NOVEL NEXT 35: As Though There Are Only Two Ways We Can Work Together
Sekibanki’s head dropped out of the night sky right in front of me. We were meeting at our bench, with the plan of having a short battle later. I didn’t flinch.
“Nice try,” I said. Then she headbutted me. “Oww!”
“Why are you stirring up trouble at Heidontei?” she demanded as her headless body walked over to sit down beside me.
“I didn’t do it on purpose!”
“Tell me exactly what happened,” said Sekibanki. “You are bringing unwanted scrutiny.”
I explained how I’d spoken to Youmu while slightly drunk, ostensibly to help Wiki. The conversation had been about seeing ghosts, instead, and we’d been kicked out by the waitress Miyoi after I’d inadvertently gotten the attention of one powerful youkai after another.
“Except Raghav,” I added. “He’s a nobody.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “I’ve heard the name before.”
“How’s that?” I asked, trying to contain my exasperation like I’d been stabbed in my exasperation-filtering organ. I pressed the no-longer-a-wound at my side.
“He’s been meeting youkai after hours at Heidontei,” she said. Her head settled onto her body. “A foolish thing, for which he has been rewarded. So far.”
“That explains a lot about how he learned danmaku. He’ll get a chance to pay the favor forward, though, because he’s agreed to try to train Wiki before the upcoming test.”
“Good,” she said.
“Would you have done it if I’d asked?”
“No,” she said. “It’s harder to keep secrets if you bring more people in on them, and especially so with Heida’s informant.”
“Ah, you know about that.” Wiki was taking a few days off from the historian’s group to study, but he planned to continue working there.
“I know many things.” I nodded and looked over at Sekibanki. I saw eight or nine faint trails of mist emanating from under her high collar.
“What are those?” I asked.
“What are what?” I reached over and touched one of the streamers. She caught my hand. “That’s my neck. Don’t touch it, please.” I pulled my hand back.
“Your–”
“One of my necks. I’m surprised you can interact with it.” She straightened her collar, and the lines receded somewhat, fading but not entirely gone. They still emanated from her. They were like thin white petals around a red flower, or several streams of fading smoke. “They are tenuous, until I will them to become substantial. Invisible, until I will them to be seen. Usually.”
“Huh.” Maybe being stabbed had been useful after all. I had inferred that the ability to see ghosts was permanent, and now I could see… whatever this was. “There’s this whole dimension to youkai that I hadn’t known about, huh?” I wrote in my notebook and remembered the questions I’d written there already.
“Possibly you are ignorant of several aspects,” she said. “Certainly several. Youkai are complicated.”
“Sekibanki, I’m sorry if this is rude.”
“Rudeness means nothing to me.”
“Are you ‘deformed’?”
She was quiet for a long moment. “Rudeness means something to me after all. This is a matter you made note of, to ask later? Why?” As she spoke an errant head came in and rejoined her body. The ‘neck’ disappeared along with the head. I’d never seen one disappear like that before.
“It matters to me,” I said. “I mean, because I care–”
“I hate your emotions. Yes, I’m deformed.”
“Was it necessary to stop drinking blood?”
“This does not pertain to danmaku lessons, so drop it.”
“Understood,” I said, while swallowing. “I’m sorry.”
Sekibanki looked up at the waxing moon, her head lifting off. I could clearly see the streamer connecting that head to her body, but as the head floated around and grew distant her ‘neck’ became more transparent in the middle. She was checking the time, I thought. I also recognized that the youkai was thinking of how to phrase something so my human mind would understand.
“Shame is better than pity,” she finally said as her head came near. “I was more than one youkai before I came to Gensokyo.”
“A dullahan, and a rokurokubi?”
She nodded.
“Two youkai can fuse, then.” The implications were… well. I had no idea.
“At least once, that has happened,” she said as her head slowly orbited mine. “There are many ways that youkai can be changed. Just as stories told by humans warp and shift, so too do humanity’s monsters.” She sighed and her head fell back into place on her body. “There wasn’t enough room for two blood-sucking head-throwing monsters in Gensokyo. So two became one. Choosing not to drink blood might have worsened it, for me, because there was less to set me apart.”
