#I decided to reference Miranda Lotto - a character from a manga I never read - for the design

[inversionimpulse]

Lately I've gotten attached to the idea of Kasen resurrecting Yoshika as an oni using the Ibaraki Box. When you ship a character who is an undead slave and a character who has a magic healing artifact, it seems like a natural idea to have.

As I imagine it, it is not a happily ever after, however. Yoshika, awakening from a thousand-year fugue of being unable to string two thoughts together, finds herself completely changed, physically and mentally. Reflexively aggressive, angry by nature, disposed against the quiet contemplation and deep thought of scholarliness and poetry that she had long defined herself by. In an unfamilar body.

But maybe, she fears, neither the body nor the mind are even really hers anyway. Too much of her body, mind, and soul had long since rotted away to nothing. There wasn't really much left to fix. To make a living thing as complete as the new Yoshika, the Ibaraki Box can only have invented new material from no blueprint, or stretched what was left of the old blueprint farther than it was ever meant to go.

In the misery of this dysmorphia, Yoshika begins to resent Kasen for saving her. It would have been better to die, she thinks, than live like this. Eventually she can't help but lash out. In the end they separate. Yoshika flees into the underground.

(There's probably a happy ending in there somewhere, if only because Kasen's fellow Sages (especially Yukari) and fellow Devas (Especially Suika) are quite incapable of letting sleeping dogs lie and moreover care about Kasen's happiness - and eventually that much meddling might hit an integer underflow error and become a positive effect)

But for now, Yuugi tries to care for her almost-daughter-in-law/the newest of her people to fall under her aegis, but from the distance that Yoshika keeps her at, there's not much she can do. Yoshika - now (or again) named Kotomichi, having abandoned the name she took up as successful courtier - lives like the stereotypical romantic poet or tortured artist. Spending too much time on creative endeavours that she hates. Isolated in an apartment that she allows to crumble around her ears. Eating too little. Drinking too much. Destroying her body with a million different drugs and facsimiles thereof, volatile enough to smash an oni.

Yoshika - Kotomichi - lives, barely, in the depths of Old Hell among the other dead-enders, desperately trying anything to obliterate herself rather than walk the endless desert of her new life.

Kasen stays cloistered in the mountains and keeps pursuing the Way that Yoshika put her on, pretending to anyone she sees that she isn't so hearbroken she feels like dying. That she isn't still dreaming of attaining Heaven side-by-side with the woman she loves.

Except if I ever do anything with this I'm going to need to redesign at least the head because while I was working on this Chiyari Tenkajin happened and she looks way too much like that goddamnit

that first outfit at the very least is staying though I'm really proud of that one