up close. It stood well over double his height with proportions that were just slightly wrong for a human body in every respect, bare chested and, despite its' height, somehow only emerging from the grass from the waist up, giving it a strange dimension about it that was difficult for the Kaguya to comprehend at a glance. Most of all, though, was the head of this entity. Not human, he stared at the visage of a jackal that had no eyes in its' sockets, its' head adorned with a white hooded crown with gold and lapis lazuli striping. Its' lips were curled back in a hideous mockery of a smile like a dog panting as chunky fits of laughter escaped its' form, chest rising and falling with each breath. Blindly it stared down at Aimi Kaguya and he stared up at it. In place of the quiet, there was only laughter now.
Last edited by Golnax on Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Golnax
Posts: 1498
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2016 7:00 pm

Death of the Self; Rebirth of Ego

Post by Golnax » Sat May 29, 2021 7:29 pm

Chapter 2
"Mm! Mm! Mm! Mm, that's good, that's real good," the thing remarked as it reached up with a long arm and patted its' belly as its' fits of laughter died down. Aimi remained strangely paralyzed, unable to look away from this thing before him even as it reached out with one thing hand and long, almost tendril-like fingers. It placed its' hand upon his shoulder and pulled itself close to Aimi and, suddenly and without warning, it was as tall as he was. Its' proportions were that of a normal mans', save for the head, and it stood next to Aimi with a casual air that bordered on the nonchalant. Again without warning it reached up and ran a slender finger against his cheek.
"So! Cut any good meat lately? Because with cheeks like these you could work a delicatessen singlehandedly!" it said and followed it up with even more demented chuckling, the thing throwing its' head back and snickering through clenched, canine teeth. Aimi's brow furrowed and then suddenly it clicked. The strangeness of this thing, the weirdness of its' happenstance. Finally after all of that paralysis his body began to move as he made the decision to confront this thing here and now. He shrugged his shoulder out from under the hand of the cackling fiend before him and took steps away from it. "I know what you are," he declared confidently.

The jackal headed thing turned its' blind head towards Aimi as he backed away, that twisted mockery of a smile returned to its' long snout.
"That so, hot stuff? Well go on! Reveal your deductions to me, Sherlock!" it challenged, crossing its' arms over its' chest and placing one hand underneath its' jowls. Aimi stepped to the side and tried to circle around what he perceived to be a blind entity but no matter where it was he stepped its' head would follow him, those large ears twitching and turning as though satellites. Aimi paused before answering, though, as he pondered that word he'd never heard before - sherlock. Had that thing just made up a word on the spot? That was usually his thing and he wasn't used to having it happen to him. It left him bewildered for a moment and he realized that this must have been what other people felt like when he spoke his gibberish at them. Never the less, he remained steadfast in his challenge of this blind jokester before him.

"You're a spirit. Only explanation for all this. Can't be genjutsu, no one around to cast it or anyone who knows how to in this country just yet," Aimi announced. The spirit chuckled, folding its' arms up and clapping its' hands together excitedly.
"Winner winner! Get this man some chicken for dinner!" the spirit cried out as it clapped.
"You've figured out what I am, but tell me, do you know who I am? Hm?" "I don't think I really care," the Kaguya retorted. "I've dealt with spirits before, and they can fall as easily as any man! So tell me what you want, spirit, before I lo-"

It laughed again, that sickening hollow laugh with so many voices just beneath the surface. It stopped Aimi in his tracks.
"Sure you have! You've dealt with some big bad spirits before! Yep! Truly! Like those Biju boys, or, er, sorry, wrong canon, Genma guys!" If the laughter hadn't stopped Aimi before this would have. It took a moment for what the spirit said to sink in but Aimi realized soon enough that what he was saying, indirectly, was that he had at least some knowledge of Aimi... enough to know that he had had contact with Genma. Flashes of memory crossed his mind as he thought of Nishiki and the beast within Yoshimitsu, Shinji and Vorashuu, and that Konoha shinobi that had invaded his body once before. Each of those encounters were private, away from prying eyes, and the genma were all sealed within human hosts, cut off from the spirit world. There was no way that this spirit in front of him should know about that! Was his mind being read? Was the notion that the genma were entirely cut off from their own kind false?
"Mm, yes, spin those thoughts around! You're so pretty when you think!" the spirit jabbed, laughing at its' own remark. That laughter was beginning to get on Aimi's nerves. "Stop that! Stop this instant!" Aimi demanded, his hands balling into fists and his stance widening.
"Or what, half-pint? Hm? Whatchya gonna do? Attack me?" the spirit taunted.

"YES!" Aimi cried out in anger, dashing forward the short distance between them and throwing a haymaker of a punch that was intended to send the spirit spiraling backwards through the grass!

Except that didn't happen. Aimi's fist landed on thin air as the spirit was vanished the moment that his arm would have made contact with its' canine face. Aimi was left standing in the grass perplexed and looking around in all directions for the spirit who was nowhere to be seen or heard. He didn't understand. There was so much he didn't understand about this situation that he found himself in. Nor did he have time to properly think about these things before, once again, he was assaulted by the sound of twisted laughter coming from above. He craned his head upwards and saw the jackal headed spirit floating in the air, cross legged and upside down, staring with those empty eyes.
"Not gonna work, pal! I'm not Yoshimitsu trapped in the body of some punky colored fox boy you know!" the spirit chortled. AImi was beginning to suspect that this spirit was going to laugh at anything and everything. He thought that first before realizing that it had said the name Yoshimitsu. That could only mean -

"You know about my efforts to contain Yoshimitsu?" Aimi asked, fanning his wings out and taking flight into the sky directly above to once again try and strike at the floating spirit.
"Yep!" the spirit had time to say before once again vanishing an instant before the Kaguya could meet his mark. Frustrated, Aimi let out a loud growl and threw his arms down at his sides. "What do you WANT!? I just came out here for some peace and quiet!" he roared.
"I want you to start asking the million ryo questions, that's what I want," the spirit called from the ground below, now hovering over the top of the grass upright but otherwise in the same position that it had been in in the air. He hadn't noticed before but the spirit was wearing a matching blue vest and spirt that went down to just above its' knees.

"Leave me alone, you fucking spirit!" the Kaguya screamed which did nothing but incite more laughter from the jackal headed miscreant below. Flapping his wings furiously Aimi divebombed down to the ground below, legs extended, in an attempt to plow the disturber directly into the ground, only to once again find his efforts to be for naught as he hit nothing but air and the ground below which ruptured upon his impact. Furious and overwhelmed Aimi stood up straight and found the spirit standing perhaps ten meters away from him at the most, now taller than him by at least three feet and holding in his hands...

He didn't want to believe it at first. He thought his mind must be playing some kind of trick on him. It had been ages since he'd seen him, true, but he was so distinct! Aimi couldn't possibly forget -

"Vodka Mutini...?" Aimi asked in confusion, looking on the small, black, four eyed cat that now lay nestled in the arms of the jackal spirit, tail flitting back and forth and all four of its eyes on the Kaguya. The trio stood without saying a word or making a sound, not even the sound of giggling, as Aimi worked it out. "You... were a spirit? This whole time? And you were... spying on me?"
"Heavens, no! Vodka Mutini is not a spy! He's just my buddy, known him for years! Absolutely zero tolerance for sake," the spirit said, holding up the cat and nuzzling its' nose against that of Vodka Mutini's before letting the cat go in the air. Vodka Mutini floated in place for a moment before righting itself, walking on the air in a circle, giving Aimi one final look and then vanishing as it stepped behind the crowned head of the jackal.
"Vodka is an insufferable gossip, though, which is how I knew about your little tussle with the genma over the years. Not spying, honest, just keeping up on those obnoxious big wigs who think they run the place! Like being huge and having special powers somehow makes you superior! Invader Zim rules!"
"BaZiNgA!"
The sound was deafening, coming from seemingly nowhere - not even the spirit, and forcing Aimi to flinch on the spot, crouching down and pulling his hands up towards his ears that were left ringing in the wake of whatever that had been. Straightening back up he looked over at the giggling spirit and found himself unsure of what it was he was looking at. A spirit, yes, that much was for certain. Powerful or fast at that to be able to avoid him three times now, and infuriatingly obnoxious... but beyond that? It was like staring at an enigma that might as well have had no form he could put any descriptors to. He was having trouble comprehending any of this at this point and the fatigue of building a nation was still upon him. Now this? It was too much and he found himself quivering with impotent rage. What could he do? Burn the field down and hope he got the thing? Sure, and there might have been a time years ago now when he would have done that, but now, as a Daimyo? He realized that there was more to a land than just the land, that resources were a valuable thing, and in Gold country these grass fields had utility and value that he simply couldn't just burn away because of petulant anger, lack of catharsis.

"Who are you?" he asked through gritted teeth, relenting to the fact that he needed to play whatever game this was to get through it at this point.
"There's that million ryo question I was waiting for! Who am I? You wouldn't know me, but your people would. I am known as En Framförallt, but I think you would better know me as the Blind Idiot God," answered the spirit who was not wrong. The name meant nothing to Aimi beyond a passing knowledge of it, but the title had stuck with him. It was the title of the deity that many of the people in the south worshiped as their chief god. He was far from an expert, but he knew that much. "Blind Idiot? So then... you're no god. You're just a spirit playing at one..."
"Not that those delightful people of the former Plains and Sea need to know about that," the spirit said, bringing a once again too-long finger up and tapping the side of its' snout knowingly.
"Not that it would make a difference to them if they did anyway! I'm content with being worshipped, even if I'm just ever so slightly lower on the ladder of power compared to the Biju - oops, Genma, sorry, sorry! I'm still every bit as powerful but in different ways!" it snickered.

Aimi chose not to dwell on that for the moment, given that he was potentially faced with at least a single earth shattering development already in the wake of Vodka Mutini's... duplicitous nature. Frankly there was too much on his plate to begin with; there was no room in his mind for the implication that statement brought with it. Raising his fists up again, Aimi furrowed his brow and crouched down slightly as if to prepare to lunge forward and attack again. "You can't have forgotten that I've contended with the likes of Yoshimitsu and come out on top on more than one occasion. What makes you think I can't catch you and smack you around for disturbing me?" he threatened vaguely.
"Hm, true! You could! You'd flit and I'd dodge and you'd catch me eventually and likely slap me silly! It might even be fun! But you've got more questions to ask me, and I'm not going anywhere until you do. We're just getting to know each other after all!" the Blind Idiot said, extending a terribly long arm and pointing a witchy finger at Aimi. It was almost an accusation, or a threat of its' own perhaps.
Last edited by Golnax on Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Golnax
Posts: 1498
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2016 7:00 pm

Death of the Self; Rebirth of Ego

Post by Golnax » Sun Jun 06, 2021 10:40 pm

Chapter 3

Questions. This spirit, this Blind Idiot God, En Framförallt, wanted Aimi to ask questions. The rogue bannin turned Daimyo didn't really understand it, and how could he? He was dealing with an entity claiming to be as powerful as any of the Genma who, legend had it, had once ran rampant and decimated the world in their wake for little other reason than the fun of it! And this spirit before him now had an attitude more befitting a jester than a destroyer. What could he possibly ask such an entity that would be worth while? Aimi had no idea where to begin but as he stood, ears still ringing from the vague aftershock of tenuities, the Blind Idiot God did nothing but bring its' fingers up to its' snout and blow on them, waiting patiently.

There was something that Aimi's mind returned to though, a detail that, for whatever reason, was still bugging him. It seemed as good of a place as any to start asking questions, so...

"Vodka Mutini... you said he wasn't a spy but... I've known that cat for years, and he was a spirit... and he was talking to you and I just... how did I not know it was a spirit?" he asked.

"On some level I'm sure you did! The four eyes are a bit of a dead give away really, but up until just now he gave you no other reason to believe that he was anything other than a cat with a birth defect. He likes it that way when he's out and about in the world of men, to be seen as a little animal and nothing more. And no, he wasn't a spy! Honest! You fed him and played with him and he'd come back and tell me and others stories, but you weren't the only one. Far from it! It wasn't as if you kept him in your apartment or anything, he was a stray! He came and went as he pleased and visited lots of people. Free food is easy to come by when you're a cat!"
The Blind Idiot laughed but Aimi found nothing humorous in what he'd said. It was as if it were laughing for laughter's sake rather than anything actually clever or funny. For some reason the news about Vodka Mutini hurt Aimi Kaguya. On some level he'd always looked at that funny little four eyed cat as his pet, even if he only saw him every now and again. Learning that he wasn't ever a cat in reality and had lots of people he went and visited felt like a betrayal. It stung, being betrayed by your cat...

He was beginning to realize that he did in fact have more questions. "What do you want from me, spirit? I can ask questions all day about all sorts of things but you have to have a point to it all. A motive. Why show yourself to me now?"

"Why does anyone do anything really?
the Blind Idiot asked, shrugging its' shoulders, lifting it's arms and letting its fingers uncurl. Their movement was like that of a spiral coming undone. The shrug was followed by the spirit waving its' hand dismissively before it continued speaking.

"I don't mean in the vague philosophical sense of the 'why'. Survival, pleasure, revenge, all that jazz - not what I meant. I mean why do people do things in that random impulse kind of way. You see a nice, succulent pastry being carried on a dish, you get the urge to just smack it for whatever reason - to see how it jiggles, how easily it pops, whatever! It's just impulse bone boy! I go with the flow! It's my style!" Aimi furrowed his brow, reaching his hand up and running it through his hair, dragging his nails over his scalp. "You act on impulse, and you claim to be as powerful as the Genma? I don't believe what I'm hearing... do you honestly expect me to take you seriously right now?"

"As seriously as any mortal facing a god should, yes! Because that's what I am, baby! Belief is a powerful thing and just because you conceptually know that I'm a spirit of the same variety as our dear mutual friend Vodka Mutini or those insufferable Genma doesn't mean you understand what being granted deific status does to a person!" the Blind Idiot said. As it spoke its' form grew slowly, creeping upwards and outwards in every direction at once, its' form distorting against the sea of grass and the sky above as it seemed to hunch over everything with its' arms spread out wide and its' head tilted down to stare directly at Aimi with those empty sockets. So large and so stretched was its' form that Aimi could very easily tell that there was scar tissue in those sockets. Just as he was making a move to defend himself, however, En Framförallt snapped back to a size that was much closer to Aimi in proportion within the blink of an eye.

"Or maybe it does nothing! Who can say, really? What do I look like an expert on religious matters? Nya-HA! Nya-HA! Nya-HA!"
it laughed, but the laughter was obviously forced. More over the spirit lifted one arm up and brought it slapping down against its' leg with each guffaw that it let out. He didn't know what but Aimi felt like this was some kind of reference to something, and not knowing how he understood that disturbed him greatly. The longer he spent time with this thing the more unsettled he was becoming as a matter of fact.

"I don't think you're acting entirely on impulse," Aimi said after a second or two of silence between the two of them. "You've been watching me for a long time, directly or otherwise... you... must have seen or had knowledge of what I was... what we... the world... the War! The Great War! You have to know about that!" Aimi cried out, his tone that of an accusation as his mind scrambled to articulate the point he was getting to.

"Ugh, who doesn't know about that great silly war of yours? It's all anyone is talking about anymore! Shrines defamed, maps redrawn, patron spirits having to serve others now or lashing out because of some long standing what's-it-or-another, la-dee-da, da, da! Honestly don't you humans ever take into account how your actions effect us? We lost an entire island to your warmongering, but do you hear us complaining!? ... Actually though do you? I could use dirt on some spirits if you've got it!"
Aimi did his best to ignore that laughter. "You're appearing before me now. The war is over for the most part, has been for months... I'm trying to make a new nation and hold a bunch of cultures together and just... you have to have picked me for something! What is it!?" Aimi demanded to know.

"Ding ding ding ding! The last horse crossed the finish line guys! Can I get a 'whoop whoop' please?"
"WhOoP WHOOP!"
Again that extremely loud reply came from nowhere and caused Aimi to bow his head with pain, eyes scrunched shut and his left hand moving up to his ear. Even though the ringing he could hear the spirit cackling. The laughter was beginning to anger Aimi Kaguya more than disturb him.

"I chose to show myself to you now because you, of all people, came and conquered my people! Mine! Those funny little warriors from the former Plains and Sea who hunt my good boy doggos, yes they are, and worship them in equal measure! Who model their entire society off of my mythological achievements and what they believe to be the bigger picture I painted like I'm Michaelangelo or something, never once suspecting that I was actually more of a Banksy man! Really, it could have been anyone. You're not special, but at the same time you are special because it was you that came from the world outside and decided to bring all your fun little toys with you! All that conquest you did? Mwah! Chef's kiss!"
the Blind Idiot declared, but Aimi could only really understand maybe half of it because of the fatigue, the situation at large and the ringing in his ears. If he understood correctly, this cackling spirit had singled him out because he was lucky or unlucky enough to have managed to succeed where others had failed in the past and brought this part of the world into the fold, the promise of progress from the world beyond these grassy borders. The Blind Idiot had said it itself - it could have been anyone, but it just so happened to be him. Somehow, Aimi Kaguya found that explanation difficult to believe in exactly the same way he found it hard to stomach that this thing operated purely on impulse.

"The thing is, you're kind of like the new kid on the block who showed up with a big house and a shiny carriage and rich parents who could get you all the tinker toys you could ever play with and more! So much, in fact, that you started showing off to the local kids and giving your toys away to them, while us old guys who used to go to the academy uphill both ways through six feet of snow every day got ignored and pushed to the side! Not cool, new kid on the block!"
Once more Aimi straightened up and looked up to this jackal headed spirit. Things were beginning to make sense to him (he hoped). Basically, he had come marching in with an army, promising unity, prosperity and progress, giving knowledge of chakra, jutsu, societal and governmental structure that he was more familiar with that the Great Five used, and this had upset this spirit who had been using these people as worshipers. That was the picture as he understood it, and if that was the case...

Aimi moved his hand down to grab at his sword but, alas, it wasn't there. He'd left it behind in Kusagakure along with all of his other equipment. Since things had settled down and he had been dedicating more and more of himself to building this country up he had found less and less time or cause to use his weaponry. They were absent from him and though the reflex remained, they would do him no good so far away. Fortunately for Aimi Kaguya, and every Kaguya really, his entire body was a weapon. He had no real need of sword or kunai when he could make his own.

"I get it now... You're angry at me for coming in on what was your spiritual turf. You waited until I was alone from everyone that might care about your image, and now you're here to assassinate me," Aimi declared, throwing his head back to move his hair off of his shoulders as he worked to push the bone of his upper arm out from his shoulder. He grabbed onto the exposed bone and pulled, wrenching a meter long shard of bone that, for all intents and purposes, was a sword for him to use. He pointed the tip at the spirit who claimed to be on par with a Genma, preparing once again to attack - but this time with lethal intent. "I think you'll find I'm a lot harder to kill than the average human, and I'm not going down without a fight!"

"Wow! Amazing! You were wrong on literally every point!" the spirit said, bringing its' hands up to clap them together.
"That's got to be worth a prize or something! Third place ribbon maybe? No, Aimi Kaguya, I'm not here to kill you. I already said I want you to ask questions! You have things that need to be answered my boney skeleboy, and you're not even capable of asking them I think! I ask you, then, if you have ever asked yourself this one simple question:

Who are you really, Aimi Kaguya?"
Last edited by Golnax on Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Golnax
Posts: 1498
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2016 7:00 pm

Death of the Self; Rebirth of Ego

Post by Golnax » Tue Jun 08, 2021 11:49 pm

Chapter 4

The question hung in the air like a dark cloud and, for some unknown reason, Aimi wasn't sure how to answer it. Not because it really hit him deep and hard, no, but it was just such a stupid question to him. Who was he? Who was he? There was only one answer.

"What kind of stupid-ass...? I'm Aimi Kaguya! Of the Kaguya clan!" he said in a tone of frustration, as if having to answer this question was entirely ludicrous in the first place which, to him, it was! The Blind Idiot didn't think so, however.

"But who is Aimi Kaguya, really? Why don't you tell me?"
Aimi's brows dipped downward as anger returned to his face. "I just told you! Aimi Kaguya! I'm no one else but me!"

"Yes but what does that mean, lean cuisine?"


the spirit retorted before further clarifying.
"What does it mean to be Aimi Kaguya? Who are you! Really think about it, I mean really, actually think. Who. Are. You? Have you ever once in your life considered who you are and come to an answer?"


"You're just asking nonsense! Of course I know who I am! Of course I've thought about it!" Aimi roared, swinging the blade of bone through the air beside him and bisecting a thatch of grass, the blades falling to the ground below impotently.

"I don't think you have. Not really. I think, instead, you've considered all the things you're not over the years which, while helpful in narrowing down what it is that you are, does not equate to actually thinking about WHO you are! So! Since you've never thought about it, let's try now! And let's start at the beginning. Are you - "


the Blind Idiot began but was cut off as Aimi slashed at the air in front of him with his crude blade, sending an equally inelegant wave of cutting air approximating his Dragon Slash through sheer speed and force towards the spirit who, predictably, simply vanished from the spot only to reappear a few meters away in a different position. It continued to speak without so much as missing a beat, and for each question that came out of its' mouth Aimi met it with the violence of a cutting wave that decapitated the grass around him in swathes.

