Chapter Text
The Netherworld is a place unique in its strangeness. A place so strange, that it somehow manages to stand out as an oddity in the already-odd-enough Gensokyo.
But perhaps strangest of all are its inhabitants, all disparate in character and myriad in number. The more common folk you'll see floating aimlessly about are the souls of the recently departed, gathered around on the banks of Sanzu, known as Shigan, awaiting a ride to the other side, known as Higan, where their final sentence shall be meted out by the revered Yama.
It's a well-known fact that the longest-lived things are to be found right here, right in the Netherworld. For it stands to reason that even at The End of All Things, there will still remain souls of the dead and maybe-damned waiting, waiting for a Shinigami more interested in pursuing an inappropriate workplace relationship with her superior than doing her job. Though it has been hypothesised by very smart individuals that perhaps there are a great many things that could survive past even the horrors of celestial bureaucracy - maybe the longest-lasting being taxes (after all, while even ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ himself at least gets to enjoy a vacation every now and again, the taxman can expect no such luxury. Taxes, then, must last very long indeed.) but for all its established long-lastedness, there is at least one thing that lives longer than taxes - mystery.
Since, for as long as there exists an unknown, there shall be a sense of mystery that lives on beside it, facilitating it, uncovering it. Case in point, upon being relieved of their mortal burdens, the first thing a newly introduced soul typically tends to think about is what the river right next to them is awash with.
Because it can't be water; water has the odd tendency to flow and ebb like, well, water. The water that fills the Sanzu, or more aptly the water-like liquid, was this ghastly sort of substance. Rather appropriate given the setting, but still odd enough and sufficiently out-of-place to register as something worthy of deep navelgazing by anyone sensible. Dip your hand into it, and assuming the ravenous spirits melded with the riverbed below don't bite it off, and you'll extract within your palm a pale ichor, closer in consistency to the stuff coursing through your veins, quickly disappearing into vapour, and leaving your hand smelling faintly of spider lilies (whatever it is they smell like).
A soul, one that looked like two or three souls smashed together to make one big soul-homunculus, approached the bank. A short-changed hero without much in the way of being able to reimburse its lackadaisical psychopomp, it began to fret, over and over, about the feasibility of somehow convincing her not to throw it overboard, and unto the unfathomable depths below.
Uncanny thoughts such as:
How on Earth am I going to scrounge up enough coin to pay the fare?
And,
The concept of money is an inherently oppressive tool used by the State to cement its authority over the common people!
And,
This is one hell of a way to end up in Gensokyo, I guess...
And finally,
How am I thinking in italics?
Filled the bulky, misshapen head of our newly-arrived, frankensteinian friend. Not necessary contrasting per se, but walk up to anyone reasonable and start spewing something comparable to the above, and they'd rightly think you mad. Usually, hearing other peoples' voices crowing out loud about:
Supreme executive power!
And,
Shame, I wanted to woo at least one touhou before I kicked the bucket.
Would've been cause for serious concern. But for all four of the very distinct minds residing within the same body, it was a thing of legends to bear witness to. After all, it was a quite literal once-in-a-lifetime experience to know what happens after death. The dead themselves seldom make for great conversation.
But now wasn't the time for infighting, something one of the constituent souls in particular would find very familiar to them. However distasteful in character the four found eachother, the appallingly strange situation that they found themselves in instilled a novel sense of camaraderie - otherwise not found in the world of the living - amongst the group.
The Yamaxanadu, whose name half of the minds didn't know translated to 'Yama of Paradise' up until this very moment, and for good measure did not know what the term 'yama' meant at all, awaited them. And it didn't take a genius, or a person otherwise well-versed in Japanese mythology, to understand it probably isn't the best of ideas to keep someone with a title like that waiting.
The Outsider shifted its weight awkwardly as it hobbled along on soft, impossibly soft red soil, one foot sinking deeper into the earth than the other, one arm failing limply with the other holding it in place, following the course of the river. It does not know where it is going, only that it must. Beckoned by the spider lillies, lined up against the banks of the Sanzu like wild reeds, it marches inexorably onwards.
It looks up, and sees nothing but dark skies. It can't put its many deformed, crooked fingers on what exactly 'dark skies' look like to be sure, but something about the air of this place just screamed 'dark' to it. More crucially, it wasn't looking ahead.
It trips. And then it falls. It tries to get up, only to take a tumble again.
Trapped in this ugly cycle of falling-gettingup-fallingagain, it does not notice how in doing so, it was slowly edging itself toward the stream, where all that misty, nasty water-like stuff was.
Until it happened all at once. A loud splash sounded. It felt - it could feel! - a terrible cold overcome its body. A red mist slowly crept into the edges of its vision as liquid succeeded air in its lungs and its consciousness ebbed away into the void. It heard a scream, its own scream - an outline of a scream really - as lucidity faded, until all it could feel was itself sinking deeper, ever deeper.
And deeper...
And deeper.