II. Compare/Contrast
1997.
It is her fifteenth birthday.
She gets a kappa's mummified hand, and a puppy.
The kappa bit was pretty weird, but it was the puppy that surprised her the most. Granted, she hadn't expected her first dog to become her true love, but that's just the way life works sometimes. You fall through time and land at the feet of beautiful boy who needs more rescuing than you do. In retrospect she would have liked to kiss him awake, but those ears had been irresistible.
(It seems like a simple progression of events to her. The well is open so she falls down it. The boy is sleeping so she wakes him up.)
And from there she adopts a kitsune and learns to shoot and how to handle suitors that simply will not give up and is kidnapped and rescued and kissed and cried upon and is surprised to find herself a reincarnation and part of a love triangle of a most depressing nature and match makes for a pervert and a girl who was dead and helps bandage things like wounds and hearts and finds herself chasing a monster across the countryside and inadvertently binds herself to more people than she can recall the names of and somehow:
She saves the world.
--
2018.
It is her fifteenth birthday.
There is cake with pink frosting and udon, her favorite dish, which her mother also loves but somehow manages to ruin. Then her parents disappear off into their room, like they do, and so she sits up alone in the den opposite the ethereal blue glow of the television. There is a late night movie on that she watches with the sound turned down. A couple searches for eternal youth; the actors are long since dead. She brushes her teeth. In the hallway there is a pile of clothes to be washed, illuminated by the light of the moon.
She crawls into bed with her shoes on. The world is small.