yumeko makes a friend (?)
The human silently glared at her from the cage she’d built in the corner of the room.
Yumeko had found the human wandering on the outskirts of Makai, gathering fairies, whilst on one of her now-regular patrols. Suspecting the human was up to something, she had observed them, and been unfortunately proved right in her suspicions when they had attacked one of the residents with little to no warning.
The human had proved fairly simple to capture, though; after throwing a handful of blades at Yumeko that she had easily deflected, they’d surrendered.
So she dragged them back to Pandemonium and locked them up until she could decide what to do with them.
---
For her part, Izayoi Sakuya’s current primary emotion was sheer embarrassment.
She’d been sent to Makai on Remilia’s request; after seeing a few natives of Makai wandering around Gensokyo, the vampire had requested that her maid bring her a few of the residents so that she could sample their blood. Naturally, she’d headed into Makai immediately, but had only managed to capture a few fairies before being defeated.
Even worse, her trusted ability to stop time had somehow failed her during battle, meaning that she’d been overwhelmed easily. Her skills had grown rusty over the centuries, it seemed; she’d grown over-reliant on being able to combat enemies whilst they were immobilised.
So now she sat in a cage made of crystals, observing the room she was being kept in and the woman who had put her there.
The room itself was wide, and circular. Brown pots filled with shining blue crystals were placed around the room haphazardly. Black-clothed fairies flitted from here to there carrying crystals to and from those pots and into other rooms through slits in the wall and a hole in the ground; other creatures, five-legged creatures with strange bowl-shaped heads, wandered around and carefully moved crystals from pot to pot, examining them with the strange compound eyes that ringed their heads.
In the heart of it all sat the woman who had captured her, sitting at a crystal desk and writing tirelessly. Her outfit was odd; a butler’s uniform in dull pink, perfectly tailored, yet still somehow unfitting. Every hour or so, she would be interrupted from her ceaseless writing by a humanoid figure emerging from one of the hidden entrances in the walls; at this point, she would hand them a dozen forms and brightly welcome them to Makai, then return to her silent work.
Sakuya had watched this happen a few times before when she finally spoke.
---
“So, who are all those people?”
Yumeko glanced at her prisoner in surprise. “Which people?” she asked, confused.
The prisoner frowned at her. “The ones who keep coming through. The ones you’re giving the papers to.”
“Oh!” replied Yumeko. “They’re new residents of Makai. After Lady Shinki gives them their identity, it’s my job to identify the locations the new residents are best suited for and send them there.” She glanced back at her papers, which were beginning to spill off the desk, forcing her bowl-crabs to gather them. “I’ve been busier than ever lately, too, because Lady Shinki keeps coming up with new ideas…”
“So you’re the head maid of Makai, then?” the prisoner remarked. “I’d heard rumours about you, you know.”
“The head maid of Makai…?” repeated Yumeko, then shook her head. “No, I’m only Shinki’s maid.”
The prisoner’s frown deepened. “Then… why are you doing all of this?”
Yumeko frowned back at her. “To make less work for Lady Shinki, of course.”
“Hmm.”
The prisoner was silent for a while after that, and Yumeko returned to her work, somewhat perturbed by the odd questions.
---
About half an hour later, the maid left the room, and returned shortly after with a couple of bowls of soup. The crystal bars of the cage slid away from her hands as she handed one of the bowls through the gap to Sakuya, then reformed as she took her hand back.
Sakuya glanced at the bowl suspiciously. She’d been warned about the food of Makai, but this didn’t seem too dangerous…
She glanced back up at the maid, who was smiling at her. “Humans need to eat, right?” she asked brightly.
Sakuya nodded, and had a small spoonful of the soup. Its somewhat savoury taste was surprisingly normal, if rich. “Everything needs to eat,” she replied. “Humans, animals, and youkai.”
“I don’t need to eat,” said Yumeko, sitting cross-legged outside of Sakuya’s cage and steadily eating her own soup. “I was made before Lady Shinki decided on that function. I don’t need to eat, or sleep, or breathe, or die.”
Sakuya frowned. “You don’t need to die?”
