Chochin-Obake

The line between reality and allegory runs blurry through the world of the mamono. A farmer may give thanks in church for the bounty and generosity of his land… only to return home and find a Gnome in his turnips, eager to accept the gratitude in person. Dreamcatchers really will catch dreams, as you wake in the night to find a scythe-wielding pony has got the thing stuck on her head. And in a quiet, backwater corner of Zipangu, a lantern watches over a household in a way which is soon to be more than metaphorical.

When exactly the little kami came into being is impossible to say for certain. Upon the creation of new items, religious scholars agree, they are mere things, geometric arrangements of matter which exist as the sum of their parts and no more. It is use, which quickens a kind of life into a tsukumogami; which brings forth their reification from object to… something more.

And the lamp is nothing if not well-used. If anyone gave it a moment’s thought, it would become obvious that the unobtrusive little light has been a part of the fabric of life in your family home for near to a century. It saved your grandfather’s life when he was lost in the woods as a child, its twinkling flame guiding him back to safety from far away in the dark, cold hills. It lit the room as your mother, your aunts, and your uncles were born, the first light to fill their eyes and welcome them to the world. And now it stands on your bedside table, a soft glow brightening your evenings for who knows how many years.

For as long as it can remember, the little spirit has watched, building up its feelings of love and adoration for the people who work and play in her gentle light. And after 100 years of illuminating and watching and wishing she could be a part of it all, wishing she could express the emotions that have been growing inside her for a century... a dread presence strokes against the lamp's flame. She flickers. The tiny kami is afraid, feeling the black power of this vast and mystical apparition, focusing just one tiny aspect of its attention on the quailing lantern.
"I'll let you have it all", the Demon Lord whispers to the artefact’s spirit.

"I'll let you walk amongst them. I'll let you look like them. I'll let you be a real part of the family you adore so much. Don't you want that?"
Inside the spiritual realm, the chochin-obake nods, nervously. She's afraid, but at the same time, she wants it. She wants it so much.
"You can have everything you desire, little spirit. There's just one thing I need you to do for me. I need you to love them. Can you promise me that? That you will love them, earnestly, and with every part of yourself?"
The way she said that every part sounds a little ominous. The item-spirit pauses, momentarily... but no, of course she'll love them! That's what she wants. That's all she's wanted, for a hundred years...
"Very well, then," the Demon Lord's disembodied voice agrees. The lamp-kami can almost hear the sly, laviscious grin in the god-succubus' tone.
She feels a tingling down to her very core, as a single tendril of demonic energy begins to pump power into her fire. Begins to change her.

"Remember, little lantern," the voice whispers. It's inside her head, now. Coaxing... commanding...
"Remember what you promised me. Love them. With every part of yourself, love them..."

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The whittled stub of a graphite pencil rolls back and forth on your desk, as your quiet snores billow across books and parchment like a changeable wind. The scribbles and sketches that lie under your cheek account an evening of exhausting script-work. On these rare nights when no-one else is home, you have a tendency to stay up beyond any time which might be considered wise. Indeed, your snoozing form slumped forward onto a pile of papers bears mute testimony to the fact that you probably should have carted yourself off to bed some time ago.

Thus you would probably have remained until morning – waking up with a kink in your neck and half a page of text tattooed on the side of your face – if not for the terrific bang which sounds behind you in the dead of night. You jerk upright instantly, startled out of your dreamless nap, a sheaf of papers stuck to the side of your head in a rather unbecoming manner. Twisting around in your seat blearily, you catch the musty scent of woodsmoke in the air. Oh, fuck, if that lantern’s fallen down and started a fire you’ll…

Technically, that is precisely what’s happened.
Also technically there’s a half-naked girl sat smouldering on your bedroom floor.

