rin "orin" kaenbyou

89 years old

creature

civilian

female

kasha

cat burglar

character overview

positive traits

✔ vivacious
✔ trustworthy
✔ loyal
✔ workaholic
✔ optimistic
✔ clever

negative traits

✘ subservient
✘ blunt
✘ assertive
✘ worrywart
✘ aimless
✘ mischievous

things they like

❤️ stealing corpses
❤️ sun spots
❤️ funerals
❤️ ghost hunters
❤️ being in cat form
❤️ updos

things they dislike

💔 cold weather
💔 frivolity
💔 getting caught stealing
💔 skeptics
💔 long names
💔 baths

character description

i've been ghosting, i've been ghosting along

A scarlet eye.

You're ashamed to admit that you failed to notice it prior, lost as you were in your life of carting bodies to and fro and rubbing up on the leg of Miss Satori in search of a scratch behind your feline ears, but seeing her now, face to face makes it impossible not to have your own red eyes drawn down to it. Most people, after all, do not see via a massive, bloody eye protruding from the chest, and you know for certain that just five days ago, Utsuho most certainly fell into that majority group. You wonder to yourself, the flames of the Hell of Burning Fires licking hotter at your feet than they ever have and death clawing at the edges of your greatest friend's typically dull expression, when could this have happened? Why has this happened? And most of all: How do you go about fixing the mistakes of your bird-brained partner?

Trouble, however, rarely presents itself in its entirety in one sitting, and you learn this in only a matter of moments. Okuu is practically brimming with unfamiliar power, enough to turn a hell raven that you used to imagine you could easily stomp in a danmaku battle into a force that you tremble at just being around, and sitting around marveling at it for an eternity does not seem to be her prefer plan of action. “Why bother staying trapped down here,” she asks you, “when we now have the power to break free of the underground and live on the surface? We could overthrow them! We could rule like gods!” Memories of frighteningly powerful youkai flit through your mind, each taking their turn to blow a shiver of cold air down your neck, and you wonder if it is worth it to remind her that she is not the only mighty beast that Gensokyo has to offer. Lips barely part, however, hot air spilling into your mouth when your friend interrupts with a terrifying display of her newfound might. Caution screams through your mind just moments before the fires around her explode into something even larger, even hotter, and even your eyes, accustomed as they are to the light and to the heat must be shielded in fear of being melted into pools of useless liquid. This is too much – too much power for a single youkai, too much power for Okuu. If she truly wanted to crush the inhabitants of the surface world, you realize with a horrific shudder, now she very well could -

And if that happened, what would Miss Satori do to you? Do to her?

Panic floods through your mind faster at that thought than at the idea of the bird trying to uproot a society under the sun (although, from the balls of fire that your fellow pet is summoning, you're beginning to think that the power of the sun has been introduced to the lowest levels of the underground world), and you know that you must bring an end to this before she becomes even greater of a threat. You love Okuu, almost more than you love snatching corpses or rolling around in the heat as a twin-tailed cat, but this is not her, and you will not let her blaze down a path of self destruction. But you, yourself are powerless in the face of that, and if you tell Miss Satori now, you'd only bring about the dreaded bad ending that you fear all the faster. There has to be someone who can help; don't the Devas of the Mountain live in the Ancient City? Oh, no, but you can't make the trip there yourself, and the idea of sending a hoard of evil spirits to deliver the message for your dies as soon as it's brought to life. They'd only attempt to possess those around them, after all; they make for very poor messenger birds. Helplessly, you think back to those mighty youkai that had graced your mind just minutes earlier; what, you wonder, would it take to bring them here ? What, you wonder, would it take to get them to defeat the would-be usurper you call your friend?

Inky black ears perk up as your gazes fixes itself on the gap in the ceiling that Utsuho uses to release access heat, opened wider than ever to accommodate for her latest spike in heating power, and you realize exactly where all of that heat is headed. Surely, someone has already noticed an increase in height of the geysers these holes create above ground, and even the evil spirits you command can't carry a message, they might just be what you need to attract the attention of the mighty underground...

