A Butterknife Mountie Enters Japan
darthcourt10
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Yellowhammer
A Butterknife Mountie Enters The Land Of The Rising Sun
Habomai Village, Nemuro Peninsula, Hokkaido
Wei Ying gave a weary smile as she saw the breakers of the Pacific's waves crashing against the coast of Hokkaido. The last 24 hours had been quite taxing for her as she flew across Alaska, then mile upon mile upon mile of seawater, guided only by her magical compass homing in on her next navigation point.
Never again! she promised herself as she shifted to try to find a less agonizing position in the saddle.
"RRWWWFF!" Her owlbear grunted as a pair of black specks approached from the land to the west.
"Me too Whitehead, me too." she said as she focused on the flyers and with her legs and reins instructed Whitehead to stop flying and instead soar slowly.
A whispered vision enhancing spell caused her to zoom in on the flyers. A cross between crows and humans, the long beak-like noses, reddish faces, and feathered wings made their identity immediately clear.
Tengu.
Ying felt her lips twist in a scowl before she controlled herself. She shouldn't let her wartime experiences with the Japanese get to her. One thing that her life as a Mounted Magical Policewoman had taught her is that you did not have to like someone to be polite to them and work with them.
She really did not like Japan and the Japanese.
Not after seeing what they did to the Canadian prisoners taken when Hong Kong fell and to the native Chinese while working undercover for four long years. Her bad luck that she had been assigned to accompany the Canadian defenders of the Crown City as an interpreter and liaison to the local magical community shortly before the War.
After their brave but hopeless fight, she had used her native shape-shifting and illusion powers and native fluency in Cantonese to blend into the teeming masses of Chinese civilians. Once there, she established herself as an agent who tracked ship movements in and out of the harbor and relayed what intelligence that she could dig up.
Spoiler: Lady Kitsune
What she had been able to report through her hidden crystal ball back to her department was bad enough. The Imperial Japanese Army's abuses of POWs, the occupation troops' rapes of Chinese women, the kempetai rounding up Chinese to use for bayonet and saber practice to blood their trainees were far, far worse, and seeing those had made her swear that the guilty would taste her righteous vengeance behind her controlled impassive face.
All of those had made her blood boil as she saw red. She knew that she had a temper that she kept under tight control and channeled into her work. Normally.
Worst of all, her heritage from her mother had a problematic at best side that she had to control at all times. While she was willing to concede that very few creatures and spirits were purely evil - save the wendigo! - she admitted that there were certain proclivities passed down in the blood that one would find among both spirits and mortals like herself who had the blood of a spirit in her veins. One would never find an ox spirit's child as scrawny, weak, and a carnivore, for instance.
Nüwa had dispached a huli jing fox spirit once as an agent of divine vengeance upon a wicked and corrupt ruler, after all. Su Dájǐ, the most infamous of all her mother's kin, had cast a long, dark, and bloodstained shadow across three thousand years of Chinese history and folklore for those actions that she orchestrated as she corrupted and tore down the last Emperor of the Shang Dynasty in lust, cruelty, and debauchery to show that the Mandate of Heaven had passed from the unrighteous. That kind of action, rightly or wrongly, was imbued with consequences for those huli jing who came after Dájǐ such as her Amā and her.
And a police officer who had spent decades tracking and punishing criminals who preyed upon the innocent and helpless was uniquely suited to act to prey upon the unrighteous among the occupying forces and their lapdogs. Worse for all concerned, this officer knew First Nation spellcraft that the Japanese did not know of, much less how to counter, such as a spell used by wendigo to isolate their prey from calling for aid. As well, her huli jing heritage gave her the ability to shift her face and body at will and spin illusions to turn a peasant's hovel into a royal palace, or make a shape-shifted killer wearing a soldier's face appear to have a spotless uniform when she walked out of a crime scene to vanish. Her skills with blade, wand, and Five Ancestors Style of martial arts made her a deadly foe in almost any confrontation.
Being able to speak fluent or accented as she preferred Cantonese, Mandarin, and English like the native that she was along with rapidly learning to speak Japanese like a native made her near-impossible to track since she could be anyone in the city...or the police. Finally, changing her modus operandi and target list regularly made it difficult for the detectives and onomouji pursuing her to determine what her goal was past 'kill Eastern Barbarians and their lackeys'.
Knowing how criminals got caught or trapped mundanely and magically had helped her save her tails more than a few times as the kempetai, Hong Kong Police, and Kamo's men desperately tried to corner and catch the serial killer preying upon them that they had known as 'Lady Kitsune'. They had managed to death-read that a fox spirit was preying on them, but no more. Their attempts to divine the location of that fox or ward against her had borne no fruit since she was in fact the spirit of her dao instead; a tsukumogami rather than a kitsune.
