Suzuran

Once, long ago, there was a bell at a particular shrine. However, due to both the temple’s location and a particularly rebellious generation of the family that ran the shrine, the temple was abandoned, and the bell taken and discarded nearby.

After one hundred years of this abandonment, Suzuran awoke as a tsukumogami, and found herself spirited away to the rather-newly-created Gensokyo. At first, she simply wandered aimlessly, mostly keeping to herself unless she happened to come across another youkai. She tried to make friends with all of them, but particularly those with abilities similar to her own.

Once, while she was roaming about the mountains, she happened upon a rather disgruntled yama-biko by the name of Kyouko Kasodani. The two became fast friends, mostly because Kyouko seemed oddly fascinated by Suzuran’s bell’s ability to ring so clearly and loudly.

It was from Kyouko, in fact, that Suzuran first heard of the the shrine whose maiden supported the great Hakurei border itself. As she continued to talk to others, she continued to be regaled with tales of this girl. Curious, Suzuran decided to investigate, and soon became a regular visitor at the shrine. Being a youkai, she wasn’t particularly welcome at first, but that quickly changed into a sort of apathy as whenever she came by, she would volunteer to do any chores the shrine maiden asked her to do. Upon the arrival of the Moriya Shrine in Gensokyo, Suzuran began regularly visiting Youkai Mountain to do the same as she had been doing at the Hakurei Shrine.

Not very long after this, Kyouko started becoming absolutely fed up with humans’ disbelief in yama-biko, and she once again sparked Suzuran’s curiosity by deciding to leave the mountains once and for all, and joined up with the caretakers of the Myouren Temple. It was at this time that Suzuran quietly added this temple to her rounds of volunteering an extra pair of hands, and quickly she found herself preferring this one over all others.

Despite her Shinto origins, Suzuran found herself drawn to Byakuren Hijiri’s teachings of equality between youkai and humans, as that implied acceptance of youkai, something she hadn’t really found before, having been chased away from the human village numerous times when she got “too close”. The more times she sat with Kyouko and listened to her praising Hijiri and the others at the temple, and listened to her echo every Buddhist sutra she could think of, the more Suzuran became intrigued by this lot. She wondered if perhaps the other shrines of Gensokyo were to be avoided…

Regardless, she continued visiting all three rather regularly, sliding into a routine of friendliness towards everyone who would start a conversation with her.