Sekibanki's cottage was on the outskirts of the human village. She kept it in a carefully-maintained state of apparent disuse—the curtains were always drawn, the lawn was always slightly overgrown, and the path to her front door was narrow and unnecessarily winding. When all else failed, the willows along the road served to mostly hide it from sight.

Living among humans required walking a delicate line. It was all about balance, she'd decided. If you looked too creepy, sometimes that was all the evidence people needed to decide that you were a youkai. It never ended well. She'd lost a home that way before she came to Gensokyo. Looking too much like a normal human was a bad idea too, though. If you were friendly and approachable, sooner or later somebody would consider themselves close enough to drop by your house unannounced, or ask the wrong kind of question in a friendly conversation. All it took was one slip of the tongue, and the whole thing would collapse. She'd lost a home to that, too.

There was just no winning with humans.

These days, she tried for the middle ground. She lived among humans, but not with them. She went into the village to buy groceries, but cut off any attempts at friendly chatter with a disinterested stare. She attended festivals, and participated just enough for people to remember that she was there. She tried to discourage people from coming by her house, but not so forcefully that they suspected she was hiding anything.

Over the years, she'd gotten pretty good at it. Nobody ever visited Sekibanki's house.

And yet, this morning, somebody was knocking on her door.

"Sekibanki! Sekibanki! Oh, I hope you're awake. It's really important!"

It was Kogasa's voice, and she sounded just as urgent as her door-rattling knocking would suggest.

Sekibanki rolled over in bed and glared at the door, but stayed silent. Kogasa didn't give up. "Sekibanki, please...!"

Sekibanki caved in. "What do you want?"

"Oh, good, you're awake! … can I please come in?"

"Why?"

"It's really important...!"

Sekibanki muttered under her breath and shot the door a death glare, but it was probably too late to say no. With a resigned sigh, she pushed herself up from the bed... then paused.

There were clothes on the floor. Her kitchen counter was covered in plates, bowls, and cooking utensils—clean, but she'd never quite gotten around to putting them away. There were three chairs at her dining table, but two of them were holding crates of vegetables. Most of the table was covered in drying herbs. Half of her paintings and books were various degrees of scorched—a testament to the fate of her previous house. She'd been meaning to replace them, but a century or so wasn't that long for a youkai, and Gensokyo didn't have much variety to choose from...

Sekibanki hadn't had a visitor in her cottage since... well, since she'd had this cottage. Only now, faced with one, did she realize just how unprepared she was.

"… I'll need a moment," she added.

Quickly, Sekibanki duplicated her head half a dozen times and got to work. Five heads hovered back and forth, dragging clothes toward the hamper with their teeth, carefully dropping silverware into drawers, scooting bundles of herbs aside to clear room at the table. One head stayed with her body, overseeing it through the process of getting dressed.

Sekibanki recognized the click of the doorknob just before the door swung open. The sound gave her just enough forewarning to snatch her cloak off the floor and cover herself. "What do you think you're doing?!"

Kogasa froze in the doorway. "O-oh, um...!"

All throughout the cottage, Sekibanki's heads stopped mid-task. One hovered in the air barely a meter from Kogasa, a discarded belt hanging from its mouth. Kogasa looked to it sheepishly. "I heard a lot of noise in here! I thought you might have fallen down or something."

With a gesture backward, she added, "The door was unlocked."

Sekibanki muttered under her breath and stepped aside, opening her wardrobe's door to give her some privacy while she finished dressing. Throughout the house, her heads resumed their tasks. No reason to turn back now.

"What do you need?" she asked, as she tried to pull her skirt on without stepping into the open.

"Oh, um. It's something that girl dropped last night..." Kogasa held up a smooth rectangle of wood, the size of a dinner plate. "I think it's kind of important."

"The things that human dropped? You're still worked up about those?"

"Well, yes, but...! This one's special!" Kogasa hurried over to one of the nearby heads and thrust it forward, shoving it right into Sekibanki's face. "Here, look!"

Sekibanki's attention drifted from head to head until she found the particular one that Kogasa had accosted. She backed up and squinted at the wooden plate. The side that she'd seen before was smooth. The side Kogasa was showing her now, though, was different. Sections of it had been carved away in intricate patterns. The remaining raised areas were stained black with ink. After a few seconds of squinting, Sekibanki realized that some of the carvings were written characters, flipped backward.

There were half a dozen lines of text on the thing, and she wasn't about to read all of that backward. "So? It's some kind of... stamp?"

"Not just a stamp! I think it's a woodblock! Like, for printing! Um, I don't have any ink, so I can't really see what it looks like, but..." Kogasa traced her fingers along one line. "This says 'Child of Miare,' right? That's somebody really important to humans, isn't it?"

