There was only one daisy in the entire patch of flowers that wasn't in bloom yet, a lone green plant amidst its white and yellow siblings. Of course, since it hadn't blossomed by the end of July, it would probably remain the solitary freak, live feebly only to wither in autumn without ever blossoming.
Unless I could help it, that was.
I held my hands on both sides of the sapling and closed my eyes. I did what I usually did when I tried to use my nascent powers; I concentrated on the mental image of the tiny plant in front of me, and made the imaginary flower grow and blossom in my mind. Sometimes when I did so, I would feel a surge of power within my veins, and when I opened my eyes again the real plant would have followed in suit. This time, though, as too often happened, I felt nothing.
I opened my eyes. As expected, the stubborn sapling was the same as it had been before my attempt. Even though I had known to expect it, I couldn't help but I lean backwards and sigh bitterly.
Cirno leaned forward to look at my face, head tilted and her hands behind her back. "No dice?"
"Nope."
"Too bad. Wanna go do something else now?" Cirno stood up and stretched her arms into the air. Her icy wings glimmered in the light. I found myself idly wondering if too much sunlight wwould make them melt. But then again, surely Cirno had enough strength to keep them frosty around the year. She had power to spare, especially compared to a second-rate weakling like me. As far as fairies go, we two weren't even in the same weight class.
I sighed again. "Guess so. Any thoughts?"
"Dunno." She flashed me a smile. "We could try finding where that key of yours fits."
Mystia, who was leaning heavily against a tree trunk, raised her gaze from her talons and gave me an inquisitive stare. "What key?"
"This one," I said, pulling the tiny brass key hanging around my neck on a red chain into full view, showcasing it to everyone in our little group. We were lounging on a small meadow next to a forest, with enough shadows to keep everyone satisfied. Today's gathering hadn't exactly been a successful one; the heat made us sluggish and unimaginative, and so the others had spent the bulk of the early evening watching me fail at doing my job, waiting for better ideas. "I doubt we'll be able to figure out what it belongs to, though."
Mystia leaned in closer to inspect the key as Wriggle yawned down from the tree branch she was lying on. "Where did you find it?"
"I didn't. Miss Yukari gave it to me."
"Why would she do that?"
I shrugged. "No clue." Miss Yukari had simply popped out of another gap of hers one evening and handed it over to me with one of her ineffable smiles. "She just told me to hang onto it, because I might need it in a few years."
Mystia frowned. "That makes no sense."
"I know."
"Since when has Yukari made any sense?" Wriggle quipped, the end of her sentence turning into another yawn. She had woken up early last evening, and I could tell by her listless gaze she wasn't exactly pleased to be expected to stay up the entire day too.
"Never, I suppose." I shrugged again and decided to give the flower thing one more shot. I had to practice, after all, if I wanted to stop being an embarrassement of a flower fairy. None of the others ever failed to trigger their powers, and I was sick of being the runt of the litter.
Still, even with Cirno and Dai-chan's advice and encouragement, I had hardly moved from square one, Sigh. Sometimes I wondered if there's just something wrong with me. Like maybe I was accidentally born as a flower fairy and not as a tree fairy or something else that I was meant to be.
I focused. Negativity wasn't going to help me, that I knew. After all, I did sometimes succeed. Not often enough to stop me being jealous of my friends - why was it that Cirno could conjure ice and Wriggle summon bugs in the blink of an eye, when it took me minutes to make a single flower bloom, if it bloomed at all? - but often enough to prove I wasn't just a magical zero. I was a magical one-half at least.
This time around, it was hopeless. My distracting thoughts only served to make sure that the stubborn thing wouldn't respond to me. Defeated and exhausted, I sat down on the grass. "Not gonna happen."
Dai-chan patted my back. "Maybe you're meant to make lilies-of-the-valley bloom?"
I hung my head. "I can't get it to work with them very often either." I had slightly better luck with lilies-of-the-valley, perhps because I've had so much practice with them, but it still only worked once every blue moon.
Cirno crouched down next to me and patted my shoulder. She smiled brightly. "Just keep practising! Do you think I'd be so good at making ice if I didn't do it all the time." For emphasis, she froze her hand and waved it in front of my face. "I've come a long way from when I was little."
"You're still little!" Wriggle shouted from where she and Mystia had been napping, grinning sardonically.
Cirno turned around on her heels and stuck out her tongue. "I'm not so little that I couldn't kick your butt if I wanted to!"
"Oh yeah?" Wriggle dropped down from the tree and walked towards us, her hands in pockets. "Wanna try it out right now?" she pulled out her spell card deck and split it in half. "Two versus two, what do you say?"
Cirno grinned and rose to her full height, cracking her knuckles all the while. "Bring it on!"
Dai-chan sighed. "Weren't we supposed to help Al to learn making flowers bloom?"
Cirno shrugged. "Hey, spell card duels are useful too! Who knows, maybe there'll be an incident on the mountain Al-chan lives on and she'll have to defend herself against Reimu and Marisa."
A shiver ran down my spine. "I'm not sure I want to do that."
Cirno waved her hand. "It's fun, really. Besides, you have to. You can't leave Medicine to defend the Nameless Hill all by herself."
"Well, I guess..." As confident as the others looked (well, besides Rumia, who was floating slightly further away and whose face I couldn't see from behind the ball of darkness she hid in), I still wasn't certain. "You don't think it's really that likely to happen though, do you?"
