Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
The old fisherman was sat in his usual spot by the old trout-pond, his willow rod leant against a stump as the line drifted lazily across the surface. "It's cold today," he thought as he rocked back on his wicker chair and pulled up the collar of his jacket around his neck. Nothing was biting today, but he hardly expected to catch anything anymore, rather he just enjoyed being outside. The north wind rattled through the bowing arms of the weeping willows as it whisked away the fog of his breath, but none of Jack Frost's trick could keep the old fisherman from his station.
Suddenly the mood changed, a sliver of sunlight escaped through the clutches of the grey sky above, tracing out an area of light which quickly skipped across the pond towards the old man, bathing him in a weak warmth portending the coming spring. The sun's heat could hardly be called "warming", but the little comfort it brought was much appreciated. Suddenly the sound of cracking twigs from the path behind him pricked his mind from its aged torpour.
"Good morning Mr Fisherman," shouted out the princess as she ran up to his chair, her face flush in a warm glow, "look what I've found!". She held out her palms excitedly to the old man, a small dirty looking object in their midst.
"Oh good morning your Highness, bright as always aren't you? Well let me see here, what have you found today?" The princess' little hands were held far too close for his old eyes to properly focus on, so he craned his neck backwards and peered at the object down the ridge of his nose.
"It's a ring!" she declared, grinning; "I found it in the rose garden."
"Did you now?" replied the fisherman, "well isn't that lovely?" Still struggling to see the tiny little thing, he could just about make out the rough shape of a ring through both his poor eyesight and the soil accumulated around it. It looked old and forgotten, probably a trinket lost by some wealthy visitor to the hall. They must have deemed it too much effort to search for and left it to be compacted into the soil by the beat of the gardener's trowel.
"I'm going to wash it clean in the pond, that's why I came down here." The princess wiped the ring against the hem of her blue pinafore and held it up to her face, inspecting it with an intensity she certainly inherited from her parents. "Do you think it's made of silver? I can't tell."
"Silver perhaps, maybe even gold." The fisherman leant back again in his chair with a creak, "But what would a young lady like you do with such a ring? Jewellery is for the grown-ups."
The princess cocked her head to one side and placed a finger on her lip in an expression of serious contemplation. Thinking for a few moments she said, "Well, maybe I will just keep it in a box to look at, or maybe..." her face suddenly lit up as if reaching a moment of eureka, "or maybe I'll keep it for my wedding-day! Then I'll be able to wear it every day forever and ever!" She nodded smugly in the manner of a girl who had solved a particularly troublesome riddle, "Yes I'll keep it safe until I'm old enough to be a a bride!"
"Oho?" the old man chuckled, "I think that's a grand plan my young lady."
"Hehe, I know", she replied, puffing out her chest, "now I better clean it up now before the maids call me for lunchtime." With that she skipped over to the pond and trudged through the few steps muddy foreshore to the water's edge.
"Be careful there," shouted out the man, "we wouldn't want you ruining your nice clothes." But the little girl just smiled and pointed at her little rain boots: she had come well prepared. The fisherman watched the girl from his perch as she worked. First she hiked up her skirt above her knees and pinned it in place expertly using the buckle of her belt. Then she carefully leant down over the rippling surface, taking care to ensure her clothes never touched the mud beneath her before delicately dipping the ring into the ice-cold water and scrubbing away at it with a little brown handkerchief she unveiled from her front pocket. She worked diligently and precisely with the dexterity of an older girl, carefully washing then scrubbing the ring in the water for a few seconds, inspecting the progress, and repeating the process over. She was engrossed in her little task in a way that only certain children can be, her concentration such that hardly anything could have got pulled away her attention. Hardly anything.
"Froggie!" she suddenly exclaimed, pointing her finger towards what the old man could only assume was some amphibious creature which had just emerged from the depths, for he couldn't see anything there, "come here Mr Frog!" With the previously all-important task at hand forgotten in a moment, the princess turned her undivided attention instead to this certain "Mr Frog Esq." Squelching her way along the muddy bank, she held out her hands in some vain attempt at coaxing him in. But the hunting instinct of children should never be underestimated, and a few minutes of squelching and tactical manoeuvring later the frog was gripped firmly between her hands. She held the slimy thing up and peered inquisitively into its black eyes, presumedly communicating with it through some purely cerebral method. She stayed in this position for a long while until, evidently shocked with whatever she had to say, the frog made his heroic escape by freeing himself from her iron claw and launching his body a good seven feet in one smoothly executed movement. With a "plop" he landed back into the water and instantly disappeared, reunited with the black deep. The princess staggered a little, looking for a moment like she was about to fall backwards into the sludge, but managed to steady herself at the last second avoiding a potential laundry-disaster for whomever washes her clothes. After recuperating her balance she turned to the old man and shouted in a tone of shock tinged with a hint of anger, "Mr Frog took my ring!"
