Day 1 : Eastern Story
That prompt reminded me of the name "Story of Eastern Wonderland", the first game with Marisa in. After that, she accompanied Reimu across a lot of incidents until today and never left her side as a playable character. So yeah, that's Touhou, their story, the eastern story!
I may not complete every single day of the Gensokyo Festival, but it sure is a good practice to try and draw once a day
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this is incidentally what most Touhou but Fucked Up!! works get wrong. touhou IS fucked up, naturally, but not in the way you think. living in gensokyo isn't a constant battle, your neighbors aren't having to always ward their houses in fear of being violently dragged away in the night. the old gensokyo was like that, for certain, but it is not now. you might hear about one person disappearing a month. you're very, very rarely going to find a body.
you know that the youkai don't come to the human village. you have no idea why not- the shrine maiden isn't very good at getting rid of them (nor is her friend, nor is the other one on the mountain). you can't just ask them, that would be inconceivable. but there are whispers that the village's safety was created by the youkai even youkai know nothing about. what could she possibly want with it? what are her plans for the humans?
there's a reporter girl handing out newspapers. the newspapers are written in an odd script. you can understand it, but it's unfamiliar nonetheless. the newsgirl's got a normal haircut and wears usual, if fashionable, clothing, but she's got bright red eyes. it could just be the magic in the air- there's that kid from the motoori family with the bright orange ones, for example- but it makes you worry. the articles all have a suspiciously pro-youkai bent, except for the ones about tanuki.
you and your neighbors go down to the pub. you've heard it's a good one, but you can't remember going there, even though your wife tells you you went by a week ago. there's a loudmouthed little girl with a big hat back in the kitchen drinking. that can't be healthy for her, can it? if she's human. if not, does the bartender know?
your neighbors start chatting. one of them talks about leaving gensokyo, waves a newspaper about the outside world around. you nod hesitantly. you've considered doing that yourself, but your wife doesn't want to go; the books she's been borrowing have been talking about great fire and poisonous dust in a land whose name you can't pronounce. it sounds western. she says that it might be nearby, past the barrier. you can't really know, since weather is the only thing that crosses it naturally. you've dismissed her concerns, but she keeps talking about earthquakes and tidal waves. you'd like to at least take a peek, though, yourself.
your other neighbor loudly shoots down the idea. he's been to the barrier himself, he says. or so he thinks. he walked past the hakurei shrine one day, during a festival, and beyond the pond in the back with that big old turtle. there was a path leading into the woods, and he started walking down it. he walked for a long time, but he noticed eventually that the scenery wasn't changing, that the trees all looked the same. he turned around and he was back at the pond again.
a third neighbor pipes up, quietly. he says that he's actually met an outsider before. not the teenager who flies, but a normal one. he's a metalworker, you see, so he's often on the lookout for new sources of scrap. he takes his guard dog with him along the river sometimes, past the miasma-filled forest and to the hill that's covered with spider lilies in the spring. he finds metal there, and glass. there's a third material that a lot of the things he finds are made of, moldable like metal, but when he tries to put it in a crucible it burns away, so he's stopped collecting it. he always feels like he's being watched, but he never sees any youkai.
the outsider he met had told him he didn't have any "reception", so the map he had didn't work. the outsider had shown your neighbor a small rectangle of glass and metal, illuminated in the center, with a blank grid shown on it. there were some words at the top and bottom of the grid, but they didn't seem to be helping him. the outsider had asked your neighbor for a map, but your neighbor had said- truthfully- that no one knows their way around gensokyo, and had offered to guide him back to the village. the outsider had hemmed and hawed for a bit, and asked what the village was like; when he heard, he refused, and said he'd find his own way back. your neighbor had entreated him and warned him about youkai in the area, but he'd laughed it off, and the neighbor had gone on, collecting metal, after they went their separate ways.
when the neighbor was on his way back to the village, he saw some torn-up grass and the small rectangle lying on the ground, but no blood or any other signs of a struggle. his dog had growled at the rectangle, but he had picked it up and brought it home. he pulls it out of his haori. the glass is cracked, and it won't light up, he says. you stare at it for a bit, then ask how the outsider got there, anyway. the first neighbor chimes in again, telling you that the area over there is full of outside objects- the barrier must be thin there. that's where he plans to make his way out.
the second neighbor snorts incredulously. the bartender pours you another drink. she has an adorable smile, but she seems so nervous, and you feel a little bad for her. it would be lovely if girls like her didn't have to live in fear of what lives outside the village walls.
you wake up the next day with no memory of the night before. you wrap an ofuda your wife got from the moriya shrine to your fishing rod and head out to work. that night, your wife tells you that one of your neighbors didn't come back from work. you hope someone finds him soon.
THAT is how Touhou is Touhou but Fucked Up.
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Prompt List for 2023
It looks like we’re going to have a month-long event in March as usual, so here for your enjoyment is this year’s prompt list! I carefully chose all these prompts for variety, open-endedness and creative potential, by getting Cirno to recite random pages from a dictionary. We hope you like them.
If you haven’t heard of the Gensokyo Festival, we run a yearly event about sharing Touhou fan works during a month of daily prompts. Everybody is welcome, even if it’s just for one prompt, and having fun is what matters most. As Cirno would say after reading an entire dictionary out loud, why not come for a tarriance and undertake our conjuncture?
Day 1 | March 1: Eastern Story
Day 2 | March 2: Stone Walls and Terracotta Teapots
Day 3 | March 3: This Time, With Feeling
Day 4 | March 4: Flower Power
Day 5 | March 5: Unanswered Questions
Day 6 | March 6: I Want One
Day 7 | March 7: Why?
Day 8 | March 8: Banding Together
Day 9 | March 9: Peaceful Days
Day 10 | March 10: Turning Over a New Leaf
Day 11 | March 11: Bogged Down
Day 12 | March 12: Imagination
Day 13 | March 13: Acting Your Age
Day 14 | March 14: I Did It My Way
Day 15 | March 15: Partnership
Day 16 | March 16: Take a Chance
Day 17 | March 17: Bon Voyage
Day 18 | March 18: Rice Field
Day 19 | March 19: Defeat
Day 20 | March 20: Are You There?
Day 21 | March 21: Reminds Me of a Song
Day 22 | March 22: Sunrise, Sunset
Day 23 | March 23: Protection
Day 24 | March 24: Dressed for the Occasion
Day 25 | March 25: Movers and Shakers
Day 26 | March 26: In a Pinch
Day 27 | March 27: Dungeons and Daidarabotchi
Day 28 | March 28: Union
Day 29 | March 29: Taking It to the Next Level
Day 30 | March 30: Her Finest Hour
Day 31 | March 31: Closing Time
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