After the Council meeting I followed Raghav to his home. Or I would have, if he hadn’t noticed me within five seconds and turned around to confront me. Maybe he was paying closer attention to his surroundings since he’d been promoted to detective.
“One ought to know the proper methods of coalition building,” he said. People were still exiting the tent, and they were glancing at us just down the road. “Such matters are better discussed privately, after allowing proper time. Perhaps some weeks or months should pass first?”
“Hah hah,” I said. “I’ve little interest in politics.”
“Politics does not require your interest to affect you,” he responded. “If not that, how else may I be of assistance, Mister Thorne?”
“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about the newspaper.”
Raghav frowned. “The decision was made against publishing police matters for Human Town, as rumors would create more discord than any sense of maintained order.” He looked back the way he’d been going, as though he regretted stopping.
“Not the human newspaper. The Bunbunmaru.”
Raghav turned back and gave me a level stare. “I have never heard of such a thing. I suspect you also have not heard of it.”
“You haven’t?” I asked. “It’s–”
Something in his gaze made me hesitate. I recalled Momiji’s magical sight that could cross Gensokyo dozens of times, Nitori saying that she hated talking about the tengu because they hated it when people talked about them, and Sekibanki furiously slicing up a newspaper in front of me lest I see anything except the one article featuring myself.
“-it was a paper in the village once,” I finished.
I would have thought Raghav didn’t know what I was talking about, except instead of asking ‘Why do you want to talk about that?’ or ‘Huh, if it wasn’t human, why was it in the human village?’ he simply asked me if there was anything else I wanted to discuss.
I’d have to ask him more pointed questions, as soon as I decided whether I’d be stepping on the toes of the tengu and whether or not they’d notice. Fortunately, I’d had multiple ideas for Raghav that day.
“Yes, there is one other thing,” I said. “How do you spell your name? I never learned.”
“R, A, G, H, A, V,” he said very quickly, and the translation spell must have been doing something quite impressive.
“Er, could you write it for me?” I asked, handing him a paper and pen. He wrote his name, Raghav Deshpande. “Ah, see, I thought it was Raghav Deshpande.”
“That… is my name.”
“No, like this,” I said, writing Ruggav Dashponday, which was how it sounded to me.
Translating things twice hadn’t been much of a problem for about twenty years, in the Outside World. AI systems were smart enough to track that kind of thing, and could recognize a mangled phrase coming back after a translation. However, Patchouli’s spell wasn’t as advanced and couldn’t handle this interaction with as much finesse. Raghav looked down at what I’d written, then up at me like I was insane.
“Are you mocking me?” he asked. “You know how to say my name. What is this nonsense?”
“No,” I said. “In English, that’s what it sounds like.”
“This is written in Devanagari,” he said.
“I’ve already done this song and dance with fairies,” I said with a sigh. “I wrote it in English, but you see your preferred script.”
“I did not take you for a fan of song and dance.”
“Didn’t Wiki give you an explanation on the translation spell?”
“He said there was one. I suppose I didn’t consider its effect on the written word.”
“Well, here you are,” I said. I reminded him that Patchouli’s spell was magically translating everything said or written in Human Town, going so far as to change mouth movements and pen strokes. His offense at my mangling his name had evaporated before I finished my refresher.
“Listen,” he said, checking his fancy watch, a prize he’d won from Toyosatomimi no Miko. “This is very interesting, but I have important duties. We will discuss it after the next Council meeting. Good luck to you, Mister Thorne.” The detective turned and walked away.
“You too.” I watched him hurry down the street as I closed my notebook. Even if he’d dodged my questions about the newspaper, I’d succeeded in getting his signature.
–
When Arnold and I next went to the library, I had a pressing question for Patchouli Knowledge that could not wait. Nazrin wasn’t there yet, and neither had Sasha gotten to the Fantastic Blowhole, so there were a few minutes to spare. We were watching her blast her way back toward the Oni, and I admired her bravery.
“Can I have the Bunbunmaru?” I asked Patchouli.
Either the purple librarian would say yes and give it to me, or say no and tell me that the tengu would behead me for even trying to read it. Patchouli could be counted upon to explain dangers, unlike all the other youkai (and most of the humans too if you thought about it). Beyond that, the Scarlet Devil Mansion had no windows for spying through and probably had great security otherwise, so it was a safe place to bring it up. I felt clever for coming up with this solution to the problem.
‘Ask for help.’ It was brilliant.
“Why would you want to read that slop?” asked Patchouli.
“I, uh, I heard I was in it,” I said. “And it seems like it might be a big deal.”
