The network traffic during Maribel's appearance was completely normal. TV is so heavily encrypted that you'd never stand a chance of decoding the packets without an approved device, but the same goes for any hacker. If she's showing up on your TV through electronic trickery, she's very good at covering her tracks. That, or the guide you found online to using a packet sniffer isn't as authoritative as it likes to pretend.

You're a little less surprised by that than you probably should be. The really surprising thing, though, is the camera.

It takes you a few hours just to work up the nerve to watch the footage. When you do, you find... nothing. It's a video of you, with your hair mussed from sleeping on the floor, having an impassioned conversation with a household appliance. "Well then, Mari—Merib... M-Mae..." You go silent, flustered from your own mispronunciations, as two cartoon characters walk through a garishly decorated train. "Well, er, Merry." The TV show continues, oblivious, as the two characters walk up to a banquet table and glance in their bags to make sure that their guns are still there. "You said before that y—"

You turn off the recording, with a tight feeling in your chest and disbelief creeping into your mind.

Afterward, you feel hollow. There's something missing. That sense of nostalgia for some loss you can't even remember clings to you, and you can't shake it.

You barely even remember that you still have classes until your alarm wakes you up the next day. You throw yourself together and barely make it to your Theories of High-Energy Physics lecture on time. Your brain feels like a wet rag, and you can't concentrate. At some point, the professor calls on you and points out that you've been staring into space for twenty minutes. You claim to have a headache and spend the rest of the session with your head on your desk, trying your futile best to pay attention. Afterward, you skip the rest of your classes and catch an early train home.

You try to reason yourself out of an emotion. 'Why am I even sad?' It doesn't make sense. Maribel said that you used to know her, but what about it? No matter how you strain, you can't remember ever seeing her before that first night on the TV. Besides, for all you know, she's lying, or a hallucination, or any one of a dozen other things. There's no proof that anything she's said is true.

It's scary, a little. There are only so many things on your list of possible explanations, and 'hallucinations' is pretty high up there. It seems to best fit the current evidence, too. Halfheartedly, you read a few articles on the topic, take a few anonymous diagnostic batteries. I sometimes feel like other people can read my thoughts: Strongly Agree/Agree/Disagree/Strongly Disagree. Getting messages from your TV is enough to put you pretty high on the scale on a few of them. Begrudgingly, you print out your results and add them to the case file.

It doesn't feel right, though. Maribel's lopsided smile makes you ache for something you can't even remember. Like the memory of an old song, carrying emotional baggage from every time you heard it growing up. Something about it feels right. You want to believe her. It isn't the most objective measure of accuracy, but you can no longer call this an objective experiment.

In the evening, with the shadows growing long, you decide to go check her apartment.

It's a bit of a trip. If this place is really hers, she can afford to live a lot closer to campus than you do. It's only a few blocks from the train station, though, and even in the rapidly dwindling light, it isn't hard to find the place. It's a small, squat building. The first floor is a store front, with its windows plastered with handwritten signs announcing the latest sales. The next few floors have rather plainer windows, with house plants sitting in a few of them. The shop is already closed for the night, but slipping around the side, you find a door leading to the interior.

You enter.

A narrow, steep staircase leads up to an equally narrow hallway. There are only a few apartments up here, and while the doors are all shut, you can hear the sounds of life coming from behind most of them. Muffled televisions and parents scolding their kids—not exactly the background music you were expecting for what is, you're realizing a few seconds too late, a paranormal investigation.

Apartment 203 is near the end of the hall. You approach the door, but hesitate. If Maribel was telling the truth, then you've been here dozens of times before. Taking a step back, you look around, soaking in the ambiance and waiting to see if it stirs up any forgotten memories. Nothing occurs to you, though. You've stood in half a dozen hallways like this in half a dozen apartment buildings, and this one feels no more special than the others. It only makes sense, you suppose. If meeting Maribel herself didn't bring back any memories, it would be kind of weird if the apartment did.

Which only leaves one more step to this experiment. Taking a deep breath, you knock.

You can hear movement inside almost immediately. Soon, the apartment's resident comes to the door. She's an exchange student. Her name is Jennyfer ("'Jenny' and then 'fer' at the end. My parents thought it was cute," she explains.) She moved in ten days ago. The apartment, she says, was completely empty when she moved in, and as far as she knew, it had gone unused for a few years.

