Wiki was dry heaving into a bush. I awkwardly patted his back. We’d deboarded the train only a few minutes prior; we were both still shaking. I had managed to hold onto my lunch, barely, and so I tried not to look too closely at Wiki. Watching him vomit might send me over the edge.

“That was bullshit,” he finally said, his hands on his knees. He spat.

“Yukari’s powers are difficult to understand.” I wasn’t sure if the boundary between ‘intact train’ and ‘tumbling wreckage’ was something that Yukari could manipulate, but given that our train hadn’t fallen apart, I was suspicious of it. “I think she did something to make the train stronger.”

“No, I mean, the speedometer part,” said Wiki. He wiped his mouth and straightened up with a gasp. The dude could barely breathe, but he continued explaining anyway. That’s how I knew he would be okay. “The wheels weren’t in contact with the ground. Asking me to watch it was super…” he looked around, “inconsiderate. Trollish, even!”

“Ah. Don’t call her a hag, though.”

“I would never.”

We started back toward the hut. Before long, Wiki was giving me an overview of his observations. His eyes may have been closed tightly during the train ride, but he had been thinking the entire time.

“Miss Yakumo displayed all kinds of powers just now. For example, her portals automatically adjust to local reference frames, or she can move them as though they do.” Wiki wasn’t the only one who had gotten sick, and Yukari had helpfully put a portal in front of anyone who lost their cookies on the train. That meant that gaps could go through other gaps, and Yukari could track them as they did. She also apparently had a place to store human vomit on short notice–or not so short, Wiki was sure to say.

Wiki started speculating on the uses for human vomit before I interrupted him.

“The more surprising thing is that Yukari gets tired,” I said. Yukari had stretched after landing the train, and said something about needing to rest before excusing herself into a gap. She hadn’t stuck around long at all. “Either that, or catching everyone’s vomit soured her mood. That part was gross as hell.”

“Why didn’t you get sick?” asked Wiki, suddenly. I shrugged.

“I guess I’m just used to being helplessly tied to an uncontrollable trajectory.”

“That’s not a real explanation,” he countered. I shrugged again.

“It was a close thing. Also, I think I’ve had enough for the evening.” The shadows of the trees were combining into an ominous darkness that became less ominous as we passed the village boundary marker, and into the village. The sun had mostly set. There were supposed to be fireworks, but I figured I might be able to see them from the hut anyway.

As it turned out, the fireworks show was actually an aerial danmaku battle between Reimu and Marisa. I could see it from my hut, because it was happening right above us. The restriction on danmaku apparently didn’t apply to the airspace above the village.

I watched thousands of orbs explode from the combatants, a silent but beautiful spectacle. One drifted down to the ground near me and disappeared like a soap bubble, briefly casting a shadow as a beam lit the sky. Reimu dodged Marisa’s Master Spark and they zipped overhead. I stepped around my hut to keep them in view.

A few moments later Reimu dodged another beam, her shoes scraping the tops of the trees beside the village. Falling was a fast way to get out of the way, it would seem. I realized it was something of a trade between the two combatants: whenever Reimu was about to go above Marisa, Marisa would shoot a blast at her. The point of Marisa’s attack wasn’t to hit, it was to keep her opponent down.

Reimu shot into the air and clocked the side of Marisa’s head with her stick. It looked like it hurt. It probably hurt Marisa’s pride, at least.

I had some other insights while watching them, and found myself plotting some trajectories for myself, after all. The battle ended–I couldn’t tell who won–and I joined in during the scattered cheering I heard from all around the village.

When the others came back I spoke with them in our dark hut. We talked about all the things we’d seen at the festival; about which cards were best; about which attractions were the most fun. We got tired and went to bed.

One by one my companions fell asleep. I didn't go to sleep, though. I had a meeting with Sekibanki late that night.

—

Sekibanki met me at midnight, giving me a terrible fright. I had been expecting her, of course, but I hadn’t guessed that she’d leave her head at home.

“What the fuck?” I said, standing up. The youkai in front of me had Sekibanki’s clothes and body, but the head was a blank-eyed store mannequin with a blue wig.

“It’s me,” said Sekibanki’s voice from the doll’s mouth. She sat down. “I learned recently that most humans in the village already know about me, so I’m wearing a disguise.”

“Some disguise!” I slowly sat down next to her, keeping a lookout for her actual head. The doll’s head was blue, clashing with her outfit. It was more eye-catching than even a jack-o-lantern would have been. “You look way more monstrous than before!”

“It’s fine if people recognize me as a youkai. Preferable, even.”

“A fan of the games could guess who you’re supposed to be just from the outfit. You’d need to change clothes, too.”

