RP Shinjuku Academy Paranormal Investigation Club

An unfelt breeze passed its way through crooked branches as Eiji spoke to the tree, though maybe it was just a trick of the light but it didn’t seem like the branches that Sayane stood upon had joined the others in their rustling. To Akina’s eye, the cherry blossom tree didn’t seem discontent with having someone climbing up on it, but she also didn’t know how to speak to a tree. Still in deference to Eiji, Akina didn’t join Sayane in attempting to climb her way up the tree, instead she placed her hands together to thank the tree for the shade.

“If there is one, it might have gotten moved due to the construction.” Akina offered, raising her head. That would leave the question of where it was moved to, which hopefully didn’t have an answer to the effect of a forgotten storage room in the old school building. It was dusty there. Wiggling her nose against fake dust Akina stepped away from the tree. “See anything that looks shrine-like Sayane?” She asked, stepping around the pile of tarp covered materials to see what was behind it.

—~~—~~—~~—

Kyo, driven on by more courage than Chiasa possessed, strode forward to the end stall and as Chiasa watched, a little awed, as Kyo taunted whatever might be inside.

Water gurgled through the shower head and ran down the length of the piping as the handle below was turned just enough to start the tap but not quite enough for there to be water pressure for the shower to run in earnest. A metal vent sat on the bottom of the shower, presumably fallen from the gaping hole in the wall above.

“Is anything there?” Chiasa asked, she herself was a step or two into the shower room now, though she couldn’t remember when she had stepped inside.
 
Eiji's cry of warning was lost in the breeze as Sayane began hoisting herself into the branches. She expected some of them to bow under her, maybe become a bit shaky in the breeze, but it seemed that whichever ones she picked were strong and steady. She paused for a moment, taking in the sight of the school around her, enjoying the breeze in her hair and the sun in her face.

Sayane glanced down at the other two girls, only slightly disappointed that neither had followed her. She had expected Akina not to, simply because of the kimono, but she had hoped Eiji would be at least a little bit less of a stick in the mud. Ah well, maybe next time. In the meantime, she turned her gaze to the schoolyard, looking for anything that might resemble a shrine. There were a few piles of construction equipment, as well as some materials strewn about, but nothing that screamed "shrine".

"Uh, I'm not sure." she shouted back down. "What would a tree shrine look like?"
 
Well, eventually, she'd have to check. Begrudgingly, to get Kyo out of there and to get them back on track and for no other reason, Miiko approached the darkened shower, stepping in front of Chiasa to keep her separated from whatever was hiding in the dark. She poked her head around the corner to find...

Nothing. Well, nothing of note. Kyo was there, obviously, but beyond that, there wasn't much beyond a dripping pipe and a crashed grate. A very shaky, cautious sigh escaped her lips, as she let herself relax a small bit. "Ohh- okay. Okay. There's nothing here. Can we go, now? Surely the others will be getting nervous by now, right?"
 
"Nothin'," Kyo said proudly to Chiasa. She grinned as Miiko approached - then froze, eyes going wide.

"Oh. Oh no! Oh no!" Holding her hand over her chest, she took a step backwards, pointing behind Miiko with a shaking hand. "It's - it's - a shower! I bet there were naked people in this! Maybe we'll have to get naked too!"

The look of fear was immediately replaced with a roaring shriek of laughter.

"Then we'll be maybe skeletons! Just gotta take the skin off too! Spoo-oo-ky! Pah! Not gonna scare Kyo with some dumb ghost stories. Too knightly brave for that."
 
"I mean, it could look like anything," Eiji answered, realizing that this was not really much of an answer at all. "But, um... you'd know a big shrine if you saw one, so I guess we're either looking for one that had been torn down - in which case I think we'd have a lot angrier tree spirit on our hands - or we're looking for something small, easy to overlook. It could just be something as simple as a flat rock." Some of the shrines were like that - not what people thought of as proper shrines, not really, but Eiji wondered sometimes if the tree spirits had different ideas about what made a proper shrine than people did. Maybe a flat rock was enough for them. Maybe anything was fine, as long as it marked their presence. Maybe they just wanted someone to care that they were there.

Maybe she was projecting a little bit. Eiji still didn't really like the city. She circled the tree, her eyes down on the ground, gently kicking aside bits of leaf litter and nudging aside the grass, just in case something had gotten buried.

"We could also set one up, I suppose. It might work just as well to build a new one. That way we could still make an offering, and maybe the tree spirit could point us towards the old shrine if they wanted to. Or if they didn't, that would be okay as well."
 
Branches shifted in the still air, the higher ones that Sayane had not yet reached. Wood creaked and croaked, maybe squeaked too, though Akina didn’t know how to speak tree, if it was a spirit trying to communicate. Though, it did cause Akina to look up from the collection of building materials to look back at the tree. Oh, was she just being a little silly? She couldn’t help but feel that she was. The leaves flickered as they caught the light in their motion, the branches moved in gentle swaying waves. It wasn’t trying to speak, was it?