This episode left the fisherman standing up, having instinctively risen with the chaos. "Come out from the mud young miss you're going to fall. How do you mean the frog took the ring?"
Doing as she was told, she climbed up from the water's edge onto the drier ground, her gait now suggesting something closer to an impetuous stomp. "He took it!" she repeated, "he grabbed it when he jumped and now its gone. He took it with him down to the bottom of the pond where I'll never get it back."
The frustration in her eyes was clear to see, and it threatened to materialise into a flood of juvenile tears. "Now now, you know that can't be true," replied the man, struggling to find the right words, "frogs are good creatures, it must have been a mistake. Maybe you just dropped it where you were standing?"
"No I saw him do it. I saw him holding it ring as he splashed in, I know he took it on purpose! I-". Her words were suddenly cut off by the ringing of a school-bell from up towards the hall, and the faint shouting of a female voice calling "lunchtime, lunchtime".
"I've got to go." She turned away without another word and began her stroppy walk back up the hill, the emotions welling up in her eyes.
"Wait, little miss wait," the old man shouted towards her back, his voice strained; "listen, I'll get that ring back for you, don't worry. You just come back tomorrow and you can have it back then."
She stopped and turned back towards him, just about forcing a smile before continuing her retreat at a running pace: "That's a promise Mr Fisherman, you promised."
With that the fisherman sat back down into his chair with a deep sigh and waited for the inevitable string of excuses which were coming his way shortly. And he didn't need to wait long, because the princess was hardly out of ear-shot before the frog emerged spluttering and splashing from the pond. With the noble presence now gone, Mr Frog instead appeared in his self-described "amiable form", maybe three foot tall and bipedal, somewhere between amphibian and human.
"Did you see that?" the frog started excitedly, water still dripping from his limbs as he skipped his way through the mud towards the old man's chair, "the princess held me! She picked me up and held me so close! I'll never wash again..."
The fisherman interrupted the loud little creature in his tracks, "yes of course I saw. Do you know how much havoc you've caused? Why did you jump away like that?"
The frog suddenly looked bashful. The old man thought it wouldn't be incorrect to say he blushed, although perhaps that word would not be anatomically accurate. Either way this emotion didn't fit this creature one bit, and frankly it was unnerving. "I got embarrassed..." explained the frog, "I've always dreamt of meeting the princess but I never imagined I would really..." His words trailed off as he caught the scathing glare of the fisherman, its sharpness unwithered by age.
"And the ring?" continued the fisherman, "what have you done with the ring? She and I both know full well you snatched it when you jumped away. I've promised she'll get it back by tomorrow morning so you'd better return it right now."
Once again that slightly bile-inducing bashfulness took over the amphibian's countenance: "I can't..."
"Why not?"
"I dropped it. It fell into the sludge and I can't find it."
The old man sunk deeper into the recesses of his wicker chair. "Well then," he started, slowly, "you should better start digging around in that sludge then, shouldn't you?"
"No way!" protested the frog, "once something is lost to the black mud you'll never find it again. Every frog knows that. And I dare even the newts wouldn't dare bother." He said all this while purposefully avoiding meeting the eyes of the old fisherman, attempting to demonstrate the impossibility of such a task with the vague flailing of his forelimbs. Unfortunately he found these histrionics did nothing to sway the old man, whose years had made him wise to such excuses. So it took mere seconds from the moment he built up the courage to face his glare again for the frog to crumble like a house on sand. "Ribbit. Oh okay okay, I'll go and look. But don't expect much alrighty? It really is an impossible task I'm telling you." At that Mr Frog averted his eyes back to the trout-pond, and with one powerful kick of his hind-legs disappeared once again into the murk.
The fisherman shook his head in frustration. Out of all the creatures in this demesne it was this one which he found most insufferable, and it was this one he somehow ended up spending the most time with too. Picking up his long-neglected rod he cast it into the water away from the area of the lost ring, and listened to the winter birds sing as he awaited the results of the search. The frog was down there for a surprising amount of time, and diligence wasn't normally in his nature. Maybe twenty minutes passed before the tell-tail bubbles started to appear on the surface heralding his return. But triumphant it was not.