She seems basicly human and basicly female, but at this point the breadth of your experience falters. Big brown eyes – the colour reminds you of varnished wood – gaze up at you with the same stare of surprised confusion that you’re projecting at her. Zipangu ceremonial dress is of course no stranger to you – you live here, and you’ve got three hakamas in your wardrobe for formal occasions – but the girl seems to be sporting a fashion that would have been considered quaint and traditional even back in your great-grandfather’s time. A squat, saucepan-like tokin hat perches on top of a bell of mousey-brown hair, augmented by an exceptionally long pigtail which sprouts from the top of her head like a handle and falls all the way down the girl’s back. The strands of hair spool behind her, atop a the trailing sleeves of her own furisode kimono – a ceremonial dress which is supposed to… err… signify a girl’s arrival into womanhood. It’s also supposed to not end just underneath the breasts, revealing a slender midriff with skin which almost seems to glow in warm, supple pinks. A pair of baggy black sirawil shorts cover the same - minimal - amount of flesh as her kimono top, before curtailing with the similar hastiness to leave a pair of creamy, spread thighs shining naked in the firelight.

Firelight?

Thin streamers of smoke rise up between the girl’s legs from the point where her butt has plonked noisily onto your bedroom floor, and the decorative circlets around her ankles crackle even now with jolly little flames.

The spontaneous appearance of a scantily-clad girl in your bedroom in the dead of night may not quite be sufficient to push through your torpor, but when you’ve lived all your life in a house essentially constructed from wood and paper, fire most certainly is.

With a strangled, horrified squark, you leap up from your chair and half-run, half-fall through the sliding door into the kitchen. You fetched two pails of water up from the well this morning, and, thank the spirits, only used one of them in making your rice. The water sloshes as you grab the pail by its handle and careen back the way you came, to throw it on the smouldering girl…

Her big brown eyes follow you curiously throughout the whole volte-farce, but as you heft the bucket while racing back through the partition, your intention obvious, she shrieks like you’re charging her with a knife. The water cascades out of your bucket… to hit the patch of floor she used to occupy, quenching the slit-shaped char mark she’s left on your floorboards. You blink at the spot where she suddenly isn’t, bewildered; but the direction of escape becomes rapidly apparent by a pitiable wailing above you.

“Uwaaaaaaaaaa~!! Please don’t douse me, Master, please don’t douse me!” The creature bobs in midair above you, her flaming feet just about level with your head. Those vast sleeves hang down in front of her, emblazoned gold-black, as she presses her hands together in front of her face, imploring. You gawk in bewilderment as the girl attempts to kowtow at you in midair; though without any traction, the effort succeeds only in disturbing her balance and sending her spinning away from you. Clearly, she’s got no idea what she’s doing up there either; she pinwheels her arms comically, the panic evident in her face as she levitates drunkenly towards your ceiling. “Waaaa! Help! Chochin can’t stop! Master!”

You’re not altogether convinced you want to help this bizarre interloper-slash-arsonist that’s appeared inside your house in the small hours of the morning, but you are altogether sure you’d rather have her down on the partially-flammable wooden floorboards than the exceptionally-flammable reed-woven ceiling. You’d catch her by the ankle yourself if not for said ankle being on fire – a situation which apparently troubles her not at all. Her sleeves – and all the rest of her clothing, for that matter – look about as substantial as paper, and you’re fairly certain if you tried grabbing them then you’d only succeed in ripping them off. This leaves the only remaining option of the ponytail. Grasping the writhing tendril of hair before it floats out of reach, you tug downwards onto it with the best compromise between haste and gentleness you feel able to manage. A little strangled “Urk!”comes out of the girl as the tension pulls at her scalp. But in short order, she’s the right way up and almost back down to the floor. You stop pulling when her toes are about six inches above the wooden boards; you do not want any part of her touching anything in this room.

The height puts her on eye level with you; a relevelling which she makes no use of, preferring to stare down at her floating feet. You didn’t think it was possible to shuffle nervously without a floor to shuffle against, but she’s proving you quite wrong.

“Umm… tha-thank you for righting me, Master,” she stammers. Now that she's not wailing a meter above you, her voice sounds shy; like an evening breeze in high summer, seeking to warm, not to billow. Her eyes flick up at you nervously, and then instantly back down to her feet when she sees you meet them.

You exhale noisily, wondering where you should even begin in a situation like this. The girl visibly winces at the noise, screwing her eyes up as though she expects a death-blow to follow the sound. Your breath peters out in a fresh bout of bewilderment at her; it takes about five seconds for the bizarre female to open her eyes again, one at a time, and look around as if completely astonished at her continued existence.

