Takahiko
Legacy Name: Takahiko

A rather substantial pile of bamboo scrolls and ink paintings safely housed in the temple of Shinwa depict a great, brilliant bird the colours of an island sunrise on a clear day, flying endlessly on for all eternity in search of something called the Hidden Dawn. Referred to simply as Red Lain, he's something of an enigma that has forever brought wonder to the people of the Sacred Lands, most unsure if he even exists, and if so, where he came from and why sightings of him so often seem to happen there. Those familiar with the legend who see his flight in the early hours of the morning claim that it fills them with courage and the will to stand up for their convictions. But then again, the whole thing could have just been due to some orthographic misunderstanding when adopting the Veta folktale of Red Rreign, as a couple of famous Sacred Lands anthropologists point out; no one fully knows whether to believe all those silly stories or not.

Except Takahiko, the original Red Lain.

Takahiko's early life was a bit rough. It began on a desolate, outlying part of the Omen islands, in some unseen sandy patch shaded by some small tropical ferns; his parents, nested comfortably in the canopy, had not noticed his egg fall into the sand, and were much too busy looking after the others to search for it once they did notice days later. He can fend for himself if he survives, they figured, and didn't think a single thought more about him.

Takahiko, however, was distraught when he hatched. Alone, shivering, and already not feeling well on his first day of life, he really wasn't even sure if he wanted to get up and see the world or just stay curled up in his dismal clod of sand and die. Even the plants that shielded him cast creepy shadows, and he was hardly sure he could trust the spiders, always hovering there ominously on translucent threads. And those shifting dark forms in the sky... those were the most worrying of all. They had a familiar set of wings, but that long, slender body that seemed frozen in a rigid series of curves but yet seemed to subtly undulate in slow motion in contrast to the quick, fluid beats of the wings was rather strange and unnatural. And a little spooky.

But even so, he began to grow desperately hungry before long, and had to venture out to find something to eat.

And then it came. One of the dark forms came swooping out of the sky with its mouth wide open and its fangs poised to sink right into him, and he didn't know what to do except squeak at the top of his lungs. It was coming closer, and the world was getting darker, and he could already feel his meagre life force fading when—

It missed.

It went sweeping right past him and caught something else still hiding in the bushes, leaving him very much alive and intact. He shivered with surprise, then breathed a sigh of relief as the long, deep blue creature turned around, seeming to have no interest in him at all.

But shortly after that, it shifted around again and looked him straight in the face, displaying deep brown eyes with ferocious-looking slit pupils and a long, forked tongue that rapidly flicked in and out and trembled like the tip of a crackling flame. Now he knew that it was really the end, and that his only chance would be to quickly swivel around and scramble away as fast as possible—so he turned and did exactly that. But before he could go anywhere, the beast's immensely long tail went sweeping all the way around across the sand and knocked him off his feet. He had no chance of escaping now.

"What are you doing all the way down here, little fellow?" it asked.

Takahiko shuddered and tried to hide his head in his down at first, but finally managed to meet the enormous creature's terrifying gaze.

"What's the matter...? Can't you talk?"

Takahiko quivered slightly again, but was too petrified to do anything else and thus continued to look up into the deep brown eyes apprehensively without making a sound.

The beast looked as if it were trying to force its lips upward to assume a more friendly expression, and attempted to speak to him in a softer, gentler tone.
"Can you understand me?"

Still Takahiko said nothing, and it soon realised that it wasn't really making any progress in its efforts to be nice and un-threatening.

"So you can't talk and you can't understand... I guess that means that either you must be pretty young, or you're a deaf mute. Ah, well... I guess I should take you with me whether you can understand me or not. Either way, you don't deserve to be left out here on the ground to die, no matter what it was you did."

And with that, the monstrous blue thing with fur and feathers and scales, whatever it was and whatever it wanted, swept him up onto its back with the tip of its tail and took to the skies again. Takahiko clung to its mane with all his strength, unable even to look at his surroundings for fear of what he'd see as the creature's back rippled and shifted beneath him.

