Arnold, Sasha and I went to see Sanae at the Moriya booth during the Sunday festival. Scarcely had she swung her stick before Sanae shook her head and sent Sasha and I away so she could speak to Arnold separately. We spent a few minutes waiting outside the tent, surrounded by fans of Moriya.

“I’m getting déjà vu,” said Sasha.

“Is it concerning that this keeps happening to danmaku users?” I asked. “Do you think I should talk to Raghav?” Sasha was rubbing her forehead.

“I don’t know.”

“It seems like–”

“How long have you and Patchouli been a thing?” she asked me, suddenly. “Were you already making moves on her back then?”

“Oh, I was turning into a youkai way before… that,” I said, waving my hand.

“That’s weird. Mine was ‘cause I ate the cursed oni meat.” I could not bring myself to make an innuendo. “Arnold’s is… presumably because he’s being unsafe with Yuyuko? But why the hell were you turning into a youkai?”

“Blood donation,” I said.

It was kind of a lie; the mysterious donation had been given to both of us without converting us. Beyond that, there was a different piece of the puzzle that I’d left out. I knew that Sekibanki had started my conversion with a kiss. I didn’t bring it up. The drama to value ratio of explaining that wasn’t high enough for me to bother, especially since Sasha still thought I was secretly meeting Alice’s puppet ghost.

A few minutes later Arnold came out of the tent looking chastised.

“Everything good?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “She says I’m not so bad that they’ll have to kill me. I do have to visit the shrine for my curse to be cured, though.”

I frowned. I kissed a lady and was struck down; this guy got to round the bases without much issue. Life wasn’t fair.

On the other hand, I was glad that Arnold didn’t dither or disagree with the idea of stopping his youkai transformation. He might have been better than me, because I’d been reluctant to give up power. Well, not better, exactly–just less willing to do self-destructive things, sleeping with youkai notwithstanding.

“Well, we can look for the fisherman youkai while we’re there,” said Sasha.

“Fisherwoman,” I corrected Sasha.

“Monster hunter,” Arnold corrected me. “Plesiosaurs aren’t fish.” We all looked around for Wiki to start arguing definitions, but he was busy elsewhere.

Arnold and I would have called Urumi the cow youkai, but we were going to beseech her for extinct fish-and-anything-else, so ‘fisher’ was pretty close. We made our way back to our dorm. Arnold still looked troubled.

“It’ll be okay,” said Sasha. “Getting cleansed doesn’t hurt.”

“They drowned me,” I said, deadpan. “It hurt a lot. More than you’d think even after I say that.”

“Getting cleansed doesn’t hurt if you catch it early enough,” she amended. Sasha turned to me. “You aren’t helping, asshole.”

Arnold didn’t look reassured. “She said I’d have to sacrifice something in exchange.”

“They said that to me too,” I said.

“What did they take?” asked my bearded roommate. His eyes were wide and wild. It was unlike him.

“My… life, I guess?” I didn’t recall losing anything in particular.

“Your sense of smell,” said Sasha. I blinked.

“My sense of smell, yeah.”

“Well, Sanae was looking at my pants,” Arnold continued. “Which isn’t that surprising, until she also looked at my axe for a moment. That got me to wondering.”

Sasha and I considered this, and the activities that were driving Arnold’s transformation, in silence.

“You could go back in there and ask for clarification,” I said.

“I already did!” he said. “And she said it had to be a surprise! She wouldn’t meet my eyes!”

“I’m sure it isn’t…” I started, but I wasn’t sure of anything. Really, being drowned wasn’t so bad, as long as it was temporary.

—

We were waiting for the ‘livestream’ to start, in which Sasha would project back her expedition to the waiting crowd. All of the most proficient danmaku users were there to watch: the martial artists, the policemen, the enthusiasts, and the students. We were watching a blank screen and the youkai that sat nearby.

Patchouli Knowledge and Nazrin sat at their table beneath the hemispherical awning of the Scrydome. It was a wooden structure with tight canvas between the sections. Geodesic domes weren’t great at displacing snow, but Rick’s workmen had built an angled roof above to protect the screen below. I was impressed that they could finish it so fast without power tools.

