"S-so it is you," Alice said from the edge of the clearing, with her voice still shaky from the shock.

"It... it looks like me, y-yeah," Marisa said. Everything felt wrong. It didn't feel like her brain was connected to the rest of her, the part that was still talking to Alice and wiping her hands absently on her apron. Here she was, reeling and lost, and some fragment of her was still able to focus on the matters at hand. Alice reluctantly stepped back into the cottage and rested a hand on her shoulder, and the reassuring gesture helped ground her thoughts for a moment. "I mean. I mean, it's gotta be, right?"

"I would think so," Alice said uneasily. "... so you're a ghost, then?"

"I-I guess?" Marisa brushed a hand back through her hair, not taking her eyes off the corpse for a second. The whole thing still felt unreal, like she was rapidly closing in on the point where she'd realize that it was all a dream and wake up safe in bed. In a way, though, it helped. It distanced her from the horribleness, let her shakily assemble thoughts even though she should have been curled up on the ground.

"I'm... I'm sorry." Alice gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. The gesture seemed hollow, like she was aware that no amount of apologies could ever make this better, but felt like she had to do something. "How do you feel...?"

"Well. Uh." Marisa tried to focus some of her racing thoughts on the question, taking an uneasy self inventory. "I didn't... I hadn't realized that anything was really wrong until now. I felt fine. I mean. I mean, I died and didn't even notice..." She heard Alice start sniffling behind her, and went quiet for a moment before adding, "... it just doesn't feel real yet, you know?"

"R-right, yes, of course," Alice said, doing her best to keep her voice steady. "I'm sure that this is..." A soft sniff. "I-is a shock for you too."

"Yeah..." Another sniffle came from behind her, and without much conscious thought, Marisa settled on her next course of action. Everything about this situation was wrong, wrong and confusing, and right now, she really just needed some time to think. Slowly, she rose to her feet, with her back still to Alice. Like she was afraid that her corpse would vanish if she looked away for even a moment. "Hey," she said quietly. "Don't worry about me too much, okay?"

"M-Marisa, you're dead."

"I know, alright? 's just... worrying isn't gonna do me any good, either." She took a breath to steady herself. "I think I need to be by myself for a bit. Sorry."

"You don't have to handle this alone... I can..."

"That's not it, I promise," Marisa said, and finally managed to turn toward Alice.. "I just... need some time to think."

Alice still looked reluctant to leave so easily. She took one step back, and her gaze drifted around the scene again. Once it settled on the corpse, it seemed to finally give her the push she needed. "Well, then. I'll... just be off." Despite the words, she remained frozen to the spot. "... but. Marisa, if there's anything you need..."

"Yeah. I'll let you know. Thanks."

Alice nodded, but lingered a few seconds longer. Finally, she turned and headed toward the edge of the clearing, back toward her cottage. Marisa was already facing the other direction, but she could still hear the dollmaker burst into tears as soon as she disappeared into the underbrush.

As soon as she was sure that Alice was out of sight, Marisa slumped back to the floor next to her corpse, with her back resting against the remains of a wall. The emotions were catching up to her now, but with none of the sharpness she was used to. Her sorrow and fear felt as deep as they ever could have, but delicate and subtle, instead of the urgent animal edge they usually packed.

Despite all the horribleness, she still felt a part of herself detached from it all, rationally analyzing the situation from afar. Emotions are mostly because of chemicals in your blood or something, right? it whispered with detached interest. Maybe since I've got no blood... She smiled at the grim joke of an idea, and the sheer absurdity of thinking about something like that at a time like this. Somehow, it helped her feel better about things for a moment, until the idea continued: No blood in her veins, no sweat when she had run back and forth... she was no longer a person, just the abstracted idea of a person, with all the messy biological details smoothed away.

It was an uncomfortable thought. She'd never really considered ghosts before, beyond the best ways to capture phantoms for cooling in the summer. She suddenly wished she'd paid more attention to the times that Yuyuko had visited. What little she could remember was a mix of ghost stories and dry, near-academic text that she'd read in pilfered books. Being dead wasn't something she'd ever really planned for. It had always been a distant, abstract possibility, and now that it was her immediate reality, she found herself lost and uncertain for the first time since she'd left home.

Numbly, Marisa scooted over and leaned over her corpse, then started uncovering it. The first brush of her hands against her body's own cool flesh made her flinch, but she forced herself to work past it, taking a perverse pride in the way she forced herself to treat it like just another object. Bit by bit, she pushed smaller pieces of rubble aside until the body was completely uncovered. With that done, she kept going brushing off the thick layer of plaster dust and soot that was settled onto her. She was suddenly uncomfortable with it, wanting even her dead and broken form to be clean in its repose. After ten minutes of anxious labor, her body was as clean as it was going to get, and Marisa pulled back to look over it.

Apart from the blood, she looked... peaceful. Little rips through her clothes showed where shrapnel and splinters had pierced her flesh. She wondered how she'd died so quickly. All that blood-soaked hair probably had a pretty big wound under it, but she wasn't about to look for it. It felt... wrong, somehow, to look into it too deeply, so she moved on to phase two of a plan that she hadn't even realized she'd been working on.

