Chapter Text
The world was bathed in a fuschia tone as the mysterious woman stood from her axe kick, staring down the three humans before locking onto Shiratori. “ Aira! I found you, my dear! ” she cheered, to everyone’s confusion. “You know her?” Okarun asked, only for the popular girl to shout back “I should be asking you that! She must be another Familiar of that demon!” she pointed an accusing finger at Momo, who looked very offended but couldn’t do much back to her. “What the fuck are you talkin’ about, Pinky?” Turbo Granny wondered, crawling free of Okarun’s backpack to witness the chase. “Yo, Turbo G, you know what that thing is?” Ken asked as he kept running from their assailant. The maneki neko pulled out a smartphone from his bag and started tapping away at it, grumbling “Gimme a minute, I ain’t a damn yokai encyclopaedia.” “Hey, that’s Muko’s phone! She was complaining that it was missing all day!” Momo realised, “Oh, you know that tanned girl? Means I ain’t gotta find a way to give it back.”
All of a sudden, Okarun dropped all three of them, fell to the floor and was dragged away by the ankle. “ Stop getting in my way, you beastly boy! ” the yokai screeched as it tossed him into the air, lying in wait with her maw wide open for him to fall into. Momo pulled herself up and tried to catch him with her psychic hands, ending up in a tug of war between them and the ghost’s gullet with Okarun as the rope. “Gah, I can’t move them the way I want with my hands like this!” she complained. The woman then lashed out with a kick, knocking the psychic aside and swallowing the cursed boy whole. With no other obstacles in the way, the spirit picked up Aira, holding her aloft and proclaiming “ Don’t worry, darling, Mommy’s here! ” as she twirled around, “ I’ve been waiting for more than 10 years for you to be able to see me again, and now you can! We can be a family again, my precious daughter! ”
Meanwhile, Turbo Granny approached Momo’s prone form, “Well, I found it. Looks like this thing’s called Acrobatic Silky.” she informed her. “Cool, great…don’t suppose you could untie my hands?” the girl requested, only for the lucky cat to shrug, “Sorry, no opposable thumbs. If I had my powers back I could.” Momo pulled herself back to her feet and called out to Acrobatic Silky, “Hey! Give back Okarun, you lanky spook! There’s rules for spirits interacting with humans and this ain’t following ‘em!” Watching this, Aira whispered to herself “She’s fighting this demon, too…?” before coming to a conclusion and shouting “Ayase, though I’d normally hate to cooperate with a demon, shall we join forces to defeat this monster?” Momo still had no idea what she was talking about, but the yokai looked furious. “ Monster…? Aira, why would you call your mother a monster? I’ll have to punish you for misbehaving! ” she told her ‘‘daughter’’, the girl’s shriek being silenced as she was shoved down the spirit’s throat.
Acrobatic Silky turned to Momo. “ You did this! ” she accused her. The yokai’s hair lashed out and wrapped around Momo’s neck, hauling her up as the acrobat began to pirouette, slamming the girl into walls and choking her, all the while Silky ranted and raved “ It’s your fault my baby hates me! You corrupted her with your delinquency and trashy style! ” She stopped spinning and hung Momo close to her ear. “ But, I’ll forgive you if you call me ‘Mommy’! ” she told her, waiting patiently to hear it. “...Piss off…” Momo managed to croak out, enraging the yokai, so it swallowed her whole along with the hair around her neck.
With the children gone, Acrobatic Silky cried out “ My baby? Oh, where is my baby? ” leaving Turbo Granny to confront them. “Hey, I’m warnin’ ya now: spit out the brats you swallowed or things are gonna get messy.” “ Quiet, you old bat! I need to find my daughter! ” she dismissed her, but the senior yokai wasn’t finished. “Heh, well the thing is: I’m in a maneki neko, which means I can bestow good luck to people in my favour. You got some of your hair in your mouth when you swallowed that last one, and one of ‘em had a lighter handy.” she pointed out, “I predict in 3…2…1…” just as Turbo Granny finished counting, Acrobatic Silky burst into flames from the inside. She forcibly spat out everything inside of her, throwing the three kids to the floor.
