Hina didn't come into the human village very often.

Most humans weren't very knowledgeable about Gensokyo's inhuman residents. Youkai and spirits who made it into the newspapers a few times, or who caused incidents, those might eventually work their way into general knowledge. Others would get cautious glances if they walked around openly, but as long as they minded their own business, they would be left in peace.

Hina didn't fall into either of those categories.

The humans probably thought that she couldn't hear them. At least, she liked to think so. She'd made a bit of a game out of categorizing people's reactions to her.

"Don't look that way," a mother muttered to her children, tugging them toward the edge of the street. More quietly, she added, "Do you know who that is?"

Hina rounded a corner. In front of her, a shop's door slammed closed. A group of pedestrians hurried over to the other side of the street, keeping their eyes carefully averted from her. An old man sitting on a front step stood his ground, but as soon as Hina was past him, he started mumbling a prayer to Amitabha.

She was used to it by now. She liked to think that she had pretty good control over the misfortune that saturated the air around her, but accidents did happen. They tended to be the kind of accidents that humans didn't forget easily. She did her best to put them at ease, walking with her eyes lowered and paying no particular attention to any one person, like she was walking in her own little world. It didn't help much, but it helped.

Mostly, she just tried to get her business over with quickly so she could go home. First stop was the market, to buy the few food items she couldn't grow herself or trade for with the Akis. Next was the potter, to buy replacements for a few cups that had cracked over the years. Then, the tailor, to get the supplies she needed to mend her clothes over the next few months.

That finished up the actual business she had today. But, she still had one more stop to make. At the end of a long row of storefronts, she turned and walked through the front curtain of an udon shop.

It was a routine she'd picked up somewhere over the years, and it was one that had stuck. The shop wasn't much to look at—there was a much nicer one down the road, and the shopkeeper was a sweaty, greasy-mustached man who charged too much for everything. The food was good, though, and more importantly, he'd always treated her like every other customer. In his case, that meant that he barely grumbled more than a few words to her and mostly tried to pretend that she didn't exist once she'd paid, but that was something Hina didn't get to experience often. Combined with eating a meal that she hadn't cooked herself, and it was an experience she was willing to pay for.

Today, the shop was a lot more crowded than usual, with five or six customers clustered around the counter near the door. She silently stepped past them and made her way down the row of stools, settling down at the far end.

None of them even noticed her presence. After sitting in silence for a few seconds, she subtly glanced in their direction. The other customers were all leaning over the counter, fighting for space to see something on top of it, but she couldn't get a good look at it past the forest of heads. She could hear low noise, though, like distant conversation.

"Oh, it's you," the shopkeeper grumbled, leaning against the counter across from her. "What'll it be?"

"I'll have the curry udon, please." Hina knew the menu by heart by this point.

The shopkeeper snatched up her payment with a grunt of acknowledgment and turned to head toward the kitchen, but before he could leave, Hina raised her voice again. "If I might ask... what's so interesting over there?"

He grudgingly followed her gaze toward the crowd, then turned back toward the kitchen. "One of those new talking boxes. Thought it'd bring in more customers."

Hina nodded along with the explanation. She didn't understand a word of it, but she felt obligated to keep up her end of the conversation. "It looks like it's working pretty well."

"Not hardly. Not a single one of the cheap bastards has ordered anything." With a final grumble, he continued toward the kitchen and disappeared through the door.

Hina waited patiently with her hands folded in her lap, but her attention kept getting drawn back toward the group. Whatever they were looking at, it seemed so interesting that they hadn't even noticed her presence yet. And she'd never seen a talking box before... After a few minutes of deliberation, she rose to her feet and walked cautiously toward the other customers.

"The boss will have your head for this for sure," a tinny voice said from the center of the group.

Hina edged up against them and rose on her tiptoes to see past the wall of shoulders.

The sound had come from a box, alright. A metal box, with a glass screen on the front. Onscreen, two men were standing in an alley, in a distinctly outside world-looking sort of city. The men looked like outsiders too, with slicked-back hair, sunglasses, and flashy jackets. One had an item pointed at another that Hina vaguely recognized as a gun.

Hina watched for a few seconds, her eyes slowly widening in amazement. The man who was being held at gunpoint babbled out apologies and excuses, in a rough accent that Hina could barely follow. "Wow..." she said. "How did they fit such little actors into a box?"

"It's not little men," one of the other spectators said, with a ton of smug superiority. "This is happenin' somewhere else. We can just see it here, 'cuz of technology."

"Technology..." Hina repeated, rapt. "So this lets you see people without getting close to them...?"

"Think that's basically how it works," another man mumbled, not tearing his eyes away for a moment.

