2020-05-24 - The Thing From The Spring

Title: The Thing from the Spring
Summary: Shiho Kubota takes advantage of summer break to release her first feature film. Nagisa Misumi finds herself the unwilling star. (Features several minor Futari Wa Pretty Cure characters; find their information via the links below.)
Who: Nagisa Misumi, Honoka Yukishiro, Shiho Kubota, Yuka Odajima, Rina Takashimizu, Mayu Kashiwada, Akane Fujita, with special guest star Setsuna Higashi.
Where: Short(???) Film Festival, Ueno Park
OOC - IC Date: 5/23/2020 - 08-27-15

Flashback: school trip. Best friends Shiho Kubota and Rina Takashimizu found someone's lost hair scrunchie floating in the hot spring while relaxing at the end of the day. Rina returns to find Shiho wearing the pink band around her wrist.

"Is that the thing from the spring?" Rina asks, rubbing her chestnut hair with a towel.

Shiho looks up, her feet kicking loosely as she lies on her stomach in a robe. "Is it what?"

"The thing from the spring."

-=--=-

Today:

JUUBAN HIGH SCHOOL PRESENTS
THE THING FROM THE SPRING!
a shiho kubota production

"I like the font," Rina says.

"Weheh," Shiho grins.

STARRING
Nagisa Misumi

"Oh god," Nagisa whimpers, covering her face with both hands. The film festival audience, nominally a 50/50 gender split, suddenly waxes soprano with 100% female appreciation, almost entirely from the nearby cluster of Juuban students.

"Come on, watch-watch-watch! It's your debut," Shiho leers.

"It's not my debut! I'm always having to do this!"

"It's your /film/ debut. Much different medium than stage." The other credits are still rolling through. Rina gets second billing.

"Boo hoo, I'm Nagisa," Rina moans. "I'm too popular."

"Stooop...!"

and featuring
HONOKA YUKISHIRO as
Faint Snow

This cheer is less rowdy, despite the fact that it is more like 70/30 male/female. There is a certain reverence for the famous Queen of Knowledge.

"Waa my girlfriend is too pretty!"

"Now you're making fun of me for stuff I didn't even complain about!"

"Shh," Mayu Kashiwada hushes. The art club wallflower is the shortest--even diminutive Director Shiho has an inch on her--and normally far too meek to interrupt her social betters. "I'm not in many scenes." Her serious little face is fixed on the screen.

"Mayun," Shiho sniffles, greatly moved.

The film opens on a shot of a whiteboard scrawled with various chemistry equations. The handwriting is clean and elegant. Panning down and around the room, we see dim light filtering through aluminum blinds, flasks and vials with multicolored liquids, and open notebooks.

"Yukishiro-senpai!" someone cries in anticipation, and a preemptive cheer goes up, 70/30.

"Arienai..." Nagisa moans, covering her face.

The camera draws across a bare, honey-tanned forearm, up to the sleeve of a white dress shirt that has been rolled up to her elbow with artful sloppiness. Nagisa's head is resting on that arm, her eyes closed in an apparent exhausted nap across her notes. Her bleach-orange hair is slicked back tightly on the sides, parted in the middle on the top to give her a more masculine set of bangs. Her jawline is dotted all over with pokes of eye pencil to give an impression of the stubble of overwork.

A burst of laughter, radiating from the Juuban cluster but shared by the whole audience, serves as the launchpad for various girlish "kyaa's" and "eee's."

"Handsome!"
"Marry me Misumi!" calls a particularly hardy soul.

Shiho and Rina each seize a shoulder as Nagisa tries to flee, dragging her back down.

"This is why I had to cast you, even though you bigtime suck," Shiho sighs. "You put butts in seats. Butts in skirts in seats. Not many people realize, the female demo has the most purchasing power."

"You said I was a born actress!"

"Shh!" Mayu orders.

A hand grasps Nagisa's shoulder, shaking her awake. Nagisa murmurs awake, and the camera pulls back enough to show a girl with a similar hairstyle, albeit not slicked back. She is otherwise quite dissimilar, with red hair and freckles.

"Onii-san," Mayu says, worried. "Did you stay up all night studying Faint Snow Mountain again?"

