Arnold was polite enough to hold it in, but Sasha and Wiki openly laughed at me. I’d returned from the Scarlet Devil Mansion with my new wings. I had to walk because I was too weak to fly the entire distance, or indeed, all the way over the gate of the mansion.

“You’re literally a fucking fairy!” said Sasha, doubled over.

“A giant, masculine fairy!” added Wiki.

“Eh,” said Arnold.

“Shut up, all of you,” I said. “At least I can fly!” To demonstrate, I willed myself into the air in front of them, wobbling slightly. I felt the slight drain that flight caused. It was like trying to balance on one foot. I wasn’t confident or strong enough to go more than a few inches off the ground, but I could fly–and they couldn’t, so they really didn’t even have a leg to stand on.

“You seem a bit upset,” said Arnold. “Disappointed…maybe?”

“Yeah…” I said.

Wiki composed himself. “I suspect that this artifact isn’t as valuable to the Scarlet Devil Mansion as your lessons were?”

“Of course not,” said Sasha. “They’re capitalists.”

“Patchouli made another set to replace this one in about thirty seconds, it’s true,” I said, shaking my head. “They could give everyone in Gensokyo the ability to fly tomorrow, except that they’d ‘lose a source of competitive advantage’ and ‘installing netting over the outer wall would be expensive’.”

“That’s awful,” said Sasha.

“Yeah.”

“I still think they’re pretty cool,” said Arnold. “Can I borrow them?”

“Sorry,” I said. “They are kind of… embedded.” The bands had mysteriously and magically sunk into my skin after I put them on, and I felt a slight pressure in my chest even then. I told the others as much.

“Oh,” he said. “Gross!”

“Yeah, but I asked, and Patchouli said they’d be willing to sell a pair to both you and Sasha at a discount, at least if you ‘paid with your blood’.” I glanced at Wiki. “And maybe you too!”

“Damnit,” whined Arnold. “I just donated!”

“Sucks to suck,” said Sasha. Arnold looked hurt. “I was talking about Remilia. I’m going to have to donate some blood after all, it seems.”

“Why wouldn’t they give a pair to me?” asked Wiki.

“Patchouli said she’d get back to me on it…” I said. “I have no idea.”

“Figures. Well. I have so many questions about those wings.”

I answered Wiki’s queries to the best of my ability. I could fly upside down and backwards, and would one day be able to spin quite fast if I didn’t mind getting dizzy. Flight felt physically taxing as a proxy for a magical cost. Flying too much would leave me exhausted. I had a hard time explaining why magical and physical exertion were so similar, and Wiki speculated about whether they were fungible after all.

“It would explain why Miss Knowledge is so weak,” he said. Then he told me about her frailty in canon, as though I hadn’t been working with her for months. “She’s constantly using overwhelmingly powerful magic.”

“Yeah, she flies everywhere!”

With practice my flight would become effortless, like danmaku or walking. Just like running, if I tried to do it too fast I’d wear myself out, and my max speed could increase but not indefinitely. The wings would not allow me to fly forever, but there was no risk I’d lose concentration and fall right out of the sky.

“She spent some time talking about safety mechanisms,” I said. “If I lose consciousness they will slowly lower me to the ground, and the same thing if I get exhausted. But even though they are ‘safer than walking’ I can still fly into walls, so I have to be careful not to consciously do stupid things.”

“Good luck,” said Sasha.

“What if you jump over a bottomless pit?” asked Wiki. “Does it care about distance from the ground?” I shrugged. Wiki made a note. “Well, we can tell which fairies have legitimate wings by knocking them out, at least.”

“Why do we even need to know that?” asked Sasha, who was spinning a coin on the table. “And who would do such a thing?”

“I would,” said Arnold. “Cirno’s legit, by the way. She hit the ground right away.”

“Nevermind, I get it,” she replied as she thought about the ice fairy that had spat on her.

“You could just ask them,” I suggested, “Except it’s rude, and antagonizing a fairy is somewhere between cruel and idiotic.”

“Better to knock them out with an axe,” said Arnold.

“Cruel and idiotic aren’t on the same continuum,” said Wiki, “As evidenced by the fact you can be one, another, or both simultaneously.” He took in a breath and moved on before I could object that it was always possible to find the midpoint between distinct vectors. “So what kind of fey need prosthetic wings?”

Wiki still had out his notebook. Sasha had put away the coin and was petting Emeff. Arnold said he was going to get started on dinner as I spent a few minutes explaining that fairies came in all flavors.

Sprites were fey of the air, gnomes were the fey of the earth, and nymphs were the fey of the water. All of them were fairies.

“Cerulean is a nymph, by the way.” He wrote it down. “Wings aren’t unique to any particular kind of fey, but apparently gnomes and nymphs have them less frequently than sprites.”

