We walked back to the human village. I told Raghav that one of my roommates had gotten new clothes from the public bath, and maybe he could go there to get new underwear. He thanked me and wandered off that way. Some others followed him.

All the students had clothes that were damaged in places, but for the most part our outfits were still intact. I wondered if we’d all been brought in our favorite clothes for that reason. I also wondered how the hell Yukari knew what our favorite clothes were in the first place, if she needed to interview us before admission.

I’d probably need to pick something a bit more distinguished than a red shirt, if I was going to make my outfit nigh-immune to danmaku.

When I got to the schoolhouse it was deserted. Reimu had given up teaching us first, it would seem. I wondered which direction I should go; perhaps I could catch the tail end of a second lesson if I hurried. Reisen’s beams of light and Youmu’s swords might be interesting attacks to witness. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near Marisa, though; her Master Spark would probably destroy my underwear, just like what happened to Raghav. It would be an eight-foot-wide laser beam if it were true to the games.

Something about the thought made me uncomfortable. It wasn’t like I cared all that much about going commando. And yet, I felt this little nagging doubt at the back of my mind. Perhaps I was just scared of the Master Spark. Although… I should probably be more afraid of Reisen’s gun.

Wiki walked up. Apparently Youmu had finished her lesson second. He looked a bit dazed.

“Are you alright?” I asked. His shirt had a little line missing from the right side. “Did you… get cut in half?”

“No…” he said, idly patting at the slice in his shirt. “I thought I was doomed, but the blade went right through me.” He stared at the ground quietly.

“A brush with death, huh?”

“I guess.” He didn’t say anything more.

“You’re acting weird.”

“Oh, just thinking about whether my constant exposition on Touhou bothers others,” he said.

“Where the fuck is Wiki, and what have you done with him?” He gave me a confused look, then chuckled.

“Youmu hit me with Hakurouken. It’s a legendary blade that dispels confusion.”

“So…” So if he were stabbed, he’d stop being such an asshole? I should have thought of it myself.

“In my case, it made me a bit self-conscious.” He flexed his hand. “It’s funny. I care so much about Touhou that I memorize almost everything I can about it… but now that I’m in the actual Gensokyo, I need something else to set myself apart from others. And I do care about setting myself apart from others.”

“We call this the Outside View,” I said. “Don’t use it too often, it leads to underconfidence.” What was I even saying?

“You know, I used to keep going to work just so I could buy yet another Touhou fumo?” Fumos were little felt dolls that were popular in the fandom. Fakes abounded, but the ‘real’ ones cost many hundreds of dollars. “I left my entire collection back in the Real World.”

“That’s super cringe,” I said.

“I don’t care what you think,” he responded, and I was glad that Wiki was starting to feel better. “Anyway, Youmu really wanted to help us. When she stabbed me, I realized she feared for our safety. She felt like she had to give us every tool we needed to succeed, lest our inevitable deaths be blood upon her hands.”

“That’s super dark.”

“I felt some of that emotion.” He looked at me. “I’m saying I want to help you. The feeling didn’t go away after a few seconds, like the other feeling of Youmu’s, which is that she had better things to do.”

“Well, thanks, I guess.”

“Even though it will be a giant waste of time, I may give it some effort.” He looked around. “Have you seen Arnold and Sasha? I’d expect their teachers to give up even faster.”

“They must still be at their lessons.” I looked at his sliced shirt. “I wonder if they’ll get clothing damage, too.”

“Reisen can just use her illusions to defeat people, so Arnold’s probably safe,” said Wiki. “Sasha’s much more likely to get her outfit destroyed. Hopefully she really likes her shorts and t-shirt–did you know that how much you like your clothes matters?”

“Yeah, Reimu mentioned it. Sasha wasn’t wearing her own clothes, though.” I looked to the west. “Wait a minute, if Marisa hits her with a Master Spark, she’ll end up completely naked!”

“Huh,” said Wiki. “She… might not like that.”

