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Non-Pokémon Since the World Was Born [Ōkami]

love

Memento mori
Pronouns
he/him/it
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  1. leafeon
Since the World Was Born

The world is as kind a place as ever it’s been, but still it’s not enough.

There are some references to suffering in nature, though they are no more graphic than what you might hear in a nature documentary.

In the stony understory stood something not known to kami or man. A gauzy white ginkgo leaf rooted and enlarged a hundred times. It did not disappear when Amaterasu brushed it with her paw, but from the nodules lining its edge released a puff that might have been spores.

She bounded up the mountain, the moss rocks glowing like firefly bulbs at her footfalls, the ginkgo fans fluttering. A wolf extracted its head from a fawn, growling, until it glimpsed that white coat and blazing reflector.

Upland, the understory thickened, the beech’s autumn leaves like confetti bursts amidst the evergreen bamboo. Amaterasu slipped fishlike through the gaps, old branches gifted spryness to flex around her. More anomalies: folded strips that fluttered like origami butterflies; still and wispy growths like bleached seagrass; loose spheres, light as temari, spilling, when kicked, specks that looked like seeds. These things all frostily hued, for all her passing’s warmth.

A ledge. Rose finches fought, or maybe just played, beside the long drop. Kites wheeled languidly in viscous light, lost feathers regenerating, as sunbeams swept the mottled vista. Anomalies twinkled, thickening toward the southeast. Toward the southeast Amaterasu ran, and ran, until the first dusk stars peeked through the clouds.

She slept by the crotch of a stream, flanked by processions of bubbles. The rain hissed steaming around her reflector, a lambent sauna for sparrows. A turtle passed floating belly-up.

Day broke with golden curls of steam, sugar-fine droplets sifting through the canopy. She descended into yet damper air, stream-laced lowlands littered with leaf skeletons. Stopped to entertain a pair of bear cubs, wrestling, running, thrashing dead bamboo like dog bones, all before the mother’s watchful eye. Amaterasu hesitated when a cub batted one of the temari balls toward her. Then batted it back.

By noon, openness at last, the clouds like spills of cream in the lakewater. Skimming that celestial reflection, she might have felt a sense of flight. She passed a concave islet on which was a fledgling black with ants, moving. If she’d seen it, I wonder what she’d have done, what expression would have passed across her face.

She reached the shore at golden hour. Susuki stalks strained honey from the sun. The grass frissoned at her passing, all of autumn’s seven blooming in her wake. Anomalies like rock formations made dilated melodies from the wind and bounced cricket calls. Dragonflies chewed the heads of false white moths, sparing real ones.

At last she reached the grotto. Here the anomalies grew so thick as to crowd out the grass, and grew in great diversity, everything seen before plus crowds of discs and stems and wisps and coral stands. But one patch was clear, containing two straw mats, one sakazuki cup, one bowl of stir-fry, and one ink-stained notebook; and, on the far mat, one six-tailed kitsune.

“Amaterasu,” I said, bowing, “I am humbled by your presence. Please accept my offerings.”

She started on the stir-fry.

For a few moments I waited, holding my breath, pins and needles intensifying in my extremities. Then I gave in. “A scholar in Tochigi determined that a spider the size of a brush tip eats about three insects per day. Three insects every day to have their insides dissolved. By my count you passed about a hundred webs every day on your way here. And that is just to speak of one kind of predator. Thanks to you this world is as kind a place as ever it’s been, but still it’s not enough.”

Her expression remained neutral, but she’d stopped eating and looked at me.

“The welfare of mortals stands upon a foundation of cruelty. So we need a new one. The autonomous life I’ve crafted constitutes exactly this. It just needs your support to flourish.”

She gave a long exhale, and before her feet bloomed a blue rose.

“But how can’t it be possible?” I nudged my notebook over, summoned a gust of wind to flip through the pages. “Look, see this design—it puts out roots like a plant’s, cycles nutrients, but propagates without pollinators. The fruit is nutritious to all. And this one, people can use it for construction just like the susuki. I designed the roots to work the soil like worms. There’s proper detritivores, too, traps for flies that kill them right away, no pain—it’s only sustaining it all that’s hard, but if only you extended the blessing of your light, then all will be solved.”

The look on her face reminded me of my mother’s after the fifth time she’d found me hiding in the fields past bedtime. The tiredness that follows from burned-out frustration. From her bag she removed a glowing device and through some tactile interface issued commands. The clearing became a tangle of information, 3D schematics and hyperlinks and animated time series. I could not have hoped to analyze half of it before the night was done, yet I divined the intent as easily as I’d recognize my own face. It was the same thing I’d spent centuries doing—save for one key difference.

