valentine's day with marisa!

	The wind swept through the shrine maiden's clothes and brushed aside her hair, and she felt the full brunt of the chilly midwinter morning.
	"Seems like winter will never end," she sighs, looking to the sea of clouds that had formed above the shrine's gate. "I should find that winter youkai and beat her up until this stops." She give some serious consideration to the idea as she brushed the dusty snow that had gathered on her red and white garb near her feet. She was wearing a shrine priest's dress, its long white sleeves and tall red skirt protecting her from the worst of the icy chill in the air. It was still quite early, and while it was her job to keep the shrine clean and presentable, she had no idea how she was meant to keep all this troublesome snow off the stone steps. Perhaps if she become angry and yelled at it enough, it would simply leave?
	"Oi, Reimu!" Above the white treetops, a voice rides along the chilly wind. A blonde witch in a black dress and hat approaches the shrine at a troublesome speed, flying on a broomstick. Oh good, thought the shrine maiden, perhaps I can get her to destroy the snow with a spell.
	"Hey, Marisa," she responded, unable to muster the energy to shout back. The witch plopped down into the fallen white next to her, her landing not quite a crash, but not very smooth either.
	"Oi! Do ya know what day it is, Reimu?" The witch picked herself up, her black dress now covered in white. She bore a big, goofy smile. "It's Saint Valentine's Day!"
	"Oh," the shrine maiden responded slowly. A quiet moment awkwardly passes.
	"What's Saint Valentine's Day?" Reimu asks finally.
	"Gee," her friend says smugly, shifting her stance to cross her legs, holding her broom horizontal behind her head, "you don't know? It's only the most romantic day of the year!"
	"Okay," Reimu says with an audible disinterest, "what's so romantic about it?"
	"Well it, uh..." The witch soon finds herself confounded. She did not expect to be asked if she knew anything at all about the holiday other than its name. "It's something they celebrate in the outside world, I think."
	"Say Marisa, could you do me a favor?" Reimu asked, approaching the short witch.
	"Uh, depends on what it is, yo." Marisa sounds off her verbal tick as she becomes suddenly nervous, a lecherous look in the shrine maiden's eyes.
	"Turn around and fire a master spark. Straight through the gate."
	The witch took a small wooden hexagon from her pocket, small enough that it could be easily held in the palm of her hand. It bore a yin-yang in its center that looked as though it opened to give way to some inside chamber,  and was surrounded with little rectangular holes all around the thing's wooden body, almost like exhaust slots meant to allow heat to funnel out of the contraption.
	Reimu placed her hands on Marisa's shoulders and directed her to the center of the stone walkway. The witch then aimed the small contraption toward the gate leading out of the shrine, and braced herself.
	"Like this?" She asked, giving Reimu a queer look. The shrine maiden folded her arms and nodded.
	The little wooden device made a sort of buzzing noise, like an electrical current was flowing through it. The yin and yang opened to reveal a small canon, in the middle of which tiny sparks were flying to and fro, energies pulsing through its body. The cannon began to spin and Marisa dug her feet into the ground in preparation.
	Suddenly, the shrine and the two girls around it were alight with a rainbow colored illuminessence. From the cannon Marisa held, a forceful beam of light made its way out of the shrine's gates and into the countryside. Their ears were filled with near deafening hum, the electric sound of a beam of energy firing high into the morning. The force of the thing kicks up the air all around it and suddenly the shrine was amidst a blizzard as the snow that had littered the ground was again in the air. Reimu shook herself off to be rid of the white watery soot she'd been covered in. It was a temporary solution at best, but as far as the shrine maiden could see, the snow on the ground was now at least farther away from the shrine.

	In order to maintain the facade she had any idea what she was talking about, the little witch goaded her friend into traveling together to the curiosities shop to ask a certain romantic local for some trinket that might illuminate the ignorant shrine maiden on the holiday.