She reminded me that most immigrants changed during the transition to Gensokyo. Youkai could change themselves like that at a significant event, like going to a hidden land.
“So not something the vampires could just choose to do,” I said.
“Now I understand why you ask,” said Sekibanki.
“Do you remember things from… both of your earlier lives? From being both a rokurokubi and a dullahan?”
“Not really,” she said. “Flashes. Some people. Instincts about how to use my powers.” She licked her lips. “Tastes.”
“I see.”
“I’m surprised you know both types of youkai. You learned of these from Wiki?”
“It’s true,” I said. “You know, he’d probably love to talk to you.”
She laughed. “I’ve already decided to not teach him, Jake. Having one human friend is already having too many, and two is untenable.”
“Why, though?” I asked. She stared at me. “I know you need fear to survive, but maybe like Rin and Utsuho with the haunted house, and the rollercoaster–”
“Don’t lump me in with ascended animals,” she said. “I am not a pet.”
“Of course not,” I said. “I just want to help you.”
“And be helped in turn,” she said. “You want an ally for humans.”
I lifted a hand to acknowledge that she was correct.
“That is only rational,” she said. “Strength through cooperation. In some sense, that has brought all of us to this land.” She stood up and began to walk toward the edge the village. I hastened to keep up. Sekibanki walked fast, like she was always late to wherever she was going. “I like that about you, Jake. You don’t pretend to help me from the goodness of your heart. You make deals that are mutually beneficial. Plausible deals, without maudlin generosity.”
I thought of saving Wakasagihime just from empathy, and chose not to say anything lest it be construed as maudlin. I liked to think Wakasagihime had saved me and Bruno for similar reasons, though.
“Our friendship is pure,” Sekibanki went on, “because it’s not a lie told for the sake of your self image. You don’t strain yourself from pride; you take what you want.”
I opened my mouth, and closed it. Maybe Sekibanki didn’t understand me all that well, after all. “You really could become our ally, Sekibanki. Openly.”
“No. I am a monster first and foremost. Don’t forget it, and don’t insinuate to your friends that youkai are anything else.”
“You know that ship has sailed, right? Wakasagihime and the fairies have helped us. Remilia came to protect me from Yukari, and Yukari had already protected me from Remilia.” I wasn’t actually sure which of them I could trust less, now. “Youmu took steps to avoid hurting me, at first at least… and tried her best, otherwise. Miyoi is friendly, too–”
“That is supposed to be a secret. Your little intrusion the other day put unbearable stress on her, even if she’d never admit to it.”
“I told you, it wasn’t my fault.”
“Where there’s smoke, there is fire.” Sekibanki walked on. “You haven’t told your human friends anything about me, right?”
“Of course not,” I said. “If you want to tell the youkai you know about me–”
“I don’t want you to get killed.” We walked in silence for several steps. She did like me.
I checked my notes. “There is another important matter. Yukari didn’t want me to tell Yuyuko about artificial intelligence. In fact, she told me to tell nobody about it at all.”
“Hmm….” said the youkai. “Interesting.”
“She threatened my life,” I said. “Obliquely, but, you know, that’s par for the course with her.” Actually ordering me stabbed was refreshingly straightforward; it was the fixing my wound that confused me.
“I warned you about it,” she said. “I warned you that our lives were in danger.” We continued to walk.
We were leaving the village. Soon, I’d be dodging lasers and bursts of blue and red light. Except, there was a pain in my side. When I said as much to Sekibanki she said we’d do aiming drills instead.
“Why do you think Yukari wants facts about AI to be a secret?” I asked.
“I can think of one obvious reason. Gensokyo is a land where beliefs and superstitions reign supreme. A place where attention makes things swell in importance, and ignorance makes them fade. A place where certainty freezes a thing solid, and doubt melts a thing, allowing it to assume whatever form is most convenient.”
“So? The Outside World doesn’t work that way, right? It wouldn’t make the AI more powerful, would it?”