"A sick baby? A parentless child? A weapon forged by Kirigakure? A rebel? A killer? A teacher? An estranged son? A wandering nobody? A destroyer of forts and cities? A shepherd? A unifier? A conqueror? A builder of nations? A ninja? A Daimyo?"


"SHUT UP!!!" Aimi cried in desperation and rage. His body was sweating from more than just heat but physical effort, his chest rising and falling with the panting of his breath. He shook not just from the strain on his body that using such unrefined techniques to attack at seemingly nothing caused him, but also at the realization that this Blind Idiot was speaking about him intimately. Each question he asked was a part of his past or his present, and what was worse was that they had been asked in chronological order. They forced Aimi to think of specific moments in his life, much as he was unwilling to, and realize that, yes, at one point or another this was how he had identified himself. But they were not him, none of them... which meant that the spirit was correct. His anger at this chattering jackal's rightness was evidenced by the huge swathes of short grass stalks all around him.

Meanwhile the Blind Idiot hung upside down in the air behind Aimi, clapping its' hands together to draw his attention over to him.

"I think you'll find that shutting up is not one of my strong suits, Aimi Kaguya. Just like thinking isn't yours! But I want you to think! I want you to ask questions, I want you to ask these questions - this one single question - and give me an answer. If you can do that, I'll leave you alone and you'll never have to see me again if you don't want to!"


Panting heavily, Aimi gripped his weapon and clenched his teeth. He locked his eyes on the visage of the floating spirit who was beginning to spin right-side-up relative to Aimi and, as it did, grow ever larger in size until its' feet touched down on the ground below and the grass could only reach up to its' ankles, leaving Aimi to stare up at a colossal spirit. "I've had enough of your games. I'm going to end you, and that'll be that you dummer verdammter Hund!!" he growled, only for the Blind Idiot to cackle at him, it's horrid lips drawn back as it's mouth shot open wide, revealing rows of sharp canines and dark gums.

"Ich bin kein Hund, ich bin ein Schakal! Holen Sie sich Ihr Fauna-Wissen richtig!"


the gigantic spirit retorted - in Aimi's own made up language! Such was the Daimyo's shock at his own gibberish being thrown back at him - and by anything holy did it sound exactly like something Aimi himself would have made up on the spot! - that he froze up on the spot for a moment! He didn't even understand what had just been said to him and it was his own made up words! Roaring with all the might that his lungs could muster, Aimi flapped his wings and took flight, leaping off of the ground and flying towards the spirit, all rage and intent to kill, bone sword raised high and ready to strike down the spirit before him!

The Blind Idiot God, for its' part, merely raised an arm to meet Aimi, extending a finger and touching him on the chest every so briefly, so quickly that it could hardly have been said to have occurred at all, before Aimi fell through the body of the spirit and into some place entirely different, as if the Blind Idiot had been a doorway all along! The raging shinobi fell from the air in an arch and came tumbling down to the ground below on a grassy hill not at all like the grass he had been standing in moments before. Short and soft he tumbled through it and came to a stop on one knee, wings fanned out to either side and sword raised to attack once again, but as his surroundings flooded his senses he, for the umpteenth time, hesitated. This time, however, it was full blown mind destroying shock that kept him still.

The sky was pink clouds and red horizons. Trees thick and thin stretched up high as though pulled taught by invisible fingers, tapering off into visible nothingness as their branches stretched out in all directions like dandelions. A river flowed in front of Aimi with alternating black and red tori gates hanging over its' banks. Not so far in the distance Aimi could see strange creatures lifting their heads and looking over at him. They looked almost recognizable but were as distorted, feverish dreams to wildlife he knew. As he stared a tiny boat surrounded by and covered in what appeared to be fireflies drifted down the gentle waters.

"Where in the world..." he mumbled once the initial shock had worn off, getting up slowly and continuing to look around. He was nowhere near the plain he had been standing it. Nothing looked familiar! All was strange and alien looking to him, and the only thing he did recognize was the conniving laughter that set the hair on his neck on end.

"Not in your world, silly! In mine! Welcome to the spirit world, Aimi Kaguya! Rejoice! For you are a rare individual to have made it here!"
came the mocking chortle of the Blind Idiot God who stood, once again at a reasonable size, behind Aimi a good five meters away. The Kaguya whipped around to face him but took no other action. "The spirit world...? I don't... How? How did I get here!?" Aimi demanded.

"I brought you here! I thought it a good idea for you to really get away from it all when you use that noggin of yours for the first time, and what better place to go than no place at all?"
it asked rhetorically, and as the word 'all' left its' lips the world shook as though a great ripple ran through it emanating from the Blind Idiot's mouth and covering over everything - including Aimi himself who shivered and convulsed at the feeling before falling back down to his knee.

"I wouldn't get too comfortable if I were you, Aimi boy. The spirit world is not like your own! You'll find things are weird and hard for you to understand at first, so you need to take special care and conviction to pull yourself together, or else you'll find yourself drifting away into nothingness!"
the spirit warned ominously. Despite its' cartoonish cadence of speech, Aimi could tell that it was being serious at least on some level... and that scared him. He felt his heart skip a beat as he tried to push his shaky legs back up to stand. "What do you m-" he began to ask, only to stop as he stumbled on the spot and almost fell over. Confused, he looked down at his feet and gasped in horror! His right ankle was no more, at least, it was not attached to him any more it would seem. Instead where the top of his foot was and where his calf met his ankle his flesh was bubbling as though boiling while small flesh-colored bubbles, the same color as his skin, began to float away as if following some invisible breeze, for none was blowing. There was no pain, only the shock of what he was seeing and going through.

"I told you! In your world matter is solid and immoveable unless acted upon. In mine, you need a strong sense of self in order to keep yourself together, and since you've never really thought about who you were before, well I'm afraid that means in a matter of moments you won't properly exist as you know existence to be!"
the Blind Idiot God proclaimed with utter glee in its' voice. Aimi snapped his head back up in horror, a look of genuine fear on his face as he realized only that he was facing something, an entire world - a completely different realm of existence - that he had absolutely no hope of understanding! For all of his usual intellect and comparative calm, his channeled rage and physical prowess, his debatable genius in the use of chakra and all the other things that he normally held as points of pride for himself, Aimi Kaguya stood, dissolving into bubbles, and was for the first time in an extremely long time afraid for his very life.

"No..." he sobbed in disbelief, taking a step backwards and leaving his right foot behind as it too began to morph into nothing but floating bubbles. He looked down at his hands and found that his left was following the same process! He threw his head back and forth to his wings to find that they were already more than half way gone and he hadn't even noticed! "No!" he cried in horror, turning and trying to run away one awkward hop at a time, heading away from the Blind Idiot God who was holding its' gut with laughter and cackling into the red sky as Aimi began to stumble again and float in the air, bits and pieces of himself rapidly floating away into the breezeless wind.

"No! No! No!" he cried out fearfully, throwing himself to the ground and trying to claw at the grass beneath him for some sort of anchor, for support, only to be met with the blades of grass he pulled at popping into small insectoid looking spirits who scurried away from him. Frantically and screaming he clawed at the ground and dragged himself towards the river, desperately trying to keep himself grounded even as his legs were gone and his torso began to rise into the air. In a last ditch effort he reached out with his right arm and grabbed a hold of a rock not far from the river bank. He clung to it for dear life, staring at his hand and hoping beyond hope that his grip would hold, all the while screaming out, "No no no no no no no no!!"

"Surrender to the vooooooooooooooid!"
the Blind Idiot God howled in support of Aimi's plight, only to be met with screams as half of Aimi's head disintegrated just before his right hand, too, began to bubble and wander away. Within seconds, as the last of Aimi Kaguya's screams echoed out into this strange otherworld, all that remained was his eye before it, too, vanished into an ethereal wind.

And then,

he was gone.
Last edited by Golnax on Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Golnax
Posts: 1498
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2016 7:00 pm

Death of the Self; Rebirth of Ego

Post by Golnax » Wed Jun 09, 2021 1:34 pm

Chapter 5
~SIX MONTHS LATER~

Lying next to the tori gate river was a disembodied skull half formed with the brain showing through, a pair of blue eyeballs lying in the sockets unblinking, a pair of lungs connecting to nothing at the bottom of the skull laying on top a mostly complete nervous system, the right tendril of which laid on top of a rock as if gripping it. The lungs rose and fell as if drawing air but did no such circulation of oxygen. The eyes stared into the sky above as clouds rolled by as they had done for weeks now. To those eyes it seemed as if the same clouds had been flying over dozens of times. At times they seemed to crawl through the crimson sky, other times it was as if they raced past over and over again.

This skull, brain, eyes, lungs and bundle of nerves was Aimi Kaguya. This is what he had become in the intervening six months since he had initially arrived and dissolved in the world of spirits. After his body dispersed he was left as just a disembodied consciousness stuck to the spot and screaming constantly. For weeks that was how he had remained; bodiless, without form, a stream of thoughts that whimpered impotently into the strange world around him for absolutely nothing to hear. It took that long for him to even consider that he could exert his will on the world around him since his thoughts remained, to try and call back his body into being. And that's what he did.

Bit by bit, piece by piece, bubble by bubble, Aimi Kaguya recalled his body back from the void and tried to pull it back together though sheer force of willpower. Trouble was, Aimi's willpower was weak in this world without a form or a proper sense of self. In his own world, in the reality he knew, exerting his will was easy. As easy as moving his body and striking out at the world around him. He could make his will manifest through action. Here? As a disembodied thought? The task was titanic. It was easily the most difficult thing that Aimi had ever attempted in his entire life. All of his thoughts, his entire being, needed to be put to the singular task of pulling himself back together. It took time. An excessively long time.

Six months passed by, the passing of the days marked by a cyclical night that came and changed the color of the sky from red to violet, and a brain, partial skull, lungs, eyes and a bundle of nerves.

In six months time, no spirit had come to bother him. He had seen many strange and wonderous forms flying up over head of him. He'd watched as things unknown to him stared down at what must have been his partially formed body, even less formed than it was now, but did nothing and eventually wandered away beyond his sight. He had seen and felt the world pass around him but it was all different agonies. How jealous he felt of these creatures! With bodies of their own to move and fly and flaunt! He never once saw any of the spirits attempting to eat or drink in any sort of way but he himself had longed for the comfort of food many times even though his stomach was off in the void and he knew no hunger.

He'd found himself running the full gambit of emotions while he lay there trying to pull himself together. Anger at his situation, sadness, envy and despair. Aimi did not experience a single positive emotion in all that time, and this state he found himself in was as much as he could manage. The constant thought that this was all he was capable of here was a constant source of rage as compared to the memories of all he had accomplished in his body in his own world. each bubble that rejoined his corporeal form was as another sting rather than a relief. He wanted so badly for this to be over already. All he could think of was returning to himself...

"Well! Don't you look like shit, boney boy?"
Aimi's concentration was interrupted by that infernal voice that had put him in this situation in the first place. His unmoving eyes snapped over to his left where the voice had come from to find the Blind Idiot God standing over him and looking down. The whites of Aimi's eyes grew red with rage and his lungs palpitated faster and faster. He felt such an intense hatred for this spirit that he had never felt before. In that moment, if he could, he would have burnt it and this whole world into ash. He would not stop until there was nothing left no matter how long it took, such was the extent of his animosity towards this one, disproportionate, jackal headed spirit.

"I thought I'd give you some time to collect yourself, but I can see I didn't give you quite enough time! I'll come back when you're finished cooking and we can has things out then."
said the spirit, and then it left. Turning and walking away beyond the line of sight of the partially formed human laying on the ground close to a river in the world of spirits. Aimi's lungs rose and fell so fast that, were the rest of his body there, he likely would have passed out from taking in too much air. He could not move to follow, he had no vocal chords to shout. The best that he could do was let his jaw bone drop and scream silently into the nothingness from whence he had came, only for all the work he had accomplished up to that point to return to that nothingness in one fell swoop.

Screaming silently, Aimi Kaguya once again dissipated into a cloud of bubbles and was, for the second time, no more.
Last edited by Golnax on Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Golnax
Posts: 1498
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2016 7:00 pm

Death of the Self; Rebirth of Ego

Post by Golnax » Thu Jun 10, 2021 10:51 am

Chapter 6
~ONE YEAR AFTER DISSOLVMENT~

Aimi Kaguya stood mostly restored to his former self. His entire skeletal structure had been formed months before, his nerves and organs were in place. Musculature had mostly formed over his body as it should have been and his skin was beginning to retake his upper torso where it had already covered his head. His long white hair was coming back and even his clothes had begun to return to him. Strangely, as was everything else in this world, they, too, had broken apart as bubbles and drifted away with the rest of his being as though the cloak and belt he wore as a means of clothing were intrinsically tied to his being. He thought little of this. It made as much sense as anything else in this alien world.

He stood next to the rock he had clung onto for months at a time after spending an entire month relearning how to stand, his eyes closed and concentrating. His hands, bereft of skin though they were, clenched open and closed repeatedly. Aimi was waiting for it to happen again, what he had been trying for hours now that he felt confident enough to try. The only thing he felt he could do to have a chance at escaping this situation he found himself in. He was focusing, clenching, releasing, trying to channel, and...

There it was! A burst of flame! Small, but it had happened in both of his hands! The feeling of warmth against his muscles made Aimi sigh in a familiar comfort that he hadn't felt in over a year and was still trying to regain. He kept his eyes closed though, for the flames faded quickly and his hands were once again empty. He had to concentrate in order to bring them back and it was as if he were a child again trying to learn how to channel chakra for the first time. He couldn't speak for anyone else, but for him at least, channeling chakra had an intrinsic physicality to it that made channeling his chakra without a full body, such as it was, extremely difficult for him. There was a certain feeling that moving chakra throughout his body gave him that he could immediately recognize and put to use. It was a second nature for Aimi, a subconscious impulse practically given his age and experience. Without his body whole, though, it was almost like learning how to breath again.

And he needed to know how to channel his chakra, how to breath, for when his nemesis returned as he felt he inevitably would. The Blind Idiot God who had banished him to this realm to begin with. For a year he'd languished simply trying to pull himself back together. Gone now were any feelings of despair or hopelessness he had experienced in his first six months. After seeing the spirit again and dissolving back into nothingness, naught but anger and hatred dominated his being. He found that it had been easier to pull his form back to where it had been than it was the first time around, but it still took time. Half the time for sure, but three months had still been three months and the three months that followed it had brought him to this state rather than one of completeness.

The problem was that, ultimately, this was different from regeneration. Regenerating damage to his body, loss of limbs, loss of blood, whatever the damage, was to him as chakra control was in reality; it was like breathing. A subconscious act he never had to think about if he didn't want to make it even more potent. What had happened to him here in the spirit world was different. His body wasn't damaged per se, it was simply pulled apart. Separated into millions of pieces that needed to be recalled by force of will alone. It was an entirely new skill set for him that he had to learn as he went along. It was a skill, he suspected, would be useful for as long as he was in this world and each time he faced that jackal headed jester.

All of this preparation, though, seemed to be for nothing. Of course he couldn't be certain that the spirit wouldn't just appear before him at any time that it pleased, but he had expected to see the thing much sooner. He imagined that, after that first appearance, it would have come to visit and taunt him quite often. Yet it had not. It remained absent from his life and, to Aimi as he was, that made his hatred all the stronger. He had a body now! No skin, true, hardly any clothing, and he could barely channel his chakra but he wanted nothing more than to have the eyeless jackal appear before him now so that he could tear him to shreds!

Yet he did not come. He remained away which only gave Aimi more time to prepare. He was determined that, when he was whole again and could hold his form in this strange land, he would find and end the spirit who had done this to him before finding a way to leave this world. It was only a matter of time. Only time...
Last edited by Golnax on Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Golnax
Posts: 1498
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2016 7:00 pm

Death of the Self; Rebirth of Ego

Post by Golnax » Sun Jun 13, 2021 11:27 am

Chapter 7
~TWO YEARS SINCE DISSOLVEMENT~
Aimi Kaguya wandered the spirit world in a waking rage and found himself in a world that was empty.

It had been a little less than a year since he had fully restored his body and with it the use of his chakra. As soon as he had he went over to the river and took a massive drink of the water, for the moment that he was whole was the same moment it hit him - the hunger, the thirst. He had ate nor drank anything for a year and it was insufferably obvious. He'd dunked his head below the water and guzzled as much as he could stand of the cool, crisp liquid. He hadn't even considered if it would be safe for him to do so. Fortunately for the stranded Kaguya it seemed that water worked the same here as it did in his reality. He drank so much, in fact, that when he pulled his head up for air he found himself vomiting up most of what he had drank only for him to drink some more, slightly less voraciously this time.

After drinking some water he searched for food which, fortunately, was close by. The tall, spindly trees bore fruit on branches that reached down to meet him as he approached. Peaches had never been his favorite food but after a year of nothing he at as many as he could hold in his water logged stomach. Once those base needs had been met, his mind returned to that motivation which had sustained him throughout his experience without a body; revenge.

"WHERE ARE YOU!? FACE ME! I DEMAND YOU SHOW YOURSELF YOU LAUGHING ASSHOLE!" Aimi roared into the aether over and over again, using various taunts and claims to try and draw out the laughing jackal who had put him in this spot to begin with but to no avail. The jackal did not show himself. In fact nothing did. When enough time had passed for Aimi to notice that he was alone the realization was like a strange buzzing in his ear. He'd seen spirits flying over head occasionally for a year, seen strange faces looking down at him with curiosity or disgust. He remembered the boat of fireflies (because it had been one of the only things he'd seen before his eyes were taken from him) and the strange animals in the distance. Now though there was nothing around him. He was, for all intents and purposes, all alone.

So he set his mind to finding the Blind Idiot God En Framförallt. He took flight and began his wandering in the only way he knew how to. He flew far and wide, high and low, fast and slow. Aimi traversed strange forests, plains, mountains and deserts, bogs and swamps and oceans that seemed to go on forever only to abruptly stop, tirelessly seeking out his query. He stopped to eat and drink when he felt hungry or thirsty but otherwise kept hunting. After a couple of months he began to really notice that his need to eat and drink was becoming longer and longer apart from his last meals and he took this to mean he was gaining some sort of tolerance for these weird aeons he found himself in. But aside from the varied landscapes and alien shores, this was the only thing he found.

Aimi Kaguya had been flying for over a year, and in all that time he had been alone. He had not seen a single spirit of any sort in his hunt for the laughing god - not one! No where! No matter where he went the world was empty and devoid of life save for him, which made no sense! There were spirits here, of course there were! He'd seen them! This was the spirit world! So where were all of the damn spirits!? Where being disillusioned from his body had left him insane with rage and a need for revenge after taking over a year to pull his body back together, this year of solitude left him raging and insane simultaneously. The solitude gnawed at Aimi and it didn't take long for him to start talking to himself regularly. He would shout, curse, constantly demand an audience with his captor. He threatened, he begged, he pleaded, he bargained. Nothing worked. He was alone. After a year of flying aimlessly with no trace or tracks to follow of any sort, he didn't even know how to return to the tori gate river that he had drank from initially.

Despair - true, utter despair - began to set in. After so long without any other form of life to be found, let alone the object of his revenge, and no way of knowing how to return back to what had been his home, Aimi stopped flying. He stopped running. He walked, he trudged. He thought of Kusagakure, of Gold Country and the people he had united. He had done that! It was an amazing feat! On par with, if not exceeding frankly, the founding of Kirigakure itself, when the first Mizukage made the island and the mountains that protected it and the mist for which the village was named! An extremely powerful ninja village had been born and cultivated over the course of dozens of life times and his Gold Country could have been so much more! But after a year of solitude, of true loneliness, of being by himself with no way back... he was beginning to believe that he would never see what he had started through. Had Gold already fallen apart in his absence? Were the samurai fighting amongst each other? Had building ceased? Had Wind stolen all of the gold mines to the north without him there to protect them? So many worries, so much hopelessness. How could he possibly go on when -

"Hello there!"

Aimi flinched, stopping in his tracks and snapping his eyes wide open. He had long since stopped paying attention to where he was going and it was only at the sound of this voice, this foreign voice, that his senses came flooding back to him. He was... in a field. A hilly field, covered in short grass and violet flowers. he was walking towards yet another mountain range in this endless landscape that apparently was the spirit world and in front of the mountains was a forest. The sky was still red and clouds remained pink... and the voice! The voice had come from behind him! He'd heard it! It wasn't his own voice or his thoughts and, while it wasn't the voice of that jackal he sought, it was the voice of someone else! Something else! After all this time!

Straightening up Aimi whipped around on the spot to face whatever had spoken to him only to find a spirit that was just as strange as any other he'd seen. Mostly rose pink in color, the spirit had an odd, almost pumpkin shaped torso with bulbous shoulders, thin upper arms and equally large forearms and ended in large hands. Its' waist was thin and it wore pied pants of green and white and boots that rose well past where a pair of knees normally would be. Its' chest was 'split' down the center with what appeared to be fabric and buttons and on its' right breast was what looked like a handkerchief tucked away in a pocket. Most strange of all, however, was its' head... or rather lack thereof. It didn't have a face, so to speak, not a skull as Aimi understood it but rather its' head was simply one singular giant mouth, grinning wide and filled with flat, square teeth.