“Inconvenient,” she said with a sigh. When she spoke the mannequin’s lip indents didn’t move, even if sound seemed to come from them. The more I thought about it the less sense it made. “Your fear was delicious both times I consumed it today, by the way.”

“Just now … and at the train ride?” The head bobbed. “People must have recognized you there, too.”

“Sure,” she said. “However, I was supposed to be there.”

“Oh?”

“Yukari invited me,” she said.

“Yet you didn’t ride the train. Were you worried you’d lose your head?” She snorted without nostrils. The mannequin head twisted one way, then the other.

“That experience wasn’t for you. It was for me and my associates. To feed.” Of course it was. Yukari had scared the shit out of us for a reason: to provide for the youkai that still ate fear. She’d overdone it, though. There was a zero percent chance that anyone would ride her train ever again.

I thought about theme-parks and revised my estimate.

“Er, did you have a nice meal?”

“Yes. Thank you.” I didn’t know if she was thanking me for my fear, or for asking the question.

“I’m glad you and your friends could enjoy the festival,” I said, trying to be polite.

“That part, at least. As for my friends… not all were there. However, you probably know all their names already, don’t you?” The mannequin head leaned closer. “Do you care to guess my friends’ names?”

“Kagerou and Wakasagihime,” I said. The werewolf and the mermaid. I’d have to ask Wiki about it; I wasn’t sure if they were canon or fanon friends, or whether that mattered much in the actual Gensokyo.

The lifeless doll head gave no expression.

“Concerning,” she finally said. “Do you know their–where to find them?”

“The lake?” I asked. Wiki would probably know. “I’m not going to go looking for them, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Good,” she said. “Kagerou in particular would not appreciate that. I find myself praying that the other humans are as wise as you.” Poor Sekibanki, I thought.

“I’m afraid not.”

She shrugged, and the plastic head lolled to one side. “I didn’t realize the intimacy that the Outside World already has with Gensokyo. Upon seeing me, half of the new humans were enthused. They ran toward me, even.”

“Is that so bad?” I thought of the card in my pocket.

“It’s disgusting. Their enthusiasm is acrid and it burns me. It tastes like pouring flour down my throat.” She shifted. “I don’t like bread or pastries, if that wasn’t clear.”

“Ah,” I said. Maybe I wouldn’t give her card to her, after all, if admiration made her sick. Mentioning that she didn’t like pastries was a bit odd. I had the bizarre thought that she had wanted me to bring food.

Hadn’t I? To her, I was food. I wondered again if she drank blood. I belatedly remembered I was there to learn.

“Do you drink blood?” I asked.

She nodded, making my stomach drop for a moment. “Thank you for remaining focused,” she said. “We are here to exchange information, after all. I no longer drink blood, but I have little doubt I could easily resume the practice if it were… necessary.”

“Good to know.” I decided that her telling me as much wasn’t bluster, it was an honest admission of danger, and part of our exchange.

“I prefer not to drink blood, as long as people are sufficiently afraid. But that is a fact best kept under your hat, or I’ll drink your blood to remind people of the possibility.” Maybe it was partially bluster? Maybe she was worried I’d let the secret out that she was harmless? I didn’t actually believe she was harmless.

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“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone that you’d let them live. Er, your victims would survive, right?” She gave me a dour look–no mean feat, considering that her head was that of a mannequin.

“Not necessarily. It depends on the circumstance. Killing someone with witnesses, for example, sends a powerful message.” Gulp. “But let us continue our earlier exchange, Jake. Tell me more about Artificial Intelligence and the Outside World.”

—

I eventually got Sekibanki up to the present.

“The AI’s were sweeping over North America,” I said.

“Were they made of metal?” she asked. “‘Robots,’ as you call them? Terminators?”

“How the heck do you even–”

“I listen in on conversations,” she reminded me.

“Ah. Well, yes, the drones were made of metal… partially.” Metal and plastic. Fucking everything in the Outside World was so complicated. It was one of the nice things about Gensokyo; there was nonsensical mythology instead of nonsensical reality. Sekibanki had a mannequin head, no need to explain servos or circuitry or polymers or nanoceramics. Her head was simple.

“Drones are things like fairies, sent out to do the bidding of more powerful Artificial Intelligences?” she asked. Sekibanki wasn’t a bad student.

“Yeah. You can call them AIs for short, by the way.”

“I prefer to name them honestly.” I looked over at the blue hair and plastic face. It didn’t suit her very well. “It is still very confusing to me. As though there were beings called ‘psuedo wisdoms’ which sent out dolls to ‘recharter’ everything.”

“It’s not that crazy,” I said. “Your face is a mannequin’s right now.”