“No shit, Sherlock!” Just thinking about being naked in public made my stomach drop. I imagined a dozen slobbering nerds staring at Sasha, and my anxiety doubled again. I was so worried about her that I forgot to imagine her naked myself. “We gotta do something!”

“Like what?” asked Wiki. “Wait, no we don’t!” So much for wanting to help people.

“I don’t know! Give her a shirt, at least!” I started to run to the west.

“Maybe she wants to be stripped naked by the famous Kirisame Marisa?” called Wiki. He trailed behind me. I didn’t waste any breath arguing with him about the possibility.

“Hey guys, what’s up?” said Arnold as he ran up beside us.

“Where’d you come from?” I gasped. I was already almost out of breath.

“Oh, you know, I saw my friends running, thought it might be important.” He jogged in place as we came to a stop. “We’re not just exercising, then?”

“Go…. to Sasha…” I said. “Give her your shirt.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Marisa is going to blast her clothes off,” said Wiki.

“Oh, she might not like that,” said Arnold. “Sounds fun, though.”

“Go save her, dumbass!” I said. He ran off. I straightened up and chased after him.

Far away, I saw immense flashes of laser light. Then I saw stars exploding in every direction. Marisa had begun her demonstration. I tried to run faster.

When I got closer, a handful of men walked past me with blackened and burnt clothes. Half of their clothing had more damage than the other half–any given person’s outfit was only burnt from one direction, the side that Marisa had hit them from.

One of the men stood out from the rest. He was wearing a speedo instead of rags, and a pair of tennis shoes.

“The fuck…” I gasped. I hadn’t ran a mile in, well, a very long time. It was making my stomach clench painfully.

“My favorite outfit,” he said. “I wear it under my street clothes, every day. Don’t I look good?” He flexed, then pirouetted. I tried not to throw up from the exercise.

I’d need to get healthier if I was going to be dodging danmaku. As I caught my breath I thought about asking these bozos if they’d seen a naked woman go by, then I decided against it. I went toward the battleground. It was in a forest clearing.

Somebody–the fairy Daiyousei, I noticed–was beating a burning tree branch with another branch. It didn’t seem to be working. She yelped as her stick caught on fire. I watched as Cirno flew by and froze the tree solid. Technically, it put out the fire.

There were other youkai–mostly fairies–putting out fires as well, but I didn’t stop to look at them. I was on a mission.

The ground was covered in patches of smoldering ruin. There were great tracks of burnt grass. A few of them had shadows where a person had fallen down or been blasted anyway. I followed the lines of destruction back toward a central point.

“Sorry. I’m not used to fighting so close to the ground!”

Marisa Kirisame was standing there next to Yukari Yakumo. Arnold was a respectful distance away. Sasha was nowhere to be found.

“One must be careful in all endeavors,” said Yukari. I walked up to them, and Marisa turned to face me.

“Did ya run all this way for your friend too?” asked Marisa. “That’s so sweet!”

“Miss Kirisame, I have not finished reprimanding you.”

“Funny, I’d had about enough.” She stepped toward me, and a stop sign appeared between us from a gap. Marisa bashed her head against it. “Ow, you hag, I said I was sorry!”

“The new immigrants need guidance,” she said. “Burning down the forest is a poor lesson.”

“The one with the fetching underwear said there wasn't no way I could hit all of them with my Master Spark! I taught ‘em a very valuable lesson!”

“Leave displays of power to me,” she replied.

“I did ‘ya a favor by coming here at all, ya know.”

“True enough,” sighed Yukari. “You might as well be on your way, then.”

“Gonna ask me to teach again in a few days?”

“Half the students remain,” said Yukari.

“Damn.” Kirisame Marisa summoned her broom by lifting a hand, and it flew through the air to land in her grip. She then flew off without another word.

“Where’s Sasha?” I asked, looking between Yukari and Arnold.

