Practitioners forming strong emotional bonds with Oni?
So, I’ve had thoughts recently, and as usual I have nowhere else to turn for information but here.
Has there ever in history been a case of Oni and Practitioners forming lasting bonds as partners? If a hypothetical practitioner were seeking to get closer to an Oni who has been incredibly supportive to this point, what advice would you give them?
I don’t have anything to start the discussion with this week, as my knowledge on Oni is rather limited, but I hope we can still have a good time with the thought experiment I’ve provided.
Student Recess
Nolan woke up in a sticky, sweaty pile of garbage. At least it didn’t smell. He sat up, and saw that Bitey had curled up on top of his feet at the foot of the ‘bed’ and was sleeping like a kitten. He brushed the loose plastic scraps off his hair and his back, and tried to get a sense for how long he had been asleep. The lack of external lighting made that difficult.
He leaned over to grab his backpack, careful not to move his feet and wake his host. His phone was at the bottom of the bag, and it read ten am. He’d slept for about eight hours then, he guessed.
He laid there reading OMO on his phone, thinking about how well his plan was going. He had a sense of dread deep within him, that the other shoe would drop soon. The last time he had been this happy and secure about the practice- He didn’t want to think about it.
He trusted Bitey. She didn’t have anything over him, didn’t fear or distrust him, hadn’t heard of his slanderous reputation. He wasn’t sure what he wanted between them. Could a strong bond ever form between Practitioner and Oni? He hadn’t heard much about it, but he knew so little about Oni.
He posed the question to the forum. He didn’t really want advice, he couldn’t share enough about his own situation, but any useful anecdotes could sway his thinking in one direction or another. So far all he had gotten in the first half-hour was one response which didn’t particularly stir Nolan in any way. He didn’t have to decide any time soon, anyhow.
“C’mon. Get up.” He jostled her pudgy face and pulled out his legs from under her.
“Rabbit’s got kicks.” She mumbled, flopping onto her back.
“How do I get out of here?”
“Ummmmmm.” She flopped back onto her stomach. It seemed she was doing her best impression of a rotisserie chicken.
“Bitey, there is a way out, right?”
“What time is it? If it’s not bright out you can still get out of here.”
“Half past ten.”
“Ah shit. We slept in.”
“We? I was following your instructions to rest. You were the one who curled up and slept in!” He shouted. Being stuck inside this small workshop was not going to be pretty. There wasn’t even a bathroom!
“Keep your voice down, could’ja? We’ll have to take one of the back-doors. It shouldn’t be too hard to get you out. But first!”
She crawled on hands and knees to her main worktable, and a swiping hand pulled down the mask. It was complete, with roughly carved ornamentation and battered brass lining, and an elastic headband going around the back. The eyes had been carved out and the back face had a thick black felt lining, for cushioning and blocking view of his eyes through the eyeholes. Still proudly carved where the mask touched his forehead were the words ‘Majishins Rabits Mask’, now with a gold painted inlay.
“Swear yourself as the originator of this mask, and give it its power.”
“Will this even work? What words should I use?”
“Don’t worry about that. Just keep your intentions pure, and we can glance over the fact you’re still just a human.”
He sat cross legged, in this tiny crack hollowed out of the Abyss, and searched for the words.
“I am Magician’s Rabbit. It may seem that the man holding the hat has all the power, but I am the one with the ability to vanish into thin air. By the luck of my foot and the moon in my belly, I swear my power will be held forever by this mask.”
The strength of the connection pulled from his Self and laid into the mask was enough to make his hair stand on end.
“Well done big rabbit. Put your mask on while I open up the back-door.”
The mask fit perfectly against his face, with hollowed voids fitting his rather large nose and cheekbones. His mouth lingered on the boundary, with his top lip obscured but his bottom lip revealed. The elastic headband kept the mask snug to his face. The eyeholes lined up and provided clear and wide vision.
“Looking good, Magician’s Rabbit.” The way she said Rabbit reminded him of Elmer Fudd.
