I didn't read the previous chapter, but wow, I found this story RAGE-INDUCING. Not necessarily because of _what_ they do, but because of the way it keeps going ON AND ON while I'm desperately wanting the yukkuris to get their comeuppance.
General overview of the events of this chapter: Reimu and Alice spoil their babies dreadfully, pissing off FemAnon. There are several vignettes illustrating what bad, indulgent parents they are.
FemAnon snaps and starts to throw away the little ones per their agreement, then relents and gives the parents one more chance--there's a bronze-badge exam in five days, and if the kids pass, she'll spare the kids' lives. Privately, she expects them to fail and decides she'd better castrate the parents, too.
The exam is a fiasco. The children ignore the questions, pee and poop, do a home declaration, and go to sleep on the table. Furthermore, Reimu and Alice announce to the humans that the children have shown them what TRUE EASINESS is, and expect Miss to agree with their way of thinking.
FemAnon is outraged, but also recognizes that just as her yukkuris spoiled their children, she spoiled her yukkuris. She plans to squash the little ones and try to retrain Reimu, but while she's in the supermarket buying their last meal, the yukkuris escape from the car and run away.
The family join a clan of strays whom Reimu befriended back when Miss used to take her to the park to play.
Reimu and Alice introduce their little ones, and the other yukkuris are flabbergasted by the children who still talk like babies and pee, poop, and drool everywhere. [/end of chapter]
The spoiler bars were probably completely unnecessary--I can't imagine there's anyone interested in this story who's NOT going to read them--but I felt like preserving some of the mystery, just for a moment.
Also, it's always nice to hear about a pet owner actually attached to her pets and giving them a chance instead of squashing or throwing them out at the earliest opportunity.
ParticleMan said: Haha, Reimu and Alice really fail at parenting.
Also, it's always nice to hear about a pet owner actually attached to her pets and giving them a chance instead of squashing or throwing them out at the earliest opportunity.
I actually thought (from what I could understand when I read the anko before) that fem anon let them go, instead of the shitheads escaping.
There's an end part where I betthe author is saving up all the justice. Until then, thank you platina for weathering a story filled with karma houdinis.
Now the Scarred Marisa with the pointy Stick has stronger connotations after reading the summary. And yeah if there is a Justice End at some point, it would be nice to get it when it's out, this story really needs a proper closure.
Skribulous said: I actually thought (from what I could understand when I read the anko before) that fem anon let them go, instead of the shitheads escaping.
They escaped from the car, FemAnon wandered around searching for them, and finally saw them some distance away and below, beyond a chain-link fence--not a place she could easily get to. She told them to come back, but they said that they loved their children more than they loved Miss, they were quitting being pets, and they were Mister Resolved to live as strays.
Enforcer Marisa comes to Leader Patchouli with yet another report of trouble from the newly-arrived family--the little ones are demanding sweet-sweets from a human while the parents just stand by. The family has been in the park for three days, but there have already been more than ten incidents where Patchouli and Marisa have had to intervene.
No matter how much humans exterminate stray yukkuris, the yukkuris always seem to bounce back. On the other hand, if humans do nothing, the yukkuri population seems to stabilize at a certain level, so this town tends to do nothing unless yukkuris cause problems. For this reason, Patchouli's clan tries to avoid contact with humans. With this incident, Reimu and Alice have broken three rules: 1. Not approaching mister humans 2. Not asking mister humans for things 3. Not letting little ones run out of control The parents whine and argue that they're not to blame, that little ones should take it easy, but the other yukkuris in the clan condemn their arguments. As punishment, the parents get nine whacks on the bottom with a big stick.
Patchouli acknowledges that in some ways, Marisa should be the leader of the clan, but Marisa says that while the yukkuris must fear Marisa in order for her to be able to police them, the clan also needs a leader who they don't fear.
After the caning, a Reimu with a brooch on her ribbon kindly invites the family to rest at her house. Like Reimu, Brooch Reimu is a former pet yukkuri. She was lonely spending all day in the house by herself, but when she asked her owner for a mate and little ones, he had her castrated. Brooch Reimu fell into a deep depression, so her owner abandoned his broken, unresponsive pet. She joined the clan in the park and finally found happiness as the adoptive mother to two orphaned little Marisas.
Brooch Reimu tries to convince the parents that their children should be toilet-trained, but the parents insist that their little ones are fine. The little Marisas are disgusted when Little Reimu poops does the equivalent of pooping while still at the dinner table. Brooch Reimu worries about the family.