"Onii-saaan~" a female chorus sighs happily.

"I'll go to bed soon, Kaede-chan," Nagisa assures woodenly, overacting as she stretches awake. Her dress shirt has the top button open and the tie tugged partially loose, arranged at a strategic angle by the director. She practically says the word 'yawn.' "I need to be able to prove to the Chairman that his project is causing these mysterious disappearances."

"It's already morning, onii-san." Mayu looks visibly afraid to be on camera, but it clicks with her character well, coming off as cute. "Y-you need to take proper care of yourself."

"What did I do?" Nagisa asks, standing up. "To deserve," she pauses an awkward moment to put her hand on Mayu's shoulder. "Such a devoted little sister?"

"Kyaaa!"
"Misumi-oniisan!"

"Arienai..." Nagisa despairs, hiding her face again.

-=--=-

"The disappearances on Faint Snow Mountain haunted me." Nagisa's voiceover dialogue is monotone, but at least she never stumbles or stammers, probably because recording voiceovers let her read right from the script and do infinite takes. The camera is panning across some woods outside some Tama suburb, meant to represent a much larger forest. It was shot in daytime but darkened and filtered bluish to look like night, a weird and unconvincing effect that nonetheless gets the idea across.

"The stories were all the same. Somebody would start having nightmares..."

A shot of Setsuna Higashi in bed, with a full outfit of sweatpants and sweatshirt to avoid any impropriety.

"They'd wake up and only remember a horrible green face, dripping with water."

Setsuna wakes up, feigning fear, before flopping back onto her pillow. "Just a dream," she says helpfully.

"But are they really just dreams? Because after a few weeks, someone will find their house empty..."

A shot of a door opening, with a cartoonish creaking sound from the internet.

"And huge wet footprints on the floor..."

A big, bulky green foot steps into the frame, dripping water everywhere. It's all wrapped up with fake plastic plants from a craft store.

Several in the audience make little shrieks or cries, good-naturedly.

"And when the police are called, they find the house empty..."

A first-person shot now, the camera moving through the house, bobbing exaggeratedly to the sound of big thumpy footsteps and wet squishing.

"I recorded myself smooshing a lemon right next to the microphone," Shiho whispers.

The camera swings dramatically into the bedroom, and Setsuna claps her hands to the sides of her face and screams. Someone female is growling behind the camera as it stomps into the bedroom right at Setsuna, and suddenly the image goes black.

"...as if that terrible nightmare came true."

There's a collective indrawn breath.

With a heavy sting of classical horror music, the monster is suddenly fully in the frame. Green trash bags, soggy papier mache, yards and yards of plastic plants, and various mismatched green clothing articles form a bulky, shambling form. For some reason, the quality of the costume shoots up dramatically above the neck; where it becomes a vaguely humanoid mask built of real sticks, woven together with green twine. The sticks were selected for shape (and sometimes carved a bit) to create a horrible visage with hollow eyes and a gaping, remorseful mouth, both of which have nasty seaweed dangling from them.

The mask cannot carry the rest of the costume, however, nor the garish, 50's-esque cinematography, as the dripping-wet actor in the costume struggles forward under the princess-carried weight of Setsuna Higashi. The purple-haired maiden has the back of her hand across her forehead to demonstrate her faint, as the monster garbles incomprehensibly and hurries past the camera, towards the woods.

The audience bursts out laughing, any suspense fully released, though some play along with "nooo" and "Save Higashi-san!" Shiho looks grumpy but not surprised.

"Eh? Huh?" Nagisa's head keeps switching sides as she glances back and forth behind her, confused. "Is this a funny part or a scary part?"

"Sometimes your innocence is so cruel, Misumi," Shiho sighs.

"Thanks for working so hard on that mask, Mayun," Rina smiles. She's enjoying the laughter, unlike her best friend. "I really look creepy."

The monster can now be seen running into the forest in the far distance.

"As a biological chemist, I was trained to be a man of reason," Nagisa continues her largely uninflected monologue. "But I begin to admit to myself that the legend may be true. The legend of..."

"This is the most pro part," Shiho whispers. "I have a friend in the school newspaper."