It was weird to behold, to be sure, but this was the first spirit he'd seen in a year, the first anything that wasn't some inanimate object that only looked like a close approximation of what it should look like back in the real world. For all he cared it could have been made of mouths. "H-he-hello there..." Aimi replied meekly. He immediately felt embarrassment for his stutter. He never thought a year of solitude would make him feel socially awkward once he was reintroduced to an entity that could speak back to him!

"Goodness, you look dreadful! Been here long?" the spirit asked, extending a hand outwards in a questioning gesture.

"I... yes. I uh," he cleared his throat. "Two years, I think. I've been stuck here for two years..."

"It's been eating you up, hasn't it? All that anger and rage. It's still there, just a little deeper down. I can feel it, and so can all the others," the spirit stated, giving Aimi a hint that absolutely went over his head. He was still getting used to the idea of speaking with something other than himself frankly, so it should be forgiven. "Two years though? And no one's greeted you yet? Oh, that won't do! That simply won't do!" the spirit said, the huge head-sized smile growing even larger somehow.

"What? No, I was brought here by... listen, do you know a jackal headed spirit? Calls himself the Blind Idiot God? I need to find him and..." Aimi got no further and the spirit didn't seem to be paying attention to what he had to say at that point. As he spoke it rose its' hands up in the air over its mouth-head and clapped them together. As it pulled them apart a simple bamboo cane formed between the palms that it took a hold of and held in front of it with one end on the ground and its' palm resting on the other. As the cane touched the ground the world grew dark around Aimi and everything else... or rather it was as if the daylight was all condensed into a single point directly above the big-mouth spirit, the grass and flowers and sky above it still appearing as it had a second before while all else around it was as night prematurely.

Then it began to sing. As it sang it bounced on the spot lightly, bending its' approximation of knees and straightening them in time with a musical beat that, yes, Aimi could very much hear like the low notes of a calliope machine. The sudden change from day to night, the dancing, the singing, the music, all left Aimi Kaguya speechless once again.
"Welcome to the Spirit World!
Have a look around
Anything that brain of yours can think of can be found
We've got mountains of insight
Some better, some worse
If none of it's of interest to you
You'd be the first!"
The daylight was snuffed out around the big-mouth spirit leaving Aimi blind for a moment before the light shone down directly on top of him, further blinding him and forcing his eyes shut while the spirit appeared directly behind him with one arm over his shoulders while the other, can in hand, tapped to the continuing beat as it bobbed up and down and continued singing now almost directly into his ear.
"Welcome to the Spirit World!
Come and take a seat
Would you like some brisk refreshments
Or something good to eat?
There's no need to panic
This isn't a test, hehe
Just nod or shake your head and we'll do the rest!"
The singing spirit grabbed onto Aimi's shoulder and spun him around, sending him twirling through the flowers until the back of his knees collided with a wooden chair, forcing them to buckle and for him to fall onto his backside on top of the chair. Back in the dark he blinked several times rapidly and forced his eyes open. His vision was spotty from the light/dark shifts but he could see the spirit beginning to march in time with the beat. The daylight followed it, and was the music growing a bit faster and were more instruments joining in?
"Welcome to the Spirit World!
What would you prefer?
Would you like to fight your appetites
Or give the pot a stir?
Be friendly! Be nosy! Be bursting with rage!
We've got a million different ways to engage!"
It stopped marching and turned to face Aimi once more. In addition to its' knee bobbing it began to sway from side to side while holding onto the cane in front of it as it sang. The world around the spirit began to shift subtly. The night sky beyond the light of day started to rotate as if on a platform, the unfamiliar stars all starting to spin in the heavens slowly at first but gaining momentum with the music. Faster and faster the world turned and the spirit bobbed as the music grew more and more frantic.
"Welcome to the Spirit World!
Put your cares aside
Don't over think or underthink
The fact you almost died!
We've got gurus, and kami, and genma galore!
And a bunch of spirits just waiting around to eat you at the slightest mistake
Welcome to the Spirit World!
Hold on to your socks
'Cause it's gonna be a real long time
Before you find the one you stalk
It's a process of learning
You get more and more!
Don't act surprised, if it was easy you'd bore!"
Suddenly the chair Aimi was sitting it began to spin, or was it the entire world under his feet that spun around? He spun horizontally while the sky spun vertically and both rapidly sped up more and more as the calliope tune quickened its' beat. The trapped shinobi sat paralyzed in confusion, fear and a lack of understanding that he hadn't felt since first arriving in the spirit world. That lack of understanding only amplified his fear to the point of it shorting out every other process in his mind, save for the want to escape. "Stop! Stop!" he cried out over the music and singing, but to no avail. The song was not over yet. Each revolution of his chair brought the singing spirit and the daylight closer and closer to him.
"Face what you have dreaded!
Face the facts and see a shrink!
Nothing in the world around you
Is exactly what you think!
Show us all your deep desires
Tell us every thought you think!
Start a rumor!
Be an exhumer!
Show us all your sense of humor!
Or just flex those myomere
Ignore the tumor you late bloomer doomer!"
By this point the spirit was directly on top of Aimi and he was back in the light. The spirit kicked his seat back by the leg supports causing the ninja to tip back and cry out in fear and surprise, only to be caught by the same foot and the cane to hold him in place, practically forcing him to stare up into that huge, gaping maw as it sang and tilted back and forth with the stars and clouds rotating just beyond the frame of its' lips.
"Here's a tip for enlightenment!
Here's a bewitching balm!
Here's a spirit who can help you!
Just listen closely to this psalm!
Which Aimi Kaguya are you?
Take this quirky quiz!
En Framförallt is teaching you that ignorance forbids!"
The big-mouth removed its' foot and cane from the chair Aimi sat on and yet he did not fall backwards. He remained as he was perfectly balanced while the spirit began to float upwards into the sky, into the light, twirling its' cane to and from while kicking its' legs out from side to side and continuing to tilt and bob its' mouth-head.
"Can I interest you in everything all of the time?
A little bit of everything all of the time?
Apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime!
Anything and everything, all of the time?"
It was then that Aimi's chair fell backwards and instead of hitting the ground he was plunged into a void of darkness, surrounded only by the big mouth spirit and the beam of sunlight it resided in. He clung to the sides of his chair as the feeling of vertigo consumed him. More lights shone in the dark and Aimi whipped his head from side to side like a frightened animal, seeing copies of, or perhaps just other identical spirits for all he knew, the big-mouth each dancing entirely differently in their own spotlight while the one directly in front of Aimi, no matter how he spun or turned, continued to sing.
"Can I interest you in everything all of the time?
A little bit of everything all of the time?
Apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime!
Anything and everything, all of the time?"
Then it all stopped. The music abruptly went away, the lights went out and Aimi was once again left alone for a few seconds before the feeling of falling stopped as well and he was left upright once again in the chair, clinging to it desperately and practically hyperventilating. Then the light came back on and standing in it was, of course, the same spirit that was now tormenting him through song. The calliope started back up again, and it spoke before beginning to sing once more, the music picking up slow.

"You know, it wasn't always like this...
Not very long ago, way before your time
Right before the Genma fell
Before the need for shrines
This was connected, affected
With all that you knew.
We set out sights and spent out nights
Waiting.... Waiting, for you! You.
Insatiable you.
The misty ninja they trained you
Cured your bone disease too
And you did all the things they designed you to do!
It was always the plan
To put the world in your hands..."


The singing stopped, and then came the laughter. From a mouth so large and with no other features it was truly disturbing to see those lips curl and hear that deep, hollow laughter come out slowly at first but growing more and more manic with each second that passed. It seemed, too, that the laughter sounded more and more familiar, like that of a certain nemesis Aimi had been fostering hatred for for years now.
"Can I interest you in everything all of the time?
A little bit of everything all of the time?
Apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime!
Anything and everything, all of the time?
Can I interest you in everything all of the time?
A little bit of everything all of the time?
Apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime!
Anything and everything and anything and everything and anything and everything and
All of the time!"
For the entirety of this final maddening stanza, Aimi closed his eyes and screamed.
Last edited by Golnax on Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Golnax
Posts: 1498
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2016 7:00 pm

Death of the Self; Rebirth of Ego

Post by Golnax » Mon Jun 14, 2021 7:07 pm

Chapter 8

"Hey, hey, calm down! Calm down!" Aimi could hear through his screams. He felt the large hands of the big-mouth on his shoulders shaking him relatively gently and he opened his eyes, panting frantically and staring wild eyed at the large mouth that was now frowning rather than smiling. He did stop screaming but was primed to start again at any time so complete was his delirium and fear.

"There, now, it's alright. No need to be so upset... what's got you all bothered, huh?" the massive mouth asked in a soothing tone.

Panicked, Aimi replied sobbing, "I don't understand anything here! I've been trapped in this world for two years as far as I can tell and I don't understand anything! I just.. I just... Why are you the first thing I've seen in over a year!?"

"You don't understand? Ok, ok, well that helps explain your strange behavior. Here, why don't we just take a seat and has some stuff out, hm? I'm sure I can help explain," the big-mouth replied, letting go of Aimi's shoulders and taking a few steps back. Lifting up one leg from off of the ground the rose pink spirit leaned back and a chair rose up from the ground below to meet it. "How's about I start with that first question of yours - why am I the first spirit you've seen for so long? Well, that's simple really. I chose to let you see me."

Aimi took a few moments to breath, tears still trapped welled up in his eyes and his heart racing still. He panted and held back the waterworks and sniffled, trying to pull himself together. He released his near death grip on the seat of the chair he sat on and tried his best to relax. He was getting some answers from an entity that seemed perfectly willing to explain to him. It took time for him to process that. "You... chose to let me see?"

"Yes, didn't En Framförallt tell you any of this before you came here?" the spirit asked. At the sound of the name of his Nemesis Aimi's body tensed up with still potent rage. The moment he did the big-mouth raised its' big hands up. "Ok, ok, let's tone it down a bit! Sensitive topic I gather? I got it, I got it, so... let me explain."

The spirit paused, smacking it's big lips and putting on a gentle smile.

"The spirit world is not at all like your own, I'm sure you've gathered. It's more than just superficial changes like the color of the sky though. In your world, things are fixed, written in a universal stone so to speak. You have constants like gravity, heat, cold, light, dark, all of that. Everything you can think of is 'set' so to speak, where as here? Here things are more flexible. It's tough to explain in a way that you'd understand, but the rules that you have as a frame of reference don't apply here as you know them. Things like thought, will and emotion all have a certain power here if you know how to use it, and your rage has been quite potent indeed."

"Put simply, you were repelling us away from you with your anger. Whatever you feel towards En Framförallt, I assume, is quite literally toxic here. Being a mortal, your body, your will, your emotions - they all work differently here, even from our spiritual bodies. Your feelings can affect the world around you, and so the safest thing for us to do was simply to avoid you. We made ourselves invisible to you and gave you a wide berth because it was safer that way. I've got to say, you've got some really sharp emotions!"

Aimi took a minute to process this information. By the time that the big-mouth paused in its' explanation he was calmer than he was if not still confused. The fear had abated now that the world around him wasn't spinning. "So... all this time... I haven't been alone, just... ignored?"

"It's a little more complicated than that, but sure, basically," the spirit confirmed.

"Does... does that mean we're not alone right now?"

"Yes, it does," the spirit confirmed, raising its' large hands up and clapping them together. In an instant the two of them were surrounded. Not crowded, but in every direction there were spirits. Most of them were not even paying attention to the two of them, although a couple had their eyes upon the duo. Many were just minding their own business in the flowers, each one unique looking and strange. Aimi looked around him and couldn't help but feel anger quiver inside of him.

"You're telling me that that laughing jackass as just been playing hide and seek from me for all this time!?" he demanded to know, raising his voice. The moment he did though, all of the spirits vanished again, their bodies practically turning sideways and becoming flat until they were nothing.

"Easy, easy. Emotions, remember?" the big-mouth reminded him gently, the small smile faltering into a frown again. "I can't speak for En Framförallt, and, again, it's not as simple as all that but, basically? Yes. That's very much something he'd do."

"So what are you then!? Some kind of messenger or herald for him!?" Aimi asked annoyed.

"No, not really. He approached me and asked me to approach you. He was vague of course about what he wanted, but he said that you'd enjoy some entertainment. Said you were new to the spirit world, so I figured, why not? It's not like it's a smart thing to reject En Framförallt..."

"Why's that!?" Aimi demanded to know.

The pink spirit paused. Hesitated more like. "Let's just say that there's more to the laughing jackal than meets the eye. How much do you know about him, exactly?"

"He's evil, he trapped me here, he's an annoying asshole that doesn't tell good jokes! He claims to be as powerful as the Genma but I don't believe that for a second!"

"He's not 'evil' per se... amoral is closer to the truth..." the spirit sighed. "He wasn't lying about being as powerful as the Genma, though. He's very much their equal."

"That's..." Aimi scoffed. "That's absurd! The Genma are supposed to be the most powerful spirits, they invaded the world and tried to take it over! It took all of them to bring the world to its' knees! Why would they have left a spirit as powerful as them behind if they were trying to take over everything!?"

Again the big-mouthed spirit sighed. "Your knowledge of history is... flawed. Corrupted even. Just like everything in this reality, it's not that simple. En Framförallt is as powerful as any of the Genma, and he's not alone. There are other spirits just as powerful wandering the spirit world or in some cases roaming freely in yours. The Spider Queen comes to mind as a spirit who, as far as I know, exists in your reality as an entity unbound like the other Genma spirits. The Genma were... well, exactly as you said. Among the most powerful of spirits, but you're wrong in believing that they alone were the single most powerful entities here, or that they had convinced all like them to invade. Spirits are like people in that respect - not everyone agreed with the Genma. Some, like En Framförallt, chose willingly to stay behind and wanted no part in their conquest. En Framförallt specifically called the whole endeavor a joke, actually, and predicted that their defeat would come to pass. He doesn't really talk about it anymore, but I'm certain it's one of his favorite 'jokes'."

Once more Aimi was left stunned at this realization. Frankly none of it was really sticking with him. The revelations being presented challenged his worldview too much and he was already struggling with the idea that his emotions affected the world and spirits around him here! The lost ninja simply packed all of this information away to be examined at another time.

"Let me ask you; why did En Framförallt bring you here?" the spirit asked, leaning forward slightly.

"I don't know! I can hardly even remember!" Aimi replied in frustration. "All I remember since being here is agony without pain! I was... I was just trying to find a quiet place for a while. I remember that. I just wanted quiet and then he showed up and brought me here! He said... I don't know... he said he wanted me to ask questions? Or get answers? I don't know. I don't remember! It was two years ago!"

"Ok, alright, try to keep calm, remember?" the spirit advised. It still really hadn't hit Aimi that his little outbursts were negatively affecting the one spirit who was willing to help him at this point in any measure.

What did hit him, though, was the realization that the Blind Idiot had spoken to this spirit before him.

"You said that jackal sent you here, right? That means you talked to him. You know where he is!" Aimi accused, hands balling into fists as he prepared to visit violence upon this spirit if need be to get what he sought.

"No, no I don't, calm down! Hold it, hold it! I don't know where En Framförallt is, he sought me out far away from here and I followed you to this place! He could be literally anywhere or nowhere!"

"You said that things aren't like how they are in my reality... that things aren't fixed. If I can affect spirits with my will and emotions..." he stated, wheels beginning to turn in his mind as he started putting pieces of information together that would actually help him seek his revenge. "So if I will it so, I can bring that blind idiot to me, right?"

"No, it doesn't work that way!" the spirit explained. "You can't just exert your will over another here. Your will affects things passively, just like your emotions! Even if you could just force him to appear, there's no guarantee that he's even here right this second! He could be in your reality, or in a different part of the spirit world all together!" The rose colored spirit brought it's hands up to the corners of it's mouth and slapped them as if they were cheeks, running its fingers down the sides of its' mouth-head as it continued.

"Look, not every part of the spirit world behaves the same way, alright? Everything I told you about emotion and will is true here, but there are parts of the spirit world where it isn't. Imagine an open book, and you're on a set of two pages. If you turned the page of the book, you'd be on two different pages and the words would be different - the reality on that page would not line up with the reality of the previous pages - the spirit world is like that! Layered on top of itself in such a way that what is true in one place isn't true in another."

"I was flying through this place for an entire year!" Aimi cried out in deliberation. "I passed over oceans and mountains and none of it was the same! I didn't go to any location twice! How could there be anywhere that's different than here in all of this!?"

"Layers," the spirit replied with a shrug. "The spirit world has layers, and there's no guarantee that En Framförallt is on this one or in the spirit world at all. You can't just force him to show up in front of you. I'm sorry."

Aimi was quiet for a moment. His hands relaxed and he slumped back in his seat, his head tilting down as he looked to his lap. The despair that had left him before the singing started began to creep back in. "So... that's it then? Unless he decides to show up and present himself to me all on his own, I'm just... stuck here... no way back..."

"That's not strictly true," the spirit assured him. Aimi lifted his head to look at the speaking mouth. "You're human, not a spirit. You can shape this world around you in ways that we can't. It's possible that you could find a way out of here or even will a way out. I have no idea how difficult that would be, all of you humans are different after all, but it is possible. It's been done before."

"But I've tried! I've tried finding a way out! There's nothing! I can't do anything to this world!" Aimi sobbed, bringing his hands up to his face and covering them in frustration, digging his nails into his forehead.

"There is another possibility as well... En Framförallt brought you here for a reason. He'd claim that it was a 'joke', like everything he does supposedly is, but he had a reason. I know you said you don't remember what that was, but maybe you should try to recall it and do whatever it was he wanted you to do. Knowing En Framförallt as I do... which isn't all that well, mind you but, he's got a reputation - I'd say it's likely that if you do what he wanted, he might show up and take you back himself. In the same way that you can affect the world around you, so can we to an extent, and we know when there are humans close by. A spirit as powerful as En Framförallt? He probably knows your every action you take in this world and is monitoring you no matter how far away he is. It's just one of the things we can do in this world of ours. Like breathing for you. My advise? Remember what it is that he wanted of you, and try to work it out."

Thus spoken, the spirit got up from its' chair and turned to leave. Aimi pulled his face out of his hands and looked to the spirit as it turned its' back on him. "Wait, where are you going?" he asked.

"Just... somewhere. Nowhere specific. I was only asked to give you a welcome party of sorts, and I have. I've explained some things to you and now I want to go," the spirit explained without turning its' back. "Good luck! And remember about your temper! Keep your emotions in check if you don't want to be alone!"

And then it was gone, turned sideways and vanished like all the rest, leaving Aimi alone... except he knew now that he wasn't alone. Not really. The spirits around him simply were keeping themselves hidden from him. He thought about what the spirit told him, sitting and thinking about it as he faced the other empty chair. He sat for a while, processing, going over what was said and... trying to remember. As he sat in contemplation he calmed down and, finally, he closed his eyes, took in a deep breath, let it out slow, and when he opened his eyes and looked around... he could see spirits again. There were none around him now or paying him any attention, but they were around him and visible all the same.

Aimi knew now that he wasn't alone, that he couldn't force his nemesis to show himself, and that getting out of this world wasn't going to be as easy as finding a door. Mostly he dwelled on the fact that he wasn't alone... and that that was good.
Last edited by Golnax on Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Golnax
Posts: 1498
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2016 7:00 pm

Death of the Self; Rebirth of Ego

Post by Golnax » Wed Jun 16, 2021 11:36 pm

Chapter 9
~FIVE YEARS AFTER DISSOLVEMENT~
A spirit in the vague shape of an antelope tilted its' head down and met its' lips to the cool water of a still pond. It had three eyes that floated above its' head and no sockets upon its' skull. It's fur was green as moss and its' form bled from fur into foliage from front to back. Within a pace of this spirit, Aimi Kaguya knelt down and dipped his hands into the water, bringing them cupped to his lips and taking a morning drink.

Aimi had been stranded in the spirit world for five years now. He had learned much in that time, struggled and adapted to the world around him, and he was slowly beginning to change. For a start his hair was more disheveled now than it had been. It wasn't that it had grown longer or anything of that sort, his hair physically couldn't grow longer any more, but he had long since ceased pushing it out of his face and instead let his bangs hang limply on the sides of his head or the front of his face as the wind blew it. He had also grown a white beard in his time there. It was short and bushy and covered the entirety of his lips, extending down towards his neck but not much further.

After finishing his drink Aimi cupped more water in his hands and splashed it against his face. The eyes of the spirit turned towards him briefly, considering the human next to it unblinkingly before turning away after deeming him acceptable to be around. Most spirits anymore did that when they were near him. He had long since learned how to calm himself to the point that he coexisted with the spirits around him rather than scare them off. The only exception were those overly aggressive spirits who chose to attack or try to drive him off which he met with equal if not greater amounts of violence that usually ended in the opposite of what the spirit had intended. Afterwards he would calm himself back down and goa bout his business. These occasional bouts of conflict, he had found, were good chances for mental exercises in calmness and tranquility.