“What… are you?” you eventually manage. Appending a ‘doing here?’ is the traditional question to ask arbitrary intruders, but you get the impression you’re missing something altogether more fundamental at this point. The whole flame-feet and levitation is a bit of a clue, as well.

With a quiet rustling, the girl extends an arm over to the table at the side of your bed, which is marked with the same slit-shaped char that’s now under a puddle of water on your floor.

“Ch… Chochin was just sat on the table watching Master sleep, and I… I thought I wanted to keep you warm so I tried to w… to w…” She searches for the word, as though relating an unfamiliar concept, “to w-walk over to you, but these things are new and I didn’t know how to do it right and I fell and I… Chochin didn’t mean to wake you, Master, I’m so sorry, please don’t douse me!”

*click*

The conspicuous absence of your battered old bedside paper lantern is the point which finally makes the realisation crystallise in your mind. While an unkind observer might think it incredible that it took you even this long, particularly when she kept naming herself in the third person, 3am with a house on fire are not conditions under which you are at your most adroit.

“…a Chochin-Obake,” you breathe.

The girl peers hesitantly up from her obsequious bowing, surprised that you have the full name to put to her. She nods, a timid smile literally lighting up her face as recognition dawns on yours.

“Umm… but if Master would just like to call me Chochin, that would be fine…”

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It is use that brings tsukumogami to life, and use which sustains them inside their artefact. But to merely be vivified is no great change for a kami, in and of itself. A bacterium is alive. A plant is alive. The world of the Chief God teems with life, as staggering in its variety as it is in its contingency. What need have the humble creatures for proximate purpose? ask the wise sages of Zipangu. There is dignity – for a beast, a spirit, or a man – to live a quiet existence, unburdened by the dross of the body, the hubris of mission, or the vagaries of emotion. Enlightenment derives from a passive acquiescence; a willingness to observe the world rather than to act upon it, to not be blown hither and thither by winds of passion.

So the old ways said, though such sages do not tend to last long when blown hither and thither by a kitsune.

But it remains the case nonetheless that a reverence for the kami runs deep in the cultural heritage of your homeland. That a tsukumogami should manifest in your household is an exceptionally lucky portent, and one which by rights should have you bowing your head to the floor and calling her ‘Master’, not the other way round. Err… even if this ‘Chochin’ doesn’t look as… entirely respectable as one might expect a masterly guardian spirit right now.

The fire safety part of your brain told you to suggest to the kami that you move outside, given that just about everything in your room can and will burst into flames if she bumps into it. The remembering terrible stories about the vengeance of yokai part of your brain, however – a part very, very carefully fostered by the ruling inari – suggests that kicking a spirit out of your house is unlikely to end well for you. So after some trial and error and additional minor fires, the kami finds herself sat cross-legged inside the largest iron wok you could find. Counting her toes.

“…eight …nine …ten!” she announces happily. As her body is the only source of light in the room, Chochin’s movements cast shifting shadow-puppets across your walls, weaving and contorting in her warm, orange glow. A pensive silhouette broods across your doorway, as she places a finger against her forehead and sticks out her tongue in calculation. “So that makes… ten for the hands and ten for the feet means Chochin has twenty all together? Auuuu, this is confusing!”

The girl wiggles her digits haphazardly, giggling at them as she waves her hands in front of her own face. Now you’ve convinced the kami that you’re not going to ‘extinguish’ her, she is happily sat in her pot, busily exploring the new form she’s acquired. It is proving a steep learning curve. “Master, how do you keep track of them all?” she asks sincerely, trying to point at both her own hands at once. The flames from her feet make the spirit look almost like she’s roasting in the wok.

“Err… you just… sort of… do,” is the best you can come up with in the way of mildly unhelpful answers. The lantern-girl peers at you with sceptical brown eyes, but they widen in amazement as you demonstrate that you can, indeed, move your fingers one by one, by drumming out a rhythm on the top of your desk.

“When I was a lamp, all that ever moved was my lid…” she recalls, prodding her metallic hat. “Hehehe. It was nice when people took my top off and poured stuff inside me. I’d drink it all up and feel all warm and yummy and full!” Chochin’s eye’s sparkle as she rubs her glowing belly contentedly. You… subtly shift your position on your chair.

