Afterword
(Table of Contents)
Well, nobody asked for this (or asked anything), but this blog is sort of a diary as well as a way that I can put thoughts out for others to read, so I’m still going to write this for myself.
I wrote that whole long story for myself, too, so that’s appropriate, right? Here are some thoughts on it.
Who are these characters, anyway?
Daisuke was originally from a pen & paper RPG I started playing with some friends back around 2005 or so. He made it to the second-highest level possible in the game before the guy running the game got too burned out on the campaign to continue it, so we all just sort of decided as a group what the ending was going to be, and he moved on to a different campaign.
Years passed, and, in another campaign he was doing, one in the modern day, I asked if I could play as Daisuke’s daughter from the previous campaign, reincarnated into the modern world along with her parents. None of them had any memories of their previous lives, but there were certain echoes of them in their backstories that my friend and I both found really amusing.
For example, in the original campaign, the party assassinated the emperor’s son based on intelligence gathered by the clan to which Daisuke and one other party member belonged (the other party members came from different clans). This was a mistake–the intelligence was faulty, and, though we had been given clues that it was, we didn’t follow up on those clues enough and went through with the assassination anyway. This led to a prolonged series of adventures where the party had to regain the empire’s trust enough to be allowed to live and continue their adventures.
Don’t worry about the imperial line: the emperor had lots of sons. This was just one of them. It was fine. Everything was fine.
So in the modern day, Daisuke, instead of the fourth son of a feudal lord, was the fourth son of the head of a major corporation, and instead of becoming a samurai, he became a national kendo champion. That is, until he accidentally broke the wrist of a young up-and-coming kendo star whose father was in charge of an even larger conglomerate than Daisuke’s own father, and who was known colloquially as the prince of kendo. For assassinating the prince like that, Daisuke was shamed into retiring from kendo, but he still gave his daughter private lessons. It was that kind of thing.
The campaign ended before it began for me. I came up with Mikoto’s name, stats, character sheet and backstory, but never got to play her. I moved away and went to college, instead.
Years passed, and I found myself running a campaign with some but not all of the friends from the original campaign. In that campaign, the party wanted to meet with the heads, or capital-K Kings, of different afterlife planes in order to seal the mortal world away from the interference of various deities who kept fucking things up for the mortals who just wanted to live their lives.
Which was a bummer for me, because I’d put a lot of time and effort into those various gods, but hey. It’s what the players wanted, and sometimes, as a GM, you have to accept that the players might not like the things you put into the game world. They wanted to play a bunch of humanists (though they weren’t all humans), and I was willing to let them.
I set things up so that there were nine distinct planes, one for each of the 9 basic alignments from old-school D&D: Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic on one axis, and Good, Neutral, and Evil on the other. Arrange them in a 3x3 grid, with Lawful Good in the upper-left corner and Chaotic Evil in the lower right.
As a rule, the four Kings in the corners (Lawful Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Evil, Chaotic Evil) were more powerful than the ones in the middle of the four sides (Lawful Neutral, Neutral Good, Neutral Evil, Chaotic Neutral). However, the Neutral Neutral, or True Neutral, King was the most powerful of them all, was known as The Judge, and had oversight over all nine of the planes.
Daisuke, along with the friend mentioned in Sixteen, was one of the Kings of the Chaotic Neutral plane. It was the only plane with two Kings, because the two of them together were only as strong as one of the Kings of any other plane.
Daisuke never talked about the family he left behind when the family found him. He never even told them his name. He was the Red King. His friend was the Gold King. Those were the names they’d gone by for untold centuries in what they believed to be Hell, and they had no use for other names.
Still, the party needed to track down Daisuke’s body to bring him and the Gold King (I THINK his name was Kazuma, but the real-life player who played him actually had the surname King, and we usually called the character that even though the player was often absent) back to life as part of a larger plan. They only stayed alive briefly before returning to Hell. They knew better than to stick around.
More years passed.
I always thought of Daisuke as being almost sociopathic. He had so little attachment to his family. He’d taught his daughter out of obligation, died, gone to Hell, found his dead friend, and never given his wife and child a second thought.