Aimi washed his body slowly with the cool water as the spirit drank, splashing his bare chest, covering his hair and the back of his neck, shivering lightly as the cold liquid ran down his spine. He'd yet to come across any soap in this strange land he inhabited of any sort but he found comfort in the rituals that anchored him to his own reality such as bathing, eating, drinking, et cetera. He'd figured out years ago that he didn't actually need to do any of those things here. If he grew hungry or thirsty he could simply will it to go away and it would and he would be sustained. If he was dirty, he could quite literally walk the dirt off of himself and let it fade to nothing. The big-mouth spirit, who he now thought of often fondly, had been quite right when he said that thought and will were paramount in this land. Still, more paramount to himself was the connections he could keep to home, so he bathed, he drank, he ate, to remind himself what it was like when he needed to. There was comfort in the memories.

His quest for the Blind Idiot God continued in vain, more or less, and he had begun to accept that. The world of spirits went on without end no matter what direction he went in. It wasn't a globe like the world he knew but more of a flat plane that went on and on in each direction. He sometimes wondered if he, and the spirits around him that called this place home, continually created the landscape as they inhabit it and in that way create infinity. Such thoughts were only mild curiosities to his human mind. He had no answers, and he was beginning to accept that too. Still he hunted, hoping to meet his nemesis and confront him again. If he could find him and force him to either submit or trick him into transporting him back to reality, then this could all be over and he could try to pick up the pieces of his life back in Gold Country. He still thought of the people he'd grown close to during his conquests, from time to time...

The antelope spirit, satisfied with its' drink, lifted it's head and began to walk away. Aimi turned and watched it go while rubbing his hands together. He thought of calling out to the spirit but decided not to ultimately. Not all spirits, he had come to learn, could speak in the first place and those that couldn't, or simply chose not to, were often more difficult to communicate with. Best to leave it to its' business and he to his. He flicked his hands free of the water droplets and stood up before walking away in the opposite direction. It was another day of wandering and hunting for him. Hopefully he would find his foe that day, but not even deep down at all he didn't believe he would. He was beginning to forget what the spirit known as En Framförallt even looked like, let alone what he'd said to Aimi before stranding him here years ago.

Aimi Kaguya was, at this point, a fact as immutable as anything within the spirit world. Spirits were fluid and formless unless they desired to have a form here unlike in the real world where they were forced to conform to a shape. He had witnessed spirits change their appearance - color, shape, texture, size - on the fly for various reasons. He, on the other hand, did not change beyond what was natural for a human body to change... a human body that could not age because of regeneration anyways. For the first couple of years especially he had struggled to keep his physical form together, to prevent himself from breaking apart into bubbles and floating away. It took a certain concentration that was difficult for him at first and any break in that concentration would result in his banishment once more. In his year of wandering in solitude he had broken apart and pulled himself back together many times. It'd been two years since that last happened now. He was adapting well to this world it seemed.

The fact that was Aimi Kaguya wandered over river, valley and forest alike with no real purpose and no plan. He simply followed his oldest desire and just... went. There was a certain amount of freedom to be found in this world that he did not have any chance of possessing in reality. Back home, he could go where he wanted, sure, technically - but at great risk to himself and with tremendous effort. So much time and energy had been spent in the short time he'd been allowed to wander before the Great War disguising himself, avoiding major roads and villages when he knew that patrols of samurai or shinobi were around, carefully utilizing his speed and wits to avoid people when he didn't want to make contact or to make sure he was as far from himself as was possible to be when he did so that no one recognized him as a Kaguya. It was all so restrictive!

Here there was a measure of true freedom. There were no borders, no countries, no conduct or behavior he needed to observe. He was free to simply walk, jump, run, fly, climb, swim as he pleased as long as he wanted barring the occasional aggressive spirit he had to confront. In any direction without end, always seeing something new and strange that he could explore. In his wandering he'd become quite the observer! He'd hang back and study spirits as they interacted with each other. AImi merely watched, made no judgements, tried not to intervene. It was fascinating in a way to be able to see things so distant and alien from himself act in this natural world of theirs. In reality spirits were often aggressive and territorial, likely because, he realized at some point, because they, like he, were stranded in a world not their own with no way back easily available to them. It was only exceptionally powerful spirits such as his nemesis or the Genma who were able to force their way back and forth freely... or so he was hypothesizing anyways.

It was just such an observable moment that Aimi found himself at as he passed through the shade of a yellow leaved forest. The flutter of feathered wings caught his attention and he turned to spy a peacock looking spirit strutting through the trees some distance ahead of him. He smiled gently and made his way forward slowly, quietly. Detours like this had become an expected part of his day. What use was there in constantly hunting down an enemy that was impossible to find? He'd tried for a good three years almost nonstop to find either him or a way out on his own in one fashion or another and all had turned to nothing. Better instead to indulge in these momentary distractions. En Framförallt could and would wait for him he suspected.

The peacock spirits' body was as a jelly, thick, viscous and transparent. Its' eyes were a deep black and its' tail feathers were as the inverted colors of an ordinary peacock but still equally as beautiful. As he crept up behind a tree to watch the spirit let out a guttural warble, its' whole body shaking, and fanned its' feathers out behind him as it basked in the rays of red sunshine. Aimi smiled at the display, equating it to his morning stretches he did... or used to do, anyways, back when he actually needed to sleep. Sleep, like eating or drinking, was a negligible thing here for him and he hardly did it anymore unless he felt like taking a nap. Either way the shake of those feathers was nostalgic on some level and he found himself chuckling at the sight quietly. That was when he heard it come from behind him. A voice. Familiar, and yet a new level of impossible in this place:

"Who are you?"

The peacock spirit heart the voice at the same time Aimi did, folding its' feathers and letting out a shrill warble before turning and darting away. Aimi frowned (not that it was visible through his beard) and turned around on the spot to see... himself. A younger version of himself standing a few meters away. It was a child version of himself. Judging from the clothing he wore... yes, he remembered those clothes. This was Aimi Kaguya - himself - as he had been at thirteen, standing before him now impossibly with no distortion as would be expected from a spirit trying to imitate him. It was exactly as he was but well over two decades younger than he was now.

"Who are you?" his younger self asked again, more impatiently. Aimi Kaguya was about to confront himself...
Last edited by Golnax on Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Golnax
Posts: 1498
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2016 7:00 pm

Death of the Self; Rebirth of Ego

Post by Golnax » Sat Jun 19, 2021 12:19 pm

Chapter 10

Aimi the elder immediately felt a distinct sense of deja vu from this scenario. Staring himself down, it was as if he were remembering a dream long sense passed that, even then, was still foggy and distant. This moment, a younger version of himself staring down an older one, felt familiar to the Kaguya but he didn't understand exactly why that was. His younger self looked exactly as he remembered looking back then - shorter for sure, his hair, too, shorter, only down to his chin in length. His facial features were softer on the whole and he was actually wearing clothes! A black hooded jacket with flowers on it, more at the bottom and less as the design ascended, a pair of regulation ninja pants with all those pockets, his foot wrappings which he wore even more, but no undershirt. His younger self wore his jacket open as Aimi often did at that age. Even all those years ago he was beginning to see the practicality in not wearing clothing when you were able to produce sharp objects from your body at will, though he would yet to take the fully leap into near nudity for just under a decade from then.

"Hey, are you deaf? I asked who you were!" his younger version asked, their tone of annoyance quite clear at this point.

"... I'm you, but older," spake the elder Kaguya.

Aimi the younger scoffed. "What? That doesn't make any sense... where am I?"

"I think you must be dreaming," Aimi said to his younger self, recalling more of the dream that he had had all those years ago. Yes, it was coming back to him now. This had been a dream he'd had as a teenager - meeting an older, decerped version of himself. Thinking back on the memories, he'd thought of this dream as his older self (now his actual self) being extremely old and frail. It only just now clicked with him that that sentiment was born from the vestiges of a dream and an immature concept of what constituted being 'old'. "You're in the spirit world... at least your spirit is, I think. I... Sorry, this is all kind of confusing..." he admitted to himself.

"Whatever, you don't know a thing old timer," the younger Kaguya said dismissively, turning away and beginning to walk. This dismissal gave an echo of panic in the older Kaguya who quickly followed after.

"Hey, hey! Wait up a second!" he cried to himself. "This is strange, I know, but you're the first person I've talked to in a really long time! Everything else here is just a spirit and they're not always the talkative types!" he said and the moment that the words left his mouth it forced him to stop in his tracks. It was true, wasn't it? In the five or so years he'd been here, he'd only ever encountered spirits. Why would he suddenly be confronting a younger version of himself now? The logical conclusion was that this young apparition of himself must have been a spirit of some sort as well... but then... why the memory?

"Leave me alone! I'll find my own way back," the teenager said dismissively without looking back as he passed through the forest and headed towards the field beyond, pulling a hand out of his jacket pocket and waving it.

"Come on now, that's not a good attitude to have," Aimi replied, catching up and walking beside himself. He'd quickly decided that, even if this was just a spirit he was talking to, company was company - and on the off chance that this wasn't just some imposter, that it really was the vision of himself from across time... "Aren't you at all curious about this whole situation?"

The young Kaguya turned his head and glared at the older man beside him. "Not unless you can teach me some kick ass jutsu!" he retorted. The older man chuckled at the response. He remembered being so willing to experiment and learn, always trying to find that next great jutsu that would push him over the edge. Had he attempted his first chunnin exam yet? At that moment he couldn't recall how old he'd been exactly. Such distant memories were so unimportant given the current situation.

"I could teach you lots of jutsu, but you wouldn't be able to use any of them," he responded.

"So in other words, 'no'. Thanks for nothing, you can leave me alone now," the young man said, bringing his hands up and placing them behind his head as he walked. The pair made their way from out of the forest and into the field, bright blue grass reaching up to meet them as they walked and a flock of small flying spirits departing from the last trees they passed. The younger Kaguya seemingly paid no mind to the strangeness of the surroundings, which honestly did lend credence to the theory that it was himself but dreaming or that it was just a resident spirit pretending to be him. Both remained equally plausible.

"You should work on being a bit more friendly. What's your name?" the older Kaguya asked.

The young Aimi groaned. "Aimi Kaguya, bled from the house Muramasa, born of the clan Kaguya," he replied with obvious disdain in his voice. The older Kaguya chuckled. He'd always hated that long winded greeting, even way back then.

"You know you could just give your name. You're not exactly in the company of Kirigakure right now, so there's no need to be so formal," he advised. The younger Aimi looked to the older for a moment before scoffing and looking away. "Whatever," he said, but the older Kaguya wasn't fooled. He recognized that look in his own eyes, that realization that he could do something one way rather than another. Goodness! Had he just implanted the idea of not using that obnoxious greeting to himself in a dream?

There was little time to consider this possibility before the young man asked in return, "So what's your name then, old man?"

"I'm really not all that old... and you can just call me Arisato," he said, giving his pseudonym that he would adopt only when he was a Special Jounin some years from now (ago) when he was permitted to lead missions that required he use a false name.

"Sure, Arisato then. Why are you following me, Arisato?" asked Aimi.

"Well, I kind of want to answer your question. Help you get to the bottom of it at least."

"What question? That doesn't make any sense!" Aimi retorted in annoyance.

Arisato had forgotten how easily annoyed he could get at that age. Puberty! "Your first question, 'who are you'," the older man clarified. "It's a bit more of a complicated question than you probably think it is."

"Seems pretty simple to me," Aimi said. "I ask who you are, you give me a name or your job or whatever, that about sums it up. A name's a lot less important than what you can do anyway."

"I suppose that's true in a sense," Arisato mused, reaching up and running his fingers through his beard. "So then what about you then, hm? What is it that you do?"

"Isn't it obvious? I'm a shinobi! A weapon of Kirigakure! I do what my missions require of me, cut down anything in my way, and follow orders! It's pretty simple, old man," Aimi said, summing up his entire world in a couple of sentences. Arisato held his tongue and simply thought on that for a while. Had his worldview really been so narrow back then? He seemed to recall that it wasn't, yet faced with himself now, this was the first answer he gave without any sort of hesitation. He shuddered lightly at the thought of just how deep the Bloody Mist village had sunk its' hooks into him at that time. They'd take years and years to dislodge...

He decided that now might be a good time to test the resolve of his younger self in this. "I see... so then, let me ask you; if you're on a mission and it requires you to use a genjutsu, what do you do?" Arisato asked, knowing full well that he had never been any good at using genjutsu.

"I'm not all that good at using genjutsu, so I'd be paired up in a team with someone who is. Not every weapon is meant for every situation, so it's best to carry multiple at once," Aimi replied quickly enough, spouting off the same sort of rhetoric that had been drilled into him from the moment he could understand that he was going to be a ninja for the Kaguya clan.

"And what if you failed? If your comrade in arms falls ill or dies and can't perform their function, what then?"

"Don't you have any idea about Kirigakure? We'd do what we could to finish the mission another way, obviously!" Aimi said.

"And if you couldn't? If there was only the one way to complete the mission and it was impossible for you to do it, what then?"

"If the mission couldn't be completed any other way, then it would be a failure, and I'd return to the village to be punished." Aimi replied frankly.

"Do you think that's fair?"

"Does it matter that it's fair or not? I'm a tool, and if I can't do a job my superiors will either find a different tool or get rid of me. So the choice is simple, really; if I don't ever fail there won't be any consequences. So I'll just make sure that I don't fail."

"And do you think that's fair?" Arisato asked again, reaching out and placing a hand on Aimi's shoulder to stop them from walking. The two looked at each other as the older continued to speak. "Is that a just expectation to be placed on you - or anyone elses' - shoulders? To never fail under penalty of pain at best or death at worst?"

Aimi stared at Arisato hard for a few seconds before replying. "No... but it doesn't matter. I'm alive because of my clan, my village; without them I'd be dead. I owe them everything I can give, and the least I can do is never mess up. I don't think you understand that kind of debt, old man Arisato. I'm alive, so I'll be a tool to serve the ones that saved me. Fair doesn't matter compared to that."

Aimi forcefully pulled his shoulder away and turned his back on Arisato, walking away once more. His older counter part stepped up behind him and forcefully turned him around, grabbing onto his shoulders and holding him in place. "Let me go!" Aimi protested, again trying to force himself away from the hands of his elder but Arisato held firm.

"Listen to me! That world view is wrong! It's twisted! You were born a sick child and they use that against you! By saving your life they convince you it's okay to live in servitude but it's not! They should have cured you regardless and used your strength for the betterment of their village, not use it against you to keep you shackled! Don't you see? They tell you you're a tool to control you, keep you in line! They strip your humanity away from you and tell you to fight until you die because you owe them that! They take everything from you and expect you to give the one thing you have left in return; your own life! Can't you see how wrong that is? How wrong they are!?"

The two Kaguya stood staring at each other in silence after Arisato's heated speech. Aimi was stunned, unable to properly process what he was being told because of the years of indoctrination that he had been fed since the moment he was born. To him what Arisato was saying was not just anathema to the world he lived in but incompatible with it. His words didn't make sense to the young Kaguya and he might as well have been speaking an entirely different language or gibberish. For Arisatos' part, he was stunned that he had said it in the first place. They were thoughts that he'd kept in his head for years but had only just now spoken, things that he had felt with all of his might but had been until that moment had not had the courage to say aloud. It seemed that five years without human contact had somewhat diminished the few social barriers he had erected to protect himself from these feelings for all of this time.

Finally, Aimi reached up and gently pushed Arisatos' hands off of his shoulders. "You don't know what you're talking about," he said simply, but he did not look into the eye of his elder when saying it.

Before the moment could continue there came a tremendous clatter. The sound of weird cries of fear and warning that echoed out across the horizon. The pair looked to the direction of the noise and found that the blue grass was receding in a great wave, departing down into the ground below and leaving only dirt in its' wake. A great cloud of dust was barreling towards them and as it grew closer they could make out the shapes of spirits both on the ground and flying. Within moments they were upon them and were roaring, babbling, crowing out as they sprinted past the pair as quickly as they limbs could carry them.

"Humans! What are you doing!? Run! Run! Flee for your lives! Kammapa is coming!" cried one of the flying spirits, pausing only long enough to deliver its' message before flitting off with the others. Arisato looked around him at the fleeing spirits and down at his younger self who stared in bewilderment at the stampede all around him. Kammapa? That was not a name that Arisato was familiar with. He turned towards the horizon from when all of the spirits came running from and waited for them to pass and the dust to settle.

"What is it? What's coming?" Aimi asked.

"I don't know. Some kind of spirit that's making all these other spirits run in terror... a Genma level spirit maybe," he concluded after some thought. Years of training, ingrained in his very being, kicked in as he prepared to face whatever was coming their way. All thoughts of Kirigakure and how it had twisted him were set aside for the moment as his fight or flight response kicked in and he chose the former. Arisato began to walk forward as the last of the stampeding spirits whisked on by him. "I'm going to face whatever this Kammapa is. You should run along, wake up from this dream," he advised, but his younger self was having none of it.

"As if!" the young Kaguya boasted, similarly forgetting the emotional conflict that he had been going through moments before in wake of this oncoming challenge. He stepped up beside his bearded self and held out his arms, extending from the palms of his hands a pair of meter long spikes of bone, the catalyst for his Dance of the Willows taijutsu, the first Dance he learned. "I'm a Kaguya of Kirigakure! A living weapon! I don't run from what's in front of me, I face it head on!"

Arisato had forgotten how prideful he was in his youth and, frankly, stupid. There was no telling what was coming towards them and no way of knowing if he was actually prepared or not. The older Kaguya had at least some experience in fighting spirits at this point, but it was literally an unknown battle each and every time one came to call. Sometimes it was better to flee he had learned, but now it seemed neither would be running. Arisato gave no reply to young Aimi's boast as he waited for Kammapa to come, the ground beginning to tremor lightly at its' approach.
Last edited by Golnax on Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Golnax
Posts: 1498
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2016 7:00 pm

Death of the Self; Rebirth of Ego

Post by Golnax » Sun Jun 20, 2021 9:17 am

Chapter 11

The dreaded Kammapa had come. Over the horizon it rose, a great gelatinous mass, bulbous and shapeless, carried on long spindly legs that had no business successfully carrying a bulk of such magnitude. It was like some sort of massive living mountain of flesh lumbering with great steps that shook the very ground on which it trod. Even from so far away both Aimi and Arisato could tell that this was a monster of some magnitude as of yet unknown to either of them. It dwarfed even the largest of beast or spirit that Arisato had ever seen, and for Aimi's part? He'd never even dreamed of a thing so massive that it practically covered the entire horizon from end to end. As it drew closer, they could both see its' enormous wet eyes jutting out from either side of its' head. It was unclear whether or not that was their natural position or if its' sheer size had pushed the globes to the side. As it drew even closer, they duo could see that it's entire underside was split down the middle in wake of a maw of such magnitude that it tore up the ground as it passed, drawing it upwards and into this great spirit Kammapa.

"I've never seen anything like it..." Aimi mused in bewilderment.

"Nor I..." Arisato confirmed. The sight of this great moving mountain pulling up whatever it could catch in those horrid lips made him think of all the past meals he'd had back in the real world that had been four, five, six courses in size. It actually made his stomach churn a bit with the idea that he could on some primal level relate to this oncoming Kammapa.

The spirit drew ever closer. "Do you think it can be killed?" the younger Kaguya asked pensively.

"Probably," Arisato responded. "I've yet to met a spirit that claimed they were immortal anyway, so..."

This answer seemed to embolden the young Aimi. The ground now shook to such an extent with every great step that their vision blurred and quaked. "Well, if it can die, then I can kill it!" Aimi cried, leaning forward into his dash as he rushed forward to go on the offensive!

"What the? No! You idiot!" Arisato roared. The fool! The young brazen version of himself! He must have believed that he was dreaming and thus couldn't be harmed! At this point, Arisato had more or less accepted that he wasn't speaking with some imposter spirit but instead his actual self from years in the future and past simultaneously and thus all consideration that there was no harm to be had by this action was thrown out the window. To his mind this was actually himself running towards the jaws of gluttony incarnate, and he had no idea what sort of effects this would have because, for the life of him, he still couldn't remember any of the specifics of that dream!

Aimi raced forward as fast as his young legs could carry him. Despite being nearly two decades younger than his older companion, speed was still clearly his greatest attribute and thus he darted across the barren dirt with tremendous vigor for one his age leaving a ribbon of dust behind him as he kicked up the ground beneath him. He raced with the absolute surety one had when they believed themselves invincible. Fearlessly he went to meet this Kammapa head on and as the two came within range of one another he would leap in the air, arms held up high, ready to plunge his bones into the face of this monstrous spirit in order to climb its' great mass! As he rose in the air so too did Kammapa lift its' equivalent of a head up with it's maw held open agape to swallow the gennin whole!

Neither came to pass, however, as Arisato suddenly appeared and grabbed Aimi by the hood of his jacket before pulling him out of the way and flitting away on wings of bone to safety. He came to a skidding landing on the ground and spun around to face the beast Kammapa, letting go of Aimi's hood and allowing the boy to tumble backwards and roll in the dirt while he stood tall and faced this challenge.

"Hey! What gives!?" Aimi demanded, glaring hatefully at his older counterpart.