THE THING FROM THE SPRING??? blares the headline of a realistic-looking newspaper that drops into the next shot.

The regular people attending the festival don't react, but many of the students present 'ooo' at that; they don't understand how that was pulled off. Shiho finds her ego mildly assuaged.

-=--=-

"Chairman Sumisu," Nagisa challenges. "Are you telling me it--that you always i-intended to proceed with this project? Even if? It cost lives?" Despite her halting delivery, she looks suitably heroic, still with her blue tie askew, and with a new and slightly different pattern of stubble laboriously drawn onto her face. She's holding up a sheaf of importantly paper-clipped papers, her forearms bared and her posture defiant.

A tall-backed chair rotates around smoothly, dramatic diagonal lighting (trembling slightly from Rina's arms strugging with holding up a floor lamp) revealing the shoulder of a black business suit.

CHAIRMAN SMITH
(smarmily)
Lives don't have a cost. That's what your kind is always whining about, isn't it?

"Every cost is a cost in life, Mr. Kita," a velvety voice purrs from the shadows. "The minutes and hours that form the pages of our lives, torn out one by one by the nostalgic inefficiencies of tradition."

"Eh?" Nagisa looks blindsided. "Um, ah... you c-can mock it all you want, Chairman Sumisu. But people are disappearing every day in those mountains, and I think you know why."

The chair turns further, revealing Yuka Odajima, the glorious Madonna of Juuban. Her normally wavy caramel locks have been slicked straight back, making her look like some sort of jpop music video version of a CEO. She wears a perfectly neat black three-piece suit, with burgundy tie and a gold tie clip. Her neat little drawn-on facial hair gives new meaning to the phrase 'pencil moustache'.

"Ooooh!" "The Madonna!"

CHAIRMAN SMITH
(snorting)
You 'think' you know, do you Kita? That's all you scientists do is think, and you're not very good at it either.

"I do know why, Mr. Kita," Yuka agrees smoothly. She uncrosses her legs and glides to her feet in a supple motion, briefly leaving the frame before the startled camera catches up to her. "We're all disappearing from the moment we're born onto this wretched earth. What is so sacred about the loss of one life, compared to the diminuation of a thousand, or a hundred thousand?"

"I really like this scene," Rina whispers.

Shiho looks depressed. "I feel like I lost control of it a little."

"Wh-wha?" Nagisa has a hard enough time with her lines when she's getting the right cues. "What... what I think, Chairman Sumisu, is--"

"Please," Yuka insists, folding her arms across her uncharacteristically flat chest. She went all in on costuming apparently. "Call me Jameson."

Nagisa appeals for aid directly to the camera for a split second before looking back at Yuka. Chairman Smith did not have a first name in the script. "Jeima-san... is... is that... your futuristic power plant is just burning ghosts into electricity!"

CHAIRMAN SMITH
(squeezing KEIJI's shoulder threateningly)
Who's gonna believe you, Kita? Who even wants to believe you? Get with the program. 
Ask anybody off the street if they'd rather have a dollar or a ghost.

"I really liked my Smith dialogue," Shiho sighs.

"It is the nature of the past to be sacrificed to the future, Keiji-san," Yuka ingratiates, her skinny moustache bobbing with her enunciation of the name. She gently brushes invisible lint from Nagisa's wrinkled white dress shirt, then lays her elegant palm there as if by accident. "If I could, I would burn every memory I've ever had, every pain and every joy... if its flame would lend the slightest warmth to my future."

No one is keening happily now, not even Nagisa's fangirls. They're too in awe, either from Yuka's entirely inappropriate gravitas or just from watching this bizarre yaoi encounter between two of the hottest girls at Juuban.

"Smith was supposed to be a weasel type," Shiho complains. "Steve Buscemi maybe. Not sexy Rufus Shinra."

"I-I..." Nagisa looks so helpless right now. "Would take one ghost... over a m-million dollars?"

CHAIRMAN SMITH
(apoplectic, shoving KEIJI)
Get out of my office! I'm burning every one of those ghosts to become the richest man in Japan, and there's nothing you can do about it!