“I always liked it when you did it, Master,” she continues, leaning forwards to gaze up at you earnestly. No, no, no, stop thinking like that, you tell yourself. Tsukumogami need to be treated with reverence, not… not...
The two halves of her loose kimono don’t quite meet in the middle, you can’t help but notice. You can see straight down her cleavage; the rolling, shadowed hills of the kami’s breasts bisected by a cleft of orange light, like sunrise viewed from the bottom of a deep valley.

“You were always gentle with Chochin,” she breathes. “A-and you always gave me… lots of…”

In retrospect, the very last time you want to allow your eyes to wander obviously onto a yokai’s chests is when she’s staring you right in the face. The lantern girl’s attention follows yours, tracing the line of sight back to the twin protuberances that hide under her flimsy clothing. “Huh?” she remarks, as though noticing them for the first time herself.

“What are you looking for, Master? Here? I wonder what’s under…”

And no ceremony whatsoever, Chochin tugs untied the flimsy ribbon at the front of her blouse. As the unbound kimono slides down her shoulders, the kami’s peachy breasts bounce free, jiggling curves abruptly liberated from their papery concealment. Succulent mounds almost glow with warm, fleshy colours; it might just be your romantic side talking, but you could swear the room gets brighter as she exposes her flesh; a soft, comforting luminance chasing away the dim shadows on the back wall. Her perky, quivering nipples burn with a light, kissable umber; but the brightest feature is Chochin’s wide, complaisant smile, as you both take in the figure suddenly, shamelessly uncovered.

“Chochin! You… err… you shouldn’t –“

Whatever it was you were going to advise against quickly trails into irrelevance, as the mamono cups her own breasts experimentally in her hands. “Master, they’re… they’re kinda heavy?” she asks, as though expecting you to confirm her analysis. “I… I feel like they’re… ah!”

The lamp-spirit lets out an adorable little cry of surprise as a nipple scrapes against one of her exploratory fingers, sparking off a burst of sensation in her newly acquired nerves. Looking down at her chest, and then back up at you, Chochin beams in amazement. “M-Master, they’re…” she starts, before a different digit brushes over the nipple again, stifling another yelp of excitement.
Crap, crap, crap, this pressure in your pants, she’s a kami, you can’t…
…you can’t…
…look away…

Feminine globes wobble and sway as pliant flesh squashes between Chochin’s increasingly curious fingers. She squeezes her bosoms together, toying with them like a new discovery – which of course to her, they really are. The display freezes you in your chair. You daren’t move, for fear of what sacrilege might follow. Biting down on her lower lip as she stifles another quiet moan, the kami blinks her big brown eyes, a dreamy expression coming over her face as she continues to soak up the sensation washing over her breasts. Apparently of its own volition, one of her hands starts snaking downwards, across the bright plain of her stomach. Chochin giggles as the questing limb tickles its way over her navel… and then slips under the waist of her pants, to explore… deeper. Projected against the inside of her clothes by the glow of her skin, you can see the silhouette of the spirit’s hand, creeping underneath her hips, and-

Abruptly, everything stops.

The hand kneading her breasts freezes. The exploratory, feminine laughter cuts out. The happy smile of pleasure falls off Chochin’s face. The worming motion of her digits retreats, pulling back out of her garments, and…

Slick with clear, glistening, viscous oil, the kami’s fingers gleam in the room’s soft light, hues of red and orange refracting through the dribbling liquid from between her thighs. But there’s more than that. It is on fire, tiny licks of bright pink flame dancing over the fluid, arcing between the tips of her fingers like ethereal, magenta candlelight. Chochin’s chest rises and falls, her breath coming in little pants: panic crossed with confusion crossed with an simple, unmistakable current of… something primal.

“Ah! M-m-master! I’m l-leaking!” she stammers, holding the flaming proof towards you. The scent of it assaults your nostrils; a smell of heat and yearning and overwhelming femininity.

“Ch- Ch- Chochin can’t leak! I’ll g-go out, Master, I’ll go out! I, I need, I need…” Her eyes flit across the room in misapprehended distress, seeking. “S-something! Something to stop…”

The room’s illumination grows a bright panic-red, her skin flushing hot while a crimson blush spreads over Chochin’s cheeks. “Master…” she gulps, her roving, fearful eyes finally fashioning on you. “P-please, I need…!”