You thank her for her time and leave, without a single clue to lend credence to the idea that you aren't hallucinating.

On the way back to the train station, you debate your options. You could ask Maribel to explain all of this, but you'd need to find a medium where you could talk for more than five minutes. If there's no proof that she exists outside of your head, though, should you? You've already got one foot in a fantasy world, investigating leads given to you by a girl who lives in your TV. The sensible thing to do would probably be seeing a psychologist. At the very least, you should perform some more experiments before you naively accept the 'girl who faded from existence' claim.

You're focused enough on this internal debate that it takes you a few seconds to realize that something is... wrong.

The air feels stagnant. Not just unmoving, but dead, like it's been locked up in an abandoned house for a century. Your every movement feels deliberate and engineered, like you're a robot learning to walk for the first time. It makes you aware of just how many joints you have to bend to make it possible, how many muscles cooperate for you to take a single step. It's absurd.

A streetlight flickers on overhead, and it strikes you as even more ridiculous—fifty kilograms of refined metal, ripped from the ground and shipped halfway around the world to hold up a single light bulb.

Everything suddenly feels unreal. Like you've been walking through a movie set all along, and only just now noticed that you're surrounded by cheap plastic props. The meaning has fallen out of everything. You've logically believed it before, but not until now have you really understood the fact that the universe is just a bunch of molecules, floating around in nothingness. Your entire being is just a bunch of baryons chained together in one specific way, and your existence doesn't mean any more than that of a ham sandwich.

It's enough to make your head swim. It's a struggle to even walk. You set your eyes on the horizon and push forward, trying to concentrate on the simple, mechanical motion of walking.

There's a man in front of you.

He's walking down the sidewalk in the opposite direction, looking at you with blank interest. Normally, having a stranger stare at you so intently would set off about six alarm bells in your head. Now, you don't see why it shouldn't happen.

You shuffle ahead, eyes glazed. A firm sensation on your shoulder stops you, and in your dazed state, you barely register it as his hand.

He slides over in front of you, still looking you over. It's weird, but no less meaningless than everything else around you. You stand and wait, giving the occasional twinge as your body tries to resume walking.

He leans in, locking eyes with you. His other hand settles onto a shoulder. He pulls you closer, and closer.

"Let... let go of me." Some part of your mind has enough presence to say that, at least.

In response, he unravels.

His arms and legs vanish, and what replaces them is a flickering nothingness, a no-color that your eyes can't even process. It's an... abomination, a patchwork thing. The man's face is a blank mask, sliding across its skin like a leaf on the surface of a pond. There's a jacket, too, and the subtle peach-tinged scent of a perfume, and a woman's voice. It's a razor-thin veneer, cobbled together from a dozen pieces and slipped on like a garment, hiding whatever is beneath. The jagged gaps between these stolen pieces of existence are filled with an aching, blank absence, like static set aflame.

The thing has a tendril of its body draped over each of your shoulders, squeezing down on them painfully. It lurches closer, and the man's face slides along its surface, lazily spinning.

You're frozen in something between disbelief and terror. Your eyes ache and blur, like you're trying to see both sides of an optical illusion at once. Finally, one view wins out. You're once again looking at an out-of-shape businessman, staring blankly up at you from mere centimeters away.

You've seen what's behind that mask, though.

A scream rips itself from your throat. Acting on sheer animal instinct, you drive a fist into his face. It feels like a trash bag full of pudding. It squishes back, sending bulges and ripples through his form. Another blow, and another, and blood starts leaking from his nose. He takes the beating without complaint.

One of those arms, or tendrils, or whatever loosens its grip on your shoulder, and you don't pass up the opportunity. You drive your heel into something below. It feels wet and crunchy. It gives you enough of an opening to slip out of the thing's grasp.

You turn, and you run, and you don't dare to slow down until your legs start to ache.


The door of the restaurant lets out a cheerful chime behind you, and you realize that you've made a mistake.

You couldn't keep going. Not right now. Not with that thing out there. Following some terrified caveman instinct, you ran toward the first lit shelter you saw. So, here you are, standing in the doorway of a fast food joint, gasping for air, disheveled, and with some blood splattered on your blouse.