“I doubt it. But why waste your attention on a world that doesn’t matter?” I wasn’t sure I agreed with that. “Whatever is going on out there, we are here, and our attention is better spent on our domain. I don’t really care about what is going on there, only about the flavors of fear in the humans near my home. AI makes the fear unpalatable.”
We walked in silence for a few moments. I wondered if that could really be it; was artificial intelligence just distracting to youkai? I wished I could ask Yukari these questions, but she couldn't be trusted to give an answer that meant anything.
“I know you didn’t want to explain this one,” I said, “but why is it that we can get away with this? Doesn’t Yukari have eyes and ears all over Gensokyo? Every time I’ve said her name, I’ve gotten her attention, however briefly, except when we are together.” Sekibanki grumbled, but gave in to my question.
“She does hear all within her domain, for most of the day and night. But every night, for a time before and after one day changes to the next, Yukari is asleep.”
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
“So she can dream.”
—
“Reimu is the player character,” said Wiki, as he left in the morning. “I’ll be safe training with her and Raghav. As long as Reimu is there, I’m safe. Reimu means safety.”
“You just keep telling yourself that, buddy,” said Arnold without a trace of irony. He probably thought the mantra would help Wiki feel better about having to leave the village to practice.
—
Maroon and I studied in the library while Patchouli read a book. Bags were forming under the fairy’s eyes.
“Are you sure you aren’t pushing it too hard?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine what she was staying up late at night for–reading picture books? Reviewing shapes? Writing comics?
(She’d shown me an attempt at a comic, and it had been charming, if a bit short on dialogue.)
Maroon chirped at me. Fairies could hardly speak at all without magic. I touched a rune that Patchouli had drawn on the desk. A magic circle collapsed, and the much larger library spell took effect again in our study area.
“Could you repeat the question?” asked Maroon.
“Are you overdoing it?” I asked.
“No, not at all!” she said. She yawned. “I’m having so much fun. And it’s red here in the Mansion, so I get a boost! Especially if my eyes are red!”
Red empowered her, and I wondered if I could leverage that to help her study. I decided to give her a gift.
“You can have this,” I said, presenting the Sekibanki card I’d earned long ago. It’d gotten a bit dog-eared from being in my pocket for so long.
“This… is amazing!” said Maroon. “Thank you! Who is…” she squinted. “Ske–chee–bom–ki?”
I laughed, making my side hurt. The automatic translation was starting to believe that she could read in English, at least. “You’ll have to ask someone else,” I told her, which wasn’t technically a lie.
“She’s very red,” said Maroon. “I love her.”
“I’m glad,” I said, resisting the urge to tell her reasons why loving Sekibanki was a bad idea.
With another touch, the spell was disabled again. Maroon went back to copying short words from the vocabulary sheets I’d prepared with the help of demons. I heard a huff from Patchouli, who was sitting in a plush chair nearby. The purple librarian had kept reading the whole time, but apparently the spell thought a different language would work better even if Patchouli was ‘fluent’ in the original language of the book.
“Sorry,” I said.
"Lisible et silencieux sont facultatifs à la bibliothèque, tant que nous faisons avancer notre projet,” said Patchouli.
“Demon,” I said.
“Yes?” asked a koakuma. They all spoke in perfect English, regardless of translation spells.
“What did she say?”
“She said you can be as loud or incomprehensible as you want,” said the red-haired assistant.
"Je n'ai jamais dit ça, espèce de démon infernal!" I laughed again at Patchouli’s deep frown, and then winced. "Tu es blessé ou quoi?" After a few exchanges with the demon, I realized Patchouli seemed to be concerned for my health.
“I was stabbed, yeah,” I said, pointing at my side and toward my back. “Why, do you have a magical solution?”
Twenty minutes later, with the translation spell resumed, I found myself laying face-down on a table in the library without my yukata on. Fortunately, I’d commissioned a new pair of pants, so I wasn’t totally exposed. I was still supremely uncomfortable as Patchouli prodded my back.