“You tried to keep everything. Every extant species, alongside the new.” The thought of the endeavor made my head tingle. “But of course that won’t work. The complexity is too great. You have to excise at least the lower taxa.”

She looked away. I did not follow her gaze but in the silence noticed the susurrations of crickets and visualized that persimmon dusk, the migrating wagtails starkly underlit; I saw her dark eyes twinkle with fireflies. The flowers that bloomed around her were carnations.

“I feel that love too,” I said softly. “More than you must think. But I also know how they suffer.” And I really did. I took a deep breath, prepared at last to recount my awakening, the incarnations I’d remembered, the thousand infant deaths preceding each adulthood; prepared to bare my heart, to render some sample of my nightmares with my brush; but for all my rehearsals the words would not come, and my tails, my legs, had begun to tremble.

A sunbeam fell warm upon my head as Amaterasu lay beside me. Though tears blurred them, I recognized around her white lilies and chrysanthemums, a mourner’s arrangement.

Ultimately I never explained any of it. I think she gleaned it anyway, through some divine or maternal instinct. I must have moved her somehow, for she returned with daybreak, the sunlight no longer bouncing off but suddenly shining through the anomalies, revealing the veins inside, flushing them green and orange and red, ripening candy-colored fruits. And she is with me now, leafing through my notes, sketching revisions, evaluating compromises. As I watch her, my heart, that old threadbare thing, buoys with warmth like a floating lantern. I think that maybe something will finally come of all my pain. I think that maybe, for the first time since the world was born, things will be okay.
 

Spiteful Murkrow

Busy Writing Stories I Want to Read
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He/Him/His
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  1. nidoran-f
  2. druddigon
  3. swellow
  4. lugia
  5. growlithe
  6. quilava-fobbie
  7. sneasel-kate
  8. heliolisk-fobbie
Heya, swinging by for some light reading tonight, though an Okami one-shot, huh? That one’s definitely different. Though I’ve always had a soft spot for that game, and this one-shot looks nice and digestible, so let’s just jump right in:

In the stony understory stood something not known to kami or man. A gauzy white ginkgo leaf rooted and enlarged a hundred times. It did not disappear when Amaterasu brushed it with her paw, but from the nodules lining its edge released a puff that might have been spores.

Wait, is this the equivalent of those brushstrokes you can use to make plants bloom in the game, or am I tripping?

She bounded up the mountain, the moss rocks glowing like firefly bulbs at her footfalls, the ginkgo fans fluttering. A wolf extracted its head from a fawn, growling, until it glimpsed that white coat and blazing reflector.

Mmm… venison. Though there’s where that content warning was coming from.

Upland, the understory thickened, the beech’s autumn leaves like confetti bursts amidst the evergreen bamboo. Amaterasu slipped fishlike through the gaps, old branches gifted spryness to flex around her. More anomalies: folded strips that fluttered like origami butterflies; still and wispy growths like bleached seagrass; loose spheres, light as temari, spilling, when kicked, specks that looked like seeds. These things all frostily hued, for all her passing’s warmth.

Can’t tell if she’s just going to town with the Celestial Brush right now, or if this is meant to be something completely different here.

A ledge. Rose finches fought, or maybe just played, beside the long drop. Kites wheeled languidly in viscous light, lost feathers regenerating, as sunbeams swept the mottled vista. Anomalies twinkled, thickening toward the southeast. Toward the southeast Amaterasu ran, and ran, until the first dusk stars peeked through the clouds.

Okay, yeah, these ‘anomalies’ are totally Celestial Brush antics, just saying.

She slept by the crotch of a stream, flanked by processions of bubbles. The rain hissed steaming around her reflector, a lambent sauna for sparrows. A turtle passed floating belly-up.

I now have the cursed mental image of the sparrows in Sasa Sanctuary just chilling around Ammy while she’s being rained on.

Day broke with golden curls of steam, sugar-fine droplets sifting through the canopy. She descended into yet damper air, stream-laced lowlands littered with leaf skeletons. Stopped to entertain a pair of bear cubs, wrestling, running, thrashing dead bamboo like dog bones, all before the mother’s watchful eye. Amaterasu hesitated when a cub batted one of the temari balls toward her. Then batted it back.

D’aww…
784725534470963221.webp


By noon, openness at last, the clouds like spills of cream in the lakewater. Skimming that celestial reflection, she might have felt a sense of flight. She passed a concave islet on which was a fledgling black with ants, moving. If she’d seen it, I wonder what she’d have done, what expression would have passed across her face.

701450038513238106.webp


Though my money would’ve been on Ammy intervening since she seems to have a thing with helping birds in the game.