Insofar as an artefact can be said to have an instincts, the lamp-spirit’s nature fills her mind with a particular impulse, when the prospect of an oil leak rears its terrifying head. And it is, quite simply, the need to be plugged. To have her leak stopped. And her hole filled.
It is an impulse which intersects quite squarely with the other impulse, more recently acquired, that whispers insistently in the back of her mind. Ever since new eyes first glimpsed a young man asleep at his desk in an entirely new light. A voice given new power now, and volume, as the kami’s eyes scroll down your seated frame, to widen at the similar powerful volume pushing against the inside of your trousers.

"Do it… Make him use you... Make him FILL you..."

The kiss is as fast as it is fiery, Chochin leaping out of the pan like a crackling ember to plant her lips passionately atop yours. Your cry of surprise is stifled as she smothers your mouth with a second kiss, and a third, her tongue tracing hungrily against your teeth, the peppery taste of the girl pushing itself forcefully onto your tastebuds. Your arms flail, trying to keep the chair from tipping over; she grabs them, her touch hot on your skin, and brings them back round, clamping your hands to the flanks of her waist. You gasp as your palms connect with her flesh, the heat boiling off her midsection almost painful to the touch… but you daren’t let go, lest your now-precarious balance topple, taking the pair of you to the floor – and putting the house to the torch.

“Ch-Chochin, wait!“ you plead, eyes wide as the flames on her ankles flicker mere centimetres away from your clothing. You can’t believe how warm she is; if you’re fearing for your own apparel, how is hers even…

The kami isn’t listening. Her eyes blaze like little fires in their own right, consumed by lust, as her fingers pry desperately at the garments around your waste. The pink fire still dances over the digits of one hand; demon-fire burning its way through whatever fabrics she can’t undo fast enough. And all of a sudden, she’s through, her shaking fingers crawling under your smallclothes... and grabbing hold of their prize.

The audible moan of desire from her throat as Chochin pulls your cock out of its captivity is perhaps the sexiset noise you have ever heard. The organ itself certainly reacts as such, thickening under her oil-slick grasp like a gluttonous eel. Fluid from the kami’s fingers glistens along your length, a sheen of liquid left behind as your shaft grows beneath Chochin’s grip. You can feel her nectar tingling on you; the strange, spicy sensation suffusing into your skin, making your penis burn a hot, angry crimson. Her breasts bounce in your face, only encouraging your cock’s reaction, as the tsukumogami hands retreat to deal with her own undergarments.

Chochin’s black pants are gone in a second; she simply rips them off her hips, with the sound of tearing paper, and throws them aside with desperate haste. The heat rolls over you like a wave; her garments leave a trail of smoke as they sail through the air; and it is now impossible not to see why.

The kami’s inner thighs are alight with dancing, salmon flames, like effervescent fingers stroking her skin, promising a sweet caress for anything that approaches. The lights get denser, hotter, as they creep up her legs, until finally, with a profusion of warmth and light, they reach their burning source. Chochin’s secret place dances with merry flames; petal-folds of flesh interposed with blooming fronds of living fire. And the temperature! Red, yellow, and white hot, Chochin’s blossom flares under your gaze, like a fire desperate for kindling.

And she kisses you again, deeply, hungrily, on the lips.
“Master… please…” she murmurs, her words garbled as her tongue twines with yours. “Please… I…” The kami’s hands flitter nervously over her own thighs, as though trying to staunch the leaking fluid - but succeeding only in exciting her further. “Ch-chochin feels strange, I… I want…”
Her eyes plead with you; nervousness and passion in equal measure. “Ch-chochin w-wants… Chochin needs… her Master’s oil…”

That’s it.
That that’s exactly what this is.
The kami is afire, and you are the fuel.

She wraps her arms around your head, squashing your face into her cleavage to muffle your terrified thoughts. A tiny part of your brain yells, and recoils; convinced that your fate is to burn; but the rest ignores it, carried away on the rolling tide of warmth and demon energy washing out of the lantern-girl. Your hands squeeze against her burning hips; your lips earnestly kiss Chochin’s breasts; and down below, your cock stands to rigid attention, so hot it feels like it’s trying to match the kami’s temperature itself.