	The shop was quite empty, as typical, save for the brightly haired man in glasses sitting behind the counter, reading an issue of some foreign publication. Neither of the girls could read its english letters, but the cover bore a picture of a high-tech soldier doing battle with some grey-skinned humanoid monster.
	"Oi, Kourin," Marisa spoke up as she stepped into the shop. "What kind of valentine's day stuff ya got? Reimu, uh, doesn't know anything about what day it is."
	The man rose an eyebrow at her, then descended below the counter to retrieve something. He produced a few small square cardboard boxes that rattled as he placed them on the counter.
	"Well, I find these all the time. They're not worth very much, so go ahead and take a box." He says, and the girls take one package each. The little box has a heart on the front, and a strange unfamiliar scent assaulted Reimu's nose as she popped it open. She tucked her fingers into its confines and pulled out a few hard little candies adorned with english letters.
	"They're meant to be given to your sweetheart. It's candy." The man explains, adjusting his glasses.
	"They don't taste very good. What kinda candy is made outta chalk?" Marisa questions, but pops another into her mouth anyway.
	"There's some words on them," Reimu says, examining a heart in the palm of her hand. "What does it say?" She passes it to Kourin, who takes a close look.
	"'Be mine,'" he reads without much enthusiasm, and passes the heart back to Reimu, who then eats it. "What about this one?" She asks, mid-mastication.
	"'You're sweet,'"
	"And this one?"
	"'Happy Valentine's Day,'"
	"How about this one?"
	"'The shrine maiden and her friend must leave the store now,'" he says in the same voice as his other readings.
	"Wait, Kourin! I meant to ask you, yo," Marisa started, pocketing a couple candy boxes, "explain to Reimu what Valentine's Day is all about!" He smiled, seeing through the young witch's scheme.
	"In truth, I do not know too much about it myself. From what I can gather, it appears to be a day in which lovers give each other gifts to affirm their feelings. It is a day the chocolate and gift card industries make a lot of revenue, according to a paper I read." His glasses gleam as he adjusts them, and he takes on a sinister smile. "So, then, are you here to buy something for your loved ones?"
	The word 'buy' causes Marisa to reel. She backs away toward the door, tugging on Reimu's sleeve as she goes.
	"Uh, n-no that's okay Kourin, we'lljustbegoingnowthankyou," she says as quickly as she can, dragging the shrine maiden out the door with her.

	The two traced the treetops, flying over the white-coated land below them. Marisa was pondering just where to go next, having found no satisfactory answer to just what this holiday consisted of.
	"That other shrine maiden is from the outside world, right? She'd be able to tell us 'bout Valentine's Day," she calls to Reimu through the air.
	"Why can't you just tell me yourself? Don't you know about it?" The shrine maiden responded, disdainful of being dragged to yet another place so early in the morning.
	"Uh, I just think it'd be better if ya heard it straight from the horse's mouth!" A flimsy excuse, though it elicited a giggle from her friend.
	"Well, you've got that right. Sanae's face is pretty horsey."
	They glide over the many steps leading up the youkai mountain and into a competitor's shrine, housed by two goddesses and their priest. The goddesses were missing, however, and the priest could be found outside digging in the snow with a spade. The pair land outside the gate and slowly stroll inside, taking their time to watch the grass-haired priest work.
	Wow, thought Reimu, this looks like slave labor.
	"Oi, green Reimu!" Calls Marisa, and the priest, named Sanae, looks up from the hole she's digging in the snow.
	"That's not my name," she yells back, flustered. She plants the spade in the snow, which stands firmly on its own in the packed slush. "What are you two doing here?"
	"Reimu wants to know about Valentine's Day, yo," Marisa says, grinning. "You're an outsider. Tell us what you know, yo!"
	"Oh," Sanae says, putting a finger to her lip. "I suppose people in Gensokyo wouldn't know much about christian holidays."
