Sakura Kitsuki
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Posts: 1
(4/24/04 12:14 am)
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Welcome to the Henhouse...
((Hope I'm not stepping on any toes by posting this, but since the servers won't be up for IC introductions for a little while, and I have the time now...))
This city never fails to amuse me. Take this place: clean wood-panel walls, soft incandescent lighting, packed with tables and chairs. A few of them, toward that corner, have a cooking surface built in. Hibachi, they call it. If you went up that staircase in the far corner, you'd find yourself in a much smaller room, partitioned into "traditional" booths with low tables. This, they call a Japanese restaurant. It's nothing like the ones I remember. That woman who greeted us? Korean. The one who took our order was Chinese. One of the chefs is American. I'm not sure there are any Japanese working here. So why build a Japanese restaurant? Why not Korean, or Chinese, or American? You don't think that's funny?
Me? I come here for the sashimi. Best in the city, unless you want to blow a few hundred bucks at--
Well, of course they don't have to be Japanese to prepare it well. You've missed the point. The other food's okay, too, as far as it goes. It's definitely not "traditional," though, unless they mean the traditional Americanized version. I should know, I'm a native. Now, the sake selection is pretty good, as long as you avoid the lowest-priced one...
Yes, most Japanese don't have red hair. You wanted to hear my story, didn't you? Well, I'll get to that. It starts in Japan, as you've probably guessed by now.
When I was young, Japan wasn't as it is now. You think of it as a technological democratic society, but that modernization is a recent development. The industrial revolution hit around the same time as in America, but it wasn't until after World War II that--
I thought you knew that already. No, I'm not human. You thought I was a mutant, did you? A lot of people make that assumption. That, or a magician. That's closer, at least. But my kind have always been here. Why do you think I chose the codename I did?
Ha, you're a smooth one. And you're not wrong. I do love double meanings.
It was several centuries ago that I was born. The world was much larger at that time, and Japan still had wild and mysterious places. Well, perhaps not so wild. Time has a way of exaggerating memories.
We were of Clan Kitsuki. It's not a clan you'll find in the history books. It wasn't a "real" clan, you see. History is for humans. You may find a reference or two in our folklore, if you look, but likely not. Some of the elders appreciated their privacy. For all that, we were an influential clan, in our way. We dealt with the humans rather often. My oldest sister fought alongside them. But we've always been fond of the humans.
My sisters and I were only a small branch of the family. Sakura was the oldest, and she was a warrior born. She would go into battle with a naginata or a katana or her bare hands; it didn't matter to her. She was like a river, graceful, and fluid, and unstoppable. She almost danced. And where she went, the humans would fall like wheat to a scythe. She very nearly killed Nobunaga three years before his eventual defeat, you know. But he escaped, then. She might have changed the course of history. Ah, well, perhaps she did anyway. She killed more than her share of his officers.
Then there was Shizuka, the youngest. She was a peaceful soul, rather unlike us. Her greatest joy was her gardening. I have to admit, I never understood that. But she was quite good at it. There's a story about her, in fact. The fox-wife who gave up her human identity in order to bring the rains to make the rice grow. I don't think I would have gone that far, myself, but she's the gentlest of us.
I guess that leaves me as the most traditional. I'm the trickster.
Most cultures put the fox in that role. Reynard, Br'er Fox. I like to think my kin were behind that. They may have been. Or perhaps not. There were never as many of us as the humans thought, and many never wanted to leave Japan. But we're clever enough that it may have been. Clever enough to learn to take human form, we kitsune.
Those were good days. A chaotic time for Japan, of course, but good days nonetheless. They didn't last. Unification was achieved in time, and then, all of a sudden, the modern world was upon us. The Great White Fleet came and forced ports to open for trade. The carrying of swords was outlawed in order to break the samurai. Japan fought Russia, and won, and became a world power. Of a sort.
It was no longer the country we knew.
You must realize, we kitsune can live for a thousand years. Change is not unknown to us. We thrive on chaos. But this was the imposition of order. And in this, the changes came too rapidly even for us. My sisters and I decided to leave. To come here. Well, to San Francisco, at first.
We spent the better part of the next twenty years or so learning the language and customs. Such a bizarre and difficult language, English is. If I didn't know better, I'd suspect one of us created it as a joke.
It was easy to avoid attention. We're indistinguishable from humans, and, once we'd learned the language, we didn't even have to appear Japanese. I rather like the red hair, myself. I was a blonde for a while, in the 20s, but that didn't suit me. Sakura is drawn to red as well, though Shizuka seems to prefer black. My talents were especially helpful in that regard.