Behind Patchouli was a koakuma. The demon was outside of the Scarlet Devil Mansion, so she was wearing a loose pair of iron handcuffs. She also wore a beanie that clashed with her formal dress so much that I was surprised it didn’t fly off on its own, disregarding the bat wings it would be covering. The demon sat casually. You wouldn’t notice the handcuffs unless you’d seen Patchouli attach them in the Scarlet Devil Mansion some thirty minutes before.

Patchouli had insisted on bringing the demon as a spotter: a koakuma’s superior observation skills had been too useful during earlier expeditions for us to go without. I secretly thought she also wanted someone to pour her tea. The koakuma was smiling pleasantly, an order, and acting like a piece of furniture, also an order.

These three weren’t the only youkai present, but they were the ones getting the most attention. The majority of one hundred seats were filled with talking humans. Most people were quietly chatting with their neighbors, but many were staring at the youkai on the projecting platform, Patchouli in particular.

They were staring at my girlfriend. Youkaifriend? Coworker-with-benefits? I didn’t know what to call her.

Youkai didn’t (openly) come to town all that often, and Patchouli was the most famous of the three, so I couldn’t blame anyone… but it still irked me. The feeling wasn’t exactly jealousy. It was more like shame. Part of me felt remorse for subjecting her to this. Her asthma and anemia were one thing, but the way my favorite librarian hid her face behind her book revealed that introversion was another reason for her to avoid going outside. Part of me wanted to stand up on stage and draw all that attention to myself to spare her, but I had nothing to say.

I sat between Arnold and Renko. Arnold and I were given front row seats for free; Renko had to pay. She didn’t seem prone to boredom or at all interested in danmaku, so it surprised me that she’d wanted to attend. Maribel was on her other side.

I wondered if Maribel had dragged Renko there, or possibly the reverse. Despite them not actually knowing each other in the Outside World they were becoming close friends already. Renko asked Arnold a question about the potty-port without laughing at our sarcastic name for it. Maribel seemed to be half-listening to the answer.

On Arnold’s other side were two empty seats. We’d saved one for Wiki, but he was busy with council business. I had no idea who had bought the last seat. The two empty places were notable; everybody else was arriving and sitting down, talking, and increasing the noise level enough that I regretted not going on the first livestream expedition.

I felt vaguely uncomfortable at the crowd behind me. I knew that they had little reason to pay attention to me in particular. I conceptually knew that all eyes were on the youkai and the inactive crystal at the center of the stretched half-dome. Nobody should be paying attention to me. The feeling of eyes on my head was psychological, a distraction, a falsehood, a–

I looked behind myself and saw three people look away, including Raghav and his girlfriend. Maybe I had some of the same issues as Patchouli, I thought as my cheeks reddened. I was becoming better known. The feeling of being watched didn’t go away.

Then I looked further and saw five large fairies sitting in a tree. Sunny and Luna were roughhousing. Daiyousei and Star were quietly watching. Cirno was loudly watching, narrating the lack of action to the other fairies. When the ice fairy saw me looking she flipped me off for no reason that I could ascertain.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

That explained the feeling of being watched. I turned back. The projection wasn’t going yet.

I was stressing out, like this was a class presentation. Time slowed to a crawl. It would be my turn to live stream the next day, and I was nervous about it. It reminded me of my school days, where I worried how many people on the other side of the camera were paying really close attention. I’d imagined many hyper-attentive students, and Wiki’s existence proved that they were a real thing. I looked back toward the table on the raised platform.

Patchouli may have been hiding her face, but Nazrin had her arms crossed and her head held high. It was an imperious attitude like we were all beneath her. As long as she was standing on the platform it was literally true.

“Nazrin seems stressed,” I said, expressing myself poorly.

“She’s in commander mode,” said Arnold.

“Hmm?”

“Commander mode,” he repeated. “She’s the little mouse commander. Her body language is different right now, because she’s thinking of us like her soldiers, I bet.” He looked at Patchouli, who set down her book to glance at the crystal and then cracked it open again a few moments later. “I don’t think either of them are used to this kind of attention, though”

“I suspect not,” I said. I did not envy them.

As we waited for the livestream to start, I kept thinking about how I should have just gotten it over with.

