anko1919
A Clan that ought to be able to Take it Very Easy
Summary:
A Chen, an Alice, and a Marisa return to their clan from a successful hunt. The narrator says that wild yukkuri clans may look peaceful, but the more you get to know them, the more problems you see.
Alice returns to the home that she has worked hard to furnish and decorate with city-sect coordination, but she is shocked to find everything broken and ruined by a Reimu who is now sleeping in her bed. The Reimu answers her rudely and says she was just taking it easy. Alice body-slams her and drives her out of her house. This Alice rarely resorts to violence, so that shows how furious she was.
Reimu storms off in a huff, saying she'll never come back and Alice will be sorry. Alice cries at the damage done to her beautiful home.
As Chen nears her home, she sees a group of Reimus noisily and messily wolfing down a pile of food. Being a yukkuri, she knows that it feels very easy to eat as much as you like, but she knows that it's foolish to do so--you may end up unable to take it easy in the future. Chen always puts part of her food away in storage for the future.
Going into her house, she sees the place ransacked and her stockpile of food gone! Chen asks the Reimus if it's her food that they're eating (expecting them to deny it), and to her surprise, they say yes as if nothing is wrong and ask her to give them more. On top of that, they insult her by calling her an uneasy yukkuri and decide to leave before her uneasiness rubs off on them. Chen is too shocked and hurt to do anything.
Marisa returns home to her mate Reimu, who complains about Marisa making her wait so long to eat. Marisa sighs, but her mate's behavior is nothing new--what really troubles her are their children, two fully-grown Reimus who still live at home because they can take it easy there. (The family's two Marisa children have already moved out and started households of their own.) The Reimus say that Marisa is an embarrassment to them, always out working instead of taking it easy.
Marisa wonders how her children got that way--she didn't discriminate between her Marisa and Reimu children. However, when father Marisa was away, mother Reimu spoiled the young Reimus. Furthermore, all their friends were "Yukkuri Supremacists" who believed in only taking it easy and who looked down on hard-working yukkuris. Nearly all the Reimus in the clan are Yukkuri Supremacists now.
The clan's leader Patchouli is beset by yukkuris, all complaining about the Reimus' behavior. They invade and damage others' homes, they take others' food and gobble it all up, they grow up but won't leave home, they sing at all hours of the night so others can't sleep, they ignore the clan's restrictions on refreshing and make too many babies.
How did the clan get this way? All yukkuris like to take it easy. That's why they work hard to improve their homes and their food stockpiles--work leads to greater easiness. However, if yukkuris didn't have to work, they wouldn't. Because this clan had many kindhearted yukkuris, they shared their food and their homes--just a little--with Reimus who were less competent and didn't have as much. Given the opportunity, the Reimus began to take advantage of the situation, and encouraged by each other, and unchecked by other yukkuris, Yukkuri Supremacy become the majority belief among Reimus, too deeply ingrained to easily remedy.
Things are getting worse day by day, and worst of all, the Reimus have ignored the clan's restrictions on refreshing (sometimes practically forcing other yukkuris to refresh). This clan has an agreement with the nearby human village, and all the Reimus' babies have put the clan over the population limit imposed by the humans. The humans will be coming to observe the clan soon, so they need to reduce the population before then.
Leader Patchouli thinks about banding the others together to drive the Reimus out by force, but since Reimus comprise half the clan, they would probably fight back and hurt some of the others. Plus, most of the other yukkuris are niceheads who'd be reluctant to resort to violence anyway. Just then, one yukkuri says she has a good idea...
Elsewhere, some Reimus are taking it easy, eating some food that just happened to be lying around (in someone else's home). They complain about hard it is, having to live surrounded by such uneasy yukkuris. Another Reimu comes up to the group, commiserates with them, and suggests that they start their own clan where they can take it easy without any interference from uneasy yukkuris--she already knows a good location. The Reimus like the idea, and agree to spread the word to the other Reimus.
Why did the Reimus agree to this reckless plan? It was because they didn't understand how the hard-working yukkuris enabled their lifestyle. These Reimus were a little different from true scum who manipulate and use others for their own gains--they simply had no awareness that they were taking advantage of others. They couldn't imagine what it truly would be like to have a clan of only themselves. Basically, they were worse than scum.