She reached the shore at golden hour. Susuki stalks strained honey from the sun. The grass frissoned at her passing, all of autumn’s seven blooming in her wake. Anomalies like rock formations made dilated melodies from the wind and bounced cricket calls. Dragonflies chewed the heads of false white moths, sparing real ones.

I’m now morbidly curious as to if this also happens to those birds and stuff we feed like five seconds after we leave them in-game. :copyka:

At last she reached the grotto. Here the anomalies grew so thick as to crowd out the grass, and grew in great diversity, everything seen before plus crowds of discs and stems and wisps and coral stands. But one patch was clear, containing two straw mats, one sakazuki cup, one bowl of stir-fry, and one ink-stained notebook; and, on the far mat, one six-tailed kitsune.

“Amaterasu,” I said, bowing, “I am humbled by your presence. Please accept my offerings.”

Not sure who this is, but we have a narrator, at least.

She started on the stir-fry.

For a few moments I waited, holding my breath, pins and needles intensifying in my extremities. Then I gave in. “A scholar in Tochigi determined that a spider the size of a brush tip eats about three insects per day. Three insects every day to have their insides dissolved. By my count you passed about a hundred webs every day on your way here. And that is just to speak of one kind of predator. Thanks to you this world is as kind a place as ever it’s been, but still it’s not enough.”

Ah yes, getting straight to the crux of whether all the hard work we put into the game will actually amount to anything or not.

I mean, in relative terms, it’s an improvement? That counts for something, right?

Her expression remained neutral, but she’d stopped eating and looked at me.

“The welfare of mortals stands upon a foundation of cruelty. So we need a new one. The autonomous life I’ve crafted constitutes exactly this. It just needs your support to flourish.”

Amaterasu:
e0195fac38895c57773deebd0909dc40.gif


She gave a long exhale, and before her feet bloomed a blue rose.

“But how can’t it be possible?” I nudged my notebook over, summoned a gust of wind to flip through the pages. “Look, see this design—it puts out roots like a plant’s, cycles nutrients, but propagates without pollinators. The fruit is nutritious to all. And this one, people can use it for construction just like the susuki. I designed the roots to work the soil like worms. There’s proper detritivores, too, traps for flies that kill them right away, no pain—it’s only sustaining it all that’s hard, but if only you extended the blessing of your light, then all will be solved.”

de7.png


The look on her face reminded me of my mother’s after the fifth time she’d found me hiding in the fields past bedtime. The tiredness that follows from burned-out frustration. From her bag she removed a glowing device and through some tactile interface issued commands. The clearing became a tangle of information, 3D schematics and hyperlinks and animated time series. I could not have hoped to analyze half of it before the night was done, yet I divined the intent as easily as I’d recognize my own face. It was the same thing I’d spent centuries doing—save for one key difference.

Oh, so Ammy’s just
803141280380485632.webp
-facing during all of this, huh?

“You tried to keep everything. Every extant species, alongside the new.” The thought of the endeavor made my head tingle. “But of course that won’t work. The complexity is too great. You have to excise at least the lower taxa.”

She looked away. I did not follow her gaze but in the silence noticed the susurrations of crickets and visualized that persimmon dusk, the migrating wagtails starkly underlit; I saw her dark eyes twinkle with fireflies. The flowers that bloomed around her were carnations.

More flower symbolism, huh? Let’s see what this-

Carnation meaning varies depending on the flower color. But at its heart, basic carnation flower meaning embraces the ideas of fascination, distinction and love.​

Ahhh… yeah, I doubt that Ammy’s going to sign off on deleting a huge chunk of life here.

“I feel that love too,” I said softly. “More than you must think. But I also know how they suffer.” And I really did. I took a deep breath, prepared at last to recount my awakening, the incarnations I’d remembered, the thousand infant deaths preceding each adulthood; prepared to bare my heart, to render some sample of my nightmares with my brush; but for all my rehearsals the words would not come, and my tails, my legs, had begun to tremble.

A sunbeam fell warm upon my head as Amaterasu lay beside me. Though tears blurred them, I recognized around her white lilies and chrysanthemums, a mourner’s arrangement.

… Ammy, you’re scaring me right now. .-.

Ultimately I never explained any of it. I think she gleaned it anyway, through some divine or maternal instinct. I must have moved her somehow, for she returned with daybreak, the sunlight no longer bouncing off but suddenly shining through the anomalies, revealing the veins inside, flushing them green and orange and red, ripening candy-colored fruits. And she is with me now, leafing through my notes, sketching revisions, evaluating compromises. As I watch her, my heart, that old threadbare thing, buoys with warmth like a floating lantern. I think that maybe something will finally come of all my pain. I think that maybe, for the first time since the world was born, things will be okay.

