"Demon tourists?" The teashop's owner narrowed her eyes. "No, we haven't had any, and good riddance! I've had it with youkai coming over and mucking everything up. Stomping across my floors in their dirty shoes..." She glared daggers at my mud-encrusted feet. "Shoo!"
"Oh, yes, they discovered a new entrance to Makai recently." The old human nodded his head sagely. "It's from there that Lady Byakuren emerged. Have you heard of her, little one? Eh? You want to know who's the last person to come from there before Lady Byakuren? She's the first in decades."
"Yes, I remember them." The shopkeeper stroked his chin. "Polite girls, for the most part. We made a tidy bundle selling them souvenirs before the shrine maiden went to Makai and put a stop to it. She never thinks of commerce, that one." He gave me a stare. "What do you mean, which shrine maiden? The Hakurei one, of course! Didn't have to specify in the good old days..."
"Oh, that nuisance." Reimu put her broom aside and folded her arms. "I had to go over and tell their leader we wouldn't have it. I have enough hassle exterminating local youkai without the added burden." She tilted her head and pulled an ofuda from her shirt. "Are you from the Nameless Hill? We have some talking to do."
A blade of grass tickled my nose. I swatted it away and rolled onto my back, greeting the clouds and the hint of summer sun peeking behind them with a smile. It was the perfect day for taking long naps: the temperature was like a warm embrace, and the plants beneath my body were at their very softest.
I let the sunlight massage my bruises. Ultimately, Reimu had believed I knew nothing of the purple flowers spewing toxic pollen that had sprouted all around the village, but that was only after I had been seriously pummelled. Some days, it just doesn't pay to be a simple flower fairy.
My gaze drifted to my left. The few human and youkai who came to the Nameless Hill usually fled as soon as they caught whiff of all the poison in the air, but Miss Yukari lay down next to me with her hands crossed on her chest like she had no care in a world. Maybe she was like me and had poison for blood. Her eyes were shut, but I was pretty convinced she was actually wide awake.
I rolled onto my stomach and buried my nose in the soil. Usually, I was more than capable of falling asleep at will, but something about the thoughts drifting in my head kept me from sleep.
"There's something on your mind."
I nodded. I wasn't going to bother to pretend I was surprised Miss Yukari had noticed. "It's just something my friend Rumia once said."
"Hmm." Her eyes remained shut.
I gathered my courage. Who better to ask about this but Miss Yukari? "She talked about an incident none of my other friends remembered. I was bored, so I asked around the Human Village the other day. Some of them knew about it, but others didn't."
"Different people have different memories. It's as simple as that."
"Well, yeah." Since I wasn't getting any more sleep anyway, I stood up and stretched myself, standing on my toes and reaching for the sun. "But usually it's about stuff like who said what, and who played what prank on who. My friends sometimes remember how incidents went down in different ways, but disagreeing if an incident happened at all or not, that's..."
As so often happened, my head began to throb. I groped for the words I needed to explain myself and failed. "It's... too big."
"Really, now?" Miss Yukari's voice was very soft.
"Yeah." Some sleeping part of me whispered that I was treading on thin ice, but I couldn't tell why. Miss Yukari's expression was perfectly relaxed. "I think that maybe some of them were at a different place at the time. Like, maybe only Rumia was there to see the incident." I frowned. "But Cirno says she's older than Rumia. She must have been there."
"One would imagine that, yes."
"You don't seem very worried about it, Miss Yukari."
Miss Yukari slowly opened her eyes. "If you must know, I believe both of your friends are correct."
"But how can that be, Miss Yukari? I don't understand."
"Perhaps you don't need to. After all, you are only two years old."
That old excuse again. Even if it's true, I'm tired of being treated like a baby.
I looked downhill. Medicine was floating just above the wilting lilies-of-the-valley, her fairy doll hovering next to her ear as always. She was clearly heading towards us.
"I wonder what—" I turned to speak to Miss Yukari, only to discover I was speaking to myself. I was still staring at the spot where she had been when Medicine reached me.
"What is she doing here, Alraune?"
"She just came to say hi to me." I didn't understand why Medicine was fuming about it. Why Miss Yukari chose to be my friend, I could never guess, but it was nothing new. Her presence had never made Medicine upset before.
Medicine gave me an annoyed look. "The red-white one wishes to say hi to you?"
"Oh!" I scanned the horizon for signs of Reimu. "No, definitely not! What's she doing here? I told her you had nothing to do with the poison flower incident!"
"If she was here because of the incident, the black-white one should also have arrived by now." Medicine hesitated. "Maybe that's why the red-white one isn't moving."
