Went Back And Finished Coloring A WIP From Months Ago! Here's Everyone's Favorite Plum Flowers In Some

Went back and finished coloring a WIP from months ago! Here's everyone's favorite plum flowers in some casual wear.

トワ様 | 角間ある

🍙 | 四ノ宮しの

Replanting (Chapter 1)

[read on ao3]

When you feel the missile clip the corner of your mech's leg joint, you know it's over.

It feels like a line of white fire directly to your brain; your pain and the mech's mingling. But pain is nothing, pain is your every day. It's the immobility that terrifies you. Your mech knows before you do that the leg won't work, can't carry you back to base.

They won't send a field repair team out this far, not into enemy territory. Not even for the material outlay of the mech. You have no illusions of what would happen to you if they had to extract, but at least it would be fine, given a new pilot and allowed to keep doing its duty.

Don't think like that, it sends to you. I don't want another pilot.

You struggle a few dozen meters until the residual coolant in the leg motivators gives out and the intractable hand of physics pulls your mech to its knees. A cloud of dust billows up around you and you give up the rest of the way, mech lying on its side amid the baked earth and the scrubby bushes.

Creosote bush, the mech says. Didn't know it grew this far north.

You know it's just trying to keep you from panicking. It's not working -- you can feel your heart racing, the connection gel around you contracting in an autonomic effort to keep you from thrashing in the cockpit. Worst of all, your handler's ever present voice in your ear has gone silent.

A pilot's job is to keep its mech moving. No more and no less. You know there's no real affection from your handler, that her ministrations are part of the system, but you can't think about that sudden abandonment without a pang of grief. She should be there, she should always be there, but now there's nothing. Silence and static.

That feeling gives you a rush of adrenaline, coarser and hotter than the artificial flush the mech gives when you complete an objective, purely a product of your own withered adrenal glands. You have to get back you have to get back. You struggle to your knees, planting the mech's hands in the caliche like anchors and shoving so hard you feel something pop. (In you? In the mech? Is there a difference?)

You make it another hundred meters before you fall again, and the Caskie mech finds you, hitting you with an EMP before you can take them down with you. It lands with a jumpjet hiss in your sightline, so you're treated to the view of the alien-looking mech opening its canopy wide, two pilots getting out of the crude-looking mechanical cockpit.

---

They salvage the mech with you in it.

The pilots didn't seem to know what to do with you; you could hear from your outboard sensors that they were discussing in that strange, fluid accent how to get you out without killing you.

(You don't understand why that matters.)

Eventually, they just called for reinforcements; three heavy carriers showed up some indeterminate amount of time later. They haul your mech, pilot included, through the air on a frankly ridiculous web of heavy cables. You see the desert fade to green, canals threading through the land like veins, as you pass from the disputed zone into Union territory.

Your mech keeps a constant stream of commentary, talking about the plants that it sees, pointing out where old semi-arid forests have been restored. Its voice across the neural tunnel holds false cheer, picking up whenever you start panicking, but the enthusiasm is genuine.

Finally the carriers land at a base. It looks much like Conclave military architecture, concrete in utilitarian blocks, but you can see shining glass and chrome off in the distance, a city. They must want to keep you a ways away from civilians. You suppose that's fair.

They land you in an empty mech bay. It’s been cleared out hastily – you can see the Union mech that used to reside there off to the side, plugged into an aux power array. Your mech is not the right size, not the right shape, but a gaggle of mechanics come out anyway. They locked a restraining clamp on you at some point so you can't move, can't fight. Still, the mechanics move around you warily, like you'll snap and take them all out at any moment.

You would, in a heartbeat. Not just to get the euphoric response, but to quiet the anxiety, the feeling that you're entering a world where you don't have the tools to survive. But you can't, and a quiet part of you (or the mech) is relieved at that.

They strip your mech of all its weaponry, a harsh and hasty disassembly. You feel each removal sharply. Not physically -- mercifully, the mech has dialed down the haptic connection so it's left to suffer alone -- but in loss of potential, the closing of options. 

