I was in a round, not-quite-spherical room with pink and red tapestries hung on every wall. The decor was awful. A white carpet with finger-thick threads was beneath my bare feet, and the walls were similarly white, although they were cracked and curved concrete. I worried I was in a septic tank, for some reason.

In front of me was a table with a smattering of junk atop it. A hat, a notebook, and a pair of pants. I walked forward. These things were familiar, so I held them in my vision the way a drowning man holds onto his piece of debris. The notebook had been torn in half, but I couldn’t figure out whether I was holding the front or the back. The pants had a tear in the crotch. The hat…

The hat I put on my head. It was dark, but who knew when I’d next see sunlight.

“Mister Thorne!” said Maroon. She flew over and hugged me, and I hugged her back.

“Hey,” I said, patting the top of her head. “How are things? Where have you been?” I couldn’t remember why, but I was a bit surprised to see the fairy.

“I don’t know,” she said as she looked around. “I’m not sure I was anywhere. Where are we now?”

I shrugged. “I was hoping you knew.”

“Nope! At least it’s really red!”

I looked around. Every wall was covered in tapestries featuring pink and red swirls with purple lightning bolts. The light was so low that it was hard to see. Two big windows let in some starlight behind me, and that was all I had to work with. It didn’t really illuminate these fleshy-looking flaps that someone had thought to hang up.

“I bet red is the decorator’s favorite color,” I told Maroon. I looked away from the faintly-disgusting tapestries. “I’m glad to see you. Patchouli is worried sick about you. You should go home.”

“I was worried about that,” said the little fairy. “I miss her too.”

“And I miss you.” I hugged her again. “So come back?”

“If you want me back, why aren’t you trying harder?” asked the fairy.

“What?” I asked. “I’ve been trying! I went through Hell looking for you!” Well, Old Hell, but I didn’t feel like explaining the distinction to a fairy.

“Nuh-uh,” she said. “You didn’t ask them for help!”

“Ask who?” She pointed over my shoulder. I grabbed a tapestry and pulled it to the side. Behind it was four thousand people. I let the tapestry fall.

“I mean, I didn’t know they were there. If I ask them for help will you come back?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Then I will,” I said, resolutely. “I will talk to them all day, Maroon, if that’s what it takes.”

“I don’t know…” said the fairy. When she continued, it made even less sense than the tapestry thing. “Do you think fairies can love their mothers?”

“What?”

“Fairies don’t have mothers. So how can a fairy love her mother?” She was staring at me, tears lining her eyes. “I’m trying, but it just doesn’t work!”

“I don’t… I don’t think it matters much whether your family is blood-related or not.” I thought of my roommates. “What matters are your feelings. Do you love Patchouli?”

“Yeah…” said the fairy. She had begun to cry. “I wanted her to be my mother.”

“Well then, she can be,” I said. “It’s that simple.”

“That’s not how fairies work.” She shook her head.

“Don’t say that!” I said. “Look. If you want a mother, you can have one. You should stop worrying about whether you’re a fairy or not, or whether she’s actually your mother.”

“I gotta be something, Mister Thorne!”

“In any case, I’m sure she’d love to support and protect you, even if she’s a bit strict about homework.”

“No, it’s…” Maroon wiped her eyes. “She wanted to eat me!”

“What?” I asked again. Maroon was becoming insubstantial.

“That’s what witches do, right?” she asked. “I read about it in a book… they lure children in, and eat them… I still love her, though…” The fairy disappeared, fading into nothing.

I shouted and the sound hurt my skull. I slammed my fist on the table, and it hurt nothing at all. I’d lost her again before I’d remembered that she was lost.

“This fucking sucks,” I said.

“I agree,” said a voice from behind me. “So tiny and empty, except for junk!”

I spun around. Suwako was there. Her voice was high-pitched and irritating, so I felt like strangling her, but she waved a finger and I stepped back. The finger was like a tongue. I was afraid of her tongues.

“We’ve had enough fun,” she said.

“You tried to murder me,” I said. “I didn’t have any fun!”