“So, where to?”
“Just a quick jaunt through the warrens tunnels.”
“I thought we weren’t in the warrens.”
“We’re not. Warrens tunnels connect to all kinds of realms, if you know how to crack ‘em open and navigate them.”
So they were going to go through an unexplored random tunnel connected directly to the filthiest land imaginable, and just hope to emerge somewhere safe on the surface?
Even with his face hidden, his hesitation was unmistakable.
“I know it’s not great, Rabbit, but I need to eat and you need to do whatever it is you do, so let’s get going.” She zipped her hood on and got into a feral crouch.
“Okay. I’m good. Cool. You lead the way.”
“Stay close, I won’t come back for you if you miss the openings.” Her voice was bitter and displeased. Had he done something wrong?
She swung her hand at the wall, and lodged a chisel into the rocky, claylike dirt. Had she had that chisel in her sleeve the whole time? She yanked with tremendous force, and her entire body inflated with muscles and spines that pressed into the surface of her hoodie, making it look like it was painted onto her back. The chisel dislodged a huge amount of clay and rocks, which shifted and fell into the earth, making a tight tunnel that spilled soil from all sides.
“Go!” She yelled, leaping in and crawling on all fours.
He did his best to keep up, not letting his eyes lose sight of Bitey for even a moment. As they moved, she seemed to pick her path through the splitting intersections at random. He trusted that she knew the way. Soon enough the tunnels got big enough for her to run upright and him to run at a steep crouch. The filth was worse in these tunnels, but at least his face wasn’t stuck right into the mysterious puddles of bile.
“Big Jump!” She yelled out, before dropping out of sight.
“Big Jump?” He called ahead. Right where she had slipped away was a hole in the ground. He hesitated for a moment. He was a Rabbit, the tunnels of the Warrens were his homeground. The words felt empty, but he took all the courage he could from them and plummeted.
He felt the hole expanding around him as he fell, and he braced for a heavy impact. He hit the stagnant water toe first. He expected to sink to the bottom with his momentum, or maybe die on impact due to surface tension. Instead he immediately shot out of the water with all of his momentum, and landed in another pile of scrap metal.
“Shit.” He rubbed at his back, which took the brunt of the impact. He wished he knew healing magic. Was that even a field of magic? He didn’t remember hearing about healing mages. The Clerics mentioned by his teacher were more the heavenly smiting kind. Maybe a kind druid would give him some goodberries.
He breathed in, and it still smelled foul, but the fresh spring air lingered in the breeze as well. He opened his eyes, and it was bright out. Very bright. He winced. Did he have to move? He could have a spinal fracture, and moving would make it worse.
He was slapped in the face.
“Get UP! What took you so long we’re not done running you PEABRAIN!”
He took a few more breaths and slowly rose to his feet. “We’re not out yet?”
“Out of the frying pan maybe!”
“And into the fire?”
“And into the WE NEED TO GO NOW!” She shrieked loud enough to leave his ears ringing.
He got moving, and a sense of his surroundings. He was mostly surrounded by crushed cars and other scrap metal. A landfill? Made sense from what he knew about goblins. The climate and the trees he could see in the distance were familiar enough to make him think they were still on the island.
So why were they still running?
“Stop right there! INTRUDERS! INTRUDERS!” A person with a voice like a broken squeaky toy screamed.
From the cracks and corners of the scrapyard goblins started emerging. These were the goblins he was familiar with. Incredibly varied bodies and heads, only similar in their offputting nature. The biggest threat seemed to be one the same size as Bitey, who had a mouth half the size of his head that he filled with as many knives as he could, and filled in the cracks with six inch nails.
“Split up! I know how to take ‘em!” She said, before lunging straight at the knife mouth. A bulging arm delivered a straight right punch that sent him flying ten feet back.
Okay. She could make it for now. He would do his best to prepare a flank, once he was out of immediate danger. He slipped back and moved quietly, giving his words to the spirits.