We continued to chat. I shifted and one of my wings got close to the hot stove, making me jump.

“Oh, and I can do this.” I concentrated, and the wings retracted until they were hidden. “Unfortunately, I still had to poke holes in my shirt, but with some careful work the vents can be made all but invisible. I’m going to have to visit the seamstress again.”

“Just go shirtless,” suggested Arnold.

“And get sunburnt? No thanks.” Sasha was staring off; I wasn’t the only one getting bored. “Speaking of which, I’m going to go looking for my hat tomorrow, if anyone wants to join me?”

“Oh, good,” said Wiki. “You can help Sasha look for Marisa’s house at the same time.”

–

“Do you ever think that too much shit is going on?” asked Sasha as we wandered through the woods.

“Like what?” I asked. I leapt and hovered in the air for a few seconds. I was going to do that approximately constantly, until I could fly as well as Patchouli or even better. In one day, I’d learned to fly higher than I could jump! (Most of the improvement came from jumping before flying.)

“Just, too much shit. Miss Yakumo might be up to no good, the youkai murderers are definitely up to no good, you’ve got a mission to save a fairy who is very important for some reason that we still don’t know…” she stepped over a log. “...and the fate of the village depends on that and so much other shit that the real heroes are too busy to do it themselves!”

“I’m a real hero,” I said. Maroon would back me up on it, I felt sure. Especially if I saved her.

“We’ve been working overtime to expand the village, Satori’s stopped coming to the festival, the Scarlet Devil Mansion has a creepy hallway and a creepier alchemical diagram… uh, Arnold can’t pass the danmaku exam, Wiki can’t fuck, you can’t find your hat and I can’t find Marisa’s house.”

“Wait, Wiki can’t fuck?”

“He’s ace, not bi,” said Sasha. “Way to focus on what matters.”

“You brought it up! And you know this how?”

“Reika and I chat,” she said with a shrug. “I’m surprised you didn’t already know. Don’t you guys have locker room talk?”

“What is that?” I asked. Everything I’d heard about locker rooms was awful, and everything I’d experienced directly was unpleasant. I glanced at a nest in a tree that was almost the same color as my hat. I quickly walked on. Some of the birds in Gensokyo were terrifying.

“You know, when men talk about…” she waved a hand. “Preferences, in the locker room.”

“While naked?”

“No, dipshit, while women aren’t around. Isn’t it a thing?” I considered channeling my inner Yukari and refusing to confirm or deny, but I decided against it.

“Maybe in nineties television,” I said. “I usually get changed as quickly as possible and go about my business.” She raised an eyebrow, and I remembered that Satori had revealed some embarrassing details about my ‘business’ in the bathhouse.

“Suddenly I think that us getting our own shower is a bad idea,” she said.

“The point is that I don’t talk to Wiki about that sort of thing.”

“That’s sad,” she said. Sasha didn’t elaborate as we walked through the woods.

We were trying to hurry: Yukari didn’t want anyone to miss the parade at noon, a requirement that was as important as the spell card rules. We’d only have the morning for our search.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

We walked on as straight a line toward the Scarlet Devil Mansion as possible, looking up in the trees and down on the ground for my loose hat. I’d lost it two days prior, so it could have been anywhere. We made our way all the way to the lake without finding it.

“Could you have dropped it in the water?” asked Sasha.

“Of course not,” I said. “We flew around the lake.”

“Oh.” She bent over and picked up a green stone, which she turned over in her hand. “And you dropped it after that, huh.”

“Yeah. What if somebody stole it?” I felt my stomach roil at the thought. It would explain everything.

“What are you, twelve?”

She had a point; the certainty that someone had taken a missing possession was a juvenile thing to feel. At the same time, I was in the land of magic and my hat was a part of me. Maybe I had a supernatural connection to the truth of where it was.

I’d expect to notice if someone tried to steal my head, for example, at least until I remembered my missing kidney and revised my estimate.

“I’m still not one-hundred-percent sure how ‘making your clothing part of your identity’ works, but when I asked Patchouli she said it’d disconnect from me after a while.” I looked back toward the human village. “I’m feeling increasingly unsettled about it.”

Sasha’s frown softened. “Sorry, man. You’ve lost a lot, recently.”

“The hat isn’t even a tenth as important as Maroon,” I said, once I realized what she meant.

“Of course not. She’s very important to you.”

“Yeah.” I appreciated that Sasha used present tense. I forgot to look in the branches as we retraced our steps. “I feel responsible for her. Part of the reason she unmanifested was that I pushed her so hard. It’s kind of my fault.”

“I’m pretty sure it was a literal demon’s fault,” said Sasha. I almost told her that the demon had just waited for an opportune moment, one that I had provided, but I didn’t have the will to argue about whether it was really my fault or not.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m going to bring her back if I can.”