Patchouli and Marisa talk about the family, saying they weren't suited to be pets. Because humans see stray yukkuris begging for sweet-sweets, humans think that sweet-sweets are all yukkuris need to be happy, but actually, it's only delusional scum and strays who are bad at hunting who admire pet life. When yukkuris consider not being able to freely make friends or start a family, they'd rather be dead. Marisa speculates that because Reimu has experienced the tightly-constrained lifestyle of a pet yukkuri, she doesn't want to impose any restrictions on her children. However, Marisa says that expelling the family will be best for the clan as a whole. Patchouli wants to wait and watch.
All the other yukkuri children hate little Reimu and Alice. They're covered with poop and drool, they selfishly hog all the toys, they scream and cry when anyone tries to oppose them, and the parent Reimu and Alice are always hanging around scolding the other children, "It's uneasy to exclude others!"
Brooch Reimu tells Reimu and Alice that they can't force the other children to play with their children. Meanwhile, Brooch Reimu has been encouraging her two little Marisas to be kind and play with the newcomers, and being compassionate children raised by a compassionate mother, they do so. Brooch Reimu hopes that little Reimu and Alice will learn and mature through contact with their peers away from their indulgent parents. She sympathizes with the family because as a former pet, she thinks she could easily have ended up like them. (She never had to deal with raising babies--her Marisas were older children when she became their mother.)
The little ones decide to race to a pebble. Reimu and Alice cheat and start before Brooch Reimu's signal. However, they're crawling along while the Marisas are vigorously hopping, so they're soon overtaken and start crying. The Marisas deliberately slow down and let Reimu win. (Alice is still halfway back, peeing.) However, Reimu starts taunting the Marisas as slow and stupid, saying that she's the fastest and strongest. The Marisas are angry, but they hold in their anger. Then Reimu goes too far, attacking one Marisa by jumping off a rock on top of her. (When normal children play-fight, they only jump at each other from the side.) Bean paste comes out of Marisa's mouth, her tongue is nearly bitten in half, and one eyeball pops out. The parents rush to the scene, but Reimu and Alice only show concern for little Reimu, who is crying about being hurt after wobbling and falling off of Marisa.
Little Marisa is rushed to treatment. Brooch Reimu is outraged not only by the incident, but by Reimu and Alice's lack of concern--they brush it off as a simple playground accident, and only some time later do they even think to give a casual apology and ask about Marisa's condition.
Patchouli tells Reimu to take her family and leave the clan. Reimu and Alice keep insisting that it was a simple accident, that the little ones can really take it easy. They resist Patchouli's attempt to tell them that normal, properly-raised little ones wouldn't act like that. Since they won't listen to reason, Marisa steps in and tells the parents that this is a scum clan, that everyone is jealous of the easy little ones, and that Reimu should go find some other clan where they'll be appreciated. Reimu and Alice can't say anything to that. Marisa says she's a scum Marisa who can't help hoping that they take it easy forever right away, and that if Reimu and Alice hang around, Marisa will have to punish them in accordance with the clan laws... In front of the gathered clan, Patchouli annouces that Reimu's family is officially expelled from the clan, and if they're seen in the park again, the other yukkuris have the right to punish them. Any yukkuri sheltering them will be punished.
After they've left, Patchouli apologizes to Brooch Reimu for not expelling the family sooner. Brooch Reimu places some of the blame on herself as well for trying to help the family. Little Marisa's tongue is likely to heal, but the fate of her eye is uncertain.
---
A week has passed since FemAnon lost her pet yukkuris. Full of loneliness and self-blame, she leafs through a pet-yukkuri catalog. Miss has always had pet yukkuris since she was young, but always was able to work through any problems with them. This was the worst incident she's ever experienced, and up until Reimu and Alice had children, she considered Reimu the best pet yukkuri she'd ever had. She still doesn't know what she should have done--she could have castrated Reimu, but yukkuris with such a strong mothering urge often ended up suffering a breakdown if they couldn't have children.
Just then, she hears a noise at the sliding door to the garden. Her yukkuris have come back and are begging to be let inside. However, she knows that if she forgives them, the same thing will happen all over again. The little ones are still talking like babies and have poop on their bottoms.
Miss asks them what happened to their "true easiness." They say that whether they tried to join a clan or begged humans to take them in, everyone said their little ones were dirty, stinky, and couldn't take it easy. Miss wonders if it's love, stubbornness, or something else that keeps the parents from recognizing the faults of their children.
She tells them that she'll take them back only if they get rid of their children. Otherwise, they can live as strays with their children. Miss closes the curtain on them and waits. Their voices get quieter, and when she checks an hour later, the yukkuris are gone.