"It does look like it says that," Sekibanki conceded. Her body was fully dressed now. She stepped out from behind the wardrobe and pulled her head back on, then stepped over and gently pushed aside the one that Kogasa had been talking to. "And she's important to humans, I guess."

"Right? So, we have to give it back! I bet it's really important to that girl from last night!"

"... 'we'? Why 'we'? If you want to take it back, you can take it back yourself."

"Well, right, but... I don't know where she lives!"

"That was the shopkeeper from Suzunaan. It's near the edge of the village, along the river."

"I don't know the human village that well..."

"I can tell you how to get there."

"But... what if I try to talk to her, and she's still mad about last night?"

"I don't care. You're a youkai, you can handle it."

"But—!"

"Most of the village still thinks I'm a normal human. I can't just walk up to her and say, "Excuse me, miss, but I'm the youkai that scared you last night, and I think you dropped your things.""

"But didn't she see you?"

"You'd be surprised how few humans recognize you when you're decapitated."

"Really?"

"Humans aren't very bright."

"Oh. Um." Kogasa looked down, fidgeting with her umbrella, then perked up with an excited little hop. Sekibanki winced as the umbrella nearly smacked into a hanging plant. "Then! Then we can just say it was me!"

"That you're the one who scared her?"

"Right! That way we won't mess up your cover, right?"

Every instinct that Sekibanki had told her to say no. Setting aside the fact that she didn't care about the plate, giving credit for her hard work to anybody else, let alone Kogasa, grated on her. She had to admit, though, it wasn't a bad idea. "… I suppose I could say that you came to me for help."

"Great!"

"But after this, I'm done. Even doing this much is risking my cover, and I don't really care whether some girl gets her woodblock back or not."

"Right!" Kogasa stepped forward, giving an enthusiastic, but serious, nod. "I really appreciate it! I'll owe you a favor after this!"

It wasn't much of a promise. Sekibanki couldn't think of much that she'd ever need from Kogasa. She was probably even less useful than Sekibanki's actual umbrella, because the normal umbrella wouldn't talk the whole time that you used it. But, it was good enough for now. "Fair enough," she said. "Let's get this over with."


"You lost the printing block," Akyuu repeated dryly, leaning forward over the desk.

"Right! It went missing somewhere," Kosuzu said.

"Where was it when you last saw it?"

"It was... on the desk."

Akyuu looked down. "This desk?"

"On that corner over there," Kosuzu added helpfully, pointing to the far corner.

Akyuu shifted the books on the desk around. Not surprisingly, the woodblock wasn't hidden beneath any of them. "Are you sure you can't think of how it might have gone missing? Anything... out of the ordinary you might have been doing?"

Kosuzu flinched, but tried her best to look innocent. "A-ah, nope! I've kept a pretty normal schedule the past few days. You know what? Maybe it, er, ended up on the shelves somehow! I'll look around for it again!"

Akyuu studied her face, then gave a curt nod. "Please do so."

Kosuzu hurried over to the shelf of recent returns, pretending to look through them while she desperately considered what to do. Behind her, Akyuu took a seat at her customary table in the corner. Kosuzu could still feel her eyes on her back.

Before she could make much progress in her imaginary search, footsteps came in the front door. As tense as Kosuzu was, the sound made her jolt and take a step back. Her would-be customer paused, looking slightly bewildered by this greeting.

"Excuse me," Sekibanki said. "Is the store open today? There was a sign out front, but the door was open."

"Oh, we're closed to focus on a print order, but... that's actually on hold for now. Can I help you with something?"

"I think it's more like me helping you." Sekibanki glanced back toward the door, then sighed and reached through the curtains. She tugged a reluctant-looking Kogasa into the shop, after a moment of finessing her umbrella half through the doorway. "This girl has something that belongs to you."

Kosuzu's sense of danger had never been well-honed, by anybody's standards. So, it took her a few seconds to piece together what she was seeing: A girl in weird clothes, with mismatched eyes, and an umbrella with a giant tongue lolling off of the side. There was a youkai in her shop.

Her heart froze up, and she glanced uneasily to Akyuu. Akyuu was studying the intruders with annoyed-looking disinterest. Kosuzu had, it turned out, served quite a few youkai over the years. This wasn't even the first obvious youkai customer she'd had. But, it was unusual enough to make her worried, especially considering everything else that was happening. Worried enough that it took her a few seconds to work up a response.

"A-ah, something that belongs to me...?" Kosuzu stepped over to the front desk, feeling like she was in a dream.

"Right." Sekibanki seemed to have no intention to explain herself further. She gave Kogasa an insistent push toward Kosuzu.