“And I succeeded!” she reminded me. “You might want to wake up as soon as possible. A beautiful woman is giving you mouth-to-mouth right now.”

“I don’t really care,” I said.

She walked up and flicked my nose. I glared at her.

“I am awake,” I said. “It hurt when you flicked my nose.”

“Hah hah. Now let’s take a look around.”

The table and the tapestries weren’t the only things in the room. The so-plush-it-was-probably-hiding-something carpet also had a record player and a cheap plastic desk sitting on it in a corner. The desk supported a computer that was from an earlier century. Between the windows there was a sickly plant next to a water spritzer and some other device, and there was a string hanging from a light in the ceiling.

“Let’s start with this thing,” said Suwako. She walked up to the record player. It was an old device, like a phonograph. She flicked a switch and I heard a record playing. Hurried, faint voices were talking about how to save a dying man as the background to a sweet edm track.

“This person’s taste is a bit odd, isn’t it?” I said. I danced a little bit. I hadn’t listened to music like this since coming to Gensokyo. I wondered whose room this was.

“You’re telling me!” responded the not-a-frog youkai. Next she sat down at the cheap desk. The computer on it had hundreds of cables going into the floor, through holes that someone had made with a drill. It was an old style, a mainframe, although it somehow fit on a desk.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Turning you on,” she said after she’d pushed the computer’s power button. There was a shudder in the room and I almost lost my balance. “That one’s going to take a while. By the way, do you see anything that looks dangerous in here?”

“Uh,” I said as I took an inventory of the room. The janky computer was too old to run an LLM, I suspected, so at least that was safe.

I looked behind a tapestry and saw a chamber full of filing cabinets and strewn papers. It looked too confusing and disorganized, so I tried a different tapestry. The second one hid an adult video store. I might come back to that one later. I checked a third tapestry and saw my own corpse.

I resolved not to look for danger behind any more tapestries. The main chamber was mostly empty, but I went to look at the water spritzer. It was set up to spray a moldy and sickly-looking cactus. The plant was small and round, barrel-shaped, and quite cute save for a fungal deformity.

“This thing has thorns,” I said. “Is that dangerous?”

Also, oddly, there was an automatic fish feeder in place to dump fish food on the cactus. A little pile of food had fallen on the floor. The cactus wasn’t even in an aquarium.

“Oh, that won’t do at all,” said Suwako. She walked over, picked up the moldy cactus, and ate it in one bite. When she tried to swallow it got stuck. Her eyes began to bulge. Suwako patted her pockets, then she pulled a giant fake office plant out of her hat and set it on the floor next to the spritzer.

Then she choked on the cactus and died. I frowned.

“Honestly, what did she expect?” I asked aloud, to nobody in particular.

“Good question,” said a third voice. I spun around, and this time it was Yukari.

“Oh, you’re still alive,” I said. “Nice.”

“I was about to say the same!” she said, waving her fan. “Welcome to the still-alive club!”

“Why aren’t there more chairs?” Or any chairs, I wondered.

“I’m the president. Most of our members are only half-present, unfortunately, but I’m half-glad to see you!” I wondered if she was happy about me being half-dead, or half-alive.

“Thanks. Wow. This artificial plant is very convincing.” I tilted it and looked for rubber seams. “By the way, when are you returning to Gensokyo?” I went to the table and grabbed my notebook. It was whole again.

“I’m not coming back to Gensokyo any time soon,” said Yukari. “I think I’ll stay away for another, oh, five thousand years.”

“Ah.” Yukari is coming back in five thousand years, I wrote. That was unfortunate. People would starve.

“I’m dreaming, by the way,” said Yukari. “I could tell because it didn’t hurt when Lady Moriya flicked your nose.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“But it did!” I objected. Yukari shrugged.

“If I wasn’t dreaming, I would send you back to the Outside World for dying so stupidly, by the way.” I decided to stop arguing with her about it. Talking to Yukari was pointless, so I went back to the plastic potted plant.

“Erm, do you know what this is about?” I asked. Something was growing on the rubber–a mushroom. The fish feeder dutifully dumped flakes on it. It released a puff of spores.