The implications slowly dawned on Hina over a few more seconds. She stood rooted in the place, a wide smile growing on her face. "Where... do these boxes come from? Can anybody get one?"

"Heard it's that creepy bookshop at the edge of town. Wouldn't set foot in the place, myself, but—"

The man was cut off by the sound of Hina's hurried footsteps headed toward the door.

Nitori had taken six televisions down to Suzunaan on the first visit.

When she'd returned the next day, four of them had sold, and she'd delivered eleven more.

The day after, every television had been sold, and she'd delivered thirteen more.

Those all sold out too, and she'd dropped fifteen more off the next day.

Nitori was no mathematician, but she knew a pattern when she saw it. She'd been up for half the night making televisions, and eleven of them already sat neatly lined up next to her. She wanted to make nine more before she headed down to Suzunaan, and she was half-afraid that it still wouldn't be enough. At this rate, she'd need to be making televisions every waking moment just to keep up with demand. At least the batteries were easy to mass-produce, or she'd have to hire on assistants. Nothing irked a kappa more than admitting that they needed help building something.

Success had its downsides, but when success sold for a thousand yen a unit, she really couldn't complain.

"Good morning!"

The front door of the station flew open, and Sanae burst in, her voice echoing off the walls. Nitori wasn't sure how she managed it. Her dealings with humans led her to keep a far earlier schedule than most kappa, and she'd seen enough to know that most humans took a while to get going in the morning.

But not Sanae. They'd been running the station together for four days now, and she'd picked up on that much. If there was work to be done, Sanae dove in without complaint. If there was something fun to do, her enthusiasm could be almost intimidating. Nitori was halfway convinced that if you dissected the girl, you'd find the secrets of perpetual motion hidden in her guts.

Not that she wanted to. The enthusiasm was... well, she didn't want to call it endearing, but it was a good trait in a business partner, if nothing else.

"Good morning," Nitori said, without looking up from the workbench she'd set up in the studio. "What's on the schedule for today?"

"I'm glad you asked! I've been thinking about it, and..."

Sanae moved closer, and only then did Nitori notice that she was carrying a chalkboard, almost as wide as she was tall. Carefully, Sanae sat it on top of one of the shorter electronics cabinets and propped it against the wall.

On the chalkboard were seven horizontal bars, labeled 'Monday' through 'Sunday.' Along the top, they were divided into times, from 9 AM to 9 PM.

Most of the bars were divided into large blocks. Action Movies, Comedy Movies, Tokusatsu, Gundam, Super Robot Series...

"Oh. An actual schedule?"

"Right! Now that we've been running for a while, I thought we should get a bit more... um, rigorous, you know? If we just show everything at random, people won't know when anything is on."

"Uh. Do we really need these two categories?" Nitori asked, pointing between the last two. "Aren't those gundam things already robots?"

"Huh? Oh, no! They're really different categories! Gundams are mostly real robot types, but Super Robot series are completely different! A lot of them can transform, or don't really follow the laws of physics. I mean, some people say that gundams don't either, but there are some pretty good studies that—"

"R-right, right, I think I get it." She totally didn't, but Nitori had pretty quickly learned when to spot the signs that Sanae was about to launch on a half-hour lecture. In its own way, it was cute. It was rare to find humans who cared about the important things, like accurate use of technical terminology.

"Anyway, I'm pretty happy with this. It gives us a nice rotation. Well, except..."

Sanae glanced back to the chalkboard, and Nitori followed her gaze. "Except what?"

"Well, um. I bought every DVD that was for sale at Kourindou, and there's the stuff Sumireko was able to import for us... but even then, we only have about two hundred hours of footage. If we broadcast twelve hours a day, we can barely go for two weeks before we start repeating shows."

"Well, nobody said we had to be on the air for twelve hours a day."

"Right, but it would be bad if we went for less time, don't you think? In the outside world, a lot of people watch TV while they're getting ready in the morning, then again at night when they get home. If we move the start or end times too far, we'll miss one of those. It's, um, marketing! Or something."

"Eh, I guess. Anyway, people won't notice if we repeat stuff a few times. It's not like anybody is watching all day every day."

"But! That's just in general. When you get into individual categories..." Sanae tapped one of the blocks on the chalkboard. "Like! We only have nine comedy movies, so if I show one every day, we'll be repeating them by this time next week! With horror movies, it's even worse, so I can only show two of them a week if we don't want to run out within a month."

"So we've got to get more, is what you're saying."

"Right! Except..." Sanae glanced over the chart again, the sighed and slumped. "If we're buying stuff from the outside world, it's pretty expensive. Even if we set aside a lot of our money for it, Sumireko might not be able to import them fast enough, and that's only if she keeps helping us..."