In writing this story, I changed that. I changed it so that Daisuke was someone who went to Hell with a smile on his face and a song in his heart, because he knew that he and his daughter would see each other again.
And they did.
How did Daisuke originally die?
He was punched by a giant golem-like monster made of metal really, really hard, so hard that it knocked off nearly half of his max HP, and he was already injured enough that he went from alive to fully dead in one hit. Simple as that. Bad luck on a dice roll. He shouldn’t have entered that fight with such heavy injuries. That was my fault. A poor decision made by me.
What’s up with all of Daisuke’s scars?
Before I started playing with that group, I had an old AD&D book called Player’s Option: Combat & Tactics that was loaded with an absurd number of charts and tables that nobody in their right mind would ever find fun or worth using. One of the charts in it was on critical hits: instead of the usual damage multiplier, you could roll several more dice, consult a multi-page table, and determine where the critically hit creature was hit and what happened to it. For fun and no other reason, I asked the GM running the campaign if we could consult that table whenever Daisuke was critically hit to determine what kind of scar he’d get from the injury. One of the first scars he got was when an oni spit molten copper at him, and the table said that he was hit directly in the eye and blinded.
Since it was purely for funsies, Daisuke was not blinded, but he did get a scar on his face.
If he was ever magically healed back to full health, the injuries were fully healed, and he wouldn’t get a scar. I would get angry when that happened, and insist that Daisuke be allowed to heal naturally so that he’d get a scar. He got many scars. During one mission, he was poisoned so many times through various traps and weapons wielded by the enemies that the party encountered (who fucking LOVED poison) that every single one of his stats was damaged to the point where he had penalties on everything he did. The poison wasn’t ever purged from his body. The party’s healer, Daisuke’s future brother-in-law and Mikoto’s uncle, used his magic to restore Daisuke’s stats, but not to cure the poison. This led to Daisuke having a deathly pallor and gray eyes, because his sickly complexion was never cured.
The final scar on his character sheet, received when he was critically hit by that iron defender, landed on his stomach. I wrote “No Torso” on his character sheet to reflect the newest scar, and that was the end of that.
Daisuke was reincarnated, but the way reincarnation worked in that system was that someone else in the world “awakened” to the destiny carried by the deceased character and inherited their stats, meaning Daisuke got a new body to inhabit which belonged to one of his distant cousins. Normally, the deceased character’s spirit wouldn’t actually possess the new character, but Daisuke was again an exception to this. Daisuke never did get over the guilt caused by the fact that he basically piloted his cousin’s body for a year or so and led him to an early grave, because Daisuke wound up dying a second time.
Daisuke’s third shot at life was given to him by a necromancer that the party had encountered who was able to use some of Daisuke’s original genetic material to create a clone body for him, which his spirit inhabited.
You might think that a clone body wouldn’t have the scars that his original body had. You’d be right. Daisuke had to meticulously give himself all of those scars again. He had to pour molten copper onto his own face, poison himself, and so on, in order to maintain the lie that most of the world thought to be fact: that he had never died to begin with.
You might think that’d be pretty difficult, considering the variety of scars he had. You’d be right about that, too, but it’s best not to dwell on the details of how he gave himself bite marks on his leg or claw marks on one arm and chain marks on the other.
You might also think that people would have known something was up when he spent that year piloting his cousin’s body. You’d be wrong about that. Daisuke’s clan really did typically wear masks, and he also typically wore a helmet because he was a samurai, so very few people ever saw his face, and those few people still would have never seen both his face and his cousin’s face to be able to do a comparison and see that something was amiss.
As the Red King, Daisuke had all of the scars that he had at the time of his original death.
You might think that Daisuke was dishonest with Mikoto when he talked about his scars if those were recreations of his original scars and not the actual original scars. All I can say to that is that Daisuke obviously disagrees, and thinks that what he said was totally honest. He really did get those scars the way he said he did. He just also had to put them back onto his body after his entire body was replaced via necromancy, and didn’t think that part was important enough to include, despite his vow to Mikoto during their first lesson about how he’d never hide things from her or withhold the whole truth.