Apparently this is pretty normal by the standards of 24-hour burger places, because the clerks at the counter only shoot you a brief, disinterested look before going back about their business. You take a few seconds to collect yourself: straightening your hat, pulling your jacket in tighter to hide the blood, and trying very hard to not look out any of the windows. Here and now, you've reverted the logic of a dumb animal—if you don't see the predator, it can't see you.

You're not going back out there, which means you're stuck here.

You do the only thing you can do, under the circumstances. In this case, 'the only thing you can do' involves ordering a burger and a six-piece nuggets, with a milkshake for 99 yen extra, because you've fucking earned it.

You take a seat in the corner of the room, as far from the windows as possible. The food disappears quickly, mechanically, as your mind tries to sort through everything that happened. At least this is a good setting for it. Sitting beneath a buzzing florescent light next to a poster for 'THE ALL NEW BACON-CUSTARD SUSHI BURGER,' it's hard to take the supernatural seriously. You could hardly come up with a more mundane setting if you tried.

By the time your food disappears, though, your adrenaline rush still hasn't faded. And you still can't bring yourself to look out the window for longer than a few seconds at a time, lest you see something you'd really rather not.

In a desperate attempt to keep yourself distracted, you lock your gaze onto a TV in the corner. It's playing some sports program, muted, and you honestly can't care enough to even figure out which sport. Commercials soon overtake it, and a woman cheerfully hawks a bottle of detergent.

Another commercial starts. Maribel pops up onscreen.

She gestures wildly, and it still takes a moment for you to recognize her. As soon as she has your attention, she starts talking, but the TV is still muted. She seems to realize it after a second or two, shifting from foot to foot with anxious energy. Finally, she presses her hands together in front of her, then mimes folding them apart.

A book. She wants you to find a book.

After everything that's happened in the past hour, taking orders from the girl who lives in the TV feels natural. Refreshing, really. It sure as hell isn't like you had a plan.

You dig in your bag, but you don't have any books on you. Your phone does, though. You've got a reader app, some thoroughly DRM'd thing the school likes to use to make sure that nobody can transfer their digital textbooks. You haven't opened it in a while, and it shows—it's still open to some book from a literature assignment, your last elective before two years straight of math and physics. You're not sure what happens next, though. You skim through a paragraph... and then it catches your eye:

"Um. Hi, Renko. I'm sorry if last night was... kind of heavy."

Oh, yeah, last night. You'd almost forgotten about that, what with the events of the past hour. Really, at this point, the girl inside your TV claiming to be your lost BFF feels almost mundane. Natural.

You glance up to the TV, but Maribel's nowhere to be seen up there. "Um," you say, keeping your voice low, "it's fine? I'm not sure if this is a great time to talk, though."

"Renko...? Oh, right. If you're trying to talk to me, you might need to write. I'm not sure if I can hear you like this."

You frown down at the phone, uncertain how you'd even do that. After a few seconds, you manage to get the app into note-taking mode. "I didn't know you could be in books too," you type in the margin.

You have to skim through another few paragraphs to find the next spot with her input.

"Hold on, being a disembodied voice is disorienting. I think I need to establish myself. Um."

Maribel Hearn pushed the door open and walked into the building. "There," she said. Without bothering to remove her shoes, she stepped into the kitchen and pushed herself up to sit on the counter. She looked toward the spot where she imagined Renko to be and shot it a weary smile. "Thanks for replying, at least. I was afraid I might have scared you off."

Before writing another note, you pause and look around. The restaurant isn't very busy right now. A little too late for the people who just got off work, a little too early for people to drift in from bars and later shifts. It's just you and a few other early evening stragglers, most of them also settled in with their phones. Nobody's shooting you any crazy-girl-having-a-conversation-with-the-invisible-girl-who-lives-in-her-TV looks, at least.

"It was pretty strange," you type back, after some deliberation.

"I'm sorry if it was a bit much to take in. I would have liked to take things slower, but, um. I was kind of worried, you know?" Maribel's fingers anxiously traced along the edge of the countertop. "So everything is okay?"

"I mean, my chicken nuggets were overcooked," you type back. "Oh, and I think I just met your monster."

Maribel shifted in place, frowning up at the ceiling. "Well, I don't think it's my monster," she said, with a defensive edge to her voice. "... but what happened?"

