Text in
bold are the names of cards drawn.
Bracing themselves for their task, Yuri grabbed a
sophisticated device, a mop-like hitataki, resting against a nearby wall and went to beat out a blaze in her way.
“No, don’t-” Tsubaki called out too late. Yuri struck the fire with it and the ropy head immediately caught fire! It quickly went down the haft and
burned Yuri!
“You have to wet it down first.” Tsubaki sighed.
“That was kind of a big fire for a fire beater, too.” Natsuko added thoughtfully.
Yuri grumbled and the girls dumped a bucket of water from a firefighting basin over their heads to thoroughly wet their hoods. The cool water drenching them also felt nice in the presence of so much heat.
( The scenario card “burned” says to discard a fortune card, but since I’m playing solo I instead ran it as a peril. I also added a fire on the table to do the burning!)
The girls scattered after this inauspicious start.
Tsubaki chased after the arsonist behind the inn, when suddenly a wild fire appeared before her! Thankfully, it was not super effective. Holding her breath, she charged and leapt through the
Fire! Coming through safe, she gasped and continued after her prey. He shot back through to the main street where Yuri was waiting to box him in.
The fire starter whipped around and saw Tsubaki lying in wait. Deciding 90 lbs. of girl wasn’t a real deterrent he came at her, lobbing a fire bomb as he did. A small fire briefly erupted between them but
Shifting Wind gave Tsubaki her first break all evening as it blew away the blaze set right in front of her.
“Gotcha!” She finessed her way into arm’s reach, knocked aside the arsonist’s satchel of fun and gave him a stunning chi-charged blow to the solar plexus. A lit bomb fell from his hand, which Tsubaki kicked clean into another already burning fire nearby.
“Good job!” Yuri shouted over.
Tsubaki got her first good look at the villain now. He dressed in nondescript loose black clothing, but a tattoo on his forearm caught her attention and she committed its design to memory. His satchel contained more firebombs but also a few bottles of powerful, uncut shochu with rags stuffed in them.
By now used to the madness that was her life, Natsuko went after the arsonist by the legitimate business office despite her intense fear of everything exploding in her face. She braved a flaming
unkempt bush then succeeded in passing her second peril, stunning the firestarter with a blow to the small of his back.
Yuri went after the arsonists that had contented themselves with setting blaze after blaze between the shochu distillery and the potter’s tinder piles. She could feel the heat channeled through the alley before she saw the source and knew it would be bad. Exiting to the courtyard, the sturdy wall of flame encompassed her field of view and climbed up the side of an earthen warehouse full of alcohol. Small against the backdrop of his creation, the arsonist continued adding fuel to the fire. She was usually cocksure but even Yuri had to admit she may not survive this night.
“We all get cremated eventually,” she said with stoic acceptance.
Where did he go? Natsuko wondered. As if in response, the arsonist she saw duck behind the garage reappeared, was he going to light up the gas pumps?! She couldn’t outrun an exploding underground fuel tank so moved to take him out before it was too late!
She successfully (and with her unnatural luck) leapt through a blaze, its flames singing her kimono, and with a fumbling hop, trip, and fall managed to take down the next arsonist, as if part of some
underhanded scheme that required finesse!
Lying atop her second victim, Natsuko struggled to get up. Doing so, she knocked a dagger from his belt and a folded piece of paper, a map with locations to attack on it! Her eyes widened at the discovery, not just of the map, but how to escape!
Her gaze set upon the arsonist, Yuri shouted, “I don’t know who you are, but I hate you more than anyone I have ever met in my entire life!”
The fire immediately around the cackling mad bomber who bombed at midnight was beyond intense; she would have to brave this burning ring of fire to take him down. He looked at her and smiled, challenging her to get him. This was probably going to hurt. A lot.
“And that includes people who have literally shot me!”
Her ambitions were burned by the fire before she could get to him, not to mention her good shirt!
Fire!