"I can't find it," a defeated looking Mr Frog announced as he bobbed up to the surface, only his mouth and beady eyes above the waterline, "you can't see a thing down there, I've just been scrabbling around in the dark. I give up!"
It was clear this time he was telling the truth, his tone was that of a defeated man. "Alright alright," relented the old man, "you can stop for now." He contorted up his wrinkled face in thought as the frog hopped up onto the bank and sat himself, exhausted, on a fallen branch. "I suppose it's my turn to give it a go now."
"You?" the frog responded incredulously, "you'll die of cold-water shock if you even touch water in this season old man!"
"No-no my friend, with this;" the fisherman brandished his weapon of choice, "I haven't been fishing all these years without picking up a trick or two." With that the old man struggled to his feet and stepped forward toward the pond, his bones creaking as he did so. Deliberately, and with the dexterity of a younger specimen, he raised the rod above his head and whipped it with a subtle but powerful flick of his wrist. The hook and line sailed slowly through the air and landed perfectly in the spot where Mr Frog had just emerged. Once he felt the hook touch the bottom and sink into the sludge, he began to twitch the line this way and that with a mechanical precision. The amphibian watched in silence as the man plied his craft. The angler closed his eyes and stood there completely stock still, dampening down his very presence so that the frog thought he might not have even noticed he was there if he just happened to hop past. Only the minute twitching of his wrists gave away his existence as he traced out a complex pattern of ripples across the flat surface, mirroring what must have been an even more complex performance at the end of the line. Mr Frog, usually not one for patience, couldn't even imagine interrupting this state of autotelic tranquillity. His attention was distracted for just a moment by the passing of a cloud over the sun, and once he looked back it took a good few seconds to even locate the old fisherman's figure, standing in the same spot though he was, and once he did lay eyes on him properly the amphibian somehow thought his silhouette looked more like that of a heron's than a human, at least in the dim light of the overcast Winter's afternoon. He sat and watched with this strange tension in the air for a long but indeterminate amount of time, the rod slowly and methodically searching a wider and wider area. Suddenly the splash of a trout surfacing on the other side of the pond broke the spell, and the fisherman, opening his eyes, began to reel in his line. "Nothing," he declared.
The pair sat in their respective spots for a while without saying anything, defeated, until the frog spoke up in a sympathetic tone, "don't worry old man. As I said, anything that falls into that black sludge may as well have been swallowed by the Earth herself. Neither my hind-legs nor your rod really stood a chance..."
"I know, I know," replied the old man, now slumped even further down into his chair, "I just hate that I'll have to disappoint the princess."
Then, as the sun's light slowly re-emerged from behind the clouds, a lightning bolt of turquoise light flashed across the water's surface. The pair bolted upright in their seats.
"What was that?" asked the frog.
"I have no idea," replied the man.
The kingfisher came to rest on a twig of the willow high above the trout pond, on a bough extending over the centre of the water. Her brilliant plumage reflected a small kaleidoscope of colours against the dull bark beside her as she cocked her head sidewards to look down at the water below. The two fools beneath her looked this way and that, fretting about what they had just seen but not once thinking to look up. Her gaze delved deep into the water's depths, past what the eyes of any other creature could even imagine and into the dark beneath even that. She saw the movements of the trout as they swam to and fro. She saw the countless watersnails and boatmen of the pond as they blindly went about their daily chores. She even saw the microscopic rhythmic pulsating of the tree roots which lined the pond's edge as they pumped nutrients into their trunks. And finally she saw a flash of metal, lodged deep in the darkest recesses of the mud. And she dived.
The frog didn't notice the kingfisher enter the water whatsoever, and even the wily old fisherman only saw the slight splash produced in the aftermath. "Look there," he told the frog, pointing towards the small ring of ripples emanating out across the surface, "what was that?" The two stood side-by-side next to each other, craning their necks over the trout-pond to try in vain to see through the dark water. But minutes few passed before the master fisher broke back through the surface once again. The jewel of turquoise and orange flitted back and forth three times, before coming to perch on the tip of the old man's rod, now leant up against his chair. The pair stared at the little bird in awe, and had no time to find the right words before she was off, zipping away like a beam of light through the trees into the foliage abutting the river yonder. As she did so she dropped from her beak into the old wicker chair the glistening form of a ring, its golden surface reflecting the afterimage of her feathers.
