Gensokyo Tournament: Intro p3

"Nngh...  It's so noisy..."  The little fairy yawned and rubbed her eyes.  "Who makes so much commotion in the middle of the day?"

"Hey, hey, wake up!"  Another fairy appeared seemingly out of nowhere and tackled the first one to the ground.  "It's noon o' clock already, you sleepyhead!"

A third fairy put a hand on her shoulder.  "Sunny Milk, calm down.  Only you are this energetic at this time of day."

"Sorry, Star..."  Sunny Milk looked down bashfully at her feet.  "I'm just excited is all."

"Sunny Milk, Star Sapphire..." mumbled the sleepy fairy sleepily.  "What is it?  It's the worst time of day for me."

"Yeah, I know," Star Sapphire told her.  "Sorry, Luna Child.  It's just, there's an incident outside that one miko's shrine and Sunny here thinks it's worth checking out."

"An incident?"  Luna Child stood up slowly.  "What sort of incident?"

Sunny Milk grinned and jumped into the air, her wings fluttering to keep her afloat.  "A really big one!  Everyone's over there and there's a big list with names on it and all sorts of stuff!  I think it's gonna be a fight or something!  C'mon, let's go see!"

"We weren't going to leave without you," Star Sapphire said with a smile.  "Shall we go?"

Luna Child nodded.  "Sounds interesting," she mused.  "Let's check it out."

~*~

The first thing the fairies saw upon leaving the forest was the crowd.  "Huh," Luna Child muttered, "Curious."

"It gets curiouser!" Sunny Milk exclaimed, leaning down and flying toward a table set up haphazardly behind the shrine.  "Look at that!"  She pointed to a scroll spread across the table, with symbols painted on it in calligraphy ink.

Luna Child blinked.  "A scroll?  What is that for?"  She flew closer to get a better look.  "It looks like it's full of names."

"It is," Star Sapphire confirmed, landing on the ground next to the table.  "See?  It's all the people here."

And indeed it was.  The scroll looked something like a contestant list of some sort, indicating that maybe Sunny Milk had been right about the fight after all.  "And it's about to have some more.  Did you bring it, Star?" Sunny Milk asked her friend.  She nodded, and from a pocket in her skirt she pulled a black felt-tipped marker.

"It's kind of like a paintbrush," Sunny Milk explained, "Only it's in a stick.  I found it at Korindou."

"Did the guy there tell you how it worked?"

"Rinnosuke?  Are you kidding?"  Sunny Milk laughed and uncapped the marker.  "I wasn't around long enough for him to catch me!  He doesn't know I have this."  Before anyone could say anything else, she found a blank space on the scroll and scrawled her name across it in marker.  "Next?"

Luna Child hesitated.  "Hang on, we're signing up?  We just got here, it's-"

"It's all right."  Star Sapphire took the pen from the cheery fairy and wrote her name next to her friend's.  "Besides, doesn't it sound like fun?"  She laughed.  "I bet that we could win against anyone on here."  She handed the marker to Luna Child, who took it hesitantly.  "Well, all right..."

~*~

Hieda no Akyu ducked back out of the crowd, headed to the back of the shrine.  She took the list she'd written up in her arms and went to hang it outside the shrine, failing to notice the extra names on the parchment or the three mischievous little fairies that had hidden themselves among the rest of the contestants.