“I’m Tired of falling on my ass today!”
“Tired of being on fire…”
Aira was clearly tired in general, having passed out.
“Tired of you all complainin’!”
Once all the combatants reoriented themselves, Momo pulled herself up, “Alright, here’s the plan: Run!” she ordered as she pushed past Okarun, spurring him to grab the unconscious Aira and get going with her. Acrobatic Silky gave chase, dancing around above them with elegant acrobatics as they weaved through the crowded building. She eventually managed to get on top of them, kicking down several containers and separating the two running teens. “Momo-chan!” Okarun called out in worry, but she just yelled back “Keep running! Don’t stop!” and he did as ordered. The narrow passageways of the area and uneven ground combined with Shiratori’s still limp body in his arms made building any kind of momentum difficult, stuck running at an almost human speed. “ Having trouble going fast down there? Struggling with the terrain? ” the yokai taunted, “ Trying to outmanoeuvre my acrobatics? As if! ” her last jeer was punctuated with a foot to the back of his head. Ken was forced to drop Aira as he was launched into the nearest wall, leaving the unconscious girl defenceless.
“ At last, my precious Aira, I have you! ” Acrobatic Silky cheered as she reached for the girl, “ I’ll keep you safe inside me. We’ll be together forever! ” However, she found her daughter just out of reach. “Heh heh, that granny perm you got when we lit you on fire made you lose control of your hair,” Momo explained, having caught up with them all, “Your acrobatics ensnare everything, right? Well, it looks like you can’t untangle yourself from everything up there!” Looking up revealed the yokai’s hair knotted up in the rafters and scaffolding, trapping her in place. “ You think this will stop me!? ” Silky roared and started thrashing. Either her hair was going to be pulled out, or the roof was coming down on all of them. Momo grabbed its legs with her spiritual hands to stop her and called out, “Okarun, now’s your chance! Blow her away!” “Right!” he agreed, but stopped himself, “...How do I do that exactly?” he questioned
“Dude, just kick her or some shit!”
“Like a football or…?”
“I dunno! Use your head!”
“Momo-chan, you’re a genius!”
The support beams above them began to creak and groan under pressure and Momo screamed “DO IT NOW!” as Ken stepped up in front and declared “Goin’ All-Out!” taking off and slamming head first into Acrobatic Silky’s torso at 100 km/h, sending her flying across the building and through the far wall and into the side of the next warehouse over.
They all basked in the sound of victory for a bit, the silence broken by Momo praising her friend, “Okarun, you got her!” he was flat on the floor, and evidently Turbo Granny wasn’t impressed, “Tch, if that’s the best you can do with my power it’s damn disapointin’!” the small doll perched on his back and shoved his face into the floor with a foot. “Lay off, Turbo Granny. Shouldn’t you be getting the ball she has?” he suggested, flailing an arm vaguely in Aira’s direction. The cat grumbled but hopped off his back and trudged over to search her. The boy pushed himself up as the not knocked out girl jogged over to him, “Can you untie my hands?” she requested. He snapped the zip tie against his knee with no issue. Turbo Granny then returned and held Ken’s ball out to him, but informed them “You might have a problem on your hands because that girl is dead.” The two of them rushed over to double check the old yokai’s claim, Okarun finding she had no pulse and Momo saw her aura had dwindled to almost nothing. “When she got swallowed by Acrobatic Silky the yokai absorbed her aura. Same would’a happened to you two without having powers. A person’s aura is like a battery for living, without it they’ll be gone in minutes.” As Turbo Granny explained this the duo had begun CPR to resuscitate Aira. It wasn’t working.
“ ...What have I done? ” they heard Acrobatic Silky whimper. Okarun was back on his feet and ready to attack again, but Sara Sara ignored him. “ There’s a way to bring her back, ” she claimed “ If you link our auras with your psychic powers, you can give mine to her. ” Momo wasn’t going to believe her just like that, though, “How do we know this isn’t just a ploy to try and get her again?” she asked. In a display of her conviction to protect Aira, the yokai ripped its jaw off. “There…now I can’t hurt Aira…even if I wanted to…” Hesitantly, Momo reached out a spiritual hand to the yokai and the other to the dying girl, clutching their auras and funneling one into the other. “Okarun, if she tries anything, crush her.” she instructed before her vision swam and she was suddenly somewhere else.