Wriggle stroked her chin. "Well, it's not exactly unlikely, either. There've been a lot of incidents in Gensokyo lately."
"Yeah, like the time when the new shrine appeared on the mountain," said Cirno.
"And when spring was stolen," Dai-chan chimed in.
"Yeah, that time was the best!" Cirno yelled enthusiastically.
"Oh, and then there was the summer with the red mist," said Mystia.
"And then there was the time all these demon tourists came to Gensokyo." Rumia had dismissed the darkness around her and floated closer by, her arms to her sides like always.
For some reason, the others pulled a face at her comment.
"Rumia, we were talking about that actually happened," Cirno said. Then, she pulled a ponderous look on her face. "Demon tourists, huh? That'd be pretty interesting."
"It happened," said Rumia, a vague smile lingering on her face, unperturbed by Cirno's refusal to believe her.
"No it didn't!" Wriggle said hotly. "I don't remember anything like that, and I'm pretty sure I'm older than you."
"How old are you, then?" Dai-chan asked Wriggle.
Wriggle shrugged. "Not sure. Cirno's older than me, though, so if she can't remember, it's definitely not true. So hey," she turned towards Rumia, "when did you say that incident happened?"
Rumia shrugged. "The summer before the mist, maybe."
Cirno folded her arms and nodded like the matter was solved. "Yeah, there's no way we all could have forgotten it then if it really had happened. Anyway, it was probably a dream."
"It wasn't," Rumia said obstinately, the tiny smile on her face never faltering
Cirno pouted. "Look, I have the best memory of us guys, and if I can't remember something that happened only so many winters ago it didn't happen. Also—"
"Weren't you two supposed to have a spell card battle?" Dai-chan suddenly interrupted.
"Uh, yeah, I guess," Cirno looked a little miffed and glanced at Wriggle. "But I kinda wanna talk this through first."
Dai-chan winked at me. I nodded and suppressed a giggle. We both knew that if Cirno got started, she never gave up until she won, and if we wanted to do something other than watch her debate with Rumia for the entire afternoon, it was better to distract her as soon as possible.
"Come on, Cirno!" I said in my most cheerful voice. "I wanna see you battle!"
"Yeah, but..."
"What's the matter? Chicken?" Wriggle taunted, a diabolical glint in her eyes.
Suddenly, the warm July air got very chilly. Cirno's eye twitched as her mouth spread into a massive grin.
"Never!" She pulled out her spell cards and posed. "Prepare to eat dust! And specks of ice!"
Wriggle laughed as they both soared into the air to begin their duel.
After the first few waves of icicles and pill-bug shaped bullets, I ignored the battle and turned towards Rumia. She was floating in place with a smile frozen on her face.
"Why do you say something like that happened?" I asked her.
Rumia blinked at me slowly. "Because I remember it. I don't know why no-one else does, but I know it happened. Don't you remember it, either?"
"I wasn't even born yet."
"Is that so?"
I scratched my head. "Still, Cirno and the others already lived then, and none of them remember anything about it. Maybe you just dreamed it."
Rumia shook her head in absolute certainty. "It happened, and there's no way around that."
I frowned. "How can you be so sure?"
Rumia beamed with pride. "Because it was around the time I met the saint lady."
My frown deepened. "Who?"
Rumia grinned. "She's the one who taught me to do this." She nodded at her extended arms.
"Oh." I really didn't get what she was talking about, but it seemed to be important to her. "So, what else happened back then? Where did the demon tourists come from?"
Rumia tilted her head. "Makai, I guess. My mind was kinda on something else at the time, so I wasn't paying that much attention to what was going on, but that wasn't the only thing. Some youkai I knew just vanished around the same time, and Cirno and the others don't know about them either."
My eyes widened. "Vanished? Where?"
Rumia shrugged. "No idea. Sometimes, I think I only remember it because I remember the saint lady," She shrugged. "Or that's how I think about it, anyway." She sat down. "But the demon tourists really happened. I know it's weird how the others don't remember it, but it wasn't a dream. It was real."
"I don't think you're a liar."
Rumia nodded. Her stomach growled.
"Tell the others I'm going hunting," she said, looking at the others. Cirno and Wriggle were still duelling, with Dai-chan following with amused attention and Mystia half asleep by the tree again.
I nodded. "Yeah. Good luck."
Rumia smiled and vanished into a ball of darkness that quickly vanished into the woods. I looked where she had gone, trying to figure out what she had been talking about. I didn't think Rumia would lie, not on purpose, anyway. So, what had happened back then?
It wasn't really possible one person remembered something no-one else did, so it couldn't have happened. But still...Rumia had looked so certain. It was really weird.
I rubbed my head: it had started to hurt. Sometimes, I get this weird feeling that I'm forgetting something important, but I can never figure out what exactly it is. This felt the same, even though Rumia's memory couldn't have anything to do with it: based on what had been said the whole thing had happened over a year before I had come to be. What was it, then?
Maybe some day, I would figure it out. Either way, I shouldn't worry about it too much: Gensokyo was the land of strange things, and strange things would keep happening there until the day I drew my final breath.
I shrugged and rejoined the others, following the duel as a spectator by Dai-chan's side. The sun was setting on the woods, and the pretty red leaves looked like they glowed. Who could focus on the ghosts of the past when present time was a dream of wonder?