Kobo Daishi is my Kobopilot

Sometimes victory isn't enough.

I was poring over some historical texts recently, and I read about something called a "Pyrrhic Victory." At once, my thoughts turned to the Victory Charm I'd purchased some time ago. "Victory" can mean a lot of things, and though the charm might ensure victory, that doesn't mean I can't lose an arm or an ally in the process.

I need more spiritual protection to make myself more than simply unbeatable. With that in mind, I lately journeyed up the mountain called Koyasan, to a city of Buddhist monks. Temples are numerous in Koyasan; it boasts little else, in fact, aside from some Buddhist corpses of considerable renown. When the zombie apocalypse comes, Koyasan will be host to an innumerable horde of peaceful vegetarian zombies.

I was fortunate to find a charm whose purpose dovetails nicely with the Victory Charm. According to the description I read, its purpose is to displace misfortune away from me. Whenever something bad would happen to me, Kobo Daishi, whoever he is, will accept the misfortune on my behalf. It looks like this:



Again, the mechanics of the charm are a little tricky to suss out. Obviously not every misfortune triggers the charm; I'm still capable of losing coinflips, I've noticed. And I suffered a minor injury not long after buying the charm: in testing myself in a local trial-by-ordeal, my finger was lightly smashed by the stone I was trying to lift. Though painful, it was useful as a test case. Kobo Daishi might have taken some of the damage for me, or the charm may not have intervened at all. A small injury to my finger may not have been considerable enough to justify triggering the charm.

It probably won't trigger if I invite misfortune on purpose, either, so I'm guessing I can't get naked drunk in a 7-11 and rely on Kobo Daishi to take the rap. Overall, it's a lot more difficult to see this charm working than the Victory Charm, which has already passed a few tests. Kobo Daishi could be taking hits for me left and right and I wouldn't necessarily know about it. I'd feel bad about subjecting Kobo to all that, but after a little reading, it seems like he's purportedly in an indefinite state of Samadhi ever since his alleged death, which all-knowing Wikipi says releases him from all suffering.

So basically, any pain I send Kobo's way is just so much water off a duck's back. Not a bad deal for either of us. BTW, that same Wikipi article also contains the phrase "destruction of the taints." If you are offended by my juvenile sense of humor, direct your reprobates at Kobo Daishi.

Drifting Off

"Blurring the line between fantasy and reality?" came a voice.

"Uh, yeah," I said. Shit, where was I? An unfamiliar ceiling weaved through my vision. "Risky, I know..."

"You needed a buffer," said the voice again. It was female, with a marginal Japanese accent, and I didn't see where it was coming from. Not surprising, since I didn't seem to be able to turn my head away from the ceiling.

"I need bufferin. Why's my head hurt?"

"Heh, funny story," said the voice. "Remember that awful hangover you mentioned in your first post in this blog?"

"Yeah, vaguely."

"Yup," said the voice. "Vaguely. That's it exactly. You said you didn't clearly remember the time you spent hung over. I'm able to use that blank spot in your memory to communicate with you. That's why you're experiencing it again."

"What?" I said. "No, there's no blank spot, I made that part up. That was a plot hook for something I was gonna make up later."

"Well," said the voice, a little apologetically, "I'm pulling that particular ripcord on your behalf. It didn't look like you were going to do it."

"Yeah," I said, "I kinda let this blog slide, didn't I? The longer I left it, the more intimidating the prospect of catching up with the story became..."

I looked around. Shit, I really was in that hotel room, knocked out with that bile-coughing hangover. "Can we get this over with? I don't want to spend any more time in this memory."

"It actually has more in common with honest-to-goodness time travel than visiting memories," said the voice. "Anyway, you should have made a buffer of fictional posts back before your schedule got too burdensome. That's what you did wrong."

"You're not going to berate me about my laziness, or my ongoing crisis of confidence? Nothing like that?"

"I figured I'd offer you something practical, rather than add hang-ups to hangover."

I briefly mulled over her advice.

"Is that all?"

"That's all."

"Who are you?"

"My name's Hiro."

I hesitated. "That's a girl's name?"

"Unisex."

"No shit?" I paused. "Anyway, that doesn't really answer my question."

Hiro laughed.

"Whatever," I said. "We're done, right? How do I go back?"

"Just go back to sleep, I'll take care of the rest."

I let my eyes close, and tried shifting my weight. By this point I'd adjusted to the hangover enough that I could do so without much discomfort, so I opened my eyes and looked over to the corner of the room that Hiro's voice had seemed to be coming from.

Hiro was an Office Lady by the look of her, dressed in modest women's business wear. Hard to tell from this angle, but she seemed a little tall for a Japanese woman. Mid-twenties, and cute, I guess, albeit upside-down from my vantage point.

When I looked up at her, her neutral expression caught a flash of shock. She began leafing through some stapled-together pages she was holding, looking for something. On the pages she'd flipped over, I could make out some text, right-side-up from my perspective. I recognized my name, and some familiar-looking words...

Goddammit, I know what this is. That's a script she's reading from. It has everything I was going to say on it, and everything she was supposed to respond with.

"Man, fuck time travel," I said, pressing one hand against the wall and lifting myself to my feet. I probably wasn't too weak to stand, but I didn't feel like taking any chances. "Thanks, lady."

I focused my eyes on the shelves next to the door of my tiny tatami room and pushed off the wall, aiming my grasp for the bars supporting the shelves. I caught them, swung my weight over to the door, and started fumbling with the doorknob.

"Wait," said Hiro. I turned to look at her.

"You shouldn't try to leave," she said, without her earlier confidence in her words. "You need to be unconscious to go back."

She tried to flash a reassuring smile, and revealed rows of long, sharp, reptilian teeth. This girl had a T-Rex mouth. I let my eyes take a second to confirm what I was seeing before I groaned in disgust, turned the lock, and opened the door.

By this time I'd turned away from Hiro, so I didn't see her as she leapt forward, threw her arms around my torso, and knocked me to the ground. Before I could even switch gears away from trying to remember where the elevator was, I felt her teeth sinking into my left shoulder. The stabbing pain was joined by a feeling of liquid pressure, something flowing in rather than out of the fresh wound.

Okay, I thought to myself. Venom.

Numbness spread outward from my shoulder. My body gave an involuntary jerk as the sensation dulled in my neck, and I slept.

So that was my day. I woke up back in my apartment, in the present day, with a brief note of apology taped to my somehow un-bite-marked left shoulder. Going meta, it seems, is not a painless process.