Shiika

As sun and moon warred for supremacy over the land, a gentle zephyr twisted the leaves on a cluster of young saplings. Their rattling dance echoed through the forest, a percussion accompaniment to the boisterous song provided by several bullfrogs. Not too far away a fox keened, though whether it was an attempt to join in the chorus or instead was heckling was difficult to say.
A large form propped in the crook of a tree branch snarled menacingly in response to all the noise, rebuking the forest in general. It shifted its weight on the branch slowly and carefully, with all the skill and care of a nighttime predator, and then...promptly fell to the forest floor.
"Bloody...!" The oath had the power to do what up until that moment had been impossible: It stilled the entirety of the woodland.
"Oh, sure. Now you're all quiet. If I hear so much as a single giggle, I'm hunting you all down." Several bushes rattled and swayed as Shiika slowly pushed herself into a sitting position and braced herself on one hand. She passed a hand over her face with deliberate roughness, using its heel to scrub at her eyes in an attempt to alleviate the heavy, swollen ache behind them.
With a deep exhale she forced her eyes open and took a good look around. This particular woodland, while encompassing all the beauty and advantages each forest provided, had no landmarks to make it readily distinguishable. While comfortable in the forest, she had never once attempted to get out of it, and the challenge had thus far been more than a little frustrating.
Tilting her head back she called up to the hazy purple-gold sky, "I hate you! Mark my words, one of these times I am going to win this stupid Game and then I'm going to beat your..." the rest was lost to a low growl of frustration and a grinding of teeth.
A quick inspection of her surroundings held no trace of what few provisions she had brought with her, until she spied her runestaff angled across two smaller branches just beneath the one she had been using for a bed. Remembering her struggle to get up there the previous evening and how long it had taken, she quickly dismissed the idea of returning for a few more hours' sleep and instead spent a third that time trying to fish down her runestaff and the pack secured to it.
"I liked my old incarnation," she sighed, rubbing a bruised hip absently as she tried to gain her bearings enough to decide on a direction in which to head, "I could climb. I don't know how I know, but I know I was great at it."
As she picked her way through the underbrush, over decomposing fallen logs and carpets of spongy moss, she wondered where she would end up, what she would become, and whether the spotty memories in her head which weren't her own would ever clarify themselves.
She didn't fully understand things yet, though in the last year more and more of those distant, hazy memories had explained certain inconsistencies to her. Like why she felt so set apart from her family and friends, why she had had such a nagging sense of purpose even from early childhood, and why she had always felt as if she had to save someone nameless and faceless, without even knowing what from.
This was the Game. Even as a little girl she had defined it as such without knowing what it was or how it should be played. The rules filled themselves in as she went along, and the more she learned about it the more she both hated and admired it for its irony and cunningness.
Introverted as a child Shiika had long been attributed with a vivid and encompassing imagination that her elders had repeatedly but futilely attempted to curb in her. At first she had agreed with their assumptions that such thoughts were simply dreams and fantasies, until the dreams had started coming without being bidden and had taken turns for the grotesque and horrific. Imaginative though she may be, Shiika knew she wasn't macabre enough to make up such visions for the purpose of entertaining herself.
Eventually she had ceased talking about the visions lest she be considered insane. Instead she had opened herself up to them in private in the hopes that she might be able to divine what was happening to her and why. Secretly, she yearned to be those other people she was certain she had once been, for her willowy body was frail and disappointing in this life despite its as yet untapped potential.
Along with the clarity of her visions that longtime feeling of pressing responsibility had grown to where she could scarcely function. It was like forgetting something vastly important and knowing that you had, but being utterly unable to remember what it was. Maddening. Then, about a month ago, she had realized that the incredibly important thing she'd forgotten and the driving need to rescue someone were one in the same, and as more and more memories crowded into her mind as she was drifting off to sleep or was largely distracted she understood that the not knowing who or where or when was deliberate. That was part of the Game.
She'd spent a month refusing to play said Game, refusing to be baited or forced into a life not her own choosing, up until one particularly vivid memory, one she had never before seen, changed her mind by showing her one simple truth: The Game had to be played, because winning the Game was the only way in which to stop playing it.
Coming to a halt before a fast-moving stream Shiika eyed a series of stones which wound across to the opposite bank. Simple. She made the first three, then her foot hit a slick spot on the fourth and after a moment of frantic flailing she plunged into the icy cold water, managing to bruise the other hip on a stone in the process.
On hands and knees she crawled to the opposite bank and ground out, "I hate this frou-frou body! I hate not being graceful! I used to be graceful, gods-damnit, I know I was!"
Clambering up onto dry ground she wrung out her hair and her hem and then looked around for the easiest path. With the shuffling steps of an old woman she once again started her journey, one hand crooked on her newly paining hip.
If this was a Game, it was clearly meant for the enjoyment of those who viewed it as opposed to those playing it.
"Fine," Shiika bit out as her gaze fell hopefully on an actual road just beyond the tree line. "We'll play it your way. You don't want to tell me who I have to save, or why?" Cutting a new path to intercept the road more quickly, she cursed when she caught herself on the spiny thorns of a gooseberry plant, tearing a few new scrapes onto her calves in the process.
I'll bloody well save them all.
She stumbled out of the lip of the forest onto the relative safety of the road, then spent a moment deciding which way to travel on it.
"Just you wait," she muttered after a moment's contemplation urged her northwards. "This time, I'm going to turn the tables on you. Throw me your worst you sadistic son-of-a-tomcat, because this is the last time we're gonna play the Game. And when I win, we're going to have words."
And those words were going to be choice, indeed.
Category:Platinum Profiles