--
Reimu and her family are outside the train station, begging passers-by to take them in. Finally, a man stops. They show him their little ones, half-deflated from hunger but still pooping and peeing up a storm. Mister covers his nose and mouth with a handkerchief, but behind it, he's smiling. He says they really are easy little ones, and asks the family to be his pets.
Reimu and her family are outside the train station, begging passers-by to take them in. Finally, a man stops. They show him their little ones, half-deflated from hunger but still pooping and peeing up a storm. Mister covers his nose and mouth with a handkerchief, but behind it, he's smiling. He says they really are easy little ones, and asks the family to be his pets.
Final section, part 1: http://www26.atwiki.jp/ankoss/pages/3632.html Mister takes the yukkuris home and feeds and bathes them. However, Reimu and Alice wake up to find that Mister has moved the little ones into a fenced-off part of the room, where they're whining and crying for food. Mister brings out a box of yukkuri food and a "yu-beater," a special switch designed to cause yukkuris pain without internal damage. Mister says that the little ones are so easy, he doesn't feel like abusing them, but a pet yukkuri's job is to make their master take it easy, and he takes it easy by abusing yukkuris. Reimu and Alice's job is to endure his beatings, and in return, he will give the little ones food.
(Mister adds that it's not bad luck that they've ended up at the home of an abuser; yukkuris are so cheap, anyone who wants a pet yukkuri will buy one at a pet store, so the only people who will take home a stray are abusers.)
Crying and soiling themselves in pain, Reimu and Alice endure a thorough beating for the sake of the little ones. However, the little ones soon eat up their food pellets and demand more, so the parents offer themselves up for more beating until the little ones are full and go to sleep. Mister says the parents can rest until the next mealtime, and he gives them some pellets, too.
The next morning, Mister lets them do rub-rub, and they're happy until the little ones announce that they're hungry. He brings out some expensive, high-quality cookies. (Miss only used to give Reimu and Alice cookies as a rare reward for fear of spoiling their taste buds. (Thanks to that, they were able to survive as strays--some spoiled ex-pet yukkuris end up dying of starvation because they are unable to eat things like garbage and fallen nuts.) These will be the first sweet-sweets the little ones have ever had, so the parents are almost eager to be abused.
Mister gives the little ones a sample of the cookies, and the parents are delighted to see the little ones so happy. Then he gives the parents a sample of that day's abuse--sticking thumbtacks in them. Mister explains that since the food is more delicious, the abuse is more painful--if they want to go back to the beatings, the little ones will go back to the bland yukkuri food pellets. He says he'll let the little ones decide, and asks if they'd rather have a food pellet or a piece of cookie. Of course they choose the cookie. Trembling, the parents steel themselves for the pain.
Mister sticks more and more tacks in them as the little ones gobble their food and demand more. Finally, the little ones are satiated, and abuse time is over. Mister gives the parents some food, but it's the bland yukkuri pellets, not the cookies--he says it wouldn't be abuse if they could take it easy. He also leaves the thumbtacks in them, since the cookies are still in the bellies of the little ones. In pain, Reimu and Alice look over at their happy sleeping little ones. They don't realize that their mindset has changed from "If the little ones can take it easy, then we can take it easy" to "We must let the little ones take it easy."
---
In preparation for lunchtime, Mister pulls all the tacks out of the parents and wipes them down with orange juice, healing all the pinholes.
He lets the little ones choose lunch, bringing out yukkuri food and the Yu-Beater, and cookies and the set of thumbtacks. Not wanting to endure the thumbtacks again, Reimu and Alice desperately try to get their children to listen to them, but they just clamor for sweet-sweets. Mister brings out a third choice--a pile of chocolates and a hammer. After a test-taste (and a test blow from the hammer), the little ones choose the chocolates. Mister assures the parents that he can give them a hammer blow for each chocolate eaten without killing them--he won't give them that release.
As the parents beg them to wait, the little ones make a beeline for the chocolates...
The hammering is so agonizing, the parents are screaming at their children to stop eating, to listen to them. The oblivious little ones just go on eating and demanding more.
Curious to test Reimu's belief that their little ones would stop if they just understood, Mister picks up the little ones and holds them up in front of their parents to force them to listen. The little ones are frequently distracted by peeing and by demanding more chocolate, but Mister and the parents explain (and demonstrate) that Mommy and Mommy can't take it easy because if the little ones eat a piece of chocolate, the parents get a blow from the hammer.
After about ten slow, exaggerated repetitions of the lesson, the little ones finally begin to comprehend that their parents can't take it easy and want them to stop eating. However, Mister says that if they ask for more sweet-sweets, he'll give them more sweet-sweets. As they have all their lives, the little ones put themselves first, leave the uneasiness to their parents, and demand more sweet-sweets.