“She’s like a daughter to you,” said Sasha.

I tilted my head. “I guess so? I don’t know, the instinct to protect a child is strong, even if you aren’t related to them. Once she’s back… I’m not going to keep teaching her or anything. I’m just going to hand her back over to Patchouli and go on with my life.”

“Not even going to visit her?”

I thought of how happy Maroon would be to host visitors. “You know what, maybe I will! Whenever I go to read a book, I can say hi.” I hadn’t had much time to read in Gensokyo, which was ironic when I thought about it. Having a library card meant that I could visit the library and not be turned away, even if I was no longer technically an employee of the mansion.

“It sounds like you are saving her out of a sense of duty,” said Sasha, her tone light. I didn’t think she was criticizing me.

“Maybe…” I thought of how Maroon was the most agreeable fairy. “Maroon just doesn’t deserve to be forgotten, you know? I keep thinking that she was punished for trying to learn to read, for trying to be a good servant. It’s super unfair.”

“Life isn’t fair,” said Sasha in the same light tone, and my blood pressure rose.

“We have a duty to try to make it fair,” I said. “There’s a name for the fallacy, what is it… ‘fallacy of relative privation’ or something?”

“Eh?”

“Just because ‘life isn’t fair’ doesn’t mean we should let Maroon fade away! Life would be far more fair if everyone tried, instead of rolling over at the first difficulty.”

“I’m not saying you should give up,” said Sasha, a bit defensively. “What I’m trying to say is that it’s not surprising this happened. Bad things happen all the time.”

“I was surprised.” I should have seen it coming, I thought bitterly. I’d been warned about demons.

“No, what I’m really really trying to say is that I know how you feel,” said Sasha. “Bad things have happened to me too. They happen to everyone. It’s not your fault, it happened to you, so stop beating yourself up.”

“Then you don’t know how I feel, because I don’t care whether something bad happened to me. I just want Maroon to manifest again.”

“Fine,” she said. “And I’m glad, but I thought your main thing was protecting humans?”

“It is, and luckily for me, I can do that at the same time.” I jumped into the air, perhaps a few inches higher. “Anyway, isn’t Marisa’s house in the forest of magic? Shouldn’t we head there?”

“Sure,” she said. Sasha looked around and started in a random direction.

“I thought the forest of magic was to the south.”

“It is if you are a youkai or a magician who knows some grade A bullshit. It doesn’t stay put for anyone else. So who knows, maybe we are heading there right now.”

“Wait, it doesn’t stay put? What does that mean?”

Sasha sighed. “It’s always somewhere around the human village, but its location changes. In fact, if you are deliberately looking for it you will struggle to find it. That makes locating Marisa a giant pain in the ass, on purpose I’m fucking sure. But the witch herself can basically pick any direction in the woods and end up there instantly, and the convention is to go to the south.”

“That makes no sense.” To be fair, not very much did in Gensokyo.

“You’re telling me!” I asked her how she’d learned, and she told me that it’d come up at the bar once. Sasha had been trying to find Marisa’s house for a while.

“So if we try to go there,” I said, “it won’t be there… unless we are magicians?” Alice also lived in the forest of magic, I recalled. I wondered if Patchouli could go there too.

“They presumably know some secret,” said Sasha. “Reika told me that you sometimes end up there if you are just walking through the woods without a care. You can tell because of all the mushrooms.” She’d been tasked with this a while ago, I recalled.

“And Wiki knows about this?” If I was having a hard time believing it, I could only imagine that our resident realist would have some reservations.

“I informed him, yeah.”

I thought about it for a few moments. Suddenly it made sense that Wiki had wanted me to help Sasha look–or rather, had wanted Sasha to help me. “So if we keep looking for my hat,” I said, “We might stumble on the forest of magic in the meantime. By accident.”

“I suppose.” She started listing the ways that Wiki had imagined we could make the forest of magic appear: trying to go somewhere else, trying not to go anywhere in particular, trying to go to a certain time instead of place, having a specific alternative destination that actually leads there, using a ritual, evoking an emotional state, a symbolic action, a spell, or possibly a guide.

“I bet you Nazrin could find it,” I said.

“That’s actually a good idea,” said Sasha. “Add it to your list of things to talk with friends about.”

She winked at me, and I realized she was talking about Sekibanki–or Alice, rather, who supposedly also lived in the forest of magic, and who was supposedly my friend. The lie meant that my allies thought I could get information out of my contact that I really couldn’t.

Or maybe she was making a joke about Nazrin not being our friend.

“You’re right, way too much shit is happening,” I said. “Which is part of why Wiki’s noteboard is expanding into the third dimension, I suppose.” It was four or five layers deep by then.

“Yeah. He was bitching about not having a computer the other day.” She pointed up at a bird nest–the same one I’d seen earlier–and I shook my head. “That’s not even mentioning all the things that might be going on in the Outside World.”