"We, um!" Kogasa blurted, then caught herself. "I mean, I! I scared you last night. On the path to the shrine?"

Kogasa stepped forward, fumbling with a parcel by her side. Kosuzu immediately recognized it as the sheet she'd used the night before. Her fears were confirmed when Kogasa slid it forward onto the desk, opening it up to reveal the woodblock. "You dropped this!"

"O-oh! Did I…?" Kosuzu grabbed the block and held it up for inspection, if only because she desperately needed to buy some time to think.

What she really wanted was to beg for help, but with Akyuu sitting barely five meters away, she didn't dare. Akyuu sat leaning across the table, frowning thoughtfully at the two visitors, with the fingers of one hand drumming impatiently on the table. Kosuzu couldn't remember ever seeing Akyuu not sitting straight upright, unless she was sick. And there was her behavior, too. Akyuu had always been a little condescending sometimes, but that was only natural for a noble-born girl with irreplaceable powers. More recently, though, she'd been... kind of a jerk.

Something was very wrong with Akyuu, and that was only the start of her problems. She should have been happy to get the woodblock back, but now that it was in front of her, her heart was flip-flopping between elation and despair. Sure, it meant that she hadn't lost an irreplaceable carving that had taken some artisan days to make. It also meant that she needed to explain—

"That belongs to me," Akyuu said, rising from her seat. "Why do you have it?"

—that. Kosuzu peeked up from the wood block to gauge Akyuu's mood. She did not look pleased.

"A-ah, well..." Kosuzu stammered.

"Oh, I didn't steal it or anything!" Kogasa said. "It's just like I said! I scared her, and she dropped it! And since I'm bringing it back now, it's okay, right...?"

"Where did you scare her?" Akyuu asked.

"The road to the Hakurei shrine," Kogasa answered, helpfully. "Just last night."

Akyuu's gaze moved from Kogasa to Kosuzu.

Kosuzu flinched back it and glanced aside, doing her best not to look too guilty. "A-ah, right! I was taking a walk."

"In the middle of the night?"

"I had a nightmare."

"So you went to the Hakurei shrine?"

"It was a really bad nightmare."

"I thought you said you hadn't done anything out of the ordinary the past few days?"

"A-ah, um, ehe!" Kosuzu forced an anxious laugh. "I guess my memory just can't compete with the Child of Miare, huh?"

Akyuu wasn't immediately placated. She leaned in, scrutinizing Kosuzu's face. Then, she snatched the woodblock up. "I suppose the important thing is that it's back now."

"Oh, good!" Kogasa said. Judging by her smile, she hadn't detected anything unusual about this exchange. "I could tell that it was really important to somebody!"

"Important...? How?"

"Oh! Well, a lot of care obviously went into making it. Oh, and it's really nice wood, too! I can tell you'd really be sad if something like this was—"

Sekibanki cleared her throat, rather pointedly. "We should probably be going," she announced. "People will get worried if a youkai stays here too long."

"Oh, right..." Kogasa said. "I hope your printing and stuff comes out okay, though!"

"Um, thanks..." Kosuzu said.

Kogasa took a step toward the door, and Kosuzu wracked her mind for a Plan B. With the way Akyuu was acting, the thought of being left alone with her wasn't a comfortable one. If anything, she felt like things were even more tense than they'd been before the two had entered. Even if one of them was a youkai, they were the only people she'd seen in days that might have any chance of helping her. If she let them walk out that door...

"Ah, one second...!" Kosuzu blurted out. All three pairs of eyes turned toward her. She realized, a moment too late, that she probably should have decided on what to say before she spoke up.

Slowly, she pieced together a sentence. "I should... give you something! As thanks for bringing it back!"

"Oh, that really won't be necessary!" Kogasa said, with a sunny smile. "I'm just happy to help!"

"No, I insist! Oh! Do you want to borrow a book? Any topic you want, free of charge! It's a present!"

"A book...?" Kogasa glanced uncertainly to Sekibanki, then back to Kosuzu. "Oh! Do you have any books about umbrellas?"

By force of habit, Kosuzu looked to Akyuu, whose superhuman memory made her the closest thing to a card catalog around Suzunaan. Akyuu only gave her a blank stare back. Kosuzu was left to her own devices. "I don't think so..."

"Oh. Um... Oh! Ghost stories! Do you have any scary books?"

"Ah! Sure, we have some of those. Do you have any preferences?"

"New ones! The kind of things modern humans are scared of."

"Sure, let me see what I can do."