"Am I on the right pag--?" Nagisa whispers to Yuka, who cuts off this out-of-character inquiry by suddenly shoving Nagisa hard against the office door and holding her there by a grip on her tie.

"You're /not/ on the right side, Keiji-san," she improvises smoothly. "And if this sentimentality of yours is keeping you from coming around," she is suddenly venomous, "then I'll drag you into the future with the rest of us. I think I'll burn up the ghost of your precious little sister Kaede next!"

"EEEH?!" Nagisa gapes openly at this entirely unfamiliar dialogue, before she's 'man'-handled by her tie and shoved out the door.

"She hates me so much," Nagisa wails miserably. "What did I even do?"

"...are you sure that's what that was about?" Rina grimaces. "Maybe she just wanted to beat you at acting."

"You can lose at acting?!"

"Why didn't you just reshoot that one?" Mayu asks. "It made you rewrite the ending."

"The glorious Madonna refused to do another take," Shiho mourns. "And one of the secretaries kicked us out of the principal's office."

-=--=-

"What... inhuman... strength...!"

Nagisa acts a little better when she's getting strangled by the Thing from the Spring, maybe because it's more physical, or maybe because her imitating a choked voice passes for emotion. She is being held up against a tree by the single mighty arm of the Thing, held well off her feet, which are shown kicking in a conveniently separate shot.

"GrRrRrrr!" Rina growls from inside her creepy mask.

"You got really good at that."

"Thank you."

"Let go, you...!" Misadventures have caused one of the arms of Nagisa's shirt to tear off (the cut looks artificial since it had been pre-weakened with scissors) and the other to get shredded up a lot. Unconvincingly, Nagisa starts slowing her struggles and letting her head go limp. Though she has makeup all over her visible skin to indicate heroic dirt and scratches, her jawline is clean now; either Keiji shaved or Nagisa put her foot down.

"Wait..." A soothing voice is heard from off-camera. "Please, let this one be, Thing from the Spring."

The shot cuts back and forth between Nagisa, released to cough on the ground, and Honoka Yukishiro, in a pure white yukata, with the triangular white headdress of a ghost, her hands folded serenely before her.

The headdress is paper (not even cloth) and the video quality is mediocre; normally she would come across as a girl in an okay Halloween costume. But there is a special acronym: FMO, "For Models Only," used to refer to clothing that only a professional model can pull off. This is a secret acronym rarified even beyond FMO.

FHO.

KEIJI
(not realizing that FAINT SNOW is a ghost yet)
"Wow, I was almost a goner. Who... who are you? Is the Thing your friend?"

"Wow," Nagisa breathes.

. . .

. . .

. . . when the shot cuts back to Honoka, it's like you can feel the director giving up on that line.

-=--=-

"Aaah, I really like the ending," Rina sighs. She and the other girls are all walking abreast now, leaving the festival together, some with snacks in hand. "This is honestly the first time I've seen the ending, at the time I was in that mask and I barely knew what was happening."

"I'm exhausted," Nagisa moans. "I get so nervous watching myself."

"Hey Shiho, is Keiji supposed to get tongue-tied every time Faint Snow is around?" Rina teases. "Is it some sort of ghostly aura she projects?"

"Shut up alreadyyy! I'm seriously gonna pass out if my face gets any hotter."

"It's not even forbidden love," Shiho eyebrow-waggles. "Keiji's a guy after all."

"Come on, don't team up..."

"It's still forbidden," Mayu says seriously, "because Faint Snow is a ghost, and Keiji is a mortal."

"Mayun is my favorite cast member," Shiho decides.

"I like at the end," Rina enthuses, "when the bad guys think it will be Faint Snow, but it's actually--"

"Hey hey," Akane Fujita interrupts. "No spoilers." The lone full-grown adult in the conversation still has her purple work apron and red headscarf on from slinging takoyaki at moviegoers, but there is a Be Right Back sign up at the stall right now. "I saw the first part but had to dip out."

"Akane-san," Shiho warbles, deeply moved.

"Well, hurry it up," Rina says. "So we can talk about the second half of... dun da dun!" She drags it out to cue her compatriots, who all join in, some not without a reservation or two.

"The Thing from the Spring!"