“Let’s not,” I said. “Those things aren’t our concern anymore.”

But I was totally wrong about that.

—

We were walking back to the village after failing to find anything when Sasha vanished into thin air. I had one second to worry about it before I too disappeared into a void.

I was dropped unceremoniously next to Arnold, Wiki, and Sasha in the town center. Sasha had landed hard and was on the ground, but I’d reflexively tried to fly so I came to rest on my feet. Being forcibly portaled is hell on your knees, at least if you can’t fly.

Something smelled awful. It was overwhelming, like I’d just stuck my head in a mall dumpster. We were surrounded by a crowd of nervously chattering humans. The immigrants had mostly integrated by then, at least as far as clothes were concerned, so we found ourselves in a sea of kimono and yukata clad people, surrounded by the few two-story wood buildings in the village.

Someone brushed my wingtip. I retracted them before they could get crushed or draw too much attention.

“What’s going on?” I asked. Far away I saw a purple shimmer in the air. There was a flash like cellophane catching the light as someone walked into it.

“Miss Yakumo is rounding us up,” said Wiki, his voice quavering. “There’s a barrier. Nobody can leave.” I caught a brief hint of cooking meat.

That explained the cacophony of smells. I was tasting so many kinds of fear my mind didn’t know what to make of it. I felt like I was going to be sick, and being hemmed in on all sides didn’t help.

“It is an impenetrable barrier,” added Raghav, who was fighting his way toward us. He’d studied with Reimu, so he knew a thing or two about barriers. “It is beyond my meager ability to dispel. There are dozens of red haired office ladies drawing lines on the ground outside it, incidentally.”

“With bat wings?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t mention that before their hair and clothes?” asked Sasha in a loud voice.

“Fuck,” I said. “They’re demons.”

“They can’t leave the mansion, though!” said Arnold. It was a bit hard to hear him above the crowd, which was getting denser as portals dropped errant humans in.

“Well, that’s clearly changed,” said Wiki. “It looks like Patchouli is making her mysterious sigil!”

The smell worsened; my roommates, if not Raghav, had the sense to worry.

“This is all happening so fast,” continued Wiki. “I wish they’d just tell us what they are trying to accomplish!”

“Perhaps if you yell?” suggested Raghav. I gave him a confused look, and he pointed up into the air.

Patchouli was flying about a hundred feet above us, but she was far from the only one. Byakuren, Miko, and Yukari were there as well, but so were the ghost Yuyuko, the mind-reader Satori, the goddess of trade Chimata, the whatever-the-fuck-doctor-monster Eirin was, and even the kappa Nitori. There were several I couldn’t identify with a glance, probably because of my poor angle.

It was worrisome how easily I could identify youkai from their dresses and feet. It was the largest gathering of youkai I’d ever seen, hovering right above us and talking with each other. Even Sekibanki was there.

As I watched, Remilia flew forward and over the top of the barrier. She had her spear out. Yukari opened a portal to let her in. Then the fox Yakumo Ran flew in from another direction and joined the crowd, right behind Yukari.

“I can’t tell if most of them simulate underwear,” said Wiki, squinting, “But I’m pretty sure some of them don’t?”

Arnold covered his brow with a hand and looked harder. “Wow! I think you’re right!” I’ll admit, I had noticed Patchouli’s pale legs, but the youkai were too high up for proper or improper recon.

“Um, hello?” asked Sasha. “They might be about to sacrifice us all! Now isn’t the time for peeking!”

“If not now, when?” asked Arnold without lowering his hand.

“Did someone say sacrifice?” said a nearby person. Others turned and looked at him, and began to whisper. The smell instantly worsened, and my desire to leave grew with it. I hated being so penned in, like we were sardines in a can.

“I can’t tell if this is well-thought-out or not,” said Wiki. “Placating the humans this way seems… not like Miss Yakumo’s style.” I’d had enough of standing around and tittering.

“Stand back,” I said. Nobody moved. “Stand back!” They continued to ignore me.

I willed my wings out and finally people started pushing away, although my wings still brushed against several of them. It was even worse than being jostled, because the wings were sensitive and fragile. It was as though five strangers had accidentally touched my eyeball. I’d have to tell Wiki about the vulnerability later: lots of youkai had wings.

Raghav covered his mouth to hide his expression. “Did you turn yourself into a fairy?”

“I didn’t, and fuck you,” I said. If we were about to die I could at least check that off my list. I crouched and spread my wings wide.

“You can fly that high already?” asked Wiki.

“No, but I’ve got no better plan.” Before he could respond I jumped and tried to fly up toward the youkai so I could ask them exactly what it was that they were plotting.

To my surprise, I shot right into the air and into everyone’s attention.