Arnold had wanted to be on stage, but Patchouli had insisted that Sasha go first with an awkward argument about how most viewers expected a female protagonist and it would be best not to defy their expectations. My almost-a-goth roommate had reluctantly agreed. She’d flown away before the argument could drag on.

“Nazrin’s scary, either way,” said Renko, interrupting my thoughts.

“What?” said Arnold.

“She looks like she wants to bite a guy.”

I had the thought that I should introduce Renko to Sekibanki. It was a terrible idea in all respects, but if I wanted to have good ideas I had to spend a lot of time having bad ideas to sort through.

“Nazrin commands mice, you know,” said Arnold, leaning past me to talk to her. “She says they eat humans. She might literally want to bite a guy, right now.”

“What?” I said. “She said she eats normal human food!”

“And also humans,” said Arnold. “Do you think a bear would turn down a pizza? Or the guy delivering it?”

“Makes sense,” responded Renko. She was also leaning past me. I felt myself pushing back in my chair. “You said she’s the ‘Little Mouse Commander’?”

“Yes.”

“But is she little, or are her soldiers little?”

“Both,” said my tall roomate, shifting in his seat. It seemed that Renko realized the ambiguity of her question.

“Are they all human-shaped?”

“No, the soldiers are actual mice.”

“She has really pretty ears,” said Maribel from the other side, quietly.

“She showed me, once,” said Arnold.

“Her ears?” asked Renko.

“Her army of mice. You can see her ears for herself, right now. With your eyes.”

“I heard some youkai have extra,” countered Renko. She might have been talking about Kaenbyou Rin, the cat youkai who did have two pairs of ears. And for all I knew, tons of youkai had collections of them on strings.

“Youkai do have all kinds of extra organs, it’s terrifying,” said Arnold. He tilted his head forward and raised his eyebrows as he said this. Renko laughed. I didn’t get it. “But no, the mice army is something else. They pulled every pine cone off a tree by the lake in about fifteen seconds. Like workmen, or piranha.”

“And don’t you forget it,” said Nazrin down toward us. She’d heard us talking. We were in the front row, and indeed, her ears were large and pretty.

“You’re friends with Nazrin too, huh?” I whispered to him.

“It’s easy to make friends if you know how,” he responded.

“How?” I asked.

I wasn’t being rhetorical. He was the friendliest of our roommates and held the group together. He was the most well-liked member of the martial artists. He’d somehow parlayed his job as a cook in the realm of the dead into a steamy romance with a mystery youkai.

Arnold was already becoming friends with Renko and Maribel, literally right in front of me. Or Renko at least. I might have been imagining it, but Maribel seemed a little bit annoyed with Arnold.

I hoped making ‘friends’ wasn’t a matter of muscle mass.

“Quiet please,” called Nazrin, causing the crowd to go silent. “We will be underway shortly.”

I still hadn’t talked to Arnold about his relationship with Youmu and Lady Saigyouji. It was difficult to bring up. I wasn’t even one hundred percent sure which of the two he started having relations with. I needed to give him a box of condoms, a practical gift that Patchouli had promised me she could spare. The ability to duplicate physical objects was pretty awesome, as far as always having prophylactics was concerned.

As I thought about it, the purple librarian set down her book and floated over to the crystal in the middle of the dome. She started drawing lines around it with decisive motions.

Arnold had agreed to get cleansed at the Moriya Shrine on Wednesday, so asking him about his romantic endeavors wasn’t a matter of protecting him from becoming a youkai. It was a matter of trying to be more involved in my roommate’s life. I was committed to that much.

“We are having… magical difficulties,” said Patchouli. She was still using chalk to redraw runes around the crystal. “Please bear with us.”

At that moment Wiki sat down next to Arnold. “I didn’t miss anything, did I?”

“Probably lots of things,” I said. “Every single event contains almost an unlimited amount of information.”

“I’m glad you take that idea seriously,” he said. I realized I had mocked him by accident, because I was nervous for no good reason.

“But no, the live stream hasn’t started yet,” I said. “I’m glad you’re here, your input is probably going to be extraordinarily valuable.”

“We’ll see,” said a woman on his other side. I leaned forward. It was Reika.

“I didn’t expect you to want to attend this,” I said. “Or to be able to.” Reika practically lived in the bathhouse, that was how often she worked there.

“I’m a danmaku user too,” she said.

