It's a beautiful day for band practice: dark and stormy.
Raiko claimed a wing of the sky castle for herself and her bandmates a while back, and no one's bothered to contest it, even though they're pretty loud, and the thunder rolling outside is louder. She's really getting into it, having muscled her way into a drum solo while the keyboardist gets very avant-garde, the other two mostly taking a breather. This is life, quite literally.
It would be a shame if they were rudely interrupted.
A strange blue and purple portal opens in the sky just about big enough for the person who flies through. At first it's clear she's uncontrolled but then she flaps her large pink butterfly wings and brings herself to a controlled hover. The portal closes behind her. Neither her nor the portal make much noise.
That's a pretty mundane sight, except for how no one comes up here on account of Raiko's thunderstorms.
"No autographs!" jeers Raiko, punctuated by a thunderclap. She keeps drumming, though. It's a strange setup—Raiko is sitting on the bass drum, and the other drums are sort of orbiting around her. (She has beaters on her heels for kicking the bass drum.)
She laughs at being told no autographs and flies to somewhere that looks comfortable and out of the way to watch and listen.
To the extent that someplace comfy can be found in a high-altitude thunderstorm, this is quite possible, though Raiko won't modify anything about the storminess. It's half the fun, and it's the half she doesn't do in concert (except during the finale).
Eventually, though, she concedes the band practice as even the keyboardist gives up and the violinist starts pouring tea. She's still sitting on the bass drum, which can apparently float her around; the others just sort of float occasionally, as though flying isn't particularly a big deal.
Flying is apparently much easier here than back home. Once they don't seem busy she goes to introduce herself. "Hi there, I'm Akira I'm new here, what is this place and what kind of stuff happens around here?"
"Oh, you're new? Man, I'm not the best welcoming committee. Well, you crashed my band practice, on the battlements of the something-or-other castle, in the sky a little southwest of the Mountain, in Gensokyo, it gets fuzzy past that but sorta in Japan... on the planet Earth. If you're from somewhere weird I can't orient you, I think Hell is... maybe in the north?"
She tucks her drumsticks into a pocket. Her bandmates look pretty unconcerned, they're chatting about something.
"The main point of this place is that you mostly don't get hunted down and killed here, I guess, a lot of the population I think moved here because of that. I see the appeal, I thought they were hunting me down to kill me once and it was pretty stressful. Drinking and dueling are most of what goes on, I don't pry into anything behind closed doors, and there's some really weird politics I stopped paying attention to when I figured out it wasn't a threat. Don't eat humans, it's not actually allowed but we tell the humans it is for some reason, I don't think it's necessary but I'm a practical theologian, not a theorist."
She shrugs. "That's not actually a good speech, sorry, if you want to be talked at for hours you can get a good speech from someone else probably."
"I'm not too worried about being hunted. I'm pretty sure I can't die permanently but I suppose it would be inconvenient. I have no idea where anything you mentioned is except that some challengers call the underworld Hell for some reason. I guess they might be similar somehow."
"Apparently, Hell used to be an underworld, but they moved. We did some concerts in the former Hell, which is just a big underground party city for oni now."
She hands over an advertisement card touting "HORISMRIVER".
"I'm Horikawa Raiko, come to our concert tomorrow, I'll duel you now if you want but if you just showed up here it feels unsporting."
"Interesting, I wouldn't have expected that it was just the depth they were referring to. I'm not quite sure what you mean by duel so yeah that might not be the best idea. I wouldn't know what sort of attacks to use and I also wouldn't want to misjudge one of yours and get sent back home. Who knows if I could find this place again."
"Ostensibly, people can't enter or leave this place easily. I can, that might just be a fake thing people tell themselves. I go to concerts outside all the time. Do you know, there's this one band with three drummers, all in the front of the stage? That's the respect we deserve."
She shrugs. "I'm not good at dueling rules but you just sorta end up following them unless you specifically try not to. Maybe it's magic or something? The main specific thing is declaring your spells beforehand, I guess, but that's mostly just about how many rounds you go for, so there's a win condition. Some people are nerds about all of it, I'm not."
"That sounds like it would be a strange experience, I don't really have names for most of my attacks."
"I was like ten minutes old and pretty addled the first time I did it so I feel like it's pretty intuitive. To be clear, it's not a duel if you're clearing out the ambient fairies on your flight path or something. There's some kind of minimum bar for...uh, sapience, I guess?"
"I wonder if I would be forced to play along but even if I'm not that sounds fun enough to do regardless."
"It's a fun form of self-expression, even for us musicians. After all, we can go up against someone with our playing."
"That's right. There's a bit of thunder god in me ever since I seized divinity. I think I was shaped right to follow Raijin's groove, in a manner of speaking."
"Sure."
Raiko smiles. She declares three spells.
(This just feels like an ontologically simple action, though if one cares to be skeptical about this one can decompose it into a complicated interaction with ambient magical fields, but not to the extent of divining what the spells might be. It's easy enough to do without any practice; the world wants you to do it.)
"Three for three, and I'll give you the default if we each run out?"
Okay, she reaches into her magic and decides her three spells will be:
The hammers of justice
The questing hearts of unrequited love
And The curse of the wyvern.
"That works for me"
She switches to combat form, a number of red hearts appear swirling around her not precisely obscuring her but sketching out a boundary of where her shield now exists.
Raiko takes to the air as one of her bandmates starts playing again, filling the space between them with some largely pro-forma bullet patterns, large widely spaced V-shapes.
She's holding her first spell at the ready, and she'll start drumming with her band too. She's not moving around too much, mostly just hovering.
The band aren't particularly playing instruments; they have instruments, but they're just directly making sound by magic. (The violinist is making electric guitar sounds.)
Raiko is drumming for real, though. She looks pretty happy, but focused.
She'll dash towards Raiko in the air and when she gets close unleash outward spiralling hammers.
Now that they're both in motion, it's time for her to use her first spell, while seeking out gaps between the hammers through which to slip.
三鼓「午前零時のスリーストライク」. A simple pattern; three summoned drums each shotgun bullets chaotically into the air, bobbing and rotating. Watching for fire from three directions at once may be challenging, but it's predictable enough.
The gaps between hammers are practically non-existent but Akira has to pause briefly before each of the three times she sends them out which should be enough time to get clear.
Akira... is not well suited to such tight gaps with her shield fully extended so she pulls it in allowing her to dodge going forward.
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