“I saw her predicament,” said Yukari, “I teleported her back to the dorm before anyone else could notice.”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“So you were watching every lesson.”

“Naturally,” said Yukari. “It’s safe for you to assume that I am watching at all times.” She fluttered her fan. Constant surveillance was just like the Outside World, so I wasn’t too perturbed. “I must ask, Mr. Thorne, are you here to help Sasha, or to get a glimpse of her nude form for yourself?”

“Help her,” I said, despite my face turning red. “So, I suppose we’ll have to bring her some clothes from the laundry service. Unless you teleported her before her rental clothes were destroyed?”

“I am not that proactive,” said Yukari. “However, it would appear that her clothes are clean already.” A gap opened beside her and Sasha’s clothing tumbled out of it. Another gap opened below and caught the falling clothes. I heard a shriek from the lower portal. I tried not to note the color of the undergarments and failed; they were black.

Teleportation of my intimates right into my face would surprise me, too. Yukari briefly met my gaze as she fluttered her fan. It occurred to me that she’d teleported the clothing to our location, briefly and completely unnecessarily… unless all portals had to go through her physical location.

It was impossible to see through Yukari’s gap, but technically a very naked Sasha was nearby. Yukari grinned at me.

“You know, you could stick your head in there, if you want. I promise not to cut it off.”

“No thanks,” I said.

“I could even make the gap transparent,” she said. “That’s within my power. Are you pretending to be unflappable?”

“I insist that you don’t.” I looked down at my frayed shirt. “We’ll all be needing new clothes soon.”

“Yeah, I got a couple bullet holes,” said Arnold. He wiggled his fingers through one. “Bad-ass! But inconvenient.”

“Reisen shot at you!” gasped Wiki as he walked up to us. He was doubled over. “With... a real gun!”

“Yeah, but it hardly hurt at all,” said Arnold. He turned around to show us the other side. “Is there an exit hole?”

“No.”

“Hell yea, I can deflect bullets. I get more badass than you two every hour.”

“Wait, but the sword went all the way through me,” said Wiki. “This doesn’t make any sense!”

Yukari shrugged. “Not my department. As for new clothes, Mr. Thorne, you can purchase them from Mr. Morichika or the tailor with your first stipend. If you run out of money, I suppose you’ll have to rely upon charity or work.”

“Or fight naked,” said Arnold.

“When do we get our stipend?” I asked.

“Tonight,” she replied. “You all have a very important class to attend, so I suggest you get moving.” She disappeared into a gap, probably to help someone else with some minor disaster.

“Nice of her to save Sasha,” said Arnold.

—

That evening we sat around the table eating sweet potatoes. We’d been promised rice, but not until after we’d all received a lesson on how to properly cook it on the clay stove.

“Beekeeping sounds nightmarish,” said Wiki.

“It wasn’t so bad,” I responded. “What were you doing instead?” He was allergic to bees, so he’d been assigned different ‘agricultural’ work.

I’d only been stung three times. The speedo guy hadn’t been so lucky. I also had a sunburn on my arms from the meditation that morning, as well–but at least the beekeepers, who were humans, had given me a large hat to protect myself. I planned to wear it approximately always.

“I helped move crates from a field to a storage room,” said Wiki. “With a hand-pulled cart. Guess what they were full of?” He took another big orange bite out of a big orange potato.

“Corn?” asked Arnold.

“Potatoes, doofus.” We’d had sweet potatoes for dinner on the first night, too, and I suspected we’d be having them again the next evening. “I guarantee it’s Minoriko Aki planting them, even if we will be the ones digging them up.”

“So you didn’t see a youkai either,” I said.

“Nope. It was a local human guiding us.” He took a drink from a clay cup. “They hate our guts, by the way.”

“How do you figure?”

“He kept sneering at us, and giving us lectures about propriety and hard work.” Wiki shook his head. “I asked him some questions about the youkai, and he told me to focus on getting the work done. I think he just didn’t know much about them.”

“I saw a youkai,” said Sasha. “Guess which one?”