“Good catch,” said the youkai. “These things are pernicious. They like to turn forests into dead concrete, or living concrete into a dead forest. If not dealt with, they can even bring a god low.”

She kicked the water spritzer, cracking its tank and knocking it over. Then she stomped on the mushroom and broke it off the fake plant. She kept stomping until it disappeared, then she stomped on the spritzer for a bit. It was smashed to bits and water got everywhere. Then the debris disappeared into a portal.

“That should take care of that!” said the gap youkai.

“What about the spores?” I asked.

She summoned a few hundred portals with thin ultraviolet lasers, destroying things I could not even see. I couldn’t see the lasers either.

“And the fish feeder?” I asked.

“Without water it’s not very threatening, right?” said Yukari. She waved her fan after her exertion. I had the thought she was tired, and ready to go back to sleep. “I think destroying the spritzer… is punishment enough, don’t you?”

“I guess. Actually, I feel like wrecking some random person’s strange room isn’t very nice. What if they liked cactuses?”

“They set things up to overwater it,” she said. “And they gave it food it couldn’t even eat.”

“True.” The fish-feeder dumped some flakes on the rubber plant while we talked. I turned down its frequency setting.

“They also left it in a dark room. Do you really trust them with a cactus?”

“I guess not.” Did the round windows never see light?

“Speaking of darkness,” said Yukari. She grabbed the pull string for the light on the ceiling.

–

When I woke up a horned woman with black and white hair was looking down at me. Her eyes were a frightening red, but her non-human ears looked soft. Others were there, too, behind the horned youkai. She was rather close for comfort. The sky was dark and smattered with stars.

“Is this Hell?” I asked, before I saw the bright spot that meant the sky was the actual sky that Yukari had cracked. The youkai above me whistled.

“This one’s a realist, ain’t he?” said the youkai. Her voice was rich and resplendent, a far cry from Suwako’s high-pitched voice. “No, I’m sorry to say that you are still in Gensokyo.”

I’d lived. I sighed in relief. I’d had a nightmare about wrecking someone’s junk room, or maybe killing their plants? I didn’t know, but being alive was at the top of my list of priorities, just then.

The other two standing above me were Koichiya Sanae, in green, and Yasaka Kanako, in red. The former was smiling and the latter wore a sneer. The first youkai I’d seen, the one with horns, was wearing a yellow crop top. I didn’t recognize her. I tried not to look at her chest, which became more difficult as she stood up from leaning over me. She had a lot, in a group that wasn’t exactly weak competition.

“Are you offended he didn’t think you were an angel?” asked Sanae. The priestess was waving her stick around, doing some sort of purification ritual. I sat up.

“Nah, he got a read on me right away.” The youkai in yellow glanced at me. “It’s my aspiration to move to Hell one day. My name is Ushizaki Urumi.”

“Jake Thorne,” I said. I stood all the way up to give a bow, which seemed to amuse her. “Student of danmaku. What happened to me, if I might ask?” The last thing I remembered was being upset that I’d died before consuming Suwako.

Suwako had unmanifested. I wondered if they knew. I wasn’t about to bring it up.

“Ah,” said Kanako. She threw a purple lock of hair over her shoulder. “Lady Moriya drowned you. Then we brought you back to life.”

“To spite her?” I asked. Sanae frowned, but the goddess with a mirror on her chest laughed.

“No, as a favor!” Kanako said as she put her hands on her hips. “We’ve used this sequence a few times before. Suwako goaded out the evil in your heart, and defeated you in the holy lake. Your evil was defeated. Sanae purified the lingering sin in your heart. I forced air into your lungs, and stirred your blood’s motion.” She looked at her fingernails. “You’re welcome.”

“I did chest compressions to restart your heart,” said Urumi with a snort, while flexing her arm. She was holding a stone football–no, it was a stone baby. Urumi wasn’t as built as Yuugi or Keine in hakutaku form, but she did have big biceps.