ghost in your home, ghost in your arms

In all honesty, you have nothing against humans. Your species is one of few that does not require the consumption of their flesh or other body parts of nourishment, and if anything, their recently departed ghosts tell some of the more entertaining stories when you're whisking their fresh bodies away to be burned in the Blazing Fires. What you do know about them, though, is that they are nowhere near as mighty as their youkai neighbors, and the fact that you flooding their hotsprings with malevolent specters has only managed to draw out the weak and the foolhardy rather than the truly mighty is... a tad frustrating. Still, you abide by a positive outlook; the miko did, after all, manage to pass through the Ancient City relatively unscathed, and had no trouble entering or getting past the earliest defenses of the Palace of the Earth Spirits. You humor them by attacking in cat form with a barrage of danmaku, a warmup for you that proves easily dodged by them. You retreat back moments later, but trail behind them, curiosity as fatal to your kind as the old saying said. Even against your mind reader of an owner, though, they seem to prevail, apparently guided by the wisdom of a youkai above ground (why couldn't she have been the one to come down instead of sending her human?), and Miss Satori lets them pass through and into the courtyard beyond without much more of a struggle. How peculiar! You can't think of a time where a human ever made it past the pink-haired woman, much less through any of the other obstacles preceding her; she doesn't look to be a threat to Okuu and her nuclear might, but you'll give it to her that her journey has been impressive.

That doesn't mean, though, that you're done testing her.

You follow her through the opening in the courtyard, back into your fiery domain, and chuckle to yourself as she simultaneously complains of the heat and the fact that you've been following her since she arrived at the palace, giving her grief every step of the way. The cat ruse is a pain to maintain, though, when you want so desperately to converse, and you don't keep it up for much longer. “Tada!” you shout, morphing from feline to humanoid in a short flash of light and finding yourself a tad disappointed at the more or less deadpan look the shrine maiden gives you for your display. Oh, well. “Looks like you're having fun, sis! Mind if I join you?” Together, you banter for a bit, the duo before you – one visible and one thousands of miles away – wondering if you are the troublesome pet that they find themselves hunting. Up until now, you've been gauging their strength, but from the sounds of it, neither one are very prepared to go up against their latest enemy. Perhaps the human's dodging skills were enough to save her from your feline form, but you're starting to wonder if they'll be able to put up much of a fight against you as you normally are. “You wanna stop the geyser? Ya' better not! She's really dangerous, you know? The most dangerous one in the underground!” Weeks ago, you couldn't have envisioned yourself saying something so “brazen.” Now, you can't think of truer words.

“We can't turn back now,” the girl says, a look of determination on her face. For reasons you can't explain, you find yourself growing more excited than you probably should be.

“Well, if you're gonna go up against that dangerous bird, you gotta fight me first!” Your tongue darts out from between your mouth, licking at your lips in an act meant more for show than for anything else. “If I kill you, human, my hellfire cart'll get heavy again. Man, carrying off corpses sure is fun!”

when you're tossing, when you turn in your sleep

Against all of the odds, you find yourself on the opposite end of victory. It has seemed a fine plan to start her off easy, basic patterns and an attack that she soon learned you wouldn't dare fire at all if she stepped too close (for all your talk of killing her and snatching your corpse, you know deep down that you never want to be the cause of someone else's death, and a danmaku bullet straight to the face likely would have brought just that), and by the time you had started to use your full strength, it was already too late. Maybe they can save Okuu, you think to yourself, watching them as they flee deeper into the head of the Blazing Fires. For a few moments, you humor the idea of them challenging the idiot raven to combat, maybe even beating her down to her own size – and then the mental image of them slipping and falling into a never ending pit of fire jolts you out of your reverie and has you scrambling after them. No, no, that won't do; they'll get lost down here without a guide, and you're not done playing just yet.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot something!” you call after the nameless maiden, and she spins on her heel to shoot you a questioning look. “If you die around here, you'll burn so hard that there won't even be ashes left.” A visible shudder seems to pass through her at the thought – for all her gusto, she must still fear leaving this world leaving nothing left behind – but you can't find that you can relate to the feeling. No one else seems to share your appreciation for the dead, nor do they seem to take your bluntness when it comes to the subject very well. “If I want your corpse -” you say, still taunting her with the possibility that her strength may still not be enough, “- I'd better take you down there myself!” It's a cheap shot by all means, but the strength behind it is only a fraction of what Utsuho and her multitude of suns will inflict if either bullet or star make contact. Despite the speed and suddenness of your attack, though, she still has no trouble weaving through the fray, and you pull her onto the right path as you have her dancing through a sea of neon red and blue. When you finally leave her be with the rest of the ravens (weak compared to the one who seems to now harbor the power of a god), it's a one-way track to their destination; you'll consider leading her in the right direction compensation for putting her through more than a few needless exercises. Whatever happens to them beyond this point will be beyond your knowledge. All you can hope is that, should your best friend's wrath be powerful enough to bring her to kill an innocent human, she'll at least leave a body behind for you to cart away.

you don't need poltergeists for sidekicks

“Orin.”

