It was late in the afternoon when something started thudding against the roof of Marisa's cottage.
The first few taps against the weathered roof echoed through the house, and she looked up from her book to frown at the ceiling. Birds or something, maybe.
And then the full force hit. Dozens of tiny impacts landed on the roof every second, sending a clamor through the cottage and making its frame shake. Marisa looked up, startled, as a little plaster rained from the ceiling. It sounded like the world's worst hailstorm, but out the window, the sky continued to be clear.
The clamor tapered off, but there was no way Marisa was going to let it pass unexplained. After grabbing the mini-hakkero from its peg by her bed, she stalked to the door and cautiously pushed it open.
She was prepared for a strange youkai ambush, or an unwelcome visitor, or fairies trying to pull a clumsy prank. What she was not prepared for was finding herself face to face with an army of dolls. Dolls dressed in every color of the rainbow, dozens of them, standing in a broad semicircle around the entrance to the cottage. She glanced up, and dozens more lined the roof to her house, with even more doubtlessly standing on the roof behind them. A few dolls in the front ranks had weapons raised and at the ready, but none of them seemed to be moving to attack.
"Uh. Afternoon."
Hundreds of glass eyes stared back at her blankly, but the dolls' ranks parted to allow a small team to walk forward. Four dolls carried a notebook between them, another with a pot of ink, and a sixth carrying a quill over its head. Marisa watched curiously as the group with the book propped it open and turned it to a blank page. The one with the quill dipped it in the ink, then carefully wrote, "Hello, Marisa. It's Alice. Could you come to my cottage? I could use some help."
"Huh." Marisa looked over the dolls with a frown, then studied the treeline. Sure enough, Alice wasn't around. She'd seen Alice control her dolls from afar before, but this seemed a bit excessive. Still, weirder things had happened. Marisa shrugged and hung the mini-hakkero on her belt. "She could've just came herself if she wanted to talk to me, jeez. Sure, tell Alice I'll be there in a few."
The flight to Alice's cottage was a familiar one, although doing it with an honor guard of a hundred dolls on each side was a new experience. They landed outside and guided her to the cottage door. Marisa glanced back to them uncertainly. "Do I knock, or...?" She was cut off as the door swung open from inside, pushed by a small team of dolls. "... okay. Yo, Alice! You wanted to see me?"
Inside, it was immediately obvious that things were even weirder than she'd suspected. Alice was nowhere to be seen—or heard—and with most of the dolls still standing outside, the place looked strangely empty. The walls had always been lined with doll-covered shelves, and seeing those same shelves barren made the place look abandoned. The only sounds were her own footsteps, the ticking of the clocks, and the patter of dozens of tiny feet on the floor behind her. Even so, the cottage was well-lit, smelled like recently-cooked food, and otherwise looked like Alice had only stepped out for a moment. "Hey, Alice! Are you in here, or...?"
As she rounded the corner, Marisa found herself face-to-face with Alice. She was sitting primly on the sofa, with her hands folded in her lap... and her eyes staring straight ahead. She didn't react to Marisa's presence at all. Marisa crossed her arms and waited. "Hello?" Silence filled the cottage, as the last of the dolls filed in to the room.
"... you'd better not be dead. If you're dead, I'm gonna be pissed!" Marisa hurried across the room and waved a hand in front of Alice. No response. She grabbed Alice's shoulder and shook it, and the motion was all it took to disrupt the magician's balance. Alice slumped to her side like dead weight, and as Marisa stared in shock, a dozen dolls scrambled up onto the couch to haul her back into position.
"W-what the heck happened to her?!" Marisa turned to address the crowd of dolls behind her, and belatedly noticed that the crew with the quill and paper had been busy writing.
The topmost paper now read, "Let me explain. Please, have a seat."
She ignored the instructions, and instead pressed her fingers to Alice's neck. Well. She was still warm and had a pulse, at least. Somehow, Marisa didn't find that particularly comforting. Staring straight ahead, breathing so slowly that it wasn't even noticeable, and unmoving, Alice looked like that freaking jiang-shi. That thought was enough to make Marisa take a hurried step away, and she slumped into a seat. Even then, she could feel Alice's dead eyes on her from across the room.
Atop the desk, the writing team was working busily, and had soon prepared the next paper. "I'm sorry for the surprise. I thought it would help you understand the gravity of the situation better."
"I... guess so?" Marisa watched Alice from the corner of her eye, half-expecting to catch her in the act of giving commands to to the dolls. "What's going on?"
"I'm here. I am the dolls."
"... eh?"
The wait as the dolls wrote the response to that was excruciating. Half a minute of listening to the clocks tick out every second and the soft scratch of the quill on paper. "I am the dolls," it still said, when they turned it around again. "I accidentally transferred my soul into them during some experiments this afternoon. I'm not sure what happened. I need your help."
"You accidentally put your soul into some dolls."
"Yes."
Marisa looked down at the floor, covered in a crowd of dozens of dolls. They were watching her a bit more attentively than they normally would be, but it felt really weird to consider that Alice was in there. Thoughtfully, she reached down and poked one of them in the tummy, sending it wobbling. "... so can you feel it when I do this?"
"Yes."
"Can you feel it when..." Marisa started reaching for another doll, only to be interrupted as yet a different doll flew up and lightly smacked the back of her head. "Ow."
"Please try to focus."
"Right, yeah." Marisa rubbed the back of her head sorely.
"Yes, I did it by accident. The experiment was supposed to open a conduit into a doll that I could later use to try creating a soul in it. Instead, it pulled in my own."
"Huh. That sucks."