Patchouli was drawing a sigil across my spine with a paint brush and some purple paint. Four demons were assisting her, like nurses. Maroon kept flying above, half-covering her eyes as she watched in horror, and that didn’t help at all.
Patchouli used some sort of magic, causing the runes to glow warmly and evaporate. Then she rubbed her chin.
“You seem to be missing a kidney,” she finally said.
“What! That…” I held my tongue, “...youkai stole my kidney! How!”
“Teleported away is my best guess. Was the youkai holding a knife?”
“I mean, one of them was.”
“Mister Thorne, you may want to work on your observation skills.”
“But, like, I was using my kidney!” I explained what had happened to her in the briefest possible way. Patchouli Knowledge nodded along as if it were a simple everyday occurrence, and reminded me that I’d been using my liver, not my kidney.
“If it was injured beyond repair, it makes some sense to extract it. You can survive with just one, and removing a damaged organ is often simpler than trying to heal something that is broken beyond repair.”
“I don’t think kidneys grow back,” I said. “I’m surprised it doesn’t hurt more.”
“A lot of pain during surgery is damage from intrusive methods,” said Patchouli with a confidence that chilled me.
“Damn. Can you use magic to heal it the rest of the way, though? Make the…” Was incision even the right word? “...wound stop hurting? I have an exam in a few days, and I’ll need to be in top form.”
“I can do even better than that,” said Patchouli. “Do you want your kidney back?”
“I mean… yeah!” I had a thought. “Mine, though, okay?”
“Maroon, fetch Needles, and bring me a ham from the kitchen.”
“A ham,” I said, blankly.
“Roll over.” I acquiesced. She painted a line from my sternum down to the edge of my pants. She said some quick orders to the demons, and they started drawing diagrams on me with little charcoal pens.
“Do I need to sedate you?” asked Patchouli.
“This is your operation!” I said, my voice rising. “Is it going to hurt?”
“It’s yours, actually,” said the Great Librarian. “I meant so that you stop squirming.”
“Is it going to hurt?”
“No, no.” She waved a hand. “No no no.”
I did my best to hold still. She talked a bit as she worked.
“There’s a perfectly good kidney on the other side that will serve as a template,” explained Patchouli. “We just need something with the right ratio of materials…” she poked my stomach, making me flinch. “I’m glad you aren’t too underweight. There will be a material substitution to aid this process. If your own flesh and blood is mixed in, rejection is much less likely, and I can replace what I take from your abdominal and gluteal muscles with the same mirroring.”
“My what?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You’re not gonna… make ham a part of me, are you?”
“I am.” She scoffed at my expression. “What do you think happens when you eat it?”
“I don’t like pork!” Patchouli kept writing on my stomach, her lips tight. I saw a small smile at the corner of her mouth, though. “Wait, if you can duplicate organs, do you duplicate blood for the vampires?”
Her smile became a frown. “Blood isn’t something you can just mirror like that. Please stop distracting me.”
—
“I hate Reimu,” Wiki said on the third day of his training. He called her a few names, then a few more.
“Drop the sails there, sailor,” said Sasha. “What happened?”
“She and Raghav beat me up all day! And when they weren’t kicking my teeth in, they were dragging me along the barrier. I felt safe and totally powerless!”
“Hiking is good for you,” said Arnold. “Getting beat up is too, if it’s for training.”
“Take a hike, then,” he said. “Anway, I did learn some interesting things about the barrier along the way.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“It’s an illusion,” he said. “It shows a pristine natural landscape, one that doesn’t exist anywhere on Earth, not even in the mountains of Japan. From this direction, at least–who knows what it shows the Outside World. You can’t cross it, it’s as solid as glass.”
“Glass is a liquid,” said Arnold, repeating what was probably an adversarial meme created by the acrylic lobby, or disinformation from a country whose sand reserves were depleted, but definitely false either way.
“Reimu maintains the barrier by reinforcing weak areas with magical seals that disappear when applied,” said Wiki. He went on to talk about how the zone between the two worlds was a place where items could go either way, and whenever they found something on the ground it meant that the barrier had to be reinforced because things were crossing over. “Raghav is extremely concerned with the sanctity of the barrier. He’s learning the barrier magic himself.”