Sorry if that seems like a plothole!
Why did Daisuke go where he did when he died?
Per the rules of the original campaign in which Daisuke lived and died, those who lived lives of violence went to an afterlife of violence. It was described as an eternal battlefield where the damned souls would kill and be killed countless times until they’d worked off their karma and be allowed back into the big cosmic spinning wheel or whatever and reincarnated.
No matter what Daisuke did during his second and third attempts at life, he was going to go back to that Hell. He’d gotten his sentence, and the gods weren’t going to change it just because he mended his ways later.
What was the deal with the Gold King?
Kazuma, the Gold King, was the closest thing Daisuke had to a best friend.
The player, King, created Kazuma and then had to stop playing with us because of his job and other obligations, only returning to play the character a few more times across the two or three years that the campaign ran. So we came up with a lot of joke explanations for his character.
He was built around hitting hard: as hard as possible. He and Daisuke were both deadly, don’t misunderstand. But Daisuke was deadly in the way that a venomous snake or spider or scorpion is deadly. Kazuma was deadly the way that a charging bull or a lion is deadly. You should be careful around both, but, given the choice of which of them is going to be waiting for you in the next room, pick Daisuke. He’s not likely to kill you if you can keep an eye on him. Kazuma will kill you whether you’re paying attention or not.
Since King was rarely there, Kazuma never spoke. Since Kazuma’s weakest stat was linked to his character’s perception skill, and he had no other abilities to boost it, we joked that he wore a helmet that completely covered his eyes and ears to “give his opponents a fair chance.”
As the Gold King, this became a superpower of his. He could sense the locations of everything around him within a bubble of 120 or so feet with perfect accuracy, but that bubble was his entire universe. He couldn’t read minds or speak any languages, but he could understand people’s intentions perfectly.
That’s what led to some of the jokes in Sixteen in the story. He really did carry a heavier sword than Daisuke, and he really did wear a helmet that covered his eyes.
When Daisuke found him in Hell, the two teamed up and fought side by side until they ran the place. They imposed a small amount of order in the anarchy together, for as long as they were both there.
Daisuke’s hat
Daisuke’s wide hat is mentioned a couple of times. This is because he is worried about the sun and moon seeing him. They exist as physical representations of the gods, and the gods can literally see him through the sun and moon. Since he’s supposed to have died, he is worried that the sun or the moon might see him and strike him dead to correct the mistake.
He’s allowed to live, but the gods might forget, you know? He doesn’t want to risk it, so he never exposes his skin to the direct rays of the sun or the moon.
Daisuke’s mask
Daisuke’s mask is purely worn out of habit after Mikoto is born. He doesn’t need it. He just likes it.
Mikoto is grossed out by his face in Eight because he was gone for so much of her early life that she still isn’t used to it.
She wonders if he wears it to bed, the joke being that she wonders if her mom is willing to have sex with a guy whose face is that gross. She finds out two years later that he does wear a mask when he sleeps.
So… Does his wife make him wear it? No, of course not. She’s seen grosser people since she knows healing magic and had to heal a lot of injuries back when the world was under threat, for one. For another, it’s dark at night. She can’t see him. Third, she’s used to how her husband looks.
And if you think Daisuke’s unwilling to remove his mask to smooch his wife (or do other things), you’re a fool! He just feels more comfortable wearing a mask than he does not wearing one. But I still threw in the line in Ten because I thought it was funny to imagine Mikoto thinking that her mom made him wear it to bed after all.
What’s the story on Mikoto?
I mentioned before that there were no resurrections in the campaign where Daisuke was created. The rule was that you could be reincarnated as someone else, but that only lasted until your destiny was fulfilled. After that, you’d go back to being dead, and your new body’s original owner’s destiny would kick back in.
Daisuke didn’t like that. He wanted to cheat death. So he made a deal with the gods that his unfinished business wasn’t saving the world, it was raising a child to whom he could pass his ancestral sword.