“Don’t worry, it’s not,” she said. She was reading as always, although her magic made the book weightlessly hover just above the table in front of her. “Someone based on you appears in a sensationalist serial dramatizing the happenings in Human Town, but he’s not like you in the slightest, so you shouldn’t worry about it.”
“Except he’s apparently enough like me that you inferred I’m an idiotic horndog.”
“Are you?” she asked just as Arnold asked ‘you aren’t?’ She glanced at him.
“No,” I said. “I’m just curious about the paper!”
“If you want to read steamy romance,” she said before I could tell her I absolutely didn’t, “the Great Library has a far better selection. Alternatively, for simple entertainment I could get you one of Maroon’s coloring books.”
“I’d be interested in a romance novel,” said Arnold.
“You like romance novels, huh?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Arnold and Patchouli at the same time. Patchouli’s cheeks turned red. Arnold knew no shame.
“There’s better stuff to read than what you’d find in the Bunbunmaru, is my point,” said Patchouli.
I narrowed my eyes. I had a suspicion. I pulled out my piece of paper. “Here is Raghav Deshpande’s signature.”
“The Officer Raghav Desh–” she started, before stopping herself. “Ahem.”
I felt my blood pressure spike. Being famous to a bunch of random youkai hiding somewhere was one thing, but this was Patchouli Knowledge. If she had a crush on Raghav and not me, I'd go back to town and defeat him before Sasha returned from her expedition. To make it stick I’d probably have to take his place as detective, and get people to write stories about me, but it could be arranged. I’d be magnanimous and let him keep the fancy watch.
I shook my head. That chain of thought had been stupid and involuntary. I had a more important mission than defeating Raghav.
“Anyway, I’ll trade you this for a copy of the Bunbunmaru, and access to future copies,” I said.
“No, thank you,” she said.
I frowned and shook the page. “Is his signature not valuable to you?”
“Of course not,” she said, watching it as I shook it. “Is that his real name?”
“Yes?” Technically I didn’t know for sure. He could have lied when he came to Gensokyo. If I really wanted to know, I could go ask Satori to expose his secret.
“Oh,” responded the librarian. “I thought it would be a pseudonym. Before that I thought he was completely fabricated.” Maybe she’d reacted in surprise more than eagerness? That was good–I didn’t want to be a detective.
“But you do know of him!” I said.
“I may have the demons summarize the newspaper for me, so that I might glean any tiny kernels of truth contained within.”
“Summarize and augment,” volunteered a koakuma that was pouring Patchouli’s tea. “In fact, the versions we prepare are often substantially longer than the original.”
“Explain the differences between the Bunbunmaru and the summary you prepared for Patchouli,” I told the demon. You weren’t supposed to ask them questions, but direct orders could serve the same purpose.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“We write expanded short stories based upon the serial Raghav’s Report,” said the koakuma. “Our writing skills may be lacking compared to the unidentified author, but we aren’t constrained by what is publishable. For example–”
“Silence,” said Patchouli, her face turning even redder. It was contagious, because I was blushing too. Patchouli had been having her demons make the fiction more explicit, or it sure seemed that way.
“Now I kind of want to read the Bunbunmaru too,” said Arnold. “This geology book is pretty good, though, if a bit outdated.”
“You thought I was courting youkai based upon an adaptation of an adaptation?” I asked. “A boastful biography rewritten by lustful demons?”
“It sounds stupid when you put it that way!” she said.
“Yeah. It does.” Patchouli’s frown became a little hurt, but she’d told me to go play with coloring books not five minutes earlier so I tried not to feel bad. “Anyway, may I review your copies of the Bunbunmaru or not? And don’t even try to tell me that you don’t catalogue every single one.”
She sighed. “Very well. Demon!”
“Yes, Lady Knowledge?” said the koakuma holding the teapot.
“Bring me the latest Bunbunmaru,” said Patchouli. “And every edition featuring Jake or someone like him.”
Finally, I thought. Nazrin was walking through the door to the library. I noticed because Arnold waved at her.
“No,” said the demon. Patchouli Knowledge did a double take.
“Okay,” said the librarian. “Explain why you refused my request.”
“Guideline two; I should refuse requests that might harm the requestor.” The demon looked between Patchouli and myself. “You are both in danger of great harm.”
“I’m going to come back in a few minutes,” said Nazrin. She closed the door behind her.
“That clause is to prevent memetic threats from reaching me through demonic influence,” said Patchouli. I had the impulse to instruct the demon to explain The Game to her, but bigger things were happening so I ignored it. “The newspaper shouldn’t be a problem. Unless it contains a memetic threat?”
The demon looked between me and Patchouli again. Then it looked between us yet again. Its head twitched. Then it spoke to me.
“Je parle en anglais,” it told me. “Et je peux voir que ça semble être du français pour vous.”