As Chochin eases her hips down on top of you, you gasp at heat of the flames’ kiss – but only for a moment, as you slip into her warm honey-pot like a tempered sword into a water bath, and the gasp turns into a groan of abject bliss. The dry heat on your abdomen contrasts to the wet comfort inside the lamp-girl, as the oily caress of her special place welcomes you inside like an honoured guest. The spirit shudders with pleasure as your heat meets hers, and her vagina wraps your manhood with a tight, hungry embrace. Her hips sway back and forth, expression beatific, eyes half-lidded as instincts new and old drive Chochin to fill herself up with your cock - to get as much of it inside her as possible.

The kami squeals as your shaft pushes further, skewering deep inside her. Squelching, sizzling noises come from your point of joining, tendrils of smoke rising into the air as her boiling oil fizzes on her thighs and yours. It’s hot, of course, but not painful – the pink flames bring quite the opposite sensation wherever they touch your skin, in fact, tingling with passion and pleasure. Across the walls, the fiery light roils and roars, flickering and burning. A sooty scent wafts in front of your nose…

As the lantern-girl churns her hips up and down atop your prone form, mercilessly drilling pleasure into your erect cock, you feel a strange sensation running through your abdomen. It's like... you're growing? Mustering what little will you have left, you try to pull out; to escape the heat and the smoke, to escape the tickling flames you feel dancing over your length. But you can't! Chochin moans in pleasure at your movements, and looks into your eyes with a smile which is at once enraptured and at the same time devilish. You... actually... can't pull out... from her vagina! Her inner walls grip at you, like a fleshy vice made for pleasuring men; but at the same time, it's something else. It's you. Her fires, her demonic energy, has made you grow; made you bigger and thicker; made you fill up her womanhood tight and snug and oh so amazing to feel.

“Master!” Chochin pleads, her voice high, desperate with longing. “You... you can't… stop!” She hugs you close, clinging to you, pressing herself down so you couldn’t withdraw even without your organ's engorgement. “Please! F-fill me up! I want... I need...! So you have to… you have to… aaah!”

The kami’s words trail off into an incoherent trill, as she closes her eyes, losing herself to the sensations you're bringing to her. Every millimetre of your magically expanded girth grinds against her insides, while the unbelievably sensitive tip quests further, right into her core, to be licked and kissed and caressed by spicy tongues of living flame. Her warmth, her scent, her cries, it all comes together… you can’t hold it! You’re going to… to…!

The liquid explosion which bursts from your head is like pouring kerosene on a fire. The lantern-girl, until now pinning you down with hands and kisses, arches her back, hair flying into the air, and lets out an otherworldly scream of shrill, unbridled ecstacy. Her breasts bounce and wobble, glistening with sweat, as an explosion of light bursts inside her chest. You can see the red glow in her stomach; see your dick inside her, a sihlouetted shadow puppet, blasting globs of ejaculate against the roof of her womb as the glow burns brighter and brighter. Orange, yellow, and eventually white-hot, as rolling waves of orgasm consume you both, and the fire inside brings more and more pleasure as it burns ever more brilliantly...

----------------------------------------------------

The scent of ash on the wind has been with him for the last hour. The old man has a good enough nose to know what’s going on; he didn’t really need to climb up the hillock to see the whole thing for himself. And his equally old knees certainly aren’t thanking him for it. He leans against his gnarled walking stick, hoping to silence their complaining by taking a little of the weight off. To no avail. Above him, the dense copse of blackened trees creaks and sways, puffs of smoke still rising from their upper branches.

He always knew something like this would happen. Frankly, it’s a miracle it stayed up as long as it did. Human property doesn’t tend to last long in Zipangu, what with monsters – accurately – walking around like they own the place. Nureonago damp-rot; youko expropriation; or just plain old-fashioned ushi-oni demolition. It’s why his mother built the damn house out of wood and paper in the first place. Houses really do grow on trees round these parts.

The breeze carries a gritty cargo of soot with it, depositing particles rather rudely in his long, Confucian beard. Defusing somewhat the image of a sagely elder, the man sputters and waves his arms futilely, as though trying to fend off the airborne dirt like one would a swarm of bees. Eventually, with as much of the grey muck brushed away as possible, he sets off down the little hill again, making a beeline towards the centre of the smouldering mess.