It took two hours of packing rubble, but Marisa had the time. Her inhuman body was indefatigable, and soon, she fell into a daze, just dragging twisted lumber and chunks of plaster away from her house and piling them a short distance away. It was tedious work, but exactly the sort of thing she needed to take her mind off of the situation. The wreckage of her living room revealed itself to her slowly, a landslide of books here, a toppled shelf of bric-a-brac there. Finally, she found what she'd been looking for: her trusty treasure-digging shovel. Marisa let the shovel do the deciding for her. She sat it on its tip on the ground, and when it fell over, headed off in that direction without a thought.

It wasn't until she was hundreds of meters into the forest that she stopped, and began to dig.

Marisa knew one other piece of ghost lore, one that every human in Gensokyo knew by heart. The surest way to get rid of a ghost was to give their body a proper burial. In the old days, when youkai had still preyed on the villagers, there had been focused manhunts to bring home the chewed bones of loved ones and lay them to rest. Kind of a big deal. Making sure that everybody got last rites was still taken very seriously, and even a pauper was assured a modest tombstone. If anybody found out what had happened to her, they'd start looking for her corpse. If she got a proper burial, she'd pass on, to Nirvana or reincarnation or whatever came next.

She couldn't let that happen. Not yet, anyway. She had some thinking to do and some stuff to take care of. So, she had to give her corpse a quick burial, something too artless to put her to rest, and hidden well enough that nobody would find it.

Once she judged that the hole was deep enough, Marisa walked back to her cottage, slipped around the rubble into the interior, propped her shovel against the wall, squatted down next to her corpse, and hesitated. Her own glazed eyes staring up at her, the unnatural paleness of her skin... it was the kind of thing that would have made her squeamish, if she still had a stomach. It's just another thing now, she reminded herself, then reached down, slid one hand behind the small of her back, and hefted her body up onto her shoulder.

"Oof. Heavier than I look," Marisa said to nobody in particular as she rose to her feet and steadied herself, then carefully grabbed her shovel. This close, she could smell her own blood above the haze of wood smoke that filled the clearing. It was a good motivation to hurry, even with nearly half a kilometer to travel. After trudging through the forest for what felt like forever, she knelt down and lowered her body into the grave as carefully as she could, laying it on its back, then straightened up and grabbed her shovel.

She couldn't do a proper burial, but... it still felt wrong to just do it. Besides, it wouldn't count if she buried herself anyway, right? Otherwise, you'd hear stories of self-burying ghosts all the time. So she could have whatever kind of one-girl funeral she wanted.

"Um. Here lies Marisa Kirisame," she announced to the forest at large. "... aka Me. Ehe." Marisa chuckled weakly and lowered her head, embarrassed at talking to herself, but feeling strangely reassured by the act. "I mean. I dunno. I never figured that I was gonna be the kinda person to die a zillion years old with lots of kids, anyway. Still kinda sucks. You... deserved better," she mumbled, now talking directly to her corpse. Sadness welled up in her again, threatening to overwhelm the brief respite she'd found, and she forced herself to change gears again. No sense in making this more depressing than it already was. "S-so, uh. Be more careful with explosives in your next reincarnation. Ya fuckin' idiot."

Marisa sighed. Her heart just wasn't in the right place to give a speech full of actual emotion or self-depreciating jokes. Mostly she was just tired and melancholy. Still, she felt a little better for making the effort. It felt like something was missing though. Her body staring up at her from the damp soil at the bottom of the hole... the plan had been to bury herself without a coffin all along, but now that the moment had come, she was faced with the unpleasant realities of it.

It couldn't be avoided at this stage, but at least she could make it a little more proper-feeling. Crouching down, Marisa was just barely able to reach to the bottom of the pit. It took a bit more work than she'd expected to push her body's eyelids closed. Her fingers brushed an eyeball in the process, sending a shiver of revulsion through her, but at least it was done. After straightening back up, she studied her handiwork. Even with the lethal injuries, she looked more peaceful now, like she was just taking a nap. Somehow, it made her feel like everything was going to be okay.

Marisa paused to take one last look at her corpse, trying to memorize the image for eternity. The plaster dust clinging to her, the spots of dried blood peppering her clothes, the mess of golden hair around her head like a bloody halo, even the unnatural positions of her arms and the way her dress laid across her thighs. "Sorry," she said. "You were a pretty good body, I guess. Sorry you're gonna end up full of worms and stuff."

Before she could hesitate further, she jabbed the shovel into her pile of dirt and upended it over her body, dumping clumps of wet soil across the face. There. No reason to turn back now.

She didn't stop until the hole was completely filled. When it was done, she dragged leaves across the top to help it blend in to the rest of the forest, scored a mark on the side of a nearby tree to help her find it again, snatched up her shovel, and set off toward the ruins of her cottage.