Akina turned to face the direction the shifting movement seemed to indicate, and there was the old boiler room. Its door sat slightly ajar, and its windows were high and listless. “Is it in there?” Akina asked. The tree creaked in response before it stilled, which seemed like it could be a yes? Akina raised her eyebrows at Eiji, as she was the tree spirit expert.

—~~—~~—~~—

“Uh? H-hey don’t scare me like that!” Chiasa said, placing a hand over her heart. She peaked past Kyo, which offered her a terrifying view of an empty shower with a vent grate laying on the ground. Was it weird she felt a little disappointed about that? It wasn’t like she wanted to see a ghost or something but… the mood was right for it or something? Chiasa let out a sigh.

“Well brave knight, I guess we should head back to your club room, right?” Chiasa looked to Miiko for support in the whole leaving thing before Kyo could find something new. Or maybe actually find something that wanted to turn them into skeletons. She walked back to the locker room, but paused at the threshold. She did a double take, and then a third one just to be sure she hadn’t just missed it the first two times. Her brow scrunched and she looked back over her shoulder to Miiko.

“You set up the camera, right?” Chiasa asked, before she pointed to an empty space where the camera had just been.
 
"Oh? Thank you for understanding."

Oh. Except now everyone else was going to think Eiji was weird. She'd almost gone a day without ruining it. Well... no, she really hadn't, but at least she'd managed to hide her weirdness for a little while. And now she was talking to trees and that was just... throwing it right out there, wasn't it?

And it was too late. And Eiji supposed if she was going to make someone think she was weird, it was probably better that it was some students and not a tree spirit. Not that she didn't want the students to like her, but, well, tree spirits tended to be a little more emphatic about not liking things. Or maybe they weren't. Students could be mean.

She didn't understand this tree quite as well as she did Kaede-hime back home, but she could at least get the sense of it. It wasn't upset about being climbed, which was good, and it was trying to give them some instruction, which was also good, because it meant it wasn't actively hostile - at least, not towards them.

"It might be," she answered Akina's question, remembering that other people existed and, presumably, didn't speak tree. Or maybe they did and were just better at hiding it than Eiji was. "Let's go find out. Sayane, you can come with us if you want, or I don't think it minds having you up there. I think it's been lonely. Sorry. I'm not weird, I promise."

No, she was totally weird. "Anyway... I don't think this is the spirit we're looking for. It's not vengeful. But it could help us, and we should help it anyway, so let's see if we can find something in there and then decide what to do next."
 
Kyo seemed to be... difficult. Shockingly, Miiko was relatively unphased, now that she'd acclimated to the situation they'd found themselves in. Sure, her heart was still thumping, and if she heard another loud noise, it would likely scare her to death, butin this moment, she felt, at least somewhat, comfortable. She'd managed to set up the very expensive camera, and also managed to talk to the other two here some. Overall, a pretty successful day, so far.

Then, Chiasa asked a very odd question. "Uh, I'm fairly sure I did. Why?" Dumb question, since once she turned, she found it gone. Her own brow furrowed, mimicking Chiasa's expression, and she turned back to the shadowy shower. She was positive she'd set it up, and since it was just them here, that meant...

"Kyo, did you take the camera? That's not funny, it's expensive and not even ours. Give it back." The older sister voice came out, and she hoped it would prove effective.
 
"Kyo did not! Kyo replied sharply, almost indignantly. She was a lot of things, but a thief wasn't - well - a camera thief, in this particular case, wasn't one of them. She grinned, her hands on her hips.

"Maybe you dropped it." But it wasn't on the floor. "...Somewhere not here."

Or maybe -

She paused, glancing up. Her nostrils flared. A moment of confusion, then concern, then plain disgust.

"Or maybe somethin' pulled it up there and died."

She pointed up at the vent.
 
“I’m sure it’ll feel less lonely if we can find its shrine box” Akina said cheerfully as she led the way. There was likely still going to be work around the tree for some time yet, but any wait would be easier with a box filled with offerings, wouldn’t it? She could always see about sneaking back in sometime to put in something new, though she probably shouldn’t tell Eiji about that. Akina took a look back over her shoulder to see if Sayane had chosen to remain up the tree or not before stopping at the door.

Close up, Akina felt very certain that the pump house was about as old as the tree. The concrete walls were crumbling in patches, yellowing moss gathered in the thin cracks which reached towards the small window set high into the wall and smudged by time. The door was ajar only a crack, though Akina couldn’t see that there was anything beyond in the thin light. Without hesitation Akina reached out and placed her hand on the door, the paint was rough and chipped, and gave it a push. The door swung inward with a croak, and the dingy light of the windows cast the room in a thin glow. A pair of large tanks sat in the middle of the room, and in the far corner that wasn’t blocked by the tanks Akina could see a stack of wood. Or was it old newspaper?

“Sorta spooky.” Akina said with a smile as she looked back over her shoulder, before she stepped inside. A loose panel of concrete shifted underfoot and Akina placed a hand on the doorframe to steady herself. “Woah.” She said over the sound of loose panels rattling.