A few days later, all the Yukkuri-Supremacist Reimus follow their leader out of the clan. None of the other yukkuris try to stop them. The Reimus cry and moan about being tired and not being able to take it easy, but eventually, they reach a clearing in the forest. (It's actually not very far from the old clan, but since the Reimus don't go out hunting, they don't know that.)
The leader announces that this is their new Easy Place where they can all take it easy, and they all declare it their easy place. At last, they have a clan that can take it easy--there aren't any uneasy yukkuris, because all the members are Yukkuri-Supremacist Reimus!
---
...Three days later...
None of the Reimus can take it easy. There's nobody to gather food for them to eat, or make their homes comfortable, or refresh with them. And they're surrounded by uneasy yukkuris.
One of the Reimus decides she's had enough and is going home. She calls to the Leader Reimu to lead her home, but she's nowhere to be seen.
---
Back at the old clan, the yukkuris are thanking that "leader" Reimu for saving the clan.
Reimu was a wanderer who arrived one day and offered to help with their work in exchange for lodging. She helped with hunting and home-building, and she was particularly good at childcare, teaching children right from wrong and giving them knowledge they'd need to survive. Young Reimus who learned from her didn't become Yukkuri Supremacists. (Reimus who already had it ingrained into them were beyond help, though.) She soon became a valued member of the clan.
She told Leader Patchouli that after talking to the clan's Reimus, she had figured out that they weren't Reimus, they were Deibus. She explained that Deibus were yukkuris who brought unhappiness to everyone around them and finally to themselves, but didn't recognize that they themselves were at fault. If things stayed as they were, the entire clan would be destroyed, so Reimu would lead the Deibus to another place to start their own clan, then after letting them suffer for a while, she could go back and teach them the error of their ways. Reimu told Patchouli to leave everything to her.
With the Deibus gone, peace has descended upon the clan.
---
A week after the Deibus left, one of the Deibus is wandering uneasily in forest. She's starving and hurt, unaccustomed to traveling in the forest. She didn't think about _why_ the Reimu Clan couldn't take it easy, she just knew that it was uneasy and wanted to go back to her own clan so she could take it easy. She's lost, but she happens to cross paths with Alice, Marisa and Chen returning from the hunt again.
She eagerly tells them to take her back and let her take it easy (and be grateful to her for the privilege), but they coldly tell her that there's no place for Deibus with them--she should go take it easy with her own clan. Chen says that they can't have her following them back, so they're going to hurt her. They don't hurt her badly enough to kill her, but being a spoiled Deibu, she finds the pain hard to bear.
Why were Alice, Marisa, and Chen so violent and aggressive towards her? Life without Deibus was so much more comfortable than they had expected, so they attacked any Deibus who got too close to keep them from coming back. There also was an element of payback to it.
(After the hunters left that Deibu, she crawled around for two more days before dying of starvation and suffering, never understanding that all the easiness in her life had come from other yukkuris' work and effort.)
---
Wanderer Reimu comes to Patchouli, sadly reporting that the Deibu clan has self-destructed. Wanderer Reimu's plan had been that after experiencing hardship, the Deibus would easily see the error of their ways and be able to return to the old clan with a sense of gratitude. However, after just one week, the Deibu clan had perished. Some Deibus left and tried to go back to the old clan, but none made it (thanks in part to vigilantes like the hunters.)
Patchouli reassures her that it couldn't be helped. Wanderer Reimu was unable to save the Deibus, but she saved all the other yukkuris. Patchouli thanks her.
Wanderer Reimu says her work here is done, and sets off to find more Deibus and clans in need of help.
---
A human and his companion Patchouli[*] survey the remains of the Deibu clan. Some starved to death; some were killed and partially eaten by their own kind. Talking to both humans in the nearby village and the yukkuri clan's leader Patchouli, the man put together the story of what happened. The man admires the human-like intelligence of the Wanderer Reimu and hopes he can meet her someday.
[*]Characters from the author's previous stories, I think.
Illustration: post #26624