"I see what you're getting at." Nitori finally turned away from her workbench, pushing a finished TV away from her and wiping her hands on a cloth. "Well, I don't think you're going to find many more of them around Gensokyo. Outside world goods are kind of a rarity, you know? We might be able to pick up a few more at a kappa bazaar sometime, but they wouldn't be cheap."

"Yeah, I know. I'm not sure what else we could do, though. Maybe take out a loan from somebody and have Sumireko buy a whole lot of movies at once, but I'm not sure how many she can carry at a time, and that would only put it off for a while..."

Nitori considered that.

They could definitely afford it, as much money as they were making off the TVs. And apart from buying movies, the station's operating costs were practically nonexistent so far, so it seemed fairly safe. It just chafed at Nitori's natural instincts to never end up on the unprofitable end of a transaction.

"Maybe," she conceded with a sigh. "But only if we can find one with good terms. And I'd still—"

Nitori was cut off by a voice from the outside door. "Heeeey! Anybody here? I need to talk business."

They glanced to each other uncertainly. Sanae made the first move. "Sure, one second!" she called back, and headed across the lobby to open the door.

Standing on the other side was a tengu. A tengu who Nitori's mind, after several seconds, dimly placed as Hatate Himekaidou. The wait had only been a few seconds, but by the time the door opened, she was already leaning against the frame, holding her camera in one hand and idly poking at the buttons with a thumb. "Took you long enough," she said, without looking up.

"Oh, sorry," Sanae said, glancing from Hatate to the camera and back again. "We don't get many visitors! Can I help you?"

"Something like that." Hatate flipped her camera shut and leveled it at Sanae. "This is that TV thing, right?"

"The Gensokyo Channel One television station, yep!"

Hatate nodded knowingly. "See, we've been keeping an eye on this place. The great tengu have been freaking out about it all week."

"They have...?"

"Yep." Hatate pushed herself off the doorframe with a smirk. "I mean, this kinda stuff attracts attention! And here's the thing... you're sending, like, twelve hours of messages out across Gensokyo every day, right?"

"Right..."

"That's a lotta information. Two or three newspapers a day. That kind of thing makes the great tengu worried."

"Hey, listen, lady, I've heard this kind of thing before." Nitori tossed the now grease-covered cloth aside and stepped closer, patting her skirt and trying to remember where she'd hidden her various sidearms. "If this is some kind of protection racket deal, you can forget it."

"Huh? I didn't say anything like that! Jeez, that's kappa for ya, always jumping to conclusions." Hatate shook her head and shot Sanae a glance that suggested she was supposed to sympathize. "Calm down, I'm just here to make you an offer."

"Whatever. Make it quick. Sanae and I have a business to run, you know."

Hatate smirked, and seemed to take pleasure in waiting as long as she could before making her proposal. "You're selling those tele-thingies to youkai, right?"

"... we are?" Sanae said, glancing between the other two in surprise.

"Lots of youkai have those things. Do you think humans are the only ones who know about that bookstore or something? So, anyway, here's the deal. Nobody actually cares about you showing dumb human stuff to people, so you can stop worrying about that. But, we want you to, like, do a news thing, you know? Once a day, I'll write up all the latest news, and you'll send it out everywhere. In exchange, we'll let you guys sell those gadgets in the tengu village. You know, to expand your market or whatever."

"A news show...?" Sanae paused, an uncertain smile growing on her face. "That would help with the scheduling stuff! There's always fresh news to talk about!"

"Tengu news," Nitori said. "Half of it's lies and propaganda."

"Huh? I think you're thinking of the wrong paper, y'know." Hatate huffed and stepped inside, tucking her camera away so she could cross her arms and frown down at Nitori. "That rag is the Bunbunmaru. I write the Kakashi Spirit News. Stories based on, ya know, actual facts and stuff."

"Oh, yeah, that one. The one that only puts out a new edition like three times a year."

"Hey, news reporting's hard work."

"It does sound pretty hard..." Sanae agreed. "... but if you can barely fill a paper in a few months, won't it be kind of hard to do the news live every day?"

"... eh?" Hatate stared blankly into the air. She apparently hadn't thought of that. "A-ah, well, yeah, I guess that might be kinda hard. But that's for me to worry about, not you! I'm a professional news reporter and junk! Don't underestimate me!"

"Right..." Sanae glanced back to Nitori. "Can we have a few minutes to make a decision?"

"Sure, whatever." Hatate had already pulled her camera out again and resumed leafing through images. "Take your time."