"I met it on the street after I investigated your apartment. I think it tried to eat me. It was an old businessman, but also a lot of other people too? Hard to explain. Like it was wearing them."

"Oh... are you okay?! It didn't get you too, did—well, um, okay, I guess I'd know if it had eaten you. Does everything feel normal, though?"

"Now? I guess. Everything felt strange when I was around it though. Like nothing was real? I think I'm okay."

With the note committed, you breathe out a slow sigh to steady yourself. It's been ten or fifteen minutes. You're no longer bracing yourself in anticipation of a monster barreling through the window.

On the other hand, you now know for a fact that you live in a reality with at least one monster in it. You could almost convince yourself that you'd imagined Maribel. You can't possibly dream that your subconscious came up with that thing out there.

You fish in your bag and pull out your notebook. It's a log of the official club activities over the past several years. It's a little rumpled from being stuffed into your bag hundreds of times, there's dirt ground into the cover from some of your more outdoorsy kind of investigations, and you've used the back as a scratchpad to jot down notes more than once. You flip to the dogeared page, which still marks your last round of notes on Maribel. You draw a line below 'invisible, erased history,' write, 'IN A BOOK' beneath that, and turn back to your phone.

"Do you mind if I ask you a few questions now that you're here?"

"Questions? Oh, sure. I don't see why not."

"I tried recording you last time, and I didn't get anything. Do you know why?"

"Hmm..." Maribel hopped down from the counter, crossing her arms and tapping a finger thoughtfully against one elbow. "I hadn't thought about it, but that does make sense to me. I think I can explain it, but you're going to grumble, because it will be in psychology terms. Um, this book isn't written in third-person omniscient, is it? It would help if you could see what I'm thinking."

"Don't know what that means," you type, resisting the urge to switch to another app and look it up.

Maribel shook her head with a knowing smirk. "You should really take more arts courses, Renko. I just tried thinking at you, though, and I don't think it's showing up. So, um, hmm. Let me put it like this. Let's say that a meteor fell on Kyoto tonight. Boom! You die. What do you think would be listed as the cause of death?"

This sounds like a trick question. "Technically, if it hits the ground, its a meteorite, not a meteor," you type. "But it would be that, wouldn't it?"

"Exactly! But that's not really the case, is it? Let's say that as part of the impact, a building collapsed on you. A bunch of rocks from the building fell on your head, maybe. The rocks fell from the building. The building was knocked over by the shockwave, which is really just a whole lot of air molecules pushing against each other, right? The air was pushed by the meteor..." Maribel smirked slyly and crossed her arms. "And the meteor might have been flying around for billions of years. All kinds of planets and stars influenced its path. Maybe if one of those stars had been in a slightly different spot, the meteor would have went somewhere else and never hurt anybody."

Maribel paused to wait for a response, then laughed under her breath. "Oh wow, it knows I'm waiting for you to respond? Having a narrator is kind of fun. Anyway, since you're not saying anything, I'm going to assume you're with me so far? My point is, it's a big complicated mess, right? The thing about 'I died because of a meteor' is just how the human mind interprets it. It's a story you tell yourself to make sense out of the world. It's a pretty accurate one! The meteor is the most, um, proximate cause of you dying. But that's still just your human perception. The universe doesn't care about you or the meteor. It's all just a bunch of equations. Everything else is in your head."

You reread the explanation a few times until you think you have a pretty good sense of it before continuing. "Okay, I think I get it. What about it?"

Maribel shook her head with a little sigh. "Now I know you don't remember me. You and I used to argue about that example for days. You never liked Relative Psychology thought experiments that much... Um, the point is, most of your experiences are subjective. Colors are just qualia that you experience when light of the right wavelengths hits your eye. If you and I walked around a festival together, and you were really hungry, your memories of it would probably focus a lot more on the smells of food. And so on. Your senses feed you raw data, but it doesn't mean much until your brain layers meaning onto it. Does that make sense?"

It makes sense, you suppose, but it comes off as a bit... you don't want to say 'useless,' but limited in practical applications. One of those questions that people argued about in your Philosophy 101 class. 'Is the color that I call Red what you'd call Blue?' made you roll your eyes at the time. Now that you're talking to a girl who claims to have stopped existing, it suddenly seems more relevant to your life. "I think so."