Daisuke’s name, 大助, uses kanji that literally mean “big” and “help.” It’s a real name, and not a particularly unusual one. I chose the name Daisuke because it was the default name of the main character from an old dating sim called True Love, which was the oldest eroge I’d ever played at the time I created Daisuke, and I thought that it would be funny to name him that. I still do.
Mikoto’s name, 美琴, uses kanji that literally mean “beautiful” and, um, “koto,” a koto being a stringed instrument. This is nothing less than a triple pun, and I’ve been very proud of it for over ten years. First, it references the idea that she is an “instrument” of the gods, a tool that Daisuke is using to prolong his own life. Second, the first two syllables, “Miko,” is a reference to Shinto shrine maidens which are called Miko. Third, Miko, spelled just like the shrine maidens, 巫女, is also the name of the main character of La Blue Girl, an adult anime that I’ve actually never seen. I only know it from reputation. So Daisuke and Mikoto are both at least partially named after erotic animated characters from 1990′s Japan.
I am sorry if the answer disappoints you, but I have no regrets.
Why Daisuke is bitter about saving the world
Daisuke was twenty-two years old when the campaign began. He was one of several new characters joining the party, although the campaign had been going for a year or so before I started playing. The thing was, the party all died! It was a total party wipe! Only one character survived, a rogue (ninja) from the same clan as Daisuke. Daisuke volunteered to help that ninja, and became the second member of the second party that was going off to fight off a rather vague threat from a shadowy group that was hell-bent on destroying the empire and plunging the world into darkness and death and destruction and summoning demons and monsters to do it.
All of what Daisuke says in the story is true: he became a samurai to win his father’s respect and to gain glory and honor in battle for his clan. What he doesn’t talk about is that his clan was known throughout the empire for its underhandedness, its sneakiness, and its spycraft. Daisuke’s dad allowed Daisuke to become a samurai, and to go off on the adventure that he did, because it meant Daisuke became another pair of eyes and ears for his father to use to gain information for his own ends.
Daisuke was allowed to go because he was the right combination of useful, capable, and expendable. He did not know this. He thought that he was allowed to go because he was just that good, and that trusted. His oldest brother was a better warrior, but his oldest brother was not expendable, and not foolish enough to be used like Daisuke was used.
Daisuke never forgave his father for using him that way, and it didn’t really hurt him that much to throw away his family name. He was eager to do it. It was why he proposed so often to so many women, which was a thing that he really did do during the campaign.
He first proposed to Mikoto’s mother when he was twenty-three. I don’t know how old she was, but probably not far off from that age. Let’s assume she was also twenty-three. He then died for the first time and spent a year in his cousin’s body, but got his clone body back and the campaign ended when he was twenty-four. He immediately got married, got his wife pregnant, and Mikoto was born when he was twenty-five.
He was largely absent from Mikoto’s life until she was five years old. During the six years between the end of the campaign and Mikoto’s fifth birthday, Daisuke was still riding high on the reputation he’d earned as a hero. That reputation faded as time went by, but it was enough for a while that Mikoto still thought of him as a legendary hero.
In reality, Daisuke spent the first five years of his daughter’s life traveling around and studying under every sword master he could find so that he could prolong his life. He had to learn as much he could so that he could teach his daughter as much he could, and therefore not die. It was a cowardly move on his part.
In Twelve, Daisuke laughs at a joke that Mikoto doesn’t get about how he is sitting in a little boat with his daughter and never had a son. Daisuke was raised in a family where the patriarchal line was everything. A man’s duty to his family was to have sons to continue the family. Daisuke did not do this. He found that very funny, because it was, to him, a big “fuck you” to his own dad. A way he could slow down his dad’s legacy. He didn’t want to have a son who could look back at Daisuke’s dad and say “That’s my granddad, lord of his clan, what a hero, what a guy, I want to be like him.” That thought turned Daisuke’s stomach, and so, in having a daughter instead, one who would take that store-bought sword that he’d gotten from his dad, he defied his dad, and that was the best thing in the world.