At the end of the meal, Reimu and Alice are broken messes. Mister treats them with orange juice, feeds them, and leaves them until dinner time.
---
Before dinner, the parents are trying to tell their children not to choose sweet-sweets, but the little ones don't like it, plus they say their misshapen, damaged parents are scary. When Mister comes in, the little ones cry to him that their mommies were being mean. The parents are outraged that the little ones are starting to favor Mister over them, but there's nothing they can do. And Mister has brought the little ones a present--a soft, life-sized yukkuri Reimu doll that says "Take it easy" when the little ones do rub-rub against it.
For dinner, Mister presents the little ones with a fourth choice--a jar of honey and a pair of scissors. With the scissors, he cuts up the parents' accessories.
As they scream at their little ones to stop, the parents feel a disconnect between their beloved children, the easiest children in the world, and these eggplant-shaped oozing gluttons who ignore their mothers' pleas to spare them any more uneasiness.
Mister scolds the parents for trying to control their children--"they're only children, so it can't be helped"--the same excuse Reimu and Alice made countless
times, like when they failed the badge exam and when they squashed little Marisa. Why should it be any different when they ignore their parents' suffering in pursuit of sweet-sweets? And a child who doesn't care about little Marisa getting hurt--why would she care about her mother getting hurt? Isn't that what they raised their little ones to be?
[Recapper's note: I was wondering how Mister knew about the badge exam and little Marisa, but then I remembered that on the first night when Mister brought them home, the parents stayed up late talking to Mister about everything that had happened to them so far. I neglected to mention that detail in the summary of the previous part.]
There are flashbacks to Reimu and Alice loving their children, and a time in the park when Reimu wondered if perhaps they should toilet-train them after all, but Alice reminded her of the feeling of True Easiness they got from the little ones.
---
Day by day, the abuse escalates. The parents' hair has melted away, and they only have stitched-together remnants of their accessories. Mister slowly gouges out one eye from each of them. The parents are filled with rage against their children, spending their down time hurling their bodies against the fence and screaming at their children to die, but the little ones ignore them, living in a bliss of sweet-sweets and using the Reimu doll as a mother-substitute.
Mister tells Reimu that he specializes in destroying families. He says that they all fall apart in different ways, but he's never seen anyone like Reimu's family before. If the children were scum, they'd hate their parents and want them punished for trying to stop them from eating sweet-sweets, but instead, the children are utterly indifferent to them. If you make them take it easy, they gravitate towards you; if not, they ignore you.
He had hoped to make the children hate their parents, but you can't change indifference to hatred. And with their simplistic mindset, it wouldn't be any fun to abuse them--they'd just scream in pain in the here and now, with no psychological component. Mister says the essence of a yukkuri is in how it develops in relation to others, so are those little ones even yukkuris/easy? Reimu and Alice are stunned by the suggestion that the children--who they once considered to be the epitome of yukkuri easiness--might not even be yukkuris/easy.
Mister has also become bored with Reimu and Alice's dulled reactions to his abuse, so he thanks them for the fun of seeing them go from loving, self-sacrificing parents to parents who want their children to die, and he takes them all outside and lets them go.
---
Walking home from the supermarket, Miss sees what at a distance appears to be garbage, but on closer inspection, turns out to be her former pet yukkuris. Reimu and Alice are damaged and discolored, with one eye missing and bolts driven through their tongues by Mister, but they're cheerful as they apologize for their earlier misdeeds, saying that they were wrong not to discipline their children. They show off their children now--disgusting misshapen blobs with their hair ripped out, one eye missing, and pebbles shoved in their lower orifices, crawling towards Miss and begging her to save them from their parents. Reimu and Alice happily show Miss how they punish their children for not listening to them, and how they've "toilet-trained" their little ones to eat poop. They ask Miss to adopt them again, but she dashes past them and runs home, horrified.
Miss locks the door behind her and runs to the bathroom to throw up. She spends a long time hiding in the bathroom, trembling and crying, to avoid hearing the yukkuris calling to her from outside. Traumatized, Miss never keeps another yukkuri again.
---
Reimu and Alice return to the clan in the park, showing off their "well-trained" little ones. The little ones slam their heads on the ground and apologize. Enforcer Marisa reminds them that she promised to punish them if they ever came back, but Reimu and Alice say they don't mind if she kills them, just that before they die, they want to be told that their little ones are easy, now that they've trained them.
Patchouli tries to speak to them, but Marisa warns her away--they've gone crazy and just keep babbling on about how they couldn't take it easy as pets, and they couldn't take it easy as strays, and they trained the little ones to control themselves, but what good is it? Are the stray yukkuris taking it easy when they live in constant fear of being killed in a purge or caught and squished by an abuser?