“I swear I will not abandon Bite Maker to whatever fate these goblins have in store for her. Give me silent passage and I will return with a weapon to turn the tides.”
His footsteps found a new rhythm, and he stepped between the clattering metal. He kept moving until he found a relatively clean spot to hunker down. He shed his dirtiest outer layers and made a quick circle around himself with them. That would hopefully mask his presence from the smallest and stupidest ones. He checked through for whatever he could use, and was running up short. He had spent everything last night, and was dead out of luck.
He used his sight on the scrapheap, and pushed through the eye strain inducing technocolour fields to try and see what was still valuable. Because if something was worth anything in a scrapheap, it had to be clean and usable.
There, halfway sunken into the nearest pile, was a stainless steel frying pan. He stepped out of his circle of protection, and took his weapon. He took off his undershirt and wiped off the surface grime from the pan. The shirt filled the thinnest point of his circle, and he had something hopefully usable on the goblins.
He ran back to where he came from, and saw that Bite Maker was surrounded. She was clearly winded, that muscle inflation thing had to expend a lot of energy. Worst of all, a teenage man stood facing away from him at the top of a pile, next to him was a tall goblin that when squatting had its head at an equal height to the teen’s.
“Don’t let up! She will be a fine addition to our collection, right lads!” The goblins placed scraps of filthy metal down, and other goblins carefully splashed away the protective layer of filth with bottles of water. They were binding her.
Bitey clearly had some success breaking the initial bindings, she now swung a rubber hose above her head, but she needed his help.
He rushed up behind the commanding teenager, and swung around his frying pan right as the guy turned around. The lanky goblin playing bodyguard blocked the pan before it could make impact. The force clearly had some effect on the goblin though, and saw its arms snap under the impact.
“Who do we have here!” The goblin leader asked.
“I’m Magician’s Rabbit. We were only passing through. Let us go and hope to never see each other again.”
Magician’s Rabbit ducked down from the retaliatory strike from the goblin, and swung wide towards the goblin leader.
“Do you hear this idiot boys? He says they were only passing through, but they shed first blood, in the prince’s land!”
He was a goblin prince. From what he could remember, which was not very much seeing as goblins struggled to get into the heart of town, goblin princes were practitioners who… commanded goblins. His mind was throwing him a blank. No countermeasures, no nothing.
He threw the pan at the head of the lanky goblin, and headbutted the goblin prince. His mask was tough, and the metal edge had enough sharp edges to draw blood, or so he hoped. The frying pan ricocheted off the goblin’s head and landed close to Bite Maker.
At least now the goblins were no longer being instructed on the binding, and some even stopped moving entirely when out of sight of their master. Bite Maker took the moment of respite and started working. She bit off the end of the hose and tied the rubber through the hanging hole on the pan. With her improvised flail, she could deliver strong strikes with metal that many goblins were very weak to.
“Do I have to do everything for you bloody idiots!” The goblin prince stepped down to join the goblins fighting Bite Maker. “Choke the practitioner, make sure he can’t say anything.”
Magician’s Rabbit was in a much worse spot. He had lost his footing, and the broken armed goblin was strangling him. The goblin prince reached the ground just in time to see Bite Maker goad some of his larger goblins into the circle. She slipped out and closed the circle behind her. She ran away, straight outta there.
“You damned fools! Why do I even let you idiots breathe my air!” He bent down and opened the circle, but he didn’t see Bite Maker slip around behind him.
She pulled the hose tight around his neck, forming a full loop around his head.
“Tell them to stand down!” She yelled into his ear, as he clawed at her hood and hose.
“FFFFuck-” He let out the strained sound, cut off by the tightening of his noose.
“Tell them to stand down you bastard!”
Magician’s Rabbit could barely follow what was happening himself. It looked like the biggest goblins were testing to see if the barrier had really broken. Maybe they were stepping through?
His vision faded to darkness as all blood and oxygen eluded him.
He was out cold, but he did not dream.