1220916380468117705.webp


Uh… well, that doesn’t bode well for a decent swath of life in the mortal realm.

Okay, full disclosure, it’s been like 10 years since I played Okami, so the six-tailed kitsune narrator didn’t ring a bell (it might have been an OC?) but otherwise this one-shot felt decently on the mark for the general vibe of the game. Like I remembered spending lots and lots of time in my playthrough just stopping to do things like make flowers bloom or feed various animals, which in the game helps make things pop and become more visually lively. But at the end of the day, nature is a harsh mistress, and it does feel decently plausible that Ammy could be brought to question whether saving the world from destruction aside, whether her efforts were enough and whether they would ever be enough.

I don’t really have too much to complain about here. Perhaps some more clarity on who the narrator would’ve been nice? Some acknowledgement of the human side of Okami or Issun might have also been a nice call-back and felt like something that if the narrator knew about it, might be of interest to try and make his case to Amaterasu to sign off on his designs to essentially retool life in their world, but what’s already there is really good for a short piece.

Good work @love . I admittedly wasn’t expecting to read this story, but I’m glad that I stopped to give it a go. ^^
 

StolenMadWolf

Loony Moony
Pronouns
She/They
Partners
  1. scorbunny
  2. buneary
Righto, coming in as part of the Review Blitz for tonight. As a disclaimer, I typically lean towards reviewing worldbuilding, plot and characters over grammar and writing. But I'll try and cover all bases. Now this is a oneshot, so I can't really do much in the way of worldbuilding here. But I can try and go a bit further with characters and plot.

So, as a second disclaimer. Whilst I do really like Okami and it's setting, I've not actually completed the game yet, so some of the content here may or may not fly over my head. The story is pretty simple and straightforward, there is a theme on whether or not the world is actually safe or peaceful enough despite everything Ammy has done. I'm not entirely sure what the kitsune is getting at. Are they trying to encourage Ammy to cut part of the world out to reduce suffering? Or are they trying to support Ammy with all this trouble? It's not exactly clear, then again, I might be missing some context. Replacing the insects and the like with machines? Kinda stands out from what I've seen in Okami. Ammy does act fairly similarly to what I see in the game, so that's pretty nice to see as well.

I can't really make any comments on the writing and grammar. It's written well enough, it just sometimes feels a little bit unclear of what is happening at times, with too many jumps at the start. In particular, the start feels particularly drawn out, especially considering how short the rest of the one shot is. Not much actually happens despite this conversation, and without that extra context, it's hard to work out what the full intent of the story is.

Nice writing either way, I'm glad to read it and hope that if you do follow up with a longer story down the line! Either with Okami or something else.
 

love

Memento mori
Pronouns
he/him/it
Partners
  1. leafeon
Thanks for the reviews, @Spiteful Murkrow and @StolenMadWolf.

While there is a kitsune in the game, Amaterasu kills them in the game's final arc, and the one here is an OC.

It's good the story's vibe didn't feel too different from the game. I wanted to stay true to the game's beauty while acknowledging the implicit suffering. One thing I'm not sure I made clear was that the anomalies are the kitsune's creations and not Amaterasu messing around. Amaterasu follows them to where they are densest so as to find their creator.

I am glad that Amaterasu's reaction seems plausible. She was very hard to write here. How is a god embodying life and compassion supposed to react when those values directly conflict?

I appreciate that you looked up the flower symbolism. Your source seems to basically get what I was going for with carnations. "Fascination" is felicitous, in particular, besides the love. I rediscovered how finicky this stuff can be when writing this story, because flower meanings often vary considerably from source to source. Here at least we have the kitsune's reactions to help clarify.

Some acknowledgement of the human side of Okami or Issun might have also been a nice call-back and felt like something that if the narrator knew about it, might be of interest to try and make his case to Amaterasu to sign off on his designs to essentially retool life in their world

I admit I'm not completely sure what you mean here.

The cliffnotes are that the narrator is creating artificial life to replace parts of nature that they deem inhumane. Amaterasu considered similar utilitarian measures in the past but could not make it work. The narrator argues that this is only because she insisted on preserving all extant species, making the problem vastly more complex. She is reluctant to accept that some extinctions may be necessary, but by the end the narrator persuades her to "evaluat[e] compromises".

I was a bit uncertain about the beginning of the story going on as long it did too, but the idea is to show the narrator's perspective on nature, appreciating both its beauty and suffering. I think that that context is important for the ensuing conversation, especially since the source material portrays things as pretty strictly idyllic. Unfortunately I don't think there's much I can do to make it less confusing unless I know more specifically what you struggled with.
 
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