Not that anyone save Amā knew about what she had done in the bars, back alleys, and brothels of the Pearl of the Orient. Even Amā did not know where all the bodies had been disposed of, much less the ghastly details of what she had been inspired to do to spread terror and fear among the Japanese occupiers.
When Hong Kong was liberated in 1945, she was finally able to return home and tearfully confess the blood on her hands to her mother before resuming her duties with the RCMMP. Ironically, one of her first postwar duties had been to provide security for some Japanese defendants at the postwar war crimes trials, since Canada was viewed as a neutral arbiter to secure them.
Amā had only looked deep into her eyes and said, "Listen and understand, my daughter. We serve the Mandate of Heaven, and while we are called upon for divine vengeance, vengeance is not all that we are called to do. Remember what Master Kǒng taught, 'The real fault is to have faults and not amend them'. Furthermore, 'Repay kindness with kindness, and evil with justice'. You now know the fault in yourself, and what evils you are capable of when unrighteousness rules."
With that memory, she shook her head slightly to focus. Woolgathering was all well and good for someone of her age, but she had a quarry to track down and step one would be to contact local magical law enforcement after making a safe landing.
She called out, using a minor spell to increase her voice as the Tengu air patrol reached hailing distance. "Royal Canadian Magical Mounted Police Chief Superintendent Wei Ying. I'm enroute to assist the Magical Diet with an investigation. I should be expected."
The two bird-men looked at each other, then the one in the lead blinked. "We haven't gotten word, of any scheduled air traffic, especially not something like THAT beast. We are going to have to demand that you land for confirmation."
His companion punctuated the statement by clearly boggling at the tired owlbear. "What in the name of the kami is THAT?"
Ying laughed tiredly. "Whitehead is a Yukon Owlbear. According to the Dené, Owl Woman wished to conceive a child to spite her husband Raven and wrapped herself in the hide of a she-bear to lay with Great Bear. When Raven found out, he used his magic to turn their sons and daughters into the Owlbears to punish his unfaithful wife."
She finished the story with a shrug and a smug smirk. "When us pale-faces ventured to the far north in Canada, we discovered and domesticated them, although they are like cats, I'm not sure who domesticated who."
The owlbear gave a growling hoot.
"Hush, you. When we land, I'll arrange you to eat enough fish or meat until you can't eat any more. I don't suppose that your community has any salmon or seals that you caught? They love salmon, and seals, really almost any fish. I personally can't stand fish and the less said about seal meat the better."
A Butterknife Mountie Enters The Land Of The Rising Sun
Habomai Village, Nemuro Peninsula, Hokkaido
Wei Ying gave a weary smile as she saw the breakers of the Pacific's waves crashing against the coast of Hokkaido. The last 24 hours had been quite taxing for her as she flew across Alaska, then mile upon mile upon mile of seawater, guided only by her magical compass homing in on her next navigation point.
Never again! she promised herself as she shifted to try to find a less agonizing position in the saddle.
"RRWWWFF!" Her owlbear grunted as a pair of black specks approached from the land to the west.
"Me too Whitehead, me too." she said as she focused on the flyers and with her legs and reins instructed Whitehead to stop flying and instead soar slowly.
A whispered vision enhancing spell caused her to zoom in on the flyers. A cross between crows and humans, the long beak-like noses, reddish faces, and feathered wings made their identity immediately clear.
Tengu.
Ying felt her lips twist in a scowl before she controlled herself. She shouldn't let her wartime experiences with the Japanese get to her. One thing that her life as a Mounted Magical Policewoman had taught her is that you did not have to like someone to be polite to them and work with them.
She really did not like Japan and the Japanese.
Not after seeing what they did to the Canadian prisoners taken when Hong Kong fell and to the native Chinese while working undercover for four long years. Her bad luck that she had been assigned to accompany the Canadian defenders of the Crown City as an interpreter and liaison to the local magical community shortly before the War.
After their brave but hopeless fight, she had used her native shape-shifting and illusion powers and native fluency in Cantonese to blend into the teeming masses of Chinese civilians. Once there, she established herself as an agent who tracked ship movements in and out of the harbor and relayed what intelligence that she could dig up.
Spoiler: Lady Kitsune
What she had been able to report through her hidden crystal ball back to her department was bad enough. The Imperial Japanese Army's abuses of POWs, the occupation troops' rapes of Chinese women, the kempetai rounding up Chinese to use for bayonet and saber practice to blood their trainees were far, far worse, and seeing those had made her swear that the guilty would taste her righteous vengeance behind her controlled impassive face.
All of those had made her blood boil as she saw red. She knew that she had a temper that she kept under tight control and channeled into her work. Normally.