The horrible abomination that had snatched him away from his nice spot under the ferns, as he learned within a few weeks, was actually a rather agreeable Dusk Serpenth known as Seiche (although it had taken a ridiculous number of times repeating those three things just to teach him that much, "Dusk" and "Serpenth" and "Seiche", and even longer to separate the three from each other). Seiche's home of sorts was a small, loose platform of woven vines and moss suspended between the trunks of several trees—really not a bad place for a young bird—and he was tireless at bringing his new arrival all sorts of nice insects, berry clusters, and other things to eat. And even though he tended to leave the small and largely defenceless nestling on its own for somewhat long intervals between trips—not due to any sort of callous feelings on his part, but more to his species' natural behaviour of not bothering to parent young at all, he explained—he wasn't above holding the little bird between his wings at night to protect it and keep it warm.

"Sorry, little Lain," Seiche had explained with a shrug, "as strange as you may think it is, that's simply the way it is for us. Every species in Subeta has its own instincts and traditions, and you must learn to respect all of them equally."

"Why?"

"Well, it's... uh, you'll learn that later—trust me. But for now, just remember that whatever strange beast or belief you might run into, there's almost always a reason for it, and you should never go assuming something doesn't have any meaning."

These were words the poor blue reptilian would come to regret a few months later, at a time when he was explaining in more detail about all the different species in Subeta to the then-fledgling Lain.

"Chais live mainly in forests and shrubland, where there are lots of tasty berries and herbs," he explained. "Archans are a savannah species that guard the plains of the Sacred Lands. Swampies... well, they live in swamps and large lakes. Hence the name."
"And Lains?"

"Lains live in the rainforest. They build little nests out of twigs and grasses and various other things where they keep their offspring protected from predators."

"Why was I thrown out?" Takahiko interrupted.

Seiche stopped, totally not expecting that. Although he knew he would have been foolish to think it would never come up, he'd at least hoped it would have been a few more months, or at the very least a little less blunt. But no, there it was, staring him right in the face, and he frankly had no idea how to best explain the harsh realities of the world to a fragile little Lain chick not much larger than his own head. And all the while, said Lain chick was just patiently waiting for an answer, not at all able to understand why he couldn't reply.

"In this world, there are many unsolved mysteries," he succinctly answered.

Takahiko's eyes widened with shock.
"But, there always has to be a reason!"

Now Seiche felt simply awful; not only was that little bird insufferably perspicacious, but now it was making him look like a hypocrite.

"Well, there probably is, but I have no idea what it is, any more than I could tell you why you ended up with that weird colouration."

That was Seiche's second mistake—he had just given the little reddish-orange Lain with blue accents both the necessary twos, and at that point it was only a matter of time before they would inevitably fuse themselves together.

"They threw me out because I was different, didn't they?"

"I never said that."
"But that doesn't mean they didn't!"
"Neither does it mean they did. It's probably just a simple genetic mutation; why would they throw you out for being born that way?"

Takahiko suddenly quieted down and remained still for a moment, as if he were maybe starting to reconsider his previous thoughts, or on the verge of some great epiphany and re-shaping of values.

"They threw me out because I'm a worthless mutant," he quietly uttered in stunned realisation.

Seiche sighed, covering his face with his wing in shame.

After that, no matter what Seiche did, he could never seem to persuade the little Lain against the notion that his markings were somehow abnormal, undesirable, evil, or any combination of the above. No matter what kind of argument he used, the little bird's irritating mastery of logic always seemed to slay it before it could go anywhere.

"Look, no two Subetans are exactly the same," he had tried explaining once. "We might have different mannerisms, or different accessories, or something else that differs, but in some way, we're all different from one another."

"But how can we form like groups if we're all different?"
"Well, many of us are alike in some ways, but at the same time, we're all different in other ways."
"But then only some are alike in the alike ways and others are still different," Takahiko had countered.

Seiche had also tried the argument that beauty is subjective.