The writing crew turned toward the stack of now-discarded papers, then dug for a moment before holding up the one reading, "Yes."
Marisa shifted in her seat and looked to Alice's body again. She felt uncomfortable even being in the same room with that, and being watched by what felt like two hundred dolls wasn't helping her relax, either. Nor was the genuine concern that was starting to nibble at the back of her brain, but she wasn't about to admit to that. "Well," she said, with as much blustering confidence as she could manage under the circumstances, "for a badass expert magician like me, fixin' something like this shouldn't be a problem. If you need my help, I mean."
"That was what I was going to suggest, yes. I don't know what caused this, and I don't know how to fix it. I can't perform most spells like this, so there's only so much I can do about it—" The text reached the edge of the page, and the dolls flipped to the next before continuing. "—right now. Your shop's motto is 'We Do Everything,' right?"
"Yeah, it is..."
"Then fix this. I'll pay you."
"Since you're a friend, I'll only charge you double my normal amount," Marisa said, with a firm nod. "... I dunno know much about all of this... dolls and souls stuff, though."
"For some of it, I'll just need you to follow my instructions. For the more complicated parts, I can teach you what you need to know. Think of it as free magic lessons."
Even before the quill finished scratching out the last sentence, Marisa could hear Alice's characteristic sigh in her head. For a moment, her excitement crowded out the low swell of anxiety in her chest. "Free magic lessons and some cash? Let's do this!"
It didn't take long for the prosaic realities of magical research to settle in around Marisa. Or, well, magical research as practiced by Alice. Her own research was driven by time-honored scientific principles such as 'what happens when I mix these things?' and 'I think I read about this in a book once.' Alice's was much more... methodical. Soon enough, she was standing in the workshop, while the dolls relayed an incomprehensible series of instructions to her on slips of paper: "Please read page 182 of this book and perform the spell there on my body." "Please draw this diagram on the floor, and wait for me to move a doll into the center." "Please record the value that we just measured and look it up in table 112A."
The next thing Marisa knew, there was a tiny finger poking at her face. She grumbled and shifted in her seat, and reality slowly asserted itself on her sleep-fogged mind. Her face was pressed to flat wood, her back was sore from hunching over, and her clothes had that itchy slept-in feeling. With another grumble, she sat up and blinked blearily at the world around her.
There were a handful of dolls standing on the desk, in the middle of the piled results of hours and hours of magical research. "Sorry to wake you up," one of them wrote. "You fell asleep here last night, and I decided to leave you be."
"Mmh? Yeah. Guess I did..." Marisa straightened up and pushed her hat back on her slightly matted hair, then wiped a strand of drool from the corner of her mouth. She couldn't really remember the last bits of research she'd done before drifting off, but that was only natural. She could remember resolving to fix Alice before she allowed herself to rest, but it looked like she hadn't quite pulled that off.
"Would you like breakfast?" Not waiting for an answer, another crew of dolls hauled a pot of tea, a dish of sugar cubes, and a single cup into the room, then sat the cup down and started filling it.
"Yeah, sure. What about you, though? Are you... doin' okay?"
"You're the one I'm worried about. You worked until you dropped last night, and unless you ate right before I arrived yesterday, you've skipped about two meals."
"I've done worse." Marisa grabbed the tea, took a slurp from it, then thoughtfully grabbed a handful of sugar cubes from the tray and dropped them in. She eyed the four dolls dealing with the teapot as she drank. "So they're all you, huh? Must be pretty weird."
"It is, yes."
"What's it feel like?"
The dolls standing around her hesitated briefly before the quill started scratching out a response. "Strange. It's hard to focus on one doll at a time, and even harder if I split them up."
"And bein' so tiny." Marisa reached over and poked another doll in the side of the head, sending it wobbling.
"Yes, I suppose it is."
Marisa eyed the terse sentence, but no matter how she tried, she couldn't read Alice's emotional state out of it. She swished her cup a few times, looking into its depths. The tea was still struggling to absorb all the sugar she'd dumped in, leaving a grainy sludge on the bottom. Probably put in four or five cubes too many. Oh well.
She realized that the dolls had started writing again, after a delay. The notepad now read, "I'm scared, Marisa." Every doll in sight was suddenly looking away, unable to meet her gaze.
"Oh. Uh." Marisa looked through the doorway at the unmoving body on the couch. It was unsettling enough seeing Alice sitting there, barely breathing, like this. She could barely imagine what it would be like if it were her own body.
With most of the dolls back on their shelves, and the others silently watching her, Marisa was once again acutely aware of the sound of the clocks and her own beating heart. She idly leafed through a few of the papers with her free hand, just to make a little noise. "Well, now that I'm on the job, we'll get ya fixed up in no time. … um, did that stuff last night mean anything to you?"
"Not much, I'm afraid. I can't find how my soul ended up in the dolls. That spell shouldn't have been able to cause it. I was also able to tell that it's distributed am—" The writing dolls paused and flipped to the next page. "—among all of my dolls, as I thought, which will make it harder to transfer back to my body."
Marisa reached down to pat the closest doll on the head with a fingertip. "Don't worry, we'll figure it out."
"Of course we will. Today, though, I want you to go home and get some actual rest." Once Alice finished writing, another group of dolls flew in, carrying some kind of delicate pastry Marisa had no hope of naming.
"I can keep going, y'know."
"Thank you. But if this is going to take more than a few hours of research, I'd rather not let you burn yourself out too quickly." Something ruffled Marisa's hair, and she belatedly realized that a doll was patting her on the head in return. "Eat up and go get some rest. I'll see you tomorrow."