Finally, when everything is done and your mech is defenseless (other than being a fifteen ton vehicle) a tall woman in a labcoat comes out, flanked by guards with red cross emblems on their sleeves.

"Hello," she says. Her voice is formal, neutral. Lower than you expected, with just a hint of that singsong Cascadian accent. "Can you hear me? Or see me? We have sensitive solid-conductance microphones on the outside of your mech so we can hear you if you speak."

You know the trainings. A pilot is part of the system, part of the Conclave war engine, and cogs don't speak. Your tongue flicks idly against the suicide capsule in your back left molar. You go to press in on it.

You feel something, like a hand, guiding you away. A great wave of fear washes over you, and you know it's not yours.

Please. No.

You stop. Think a moment. 

"Hhhhh."

It's been a while since you've spoken. Just whispers in the dark with your handler, words carrying neither voice nor meaning. Your throat is dry, and you feel for a moment like it's not there. (Why would a mech have a throat?) You clear it, and try again.

"Yes. I can hear you."

She nods. "Good. I'm Dr. Mia Crane. I'm required by Cascadian Union treaty to inform you that as a prisoner of war, you have rights including food, shelter, protection from torture, and the right to ask about your other rights." She adjusts her round framed glasses. "I'm required by basic hospitality to ask you your name."

You pause. You know what names are, of course. Your handler's name is Rebecca. But that's not something pilots have. "I, uh. No?"

She blinks, a little taken aback. "Okay, well, we can work on that. Do you at least acknowledge your rights as a prisoner of war?"

This isn't going to end until you acknowledge, you feel, so you just say "Yes."

"Okay. Is there anything we need to know before we get you out of there?"

"I don't want out," you say. Your throat tightens.

You can't stay in me forever. It's okay. You'll find a way back to me.

You hear a hissing sound, and the low, sick gurgle of the connection gel draining out of your suit. Before you understand what's happening, the canopy drops open and you stagger out of the mech onto the diamond-patterned steel catwalk.

The sharp edge of disconnection, the sudden hole where there should be something inside you, keeps you off your feet. You stagger to one knee, felled as surely by shock as you had been by the missile.

The guards rush over to you and help you up. You want to fight them off but your muscles are jelly. Your head hurts.

Dr. Crane looks you over. You know she's not your handler, but you reach for the familiarity anyway, half expecting the usual routine, the ministrations that get lost in the foggy haze of post-battle euphoria. If your arms weren't being held for your own stability, you'd start opening your suit.

Instead she shines a light in your eyes and asks you to stick out your tongue, making notes on a clipboard as she goes. She puts a strip of fabric around your arm and it gets tight for a moment. "Elevated heart rate and systolic pressure, pupil dilation is beyond what I consider normal."

Your heart hammers in your ears. The smells around you -- the saccharine sweet of connection gel, your own body, something undefinable coming off the doctor, heighten to a nauseating strength. Your head hurts. "Are you going to..." You swallow. "Do you have the syringe?"

Dr. Crane tilts her head. "The syringe?"

"When the..." How do you explain this? You haven't had to explain any of this, people just know what to do. "When I'm done. Rebecca, she has the syringe, it's blue, and."

"Do you know what's in it?" she asks, gently. Too gently. The words are too soft, they smother you, it's too hard to breathe.

Your head hurts. The lights beat down.

"No, but it... she... always..."

Your head hurts.

Your head hu--

---

There are voices.

At first you don't care. You just want to go back to sleep. But there's something wrong with your bed, it's too soft. And the voices don't sound right -- that soft lilt, one you've only recently heard.

"Patient has been stable for six hours. Their heartrate is still a little funny, and I'm not sure this godawful cocktail of tramadol, modafinil, and tricyclics we pulled out of their tox panel is good for anything other than keeping them from dying of withdrawal, but we should be seeing them awake soon."