Once upon a time there was a woman. This woman was a single mother to a daughter whom she loved dearly. Life was not easy for this woman. She was in debt, and had to work many jobs just to get by. She worked wherever she could, as a janitor, a shop clerk, even selling herself as a prostitute. It wasn’t an easy life, but time spent with her daughter and seeing her smiling face made it all worth it. While the woman seemed to be average on the surface, she had impressive gymnastic abilities and she and her daughter would practise together.
One day, on the way home from a night with another man, she saw a pretty red dress in the window of a shop. It was the perfect size for her daughter, and she had the money, so she bought it. The child loved the gift and proclaimed she was “The best Mommy ever!”
This is where our story takes a tragic turn. The men the woman was in debt to arrived. They forced their way into the apartment and demanded she hand over the money she owed. When they learned that she didn’t have it, they took the next best thing: her child. The woman was beaten bloody and knocked out as her child watched. When she came to, she ran for the exit. Outside she saw her daughter forced into a van that drove off into the night. She gave chase on foot, crying, desperately begging for someone, anyone , to bring back her baby.
She tripped.
The van disappeared into the darkness.
If this was a fairy tale the common folk would rally or a knight in shining armour would appear and bring the child back.
This is no fairy tale.
The woman knew she would never see her daughter again. Instead, with nothing left to live for, she would give one last performance. She danced the dance of death, and leapt to her end.
Sometime later, a woman stood in the street. It had been a while, but she felt like something was missing. Something important. What…was she forgetting?
“Mommy?” she felt a tug on her dress and looked into the curious eyes of a pink haired five year old. “Oh…you’re not her…” the child babbled. “Aira? What are you doing?” a man called out, the girl’s father. “I thought I saw Mommy. I was wrong.” the girl explained. The man looked sad, but picked his daughter up, “I told you, Mommy’s gone away. She won’t be back for a long time, so we have to be strong for her.” he told her as they walked away. The girl nodded, but sent one last look to the woman.
This was enough to jog her memory. Or so she believed. ‘That’s right…I was Aira’s mother.’ she recalled and her thoughts were overcome with one thing: ‘I need to protect her…’
And so, a yokai was born.
Momo and Aira both gasped, the latter successfully revived, but Ken noticed something off; both of the girls were crying. “What’d you do!?” he demanded, suspecting foul play, but his retaliation was halted by Momo calling out, “Okarun, don’t!” with shuddering breaths and sniffling she insisted “I-I’m fine, we’re fine.” The two girls pulled themselves up and dried their eyes, but he kept his on Acrobatic Silky and he watched as the yokai’s right arm fell off and crumbled to dust on the ground, the rest of her beginning to follow. “...I’ve made so many mistakes… I’m a horrible mother! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” Silky wept, apologising over and over, pleading for forgiveness from her daughter. “What’s happening to her?” Ken asked Turbo Granny who explained, “With her aura inside Pinky she can’t sustain her presence on earth, she’s passing on. Normally spirits fade into the afterlife, but with so many regrets there’s no chance she’ll pass on peacefully. Only one place for her to go: The Void, total nothingness. Nobody’ll even remember her.” Momo was distraught, “What? That’s not fair!” she cried, tears welling again.
Aira stepped past them, up to the crumbling yokai. She wrapped her arms around its waist, the tender embrace of a child saying goodbye, and the girl told Acrobatic Silky the words she’d wanted to hear, “Thank you for everything. I love you, you were the best Mommy ever!” the yokai raised its remaining arm and returned the hug. Just before she passed on, Aira made one last promise “I won’t forget you, I swear. Never.” The three children watched as Acrobatic Silky disappeared, reaching Nirvana with those final words.
And somewhere in the beyond, a mother and her child reunited.