"You're no match for something this big, and I don't remember what happens next," Arisato replied as he watched Kammapa slam its' bulk against the ground in futility before somehow swiftly turning its' amorphous body to relentlessly charge towards them! The older Kaguya had managed in his speed to place the pair of them a couple hundred meters away from the spirit which gave them a bit of breathing room but not much when facing something this massive. "Stay out of the way and let me handle this! I'll show you what you can really do eventually," he promised and then the battle was begun.

Arisato raced forward to meet his foe the same way his younger self hand but with the not so small caveat that he actually had a plan. As the two once more came close to colliding, Kammapa raised its' mouth to swallow the man whole while the bearded shinobi continued to rush forward. Without missing a beat he created and shot bone from the soles of his feet into the ground below, creating an instant later massive jutting spikes of bone that erupted from the ground below ten meters tall that came to meet the gaping mouth of Kammapa! As the bones thrust upwards and stabbed into the gross, wet flesh of the spirit it would cry out in a guttural roar only possible from a creature that was more mouth than throat.

The older Kaguya, meanwhile, had immediately changed course and raced ahead of the sixty meters of bone that he had laid in trap for the beast and taken flight. Rising up in the air he would spin around and channel katon chakra into his right hand, snapping his fingers and setting alight one of the great eyeballs of the beast that he could see, issuing even more disgusting screams from the spirit that quivered it's body. Torrents of blood and sinew, or rather the spiritual equivalent of, came pouring out of its' flaming eye and pierced maw, but the fight was far from over. In response to Arisato's initial assault, Kammapa raised a thin limb to meet the flying Kaguya, hungrily grasping at him with boney fingers, its' speed on par with that of the stranded shinobi!

Arisato spun in the air to avoid the grasp of the thing but his wing was clipped! Bone shattered and he was left spinning downwards towards the ground while Kammapa's great hand collided with the ground below and the dozens of bone spires beneath it. It began to raise its' great body off of the boney pongee stakes in the same time that the older Kaguya began to repair his wing midfall. As he was finishing with it and stabilizing his flight just moments before he fell to the ground, Kammapa was upon him! Having freed itself from the wounding trap Aimi created it once more turned its' body and charged, reaching out with both front limbs to try and ensnare the shinobi!

His response was swift and terrible. He flew backwards, wings beating furiously to stay ahead of those arms, and grew a length of bone from his shoulder. Grabbing on to it and gripping it with all of the strength and channeled fury he would have his longsword were it there with him, he pulled the makeshift bone sword from his body, the body itself acting as a sheath, and unleashed a volley of spherical vortexes that ripped and slashed at those oncoming hands, tearing open more spiritual flesh and making the great spirit roar in pain! Having bought himself a bit of time, Arisato began to rise up in the air with the intent of using his aerial superiority to his advantage.

Kammapa would have none of it. The great spirit of hunger reared it's slithering body upwards and became as a wall for the Kaguya - insurmountable and waiting to engulf him! It wasn't even that the beast was actually faster than Arisato was but simply that it's size was so much greater that it presented an obstacle that needed to be overcome. Unfortunately for the older Kaguya there was little time to actually react as those monstrous lips came to close around him, making plainly apparent the walls of slimy teeth and gummy flesh that awaited him!

The only thing that Arisato had enough time to effectively do was to throw his limbs out in all four directions and push back against the maw that sought to devour him as it came to a close. The impact from such a bulk was so great that his elbows and knees buckled from the pressure. Above and below him the mouth closed, leaving only a small gap that Arisato himself was keeping open by force. Gritting his teeth and roaring out defiantly, Arisato pushed back further against the jaws of Kammapa until his limbs were fully extended where they strained to maintain this hold. All the while, Kammapas' great maw would ungulate, trying to force close the opening and swallow the Kaguya whole. There was no view of a throat hole to be seen by Arisato, just mound after mound of rolling flesh and teeth pointed inwards to drag whatever the spirit caught inwards without relent. Putrid saliva came flicking out from the spirits' mouth and coated the Kaguya's skin.

Needing to gain some sort of purchase in this increasingly desperate situation, Arisato channeled his chakra to form napalm. He opened his mouth and a torrent of green liquid fire came gushing out from his being, the sticky flames colliding with the great maw of Kammapa and burning immediately with third degree burns that would continue to ravage its' flesh until the fuel was extinguished. Kammapa roared in agony as the hot gelatin melted its' flesh! That undulating flesh served now only to draw the burning napalm further into its' form while the older Kaguya turned his head in all directions to ensure that as much of the beast was soaked in his deadly gel as was possible to be from this angle. He was almost instantaneously bathed in the light and heat of green flames.

Despite this, Kammapa only seemed to grow more fierce! Slamming its' raised upper body back down, with Arisato still held between its' lips, the great spirit would let out a roar that was deafening and try once again to close its' jaws around the shinobi that had burned it, forcing his limbs to once again fold in on themselves from the pressure. Once more Arisato forced the maw back but was rapidly trying to think of a way to escape this perilous situation! He had impaled this spirit with ten meter tall spikes of bone, burned one of its' huge eyes, cut at its' front limbs and now burned its' mouth with napalm. Yet it still relentlessly chased its' hunger for him and all else around as though entirely unaffected!

In a desperate attempt at escape, with his back to the ground now, Arisato would push himself out of the mouth of Kammapa and go plummeting towards the ground below. As he fell, that flaming portion of Kammapas' maw closed in on itself and when next it opened the flames had spread as the napalm had been distributed on contact, washing the Kaguya in the emerald light of his flames. As he fell he drew his arm back across his torso, clenched his fist with all of the might he could possibly muster and with a shout slammed his arm forward against the air in front of him, causing it to shatter! The resulting shockwave would travel upwards for over one hundred meters, connecting with and devastating the flesh of the hungry spirit. It screamed in agony and lifted its' massive body up once more, it's flesh pulsating and quivering uncontrollably!

Arisato fell to the ground below and rolled, coming to a stop on his hands and knees and looking up at Kammapa who, at this point, had gotten the message it seemed. Rather than pounce down on the Kaguya it turned its' enormous bulk and began to trudge away in search of easier food to eat. Like all predators, Kammapa, it seemed, had a limit for how much effort it would put into consuming something. Arisato was left panting and, quite frankly, a bit exhausted. The battle had ultimately been short but devastatingly demanding. He decided then and there that he would do as the stampeding spirits had done and simply avoid Kammapa in the future should it ever rear its' nonexistent head back towards him. He had not won this encounter he knew, merely convinced the enormous thing that he was not worth the effort required to eat him.

That left Arisato and Aimi, separated still by dozens upon dozens of meters of distance, alone as the blue grass slowly returned from the dirt below now that Kammapa was gone. Other smaller spirits, too, began to return, tiny sprites of all shapes and colors reemerging from behind stones or blades of grass and floating in the air. For his part, Arisato chose to stay on his hands and knees and rest for a few moments, to try and catch his breath. More than anything he felt the pain in his arms and legs from the effort he'd had to exert to push back and hold those terrible lips open. He was suddenly hit by the stench he was bathed in and shivered from it. He needed to clean himself off...

"That was incredible," came the young voice of Aimi who had wandered over to his older counterpart and stood by him in awe. Arisato looked up at young Aimi and pushed himself up into a sitting position. "I could barely keep up with what was going on! You were flying, and those jutsu! That green fire! How did you do all of that!?" the young Kaguya demanded to know.

"Practice and training... years of it... The green fire was napalm, not katon. Different elemental release," he clarified while panting for breath.

"Could I learn it from you?" Aimi asked, young mind already filling with the possibilities that could come from wielding such jutsu in Kirigakure! The advancement! The recognition! He could hardly imagine the praise he'd receive for bringing back and entirely new type of ninjutsu to the village!

Arisato was not so enthusiastic. He waved to the boy dismissively. "You'll figure it out for yourself I'm sure... liquid fire kid. Remember that. Liquid fire," he said, groaning slightly as he stood up. Facing his younger self, Arisato would continue to speak. "I think you should get going now. Go back and try to remember what I told you here."

"I don't know how to go back," Aimi protested.

"I suspect that if you close your eyes and try to imagine yourself waking up in bed that you might do just that. Go on, give it a shot," the older Kaguya advised. Aimi the younger nodded, closed his eyes, and within a few seconds was fading from view until there was nothing of him left, and Aimi was once again alone.

Aimi stood there for a moment before taking a seat on the ground, trying to process what had just happened to him. Not the fight with Kammapa, the stink on his body was an overwhelming reminder of that, but the encounter with his younger self. By his reckoning, it was impossible to say if he had actually encountered his sleeping younger self or if it had just been another spirit who copied him. The argument could easily be made for either and he tried to consider what each possibility would mean.

If it had just been a spirit, reading his mind and memories to look like a younger version of himself perhaps or mimicking him through some other fashion, it had confronted him with a truth that he hadn't spoken aloud until his confrontation with it. If it was a spirit, it was possible that it had been sent by his nemesis to torment or otherwise engage him as he had done with the pink, big-mouth spirit years prior. If that were the case, then the conversation had been a part of the jackals' greater game, whatever that might have been. He found himself once again wishing he could actually remember what had been said to him before entering the spirit world and what had been said immediately after.

If it had been himself truly, then the possibilities were just as perplexing. If that had been himself then at some point while he slept he had been pulled, at least partially, into the spirit world. Had that happened often and he never noticed? Moreover, if that had been himself, did that mean that he, now older, had been the cause and inspiration for his rebellion from Kirigakure, for the invention of napalm, for some of his most powerful jutsu? Had he witnessed this things done by an older version of himself in a dream and kept the ideas subconsciously within to be developed as the years came and went? Had he always been his own muse?

That final question made Aimi chuckle, because yes, of course he had been! Regardless of the truth of this encounter, spirit or his self, he had always been the catalyst of his own advancement! With a rare exception, such as that froggy samurai Fuhen who he hadn't seen or thought of in years at this point, almost his entire repertoire or ninjutsu and taijutsu were of his own design, so did it matter if the ideas had come to him naturally and organically or had been shown to him in a dream or an errant trip to the spirit world? They were still his after all, there could be no one else to thank for their creation but him!

That still left him with the question, spirit or self? And the question that followed was equally as perplexing and without an answer; destiny or design? Exactly how much of himself was of his own making and how much was the machination of a laughing spirit who viewed his imprisonment as a joke?

The question was unsettling and it left the mighty shinobi humbled, sitting in the grass with troubled thoughts.
Last edited by Golnax on Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Golnax
Posts: 1498
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2016 7:00 pm

Death of the Self; Rebirth of Ego

Post by Golnax » Fri Jun 25, 2021 7:22 pm

Chapter 12

Aimi Kaguya knelt by the edge of a pool of water, bathing himself clean of the stinking saliva of Kammapa. After the battle he had sat in the grass for a while and thought things over as he had never considered them before and he was still thinking of those things now. Silent since the moment he had bid his younger self to wake up (or the spirit who had expertly impersonated him to vanish), he ran water over his body and washed it off as best as he could, pushing the soiled water from his skin onto the ground beside him out of habit. It was a habit he had taken to automatically doing these days after an unfortunate encounter with a spirit of water who did not appreciate him bathing in its' lake without permission and dirtying its' water, so now he removed as much of his filth away from the source of water as best as he could.

This was all far from his mind, however, as he ran his hands over his arms and chest, as he let water pool on top of his head and wring it through his hair, he was silent and contemplative. He was beginning to ask himself questions that shook him to the very core that he had never had time or need to ask before and they so deeply troubled him to the point of near catatonic automatic process. Dip, scrub, remove from water, repeat, over and over again until he was more or less clean. Once he was he simply sat cross legged and looked down into the pool of water at his own reflection while tiny sprites pulled apart the puddles of dirty water he had made and carried it off like an army of floating ants he paid as equally little attention to.

Aimi was studying his own face in the water and remembering how his younger self looked. Not just the visage he had faced not so long ago but his older self from when he came into this world. He'd been clean shaven then. His hair had been kept in a more orderly fashion. His expression had not looked so haunted as it did not. there was nothing to shave with here in the spirit world and he'd long since grown tired of cleaning himself up with shards of bone he produced, hence the reason he had kept his hair in the state it was currently in. Besides, he didn't like how the hair had a tendency to float away and break apart into nothing or simply keep going on until he couldn't see it anymore. He wondered if he looked the way he did not because of laziness... or something else.

He was so concentrated on how different his face looked now that he did not notice at first the reflection of the spirit in the water across from him. When he did notice he looked up and saw the thing staring at him. It was a peculiar shape, as these spirits so often are, with a hexagon shaped head and a large eye on the middle that stared unblinking that lead down to a long neck. Its' frame was thin and frail looking, body draped in ragged clothing that hung on like loose rags rather than a cohesive outfit. It sat floating in the air in the lotus position and had an absence of light about it that seemed to darken all else around it. Looking on at the thing made Aimi also realize that he was back in another forest - he could not tell if it was the same one as earlier as he had come here in more or less a trance - and so trees surrounded them on all sides.

"Am I disturbing you, spirit?" Aimi asked tentatively, his voice cracking slightly as though hoarse. He was wary of getting into another fight for his life at just that moment and so hesitated to lash out or make any premature judgement.

"No," the spirit answered. "You appear disturbed, however., Aimi Kaguya."

"You know me?" Aimi asked quietly.

"By reputation only. You have been among us for some time and a human in this world is an unusually rare thing. For those of our kind that care for that sort of thing, we pay attention," the spirit clarified. Aimi noticed that it seemed to have no mouth and indeed he did not feel the words touching his ears but rather it was as if they bypassed them altogether, yet it was not as if it spoke directly into his mind. It was yet another thing about this world he was simply unable to understand.

All the same Aimi did not reply to this but instead lowered his gaze back down to the reflection of himself.

"You are wondering who you are," the spirit observed.

"No. I'm just... thinking about how I've changed," Aimi retorted.

"The practice is one in the same. Who you are, how you've changed, are just different ways of asking who were you before this moment, in the not-so-distant past or perhaps as a child. It is all a practice of self reflection."

The lost shinobi did not reply but continued to stare at himself. He agreed silently but said nothing. He believed at this point that this spirit was not out to harm him but instead simply to talk with him. Since he had been managing his emotions, such spirits would approach him from time to time, usually with questions about his reality or just to be pleasant. Very few asked any sort of questions or made statements of this nature. Fewer still had Aimi stuck around to humor rather than move on in his quest to find a way back home. Now, though, he was shocked enough to be open to this conversation.

"I believe I can help you in this endeavor. I am aware of who you currently are, who you have been, and have some insight as to who you might become," the spirit proclaimed. Aimi lifted his gaze from his reflection to the hexagon headed spirit and looked into that deep, unblinking eye. Before he could say anything the spirit raised its' hand as if to stop him before gently continuing. "Ask me not how I know what I know. It is beyond what you are capable of understanding. I am a kami of truth, Aimi Kaguya, and I am clairvoyant when it comes to matters of truth. This is all you need know."

The kami of truth floated forward until it was hovering over the pool of water and much closer to Aimi. "Sit up straight, please, and look into the pool when I point my hand down," the spirit requested. Hesitantly Aimi straightened his posture and asked a question. "Did En Framförallt send you?"

"No. I approach you now of my own accord. I believe you are in need of truth, and truth is my purpose, thus I present myself to you now," the kami replied before holding its' left hand up, palm flat, and pointed with two fingers on its' right hand down to the pool. Again Aimi hesitated, unsure of how much he could trust this spirit, before doing as instructed and looking down at the surface of the pool. He saw at first his own reflection as it was but shortly there after the pool rippled and the features of his face changed to that of his younger self which had been there not so long ago now. Before he knew it this reflection of his younger years was rising up out of the water and taking the shape of himself like some sort of water clone.

"Be not disturbed, this is but only a construct to help you understand," the Kami stated as the figure of young Aimi Kaguya rose fully out of the water - with the addition of another being. Vodka Mutini, his once pet cat turned spirit turned gossip/spy. The water version of his former pet curled around the legs of his boyhood self, nuzzling up to it. "I do not mince words and shall not leave you in wondering; the reflection of the spirit you called Vodka Mutini is a parallel to your own spirit in the form I have conjured. Please keep this in mind and tell me what you see."

Tight lipped and unsure how he felt about facing yet another version of himself as a boy, Aimi Kaguya looked on the water construct for a few moments before simply shrugging his shoulders. "I see myself as a teenager. Young, naïve, not knowing that isn't a cat..."

"Correct, but this is just what is on the surface. Look closer and you will see the truth; this is you as you were, your past self. Young and brash, willing to fight anyone and anything to prove yourself, inventive, inquisitive, constantly improving because you felt you had begun life at a disadvantage and had to make up for it by being overly aggressive. You were a child - ignorant of the world around you and worse yet the world outside of your immediate surroundings. You were a creature of growing violence because violence was all that you knew. You were encouraged and you leaned into that and, in time, you became one of the most capable shinobi of your village. This is who you were, Aimi Kaguya."

Aimi sat quietly as the spirit spoke and he soaked its' words in. True to its' word, strangely enough, it seemed to speak nothing but truth about him. He had been all of those things growing up. It was around the age of thirteen or so that he stopped learning standard jutsu from scrolls and started making up his own. It would only be a couple more years from this point as he was depicted in water before he created his first Ghost-light, and from there had been a cascade of experimentation, trial and error and exponential growth. He was suspicious if this spirit wasn't somehow reading his mind or if it was simply yet another being in this world that chose to watch of him (and likely others) from afar and this was how it knew the things it knew. Ultimately though, Aimi decided that this truth, whichever it was, didn't really matter. As he said nothing the spirit lowered its' left hand and raised its' right, reversing their position and biding him to look back to the pool.

Once more he saw his own reflection and once more the surface of the water rippled and changed what he looked like, removing the beard and the shaggy hair and replacing it with the clean shaven and orderly long hair he used to have. As before this reflection of himself rose up out of the surface of the water and stood next to the watery vision of his younger self, complete with a Vodka Mutini who sat at his feet and looked upwards at him without making any sort of contact.

"This is who you are. Ignorant no longer, powerful, a leader of men and nations. But lost, unsure, fearful, indecisive, knowing enough to know that you do not know who you are," the spirit said.

"No, that's not right, that's not who I am," Aimi protested sternly.

"Is it not? Think, I speak only in truths. You are aware of how your home village operates as compared to the rest of the world and the other ninja villages. You understand the difference in culture and in method employed. You recently were at the head of an ever growing army that conquered nation after nation and consolidated them into one, yet here you are, a stranger in a strange land, lost, far from home and unsure of yourself and how to get back, unsure of what is real and what is not at this point. Your past, your present, all uncertain. You are afraid of this uncertainty. You are afraid of not leaving this world, afraid of what the world will have become once you do, afraid that all you have built and worked towards will no longer be there, destroyed by the iron fists of Kirigakure. You do not know what the best course of action is to take given your current circumstances, and were you even in your home world, you do not know what course of action to take that would best protect your nation, your people. You are wholly in over your head and floundering in attempts to not drown."

"Shut up," Aimi growled, his anger beginning to get the best of him. He didn't like the words he was hearing and liked even less that he felt them to be true just as the spirit said.

"There is more yet that you fear. Look into the pool and see who you might become," the spirit said, changing the position of its' hands once more, but this time Aimi did not look back down. At the worse spoken he felt his heart skip a beat in his chest and he shook his head.

"No," he denied fearfully, an overwhelming sense of what was about to happen over taking him.

"Ever since you have been old enough to consider that what Kirigakure had done to you was wrong you have been afraid of this one terrible question; what if? Afraid to ask and afraid to face even the thought of an answer. Look into the water. Face your fear, for it is the only way that you will be able to wash away your fears and doubts about yourself and come to know who you are," the spirit urged, staring at Aimi with an ever unblinking eye.

Aimi defiantly stared back for several moments and said nothing while the spirit continued to float and otherwise remain still. He understood that he had a choice in this moment. He could leave this place and continue to wander, pondering what he would ponder all by himself and perhaps get nowhere, or he could do as the spirit said and face his fears - face himself - and learn. To grow or to retreat was the choice he faced and like the child he once was Aimi Kaguya felt terrified at either prospect. Yet, ultimately, he chose to stay. He conceded that in order to grow, and perhaps even to escape this fate, he needed to do this. Who knew? Perhaps this was what the jackal wanted all along. Hard to say when he had never made contact with it again, but regardless, Aimi Kaguya slowly turned his gaze back down to the pool.

The water had turned black and appeared empty, bottomless, a void. Then from that void rose an oncoming shape, a face, a reflection of himself as the other two had been. This was different though. Aimi did not recognize the face looking back at him rising up from the depths of the pool. It was skeletal - at least that's how it appeared at first. As it drew closer he could see the shape of his jaw and his hair but his face was obscured by some sort of mask. Aimi pulled his head back and tried to push himself back up to his feet and get away from the pool of water only to find that it was growing all around him, spreading from the tiny pond that it had been and flooding the ground around him! More than that, though, was the darkness leaking out from the water and enveloping everything in shadow, leaving only Aimi, the spirit, and the form of his worst fear emerging from the world below.