“We have no evidence for this,” noted Wiki.

“I’ve got a friend watching the counter for me,” she added. I noticed, belatedly, that she was holding Wiki’s hand.

On-again-off-again dating. Great–I’d have to have a talk about romance with both of my roomates. Probably not at the same time. At least Reika wasn’t a youkai.

A second later the crystal exploded with light, turning the half dome into a wide-angled view of Sasha standing at the edge of the human village. Patchouli winced at the sudden brightness and returned to her seat.

The perspective was odd; Sasha herself looked small and distant, at the center of the image. The rest of the scene represented an ultra-wide-angle view. The distortion in the Scrydome’s surface took a spherical image and made it more-or-less flat. This was a far cry from how Touhou games usually looked. They were 2D top-down shoot ‘em ups. This was kind of an over-the-shoulder view.

At least Patchouli had compensated for the magnification issues, and we weren’t looking at a six foot tall rendering of Sasha’s butt.

“I liked the other projection better,” said Arnold.

“Sasha, are you receiving?” asked Patchouli.

“Loud and clear,” said my roommate. “It’s fucking cold, so can we get started?” There was some laughter. The crowd was whispering excitedly behind me.

“Not yet. Nazrin wants to give an introduction.”

“Audience,” said Nazrin as she stood. “I am Nazrin. The Little Mouse Commander.”

A polite smattering of applause followed. Nazrin continued.

“This is Patchouli Knowledge, the Unmoving Great Library. She had to move to be here.” Some chuckles. “So be grateful!”

Maybe Nazrin wasn’t the best announcer.

“We are here on a mission to retrieve a deadly, powerful artifact from deep underground. All of Gensokyo is at stake.” The crowd grew quiet. “I’m in charge of pathfinding; Patchouli is handling communications, tactics, intelligence, reinforcements, logistics, and coordination.”

“Also architecting,” said Patchouli.

“And security,” said the koakuma.

“But Sasha,” continued Nazrin, “Is the woman in the arena! We are here to support her, so that she can save Gensokyo. Sasha is a most-skilled danmaku user, but she is risking her life here. She is going on an expedition to protect all of you, right now. To save your lives from whatever evil thing is hiding down there. Don’t forget it!”

Nazrin sat down. There was a moment of silence. Then Arnold clapped loudly beside me and the crowd erupted into full-on applause.

“With some probability,” amended Patchouli, but her voice was drowned out by the noise. To my shock people were standing up all around me and beginning to cheer. I jumped to my feet to do the same.

Suddenly, I was happy to be there.

“A hero!” called someone.

“Heroine,” said Wiki.

“Kick youkai ass!” said someone else.

Even Raghav was standing and respectfully applauding. Nazrin’s intro was short and sweet. I could applaud that, in addition to my roommate who really was risking her life. And in front of an audience! I clapped louder.

“Did you hear that?” asked the librarian.

“Hear what?” asked Sasha.

“Please be informed of the audience’s intense support for your mission,” said the librarian. She continued in a mumble as she took a note. “The interruption interruptor field seems to be working…”

“Now sit down,” said Nazrin. The audience quieted down and took their seats.

“We’ll have to reenact that for her later,” said Arnold. I nodded.

“Let us proceed!” said Patchouli, her voice momentarily more commanding. Fucking finally, I thought. Beside her, Nazrin waved her hand dramatically. Sasha took to the air in the image and the crystal followed behind her.

One hundred humans watched, transfixed, as Sasha flew over the road. She shot green chevrons into the most common hiding places for fairies, defeating them almost before they could return fire.

“Sasha is challenging the fairies to bolster her power,” said Nazrin. “She’ll need the boost later, when she faces the oni. Things will get interesting then.” Based upon the human reactions, things were interesting already.

I looked over and saw that Wiki was already scribbling on his notepad. Reika saw me looking, and nodded toward the screen, reminding me to pay attention. Nazrin continued her narration, talking about how fairies would fight to protect their homes and to remind Sasha of their power.

A hundred humans and some youkai watched as she progressed and eventually went into battle against Rumia. It took only a few minutes to placate the youkai.

Sasha didn’t stop there; the crowd gasped as she leapt into the Fantastic Blowhole and the expedition began in earnest.