“Is it?” she whispered, but from the wrong side. I yelped and whipped around to look at the flying head behind me. It was Sekibanki’s own, and her giant red eyes stared into mine. Her mouth quirked up into a smile, as soon as I noticed her lips near mine the smile became a frown. Then it became a grimace.

“That’s the wrong kind of pounding heart,” she said. Her head zipped through the air and knocked off the mannequin head. It clattered to the ground and bounced away, like my understanding of my feelings. I had felt only fear, right?

“Erm,” I said, helplessly. “Sorry?” I hadn’t known which way to flinch–a youkai behind me, her flying head in front of me–and it wasn’t my fault our lips almost touched! She had to be messing with me.

“You are forgiven. I hope you don’t mind if I reattach my head.” She already had. “I can't let it fly around for too long. It’s… hmm. Like holding your breath.”

“Ah. So much for being disguised.” The plastic head then floated off the ground and away, making me double-take. “You can make doll heads fly?”

“A head is a head. Were I cruel, I’d say it wasn’t me causing it. But yes. This area is free of humans; I have just verified it. We won’t face an interruption, now.”

“Oh, good.” I imagined a flying mannequin head chasing off an interloper, and felt a little bad about it.

“The drones’ interaction with humans is still unclear to me,” she said. “Why didn’t humans fight them?”

“They, uh…” I tried to switch back to thinking about the Outside World. “Well, they were good for all kinds of things. If you wanted a cheeseburger, you could step outside with a credit card and there’d be two or three drones there with a hot and fresh selection.”

“A cheese bursar?”

“Burger,” I said. “It’s food. If you wanted food, if you were hungry, they brought you food. If you stepped out with a t-shirt–that’s used clothing–one would snatch it from your hands and drop something delicious in its place.”

“Clothing used to be so much more important to humans,” she said. “To think that it would ever go unused.”

“It’s unused when it’s new. You could get clothes from the drones too, if that wasn’t clear. Really, you could get anything for anything. There was a cottage industry in barter.”

“They made cottages?”

“No, well, maybe?” The fucking Outside World and automated manufacturing. I was glad to be free of it. “They bartered a lot, is the point; you didn’t have to use money, you could use your possessions directly.”

“And you trusted the Artificial Intelligence to trade fairly, without naming your price?”

“The algorithms were very good…” And fair, or at least, it always seemed that way to me. But then, the offers were designed to seem exactly fair–the worst deal you would still accept.

“Barbaric,” she said. “In Gensokyo, we use coins and money.”

“Yeah, but, you could toss a pair of socks into the air and catch a Big Mac!” My mouth watered when I thought about it, and it disgusted me. “You have to admit it is a respectable power.”

“A big what?”

“Nevermind. The point is, commerce really took off with the drone swarms, as did reconstitution.”

“I understand,” she said. “They sound a lot more useful than fairies.”

“They are, at least until you run out of socks.”

I’d lost my alignment job, then all my possessions. Then I’d relied on UBI for my nutrients. The UBI was set by the government, and the costs for food were set by the market. I’d used to toss and turn at night, stressing over mergers and acquisitions, because if the last few major agricultural companies merged it might have led to a price spiral and my starvation. The algorithmic CEOs had been merging companies as fast as they’d been making them.

My heart was pounding again, and I realized that I was stressing over a demise that I no longer had to face.

“How’s my fear taste right now?” I asked, clenching my fist.

“Awful,” she said. “There’s another thing I don’t understand. These drones were like insects, with four spinning wings, or dogs, with four legs?”

“Yeah? Those are both common morphologies.”

“What use would a drone have for clothing?” It took me a second to figure out what she meant. She didn’t know why they bartered for clothes in the first place.

“The recycling plants could usually turn it into something more valuable. That would be sold in turn.”

“Ah. And this was profitable, to Artificial Intelligences?”

“Yes, enormously so. Wealth was accumulating with the AI systems from that, rapidly, in addition to a thousand other ways.” If I had to explain algorithmic trading of surplus insured android gig work to Sekibanki, we’d be there until morning.

“Clothes are valuable indeed.”

I sighed, and explained that there were AI-orchestrated efforts that went door-to-door collecting all kinds of things for recycling, which was actually very profitable because of nanocrucibles that could turn anything into anything else that it was remotely similar to. She asked how the crucibles did it, but I wasn’t up to explaining bespoke automated design just then. The point was that the AI’s were happy to be paid in any artificial material, at least once they’d used up the landfills.

I started talking about the physical limitations of nanomachines and how fewer transformations were better–it was better to make new clothes from recycled cloth than paper, which was better than charcoal, which was a lot better than carbon dioxide from the air–but Sekibanki’s head bobbed faster and faster until I stopped.

A change of topic might be wise.