Beating them with her punishment stick, Marisa drives them out of the park and tells them never to return, but when Marisa returns to the clan, everyone still seems depressed by Reimu's words. Marisa yells at them and tells them to get back to work. Leader Patchouli still seems to be mulling over Reimu's speech, but Marisa argues that spoiling the children like Reimu and Alice did is no solution. Life is full of uneasy things, but if you give up, you end up losing those few, precious easy moments. Marisa tells Patchouli that she can try to search for the perfect easy place where nothing uneasy ever happens, but then Marisa will have to step up and lead the clan in her place, and Marisa doesn't think she can be as good a leader as Patchouli. Patchouli understands and says she won't speak of it again, but she still feels troubled.
---
The abusive Mister finds Reimu's family back under the telephone pole where he first found them. The little ones keep groveling and apologizing like broken toys, while Reimu and Alice ask him to take the family back and abuse them again. They want to make someone take it easy, but they've been rejected by both Miss and the clan. Mister says he's going to kill them, and they cheerfully agree to it. He clamps the parents' heads steay and puts their feet in rotating clamps that will twist them around and around until they die, and he puts the little ones in a mixer that will start slowly, making them flee from the blades, then gradually speed up to kill them.
He recognizes that the parents are only pretending to laugh insanely--actually, they're crying as their fatal torture begins. Alice asks what they should have done differently, and Mister says they should have just raised their children in the normal way. Reimu says it was probably her and Alice's fault the children suffered, and Mister confirms it--they were stupid. Mister says it would have been better if the little ones had never been born, and reminds them that their owner had tried to stop them from having babies.
Reimu slowly dies an agonizing death, looking at the twitching remains of her little ones and wishing she could have taken it easy more.
The story ends with a flashback to the voices of the family doing rub-rub during happier times.
Good story, although the inclusion of abuse feels a little forced -- Mister has no real reason to torture them apart from his sadism, so it feels more like "abuse porn" included for reader's pleasure than something the yukkuri actually brought upon themselves.
ParticleMan said: Good story, although the inclusion of abuse feels a little forced -- Mister has no real reason to torture them apart from his sadism, so it feels more like "abuse porn" included for reader's pleasure than something the yukkuri actually brought upon themselves.
Nice closure with traumatized Miss at the end.
I actually look at it differently. To me, the abuse in the story isn't forced, it's inevitable. As what the summary mentioned, pet yukkuri are cheap and easy to acquire, so the only ones who would take in are abyusers like anon. Of course, you could argue that there are kind-hearted people out there who would take in gutter thrash, but those are exceptions, not the rule, and in the setting of the story, not common at all.
While we're on the subject, I actually find this abyuser rather tolerable. Unlike most portrayals of abyusers in stories, he's a pro at it, and his justifications would align him more as a justice-instrument rather than your run-of-the-mill self-gratifying abyuser. More amazingly, anon let them go. Letting the subjects of the abyuse live to reflect on their mistakes (so to speak) is much more satisfying than giving the yukkuri a (debatable) merciful death.
On that note, I'm surprised the yukkuri managed to survive that long after everything that happened. Broken, driven insane, but still alive, and still aware of what has been done to them, and--most importantly--why.
I can't say more than what had been said, but i really liked it, i think my only problem is that we didn't get a small scene of the mister doing nasty things to the little ones before leaving them alone in the streets with their parents, but that's fine, they still get their come uppance.
Great Story, it really would deserve a comic adaptation.
I disagree with patchouli's interpretation of pet yukkuri; reimu was allowed to freely make friends, and as for the no refreshing rules, it absolutely depends on the type of owner. Her own clan practices a limited form of birth control, so I sense some hypocrisy there.
Thank you, platina for this wonderful story.
Does anyone think reimu and/or alice learned their lesson?
I disagree with clan's interpretation of pet yukkuri; reimu was allowed to freely make friends, and as for the no refreshing rules, it absolutely depends on the type of owner. Her own clan practices a limited form of birth control, so it sounds like there's a bit of hypocrisy there.
Thank you, platina for this wonderful story. In the end, perhaps reimu wasn't a scum yukkuri?
I just feel incredibly bad for Miss. She should have put her foot down more firmly, which might well have stopped any of what followed, but she ended up with more mental baggage than she deserved.
ParticleMan said: Haha, Reimu and Alice really fail at parenting.
Also, it's always nice to hear about a pet owner actually attached to her pets and giving them a chance instead of squashing or throwing them out at the earliest opportunity.
. Yea it feels like most yukkuri owners want a punching bag(no mater how overpriced) rather then a pet.