"Even though you may be different from other Lains, some might find your unusual colourations to be beautiful because they don't appear often."
"But what if they really mean that I'm something awful on the inside?"
"I don't think they—"

Good grief, Lain! Seiche interrupted with his own thoughts, unable to understand how he could make such a shallow argument seem so deep.

"Look, little Lain," Seiche finally asserted one day, "there are only three ways a Subetan can acquire an unusual colour. One, you were born with it and the reason was nothing more than chance. Two, you drank some sort of weird water, as sometimes happens in places like Peka Glade and Arctic Frost. Three, you somehow got hold of a magical elixir. And I can't imagine either of those latter two had anything to do with it."

"But there has to be a reason," Takahiko repeated. "Everything has a meaning."

Seiche sighed and wearily set down his head, shading his unclosing eyes from the sun with his expansive blue coils. "If you absolutely must know what the meaning is, we can go visit a library at some point. But before we go anywhere, I need a nap... you can be so tiring sometimes."

A time later, the two of them found over two thirds of all the people and pets in the Centropolis Public Library staring directly at them, never having seen or heard such a weird Lain or such a weird inquiry.

"Do you know where we might find books on rare varieties of Lains, unusual colours, or unexplained mysteries of sudden transfiguration?" Seiche had asked.

The librarian, Alexander, had simply taken one look at the Serpenth, one look at the Lain, and then one bewildered look back at the both of them.
"This wouldn't have anything to do with that handsome young Lain standing next to you, would it?"

Seiche smiled and shrugged. "Maybe."

"Well, I suppose there's the Book of Magic, The Little Birdy Book, A Guide to the Fauna of the Omen Islands... here, I might as well write out a list for you so you can look them up in the card catalogue. Or the Book of Books, whatever you prefer."

Seiche thanked him, taking the list of books and topics in his lips and sliding over toward the card catalogue table with Takahiko energetically hopping along closely behind. But as they were heading across the room, they could tell other visitors were gradually beginning to ramp up their gossip.

"Where do you suppose they're from?" a punkish city-dweller commented quietly over a magazine.
"Oh, probably Veta Lake or somewhere."
"Think they're islanders...?"
"No, I bet they're from Arctic Frost; that Lain kind of reminds me of the northern lights."
"I thought it looked more like purgatory flames myself. Maybe they're from the Darkside?"

"No, you're both wrong," a snarky-looking Irion asserted as he put down a guide to different kinds of matter that was dwarfed by his enormous paws. "I think it looks more like somebody messed up when mixing potions. Who knows—maybe some novice alchemist went and put both the Cream and Sun ingredients in the same bottle."

Hearing some of the gossip, Takahiko turned self-consciously to his escort, still looking over his shoulder slightly as he did so.
"They seem to think I'm some sort of accident," he whispered.

"Illnesses, accidents, ability boosts..." Seiche murmured to himself as he flipped through the pages of a book with his nose. "No, it's not a curse, and it's not a blessing... I don't think. Oh, don't pay any attention to them, little Lain; people say all kinds of things."

But Takahiko still couldn't help feeling self-conscious; even as he was walking out of the library, he still couldn't help stopping and pivoting his head around to look back a few times.

"Well, we've just about exhausted the natural, so we might as well research the supernatural now," Seiche suggested as the two of them were resting on a park bench outside the library, Takahiko neatly perched on the back of it and he extended all across the seat in a sloppier tangle of wings and tail. "The next most logical place to go would be the Sacred Lands, where there's both a wizard and an oracle, plus an apothecary-type place that might be able to tell you about herbs and whatnot that might have had something to do with your weird colouration."

"Seiche, there isn't anything wrong with me, is there? You're sure Maleria didn't put a curse on me or anything?"
"No, I'm positive Maleria had nothing to do with this... if she did, you'd probably be purple and coughing up little coal-coloured blobs. Don't worry about it... It looks much too innocuous for an evil hex, and you look much too healthy for it to be a disease."