Daisuke’s lies explained
When Mikoto is seven years old, Daisuke tells her that he is only going to teach her how to use a sword. He is specifically teaching her the way of his own clan. Two chapters later, he tells her, very seriously, that he is going to teach her how to slit the throats of people while they sleep or how to sneak up behind them and kill them without being heard.
This is because Daisuke has changed his mind, not because he was lying when she was seven. When she was seven, he really did just want to teach her kendo and iaijutsu. But as she got a little bit older, and started wanting to learn other ways of fighting on her own, he decided to branch out and start teaching her other things, too. He thought that it would make her stronger and more resilient. Instead, when she was ten, he realized that it made her paranoid and afraid to sleep at night. This was a major turning point for him.
When she turned down his offer to cuddle with him that night, he knew that his relationship with her was forever damaged. She would never again be his little girl, someone for him to comfort when she was scared. That broke his heart. He had fucked up at being a dad, and spent the next eight years doing his best to make up for it. To hear him tell it at the end of Eighteen, he failed, and almost went to his death filled with regret. The final conversation ends the way it does, and Daisuke dies without regrets after all.
Daisuke’s early life explained
The only thing I wanted to touch on here that is only briefly mentioned is the implication that Daisuke used to frequent brothels in Fifteen, when he says that a young man in his hometown could purchase the company of a woman for one night at a time, then cuts off Mikoto as she’s about to ask about that.
When Daisuke first became a samurai, one of his older brothers (not the oldest) took him to the biggest, fanciest, most famous brothel in the clan’s territory and paid the fee to get Daisuke a night to celebrate. That was how Daisuke lost his virginity.
His brother had an ulterior motive: he had blackmail material on his younger brother now. That’s the real reason for the brothels and drug dens being allowed to operate: Daisuke’s father, the lord of the clan, relied on the detailed records kept by those various businesses so that he could blackmail any visiting dignitaries or officials from other clans. Sex workers and drug dealers made good spies, so he let them operate on the condition that they all, if you worked your way up the chain enough, worked for him.
Daisuke didn’t consider it to be blackmail material at all, and taunted his older brother about it, saying to go ahead and tell everyone in the world that he’d just paid to get his little brother laid. It never bothered him.
Well, until he was forty years old, and his fifteen-year-old daughter was about to make him tell the story. Then he was suddenly quite embarrassed about the whole thing.
Daisuke’s swordsmanship
As a player character in the campaign he was originally from, Daisuke wasn’t really that spectacular of a swordsman. However, by the end of the campaign, he was at the second-highest level a mortal could reach, and nobody else alive at the time was at the highest level. Kazuma was already dead, the other party members were the same level as him, and he was the only one of them who was a samurai. One, a fighter, used a warhammer to fight, and could probably have given Daisuke a serious run for his money in a fair fight. But it meant Daisuke was the best swordsman in the world even then, even though he shouldn’t have been, and he knew it. There were stronger styles out there than his.
His style, from a rules perspective, started out with drawing his sword and using an iaijutsu attack as an opener to deal bonus damage. He could also do bonus damage to an opponent from behind or who was caught unawares, a technique unique to his clan that functions similarly to sneak attack or backstab techniques used by rogues in all kinds of games. He also had bonuses on attempts to disarm opponents, and, if he could disarm an opponent, got a bonus attack on them as though they were unaware, dealing extra damage. So his ideal fight was one where he would draw his sword, knock the opponent’s weapon out of their hands, and then cut them down with his next swing. It was vicious, and showy, and relied on brute strength.
He grew to hate it.
Daisuke’s duel with his oldest brother
Daisuke references the time he fought and defeated his older brother twice: once in Ten, and again in Thirteen. The first time, he says that he won by being smarter than his brother, and the second time, he says that he won by being sneaky and dishonorable.