Blackened floorboards groan under sandaled feet as the old man approaches the epicentre of the destruction. He almost trips over the giant wok, half-melted into the remnants of the floor. Finally standing over your soundly snoozing form – soot-blackened, and crudely covered by a charred hakama as a makeshift blanket, but otherwise apparently unharmed. Your grandfather considers whacking you awake with his walking stick… but eventually thinks the better of it. You’ll have been through enough for one day, he reasons. Plus, there’ll be time enough to harangue you after he deals with the real culprit.

Reverence to the mamono does indeed run deep through the cultural heritage of Zipangu. But when an octogenarian gets his house burned down by no-good punk kids, no-one is safe; regardless of status, species, or the fact that one of those no-good punk kids is technically quite a bit older than him.

“Come on out then, girl, you must be here somewhere!” he announces to the smoking wreckage of your ex-house. “You would have spirited my boy here away too if you were gonna do a runner, so you may as well make yourself known!”

Nothing.

“Salamander, is it?” he asks, to the smoke. No reply.

“Ignis, then?” grandfather posits. Another silent negative.

“Chochin-obake?”

Finally, by means of response, a tiny cough sounds from above him.

Hanging above the pair of you, suspended from a charred tree bough by that same ridiculous ponytail, Chochin swings from side to side like a gently glowing pendulum. Her legs sway backwards and forwards, ankles making two fiery arcs in the smoky air.

“Umm… hello,” she manages, sheepishly, face beetroot-red. Her clothes, somehow, survived the fire, and having re-donned the set, she looks much the same as she did when first she popped into existence: reminiscent of that one, century-old lamp, that has been - that had been - a part of the house for as long as memory serves.

Grandfather narrows his eyes as he peers up at the swinging kami. After about a minute of silent contemplation – during which time Chochin somehow manages to turn redder than when she was actually ablaze – he finally asks: “Didn’t I keep you out on the front porch between 847 and 861?”

“Umm…” the unexpected question seems to defuse the kami’s bashfulness, as she puts a finger to her forehead and tries to count backwards sixty years. “I… I think your wife moved me back inside when you got engaged, ojii-san.” Her blush abruptly returns. “Err… I remember I was inside on your wedding night… a-and when you-"

The sound of your grandfather’s noisy sputtering drowns out any further remarks from the swinging lantern. “N-never mind, never mind about me!” he deflects. “Just… get down here, will you?” On the ground, you stir vaguely in your sleep – though if you can remain unconscious on top of a pile of torched furniture, it is unlikely that this noisy conversation is really going to wake you.

Disentangling herself from the tree, Chochin bobs down to ground level. Keeping her feet off the floor is no longer necessary at all; the flaming circlets on her calves do nothing more than stir up char which is already thoroughly combusted. The kami crosses her fingers in front of her belly, embarrassed, and assiduously refuses to meet your grandfather’s gaze. The old man places his hands on his hips, the look in his eye unmistakable to anyone from your household – Chochin included – as that which precedes a long, disapproving lecture on young people misbehaving.

“Well then, tsukumogami,” he starts. “You’ve burned down the family house, torched most of our worldly possessions, and -“ A quick glance behind him, down at the dreamy grin on your sleeping face, confirms “- had your monster-y way with my grandson here. Do you have anything to say for yourself? You’d certainly better take some responsibility, because-“

“Umm…” Chochin interrupts, quietly. Grandfather raises a single eyebrow, somewhat intrigued that anyone, let alone a mamono, would even try to talk their way out of so blatant an offense.

“I-I was hoping that w-we…” she points to your sleeping form, the bashful look on her face making way for a small, contented smile. “…Chochin would like if… if we take responsibility for each other, since…” And as the kami shyly untwines the fingers from in front of her stomach, your grandfather’s other eyebrow raises as well.

The flame shining in Chochin’s chest burns a colourful, vibrant yellow… and clearly visible beside it, two baby candle-fires flicker warmly inside her belly.
The kami breathes in happily, and three fires dance a little brighter with the intaken oxygen. The lantern-girl strokes her stomach tenderly, and lets out a smile sunnier than any burning light she has ever conjoured.
“Hehe… congratulations, ojii-san! You’re going to be a great-grandfather!”