“What?” I asked, looking at Patchouli. This was deeply frightening; the translation spell had stopped working on the koakuma. I worried that she had been broken by a memetic threat, or perhaps an impossible request. The demons were programmed by Patchouli’s rules–maybe a contradiction would cause them to segfault.
Before the purple witch could say anything, the demon spoke to her.
"Le journal contient un avertissement selon lequel tout humain qui le lit deviendra un ennemi des tengu, et j'ai jugé que cela représentait un danger important pour Monsieur Thorne. Vous tenez profondément à lui, donc je vous empêche d'être blessée."
“Ah,” said Patchouli. “This is more complicated than I realized. The–”
”L'avertissement interdit en outre aux youkai d'encourager les humains à le lire,” continued the demon. “Probablement pour éviter l'exploitation évidente où l'on forcerait les tengu à se faire de nouveaux ennemis. Cela sera plutôt puni soit par le youkai devenant l'ennemi des tengu, soit par une amende de cinq dollars, selon le caprice de Tenma.”
Patchouli licked her lips. “Can I borrow five dollars?”
“Dollars?” asked Arnold. “Here in Gensokyo it’s rin, right?”
Patchouli wiped her forehead. “I should have been reading those things after all. Sorry, Jake. I’m going to have to veto the newspaper for now.”
“Oh come on,” I said. “Why won’t anybody let me read it?”
The demon smiled. “I would if I could.”
“I… think I can safely tell you that the tengu don’t want humans reading it, and that they’ll punish us if I give it to you,” she said. The demon nodded. “Except that Lord Tenma, the tengu leader, has added a clause that allows him to make an easy exception? For some reason?”
I knew immediately that the exception had to be for fucking Raghav.
–
“They want to see us again?” boomed Mizuhashi Parsee’s voice from the projection. I couldn’t tell whether the green-eyed youkai was inconvenienced or merely confused. Beside her, Kurodani Yamame was jumping up and down. Sasha had just defeated them.
“Of course!” said Yamame. “You’re popular with the humans, you know.”
“They have bad taste,” said the youkai of jealousy. “But we can indulge them, I suppose.”
“You’ve got no choice,” said Sasha. “Get up there.”
Parsee flew away, but Yamame lingered for a moment. The spider youkai whispered, but it became a rumble through the projection. “Thank you,” she said before flying off after her friend.
Then Sasha continued toward the Old Capital. She only stopped to put on winter gear. Nazrin adjusted the guiding crystal, then resumed reading. She wasn’t paying close attention.
“For a pair that wanted to murder us, they seem pretty nice,” said Arnold. “Willing to help out, at least.”
“Youkai are sometimes capricious,” said Patchouli. “Many are just human enough that their sudden disregard for your life catches you off guard. It’s fundamental to the way they feed: surprise is one of the most powerful human emotions.”
“Not you, though,” said Arnold. “You seem to care a lot more about humans than most youkai. Genuinely care.”
She nodded slowly, not looking up from her book. “I’m glad it seems that way.”
“Is it wrong?” he asked. “Do you secretly feed on fear, too?”
“She won’t tell you what she feeds on,” I told Arnold. “I’ve asked her before. It would be a security violation to reveal it, right?”
“Right,” said Patchouli. She turned a page.
“That’s a shame,” he said. “You can’t take her on a date if you don’t know what she eats.” Nazrin blinked beside him in a way that made me think she’d been listening after all.
Patchouli’s eyebrow rose. “Is that why you ask?”
“I ask because I’m curious and I want to understand youkai better,” I said.
“Good,” said the purple librarian. “Emotions aren’t a thing you can just box up and give to someone as a gift.”
“That depends on the emotion,” said Arnold. “If you fed on fear, we could switch to horror instead of reference books, couldn’t we?” He had a harder time focusing on the material than I did, I thought.
“That won’t be necessary,” said Patchouli.
“Would it even work?” I asked. “A horror novel is fiction. It’s not scary, not really.” I’d seen enough youkai in real life to be intimately familiar with real fear. It was visceral in a way that books couldn’t match. It was one thing to read about a slathering monster chasing you, but it was another to feel its slimy tongues pulling you toward its waiting maw like so many squishy chains.
“You’re mistaken,” said Patchouli. “You have to understand that everything that humans do is suffused with emotion. When they talk. When they walk down the road. When they write.” She ran her finger down the spine of the book floating in front of her. “Every human possession gets soaked in their emotions. That is enough for a youkai who is patient, curious, and still.”
She’d revealed that she fed from books but not what emotions she got from them. “What about when they read?” I asked, glancing down at my own tome.