Takahiko glanced over at a nearby wastebin, and gave a silent sigh. It was actually a somewhat interesting wastebin, with weird helical patterns in its cross-hatching, but that only depressed him more. It was a weird metal bin with a weird metal pattern, with a weird reddish-orange Lain face reflected and distorted in it. It was kind of pretty, but that hardly offset all the weirdness.

"Oh, stop looking so down, little Lain," Seiche interjected. "You have to remember what people say isn't always true. Especially when they're surprised or upset, they often say crazy things they don't really mean, so there's no reason to be upset about it yourself. It's just the way things go."

Takahiko seemed somewhat consoled by that, but still couldn't quite shake all the negative attention he'd gotten and the possibility of his being abnormal out of his mind. When he looked at the grass, he noticed an unusually long blade protruding above the rest of the tuft, of which a sudden gust of wind swiftly snapped off the head, thrashing the poor clump of seeds onto the earth and shattering it into small, sharp fragments. He winced slightly.

"Seiche, what if I'm some sort of evil artifact and I have to be destroyed? What if I'm some sort of... Lain-shaped demon?"

Seiche blinked emphatically at the absurd statement and narrowed his eyes in an almost annoyed way.
"You are not a Lain-shaped demon, and you won't have to be destroyed. Come here."

Takahiko jumped down onto the seat of the bench as he saw the Serpenth spread his wings to make a space for him, and gladly jumped into it. Satisfied with the small subadult Lain held gently beneath him and warmed by his wings like always, Seiche turned his face inward and offered it a few more calm words of reassurance.

"Trust me. Either your appearance is perfectly normal and there's nothing strange about it, or it hides some sort of special secret that will come of great use to you one day. It's not a curse, and it's not a blessing... it seems to be something even greater than either of those, if it means anything at all. Something that will forever soothe your heart the moment you discover it, almost like... well, I'm not sure what one could compare it to, really, since I'm not sure I've ever seen anything like it. But I know it's not evil, and if anyone will be able to tell you about it, it would be someone living in the Sacred Lands."

With that, the small sunrise-coloured Lain buried himself deep in the pair of pale blue wings, somewhat calmed, and began to doze off.

Having arrived at Shinwa's temple after a long boat ride and an even longer flight, Seiche was exhausted and could do little more than idly lie around before the front door of the structure. But Takahiko was still as full of energy as ever, and bounced curiously through the initial forest of pillars into the opening hall. In the vast innermost room, there were a couple of visitors gathered around a corner adorned with a swirly pink tapestry, one a tough-looking young woman with a dark jacket and the other a fluffy Jollin with a bandanna over its shoulders. As they heard Takahiko come cheerfully hopping in behind them, both turned and stared at him in utter shock.

"Hello? I'm here to see Shinwa!"

"Y-You're supposed to bow...!" the Jollin cautiously hissed through gritted teeth with thrown-back ears, quivering as if he was afraid of some sort of divine wrath at this boorish display any moment.

Takahiko tilted his head to one side in a look of innocent confusion. "Bow?"

"Actually, it's not really necessary," Shinwa's almost light, almost twittering voice remarked from just behind the Jollin and its owner in the corner.
"What? But you made us—"
"Who's to say I don't get bored once in a while?" Shinwa replied. "I have to do something to change things around."

The tough-looking young woman and bandanna-wearing Jollin both seemed to be snarling and shaking with carefully-concealed anger for a moment, and finally just turned and left without much else to say. Shinwa smiled to herself and raised a hand to her lips to try to mask a mischievous snicker, although it hardly did any good.

"Shinwa, do you have any idea where I could have gotten markings like these?" Takahiko asked after briefly dipping down his head for a few seconds, even though he now knew it was unnecessary.

Shinwa smiled again, though this time in a much more friendly way. "I knew you were going to ask that."
"What? ...How?"

"The Oracle told me that one day a brilliantly-coloured Lain with orange and cyan feathers was going to appear in front of me and ask me why he looked the way he did. She said that I was to tell him the High Circle had selected him to be a messenger and guardian of the Sacred Lands, and to welcome him into my temple at all times. And that they have named him Takahiko."

