Japan – 7SeasonsAgo

The new sundress, the bright sunny day, the amusement park, nothing could brighten her attitude. Her favorite toy had been redistributed to her favorite cousin, Stacy. She couldn’t help hating him a little bit today. It was the ‘Fisher Price Little People Castle Play Set’ and her mother had informed her (on her birthday…) that she was too old to play with it. It had been packed up that morning to live somewhere else. Charlie was depressed.

“Charlotte, you are thirteen years old today and too old to be playing with dolls. It’s time to spend your free-time on

your appearance,

learning to run a brush through your hair,

paying some attention to the disgrace you call nails,”

her mother, Claudette, had scolded. Charlie had bowed her head in deference to her lecture. Thirteen in name only she thought looking down. Her sundress and long hair were the only things securing her place in the pantheon of womanhood. Otherwise, she was all flat plains and angles.

She was supposed to be more special, being a dragon child. The lady who lived up the street from her grandmother, Evelyn, had taught her that. The Chinese witch, that’s what everyone called her. Charlie, however, knew she wasn’t Chinese. While she had been born in Hong Kong and owned the local Chinese restaurant, her family was Japanese. She supposed she really was a witch.

It had been Evelyn’s granddaughter, Taura, that had told her this. Her two sisters, Momoko and Ryoko, had sat in solemn silent agreement pouring imaginary tea into little cups. They had all draped themselves in old pieces of fabric (towels, blankets, table clothes, and curtains) artfully tied up in what they imagined to be kimono’s. They were playing at being geishas having a party. “My grandmother is a witch. And, since they are always together, yours probably is as well”, Taura shared. Evelyn’s grandchildren often recruited her for their elaborate tea parties – being that they were all more-or-less the same age. “I supposed that means we might all be witches. Everyone knows it runs in families”, she continued mysteriously.

Charlie thought this was probably true as well. Her grandmother and Evelyn were always collecting herbs together and making special drinks. One time, when she was supposed to be asleep, she had actually heard Evelyn tell her grandmother to collect some of her hair and nails when she died so that she could come back and visit her from the grave.

It hadn’t bothered Charlie. The thought of her grandmother being a witch did not worry her, upset her, or concern her. Both women were larger than life to her. It made sense that they were also witches. Besides, it was Evelyne that had given her the castle play set. She had found it at a garage sale – practically new. She said she was giving it to her because she was a dragon and the playset had a dragon in it. That’s how she found out that she was born in the year of the dragon and that she was special.

It was the pink dragon that was breaking her heart to part with. She could part with the whole play set but she would rather keep the dragon. What if Stacy banished the dragon to the cave at the bottom of the toy castle? He might not know that Puff was the ruler.

The amusement park was supposed to be a special treat, but Charlie couldn’t stop sulking and being distraught over Puff. Even as she got on to ride her favorite character of the carousel, a green dragon, she was still melancholy. The carousel held no magic today, but her green dragon did. In her mind this dragon was also Puff, but grown. She always supposed her little pink dragon at home was Puff as a baby.

There was no conflict yet in her developing mind that Puff was different at this park than he was at home. She had tried to explain it to her mother once but her mother had insisted that it was not possible to be in two places at once; and, furthermore, you could not be a child and an adult at the same time.

Yet Charlie knew that what she had told her mother was true. All she had to do was look in the mirror and see that she was someplace else at the same time and an adult as well as a child – all at once. It seemed that getting older made things harder to understand. With the loss of her dear pink dragon, (on this the day of her birthday) getting older didn’t seem like such a great reward. She wondered ‘Is that all there is? Would it just be disappointment from here on out? Wasn’t she a dragon and possibly a witch? Surely her life was meant to be more special.’

She looked up just in time to see Stacy getting out of the car. She could see the parking lot from here. She decided today – she would find a moment to pinch him – hard. The thought made her smile.

Gentry fiddled with his specters wondering how his fellow Pneumatologists were doing. They had been out here on the holy site of Mt. Fuji studying spirit folkology for two days now trying out different technologies. Plebarious was working to understand the smaller disturbances, Raynier was tasked with understanding the nature of the spirit of the mountain, and Gentry was trying to catalogue the hierarchy in between. They all went to the same school and had been recruited by the head of the Pneumatology department – Doctor Asclepius. Gentry’s technology was a special pair of glasses called specters.

Specters allowed you to view devic energy. Unfortunately, they did not work for everyone. You already had to have a gift for sensing spirits. Gentry had tried to explain it to a friend once by describing it like this, “It’s as if the world were blind and I am color blind. Think of these glasses as you would Enchroma Lenses that allow color blind people to see the full spectrum”. In addition to having a gift, Gentry had found that he had to be in the right frame of mind – a frame of mind that was almost trance like. He had discovered snowboarding was a good technique to use.

He wasn’t sure what method he would employ when they got to Saudi Arabia to study the jinn. In Japan they would study the kami, in Ireland the fairy folk, and of course they had all of Christendom to study angles and demons. Most cultures described a spirt world. Some cultures had fleshed their worlds out more than others. It was his professor’s opinion that they were all describing the same presence. He had recruited the three young men to look for this sort of paranormality. They all shared a gift for sensing spirits though manifested in different ways.

Doctor Asclepius was fascinated by the thought of a similar but parallel world where most spirits lived everyday lives entertaining superstitions about humans, but never really believing them. While some spirits (like humans) had a sense of beings in a different dimension and were able to interact with humans to various degrees based on individual gifts. In the world of Pneumatology he had amassed quite a following and had produced a substantial amount of evidence. However, it was evidence that only a gifted few could take for fact while the rest of the world had to rely on faith. Faith a good deal of the world would not impart.

Unfortunately snowboarding and observational research were not always the best of friends. Gentry had hit a rock he wasn’t paying attention to while he was following a tree spirit. It had barely been sticking out of the snow. He supposed the tree spirit must have it in for the poor rock because he could feel the malice pulsing from the stone where he sat from being thrown a good ten feet away. A snow bank that could have done with some fresh fluffier snow had cushioned his fall.

He stood up and patted himself down. He seemed to be intact except for a scraped knee and a throbbing finger with the beginnings of a blood blister forming at the knuckle. He could move it completely although painfully and decided it was more likely a sprain than a break. It would be better in four days he predicted. He looked around to see if he had dislodged anything when he spied the letter he had received from his mother that morning. It was a fancy calligraphic affair in velum sealed with wax and a ribbon as was her custom. She was of the opinion that all of her correspondences were of the utmost importance and delivered them as such.

Gentry picked it up, sat on the mad rock, and tried reading it again. Maybe double vision would give the instructions she had provided more sense. Regardless, the letter seemed destined to complicate things.

He took out a biscuit to nibble on and spied a squirrel eyeing him jealously. The commonness of the squirrel amused him. He was all the way in Japan and yet he could still count on this rodent to try and shake him down for a bit of food. “Would you like some of my breakfast”, he asked? “Of course you do, ” Gentry answered for him.

Tag: Japan

Amusement Park Number One “Is that all there is?”

Steampunk Snowboarder “Of course you do”