"Good! So, when you're reading this book, it's kind of the same thing, right? This book is just a bunch of pixels arranged in a certain pattern. It doesn't have any intrinsic meaning. If I showed it to, like, my mom, it would just look like a bunch of gibberish to her, because she doesn't know Japanese. But when you read it, you create meaning, and that's... basically where I am, I guess? I don't exist in the TV or the book. I... I exist in your perception, basically."

"So you're qualia? … is it 'a qualium'?"

"The singular form is 'quale,' I think," Maribel chastised teasingly, with a soft smile on her face. It soon evaporated, and she fretted with the hem of her dress as she chose her next words carefully. "It's like I said before. That thing erased me. I'm, um, a concept with no basis in reality. I'm... a fantasy. Or, at least, I'm close enough that with a little boundary manipulation, I can slip into the little illusions that pop up in your head when you consume fiction."

You'd forgotten why this explanation even started, and now, looking back, it takes a bit to assemble it all together in your head. Even after rereading the whole exchange, it only kind of makes sense.

You eat another nugget—not bad, but it has that grainy feeling of synthetic meat that was grown too quickly—and consider all of this. It raises more questions than it answers, but it's the only explanation you have to work with. It takes a few seconds to decide how to respond. "Does that mean you stop existing when I'm not watching tv or anything? Where are you?"

"That's kind of... metaphysical. Um, we can talk about it later, if you want? It's hard to explain. I'm okay when you aren't watching TV or anything, but I feel kind of... woozy if I get too far away from you. Like I might, um, fade at any moment. I've had to stick pretty close to you these past few days."

It takes a few seconds for the full implications to sink in. She's practically helpless, and apparently can't influence anything beyond slipping you messages. And she's been following you around. She's presumably seen some of what you've done. The first emotions to come out of this are unease at the thought of her invisibly stalking you, but it's soon followed by self-disgust. You picture her anxiously trying to assure herself that she wasn't going to disappear while you wasted your time setting up cameras and performing rituals. It's a miracle that she'll even still talk to you.

"Renko? Are you still there?"

Your name catches the corner of your eye and drags you from your thoughts. "Yeah," you type, and turn your attention back to the matter at hand. "Sorry, just thinking. That sounds terrifying, actually. It's fine if you need to follow me around, okay?"

"Thank you. I'm sorry for, um, intruding, but I couldn't exactly ask permission first." With her tension finally fading, Maribel stretched with a yawn, the start of a smile on her face. The conversation was the first real reprieve she'd had in days, and at the moment, there wasn't anybody in the world she would have rather spoken to.

Maribel froze. "... did the book just say what I think it said?"

"I think so, yeah." You really don't know how to take that.

Maribel turned aside with an embarrassed little groan, rubbing at her cheek. "A-anyway... have I convinced you yet, Renko? That I'm telling the truth, I mean. We can't really get much done until you believe that."

It isn't even a debate.

You do believe her, you realize.

Maybe, in a sane world, the best explanation would be that you're hallucinating. Now, half an hour after the encounter, you don't have any concrete proof that the monster existed, let alone that Maribel does. Maybe you've been imagining this whole incident all along. But, then, you're an occult researcher. Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith, even if it's a really big leap like accepting that an imaginary girl is talking to you through your TV. It raises some massive questions about the nature of reality, but there's nothing to do now but ride it out.

"I think so," you write, "but what are we doing? You sound like you have plans."

"I've had a lot of time to think about it. There isn't much else to do over here." Maribel clasped her hands behind her back and leaned forward toward the spot where she imagined Renko to be, her head tilted to the side in a smile. "... gah, when the book describes it like that, it sounds really twee, doesn't it? I'd thought it looked elegant."

"I think it sounds cute," you type back. You immediately find yourself wondering what the hell led to that indiscretion. Here you are, flirting with your damn literature homework.

"I think I'm changing my mind about this narrator thing..." Maribel sighed, but didn't let it slow her down. "Um, anyway, shouldn't it be obvious? There's a monster on the loose, and I'm pretty sure that I personally count as a paranormal being now. This is what the Sealing Club is all about, isn't it?"

She smiled and extended her hand into the air. "What do you say, miss club president? Will you take the case?"