Kosuzu hurried into the shelves, thoughts racing in her head to plan out her next move. Finding a book that matched the criteria was easy—Suzunaan had plenty of books on youkai, and there were even a few from the outside world. Youma books definitely counted, but even in circumstances like this, she wasn't going to give away one of those. She settled on the most modern-looking book she could find, with a colorful, glossy cover. The cover read 101 Spooky Stories to Chill Your Bones. She'd never read it, and it really didn't look that interesting by the standards of outside world books. But, it would do for now.

"How's this?" she asked, holding it up.

"'A Hundred and One Spooky St—' Oh! That's perfect!" Kogasa said.

"Great! I'll just need to, um, mark it out of our inventory first."

Kosuzu hurried past Kogasa into the shop's back room. Here, at least, she could have a few seconds without Akyuu watching her every move. It was long enough to grab a pen, jot a quick note on a slip of paper, and slide it into the book. After fussing over it and making absolutely certain that it wasn't visible, she headed back out and offered the book over.

"Here you go. You should, um..." She glanced uncertainly back at Sekibanki. Weird or no, she was obviously a human, and that was a much safer bet than some youkai she'd never met before. "You should share it with your friend, too! Since you, um, both brought the block back and all!"

"Oh! Right! I'll definitely share it!"

After a few more pleasantries, the two left. Kosuzu was alone with Akyuu once more.

"That was very thoughtful of them," Akyuu said, rising from her seat. She stepped closer. "Why don't you tell me all about your dream while you finish my printing job?"


"I've never gotten a gift from a human before!" Kogasa exclaimed, as soon as they were away from the shop. She spun around and thrust it into the air, beaming up at it.

"I'm happy for you," Sekibanki said. She did not sound happy.

"And a scary story book, too! I bet this will help a lot."

"Mmh."

"Oh! She said I was supposed to share it with you, though. Do you want to read it first?"

"I'll pass."

"It looks like a really good book, though! Look!" Kogasa hurried to catch up with Sekibanki, and held it up for demonstration. She'd opened it to the index page. "There's a story in here about rokurokubi!"

Sekibanki glanced over. "And what does it say about us?"

"Oh, hmm..." Kogasa flipped from the index to the story, then skimmed through it. "A guy married a woman... and then a bunch of servants got sick and died, and... oh! Um." She paused. "His wife was a rokurokubi and drinking their blood, I guess? I didn't knew you drink blood!"

"I don't. This is exactly why I'm not interested. I don't need to read a bunch of stories about how I'm untrustworthy and need to be exterminated."

"Oh... doesn't it feel nice, though? Knowing that humans are scared of you?"

"It's just annoying. If I want humans scared, I can scare them myself."

"I guess that's true." Kogasa's good mood was too resilient to be damaged by such an offhand dismissal. Humming to herself, she flipped through the pages. The book was strange, in some ways. The text was printed with a neat precision that she'd never seen before, like it had been made by an accomplished craftsman, but she couldn't feel any real spirit in it. Whoever had made such a crisp and perfect-looking book hadn't cared about it that much. Weird. There were stories about bakeneko, hungry ghosts, poltergeists, witches, walking corpses...

A paper dropped out and landed on the ground. Curiously, Kogasa crouched down and picked it up.

PLEASE HELP, it said, above a fold. She opened it, and inside it continued, Not safe to talk. I think something really bad is happening. Please ask Reimu to meet me behind the shop at 8 PM tonight. PLEASE.

"Um, Sekibanki?"

"What?" Sekibanki replied. She'd sped up a little while Kogasa was reading, putting some more distance between them.

"I think you need to see this...!"

Kogasa hurried over and offered the paper up. Sekibanki read it with disinterested glance. Her brow furrowed as she progressed. "This was in the book?"

"Right..."

"Well. It's probably nothing." Sekibanki folded the paper closed and handed it back. "Humans around that age like to exaggerate things. If she says 'something really bad is happening,' it probably means something pointless, like her best friend hasn't talked to her in three days."

"But why would she need a shrine maiden for that...?"

"I don't know. But do you think the shrine maiden is going to listen if a youkai turns up on her front step to ask for help?"

Kogasa thought back to the one previous time she'd asked Reimu for help. She shuddered. "A-ah, she is kind of scary sometimes..."

"Well, then there's nothing we can do about it, is there?"

"I guess not..." Kogasa glanced back down to the letter, squirming in place indecisively. "But she said 'please' three times...!"

Sekibanki sighed. "Do what you want, but I'm not getting involved. Nothing good ever comes out of trying to help humans."

"But..."

"I'm going home. If you want my advice, don't bother. Humans' gratitude doesn't last very long."

Kogasa gave a glum nod. "Alright... I'll see you later, then?"

"... maybe," Sekibanki said. She turned and continued toward her house. Kogasa stayed rooted to the spot, trying to make up her mind, until she was out of sight.