ART TAGS
Fanarts: #paiarts
NSFW: #paiyummyART GUIDELINE
• right handed
• 155 centimeters height
• often seen with: lily flowers, dragons, folding fans, omamori, gohei, kagura suzu
• background possibilities:
shinto shrines/architecture, onsens, any forest landscape, koi ponds
• necklace and eyes glow a bright gold when she uses her dragon powers/abilities
• has freckles on her face
• has no nail polish
Deep within a beautiful forest, there was a village. A century ago, it was full of people – lumberjacks and hunters, herbalists and traders. But a famine had laid the village low, causing many of the people who had survived to seek employ elsewhere. Today, the village was almost empty – only a handful of people lived there, mostly elders.
But there was also Paiyumi. A young woman, Paiyumi – or Pai for short – came from the family responsible for taking care of the village shrine – an ornate building essentially built into the forest, with tree branches running through it. But the rest of Pai’s family had either left the village or died. She was alone.
Even so, she was determined to preserve the shrine and take good care of it. Every morning she woke up with the dawn and immediately picked up a broom, ready to clean up. Then she made her round of the village, eager to help the last remaining villagers with whatever task they had to accomplish. Then it was back to the shrine for rituals and more cleanup.
It was a solitary existence, but there was calm in it. She took pride in her duty and in how well she performed it, and she was loyal to the shrine.
Sometimes – usually on feast days – the villagers came to worship in the shrine. This worship was what helped Pai maintain her powers – for she had a pendant on her person, a pendant that allowed her to wield the powers of a dragon.
Pai didn’t know precisely how the pendant worked. The last shrine maiden before her had been her mother, and she’d died back when Pai was still a teenager. She simply hadn’t had the time to teach her everything.
Indeed, this was a problem for the whole village. Many customs and rituals only survived half-remembered, those that had performed them for decades dead by the famine before they had a chance to pass on the full extent of their knowledge.
Still, the pendant worked. Pai knew that it gained strength from the shrine’s worshippers – but those grew fewer and fewer every year. The famine had caused the village to be forgotten, having lasted so long that people were too scared to even approach the area now.
But Pai had faith. She continued performing her duties in the shrine every day even as the pendant weakened. When she had free time, she visited the elders of the village, recording whatever knowledge they had, asking them of memories of her mother and father.
Before her mother had passed, she’d spoken of a grand repository of knowledge in the shrine, accessed only by those who had the pendant. But Pai had found nothing yet, and the elders had no memory of such a place. Still, she searched. Even in the bleakest days, she believed deep in her heart that things would turn out alright – that one day, the village would be full of life once more and the shrine would be bustling, with maidens like her constantly busy.