Your ears perk at the sound of your name hours later, head spinning to meet the owner of the voice so quickly that, had you not been a kasha you may have been suffering from whiplash. Had it been anyone else standing in your position, they likely would have feared for the worst: a power-mad friend, the dead body of a raven-haired miko. You, however, are not anyone else, and the sound of Okuu's voice, for better or for worse, has a grin on your face before you've even fully turned. There she stands before you, noticeably empty-handed. There she stands before you, bruised and bloodied, but alive. “Okuu,” you counter, trying to sound more or less impassive, but finding the feat impossible. She looks and sounds defeated – but more than that, she looks and sounds more like herself, and you have a feeling that you know where the shrine maiden and her communicating yin-yang balls have gone off to.

“Let's... Let's give up on ruling the surface,” she says, wings drooping and a sheepish grin gracing her battered face. “I think I like the idea of staying down here with you better.”

you don't need tricks, and you don't need me

You collect the bodies of the fallen despite the fact that there are no more fires – despite the fact that you are no longer home. They pile up in the corner of your home, days from decomposition and staring lifelessly at you in the face. The spirits that drift from their limp limbs, their limp features drift through the air and scorn your name, but this is nothing you aren't used to. The air is much chillier, even the warmest temperatures here a frost bite against your nose, but it's nothing you won't grow used to. Soon, you think, you'll have to stop this. There's nowhere for these bodies to burn, nowhere for these spirits to go, and as warm as they may keep your home, this is no place for the spirits of the dead to roam. (What will you do, then? Where will you go?)

Your door sings open one day, and you enter your home to find the bodies and their former hosts gone. In their place is a note, and the words alone are enough to have a grin flitting across your features. You may be far from home, but you'll always have a job to do; a thousand miles can't keep you from that.

Keep up the hard work, kasha.

character classification

They flit their eyes from the corpse for one minute second, but that small juncture in time is all you need to snatch it from beneath their noses and tote it away in a cart that has carried more fallen humans and beasts alike than any container in history. The living scorn you in death, and the dead scorn you as vengeful spirits – burning to the touch and bitter over their stolen moments of glory, love they could feel and honors they'd be bestowed with, and neither of which could ever be received until they had fallen over and never picked themselves up. You don't mind their anguished cries or their lust for revenge, and even the scalding burn of their spirits brushing up against your flesh has become more of a comfort than anything else. You are simply doing your job, namely one you find morbid pleasure in. No one blames the bird for taking flight, so why would they shame the name of a kasha who whisks away the bodies no one was mindful enough to watch?

surely, like the cat waiting

The world looks upon you and first thinks of you as what you now are: a kasha. But to you, thoughts locked down in your mind, you are always a pet to the lovely Miss Satori first, and you think of yourself more as a cat than a youkai. Perhaps the cause of this is because, many years ago, you were only a cat, careless and cree to roam the beautiful lands of Gensokyo. Age made you wise and wisdom gave you new life; you were born again and dedicated your life to a woman misunderstood and hated by all, and finally she gave you purpose. You never lost your feline tenancies, however, nor did you lose its form. Before your sudden trip, you'd spend most of your leisure time basking in the fiery heat of the Blazing Fires in the form of a black furred creature, twin tailed and content. You'd lead your whole life that way, too, surely had it not been for a handful of disappointing drawbacks. To begin with, it's very difficult to communicate with the lady, with Okuu, or any of the rare underground visitors when language meets you best at a caterwaul of a “meow”, and an absence of opposable thumbs makes for a similar absence of proper corpse theft, the likes of which you revel in just as much as prowling the world on all fours. You settle, then, by alternating between the two equally; the effort of transformation, after all, is very little, and the time it takes to shift from an animal to a twin-braided girl couldn't be shorter if you willed it to.

holy water cannot help you now

You rob from the waking world the remains of their loved ones, but from the dead, you rob so much more. Anger, red and hot as the flames that they'll come to fuel, shatters their minds, and liquid hatred for you, for the ones they were forced to leave behind, for the world that houses them, you, and all of the miseries of life bubbles from in between the cracks. Death could come to you, too, perhaps, should they turn their eternal wrath upon you – but their's is a greater purposes, their fury a necessity to maintaining life as they once knew it, and who is to allow them to fulfill their destiny if your own lifeless body is burning in the slowly cooling flames of the Blazing Fires? They do not seek to harm you solely because you desire them not to. You desire them not to, and you invoke your will upon them. Should you wish it, you could command each of their every actions, and not a single fiery orb could think to disobey. This is how you hurdle them to serve that greater purpose, and this is why you are feared. Life is not guaranteed, but death is ever present. She who controls death controls all – why wouldn't they fear a beast with a power such as your own?