“That doesn’t sound like him,” I said, because it made me respect him a bit more.
“I think he’s doing it so he can put up a magical barrier around his own house,” said Wiki. “Also, we’re technically treasure-hunting when we do maintenance. Nitori likes to come along.”
“Nevermind, it makes sense.” Raghav wanted treasure, that was it.
“I should come with you too, next time,” said Sasha.
“To learn barrier methods?”
“No, dipshit, to watch you get your ass handed to you and maybe find a loot drop.”
—
The night of the exam approached. Wiki trained intensively, and we got him up to speed on the written portions. On the last day we told him to take it easy, and he refused, because he hadn’t yet produced danmaku.
“I might as well try as hard as possible, because if I’m delayed to next month anyway, it won’t matter. I can afford to be tired for this test.”
“Did you ever have to repeat courses in college?” asked Arnold.
“No. Why?”
“No reason.”
It was a work day, so we spent some more time hauling materials around the village. A dozen new, empty dorms had been constructed, except these ones had pipes for flowing water. We worked up a sweat as we carried bricks into the new dorms. The bricks were to be made into ovens.
“I hope we can move into these ones,” I said. “We’ll make the newbs have the shitty ones.” I exhaled as I set down a crate of wooden pegs for holding beams together.
“I hope so too,” said Wiki.
—
After work Wiki ran off and Arnold and I went to the bathhouse. When we entered nobody was there.
“Reika?” called Arnold.
“Just a second!” came a voice from the back. “Moving laundry!”
“No rush!” he added. I looked at the potted plants. Someone had rotated them, again; the least healthy was right beside the door.
“Hey Arnold,” I said. “What do you think the third test is?” The first one was written; the second one was practical. Nobody knew the third.
“I’ve no idea,” he said. “That’s kind of the point, though? It’s probably a measure of how well we can think on our feet.”
“Are you worried?” I said, already knowing the answer. I was worried, but Arnold had equanimity that I lacked.
“Nope. How’s your injury, Jake?”
“Gone,” I said, shivering. It had hurt when Patchouli had regrown my kidney. Not so much that I’d have refused, especially not since I’d need to run for the exam, but enough that if I ever had to do it again I’d be pretty upset. It was probably easier than getting an artificial kidney in the Outside World, at least. “I’m thinking I got the wrong idea about Patchouli.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Well, I thought she was stuck up, condescending, and inconsiderate. But then she helped me regrow one of my major organs and didn’t ask for a damn thing in return.”
“She’s not inconsiderate, then,” he said.
“It’s just… kind of interesting how different she is from Lady Remilia, though. Lady Remilia is so transactional. I can’t imagine her giving someone a gift, or even a moment extra of her time.”
“Good cop, bad cop,” said Arnold. “Patchouli will do you favors with magic if you are good, Remilia will… well, something awful I’m sure, if you’re bad.”
“You know, if her ability is to manipulate fate, she could always just know the right thing to say to get you to obey, even if she never has to follow through.” I rubbed my chin. “I’ve got to admit, I’ve felt a bit safer these last few days. I know that she will be there if I’m in danger.”
“Maybe they are both good cops,” he said. “And Remilia is just playing a role.”
“I wouldn’t count on that, “ said Reika as she came out from the back. She pulled on her collar; she was sweating almost as much as we were. “Where’s Wiki?” she asked.
“He ran to the chicken coop to prevail upon Satori’s kindness one more time,” I said. “He still hasn’t made danmaku.”
“Unfortunate. I have some advice for him, and a warning.”
“What’s that?”
”Can you remind him that it’s a full moon tonight?”
“I can,” I said. “Why?”
Reika sighed and waved us in. She continued in a whisper. “Miss Kamishirasawa is a were-hakutaku. She’s going to transform this evening.”
“Oh. Are hakutaku… dangerous?”
“Yeah. So Wiki should be careful,” she said. “Tell him that he should wait for next time.”
“That’s so odd,” said Arnold. “She’s the one who schedules the exams in the first place!”