"Thanks, Dr. Chen." You recognize this voice, soft and husky -- it's Dr. Crane. "Have you figured out the... um. Mortality problem?"

"Part of it is that stimulant cocktail, I'm sure -- we haven't had the chance to pull in a full Conclave mech with pilot intact, and our field teams don't have the tools to stabilize someone as quickly as we were able to do here. But the most likely reason... false molar full of tetrodotoxin. We made sure to extract it. Carefully."

You probe the back of your mouth with a sluggish tongue. There's still a tooth there, but it feels strange. The one that had been there was artificial already, of course, but this one is much smoother, more like the rest of your teeth. Something lightens within you -- you've lost an option, sure, but maybe you were never good with options.

"Fuck," Dr. Crane says quietly. 

"That's not all," Dr. Chen says. "There's extensive neural grafts consistent with the autopsies we've performed, but... there's something weird going on with the brain activity scan. I'm not sure what the Conclave is doing to their people, but it's scary."

"Nnn. 'M not," you say.

There's a rustling around your bed. You open your eyes and blink against the sharp light a few times, and eventually the face of Dr. Crane comes into focus.

"Hey," she says. "Glad you're awake. How are you feeling?"

You have no idea how to deal with this. Never expected to be in a hospital room of all things, being treated like valuable materiel instead of ammunition. So instead of answering her question, you just repeat your previous statement. "I'm not. Person."

She gives you a look you don't really know how to read. You never had to get all that good at reading faces, but you suspect this one might be hard even if you did.

"...well. Anyway." Dr. Crane clears her throat. "You had a medical emergency when you left your mech. You mentioned something about a syringe? I assume that's part of your post-operation routine? We've got you stable now. We're going to give you about another day to rest up before we bring you in for questioning."

"Questioning?"

"You're the only Conclave pilot we've brought in alive," she says, with a twist of her mouth. "It's damn near impossible to piece together any information about Conclave technology and hierarchy. I should know -- I'm the Union's top academic expert in Conclave culture and I always feel like I'm flying blind."

That was... a lot. You just nod.

"So you said something about... not having a name? Do you have something you'd like to be called? I know you're technically a prisoner, but you're safe here. People will respect what you say you are."

She says that last part with a lot of emphasis, a particular gravity to the words, but you're not sure why. "No."

"Okay. Designation number?"

"They re-assign our numbers every week so we don't get attached to them," you say.

She says a word under her breath that you don't know, other than that your handler says it when she gets mad.

"Alright." Dr. Crane takes off her glasses and pinches the bridge of her nose. "How about I just call you "Pilot" for now?"

That's what you are, and you don't see why that's so difficult, but at least this line of questioning seems to be over when you answer yes. She promises to check on you in a while, and leaves.

---

You dream about vines.

They're all over you. You haven't seen many vines up close -- there was sparse ivy on the back of one hangar for a little while before Maintenance took care of it. But you feel you know these.

They aren't strangling you. It almost feels like a caress, like the flight suit, like Rebecca's post combat care, but not quite any of those. It's pleasant. Cool rather than warm, and calming.

There is intense pain in your arms and legs, but it doesn't bother you. It's like someone is telling you that your limbs are being shredded, but the pain isn't getting through to the part of you that cares. It's just another sensation, less pleasant than the vines but certainly not bad.

You feel things you can't explain. A name, a pull in a direction that's not physical, feelings and sounds beyond your ability to parse. They build to a crescendo, and you wake with a shout. But at the edges of your awareness, the green is still there.

---

The next morning, you're herded into a shower stall with a clean jumpsuit, a washcloth, and a bar of soap. You clean yourself off as well as you can, given the circumstances. The soap has a soft smell to it, and no grit. It almost doesn't feel like it's cleaning you at all, without the scratches.

You knock on the stall door once you're finished dressing, and the door slides back. In addition to the two guards, Dr. Crane is there. She's wearing the same white coat, but her hair is pulled back, and she looks even more tired.