"Be brave," the spirit encouraged but its' voice was distant and as a whisper. Before long it, too, vanished into the dark leaving only Aimi with the versions of himself. The masked figure of himself rose up higher and higher, taking shape but without taking a full form, the watery visage of Aimi ending definition at his shoulders and simply becoming a large pillar of water. That is, of course, until it stopped rising altogether and took the rest of its' shape. It stood taller than Aimi himself by several inches and its' body from the neck down was obscured by what looked like a cape of some sort, held in place by a set of pauldrons both of which took on the visage of skulls. Unlike the other two, Vodka Mutini was nowhere to be seen.

For a few moments Aimi stood in the shadow unmoving and unblinking, staring at this latest reflection of himself. He expected the spirit to speak to him once more but there was silence. Not even the sound of the wind could be heard in this oppressive darkness. All of that changed, however, when the newest incarnation twitched its' head and the sound of snapping bone echoed out seemingly for forever! Aimi flinched at the sound and watched as this fear turned to look at him and as it did its' body filled with color, matching the pigment of his hair, skin and bone. He could not see the eyes beyond the mask and beyond the initial twitch there was stillness.

"What is this supposed to be?" Aimi asked, addressing the question to the spirit but receiving no answer. At least not from the truth kami.

"This is what you fear," spoke the third form of himself. His voice was deep and hollow, cold and soft and yet level and calm all at once. The sound of his own voice ringing in his ears in that manner sent shivers down his spine.

The taller version of himself stepped back and turned, walking behind the 'current version' of Aimi and standing behind the child. He reached out from under his bone white cape and his hands appeared skeletal as well yet beyond the limbs that emerged there was nothing but darkness underneath. He placed his boney hands upon the shoulders of the younger Aimi and at once its' watery form filled with color from head to toe. Just as quickly, those skeletal hands dug into and clenched what would have been flesh, turning his hands until they were practically wrapped around Aimis' young throat. Then, unceremoniously, he raked his hands across one another and burst the younger form of Aimi, returning it to nothing but water that fell down into the darkness below and rippled the surface of the water for several moments before again becoming still.

"What are you doing!?" Aimi demanded to know, disturbed by what he had seen been done to himself. The taller version of Aimi snapped his head up with another echoing snap of bone to look at the real Aimi Kaguya.

"Fall." The skeletal Aimi commanded and as his cold soft voice emanated from his being there was a circular ripple that travelled through the darkness and warped the viewable world around it momentarily. This ripple passed over Aimi and as it did he felt all of the strength leave his entire being. He grew light headed and his vision blurred, his knees buckled out from underneath him and he did as he was told and fell down; first to his knees and then on his hands before finally laying flat down in the wet darkness entirely. It was as if his body were suddenly so much heavier that he couldn't lift himself up. The word had placed some sort of invisible, omnipresent weight upon his entire being.

Aimi could hear a deep chuckling coming from his other self though it sounded distant and his ears were ringing. He groaned, trying to push himself back up with all of his might and straining against the oppressive weight that sat upon him. He struggled to keep his eyes open as even his lids felt as if they had heavy weights placed upon them. He could just see through the blur and the slits of his eyes the caped form of this latest incarnation of himself stepping over behind the only remaining vision.

"What... are you... doing...?" Aimi demanded to know, struggling even to get the words out of his mouth, his arms quaking as he fought to keep even just his head upright.

"I am showing you what you could become, and how meaningless all that came before is," came the cool words of his doppelganger. "A young boy, a slave to and of combat and assassination is as nothing compared to the man who took control of nations under his own wing nearly single handedly - just as such a man is as nothing to me," he said, placing a skeletal hand upon the naked shoulder of Aimi's 'current self' and filling it with color, only to pull that hand back and bring it slashing through the watery head of the figure and returning it to the water from whence it had come.

Gritting his teeth and groaning in pain, Aimi pushed himself up onto his hands and knees and pulled his head into an upright position. "What... are you... who... are you... supposed to be!?" the shinobi demanded to know. In this moment, he no longer believed that this was some spirits' revelation of himself but instead an attack on his person brought on by a spirit who peddled in supposed truths.

"You know me. You have feared me for years and kept me hidden in the darkest depths of your mind and heart, but now you have opened the door, and I have come."

Turning towards the crouching Aimi, the Fear lowered his hand so that it was visible to the ninja before lifting it upwards and forcing Aimi to his feet with the same invisible force that had pushed him down before, only this time it knocked the wind out of his lungs and left him gasping as he floated an inch above the rippling darkness below. "I don't... believe you... I'm not... I'm not..." Aimi rasped out defiantly.

"But you are, child. You have always been this and you have always known that you were this. You merely feared embracing yourself and becoming what you were always inevitably going to become," the Fear claimed, reaching out and placing cold fingers against Aimi's chin and forcing him to look up at the skulled face. As he looked through slatted eyes he could see that there were no eyes beyond those sockets. There was only fire.

"No... No! I... I didn't abandon everything I had in Kirigakure... and... and forged my own country... just to become what I feared I might... I left... to be more! To find a different way!" Aimi cried out defiantly, letting his eyes fall close to the relentless weight and turning his head.

"No, child," the Fear said coldly, grabbing a hold of Aimi's chin in that skeletal hand and forcing his face forward. "There is only me. There is only my way. There is only the darkness and there is only surrender!" The words cut through Aimi like a blade of ice down to the bone, chilling him to his very core. All logic and mental cohesion was beginning to slip from him and for the first time in years as an overwhelming fear came over him of what he was now facing, his body began to dissipate and break apart into bubbles.

The skull masked visage of Aimi let out a deep, echoing chuckle that only seemed to grow deeper with each passing second. "You are alone, child. There is only darkness for you and only death for your people," the Fear proclaimed, lowering its' hand down and wrapping it around Aimis' throat ever so slowly. "This is just the beginning. I will command a great and terrible army, and we will march to every land. Will will march until every light is extinguished."

Hardly grasping on to his physical form, Aimi reached up with a shaky hand and grabbed a hold of the wrist of the Fear, squeezing onto it with all of the might that remained in his body. It was no use though. With practically all of the strength gone from his body he might as well have been blowing hot air and hoping to be released. In response the Fear only grasped his throat tighter and lifted him even further up in the air with absolutely no effort on its' part.

"You are strong, child. But I am beyond strength. I am The End, and I have come for you!" it proclaimed and as Aimi looked down on it he could see that its' arm, too, was skeletal, and underneath in the darkness there was only bone as well. This was a personification of himself that he had always been afraid of, the potential for such a cold, oppressive evil, of sheer death that wanted nothing except to bring an end to everyone and everything before it. The majority of his life he had been struggling against this self image and fighting not to become it, but now that it stood before him he was nothing short of terrified to the point of dissolving once again. At least without a body he would be able to escape.

It was the only hope he had left after seeing this reflection of himself.
Last edited by Golnax on Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Golnax
Posts: 1498
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2016 7:00 pm

Death of the Self; Rebirth of Ego

Post by Golnax » Mon Jul 12, 2021 9:25 am

Chapter 13

But it was not the end.

Just as Aimi was beginning to fall apart at the seams and vanish once more, a blinding light burst forth with all of the intensity of a star. Aimi snapped his eyes shut but even through his lids the light was blinding! He felt the grip on his neck let go and he fell to the ground below, clasping at his neck with one hand, hunched over and guarding his eyes from the light with his other arm. He could still feel himself being pulled apart, but now that he was no longer looking upon that which he feared the most and could no longer feel that cold, dead touch, he felt strangely safe even if he was aware that the Fear could only have been a couple of short paces away from him.

"Stand aside," came a powerful voice and it was full of warmth and gentle intensity like fire! It had come from someone to Aimis' right but he dare not open his eyes and try to look. "This one does not yet belong to you, specter!"

Turning his head away from the light, Aimi lowered his arm and opened his eyes, blinking several times to try and get the splotches of color to vanish so that he could see properly. At first he could see nothing but the vague shadow of the light and the dark all around him. Keeping his arm raised he turned his head and saw the Fear looking away from him at the direction of the light, still and motionless. It seemed to pay Aimi no more attention and as such the disheveled Kaguya turned his own gaze upon the light, holding his hand up in front of his face to shield against the worst of that iridescent glow.

"Begone!" the warm voice roared with another flare of light as intense as raw sunlight. At its' command, the Fear took several steps back and bled into the darkness of the background. Aimi watched and heard that cold voice defiantly cackle as it turned its' flaming gaze upon him one more. Then nothing could be seen of it save those eyes which remained as dull embers in the dark shrouded in golden light, a grim understanding filling Aimi that it was not gone but had simply chosen to step back.

"Stand up, Aimi," came the booming echo from the light. The lost Kaguya did as he was instructed and got back up to his feet, keeping an arm raised to keep himself from being completely blinded. He looked on and saw not far in the distance the light was in the vague shape of a person. "What are you?" Aimi asked. "A spirit?"

"In a sense," the voice proclaimed. "I am that I am."

The light drew closer and closer and as it did its' radiance dulled until after a few seconds Aimi could lower his hand and look, bewildered, upon the new spirit before him. The spirit, as it turned out, was himself! Or rather, some idealized version of himself on the polar end of the spectrum from the Fear. This Aimi Kaguya was bathed in golden light, had strands of hair of gold, was clean shaven, and wore armor of gold ornate and decorated with etchings and symbols that the bewildered ninja could not understand, for they were not like anything he had ever seen. This specter of radiance wore a crimson cape and his head was adorned with laurels. It had a sword at its' side but was otherwise unarmed from the looks of things.

"In truth, I am you but stronger. More sure of myself. Unclouded by confusion, moral ambiguity or doubt. Sure of purpose and strong of will. I am, as the last spirit was, all that you could be."

"... Why are you wearing armor?" Aimi asked the Radiance.

"... I'm sorry?"

"The armor. Why are you wearing it? If you're supposed to be me shouldn't you know that I'd never wear armor because I can make my own?" Aimi asked frankly, deadpan and flat of note. It was honestly the only thing he could think about since he had gotten a good look at this new incarnation of himself, the perplexing choice to appear to him in armor.

His query broke a smile on the spirits' face and that smile gave way to warm, belting laughter that seemed to warm the very air and drive away the chill that had been hanging over his soul but a moment before. "Pull yourself back together and walk with me, and I will answer your question," the spirit promised, reaching out and placing a hand - seemingly of flesh and blood - upon Aimis' shoulder. The touch was warm and reassuring, further chasing away the feeling of coldness that had been in him. He tried not to think about the fact that this was technically supposed to be him touching himself as he closed his eyes and pulled himself back from the aether. Once he was whole once again he opened his eyes and the pair began to walk, followed behind by a shadow with fiery eyes. Aimi took notice of this and turned to look back into the dark only to have the Radiance gently press against his cheek to deter him from doing so. "Fret not, fret not. He cannot harm you while I am here. Now, I should answer you about the armor."

"This visage of me, of you, is wholly symbolic Aimi. I am not truly a representation of yourself yet any more than the shadow behind us is, rather I am a look into your own spirit - your soul if you like - a distilled and exaggerated look at your potential as an individual in the future. Likewise, so too is the shadow such a look." Aimi listened and tried to digest what was being said to him but was admittedly so shaken up still that he was having trouble keeping focus. He supposed that he had the advantage of hindsight to review this conversation later.

"As such, the question of 'why the armor' is answered, simply, 'because symbolism'. Armor protects the body from harm so of course you don't want to be hurt. Who does? This armor is gold, though, a soft metal not suitable for battle. It is valuable, though, and also the name of the country you forged back in the Real, thus the armor simultaneously represents your value and worth and the land you wish to rule - shiny, soft and opulent in your eyes on the outside but with a core of deep strength, represented by your body. The laurels on my head symbolize your triumphs which you are so very proud of, the red cape the passion and elegance you take with you wherever you go, the sword your capacity and willingness to fight for what you believe is a right and just cause," the Radiance explained as they walked, the three of them, side by side of one another.

"That all seems a bit... much for me. I mean I don't even wear jewelry, I barely wear clothes!" Aimi protested, exasperated by the claim that this spiritual representation of himself was making. To his protest the Radiance simply laughed and once more Aimi was filled with an almost divine sense of warmth.

"All the better that it is not you, then! Not yet at least. Remember, the shadow and I are but exaggerations of possibility. If I am the best of what you could become, he is perhaps the worst. We are both, however, merely reflections borne from the kami of truth that summoned us, thus not in any strict sense 'real' at the moment. That power is in your hands," the Radiance explained and as the words passed its' lips Aimi came to a stop with the Fear not far behind him. Turning around, the Radiance looked at Aimi and asked, "Is something wrong?"

"No, it's just... it's just a lot! This whole fucking place is a lot of nothing and then a lot of something all at once! I mean, I go years without any meaningful conversation with another human being, then in one day I'm talking to maybe my younger self and two different future versions of me!? It's just a fucking lot! Ich brauche eine verdammte Minute!" he proclaimed, running a hand through his hair in stress, only to stiffen up and flinch as from the darkness behind him came a pair of skeletal hands and a cold chuckle.

"Mox nihil aliud erunt minuta; sed nihil nisi tempus," came the chill of the Fear all over again, except this time it was speaking in some sort of gibberish that not even Aimi understood!? He barely even understood his own gibberish because he often just made it up on the spot! Now there was some future reflection of his worst self doing the same thing with completely new words!?

The Fear did not have its' boney hands upon Aimi for long though as the Radiance drew its' blade and pointed it over Aimis' shoulder. "Remove your hands, wraith! He is not yet yours!"

"He has always been mine and I will never leave him, no matter what he chooses," the Fear proclaimed ominously but did as it was told, removing his hands from Aimis' shoulders and sinking back into the dark save for a pair of burning orbs. Aimi gasped for breath and felt paralyzed by the mere thought of looking backwards!

"Both of you just stop! I need a second to breath and think to myself!" Aimi shouted. The Radiance sheathed his blade and from behind Aimi the shadow moved around him to stand next to its' incandescent counter part, merely a shade next to the brilliant star that was the Radiance. Aimi looked away from them both and took some time to process what had been told to him. "So, let me get this straight... Neither of you are actually real or here. You're just some fucking spirit mumbo jumbo reflections of me, yeah? Why can I feel you both then? And you keep implying that you're not real yet, what is that all about?"

"You can feel us because we are you in every sense of the word. Distorted self images though we may be, we are a part of you and only you can feel us. We are intangible to the rest of this world and just as insignificant. As I said before, we are potential. We are future incarnations of yourself at opposite extremes. The power to make us real is yours and yours alone. You have to choose."

The significance of this statement did not yet hit Aimi as he responded back. "So you were made by that floating geometry head spirit a few minutes ago?"

"The kami of truth, yes," the Radiance clarified.

"And so what, you're supposed to be this hyper realistic depiction of my goodness or something while... he's supposed to be my great evil? Is that it?" Aimi asked only to find the two reflections of himself remaining silent before him. The Radiance turned to look at the Fear and vice versa before the Radiance spoke.

"It's not as simple as good and evil, Aimi. It never is. I am your potential for growth and influence in a 'positive' sense, yes... but I am still you. The near genocide you performed during the Great War, that vast poaching of the pale lions with fire? I would have done the same, and made sure that none survived so as to never be a hinderance to me, my people or my plans ever again. Can the extinction of an entire species and the disruption of an ecosystem truly be considered a good thing?"

"Meanwhile I am your potential for growth in a 'negative' sense. If you had been me during the Great War, I would have razed Kirigakure to the ground and annihilated any and all inhabitants of the village from the lowest pauper in the Untouchable district to the fattest nobility in their ivory towers. The stain that is the Bloody Mist village would have been no more and there is no force known to us that could have stopped or hindered me from doing this - that includes little Nishiki, Shinji, and all those children you loved to play with and entertain. Tell me then; is the eradication of a system that produced one such as myself truly an evil thing?"

"We are not your moral compass."

"We are not in charge of what you do."

"We are merely reflections of possibility."

"And you must choose."

Now the gravity of choice was beginning to set in for Aimi. He understood now what he was being told.

"What you're telling me... is that I have to choose which of you to become? I am to pick between what I've always hoped I could be and what I've always feared I am? And by doing so one of you will become real?" he asked shakily.

"In a sense. We are aspects of Truth, Aimi Kaguya. Your truth. By embracing one or the other, you decide which reflection is more true to yourself than the other. You pick and dedicate yourself to a possible future, and though you may never don armor or shed your flesh, here and now you have to face the fact that your choice will influence your future. I am only ask that you choose carefully," the Radiance further explained.

"Yes, the choice is yours, but do think carefully on it child. Know that no choice you make will result in absolute good or evil. If you choose him you will go on to do great things child, oh yes. Terrible! But great. If you choose me, you will know a satisfaction that only destruction can bring. As one we will rip through the world as a plague and be what your teachers and lessons and beatings have always strove to make you; a perfect instrument of death. In your heart, you know you find comfort in that, and either way you must choose!" said the Fear and as it spoke its' shadow grew more and more until the Radiance was merely a dull light in the dark next to it. Its' cold voice echoed throughout the void and Aimi knew that what they both were saying was true; how could it be anything else? They were born from a spirit of truth itself, after all.

Now the choice fell to him. As he stood silently the Fear shrank back down to be but a shadow standing next to the still dulled light of the Radiance. Two paths in life, two choices, two possible futures. Aimi needed to choose one of them and in his heart of hearts he knew that turning away from this choice was not really an option; it was only a delay to the inevitable. He would have to face this choice of who to be and how to be sooner or later, here or there, in the Real or in the spirit world. In a strange way this choice was the same one he and everyone else made all their lives over and over again, back and forth dancing between light and shadow to become fuller people. Now the choice befell him once again and as he stood there, stranded, confused, faced with two reflections of truth about himself, he weighed the options of each. The simple satisfaction of absolute annihilation. The complicated path to greatness. Which was the better choice really?

In the end, after much debating, Aimi stepped forward and moved in front of the Radiance.

His reflection smiled back at him. "A wise choice," it said softly, with warmth. It raised its' arms. "Embrace me, and make your decision."

Aimi did so and closed his eyes, wrapping his arms around what he thought would be cold metal. Instead he found the embrace to be as warm as any fire he had sat next to during the long nights of his life and he closed his eyes, comforted by this warmth and his choice not to give in to temptation, to be what Kirigakure had always wanted him to be. No matter the simplicity of such a life, he decided that it was no life at all in comparison to the six short years he had spent outside of the walls of the village before coming to this place. Compared to the brightness of the sun, how could one ever choose to live in darkness?

The hollow laughter of the Fear forced his eyes back open. He saw the shadow of his future self receding into the light but not yet fully gone and heard that cold voice for one last time. "You have made your decision now, but it will not be the last time you make this choice. No child, I will be with you always, and you will face me again, over and over, time after time. It is inevitable that we will meet once more and when next we do, try to take comfort in your choice of a fading light rather than the peace of dark!" A grand cackle came from that dissolving shadow that echoed and boomed, but soon only the echoes remained as even the fire of the Fears' eyes winked out of existence, leaving Aimi alone with the Radiance who glowed brighter and brighter with each passing moment.

"Don't worry, everything's going to be alright," he reassured himself and for a moment, Aimi allowed himself to believe that this was true. He closed his eyes and was engulfed in light and only opened them again when the feeling of being embraced was gone, only to find that the world of oppressive darkness and that comforting light he had embraced was gone and he was right back where he had been; in the woods, in the spirit world, standing next to a small pool, with the floated kami of truth not far from him.

"You were very brave indeed," the Kami said simply. Aimi looked over at the hexagon headed spirit with a sour expression on his face, lowering his arms and straightening up. "What was that just now? What did you just make me do?"

"I made you do nothing. I showed you truth, and you made a choice. For what it is worth, I believe it was the best choice you could have made. I invite you to think on your choice now. In the calm serene of the pool and the wood, know your truth Aimi Kaguya, and let it illuminate the path ahead."

Finished speaking, the kami of truth vanished from sight, leave Aimi alone once more. He did as was suggested to him and sat down by the pool of water, looking down at his reflection and thinking about the choice he'd just made. The him he had faced in the golden armor was a representation of 'positive' change. He thought about what that meant and came to the conclusion that it had really been a reflection of an earlier choice he had made over a decade ago now - to leave Kirigakure and to make his own way in the world. Or perhaps it was better to say that the earlier choice had been the same as this one, just simpler. He considered that having literally embraced this choice, he could do so much! He thought for the first time in a long while of the country he had been taken from, really thought about it - the rolling plains, the vast gorge, the shimmering desert, the hidden city, the mines of gold, the people, the culture, the buildings, his village - Kusagakure - he thought of it all and how wonderful it was!

He thought of, for the first time in a long time, all of his plans for Gold. For some reason they all seemed and felt so possible! His every idea for his village, his people, his country seemed within reach! For the first time in a long time, he felt that he could do anything! He began making new plans, allowing new ideas to grow, feeling and thinking freely about something other than escape or the situation he found himself in that he had so single-mindedly focused on escaping for years now! It felt wonderful! It was jubilation itself to simply sit and imagine all that he could do! What he could achieve on the world stage! How the world might change, really truly change, because of his decisions, his influence, his will! It all felt so real and close, like he could reach out and touch it and it would be so!

But the reality of it all slowly began to creep back in.

