Anko2397: "All Set for Mister Winter!!" by Tennen-aki
Surviving the winter is tough for wild yukkuris. Some start gathering food too early and end up starving to death when their food goes bad. Others are stupid and don't start preparing until all the other yukkuris are done.
This Reimu and Marisa have a different method--in the spring and summer, they earn the trust of their neighbors, then as the yukkuris isolate themselves in their nest holes for the winter, Reimu and Marisa kill them and take their food.
Reimu, Marisa, and their four babies are comfortably ensconced in the biggest nest hole in the neighborhood with more than enough food to last the winter. Their cozy confinement is disrupted by a human mountain climber who stumbles and falls on their nest, breaking the sealed-up entrance.
Not having learned to fear humans, Marisa and Reimu demand reparations. Luckily for them, Mister is a kindhearted guy who feels bad for damaging their home. He gives them a chocolate bar (which Reimu and Marisa gobble up without thought of their children), but they demand that he fix their house, too. Mister is a bit of a perfectionist, and he ends up deeply engrossed in the puzzle of rebuilding a sturdy entrance. He ignores their nagging at him to hurry up, and when they disrupt him with soft, annoying body blows, he gives them another candy bar to get them out of his hair for a while. They're still focused on eating when he finishes the task, so his departure goes unnoticed.
After they finish polishing off the sweet-sweet, Marisa and Reimu are miffed to discover that their "slave" has escaped, but they turn to go back inside... and find that Mister has rebuilt the entrance _too_ well--they can't move the barrier to get back inside.
Marisa hits it and hits it, but it won't budge. Reimu's constant nagging drives her to the breaking point, and she gives Reimu a mighty body-blow. Reimu snivels in pain, but Marisa just turns her back and orders Reimu to open the barrier. Instead, Reimu stabs Marisa with a stick in revenge. Reimu stabs her over and over and tops off her victory by peeing on Marisa's motionless body. Then she orders Marisa to get back to work.
...
All by herself, Reimu is hungry and cold, exhausted and damaged from trying to break down the barrier. She calls for help, but since she and Marisa killed all the other yukkuris in the area, there's no one around to hear her. She apologizes--not knowing what she's apologizing for, but thinking that if she apologizes, it'll make someone come help her. She calls out for sweet-sweets, but they're all shut up inside the nest. There's nothing for her to eat but Marisa's stinking, piss-drenched corpse. The energy she gains from that enables her to go on for a while longer, but eventually, she dies.
Meanwhile, in the nest, the happy, innocent babies wake up. They demand food, but no one brings it to them. As their hunger increases, they become short-tempered and begin fighting among themselves. Not one of them has the intelligence or the initiative to get up and go look for food. Eventually, only one little Reimu is left standing. She orders her lazy scum sisters to bring her some food, but of course, they're already dead. Like mother, like daughter.
Hours later, the hungry, exhausted little Reimu finally takes it upon herself to get out of bed and look for some food. Before long, she finds the storeroom. Through a crack in the door, she can see heaps of delicious food--but she can't move the rock that her parents put in the doorway to keep the little ones from snacking on the stockpile.
The author speculates that if her sisters were still alive and they all had worked together, they might have been able to move the rock. Without self-control, they might have gone hog-wild in the storeroom and ended up running out of food before spring came, but even so, it would have been more pleasant than Reimu's current situation.
Next, she decides to try going outside to look for food, but finds Mister's immovable wall in her way. She feebly shouts at it and hits it to no avail. Alone and helpless, Reimu whimpers for someone to let her take it easy. She realizes that her victory over her sisters was a misfortune, not a stroke of luck--at least they got to die without this prolonged suffering.
No one knows what happened to little Reimu. Perhaps she starved to death soon after. Perhaps she prolonged her life a little by eating her sisters' bean paste. Perhaps she found a way to kill herself. Only two truths are certain--little Reimu never lived to get out of the nest hole, and the food in the storeroom all withered, uneaten.
---
Meanwhile, Mister Mountain Climber has gotten a bit lost. Following the sound of clamoring voices, he stumbles across a Dosu Marisa and her clan declaring that they're going to raid the human village and take the mister vegetables that they believe are rightfully theirs. Dosuyukkuris can be dangerous, and it's better to avoid contact with wild creatures, so Mister intends to slip away quietly, but he sneezes, alerting the yukkuris to his presence. Awkwardly coming out of hiding, he greets them cheerfully. Ordinary humans can be dangerous, but their danger pales before this man--the clan's doom has been sealed.
The end.
....
Comments: First off, the story strongly implies that Mister didn't deliberately build an immovable wall to torment the yukkuris. He's more of an Ayazou-style well-meaning-but-clueless bumbler. In fact, the author, Tennen-aki, takes his name from his "tennen" (clueless, space cadet) protagonists.
Secondly, the ending confused me-how does meeting Mister ensure the clan's demise? I think what the author is going for is that Mister has magical comedy powers of cluelessness that bring about inadvertent yukkuri death and destruction wherever he goes (like the way Ayazou draws a cute little Reimu in a human hand, and we immediately jump to the conclusion that she's doomed). However, considering that they were about to attack a human village, I'd think the Dosu's clan was doomed whether or not they met Mister.
Oh, and thirdly, I didn't see any mention in the story of Mister's barrier actually looking like a face--I think that's just artistic license--fate/nature/the wall smiling smugly about the karmic retribution. The label "mystery technique" comes from the author's comment saying that it's a "secret" as to just how Mister was able to build such a strong wall.
Perhaps "innocent" invites too many positive connotations. Rather, I should say that they're unaware that their parents are dead.
they become short-tempered and begin fighting among themselves... Eventually, only one little Reimu is left standing
It's not merely a case of mild squabbling leading to accidental deaths--the babies are screaming "DIIIE" and trying to kill each other. Since they're all roughly the same age and same size, it's the most aggressive one, the first one to launch a serious attack, who ends up winning.
platina said: Secondly, the ending confused me-how does meeting Mister ensure the clan's demise? I think what the author is going for is that Mister has magical comedy powers of cluelessness that bring about inadvertent yukkuri death and destruction wherever he goes (like the way Ayazou draws a cute little Reimu in a human hand, and we immediately jump to the conclusion that she's doomed). However, considering that they were about to attack a human village, I'd think the Dosu's clan was doomed whether or not they met Mister.
Tennen-aki's anon is worse than ayazou's anons. Mister Mountain Climber is actually Mister Bean.
Explosion said: I find the implications of this intriguing. Yukkuri or at least scum/shitheads have no concept or understanding of what death and killing really means.
Maybe, but I see their behavior as stemming more from (scum) yukkuris' default assumption that everything in the world--humans, other yukkuris, inanimate objects--will do their bidding. Issuing orders to their dead family members isn't much different from ordering mister door to open or (to cite examples from other stories) ordering mister rain to stop or mister hot asphalt to let them take it easy.
A few more details from the story: --Reimu and Marisa have already successfully used their murder-and-steal strategy to survive one previous winter. --Cannibalism is not a new experience for Mother Reimu--it's mainly the stinky pee that makes eating Father Marisa's corpse so unpleasant for her. --I didn't make it clear, but the yukkuris who have to deal with an immovable door (Marisa, Reimu, little Reimu) all try both physical force and yelling at the door. --Near the end, when little Reimu is trying to get outside, the author speculates that the best approach might have been to try moving individual rocks to dismantle Mister's wall. [Although personally, I can imagine that backfiring and making the whole thing collapse in an avalanche on top of the yukkuri.]