"There must be some mistake," the brightly-coloured Lain dismissed, shaking his head. "I've never really had a name."

"No, I don't think there's any mistake," Shinwa reassured him. "I don't know of any way a Subetapet can end up with the sacred sunrise markings other than an ordinance from the High Circle, and there's no spoofing one of those. It's also not so common for an abandoned Lain chick to survive to adulthood, which makes me strongly doubt that there possibly could have been more than one 'Lain forgotten by the world' that the High Circle wanted to honour."

Takahiko stood there in awe with his beak ajar, unsure how to take such a revelation. Taking advantage of that stunned state, Shinwa reached out and took him up into her arms, giving him a light kiss on the crown. Then she gently set him down again.

"I don't know what you've been through, and I probably never will, but I can tell you one thing: don't assume that you have ever been forgotten by the world or that no one appreciates you. At least not now."

"...Thank you, Shinwa," Takahiko told her, beginning to tear up a bit.

"Oh, don't mention it. I've always liked little birds; you'd probably be welcome here even without the ordinance. But since we have it, I think we might as well make use of it... and I already have an idea of how to do that."

Somewhat later, the small sunset-coloured Lain came hopping out of the temple to find his adoptive parent still lying in the exact same place as when they had first arrived.

"Seiche, Seiche!!" Takahiko joyfully squeaked. "There was a reason!"
"Wha...? Reason?" Seiche groggily muttered from inside a folded wing.
"Yes, there was a reason! The High Circle put out an ordinance and I have the sacred sunrise markings and I'm appreciated and Shinwa is going to let me stay at her temple and I got this fancy armour and I get to be a messenger of the Subetan gods!"

Seiche gave a low, purring groan and shifted slightly in his sleep, but did not seem to have listened to a word of it.

Thus the young, lost sunset-coloured Lain chick developed into a great, strong sentinel and messenger of the Subetan gods, able to fly long distances across the vast Subetan ocean and long stretches of dark forest, over the intricate and meandering rivers of the western continent and the desolate canyons and magma-pierced mountains of the Darkside, all in order to find Shinwa's lost sock or missing teaspoon. Both Shinwa and Takahiko took great enjoyment in this prank: everyone thought he was some sort of legendary spirit on some sort of romanticised, never-ending journey against the forces of darkness, as per the legends all the famous figures of the Sacred Lands spread, when all he was really doing was rescuing pink tape measures and swirly saucepans from the forces of maybe-possibly-conceivably-Maleria-but-much-more-likely-some-random-minor-lizard-minion-or-unscrupulous-Darkonite-or-greedy-little-magpie. No longer did Shinwa have to worry about naughty little hunks of Dark Matter stealing things any more, the people had a hero, and overall things rather brightened up across the Sacred Lands as his perceived (and perhaps actual) courage and determination inspired awe and a will for personal improvement in the hearts of many. And of course, Takahiko was also willing to do little errands for the Wizard and the Oracle if they needed any.

In the mythological version, Red Lain was killed by a fearsome Velosotor as a chick, but had so much pity for the cruel, unfeeling world that he decided to become Reborn and return to Subeta to fight for a return of justice and compassion. After subduing the original Velosotor and making it renounce its ways, he began to travel the world searching for a so-called "Hidden Dawn", a thing of brightness and never-ending warmth that would one day banish all hatred from the world (or so a magical Paralix living in the clouds had told him). He knew that he would never find it, but nevertheless, he still flew on in search of it and even accomplished a few impossible feats for good measure, including putting shattered pottery back together, un-wilting flowers, and even using his apparently contagious Reborn-ness to resurrect a couple of other Subetapets from the dead. Of course, in the myth, Red Lain eventually ends up leaving Subeta forever and going straight back to the beyond because he finally sees the futility of his efforts, which turns out to be a brilliant strategic move since only then does everyone start to miss him. But most people tend to forget that part of it.

The real Takahiko is much more modest, content simply to watch the grass blades gently sway in the breeze on a summer afternoon. And at this point, even the tall ones seem to sway with the others in intact harmony.