—~~—~~—~~—

“Ah, well, Kyo was ahead of us the whole time, so I don’t know how she would have hidden it.” Chiasa added from her perch by the door. It seemed mean to suspect Kyo so immediately, but wasn’t she the one who seemed most likely to pull her hat sort of prank? Chiasa crept her way back into the locker room, her attention turned to the vent that Kyo had pointed out. “Something died? I don’t smell anything.” She gave the air an exploratory sniff, which granted her mostly the smell of chlorine before she looked at Miiko, raising her eyebrows questioningly.

And, maybe it was that same curiosity that pulled her after Kyo in the shower room but Chiasa stepped over to the vent. It… looked like a vent really. Which wasn’t super shocking but… wait. Did the wall looked scratched?

“Can I get a boost up?” Chiasa asked, looking back at the two other girls.
 
"Oh, cool," Eiji breathed, peering in over Akina's shoulder. This was before she remembered that she was supposed to be setting a good example, and immediately felt bad. Not that the weird building wasn't cool, just that... well, she hadn't really meant to say that out loud.

She was really glad that Akina didn't ask if they should go inside, because then she would have had to answer. When Akina went inside anyway, Eiji could just follow her and pretend it wasn't exactly what she'd be doing if she were on her own.

"My little brother would love this place." She missed him. He'd always been her exploring buddy - sure, he was a lot younger, but they'd had a tacit unspoken agreement that Eiji would go everywhere with him so that he wasn't "on his own" and he would take the blame for "rushing ahead" any time they got into something that their parents didn't like.

And Kaede-hime had always smoothed it over, as long as it was back home. Eiji supposed it was probably hard to explore when you were a tree spirit, but if other people did it and brought back stories, there was something vicarious about it. Or maybe she was just reading too much into it.

Overhead, something rattled. "What do you think-?" But of course, Akina wouldn't know any better than she did. "Did you bring a flashlight?" Maybe it was squirrels. She liked squirrels.
 
Sayane laughed as Eiji explained what the tree was saying, at least in her mind. Of course she was weird. They were in a ghost hunting club for crying out loud, they were all weird! She patted the branches fondly, gazing up towards the willowy ones that bent and swayed in the breeze.

“Don’t worry, I won’t be gone for long.” She said quietly, unsure if that was how one properly spoke tree. “I’ll be sure to climb you a lot more.”

Unfortunately for the tree, everyone looked to be heading towards a creepy old building, which was Sayane’s specialty! She quickly clambered down the trunk, kneeling over to snatch a couple things from her backpack before racing to meet the others.

“Woah, cool.” She took in the sights of the pump house, flicking on her flashlight and scanning the modly, crumbly interior. In her other hand was a thing of Pocky, from which she drew a single piece and held it in her mouth like a cigarillo. She pushed past the others and stepped onto the loose concrete, her weight shifting to keep her balance.

“Seems fine to me!” She said with a smile
 
“Might make for a nice lair, if you cleaned it up some.” Akina looked up at the ceiling, which seemed to contain primarily gloom, cobwebs and maybe scuttling, two of which seemed to go into hiding as soon as the light passed over them. Akina took a few steps after Sayane, pausing a moment to offer Eiji a hand to help her over the unstable part of the floor. Under the sweep of light the tanks looked well worn, patchy where paint had peeled away and then was dabbed over with whatever color was on hand.

Akina slid a hand into her kimono’s belt, pulling out a cellphone and flipping it open. A few quick taps and the small light on the front flashed to life, though it didn’t offer much more illumination than Sayane’s, still, she stood up on her tiptoes as she held her phone up to the ceiling. There was a different sort of creak, like the settling of weight.

“Does that tile look cleaner to you? Akina asked, motioning her phone at a space behind the tanks that the spiders seemed to have avoided. She looked down to the two girls, a flash of a grin on her lips. “Who wants a boost up?”
 
"A lair?" Eiji repeated, in protest. Lairs were for bad guys. They were... oh, no. They were the bad guys. They were sneaking around and breaking the rules and going in places where they weren't supposed to be, and now they were going to have a lair and - and-

Akina held her hand out to help Eiji across the floor, and for a moment just holding on and focusing on her footing helped quite a lot with derailing that particular train of thought. Eiji hoped it didn't come back, because she didn't feel mentally prepared to be a bad guy.

She followed the illumination provided by Akina's flashlight, watching it scatter through the spiderwebs and wondering if she could catch enough of a glimpse of them to tell what kinds they were. Most spiders were fine and just wanted to be left alone, but some of them could get pretty aggressive, especially if you were in their space.

Somehow it helped to think of this as the spiders' place and not, like, someone else's, some other human who would have told them not to be there.

The question about going up was... well, obviously Sayane was going to want to go up, right? And Eiji couldn't just let her do that in case, um, in case it were unstable. Because she had to be sensible. And, um... go up there.

"I'll go first." Wait, she would? "Um. In case there are squirrels." This justification seemed a little weak, somehow. "And then once Sayane and I are up, we can pull you up?" They weren't leaving one person behind, after all, because... well, friends stuck together. Were they friends?

...It was probably better to be friends than bad guys, right?
 
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