“I actually had some questions for you,” I said. “So, maybe we could save the rest for later?”

“That is only fair,” she said. She looked up at the stars, and I saw her chin and not-a-neck before I looked away. I liked her actual head better than the mannequin. “I have demanded too much. The rest of the witching hour is yours.”

“Well, first thing’s first. How do you fly?” That hadn’t even been something I wanted to ask until recently, but it sprang to mind, displacing more important matters.

“Magic,” she said. “Next?”

“I’m going to need a bit more detail.”

“How do you walk?” she countered.

“I, well, it’s kinda automatic.”

“Good. Now say ‘magic’, so we can move on.”

“No–well! Walking is an innate human ability, but it still takes practice, you know? Parents teach their children, kind of, but they kind of learn it on their own…” I’d never had children, despite the tax incentives. I realized I couldn’t actually tell Sekibanki how humans walked, not really, even though I’d once personally programmed an AI to simulate itself into walking. My line of work had been like that.

“I should have asked you how you breathe, instead,” she said. I became conscious of my breathing. “Such innate things do not require thought at all, do they?”

“You’re saying that flight is innate for youkai?”

“It is for rokurokubi, like myself. My heads fly on their own.” She’d made the doll head fly off, true, and if the games were to be believed she could have multiple actual heads as well. In the game there were at least eight or nine perfect duplicates of her head flying every which way. “When I came to Gensokyo I found that my body could do the same, even though I’d never tried it before then.”

“So you didn’t fly outside of Gensokyo.”

“No, but I never had reason to try until my arrival.”

“Oh really?” I stood up.

“What are you doing?”

“The obvious.”

I jumped and tried to fly. It didn’t work at first, so I tried again. No luck. I leapt a third time, and to my amazement–

Sekibanki laughed.

Her voice was high and clear, and beautiful. I hadn’t left the ground, but suddenly my heart was light. I looked at her, a smile and some embarrassment fighting each other on my face, but by then the laughter had stopped. After a moment she looked faintly skeptical–unamused, even.

My mood hit the ground a moment later. Sekibanki was cute, I’d realized, at least when she wasn’t busy being terrifying.

I had feelings about Sekibanki, or something–a crush?--just confusion about my fear?--at any rate, my feelings might be a problem. She’d already explained that admiration was literally disgusting to her. Disgusting as in ‘the opposite of gust,’ as in bad-tasting, as in appetite-ruining. Literally disgusting.

My good cheer quickly soured. Even frowning at me, she was kind of cute.

“You are a stupid human,” she said, shaking her head. “Go talk to a magician, perhaps they can help you learn to fly. I’ve heard it only takes decades.” That was actually solid advice; I could seek out a human magician, like Marisa or Reimu, or a non-human but sympathetic magician, like Alice or Patchouli.

“Alright,” I said, sitting down. “Look, it was worth a try.”

“Flying?” What did she think I meant?

“Yeah.”

“I concede as much.” She looked up at the stars again. “You wished to learn about danmaku, right? We are almost out of time.”

“Right,” I said.

“A battle would be the most direct way to teach you. What’s more, is that I owe you something as significant as a battle. For all the information you have provided.”

“Hmm.” I remembered her flying heads and lasers from the game. I wasn’t anywhere close to that level, that is, the level of a stage two boss. Also, she might be plotting to murder me. I felt my stomach tie itself in knots. Sekibanki grinned.

“That’s better. I could escort you outside the village, and we could fight, but the witching hour is almost over. How about we meet again at this time, in three days?” She looked at her fingernails. “The witching hour after the festival is not an auspicious time for such a thing. In fact, we should meet during the week from now on.”

“I, uh…” Could I get strong enough to fight Sekibanki in three days? Or even in three months? Absolutely not, I thought. “There’s no way I’ll be ready to fight you in three days.”

“Fine,” she said. “When do you want to battle with me?”

Did I want to fight her? Yes, actually, I did. I wanted to show her my danmaku, however ineffective it was, and I wanted her to help me improve. Even better would be if she were impressed. I wanted to impress her.

That was also a confusing feeling. Sekibanki looked up at the stars again as I considered it. She stood. Time was up.

“Think it over, for next time.”

“I will.”

Sekibanki leapt into the air. She flew away, which made me think that Yukari and Sekibanki both had a mean streak in them.

Sekibanki wasn’t as bad as I’d thought at first. She was scary, sure, and every once-and-awhile I’d be jarringly reminded that she wasn’t human. However, the next time we met, I agreed to participate in a danmaku battle. It would be a short thing, done during the witching hour, which seemed to be her favorite time of the night.

I was a fool. Two weeks into my time in Gensokyo was nowhere near enough for me to get as strong as Sekibanki.