Resigned to my fate, I sighed. "I'll go see what she wants, Miss Medicine." If it truly was an incident, I'd be blasted for my efforts like any other curious fairy approaching the resident troubleshooters during a time of crisis, but it couldn't be helped.
Medicine nodded. "Go, then." She then turned towards her fairy doll and tilted her head. "Perhaps it has to do with the spirit of Su-san."
I paused, already in the air. "The spirit of Su-san?"
"You know what Su-san grows on, don't you?" When I shook my head, a dreamy smile rose on her face. "It's corpses, Alraune. That's the first thing I saw when I was born." She tittered. "Su-san growing from the eye socket of a milky white skull. The whole hill is made of pure white bones, and Su-san is the manifestation of it."
If that was true, wouldn't there be more ghosts hanging around, I wondered as I flew over the wilting flowers, too used to Medicine's eerie manner to be terribly concerned.
In any case, it was time for me to strut my stuff.
I concentrated as hard as I could. After a long pause, a single faint green bullet shot out from my palm, wobbling unsteadily forward for a few shaku before disintegrating.
I grimaced. I hadn't expected anything more.
My friends had taken me to a doctor once, after months and months of Cirno's vigorous, if uneven training had made no difference to my skills. Even the weakest fairy should be able to fire danmaku at will, they said. They figured something about me was broken.
The doctor lady agreed, flipping her silver braid over her shoulder as she read my diagnosis. Something about me was off-kilter; not so badly I could use no magic whatsoever, but badly enough I could never control it properly or manipulate anything but the smallest particles. It could be fixed, she said, but only with side effects, and the look on her face was so scary when she pronounced those words I hid behind Rumia's back.
Sometimes, I thought about going back to the Bamboo Forest of the Lost and asking the doctor lady for the pill to straighten me out after all. Otherwise, if Medicine really does start an incident one day, what will I do when the humans show up? Just fly in front of them and wait for them to swat me aside?
Still, maybe that was okay. First of all, I was worried about going back alone. The look on the doctor's face as she read her verdict made me think she was interested in me as a test subject. The last thing I wanted was attention.
More importantly, and this was something I'd been thinking about for a while, maybe I was just meant to be a little strange. I've forgotten who said it, but someone once told me we all have our places in Gensokyo. Cirno existed to be the strongest fairy. Medicine existed to lead the dolls towards a new tomorrow, or at least that's what she says. And from what I could tell, I existed to laze around and make all the other fairies look better by comparison.
All in all, it could be a lot worse. At least I could make flowers bloom now. Sometimes.
There were butterflies in my stomach as I approached the dip in the hill where I knew the shrine maiden would be. I have died dozens of times, and while it never hurt much or left any marks, it always felt really weird. Like your stomach went missing for just a second and appeared again with a jolt. Some fairies loved that feeling and headed towards places they know are incident-prone just so they could be shot down. I could never get used to the idea. Something told me that since I was such a lousy fairy in general, maybe one day I simply wouldn't return after I died.
And so, I landed amidst the flowers and sneaked forward, glad the leaves around me were still green enough to mesh with my hair.
Reimu looked just like she had when I had last seen her, right down to the irate expression on her face. She hovered just above the ground, glaring at the field of flowers. Even my most gung-ho sisters were steering clear: she was alone.
I grimaced. Maybe I could rub some mud on my dress and lie to Medicine that I had fought her without actually doing so. Annoying Reimu when she was already clearly upset seemed like the worst idea of the century.
Just as I was about to turn around and find a puddle, I saw a purple crack split the sky just behind Reimu's left shoulder. A pale hand extended out of it.
Shivers ran down my spine. Before I could call out a warning, Reimu had already lunged away from the gap, drawing a spell card and raising her gohei in front of her like a shield.
The gap vanished, only for a larger one to open to distort reality near the top of Reimu's head. Miss Yukari fell out of it, landing gracefully on the ground, her gown billowing softly despite the nearly non-existent wind.
"Adequate. Slower than ideal, however," Yukari flicked some imaginary dust of her long sleeve.
Reimu's eyes narrowed. "What are you doing here?"
"I could ask you the very same question."
"I'm here to do my job." Reimu pulled a face. "A youkai escaped from a book at the Suzunaan and destroyed a bunch of carts before flying towards this hill."
"Should you not be hunting for it, then?"
"The trail ends here. I had a feeling that if I kept waiting, it would eventually emerge."
"I see." Yukari's smile was gentle. She flicked her parasol shut and touched the ground with its tip. "The youkai you were hunting for isn't here."
"What?"
"The youkai has long since fled to the Bamboo Forest of the Lost. Perhaps your instincts thought it was more urgent for you to meet me here."