The reality was, even having rejected giving in to his 'dark side' and having all of these ideas for how to shape the world, he was stuck there in the spirit world. A prisoner against his will by a laughing god who, even now, was probably cackling to himself just as condescendingly as his Fear had laughed at him for the futility of his choice! The reality was he was trapped and unable to do all of the wonderful things he wanted to do with his life, and that made him angry. A smile became a frown. Jubilation gave way to rage. Peace gave way to violence and quiet to a scream as Aimi turned his head towards the sky and roared with all of his might! He roared in impotent rage and channeled his chakra and set the wood around him ablaze with flames so hot that they turned what did not run away to glass. He raged and rampaged, tearing through the spirit world around him like he had not done for years. It didn't matter to him that any spirits around him would vanish and most likely be unharmed by his outburst; the point wasn't the cause harm but to fume. He burned the forest. He burned the plain. He caused as much damage if not more to his surroundings in all direction as Kammapa had just passing through.

And it was all empty. Just an empty rage and futility at the powerlessness he felt right at the cusp of feeling so empowered for the first time in a long time. A cosmic joke played on him by a laughing god, a laughing universe, and there was nothing for it except the catharsis of wrath.
Last edited by Golnax on Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Golnax
Posts: 1498
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2016 7:00 pm

Death of the Self; Rebirth of Ego

Post by Golnax » Sat Jul 17, 2021 11:53 pm

Chapter 14
~ Seventy Years Since Dissolvement ~ The spirit world had changed Aimi Kaguya.

He sat atop a small hill beneath a tall, thin, wispy flowering tree with his eyes closed, sat in the lotus meditation position and floating several inches off of the ground. He used no jutsu or technique to achieve this feat. The world around him was simply lifting him up as he sat in harmony with it. His hair was tied with a piece of twine at the top in a loose bun while the back of his hair was left free to fall and float in the air behind him, subsequently fanning out in all directions as he meditated. His beard was now long to the point of reaching his stomach but maintained and trimmed, kept orderly despite the inherent disorder that surrounded him. Surrounding him were small spirits of various shapes and colors, some animalistic while others were more abstract. A bird spirit sat and slept in peace on his right thigh while smaller kodama tended to the blooming flowers underneath him, the little ones mimicking the Kaguya's hair with makeshift wigs of grass blades. All around Aimi the world pulsated in a perfect sphere in time with the beating of his heart, the grass, flowers, spirits, tree and even his own body distorting with each pair of undulations his body made.

Aimi sat in a deep meditation as was often his practice these days. He passed the time thinking, imagining, not thinking and making his mind devoid of thought as much as possible to the point of practically becoming one with the world around him that so reacted to his presence and persistence. He had had a lot of time to practice after all and he could now go for days at a time sitting still and doing nothing if he so chose. Time meant very little to him anymore and the passing of days was marked only by the heating and cooling of his body as the sun passed through the red sky overhead.

Much had happened since his raging had ended upon the completion of his choice. Much and little at all, really. Frustrating as reality had been to him all those decades ago it remained the same; he was trapped with no way out and no way to force the Blind Idiot God he had so despised to appear before him. As such his next choice was simple - continue to rampage or make the best of the situation. For a while he had chosen to rampage, but his rage could only grow to so much of a height. Eventually his flames fizzled out and he was left with a deep resignation that turned into resolution. If he was to be trapped, he would make this world his own - until he could encounter En Framförallt again, of course, as he had believed was inevitable at the time.

Years passed and that belief grew thinner and thinner. To pass the time while he waited, he spoke with spirits and had long, deep conversations with them about a plethora of topics. There were a surprising number that wished to know what eating was like! Subsequently, Aimi grew rather skilled and describing the nuances of food and the enjoyment of it. Others engaged him in talks of philosophy, of being, of the nature of things. When hostile spirits came along he fought them off and, eventually, they stopped coming for him altogether. Years began to bleed into decades and as the magnitude of time crept up on him, he began to change. Despite being the only human within this world, he began to take care of his appearance again. By the time that twenty years had passed since his first intrusion in the world he had settled on the look he maintained even now and his feud with En Framförallt was rarely thought about. He could barely even recall what the laughing god looked like.

By the time thirty years had passed, Aimi had taken up gardening. The plants that grew in the spirit world were often strange and reactive but the lost Kaguya found that, often times, if he treated them as if they were spirits themselves he could coax plants, seedlings and flowers to do as he wished so long as he was gentle with them. The tree he sat under presently was one such plant in his garden that he had bonsaied. He knew that typically bonsaiing a plant meant keeping it small but he saw little point to doing that frankly. As the years crept on his garden grew more and more expansive, becoming something of a labyrinth of the weird flora he had cultured in patches all around him rather than any sort of uniform shape or construction. Why bother in such a strange and unorderly world? Instead he had simply planted and cultivated things wherever it suited his fancy in relation to the first tree he had bonsaied which he now sat under. In time, it became a growing realm of his own personal expression. His rage subsided in equal parts of his garden growing.

As forty years passed, Aimi began to think less and less of the people he knew - because he was forgetting them. This troubled him at first that he could not think of the faces of those that he supposedly cared for. To him, it called into question whether or not he cared for them in the first place which opened a whole door of troubling questions. Eventually though, he realized that his caring about those that he had been forced to leave behind did not diminish because he could no longer recall their faces or voices. He still hoped that his countrymen were doing well in his absence, that Nishiki had gained full control of Yoshimitsu and made its' power his own, that Katsu and her family had set a firm grip on their Realm of Titans and made it a prosperous land. Aimi had just been away for so long that his images of them were just vague, colored shadows. He often thought about the state of Gold and hoped that he had provided a strong enough foundation before his abduction that it could still stand on the world stage without him all these years later. It was during this decade that he truly accepted the reality that he may never get back to where he knew, and he was fine with that.

In the fifties, Aimi began to meditate as he was doing now. With little else to do he began to practice ascetism and go for extremely long periods of time without eating or drinking which he had learned he could do during the opening years of his imprisonment but had chosen to continue to eat and drink out of a sense of comfort. During this decade he forewent that comfort for as long as he could, stretching the times between his meals further and further as a test of his endurance - not for his need for sustenance but rather his need for comfort. He became quite good at going days on end without, but in truth he could hardly ever last more than a couple of weeks no matter how he tried. He simply liked eating too much! In this same vein, Aimi, during this decade, began to be more homely in a sense. He began to cook - really cook! He didn't just heat up whatever he was eating and scarf it down, no, he began to experiment with flavors, plants, whatever he could get his hands on really. Eating spirits was more or less impossible he had found as their bodies tended to vanish once vanquished so his diet had become mostly vegetarian. Never the less, his hobby of cooking took up the mantle of filling time along with gardening and, eventually, he became quite good at mixing and matching his own recipes using plants he named himself. Between cooking, gardening and meditating and occasionally talking with spirits, Aimi found himself having little free time anymore.

During his sixth decade he began to harmonize with the world around him. His meditations went beyond merely shutting the world out and seeing how long his constitution for vices could last and entered a state of awareness and connection with the world around him. When he meditated he took notice of things like the wind, the warmth of the sun on his skin, the feeling of the grass beneath him as it swayed, the little spirits that came and acted around his still body. Gradually he started to notice a sort of rhythm that existed all around him, extending from his very being to the world at large. If he sat still for long enough and stayed observant it became apparent that he was a part of something much larger than himself; an ecosystem of his own creation. One that thrived off of quiet, tranquility, contemplation and the food he prepared. For years spirits had been coming to him when he cooked in order to sample food or returning to him at meal times just to enjoy his company and prepared dishes! It had become a part of his every day life and when he meditated he took in the processes that went into it all, a sort of circle of life in a somewhat more abstract sense that felt less complete than it was in the Real and yet somehow more fulfilling, for nothing had to truly die in order to satisfy all who came to him for such delights. There was simply the process.

All the while he felt more and more at peace and more and more connected to the world of spirits. He still felt as though he were a foreigner; his connection was not one of belonging but rather one of literal connection. His every foot step, thought, emotion all had an affect on this place and after so many decades of slowing down and taking it all in he finally began to see and truly know that he was a part of this place physically as much as any other spirit was that gathered around him. Even though he did not belong he was here and his every beat of his heart resonated in some small way. Ripples on water that grew and expanded outwards into potential infinity that had been left in the wake of riptides, tidal waves and hurricanes that had dominated his presence when he first arrived.

Now he sat floating, not of his own volition but as a natural consequence of his presence in this place, entering his seventh decade of confinement with a sense of total peace, tranquility and acceptance that he had never known in the Real - that he could never know because of the very nature of being a shinobi in that world. Here there were no shinobi, no hidden villages, no nations, no borders. There was only the existence of spirits and the impacting ripples they had on the living, malleable world around them, and Aimi Kaguya. He was alone in this world and that was fine by him. He hardly thought of the people he knew any more and the conflicts that had once been so important to him now meant next to nothing. If he counted the years, Aimi Kaguya would find that he was approaching a century of life which was a milestone that, while he had always known was theoretically possible, he had never expected to realistically reach, instead believing that he would be killed - not die but killed - long before he reached that age. Now there he was, the seconds gently passing by without him noticing, and he was about to reach the point of seventy years of being trapped in this realm.

Five...

Four...

Three...

Two...

One...

"Doo dat doot DOOT! What's going on, boney boy? Lose some weight? 'Cause you're practically floating off the ground!"
Aimis' eyes snapped open and in an instant the harmonic pulsating of his heart ceased. The world around him became still and in the same instant he opened his eyes to end his meditation and see the face of his jailer the spirits around him, the sleeping bird in his lap, the kodama beneath him and the ones idly flying around him all turned to look upon the Blind Idiot God who now stood before the wayward daimyo. There he stood, perhaps five meters away at most, a malicious, horrendous, hideous grin stretched out over those canine lips with ghastly teeth and gums on full display, giggling horribly to itself and its' joke. Aimi stared and was transfixed by the sudden appearance of the jackal headed spirit. Memories decades upon decades old flooded back to him upon sighting this ill-proportioned spirit and he inhaled sharply. He'd completely forgotten how gruesome those eye sockets and their stacked scar tissue looked like until then!

"Hey, hey, why the long face, hm? It's me! En Framförallt! Your buddy! Remember?" the Blind Idiot asked nonchalantly. Aimi continued to stare at the jackal headed spirit in silence but the lesser spirits around him began to sense a shift in the air and as such started to drift away from the two of them. They sensed that conflict was coming despite the Kaguya not saying a word in response. En Framförallt, however, had lots to say it seemed.

"Of course you do! How could you forget this face?"
the laughing god asked, moving a long, thing arm up and running those abnormally stretched fingers along the side of its' snout.

"Looks like you've been getting along quite nicely since I last saw you, hm? Got some vegetables growing, a nice tree for shade, you're all skin and bones again which would normally be a complaint but considering last time I saw you you were little more than a blood eagle attached to a jelly fish I'd say it's a marked improvement! Oh, who am I kidding? We both know I can see anything."
There was more laughter coming from the great spirit and Aimi continued to stare it down in silence. This last joke, however, seemed to be particularly funny to the Blind Idiot as it continued to chortle on for several minutes, fits of laughter rising and subsiding sequentially, the jackal grabbing at its' stomach or attempting to cover its' maw as some sort of mock gesture of modesty. Seeing that this guffawing was only going to continue, or perhaps sensing that it would only end with some other bad joke, Aimi chose to open his mouth and speak.

"Why have you come back now? After all this time... I thought I was never going to hear from you again. I thought - " Aimi said, only to be cut off shortly after. He didn't notice that he had drifted back to sitting on the ground in the interim of him speaking and the jackal headed spirit interrupting him.

"Oh good! You used that noggin of yours like I told you to? Oh I hope it didn't hurt much to do so! I do recall saying that I'd come check up on you later. Well now it's later! You seem like you've got a good grasp of yourself now! How was the cooking process? Seems you chose to take it low and slow, eh?"
"Later? That was... that was decades ago! I don't, I mean, I can't..." Aimi tried to articulate, beginning to grow frustrated at not finding the words to properly say what it was that he wanted to to this invader in his garden.

"Mm, hold that thought now! I think we should take this conversation somewhere else, don't you?"
En Framförallt said, and before Aimi had any sort of time to respond in any way the great spirit reached out with its' elongated hand and it was suddenly as if it were directly in front of Aimi and tremendously larger than he was, pushing the Kaguya backwards into what should have been hill but instead into a void. The world around Aimi shattered and suddenly he was falling backwards through empty space, the rose-tinted light of the world he had come to know and call home disappearing rapidly into a pin prick of light only for another hole to open up far beneath him emanating its' own blue light. He turned as he was falling to look down at this portal but only had time enough to understand that it was a new opening in the void before he was through it and -

He was back. Aimi Kaguya was suddenly back in the real world.

He was standing right where he had been when En Framförallt first touched him all those decades ago in a tall field of grass with no one else around. A cool breeze blew through the plain and he was struck by the comparative brightness of the day. He didn't even realize that the sky behind the horizon was blue for a few seconds as he simply stood there, froze, trying to take in the sudden change in his surroundings! Everything felt so different all of a sudden and he could not remember that this was what the real world felt like. It felt to him as the spirit world had all those years ago when he first arrived and that sensation was made all the more confusing with the lack of realization that he was in fact back to the world in which he belonged!

From nowhere En Framförallt stepped back into the plain, the same distance he had been from Aimi in his garden, still giggling incessantly to itself.

"Welcome home! What did we learn?"
the Blind Idiot God asked and as those two words sank into Aimi - welcome home - he knew that he had been brought back into the reality he had once known with as little provocation or reasoning as his initial imprisonment had been. His vision grew blurry and his head felt light.

Aimi Kaguya fainted and fell into the grass beneath him, and the jackal-headed god of his people laughed.
Last edited by Golnax on Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Golnax
Posts: 1498
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2016 7:00 pm

Death of the Self; Rebirth of Ego

Post by Golnax » Thu Aug 05, 2021 12:00 am

Chapter 15

When Aimi Kaguya awoke he opened his eyes to behold the blue sky and clouds wafting by. He blinked and he looked down towards his chest having felt a weight upon him. There, laying its' head upon him, was one of those large eared jackals sleeping peacefully to his left. He looked slightly to his right and saw another jackal resting next to him as well, back turned towards the fallen Kaguya and its' head tucked away against itself. He returned his eyes to the sky above and briefly wondered, 'Is this real? If I stop focusing and let myself slip, would I dissolve...?'

His question was assuaged with the sudden appearance of the Blind Idiot God sticking its' head out over his and looking down on him with a gleeful, toothy smile. Aimi grimaced mildly. He'd forgotten how gruesome those scarred eyes looked up close.

"Ah-haha! Finally awake are we? Good, good. Have a nice nap?"
asked En Framförallt playfully, its' question followed by a fit of giggling.

Aimi was silent as he stared up at the hideous face of his nemesis. Slowly he sat up and as he did the two sleeping jackals next to him opened their milky eyes and looked at him, the one lifting its' head up off of Aimis' stomach. The Kaguya pulled his right leg up and rested his arm on his knee, looking down at the flattened grass at his feet already trying to rise back up again. Such ordinary, green grass. Things didn't feel as they had for the longest time for him, for more than twice the length of his life before going in as a matter of fact. He supposed it was true; he was back. That meant...

"How long was I unconscious for?" Aimi asked calmly, turning his head to look at the hunched over Blind Idiot who straightened up at his question and pulled its' long arm up to grabbed a hold of its' canine chin.

"Mm, a couple of hours, a day, a week, I'm not really sure because I wasn't watching you sleep! Like some weirdo? Uh-uh! Not me! Instead I just had a couple of my good, good boys, yes they are, watch over you and make sure that nothing disturbed your sleep. Looks like they did a pretty good job!"
the great spirit said. It was one question answered, anyways, in some way at least. It wasn't exactly straight forward but, based on how he was feeling, he was willing to err on the side of his sleep lasting somewhere between a couple of hours and a day and no longer. It was answer enough and he accepted that. It naturally lead him to his next question which he asked just as calmly: "How long was I in there, in the spirit world?"

"Boy, we're really hung up on this whole concept of 'time', aren't we?"
the Blind Idiot God asked teasingly. Aimi stared back at the great spirit blankly who frowned slightly and then rolled its' head as a replacement for rolling its' eyes.
"Oh, fine! You're no fun. Let's see, for you it was about seventy years, but out here it was more like... oh... seven seconds? Give or take? Really no time at all!"
Seven seconds? It seemed unfathomable to Aimi that only seven seconds had passed since he had first been pushed into that strange, emotion-driven world and when he had been pulled out. All of that time... all those years he spent lamenting the time he had lost, all the people he knew, all the chances for greatness he had, believed to have been blown away like so much ash in the wind. He'd given up hope of ever achieving anything he had ever wanted in life. Now he was being told that essentially no time at all had passed and that all he had given up hope on was still possible... He reached up to stroke at his beard, only to find that it wasn't there! This lack of feeling between his fingers immediately puzzled him and he looked down at himself, holding his hand up in such a way that it should have held his facial hair for him to plainly see, yet there was nothing!

"What happened to my beard?" he asked.

"Oh, that old ugly rag? While you were out I had my bestest good boys cut it off for you! You look much better clean shaven!"
Aimi frowned. In his stupor he actually considered, for a moment, the logistics of this possibility before it actually hit him! He paused his thinking and realized; seven seconds? One second for every decade that had passed? That seemed hugely coincidental to him, and now his beard was missing? Suddenly it occurred to the Kaguya that what he'd been through, all that he had endured, the trials and tribulations, all that growth...

"... Was any of that real? Was it all just an illusion, a genjutsu, that you put me under?" he demanded to know, a hard look on his face.

At his question, En Framförallt snorted, then snickered, then giggled and finally broke out in a tremendous fit of laughter, tilting its' jackal head backwards and opening its' maw wide to expose every tooth and every inch of gum it had in those horrid jaws. It laughed and Aimi sat quietly, knowing that this was all the answer he was going to get... and very quickly realizing that the truth of the answer didn't matter. Whether it had been seven seconds or seventy years, what he had gone through was real, if to no one else than to him. He could remember almost every second he spent there more or less, and he especially remembered all of the important parts that had held meaning to him. Because of this, as the Blind Idiot laughed, he simply resigned himself to a choice to a question that would be impossible to answer: he chose to believe that it had happened, that he had been trapped for seventy years and that only a few precious seconds had passed in reality. That only left him with one question:

"Why? Why did you do this to me?" Aimi spoke up over the roaring laughter. The question seemed to catch the great spirits' attention who tried to calm down its' guffawing long enough to answer, reducing it to fits of snorting.

"Why? Don't you remember? All those years ago, I wanted you to ask questions! Big questions! THE big question! I wanted you to ask yourself who you are, and I'd say you've had plenty of time to think about it! So tell me! Who are you, Aimi Kaguya? What did you learn about yourself while traversing my home?"
Ah, so that had been it... yes, he could recall vaguely his first encounter so long ago. Now that his nemesis was before him he could more clearly picture what he looked like back then, but all else was fuzzy and blank. He sat quietly and tried to recall, ironically enough remembering every-so-slightly-less-vaguely the conversation he had shared with the Big Mouth spirit almost as long ago where he had been told to remember as well. He hadn't been able to recall then and he still struggled now, but being in this place and the shock of the possibility that nothing he had experienced had been true strangely made it easier to remember. Yes, the Great Spirit had asked him about his identity, hadn't he...?

Straightening up his posture, Aimi crossed his legs and sat in the lotus position with the two jackals at either side of him. He turned his head straight and closed his eyes a moment. While he got situated, En Framförallt stepped quietly through the grass until he was in front of the Kaguya and mimicked his sitting position, lifting one leg up off of the ground and then the other until he was floating in the air. It rotated itself until it was inverted and sat with its' head towards the ground and its' feet towards the sky. It was this sight that Aimi saw when he opened his eyes again. Taking in a deep breath, he prepared the answer to the question that had taken him a full seventy years to find an answer to.

"I... am Aimi Kaguya. I am a human being, a man. I was born of slaves in the Bloody Mist village, Kirigakure. I was born with a rare disease that turned my flesh to bones, and to save me my parents gave me away to the Kaguya clan who could save me. They did and I was raised to be a shinobi for the village, a weapon, a tool to be used whenever and however they wanted. I specialized in medical ninjutsu, katon ninjutsu and taijutsu. In secret I developed my own elemental ninjutsu, napalm, that very few people know about... I rose through the ranks of the village until I could go no higher. I was set free out into the world by the Mizukage and given the order to grow stronger... and I did. So strong that I no longer needed Kirigakure. So I left and I didn't return for years. When I did it was to steal from the village that had helped shape me, and I felt no regrets about it, because I was using what I stole to make my own village, to help strengthen the country I created. This was who I understood myself to be so long ago."

"When you kidnapped me -"

"Took you under my wing to teach you a valuable lesson,"
the Blind Idiot interrupted, 'correcting' Aimis' statement.

"Kidnapped me, the first thing that happened was that I broke down into millions of pieces. My body was scattered and I was left with only my mind. Before this, I had honestly taken my body for granted. I'd existed in it all my life, trained it, built it up and broken it down many times, but I didn't really have a fully understanding of the vehicle that was me. Not even with my knowledge of anatomy; I'd never really connected the two together. I also never really understood how weak my will was, being able to just brute force my way through life as I went along more or less. I never really had a need to think about what exactly my 'will' meant in context to 'me'. I just assumed that it was like power, a vague and abstract thing that could fluctuate from moment to moment. I perceived it as something I had no control over, so I never really thought about it. Those first few months, learning to will my body back together taught me much about the intricacies of my anatomy and about my own will. By the time I could pull myself back together again, I understood much better the physical make up of what made me 'me'."