“I let you do that to be nice,” Sanae told her. “We have a defibrillator that we normally use,” she added for my benefit.

“That, uh, that’s….” the words died on my lips. I had been about to tell them that defibrillators can’t restart hearts–only myocardial perfusion nanomachines could–but perhaps in Gensokyo it did work that way?

Did it work because behind the scenes, a certain god was willing it to work? And was the god Kanako, Suwako, or Yukari herself?

“Wait, was that–was that the plan the entire time?” I asked. “To kill me and the youkai, then bring back only the human part?” The feeling of horror grew in my chest.

“Essentially, yes,” said Sanae. “I don’t get why people say you aren’t smart.”

I had to stomp down on my guilt, for now. I’d worry about Suwako later. “Am I fully-human now?” I asked. I didn’t feel any weaker.

I tried to fly and promptly flipped over. The youkai and Sanae laughed at me. Their laughs were so distinct; Kanako jeered, while Urumi guffawed, but Sanae’s nervous ‘heheheh’ was the laugh that I liked the most. She laughed like she felt bad that I might be embarrassed.

It made sense that I couldn’t fly. One of my wings was still at the bottom of the lake. I decided I’d just get a new one, rather than go swimming again.

“Sorry we couldn’t tell you,” said the shrine maiden. “You have to fight and die as though your life depends on it. If you just let us kill you, the cleansing would fail.” So she could keep secrets to protect her patients (or pilgrims, or whatever you called people who came for a cleansing).

My mouth worked for a moment. I almost objected that I could fight as though my life were on the line even if I rationally knew it wasn’t, but I knew that wasn’t true. I wouldn’t have tried to kill a god except as a last resort.

“I also helped save you from the bottom of the lake,” said Urumi.

“She’s more dressed for swimming,” said Sanae while wringing her hands. She didn’t need to apologize, I thought.

“You had a very fetching and very heavy statue sitting on you,” continued Urumi. “I want you to know how contrary to my nature it is to save you from that.”

“Oh?”

“I used to make a living drowning people myself–that’s how I could tell something interesting was going to happen here.” She hefted her stone baby. “I hand ‘em this, I drown.”

“Suwako was probably stealing the concept from you,” said Kanako.

“Anyway, I could feel the potential for a drownin’, so I came to watch.”

“I, uh, I see.”

“No need to be shy, Mister Thorne! Now I just sell fish, I promise.” She pulled her piebald jacket a bit tighter, and I finally remembered her.

Urumi was a cow youkai based upon a spider youkai, and might also have been an oni, according to Wiki. He’d expected me to encounter her later on in my journey, somewhere near an uncrossable river, assuming I went that deep. The river was full of extinct marine life.

“I made the statue weigh less, so that the kappa could pull you out,” continued Urumi. “It was a team effort. She ran off after that, though.” I hadn’t even thought about Nitori, which made me feel a bit bad in retrospect.

“I tried to tell her that swimming was allowed, just this once,” said Sanae.

“I tried to tell her the opposite,” said Kanako.

“Interesting,” I said. I looked around. It was dark out, but a few lanterns were providing enough light for me to see the way back to the Moriya Shrine. “Where’s Sasha?”

“Miss her already?” asked Sanae with an eyebrow raised, and a smile.

“Worried for her safety.”

“I sent her to provide commentary on the other shrine maiden’s strategies,” replied the wind priestess with a shrug. Presumably they were still playing videogames. “She seems to enjoy that. Why did Lady Moriya want to send her away, by the way?”

“I–probably to get me to stop eating her fear,” I said.

“And where is our god?” asked the shrine maiden.

“I don’t know.” I wanted to change the subject. “Sasha’s fear sustained me. I need to tell her how important she was to my survival.”

“Not at all, right?” asked Kanako. “Don’t forget who actually saved your life.”

“Hush,” said Urumi, making her about a billion times braver than me. I wouldn’t have insulted the god. “Can’t you see he cares for her? The man had a near death experience. I bet it clarified so many things for him!”

Kanako seemed to take offense at being told to hush, but then Urumi threatened to double the cost of plesiosaur meat and Kanako merely grumbled something about cows and tornadoes.