Some people are just jerks. His back turned to her, Yuri started to move when he casually tossed an
unsettling oddity over his shoulder and it exploded in front of her! She almost ran face first into it but Tsubaki grabbed her hood and gave it a hard jerk back. She clumsily tried to regain balance with her sister’s help, though ended up having a ponytail pulled instead.
OWWWWW!!!!
Using this distraction, the arsonist ran past Yuri and into Tsubaki, who knew a thing or two about leveraging size and momentum to her advantage. Thanks to this
chance encounter, she took him down with ease! Checking his arm, she found the same tattoo as the other arsonist. (Seriously, I drew the
chance encounter card after the plot point ran into her!)
Surrounded! Natsuko’s luck struck again as she barely missed having her cause of death be “flaming shochu cask falling from the sky.” From this moment on, she would become a staunch teetotaler.
The final arsonist thought he’d made a clean getaway until seeing the countenance of a most cross Natsuko. Turning back, he got a lung full of his own smoke, causing him to drop a bomb and light up the ground around him. Hoisted by his own petard, or flamed by his own fires I guess, he was trapped with no way to escape as his seared lungs screamed with every ragged breath.
“How are we going to get to him?” Tsubaki wondered.
Yuri shrugged, “Let him burn himself out.”
“That’s not funny.”
“That wasn’t a joke.”
Accepting that four out of five wasn’t bad, Natsuko lead the sisters Hanamura to Higa Gas Stand’s garage. Yuri eyed the green machine out front, but Natsuko dissuaded her.
“Don’t bother, someone already stole the distributor cap.” She said.
“Savages in this town.”
She threw open the garage door and showed them their salvation.
“This is not helpful,” Yuri said as she eyed the machine. “None of us-”
“It’s okay; I read a book on this.” Tsubaki insisted with a certain glee.
A silver black phantom of a bike shot out the garage like a bat out of hell, Hanamura Tsubaki driving, her sister clinging far too tightly to her waist and Natsuko, head down and eyes closed, in the sidecar. Following the course on the map Natsuko found, they left the fire far behind them.
EPILOGUE“You smell like yakiniku.” Sallah told Yuri.
The girls met up with Officer Miyagi at the police headquarters to present their evidence from the night before. Sallah was also on hand to provide insight.
“You should smell the other guy,” she joked back lightly. Natsuko, like a sane, rational person, raced to a sink before she threw up. They debriefed after a quick round of bathing and some donated fresh clothes, which incidentally looked a lot like what they already were wearing. Natsuho even loaned her twin friend a kimono.
“It seems Cmdr. Hara’s abduction of Maomao has given her enemies an opening,” Miyagi began.
“Who’s Maomao?”
“Leader of the Maomao Tong,” Miyagi explained. “She’s better known as Neko in Japanese speaking lands.”
“The one who’s not a poisoner,” Tsubaki added.
Neko, from the previous scenario, was more important than the girls had realized. Without her presence, her enemies began attacking her businesses and rackets. Soon, her side would retaliate in kind. While unintended, Hara’s actions had started an underworld civil war.
“We’ve also gotten word that your associate Capt. Jackson used the fires as a cover to steal from the navy.”
To be continued…
Natsuko’s streak of amazing dice rolls made her the MVP of this scenario; she just kept getting good rolls even when I expected her not to make it. Poor Yuri on the other hand kept missing and getting hurt for her troubles. She got in some good quips though to balance it all out and Tsubaki helped hold everything together with her fancy book learning.
ERRATA Hitataki or “fire beater” looks like a mop with a ropy head; it’s wet down and used to smack out small fires. According to an air raid survivor I interviewed, they were effective at putting out individual fire bomb fires such as the spark spewing M50 or the flaming napalm bag that came out of the M69. You can read my article about her experience here:
https://www.wayfarerdaves.com/the-japanese-home-front-ii-shizue-san-the-welder/When he was a child, my grandpa had the misfortune of seeing a burning truck with the driver trapped inside. He said it’s not a smell one forgets. That’s why I had Natsuko respond so poorly to Yuri’s dark humor.
“Mao” is “cat” in Mandarin.
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