Reimu snorted. "Not likely." She turned away, her eyes briefly brushing over where I was hidden. I tried to make myself even smaller. "Bamboo forest it is."
"It can wait." While I blinked, Miss Yukari shifted to floating right in front of Reimu. Reimu held her gohei very tightly, but didn't seem otherwise alarmed.
I sweated. This was obviously a private conversation, and the last thing I wanted to do was to be caught eavesdropping by some of the scariest people in Gensokyo. But what was I going to do? If I moved a muscle., they would both spot me at once. And so, I remained hidden in the grass, praying the thumping of my heart wouldn't rat me out.
"I'd rather get home as soon as—" Reimu's retort was interrupted by Miss Yukari leaning closer and raising her hand to touch Reimu's face. Reimu slapped the hand away with a look of boredom. "And I'm sick of that nonsense."
"Sick of nonsense, in Gensokyo?" Miss Yukari's expression grew sweeter still. "I thought that was all we had here."
To my surprise, Reimu smiled back. It was a fleeting smile, gone by the time a gust of wind rose and rushed through the grass. "I'll be going now."
"What if I told you that one day, you will have to kill me?"
Without a word, Reimu pulled a new spell card from her clothes and struck a battle stance. "Is that a challenge?"
"A premonition."
"...It's a tall order."
Reimu's tone was breezy, but her eyes were wide. Suddenly, I felt so very afraid for her. If someone as weak as me could see the tendrils of power radiating all around Miss Yukari, surely to a youkai expert they were as visible as the sun and the stars.
I couldn't watch. Even if I thought Miss Yukari was joking, I couldn't watch. I squeezed my eyes shut and clamped my hands over my ears and pretended I was somewhere far away.
When I next opened my eyes, I realised I had fallen asleep. Probably not for long: I saw Reimu against the blue sky, flying towards the Bamboo Forest of the Lost. Miss Yukari was—
"Did you have a good nap, Alraune?"
The entire world froze. I turned despite not wanting to, almost like I had strings like Miss Alice's puppets. Miss Yukari had opened her parasol and twirled it above her head, its shadow falling on her face.
I must have looked like a goldfish, opening and closing my mouth like I did.
Suddenly, Miss Yukari chuckled. "No matter. I know you will keep what you heard to yourself."
I swallowed and nodded, hypnotised by her eyes. They were blue today, the exact shade of the sky. I think it was the sight of them which made me open my mouth again. "Why does she have to kill you, Miss Yukari?"
I think my question surprised her. She said nothing for a long while as she continued to turn the parasol in her hands, her gaze suddenly hazy.
What surprised me the most was that she actually answered. "Perhaps she doesn't. Who can keep track of all the paths of fate?"
She mustn't have meant it as a real question, but I answered it anyway. "I thought you could, Miss Yukari."
Miss Yukari shook her head. "Perhaps one day I shall explain wave functions to you. For now, just know the future hasn't been written yet."
I felt a quiver in my stomach. Miss Yukari was talking to me, that was clear enough, but it didn't feel like she was talking to me me.
...Wave functions...? Like an ocean?
...Why can I imagine sea spray on my feet?
I looked down at my grass-stained feet. For a while, I couldn't tell if I stood on a hillside or a beach. Which was silly. There are no beaches in Gensokyo.
"Alraune."
An eastern wind swept across the hill, exerting its will on the flowers and my hair. Somehow, everything about Miss Yukari stayed perfectly still.
"Do you still have the key I gave you?"
I patted my chest where I knew the key hanged underneath my dress. "Of course."
Miss Yukari smiled. "Good girl. Hold onto it for some time longer."
"Why?"
"So that you may open the lock."
I sighed. In other words, Miss Yukari was being Miss Yukari and just saying weird things for no reason I could understand as usual.
At least, that's what I thought. Suddenly, she crouched down, so deep that our eyes were on level. Her smile was sweet, but I was looking at her eyes, which had turned golden.
"One day, I will come and fetch you," she said, speaking softly and clearly. "Perhaps it will be a month from now. Perhaps it will be a decade. But one day I will come and show you the world of lights. Will you wait for me?"
What else could I do? I nodded.
"Thank you."
I thought I misheard, but I had no time to ask for clarification. This time, I didn't even catch her opening the gap. She was simply gone. I was left alone in the grass, listening to the rustling of the wind and feeling more confused than ever.
Well. I supposed I would wait. And since she hadn't said anything about it, I assumed I was free to keep taking as many naps and going on as many adventures with my friends as I pleased while I did so.
With a shrug, I took to the air and went to find Medicine to tell her the menacing shrine maiden was gone for now.