Daisuke’s brother was the clan’s Champion, a title that gave him the right to wield a legendary sword that only the Champion was allowed to have. Daisuke wanted that title, though he didn’t really care much about the sword. He wound up having to give the sword back to his brother almost immediately, because he went on an adventure that would almost certainly kill him, and the sword could potentially be lost if that happened. The adventure did kill him. His sword, the one his father had given him, was not lost.
So what was the duel?
The duel was an iaijutsu contest: Daisuke and his brother stood facing each other, swords sheathed, and, like old West gunfighters, they had to draw and try to take the other out. They used wooden swords to reduce the chance of an accidental fatality.
Daisuke did nowhere near as much damage to his brother as his brother did to him, but that wasn’t a problem. Daisuke had written up a contract that his father and brother had both signed that said “Daisuke will face his brother for the right to be Champion.” Nowhere in the contract did it say that Daisuke had to win anything. It simply said that he had to face his brother and go through with the contest “for the right to be Champion.”
Nobody bought it. The other players at the table thought it was bullshit and sided with the GM against me when I pulled that shit, but I made my case and I argued that regardless of what was implied (”It was implied!”, the GM repeatedly said), the contract had been carefully worded. I’d gotten support from one of the other players who wasn’t there that night, sadly, a rules lawyer like none I’ve met before or since, but it wasn’t until a couple of weeks later that the GM relented. He never forgave me for it. Thought I’d thrown a fuss and was being a real whiner about it.
I never forgave him, either. The core concept of Daisuke’s clan was that the wording of a contract, the precise language used, was what mattered. They were honest only in the most technical sense. They constantly cheated people through unethically-worded contracts. I had done what his clan does, and the GM was punishing me for it.
But that’s how Daisuke became champion: he wrote a shitty contract, got his dad and brother to agree to it, then pitched a fit and basically held press conferences decrying his family and turning the people against them until they caved to external pressure. The citizens of the clan were being told that the lord wasn’t honoring a contract simply because he didn’t want to honor it. That would damage the lord’s reputation far more than losing a sword or having a fourth son be Champion.
Daisuke renounced his title of Champion when he got married and officially joined his wife’s clan. As I said before, he gave up the sword only a few weeks after getting it. He didn’t ever really care about the sword. He preferred his own.
Daisuke’s sword
A samurai in this game’s rule system started off with a set of “ancestral weapons,” specifically a katana and a wakizashi, which they could enhance as they leveled up all on their own, no external sources needed. They’d lock themselves in a room and pray over the swords and pour some of their own spirit (XP) into them, and they’d get stronger.
Daisuke did this with his katana, but never with his wakizashi. It wasn’t worth it. His wakizashi never comes up in the story because Daisuke never cared about it in the slightest, though he did own it, and presumably gave it to Mikoto.
His katana had three enhancements on it by the end of the campaign: it was holy, meaning it did bonus damage to evil creatures, it gave him one extra attack per round if he was using it, and a straight damage bonus. He called it his “angel blade,” and I’ll let you Google that one on your own if you’re curious what early 2000′s erotic anime that is.
It was too short for him. Daisuke was about six feet tall, taller than his three older brothers, and it was assumed he’d be their height. He had a scabbard made for the sword that was too long for it. The scabbard had a few inches of extra space at the end. That meant that when Daisuke drew the sword, he drew it faster than someone looking at it would expect him to. It didn’t give him any kind of bonuses, but I used that as an explanation for why he was as good at iaijutsu as he was.
At no point in the original campaign itself did he ever break it and reforge it. I made that up for the story. If you want, you can imagine that that happened during the years between when Mikoto was born and when he started teaching her. He absolutely replaced the handle, the hilt, and the scabbard, though. He needed to do that before the campaign even began, so that they’d fit his larger hands and height.
Mikoto ends the story at 5′10″, two inches shorter than her dad. Her mother was 4′11″. Mikoto was extremely tall for a woman in her clan.
In Kazuma’s clan, where the sword style was all strength, people reaching 6′0″ tall wasn’t that unusual. Nor was it that unusual where the fighter with the hammer was from. It was extremely rare where Daisuke was from, and where his wife was from. So the two of them stood out, but they weren’t the tallest people in the world.