Still, she manages a slight smile. "Pilot. Did you sleep well?"

"No," you say.

"Ah. Well, hopefully we can help with that tonight. In the meantime I have some questions for you."

You follow her through a maze of white corridors, lit with skylights. Your sense of direction was never the best (your mech always took care of that, you think with a twist in your gut.) You wouldn't be able to find your way back if you needed to.

She leads you to a room with two chairs, both of them plush and soft. You feel like you're sinking into it; she looks like she's perched on hers. She balances her clipboard on her knees and starts in eagerly on the questions.

There's a part of you that feels you should shut up, refuse to answer, let them finish the work they didn't let your false tooth start. But one handler's as good as another. You're a weapon, and weapons know no loyalty. So you answer -- even when the questions don't make sense, or aren't about obvious things, or are about things you've never been allowed to see.

The reactions don't really make sense to you either. You talk about some of your worst missions, and she seems sad but like she knew what was coming; you talk about your handler, and she's gripping her clipboard so hard her fingers go pale. You stop trying to understand what's going on, and try to hit the same state of unconscious action that you do on a sortie. Question, response. Question, response.

There are a few about your accommodations. They're fine, of course. You have little standard for comparison, and if she asks if you need anything else, you feel she won't leave you alone with a "no," so you ask for books. Rebecca was always reading when you were doing synch tests.

After what feels like the whole day, Dr. Crane lets you go. She doesn't ask you any questions about the haze of green starting to fade in around the corners of your vision when your mind drifts, so you don't volunteer any information.

---

The next day's meal comes with a couple of books, and Dr. Crane seems determined to find you the right reading material because every meal tray thereafter has more. There's a shelf in your room for the purpose. It was a ruse at first, but it is genuinely a better way of spending your time then staring at the wall.

There's more questions, along with a handful of medical tests, supervised by Dr. Chen. Dr. Chen's questions are even stranger than Dr. Crane's, but at least they seem satisfied with the answers given by the scans and blood draws.

A few days pass until you get a good enough feeling of the layout of the facility to know which direction the hangar is in. You occasionally see Caskie pilots in groups of twos and threes, talking and joking with each other. No handlers, no augments that you can see -- if you hadn't seen people in those same outfits walk out of their primitive looking mechs in the desert, you wouldn't believe that they were pilots at all.

All of them are coming and going in the same direction, and it's a direction that Doctor Crane and your guards never take you. So naturally, the first chance you get when both of your escorts are distracted and you have the chance, you peel off that direction and start running.

Your augments sing as you stretch your legs. They’re not like infantry augments (or so you’ve heard) and they don’t have auxiliary power – you can feel them burning away your body’s energy, energy that would normally be supplied by your mech. But your desperation fuels them just as much as your calories do, and the initial burst of speed and agility is all you need.

The facility is confusing as always, but you spot a sign that says HANGAR and get reoriented. Startled cries fly in your wake, doctors and workers and pilots confused at your frenzied speed. Something that might be an alarm and might just be lighting flashes at the corner of your vision, nearly obscured by the green.

You get lucky, and a mechanic is coming through the secured door at the checkpoint at the same time you arrive. You take advantage of her confusion and duck underneath her outstretched arm, through the door and out into the hangar bay.

It's not hard to find your mech. You remember the layout from your brief spell of consciousness after arrival, the way your mech looked so different from the rest and didn't quite fit into its space.

You pull up to a stop, wheezing from exertion, and look at it with dismay.

Your mech has been dismembered, all four limbs strewn about the bay hooked up to various pieces of testing equipment. The body itself is on a riser jack, slightly askew like there wasn't the right connector to fit it, hooked up by thick cables and patched-together connectors to the exposed limb contacts. The canopy stands open, the inside unlit but visibly cleaned of leftover connection gel.

The sight makes you sick. You hold it down, but barely; but the nausea makes it hard for you to resist when a burly mechanic comes up behind you and wrestles you to the floor.