"In the years that followed, I learned just how emotional I was as a person. It's not exactly a one to one parallel but, in your world, the spirit world, at least where I was in it, my emotions of rage and anger, my lust for revenge against you, drove me into isolation. None of the spirits wanted to be around me while I was like that, they all hid away from my sight the moment they felt me getting close. I didn't think about it until much later, but I though to myself eventually, 'what if people in reality were like that too? What if they just disappeared when you got angry around them?' And I thought about how I had learned to weaponize my anger because of how I had been treated by the people that molded me into what I am, how that weapon was impotent in a world where such harsh, negative emotions left you perfectly alone, how your despair can literally tear your apart down to your atoms. When I gained a better control of my anger, my despair, my fear, I learned to feel different emotions more prominently... I learned the joy of intelligent conversation that can go on for days or weeks at a time, of meeting the new and even the strange with open arms and humble heart rather than sword drawn and flame ablaze. I learned how to express positive emotions better than I ever had in reality, and as time marched on, I only grew more mature in how I expressed those emotions. I came to control them, rather than letting them control me..."

"In my introspection, I came across a younger version of myself. A dream I once had, perhaps, or just a spirit who took the form of who I was as a young man. Regardless of what it was, it gave me an insight of who I was back then and who I was then and there standing before myself, and as the years went on I went back to this encounter, the one and only of its' like, again and again, constantly comparing myself, the child, to myself, the man, to myself the imprisoned, measuring how I had grown and changed while using my past as a measuring stick. I realized fully how much change I was going through, how capable of change I actually was. It took me nearly thirty years, thirty fearful years, in reality to know with certainty that I was able to go against that which had been beaten into me since the day I was born, and while I did so with wild, reckless abandon even, it was only after my imprisonment that I was able to slow down, contemplate, and see just how vast and capable of change I as a person really was. I had conquered my emotions, and it took time, but I did so, too, dominate my past selves. Who I was in the past, the things I had done, I realized, did not define who I am or who I choose to be. They are a part of me, yes, like bricks in a building, but an individual brick or even a section of bricks does not the building make. I was more than my horrible past or my past mistakes. There was more to me than just that."

"It actually wasn't very long after that, now that I think about it, that I encountered visions of the future as well. I admit I don't remember exactly how long it was - my mind tells me that it might have been as much as a week, but I don't think that's right. I feel like it was sooner. Anyways, I was approached by a kami who granted me further introspection as to what potential I had for change and who I could become. I saw two versions of myself in the future, one of light and one of dark. Neither were wholly good or evil, I came to realize, but they were so different from one another, and that difference came down to a choice; a dedication on how I would live my life... I made my choice, and in doing so, in facing my fears and my hopes, I was able to move forward. Not at first, and not all the way, but I did move forward eventually with time. In the same way that I continually looked back on who I was and compared who I am to that in various steps, always there was a shadow there to look at as well as a warning of what I could become if I was just a little bit less mindful, a little more passive with who or what I let influence me. It was a good incentive to stay the course and not give into the temptation of my negative emotions, to let them consume me."

"As the years passed, I became good at practicing my emotions, at interacting with spirits, at constantly looking back on myself as a path to where I should go and how I should behave. Once I mastered introspection, it was only naturally that I start to look outwards from myself. I started to notice how things were connected in the spirit world by force of will, and noticing this connection made me think about how things are connected by force of nature in this world we sit in now. I noticed how my every step over there ultimately had an impact in the spirits and the world. How I walked, the way I carried myself, the way I presented myself was every bit as important as how I thought of myself because it affected the plants and spirits I came across. If I came across too strong, the more delicate spirits, the kodama, would flee as though I were thundering with anger. Wells would dry up or forests would move at my passing. It's all very surreal to me, even still, but I understood that my presence had an effect on my immediate surroundings. As I slowed down more and more, it became increasingly apparent that my very being was cause enough to affect the world. In time I grew in tune with it and it with me: I was able to feel the pulse of the world, and I allowed myself to be orientated by it - but not to be consumed by it. There were times where I could feel myself wanting to dissolve into the surroundings in the same way that my body had involuntarily broken apart during instances of fear or despair. Recognizing this feeling helped me to further recognize myself as an individual entity while not entirely separating myself from the mystic world around me."

"I realized that the world is not so different here, ultimately. It feels different on a fundamental level, and it is just that; different. But at the same time, all things are connected here as they are there. Every natural process begets more natural processes, and every action that we as humans take against or for our surroundings has consequences that radiate out from us like ripples on water. There's a certain... oneness to the natural world that is different from the emotional... or I suppose spiritual oneness of the spirit world. If I set a fire here, what I burn will burn and become ashes. Those ashes will feed the soil as the rain falls on it. The soil will harbor new growth, animal and plant alike. That growth will feed life that accumulate in the absence of flame, and that life will eat other life. If I were to stay in a place long enough, eventually, I might end up sustaining my life off of the life of something else that came into being as a result of the fire I created. There's a harmony in that that, once you stop to think about it, makes you feel connected in very similar a manner as carrying myself did in your world. The difference is that here I can be as emotional or as distant as I want and the cycle will remain unbroken. In this, I am able to thus distinguish myself as an individual within the cycle, as a part of it that started the fire, or ate the plant, or ate the animal that ate the plant, or the animal that ate the animal. I can insert myself in at any point and be a part of it while still remaining wholly myself. I need not fear disillusionment for not being aware of the cycle; it simply is, and knowing this can help me be mindful of myself and the parts I play in these various natural cycles."

"People, too, have cycles of their own. Ebbs and flows in relationships, in society itself. It's something that I think as long as you are a part of a group of people we are all aware of but seldom think about: the cyclical nature of being. Life, death, action, reaction, cause, consequence; these concepts are largely unique to humans. The worm does not care that it dies when the bird eats it, it's not aware of the cycle. It simply is a part of all things. It has no sense of self. But a person can understand that the life of the worm has come to an end, and in this understanding of things in our world, in our own social circles, we shape who we are, and these things change from place to place. I was born in mist and blood and I behaved accordingly for so long... but the people of Fire lived often in the sunlight. There's so much contrast in the world of humans and all of it is a wonderful tool to know what you are and what you aren't; to distinguish 'you' from 'them', and 'they' can do the same with 'you'. In your world, losing your temper can mean complete and sudden isolation. In this world such isolation is not always immediately possible, but you can drive people further and further away from you regardless... it's just all so connected to itself."

"Learning about these connections, meditating on them, made me realize fully who I am as a person. I am not my past - not my mistakes, not my upbringing, not my choices. I am not my clan, not a representation of them or of my village. I am not any sort of job that I am assigned or that I give to myself - shinobi, Daimyo, it makes no difference. I am not defined by the company I keep or that I choose to exclude. I am that I am. I am me, mind, body and soul. I am Aimi Kaguya, no one else, regardless of what I have done, what I choose to do or who I may or may not be tomorrow. Here, now, eternally, I am myself, and there is no force in this world or yours that can change that. I am, therefore I'll think, and when I stop to think about who I am? I know that I am only Aimi Kaguya, and that I can be no one else. It has never been possible, and it is not possible for anyone else to be another person either. We as humans are all individuals, and that is good."

By the time that Aimi finished speaking the two jackals had fallen back asleep though they now had migrated to lay down underneath their supposed maker. All while he exposited on who he was and his identity, what he had learned of while being trapped in the spirit world, En Framförallt stayed floating in the air, rotating counter clockwise slowly but otherwise remaining uncharacteristically cordial. Its' snickering was kept down to a minimum and it seemed to listen intently, those large ears twitching every now and again but otherwise the great spirit remaining still. The rotating jackal did not bother Aimi in the slightest who had dealt with worse distractions during his later years than a single spirit moving in a circle before his eyes. What he himself was most surprised about, though, was how his own temper was still being kept in check all while he explained his philosophical discovery. This was the Blind Idiot God who had trapped him in the first place, who he had felt for the longest time was the source of his anger and contempt towards all things spiritual. He was calm and collected as he recounted his experience and by the end of it, he knew that his words rang true. Decades (for him) ago, he would have attacked this blind jackal on sight. Now, though, he was willing to have a discussion with his warden.

"So that's it, huh? That's who Aimi Kaguya is? A self aware individual caught in a system, both spiritual and natural, that he can comprehend and distinguish himself from, has some emotional problems that he supposedly got over (doubtful!), who was once a rampaging scourge upon the world but has since become zen like Ghandi?"
the Blind Idiot God asked.

"Sorry if it seems like my question is a bit overly simple, it's just kind of difficult to keep track of that word salad you served me just now! So much to dig my teeth into, so much to digest! I must admit I need a bit more of a dressing to go with all this lettuce, you know what I'm saying boney boy?"
"You could have interjected at any time," Aimi pointed out simply, not moving from the cross-legged position in which he sat.

"And interrupt your speech about who you were and how much you've grown? Not likely! But for posterity, why don't you sum all of that up in twenty words or less, hm? Try to boil that down to its' most essential elements and go real minimalist on me, chef Kaguya!" ~Ba-Zi-Ng-A~
came a tiny voice in the distance, followed by quiet laughter and snickering from the blind jackal. Aimi sighed and paused.

"As you wish. I am Aimi Kaguya, Daimyo of the Land of Gold, a man and an individual unique and proud, ye mighty!" he proclaimed, sitting up straight and tall and looking the Great Spirit directly in its' empty sockets. As he finished speaking, there was a loud pop that woke the jackals from their slumber once more, the pair instantly alert and looking around as from out of the blue above the four of them pieces of confetti began to fall. There was a dull cheer like that of children that came from everywhere and nowhere and the jackal god righted itself in the air and unbent its' legs to stand up.

"Amazing! Exactly twenty words! Such a concise statement of fact! You're awesome! So awesome, in fact, that I've decided you've earned a prize! Hold still now~"
En Framförallt proclaimed, reaching out with a long arm and extending a long finger towards Aimi who did not move. He felt himself tense ever so slightly at the gesture as the last time that such a thing was offered to him he had been trapped in a world alien to him for seventy years but was resolute this time, knowing that if they were to go back he could hold himself together and continue to talk to this genma-comparable spirit. As En Framförallt reached out for his forehead, Aimi closed his eyes and prepared himself for whatever it was that was to come.

The warm touch of that large finger against his forehead was at first just that. The Great Spirit even went so far as to let out a low 'boop' under its' breath followed by a cascade of giggling as it pulled its' hand back away from Aimi and left him be. Aimi opened his eyes and looked around, finding that he had not been transported back into the world of spirits. In fact he saw and felt that nothing was different. He frowned. "I don't understand. What did you - " he began to ask but got no further as a sensation sudden blew through his body. It was so sudden and so startling that it forced his entire body to convulse, his sitting posture broken as his back arched outwards and his arms and legs extended from his person as though he were falling! The sensation wasn't pain, far from it, but it was no less overwhelming! It was as if a river were being pushed through his every vein and muscle all at once and that he was paralyzed by the onrush of water, helpless to do anything about it! There was even a flash of blue light that grew more and more intense by the second emanating from his entire body! He grunted and groaned, trying to withstand whatever 'gift' this was but the sensation was so foreign that he worried for a moment it might tear him apart as his initial arrival in the spirit world had done!

But then it was over.

As quickly as it had come the sensation ended. The light was shut off and he was left sitting as though he were winded. Aimi panted heavily and stared bug-eyed at nothing in particular ahead of him. He was left wondering what had happened to the sound of the cackling En Framförallt.

"Tada! This is my gift to you! You're blond now!"
the Blind Idiot proclaimed, throwing its' hands in the air and shaking them back and forth in such a way that its' fingers may or may not have gradually grown and became more and more floppy with each second that passed. Aimi looked up at the spirit in disbelief, breathing heavily. "Don't... be ridiculous..." he replied, winded. "Kaguya... can't be blond... it's part of the..."

He stopped dead in the middle of his sentence as a lock of his bangs fell forward and swung in front of his face. His eyes honed in on the strand of hair and he saw right away that it wasn't his. It couldn't be! The color was a warm, golden blond, not the cool bone white that he was used to! Confused and stunned Aimi reached up and grabbed a hold of his own long hair, pulling it forward and looking at the two mats he had grabbed. Sure enough, they matched the strand that had fallen before his eyes. Seeing the Kaguya act so out of sorts over a simple change in air color.

"I figured you were due to a color pallet change to reflect on your personal growth, so I changed your hair back to its' natural color and the color of your chakra as well! It's gold now! You know, like your country! Isn't that fun?"
the Blind Idiot gleefully asked while Aimi looked up at him with confused eyes and clumps of golden hair in his hands. Only further confused by the statement, Aimi pulled his right hand out of his hair and looked at it as he channeled chakra, only to find that it did in fact glow not blue in color but with a yellow, metallic sheen!

"Ooooh, so shiny! Now your sense of fashion is really coming together, huh? You should consider redesigning your whole outfit! I'm thinking gold and red colors, you know? Something that POPS! Really stands out against that pale skin of yours! I would have given you a tan if I could, sorry Aimi boy!"
the jackal snickered, only to continue speaking as Aimi began to rise to his feet.

"But wait there's more! You never got around to figuring this out while you were making your fancy garden and having tea with some small time spirits and all that noise - I guess you just never thought to ask in detail really! There's that lack of thinking rearing its' ugly head again! - but that feeling of connection you felt in the spirit world and can conceptualize here in your reality? Well, turns out, you were actually figuring out how to use latent nature energy! Sage chakra, baby! I assume you know what that is right? Hm? Yes? No? Maybe? If you don't I'm sure you'll figure it out, you don't need me holding your hand through EVERYTHING! ANYWAYS! Along with dying your hair and chakra I went ahead and made sure that you could manipulate nature energy here in the real world like the real boy you are! Isn't that fun? And there's ooooooooooooooone other thing I did to you, but I'm not going to tell you exactly what it is! Suffice to say it has to do with the nature of your chakra, and you're just going to have to figure it out from there skeleton-man!"
"... So you're telling me that, without my consent, you... changed aspects of who I was? You forced changes upon me that I didn't request or necessarily want?" Aimi inquired, stupefied. The Blind Idiot God simply nodded and snickered, holding its' elongated hands up to its' cheeks and rocking back and forth with its' sick laughter.

That old rage that Aimi had conquered threatened to rear its' head once again, and Aimi would have been justified in unleashing it here and now if he wanted to as well. He had just finished expositing on how he had learned to identify himself as a full blown individual of his own accord, only to have parts of his physical identity changed without his consent or control! It was beyond infuriating to have his personal philosophy challenged in such a blunt and sudden manner!

... If he had not spent decades honing his wrath, he may well have exploded. Instead, Aimi calmed himself down quickly enough and lowered his hands down to his side. He lowered his head a moment as though defeated, contemplating how best to respond to this slight of his identity. The answer, he found, was to take the changes and make them his own with an equal amount of force. Ossifying the bones in his right arm, Aimi forced a makeshift blade out of the palm of his hand. With his left hand he reached up and pulled all of his hair back into a long pony tail, sliding his hand backwards until the strands of his hair were at the length he desired. Then, unceremoniously and without hesitation, he moved his right arm behind his head and slashed through his long golden hair, reducing its' length by more than half as he held what had once been a part of him that reached from his shoulders down to his backside.

Looking up at the Blind Idiot God who stopped laughing upon seeing this gesture, Aimi tossed the bundle of his hair down into the folded blades of grass. The wind picked up a moment after and carried several strands of his hair away into the green ocean that surrounded them while his now shorter hair billowed in the wind. "I didn't tell you, did I? But For the longest time, I've considered you my nemesis you know," the Kaguya stated flatly.

"Really? Is that right? Your nemesis, hm? Well I'm flattered that you would pick me to be your Kismesis!"
the Blind Idiot chortled happily.

Aimi ignored the strange words and joking response and kept speaking. "Yeah. You forced me into seventy years of isolation from other human beings on a whim, and for what? A new hair color? Some mysterious change in my chakra and the ability to... manipulate the energy of nature!? You don't see the injustice in all of that? The disproportionate suffering for such a meager reward I didn't ask for?"

"Of course I do! I just think it's hilarious is all!"
the jackal headed god howled with laughter... and for the first time, Aimi joined in. His laughter started out small but grew, bringing his left hand up and covering his eyes as he tilted his head back and laughed! The two of them laughed it up for several moments uninterrupted before Aimi continued.

"You know what? That's it! That's the final thing I needed! I've decided on something I've spent YEARS thinking about!" Aimi roared, letting out a final bursts of laughter before taking in a deep breath and regaining control of himself. He turned his hard blue eyes onto the still chuckling spirit and pointed an accusatory finger at it. "You have to go! You and all of your ilk! Your kind are no longer welcome here! I'm declaring it now, 'great spirit' for you to tell to all your kind!"

"Oh?"
"Your kind have brought nothing but misery, discourse and undue change onto humanity since the Genma first breeched into this world! You spirits are like a pestilence that won't go away! Hell there's an entire ISLAND dominated by aggressive spirits to the south, last I checked, that's completely inaccessible to humans! You're not even the first great spirit I've fought! I've beaten down Yoshimitsu in his human host! Felt the wrath of TWO of Vorashu's hosts and lived to tell the tale! I've defeated a great ocean spirit that was being manipulated by a pack of dogs and I've seen how your influence corrupts and taints everything your kind touches! You're a disease! You're simply incompatible with humanity! You have your world but you insist on bleeding into this one! But you know what!? NO MORE!! I'm declaring you all enemies to humanity, and I will spend the rest of my immortal life forcing you back from whence you came and making sure you never return by either killing you or sealing whatever cracks you keep slithering out of! You are, by far, the greatest threat to all of humanity and I will no longer tolerate you!"

This declaration of war was met only by uproarious laughter that was rivaled only by the fit that En Framförallt gave upon the suggestion that Aimis' entire experience had been only an illusion. Aimi stood firm on the spot and waited for the laughter to subside. He had been meditating on this for decades, trying to decide whether or not he could or couldn't tolerate a world with spirits in it, because while it was true that some spirits were docile or even benevolent, such as the kodama who helped him tend his garden in the spirit world, far more often, it seemed, were there spirits like the Laughing God before him who seemed to delight in the suffering that they caused humans. He had thought long and hard on it and only just now, after this final slight, come to the conclusion that their presence could not be allowed to exist in this world. He would lead a one man crusade if he must, but this incompatible species could not be allowed to persist.

"Oh my! Oh boy! Hoo! You know, I have heard a lot of bold claims in my time, from both humans and spirits a like, but I've got to tell you! What you just said takes the CAKE! You're going to make sure that there are no more spirits left in the world? YOU? I cannot POSSIBLY express how hysterical I think that claim is! And you know what? Go for it! Just try it! I want to see you attempt to force me and my kind out of this world!"
En Framförallt went no further with its' speech, simply unable to speak over the howls of laughter that it was unable to contain. Aimi did not find any humor in this situation at all and the guffawing of his foe served only to fuel the already growing fire of determination that was alight in his gut. The jackal headed spirit said no more and eventually faded away, presumably returning to the spirit world with the faint echoes of its' hideous laughter remaining long after it disappeared from sight. The two blind jackals departed shortly after, disappearing into the tall grass and keeping their heads down. Aimi remained in that clearing for a while with his thoughts, still frankly shocked at everything that had just transpired. He'd been released after seven decades from a word he did not fully understand, had expressed himself like he had never done before in this world, had aspects of his identity changed by force, changed yet another aspect of himself by his own volition, and declared a as-of-yet one man war on an entire alien species.

And what was he to make of what that laughing jackal had said about the change in his chakra? He could now manipulate nature energy? That he now had some sort of secret ability? He wracked his brain for any kind of meaning to these words but could only recall a short lesson (or perhaps he had simply not been paying attention at the time) back at the Kirigakure academy about the concept of 'sages', or individuals who could use the chakra of the natural world, so to speak, to their advantage. Was he a sage now? What did that even mean!? He would have to discover this later, for now he still needed to grapple with the fact that what had been decades for him had only been a couple of hours. So much had changed... So much was still the same...

There was only one thing he could do.

In a flash he was gone from the plain that he had come to for peace and quiet all those years ago and within a matter of minutes he was back at the edge of Kusagakure. He walked back into the border of his still-in-progress village bustling with activity, his head swimming and a faint feeling of wooziness that he was only just now noticing creeping up in his stomach. He walked past several people who went about their business before anyone actually noticed him. When they did they started to talk and it didn't take long for them to rush off and get someone of higher rank. Within a couple of minutes, Aimi was being approached by a small group of samurai. "Aimi-sama! Are you alright? What's happened to you?" they asked, obviously referring to his state of appearance that was now so dramatically different from what it had been, to them, merely hours before. Aimi Kaguya tried to keep this in mind as he looked up at the loyal samurai under his command. Bleary eyed and weary from his experience, Aimi would take a deep breath, straighten himself up, and simply say;

"We have work to do."

REPLY

Return to “Other Countries”

×