“You were tending to the chickens, right?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“So it must be the chicken youkai, oh, what’s her name?”

“Kutaka Niwatari, you scrub,” said Wiki. “Although I’m surprised she came up from the entrance to hell, or down from youkai mountain. She works at the former and lives at the latter, as any true fan knows.”

“It was Satori, actually,” said Sasha with a grin. “I tricked you, scrub.”

“That makes way more sense,” said Arnold. “She’s good with animals, right?”

“Right,” said Wiki.

“She gave us a lecture on chicken thoughts,” said Sasha. “How to tell if a chicken needed something even if you can’t read its mind. We should get chickens ASAP, by the way.”

“Sounds like work,” said Wiki.

“Yeah, but after our initial allowance of eggs runs out, you’ll be glad to have them.” She took a bite of a potato and talked with her mouth full, which was as charming as it sounds. “No eating chicken meat, though. They want us all to be vegetarian unless we’re visiting the izakaya, because meat is so valuable. Also fish isn’t meat, apparently.”

The izakaya, named Hidontei, was a fancy bar: a building in the human village. Wiki wanted us to stay there late on Friday night to see if youkai would show up, which they apparently did at Geidontei, another more traditional bar that was referenced in the lore. The human village actually had three bars, which seemed like a lot for such a small village.

It was a cultural difference I was happy to hear about. My closet apartment in the Outside World had been ten miles away from the nearest fast food place that served things that weren’t reconstituted.

“You know,” said Wiki, “I’m okay with vegetarianism. In fact, I am one-hundred-percent for it.”

“We should tell everybody!” said Arnold. “Especially the youkai.”

“Where can you buy chickens, anyway?” I asked. There were a smattering of shops in the human village, but none that dealt in livestock, as far as I knew.

“You can ask the human overseer of the coop nicely while Satori is there to confirm that you’d be the best chicken farmer,” said Sasha. “Which I did, and I would be, thank you very much.”

“What makes you a better chicken farmer,” asked Wiki. “I don’t mean you, specifically. Just, what does it require in general?”

“That you have to ask proves you’d suck at it,” said Sasha.

“Not helping me get better,” he shot back.

“Either way, good work!” said Arnold. “I could use an egg with this… plant. I’m still hungry.”

“All the more reason to get chickens,” she replied, handing him the tail of her sweet potato. He took it with a dip of the head. “Hunting in the forest is not allowed either, by the way.”

“What about being hunted?” I asked, but we already knew where we stood there. “We need to find an escort. Did you ask Satori?”

“No,” said Sasha. “I’ll try on Wednesday.”

“They’ll probably rotate us,” said Wiki. “But we need to ask everyone we can, so if I’m with the chickens, I’ll ask.”

“Yukari, want to be our escort so we can practice danmaku?” said Arnold to the open air, with a grin on his face.

“I decline,” said a dark patch in the corner of the ceiling, making Arnold jump. I squinted at the shadows, but if there had been a gap there, it had moved somewhere else.

“I’ll get to work on a cypher,” whispered Wiki.

“What about using a different language?” asked Sasha. “Parlez-vous français?”

“Oui, et j'adore les puzzles,” came the voice from a different dark corner. “La cryptographie, c'est une de mes passions.”

“Fuck,” she said.

“Dude,” said Wiki with his head in his hands. “I’m never going to figure out how translation works in this fucking village.” He said something to me in Japanese, and I shook my head because it was still in Japanese and I couldn’t understand him. “What the heck are the locals speaking, and how do we understand it?” I wondered if Raghav had been speaking Hindi or something.

“Don’t sweat it,” said Arnold. “Let’s talk about our danmaku lessons, instead.”

We’d all committed to sticking with our lessons, it turned out, which was good. I knew from personal experience that it would be easier to learn alongside other motivated students. We were all motivated by a desire to not die, so that box was checked.