“Most things do, but I don’t,” agreed Yumeko. “That’s not important, though! You’re a maid too, right?”
Sakuya nodded again. “I’m the head maid at a place in Gensokyo.”
Yumeko was quiet, thinking, then tentatively asked, “Could you tell me about Gensokyo?”
Sakuya raised an eyebrow at that. “Surely,” she replied, “there’s enough people from Makai going there now that you could probably just go there and learn about it in person.”
“Oh, I couldn’t,” replied Yumeko. “I wouldn’t leave Lady Shinki alone, and right now she’s still in a creative mood. Maybe in a few years, though, she’ll be in a mood to travel again!” She leant towards the cage. “Just last year, we finished travelling all around Makai! That was really fun.”
Sakuya was silent for a moment, only eating her soup. “Alright, I’ll tell you about Gensokyo, then. I work for someone called Remilia Scarlet…”
---
She felt like she had talked for hours, interrupted only occasionally by a question from Yumeko, but it was impossible to tell. All she knew was that when she finally began to run out of breath, the other maid reached through the bars once more and silently collected her bowl.
As Yumeko turned to leave, though, Sakuya spoke again.
“So when are you going to let me go?”
Yumeko stared at her in surprise. “Go?”
Sakuya stared back. “I have to get back to Gensokyo, after all. I’ve got responsibilities there. The Mistress-- is waiting for me.”
Yumeko blinked, slowly. “I have to let you go?”
“Yes,” insisted Sakuya. “You can’t keep me locked up forever.”
“Of course I can,” replied Yumeko calmly. “It’s the most efficient way of making sure that troublemakers don’t wander around Makai. After all, if I let you out, you could just return to Makai and begin attacking the residents again.”
Sakuya was quiet again for a moment, and Yumeko turned away once more.
---
“But how would you feel if you were trapped somewhere, and you couldn’t return to Makai?”
Her grip on the bowls tightened slightly, and the ornate, false porcelain began to crack.
“I can always return to Makai,” she muttered. “I must always be at Lady Shinki’s side.”
“But what if you weren’t?”
They said the residents of Makai didn’t dream; they didn’t sleep, after all. But in her worst daydreams, Yumeko had felt that fear -- the fear that one day, Lady Shinki wouldn’t be there.
Or even worse-- the fear that one day she wouldn’t be there for Lady Shinki.
“I’m always going to be there!” she yelled, and the bowls shattered in her hands, dripping the remnants of the soup on her shoes. “I won’t-- I won’t--”
She glanced back at Sakuya with tears in her eyes, and the other maid blinked at her in surprise, then held her gaze.
“You need to let me go,” she repeated. “There are people waiting for me.”
Yumeko hesitated again, glancing between her and the hole in the wall behind her. Then, with the remnants of their meals still ruining her clothes, she crept closer to the cage.
“You can’t cause problems anymore,” she murmured. “Or I’ll lock you up again.”
“You shouldn’t lock people up,” Sakuya replied calmly. “…But I promise not to cause problems here anymore, either.”
The cage dissolved into the ground, and the two of them faced each other for a moment.
“I wonder, what has the god of Makai done to earn such a diligent maid?” asked Sakuya.
Yumeko was silent for a moment, then smiled. “All she’s ever needed to do was be my Lady Shinki, of course,” she replied. “I wouldn’t want anything other than that.”
Sakuya was surprised for the final time, then laughed quietly. “Of course. I shouldn’t have expected anything else.” She stood at the edge of the hole in the centre of the room, nodded once, and then jumped down it, vanishing from sight.
Yumeko watched it silently for a moment, then sighed to herself as she called over one of the five-legged scuttling creatures and took a small brush from inside her coat. Clearly, trying to keep invading humans captive was far too much effort, especially if they were all like that.
As she brushed the shards of the bowls into the creature’s bowl-shaped head, though, her mind was filled with thoughts of Gensokyo. Perhaps… Lady Shinki had said she wanted to stay in Makai, but perhaps… just this once, perhaps…
The head maid smiled to herself, her thoughts unusually selfish, as she began to daydream about the world that lay beyond Makai.