	"No, Saynay, it's Valentine's Day, not Christmas!" Marisa's tone was mocking, as if Sanae were quite daft.
	"Why are you digging?" Reimu chimes in, completely uninterested in the subject at hand. She was getting rather cold standing in the snow, and had stuffed her hands into the opposite arm's sleeve in attempt to warm them. Sanae scratched the back of her head, wary that any reply she gives will bring with it strange looks.
	"Uhm, you see..." She picks the spade from the snow again, driving it back into the earth to deepen the hole next to her. "Suwako, as one of the great native goddesses, has buried herself in the earth once again to hibernate as a frog would. So I'm digging her out. Again." Annoyance spread over her features as she broke the frozen earth with her spade, as she knew that, were Suwako only willing to come out on her own, she could swim through the ground like it were water.
	"So, uh, about Valentine's Day, yo..." Marisa began, but Sanae's concentration would not be broken. After a moment and a few showers of cold, dark dirt onto the white-covered ground, she appeared to have found something, her eyes lighting up. "Ah! Finally!"
	She set the spade down and fell to her hands and knees, crawling inside the little hole she'd made. She nearly disappeared into it before her legs stiffened and dug into the surface as she tried to squirm back out. She tugged, once, twice and three times on something, then her and a small girl wearing a straw hat and purple dress illustrated with little green frogs burst from the ground. Sanae fell on her bottom in the snow, holding the little frog-girl in her arms. The girl groaned, appearing woozy, her eyes still half-shut.
	"Five more minutes..." She pleaded, groggily. Sanae began to carry her inside, the witch and opposing shrine maiden following behind her, glad to be out of the snow if nothing else.

	"Valentine's Day is a special day for girls, you see." Sanae had changed into a set of clothes not so completely covered by dirt. Suwako lie splayed out on a cushion in the center of the shrine, snoozing soundly.
	"In modern Japan, we have a unique tradition. In other parts of the world, lovers simply give each other gifts. But where I came from, the girls give their friends chocolate, and they give their sweethearts chocolate they've made themselves." She turned around and gave the shrine a cursory glance, her mood deflating a little as she thought about what she'd said. "We don't have any here. I don't think Suwako or Kanako know about it either..."
	"But anyhow," she went on, "next month on White Day, those you gave chocolate, especially the boys, are expected to give chocolate in return."
	"I dunno, that seems like a net loss if ya ask me," Marisa says. "So ya gotta give chocolate to begin with. You don't even get to eat it. And then if someone goes and gives you chocolate, ya gotta give some back later." She counts the total chocolate on her fingers as she speaks.
	"The chocolate itself's not really the point..." She tries to reason with the witch, but Marisa was having none of it.
	"Never mind, I don't think I want anything to do with this so-called chocolatey romance." She turns and heads toward the shrine's exit. Reimu and Sanae sigh in accidental unison. The red shrine maiden follows her friend out, while the green one prepares to tend to her slumbering frog goddess.
	Outside the shrine, Reimu finds her friend waiting for her. She's holding something in front of her. As the snow crunches beneath Reimu's feet, Marisa swiftly turns around, shifting the object behind her back to hide it.
	"Well Reimu, I hope you've figured out just how important this day is." She says, smiling slyly.
	"But you just said you wanted no part of it," Reimu raises an eyebrow at her strange witch companion, already regretting left the relatively warm shrine to once again stick her nose into the chilling winter air.
	"Chocolate is always important. That's why I got this for you." Marisa thrusts the object she had ahold of into the shrine maiden's arms. It's a small, wrapped package. Reimu turns it over in her hands, unable to read the letters.
	"What is it?" She asked.
	"It's chocolate. I swiped it from Alice's pantry. I think she said it was 'Van Houten' brand.'"
	Reimu peeled open the wrapper, finding the stiff candy bar to be separated into several rectangular pieces. She handed a piece to her friend, and they took a bite together, in the snow.
	"Happy Valentine's Day, Marisa."