However, many of the other new immigrants had already given up. I supposed it was because learning to handle danger meant going into danger and also feeling pain. It frustrated me that people were afraid of a trivial inconvenience and would thus worsen things for themselves down the line. I felt grateful to have roommates who were at least somewhat resistant to that ridiculous failing of humanity.

We relayed what each of our teachers had told us.

—

“Danmaku is about expressing yourself,” said Reimu. “The youkai can’t understand humans, not really–but they are close enough to human that you can sometimes bring them into line. Make sure that your danmaku is beautiful and genuine. Maybe then they’ll heed your desires.”

—

"Danmaku's not just some fancy light show,” said Kirisame Marisa. “It's magic, adrenaline, and a test of your guts! When ‘ya fight with danmaku you scream 'This is who I am!' with every bullet."

“I thought it was ‘all about firepower,’” someone said, quoting Marisa from the lore.

“Oh that too,” she added. “For sure, for sure, if your soul is full of fire and power, anyway!”

—

“Danmaku is a journey of self-discovery and mastery,” said Konpaku Youmu. “It's an art where spirit and form come together, where emotion and intention intertwine. Approach it with respect, dedication, and introspection, and you shall find harmony both in battle and within your own spirit.”

—

“Perception is your ally,” said Reisen. “Understand your opponent's patterns, predict their moves, and adjust your strategies accordingly. Every opponent relies on very few perceptions of reality, thus, every opponent has a short list of strengths you might overcome. By the same token, each of you possesses unique skills to weave into your danmaku. Embrace your strengths and integrate them seamlessly into your patterns. You should lose the ax, though.”

—

“Where’s your ax?” I asked Arnold after he finished describing the lesson he’d received.

“Oh, it’s right here,” he said, pulling it from under the low table. It thunked on the wood.

“Whoa!” said Sasha as he waved it around.

“I’m going to keep it with me as much as possible, until it’s also immune to danmaku. Then I’m going to block bullets with it!”

“I’m not sure that’s going to work,” said Sasha. “If it becomes you, wouldn’t that just count as being hit?”

“Hitboxes,” said Wiki, and we all nodded in perfect understanding. (Arnold might have been faking it.) “Also, Youmu can deflect bullets with her swords. She spent a few minutes talking about how defenses can be prepared, but declined to go into detail. I bet it’ll be a later lesson.”

“Yeah,” I added. “Spell cards as well, from Reimu.”

“Did anyone ask about bombs?” asked Wiki.

“Marisa said there were three ways of using danmaku,” said Sasha. “Unfocused, which is expressing yourself–and focused, which is like trying to make someone specific understand–and finally, emotional outbursts without any particular objective, which hit everything but accomplish very little.”

“Bombs are supremely effective in the game,” said Wiki. “They accomplish a lot.”

“I imagine it’s like shouting to get your point across,” I offered. “It works, but you can’t just rely on it all the time… maybe.” We still had no idea how to make danmaku of any type. Literally none of the immigrant humans had succeeded at making danmaku.

“It’s sure to have some effect, but not targeted enough to be reliable,” said Sasha. “And draining, as you might expect. Definitely not the most effective way.”

“It remains to be seen,” said Wiki. He yawned. “Man, we have to get up early tomorrow…”

“We should visit the bathhouse,” said Arnold. “I worked up a sweat today.”

“Finally,” said Sasha. “You should have gone in the morning, it’s gonna be crowded.”

“Maybe we should wait until tomorrow, then,” said Wiki.

“Nuh-uh.” Sasha waved her hand in front of her nose, her meaning clear. “I’ll make you sleep outside.”

“You can’t do that!”

“I’ll find a way, Stanky.”

“You know what, it doesn’t matter anyway, I was always going to go get clean.” Wiki stood up. “Are you coming, Jake?”

“Yeah,” I said. I was actually looking forward to a bath, minus the getting naked part.

“It was a better place than I expected,” said Sasha. “You’ll like it, I promise.”

I was surprised at how right she was.