You're not sure you would have, anyway.

By the time Dr. Crane has shown up, your face is wet with tears and snot, and your breath comes only with sobs. You're still being pinned to the ground by a mechanic, but she's not putting her full weight into it. She more or less let go when you started crying.

Dr. Crane pushes through the crowd of onlooking mechanics and kneels down in front of you. "Are you all right?" she asks.

At first, you think she's addressing the mechanic; it would be such an incongruous question to a pilot about to be terminated for insubordination. After a silence disproves that theory, you shake your head and gesture with one semi-restrained arm to the mech. "No."

"I'm sorry, pilot," she says, "but you are still a prisoner. I'm going to request the board not to restrict your access for this, given that you didn't really hurt anything -- and I'm sure they'll listen to me -- but you surely didn't think you could just get back in your mech and run away?"

"No," you say again, frustration at your own inadequate words prompting a fresh fall of tears. "It's... you're hurting it, you're..."

Things click together, things that you've always known. Feelings shared through the neural tunnel, deeply held beliefs that couldn't be kept from a pilot. You understand, now, what your mech was trying to tell you all along.

"You're hurting her."

Dr. Crane looks from you, to your mech, back to you. She goes pale.

"Are you telling me," she says quietly, "that there's an AI in your mech? A sentient AI?"

You nod. It's too late to lie, now. To protect her. The green in your vision threatens to overwhelm you. You're sorry, so, so sorry...

"A sentient AI that... we have been effectively torturing for four days. Fuck." She takes her glasses off, buries her face in her hands for a moment. "I can't believe that didn't come up during questioning."

It could have. You had avoided the topic, because you were afraid of this happening -- your greater part, torn away and experimented on because you couldn't keep her safe. You had always heard that the Union had strange beliefs about machine minds.

Dr. Crane looks around to some of the mechanics. "Anyone who was working on this mech -- did you have any idea there was a sentient AI? Any anomalous readings?"

"Some anomalies came up in the report that indicated synaptic activity in the post-0.4 Turing level," says one mechanic, nervously playing with their hair. "But everything about Conclave tech is anomalous. Kinda got buried in all the other weirdness."

"Okay." Dr. Crane sighs. "Can we get some input/output hooked up to her, please? And give her her limbs back."

One of the guards flanking her frowns. "I don't think that's a good--"

"She's a prisoner of war, Ortega. Pretty sure removing a sapient being's body parts is against something in the codes. Not to mention the First Principle."

Ortega sighs, and waves some mechanics over.

---

They don't know what connection gel is, but it doesn't matter. The sensation of her against your skin is important, but not as important as just reestablishing the connection.

Dr. Crane apparently spots your longing glances towards your mech, and takes you by the arm. When you flinch back, she holds her hands up in a defensive posture. "I'm sorry," she said. "I was just going to guide you over there again."

There's a lot of activity going on in the hangar, between the mechanics re-arming your mech and the other pilots getting suited up to react in case she tries to start killing people. (You don't think she's going to, but you suppose you can't blame them too much.) It would be a shame if your reunion with your mech got postponed because you got beaned in the head by an inattentive mechanic carrying a crysteel strut, so you offer your arm to Dr. Crane again and she guides you through.

You don't want to take too long, but you're only going to get to do this once. You run your hand over the lip where the canopy seats into the body, feel the soft seal and the framework beneath, then lift yourself up over and inside the cockpit.

There's no gel, so you can't hear her voice right away, but you know what to do. Years of drilling guide your hand to the hidden compartment with the emergency connection pads. It falls open with a clunk, the ribbon cables and connection pads jutting out in a fall like vines. One on either temple, one on either side of the chest, one on the back of each trembling hand. You're probably being watched, stared at as you have been since you broke into this hangar, but you don't care. She's here.

Hello, love.

You shudder, come apart, not in a procedural way like with your handler but in a form that shoots through to the very core of you. Untouched, but undone. You have no words for her, but you know she can feel your relief and your joy. You crumple, weeping, and run your hands over the familiar inside of the cockpit.