As a matter of fact, my near death experience had clarified very little. All I had was the vague sense I wasn’t really doing very well as a spelunker, and I should seek out more help. Also that maybe I’d lost something both terrifying and important, but maybe that was just the youkai part of me.

I wanted to talk to Sasha really badly. I’d overcome a god with her help, and she probably didn’t even know. We were in grave danger at the Moriya Shrine. Kanako and Sanae might realize I’d killed their elder god at any moment.

I took a deep breath. The fear in me was welling up, but after dying and being saved, I was too emotionally-drained to worry about it. I let it go. I tried to think of what I should be doing instead.

For the good of humans in Gensokyo, and to not squander an opportunity, I simply had to ask Urumi some questions. I pulled out my notebook, which was pristine and dry, and also not missing the page I’d torn out earlier that day.

“This thing healed itself,” I observed aloud. “And apparently, Yukari is coming back in five thousand years?” My notebook was getting increasingly creepy.

“I’m glad part of you has that ability,” said Kanako. “I spent a lot of divine power clearing your lungs.”

“Thank you, again,” I said. “Five thousand years seems like a long time.”

“I can wait,” said Kanako with a shrug. We made our way back to the shrine.

“How much does plesiosaur meat cost?” I asked Urumi as a way of opening the conversation. By the time she and Kanako had finally peeled off, I felt like I’d gotten some decent information for Wiki, and for the rest of Human Town as well.

“If you ever make it past all those degenerates, come visit me,” said Urumi with a wave. “I’d love to stop you from drowning. For real.”

–

Sasha was very happy to see that I’d survived. I told her about how her presence and fear had given me the will to fight, but I kept the fact that I’d died a secret. She might need to be cleansed one day as well. Sasha challenged me to videogames, but I declined.

“Where’s the crystal?” I asked.

“Guess,” she asked, deadpan.

“Ah. I brought three spares.”

“I know. I went through your bag. You might want to call Patchouli back, she’s probably still worried.”

“I will. First, I wanted to say thank you.” I hugged her, and she returned it.

“Where’s this coming from?” she asked.

“I just… I don’t know.” I was grateful I’d lived, and that when I called for help, someone would come even if they couldn’t do anything.

—

When I came back from sending a message to a demon that Patchouli had left on standby, I felt like collapsing.

“We should probably go to bed–” I told Sasha, ignoring the snickering from a shrine maiden. “Early, I mean, because we have a lot to do tomorrow.” There was some grumbling from the women.

“It is a weekday,” said Sanae. “It’ll be lights out, ladies! Sorry, Jake, you’ll have to sleep on the couch.” The Moriya shrine had bunks, but apparently they didn’t allow men.

“I don’t mind,” I said with a wave of my hand. “Honestly, that’s the biggest real concession I’ve had to make today.”

“You’ve lost your ability to eat fear,” said Sasha. “Probably.”

“And you’ve become human again,” said Sanae. “Mostly. I checked!”

“Am I going to turn into a youkai and be murdered by one god or another?” I asked.

“God-willing, no.” She chuckled at the look on my face. “You are stable, for now.”

“I’ll take it,” I said. She left the room to help the others settle in. “Thanks again!”

I was so exhausted that I started emptying my pockets right away. My notebook, my spare notebook, my coin purse and my pen all went onto the table next to the couch. I also pulled out the vial of smelling herbs that Sanae had given me. I idly unscrewed it.

Tomorrow I’d have to do some more thorough testing. I’d need to seek out a ghost to test my vision, and I’d probably go ahead and cut myself to see how long it took to heal. I suspected I still had some of my youkai strength, at least. It was hard to tell just walking around. I should have asked Urumi if I could borrow her stone baby.

I put the vial to my nose. I couldn’t smell the herbs, not even the lavender. I felt a moment of panic. Sasha walked in while I was trying to smell my armpit.

“The fuck is wrong with you?”

“Quick question: can you smell me? Wait wait, better–can I try smelling you?”