Oogata’s secret is revealed at last.

Once again, this release isn’t using our own encode. We hope to go back to the nice encodes lovingly crafted by SoupRKnowva in a few weeks.

Also, once again, there’s more info about the episode in the main post. Watch the episode first, though!

Torrent: Here

There was a sneaky cultural reference in this episode. At the start we find out that Gyubid is a fan of folk stories, and then the phantom hot spring she creates turns out to be named “Kyuubi Springs”.

“Kyuubi” means “nine tails”, and is a reference to the magical, white, nine-tailed fox that appears again and again in East Asian mythology. There are a million nine-tailed fox stories, but the general theme is that the magical fox sometimes takes on a human form (almost always as an incredibly beautiful woman), usually to infiltrate human society and cause mischief.

Here’s my own quick version of one of the stories.

A traveller was trudging along a forest trail, far from home. He’d been walking for days, the sun was falling, and he wasn’t looking forward to another night sleeping rough. Just as he was giving up hope, he saw a light through the trees up ahead. As he drew closer, he realised it was a small, but rather cosy-looking, inn. He’d never heard of there being any places to stay in these parts, but, sure enough, it was an inn with a wooden sign outside inviting guests. A little hesitantly, he opened the door and poked his head inside.

“Oh! Welcome in!” said a beaming young woman standing beside a table almost overflowing with a mouth-wateringly tasty-looking roast dinner. “See! I’ve got some food ready for you right now! Then there’s a hot bath and warm bed waiting out the back. Come on in!”

Now, the traveller had plenty of years on the road behind him and was normally the cautious type, but the sight of the food and beautiful hostess and the thought of a hot bath and warm bed for once was all too good to resist. Before he knew it, he soaking in a steaming hot spring bath under the starry sky with a belly stuffed to the bursting point. Life was good. Maybe it was the scent of the bath, or maybe it was just the aches and pains dissolving away, but for some reason he started feeling very drowsy. He drifted off to sleep…

He woke up suddenly, feeling cold, icky and hungry. It was still night, and he was still in the forest, but the bath wasn’t a bath any more; it was a slimy bog. He looked around. The inn was gone. All he could see was the trunk of an old, dead oak tree. He heard a rustle in the leaves behind him, but when he turned back all he caught sight of was a white, bushy tail disappearing into the moonlit forest.