Student Competition
The sun was still high in the sky when Nolan roused. His neck was sore from the death grip the goblin had around him, and his back was still aching from his harsh landing earlier.
He went to rub at his sore muscles, but his hands were bound behind his back. Did Bitey lose her fight? At least he was still alive, and he had to hope the same was the case for her. He was lying on the ground where he went out cold, nobody had moved him, only bound him together with a large amount of duct tape that ran from his fingers to his toes, pressing them together awkwardly and preventing him from getting any room to slip out.
Goblins surrounded him and were placing heavy objects onto his chest.
“Bite Maker? You there?” The words were pressed out of him as his lungs fought the weight of the metal pile.
“You’re up? Shit. Okay, games on, ceasefire! I don’t touch Travis and you guys don’t touch Rabbit!” Her voice was behind him, and he couldn’t maneuver himself to see what she was doing. The goblins around him stepped back and dropped whatever they were holding.
“What game?”
“A competition!” One of the goblins said the moment the words had left Nolan’s mouth.
“If you get out of your binding first we get to leave!” Bitey yelled.
“Little help?”
“You have to do this on your own, Magician’s Rabbit. If I help you they can help him. Get going!”
Nolan wiggled against the ground, but duct tape covered all of his joints and some kind of glue was clearly sticking him to the ground as well. His bare chest was covered by the stuff. It was very swampy underneath all the tape, sweat building under the hot sun.
He saved his energy and shut up for the time being.
He flexed his hands, but he couldn’t even budge a finger. He tried a whole body flex, extending out to stretch as much wiggle room as possible, but he was stuck.
“Pwah! Fuck you you stupid hoodie wearing slag! I’ll shove these ropes straight through you and hang you from the ceiling!” The goblin prince, apparently named Travis, yelled.
Travis had already broken at least one binding then. Nolan was still right where he was when he was unconscious. Maybe a bit sweatier. He felt the sweat building into a layer between him and the duct tape.
What could he do? The heat and lack of water was already draining him of strength, and the sharp metal pressing down on him would suffocate him before he could wear down his bindings.
Sharp metal. He twisted his neck, the one part of his head that was free, and leaned forward to bite onto some small piece of metal. He couldn’t reach it, everything placed that low on the pile was clearly the heaviest things they could find, and whatever was small and sharp was added to the top of the pile as an afterthought.
The heat was really getting to him, and he gasped for breath. The movement of his chest was able to slide beneath the duct tape, which lost the stickiness to all the building sweat. He forced himself to hyperventilate. His head was dizzying, but the motion shook the pile on top of him enough to shake a few nails off the top.
He bit down on the metal nail, and got a tight grip with a locked jaw. He angled his neck and pushed into the duct tape with the nail, pressing through and poking into his skin. A perforation. Now he just had to repeat as many times as he could until he could start to rip it apart.
He couldn’t see how fast Travis was working through his bindings, but he could hear as the goblin prince gnawed at whatever Bitey had him tied up in. He growled like a feral dog and spat out every couple of seconds.
Nolan’s progress was comparatively glacial. He had made a few tiny holes right around his collarbone, and he let his head drop and shoulders pull back. It ripped, barely. He could lift his shoulder to his mouth now, and poke holes down below his right armpit.
He gasped for air through his nose, and slowly cut out his upper right arm.
He had it freed over the next excruciatingly slow minutes. Puncture, pull, reposition, repeat.
He slipped his arm up through the hole he made, and got his elbow out to open air. He had enough space to apply leverage now. He pressed his elbow against the ground and levered his body sideways.
He pushed, and the sharp metal ground pushed into his elbow, but he was able to get onto his side, sending much of the piled weight on him to the ground. He could take in much deeper breaths now.
With a deep breath and a flex of his arm, he stretched it out of the hole, and had his right arm available to use.
He was frantic in pulling off the rest of the tape. He didn’t hesitate even as it pulled out body hair with it, where it still stuck down.