We have access to many abilities humans do not. The legends say that we were messengers of the goddess Inari, who is also the god Inari. I couldn't say whether that's true or not. But the abilities, those are true. Light and shadow and deception, foxfire and the calling of storms, tirelessness and spirit-talking and what you would call teleportation. We don't all practice with all of those, of course, but the legends have a basis in fact. And I am an illusionist and a deceiver. I can cloak my presence and project whatever image I please into the eyes of the unwise or unwary.
Or I could. But I'll get to that shortly. That was the early 40s. We didn't fight in the war, for the most part. The Japan that was involved was no longer our Japan, and America was not yet ours, and so we mostly watched. We are very fond of humans, but as individuals. Human societies didn't terribly concern us, then.
The incident that so impacted us came about when one of those humans was attacked. That was old Mr. Yamashita, who had come to America as a very young boy. I doubt he remembered Japan at all. Sakura had taken a liking to his mother, and eventually to him as well. He knew what we were, at least, and we didn't tell many humans that. Anyway, he was quite the patriot. I remember how heartbroken he was when they wouldn't accept him into the army. But he did what he could on the home front anyway. He didn't get much thanks from the ones who were fighting against Japan, and the ones who favored Japan certainly wouldn't have held him in higher regard because of it, but he still did it. Humans are funny creatures.
There was a group that didn't appreciate Mr. Yamashita's outspokenness in favor of the Allies, though. I'm not sure why the Fifth Column paid attention to something so minor. He couldn't possibly have made much of a difference in the war, when the government wouldn't let him fight. But for some reason, he got their attention. They decided to teach him a lesson.
Bad luck for them that Sakura was visiting old Mr. Yamashita and his wife at the time. She hadn't fought in a while, but she wasn't the type to let her skills get rusty. She took down the first man before he could blink. With a butter knife, if I remember correctly. She got the second with a saucer. She wasn't called a goddess of battle for nothing, you know.
She had a temper, too. Not an explosive one, but the dangerous kind. The slow, burning rage that doesn't interfere with clear thought. She'd decided vengeance was called for, and that night, my sisters and I tracked down the Fifth Column cell the two men had come from. Once we found them, it was over within five minutes. It would have been faster, but some of them tried to run after the first minute or so, and we had to track them all down.
You look surprised. Haven't you ever seen what a fox can do to a chicken?
Admittedly, I'm not nearly so vicious as Sakura can be. But I'm fairly thorough.
Anyway, that might well have been our one adventure of the war, if we hadn't been seen that night. We're good at concealing ourselves, but we never counted on magicians, and the White Lotus -- you might know them better as part of the Circle of Thorns -- took note of some of the energies we used. I'm not entirely sure what they tried to do, exactly, but I suspect they confused us for spirits and tried to bind us. Obviously, it didn't work.
But they'd wanted to make sure they succeeded, and they'd thrown an awful lot of magical power into it. When you get that much power together, it doesn't just dissipate. It has to go somewhere. We were the targets, but it couldn't affect us the way it was supposed to. So instead...
Well, I don't know. I don't remember anything between then and a couple of years ago. It might have thrown me forward in time, or maybe just locked me in stasis somewhere, or maybe just given me a case of amnesia or whatever the right term is. I just remember waking up in the hospital in Paragon City. Those early days still blur together. And there are some other gaps in my memories I can't explain.
And something else. Whatever happened seems to have affected my abilities. I can't remember how to hide myself from human sight any more. I can't take back the form of a fox. Oh, I didn't lose them. Not completely. It's more like... I can't remember how to use them. Almost like being a cub again.
Come to think of it, I might be. I feel young, at least. I have memories from long ago in Japan, but I also feel like I've got another thousand years left, instead of maybe a few hundred.
Magic. Who can say how it works?
I was just starting to get used to it all, and thinking about finding my sisters. I know they're out there somewhere, you see. I can feel them, vaguely. But I don't know where. That's why I first decided to become a "superhero." Setsuna Kitsuki, the Fox. If I make myself more visible, then they'll be able to find me, right? That was the theory, anyway.
Then the Rikti invaded. You can probably guess the rest. I didn't know enough to really help, at that time. I still hadn't gained enough control over even the most rudimentary of my powers, and by the time I did, it was too late to help with that. But if Paragon City ever needed heroes, it's now. We lost so many, then...
And we are so very fond of humans.
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