Worst of all, her heritage from her mother had a problematic at best side that she had to control at all times. While she was willing to concede that very few creatures and spirits were purely evil - save the wendigo! - she admitted that there were certain proclivities passed down in the blood that one would find among both spirits and mortals like herself who had the blood of a spirit in her veins. One would never find an ox spirit's child as scrawny, weak, and a carnivore, for instance.
Nüwa had dispached a huli jing fox spirit once as an agent of divine vengeance upon a wicked and corrupt ruler, after all. Su Dájǐ, the most infamous of all her mother's kin, had cast a long, dark, and bloodstained shadow across three thousand years of Chinese history and folklore for those actions that she orchestrated as she corrupted and tore down the last Emperor of the Shang Dynasty in lust, cruelty, and debauchery to show that the Mandate of Heaven had passed from the unrighteous. That kind of action, rightly or wrongly, was imbued with consequences for those huli jing who came after Dájǐ such as her Amā and her.
And a police officer who had spent decades tracking and punishing criminals who preyed upon the innocent and helpless was uniquely suited to act to prey upon the unrighteous among the occupying forces and their lapdogs. Worse for all concerned, this officer knew First Nation spellcraft that the Japanese did not know of, much less how to counter, such as a spell used by wendigo to isolate their prey from calling for aid. As well, her huli jing heritage gave her the ability to shift her face and body at will and spin illusions to turn a peasant's hovel into a royal palace, or make a shape-shifted killer wearing a soldier's face appear to have a spotless uniform when she walked out of a crime scene to vanish. Her skills with blade, wand, and Five Ancestors Style of martial arts made her a deadly foe in almost any confrontation.
Being able to speak fluent or accented as she preferred Cantonese, Mandarin, and English like the native that she was along with rapidly learning to speak Japanese like a native made her near-impossible to track since she could be anyone in the city...or the police. Finally, changing her modus operandi and target list regularly made it difficult for the detectives and onomouji pursuing her to determine what her goal was past 'kill Eastern Barbarians and their lackeys'.
Knowing how criminals got caught or trapped mundanely and magically had helped her save her tails more than a few times as the kempetai, Hong Kong Police, and Kamo's men desperately tried to corner and catch the serial killer preying upon them that they had known as 'Lady Kitsune'. They had managed to death-read that a fox spirit was preying on them, but no more. Their attempts to divine the location of that fox or ward against her had borne no fruit since she was in fact the spirit of her dao instead; a tsukumogami rather than a kitsune.
Not that anyone save Amā knew about what she had done in the bars, back alleys, and brothels of the Pearl of the Orient. Even Amā did not know where all the bodies had been disposed of, much less the ghastly details of what she had been inspired to do to spread terror and fear among the Japanese occupiers.
When Hong Kong was liberated in 1945, she was finally able to return home and tearfully confess the blood on her hands to her mother before resuming her duties with the RCMMP. Ironically, one of her first postwar duties had been to provide security for some Japanese defendants at the postwar war crimes trials, since Canada was viewed as a neutral arbiter to secure them.
Amā had only looked deep into her eyes and said, "Listen and understand, my daughter. We serve the Mandate of Heaven, and while we are called upon for divine vengeance, vengeance is not all that we are called to do. Remember what Master Kǒng taught, 'The real fault is to have faults and not amend them'. Furthermore, 'Repay kindness with kindness, and evil with justice'. You now know the fault in yourself, and what evils you are capable of when unrighteousness rules."
With that memory, she shook her head slightly to focus. Woolgathering was all well and good for someone of her age, but she had a quarry to track down and step one would be to contact local magical law enforcement after making a safe landing.
She called out, using a minor spell to increase her voice as the Tengu air patrol reached hailing distance. "Royal Canadian Magical Mounted Police Chief Superintendent Wei Ying. I'm enroute to assist the Magical Diet with an investigation. I should be expected."
The two bird-men looked at each other, then the one in the lead blinked. "We haven't gotten word, of any scheduled air traffic, especially not something like THAT beast. We are going to have to demand that you land for confirmation."
His companion punctuated the statement by clearly boggling at the tired owlbear. "What in the name of the kami is THAT?"
Ying laughed tiredly. "Whitehead is a Yukon Owlbear. According to the Dené, Owl Woman wished to conceive a child to spite her husband Raven and wrapped herself in the hide of a she-bear to lay with Great Bear. When Raven found out, he used his magic to turn their sons and daughters into the Owlbears to punish his unfaithful wife."
She finished the story with a shrug and a smug smirk. "When us pale-faces ventured to the far north in Canada, we discovered and domesticated them, although they are like cats, I'm not sure who domesticated who."
The owlbear gave a growling hoot.
"Hush, you. When we land, I'll arrange you to eat enough fish or meat until you can't eat any more. I don't suppose that your community has any salmon or seals that you caught? They love salmon, and seals, really almost any fish. I personally can't stand fish and the less said about seal meat the better."