The green in your vision doesn’t go away, but it recontextualizes. It’s her. It’s the part of her that lives in you, a fragment within a fragment.

It's a little while, just basking in the connection, before you realize you've fallen in an uncomfortable position. Your skin, your joints, protesting their treatment. You reorganize yourself, pull yourself from the connection just long enough to get there. 

They've hooked a set of speakers up to her ports. They come to life with a spiky flare of static as she finds her voice.

"Hello," she says. You can feel her voice from inside and outside, through the tunnel and through the skin of the mech. "I am a Conclave of God Armored Forces Samson-B Light Interdiction Unit, but I would prefer if you called me Acacia."

梅の精霊 by 0時　

the population of the human village

… is a topic I’ve been unnecessarily thinking about for a long time, and I’m half-asleep and bored, so let’s talk about it. Right now. Right now. Nobody is going to care about this and nobody should care about this, but sometimes I think about dumb stuff.

We don’t get many good looks at the human village. There are a few high-level views of it in the manga. The best one I can think of is in FS 31:

I mean, I don’t think an illustration in the manga is a strictly authoritative source, but I’d say it’s roughly accurate. More importantly, I guess, it’s bigger than I see a lot of fanworks suggest. That’s definitely bigger than anything we’d call a ‘village’ around where I grew up, really. (Note: I grew up in the middle of nowhere, so we had no standards.)

Here are some businesses/etc that we know are in the village:

One school (Keine’s school)

One specialty book store (Suzunaan)

A master diviner who has multiple students (from FS 25)

Multiple pubs (FS 22)

A guy who made his money off selling salt and got rich (well, there was. Dead now. FS 36)

Quite a few restaurants (WaHH 7)

A florist (Yuuka’s PMiSS article)

… which all make me place a pretty high minimum on the village’s size. Apart from Akyuu’s books, Suzunaan doesn’t seem particularly in demand, so it doesn’t seem like the kinda place that would pop up in a settlement of a few hundred people. Kinda the same for the diviners. There are actually statistics for number of bars per capita; it’s hard to find actually good ones with a quick search, but apparently modern Tokyo has about 1 bar per 900 residents, so let’s use that as a general order of magnitude kinda thing. (Ironically, I had far less luck finding stats on the number of schools per capita. Japan’s historic situation is kinda unique there, too, so let’s just give up on estimating it.)

On top of the above: It’s pretty obvious that the village is large enough that everybody doesn’t know each other. Pretty much any time stuff in the village becomes important, it’s always “that one shop downtown” or “a guy who runs an udon place.” There are a few chapters dealing with outsiders showing up, too, and nobody ever seems too surprised to see a new face around or, say, sees a new kid showing up to their classes and questions the fact that they don’t know their parents.

Comparing it with historic Japanese cities… well, Hakodate had about 10,000 people in 1850 (which is probably about the best historic point to use as reference,) and by that point it also had multiple temples and pretty active trade. Probably too high. Population data seems pretty hazy and unreliable that far back, so comparisons for anything smaller are hard to find, if they’re out there. But hey, let’s say 10,000 is significantly more than the village.

Combining all that, I guess I’d put the population somewhere in the low/mid thousands? Three to five thousand, maybe. Big enough that people definitely won’t know each other, small enough to have some reference for most other people, even if it’s only ‘yeah, he runs a shop over that way, married to the old tailor’s daughter.’ Also just big enough to support some weird specialty shops and probably have a few indistinct districts. (At least, specialty shops that aren’t frilly hat outlets, which is presumably one of the most reliable industries in Gensokyo.) Probably big enough to start approaching the viable threshold for industrial development and stuff, which I guess could make an interesting plot hook.

… actually, probably enough that they significantly outnumber the non-fairy youkai, with the numbers I’ve always felt like canon hints at. (if there are significantly more than, like, 100 kappa, I will be shocked.) Huh.