He was battered, bruised, tired and gasping, but he had won.
Travis was still in a complicated net of rubber hose and rope, pulling his feet up to his elbows behind his back.
“Victory goes to the Magician’s Rabbit!” a goblin yelled.
“Fine! Free me from this, lads. You two are free to go.” Travis said.
“That wasn’t in the deal, practitioner. We said the goblins couldn’t interfere if I didn’t help Rabbit. Since he got out on his own, you have to get out on your own!”
The goblins that had run down to free their master suddenly stopped. They knew she was right.
Nolan was beat, and didn’t want to think about any of this anymore. He just gathered his things and wiped his sweat off with the cleanest part of his undershirt.
He and Bitey walked in silence down the dusty road out of the scrapyard. He needed a shower. Did he even have an apartment anymore? He checked his phone. The first thing he saw was that he was apparently in Langford, an hour out of town by bus. Then he opened the news app.
There he was, on the front page of the website. “Police searching for house invader wearing a stolen Royal BC Museum mask.” He didn’t want to read the article, yet. His body was bruised enough, he didn’t want to put his ego through the same thing.
He swapped to the OMO tab. He had gotten a few more responses to his Oni question. He hesitantly opened them. He had gotten six new comments, but only two stuck out to him.
One was from an Oni on the board, named ~Lah. She said that Oni were not against Practitioners, but against the systems of abuse and oppression systemic to the Practice. She was biased, sure, but who wasn’t on a board like this? Everyone had something to gain or lose in the Oni conflicts.
The other post was from a practitioner, who was deeply against the Oni. Oni had killed her husband and her brother, and she said that to the Oni, practitioners were only targets or tools. She offered him assistance in escaping his situation, but her final words soured the message. “You have a legacy that must be better than this.”
What did she know of his legacy? She had a husband and brother who practiced as well. Did she assume that every practitioner was surrounded by family and partners who knew of this world and would protect them? His legacy was nothing. He had abandoned it far before awakening, and had no interest in continuing anything of the sort.
The choice was clearer than ever now. Bitey had protected him. She walked alongside him as an equal. She had been the best thing that had ever happened to him.
His phone buzzed. He had been messaged by one of his old high-school magic club buds.
“Dude, was this really you?” attached to the text was a link to a new article.
‘Police identify suspect in museum robbery and house invasion, raid downtown apartment.’
“Fuck!” Nolan’s voice was full of sorrow.
He pulled off his mask and fell to his knees.
“Whoa! Are you okay? What’s up!” Bitey turned around and put out her hands to catch him, but he didn’t move any further.
“I don’t-” The words were caught in his throat, all the emotions built up over the past few nights collapsing in on him.
He held the mask tight in his hands.
“It’s so stupid. Why do I even care about them?”
“About who? We have to keep moving, Big Rabbit, I don’t want to be spotted out here in broad daylight.”
“The police raided my apartment. They’ve probably taken everything in as evidence.”
He gasped in the dry spring air.
“They’ve gotten my magic cards!” His arms fell to his sides, and the mask slipped from his fingers and rolled in the dirt road.
“Oh.” Bitey stood in front of him, eye level, though he couldn’t see her eyes through the fabric.
He leaned forward and wrapped his arms around her. Her body was strange to the touch, a combination of hard lumps and pokey extrusions over a soft torso and arms. He hugged her tight, and she hugged him back.
“It’s okay. You don’t need them. You’re strong now.”
His breathing slowed, and he melted into the soft strokes she gave to his exposed back. Her claws dulled by the long sleeves she patted him through.
“Let’s go.” She said.
He picked the mask up from the dirt and put it back over his face.
“We should cut through the woods, we stick out on this road.” He suggested.
The pair started walking, neither quite sure where their destination would be. They both needed food and water badly, and Nolan still really wanted that shower. He could also dye his hair, try and cut it and hide his look. That could wait until the mask was off for the day though.
They just had to make it to the Full Flower Moon. Any preparation for then was a bonus.
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