Mikoto’s infiltration skills
Daisuke never learned how to pick locks. Mikoto did. How’d she manage that? One has to imagine that she found a teacher by asking her dad questions that he didn’t like, but very carefully.
What kind of lock do you have on the door to your study? A very good one. How good? The best money can buy. Can it be picked? By someone skilled enough, yes. Can you teach me? No, because I don’t know how to do it. Do you know anyone who would know? I don’t know if anyone I know is that good or not. Who do you know who’s the best at picking locks? That’d be the ninja I traveled with who was the sole survivor of the first group sent to save the world. Do you know how I can get in touch with him? No. Do you know anyone who would know? Yes. Who are they, and how do I get in touch with them?
From there, she was able to learn from that ninja, or someone like him. The fine details are not important.
As for why that ninja would teach a random teenage girl how to pick locks, that’s because she isn’t a random teenage girl. She’s the daughter of a man that ninja used to travel with. And that ninja, while not a villain who hated Daisuke, would have found it absolutely delightful to teach Daisuke’s daughter how to pick locks and break into places that her father didn’t want her to break into. He was that kind of a person. He would have taught her everything he knew if he thought it would piss Daisuke off.
Mikoto’s magic
I don’t like writing fine details about magic, or about magic systems, so I didn’t, and that’s possibly to the detriment of the story.
What you need to know is that Mikoto and her mother both had a limited number of spells that they knew and which they could cast in a given day, like in all kinds of roleplaying game systems. In 5th edition D&D, I would call Mikoto an Arcane Trickster who had levels in Rogue and Sorcerer. I’ve never actually played Mikoto in 5E, so take that with a grain of salt.
Levitation, invisibility, and a silence spell were the holy trinity of spells that we’d get our party’s main spellcaster, Mikoto’s uncle, to use on the ninja to make him all but unstoppably good at his job. Those are also spells that Mikoto made sure to learn. She does not know many others.
Her mother is a fire sorceress. Most of her spells are flashy and destructive. She had to win a number of battles to get her seat on the council. Mikoto would never win a battle like that.
Mikoto’s future
I’m afraid I don’t know what happens to Mikoto after Daisuke’s death, at least, not for a while.
I know that she traveled around the empire for several years, learning what she could of the various afterlives and trying to track down the one where her dad would have ended up.
I know that she wound up returning to her clan, her mother’s clan, at some point, and that she was able to use her various skills and her knowledge and her bloodline to get her mother’s seat on the council.
I don’t know if she ever had any children or got married. If you read Fifteen closely enough, you might wonder if she’s gay or bisexual. I don’t know, because, at the age of fifteen, Mikoto didn’t know. She knew she wanted to smooch her best friend, who was a girl, but also that she wanted to smooch the cute boys, too. Does that make her queer, or does that make her a hormonal teenage girl who is curious about smooching? I don’t know.
Whether she married or not, she died childless, having either not had any children or having outlived them, and her father’s sword was not passed on. She was buried with it. Daisuke would have found that hilarious.
She went to the Lawful Good afterlife that I described above and made up on my own. She went there because she spent many years working hard to rack up enough Lawful and Good deeds to get there, because she had a plan. She didn’t just want to enjoy being in Heaven: she wanted to work there. She got a job as a low-level bureaucrat, then worked her way up through the ranks until she was an administrative assistant to the Lawful Good King himself. Once there, she pulled strings and filed the paperwork which caused her, her mom, and Daisuke to be reincarnated into the modern-day world and the campaign that I never played.
Mikoto forced the gods to allow her and her father to meet again, and he got the chance to be a better father to her that time. He always knew she would, even though, once reincarnated, none of them knew that it had ever happened. She knew that would happen, but it was worth it.
Daisuke went to hell with a smile on his face, and he got another chance to be the dad he should have been.
That’s why I wrote the story, and it’s why I wrote nearly 5000 words, nearly a third as many as the story itself, explaining the story.
I’m very tired, and I wish this were easier.