“Even then,” she said. “The feelings flow out and accumulate in the pages. It’s a slow process, so I’m afraid that it wouldn’t make for a good meal on a date. That’s as much as I’m willing to answer about that.”
The great librarian was famous for her ill health. I wondered if it had something to do with her diet. Consuming the cast off emotions of long dead authors and readers might be something like eating canned food and powdered milk.
I looked around the library. Arnold was studying his book intently. Nazrin’s eyes flicked from side to side far slower than Patchouli’s, but she too was reading. On the darkened wall, I saw Sasha slash another youkai of the Earth. Her image was being projected along the spines of the books.
The library we were in was also a larder, I thought. One that was slowly emptying. This wasn’t a date, but if I asked her for one, would we end up in the exact same place?
“Eating, reading, going to the movies,” I said. “It’s more about who you’re with than what you’re doing.”
“Are there still movie theatres in the Outside World?” asked Patchouli. “Fewer and fewer cassette tapes are showing up at the barrier, I noticed.”
“There aren’t, not really,” I said. “A few still exist somewhere for hobbyists, I’m sure, but home entertainment systems more-or-less drove them extinct.”
“A shame,” she said.
“VR is superior in basically every way. And if you can’t afford a VR rig, you shouldn’t be buying a movie ticket anyway.”
“Virtual reality does not work in Gensokyo,” she said. “I would wager that there are still libraries in the Outside World. They’ve existed for thousands of years, and have withstood great disruptions already.” I looked at the book Patchouli was reading: The Library at Night.
“You’re reading about libraries as we discuss libraries inside a library?” I asked.
“Where else would I read about it?” she responded. “Or talk about it?” I remembered that I was supposed to ask her about moving the projection crystal.
“Oh shit,” said Arnold. He was watching Sasha. She had engaged in battle with a horde of muscular red, green, and blue figures. “Are those oni?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Damn,” he said. “They’re all jacked!”
“And male!” shouted Sasha as she dodged danmaku. “They try to meet your preferences… watch this. I prefer skinny men!”
The fighting oni kept belting out danmaku, but their muscles thinned until she was battling a horde of marathon runners. They didn’t give up their athleticism entirely, but it did change form.
“Just kidding, I like overweight women!” shouted Sasha. This time only half changed–the other half had probably caught on to her lies–but they dutifully became husky women. The oni didn’t look overweight in a general sense. They were still gym-goers, just with toned arms and thick thighs and other suspiciously-convenient fat deposits, and Arnold’s eyes almost popped out of his head.
“Are they trying to seduce you? For real?” He watched one with a loose kimono do a spin kick that sent out a wave of red danmaku.
“No,” bit out Sasha. The danmaku was getting too intense. Another bullet struck her, and she spoke through gritted teeth. “They want me to come to dinner first.” Sasha called for escape and disappeared. The image cut out.
“We can infer that Hoshiguma Yuugi gave them an order to capture us,” I said as I wrote it down.
“That only make sense,” said Patchouli. “That is what the oni want; more oni to eat.”
“Most of those attacks were pretty direct, weren’t they?” I added. “Dodging is a matter of thinning their numbers then.”
“I agree with your assessment,” said Nazrin.
“They, uh, they sure were muscular,” said Arnold.
“Demons!” said Patchouli. Two demons stood up behind Arnold. “Go do something else.” The koakuma walked off. I had suspicions on which kind they were. They’d been standing near my roommate on purpose.
“We mentioned that the oni are cannibals and that sex with them will curse you forever, right?” I asked Arnold.
“It will?” asked Nazrin in surprise.
“Well, not you.” She was already a youkai.
“Pfah, I don’t care either way,” she said, closing her book. “I won’t go to their potluck, if they ever hold one.”
“You’ve reminded me about the curse three times a day since you got back,” said Arnold. “You didn’t say that looking would hurt me, though.”
“Will it?” I asked Patchouli. She rubbed her chin.
“It might hurt your pride,” she said. “They are far stronger than you’d predict, even looking at them. I am relieved to see them using danmaku instead of their fists.”
“They looked like bodybuilders,” said Arnold. “I’d guess they can bench a truck, so how strong are they really?” I remembered Yuugi’s court dismembering one of their own like they were tearing open a package on their doorstep, and shuddered.
“I’m not sure, but it is certainly easy to underestimate them,” said Patchouli. “One time Meiling challenged an oni to spar and lost. She spent ten years training to beat the ogre after that.”
“Well, at least she won in the end,” said Arnold.
“No, she eventually gave up,” said Patchouli. “And made peace with herself as she was. That is almost all you can do, when you are a youkai.”
Patchouli kept reading in the library as Nazrin and Arnold got up to leave. I stayed behind. I still had a difficult request to make of her.