Sanae barely gave the studio door time to shut behind them before she leaned in excitedly. "This is just what we needed, right?! If we have a news show, that helps fill up our schedule, and selling to the tengu gives us more money to work with!"

"Eh, maybe. Do we really need the extra business, though? So far, the village is buying TVs faster than I can make them."

"But they'll eventually slow down, right? Sooner or later, everybody who wants a TV will have one. Plus, if we can get the tengu interested, maybe more youkai will want to buy them, too!"

Nitori made a big show of considering it. She sighed, and pouted thoughtfully, and scuffed her feet against the floor. It was hard to come up with a reason that seemed compelling enough to even bring up, though. Sanae was just like that. Whatever she said, it sounded like the most obvious choice in the world. Charisma or something. The only natural human ability that was any good against youkai. "I still don't like working with tengu," she said. "I don't know if you've hung out with them, but they can be kind of pushy. What do you want to bet that if we reject her 'offer,' she'll be back in a week with another one that's less generous?"

"But it's a pretty good offer, right?"

"Yeah..." Nitori sighed. "We can give it a shot. But the second she starts sticking her nose in where it doesn't belong, she's out of here."

"Great! And then if we let other youkai make shows...!"

"Eh? Other youkai?"

"Right! A lot of them are old and have a lot of stories, and there are youkai musicians and, um, dancers and stuff! I bet we could find a lot of them who want to make their own shows, too!"

Nitori glanced over her shoulder, where the camera lay dormant atop its tripod. "Do you really think youkai would be interested in something like—"

She stopped herself mid-sentence. Of course they would. There practically wasn't a youkai alive that wouldn't take an opportunity to make themselves the center of attention. Putting them on screens across all of Gensokyo... yeah. Somebody would definitely be interested. She was kind of jealous she hadn't thought of the idea first. "... Never mind, I see your point."

"Ah! Thanks! This is going to be great, I promise!"

"But." Nitori held up a warning finger. "We can't just give it to any youkai, right? It would have to be ones that are going to make, uh, quality content."

"Mmhm!"

"... and I guess we'd have to pay them, huh?"

"Hmm… yeah, we probably should. Maybe a thousand yen per hour of usable footage?"

"Five hundred."

"Seven fifty?"

Nitori held her gaze for a few seconds before capitulating. "Fine, fine," she sighed. "But only if it's usable. We can't afford to pay every idiot who can talk in front of a camera."

Sanae made a little overjoyed humming sound deep in her throat, which built up into a squeak of excitement. "Great! I'll start getting Hatate settled in!"

Over the few days that she'd lived in her little room in Touko's hideout, Rumi had slowly transformed it into her own. Most of it was taken up by odds and ends from their raids on the humans—a small pile of assorted tools and minor treasures, three bottles of sake, a plate she'd thought looked particularly fancy, a sword, and one Jizo statue they'd picked up from the roadside for the heck of it. She'd draped her tengu disguise over the latter, giving the bodhisattva a scowling red face.

Along one wall, closest to the entrance, was the massive workbench that Touko had furnished for her. It had started out pretty empty, but now, after days of working, it was a glorious mess, with burn marks and screws and tools littering the surface. The other end of the room was entirely enveloped by a nest-like pile of stolen clothing that she'd been using as a bed.

At the moment, she was sitting in the middle of it, and the dog was flopped down next to her, threatening to shove her to the floor if he rolled over again. Touko's main stipulation for letting her keep the dog was that Rumi would be the one to take care of it, so his food and water bowls were sitting nearby, too. At the moment, there was a mostly-dead fish carefully laid across the food bowl. Rumi had no idea what dogs ate, but over the course of the last few nights, she'd ruled out rice, peppermints, radishes, and most other foods that she had a ready supply of. Only fish seemed to spark much interest from him.

The smell wasn't the best, but Rumi was too deep in concentration to pay it much attention. Her focus was entirely on the notebook in her lap.

There was a long column of figures running down the middle of the page. She'd meticulously inventoried everything that she'd managed to steal so far, then done her best to figure out how much she could sell them for. The sword was probably worth a lot. The sake and the statue might be worth a bit. Most of the rest... not so much. There were a few larger numbers toward the end, and then line after line of paltry figures—two hundred yen, a hundred yen, a hundred forty yen, fifty yen...

And at the bottom, was her grand total. She'd checked the figures a few times, her tongue poking out the corner of her mouth in concentration, but still the treacherous numbers agreed: she'd made six thousand, two hundred, eighty yen. It was pretty good for four nights of work. It wasn't enough.

There were kappa who were banished for good, like Maeri and Ririsa. Others were a little more lucky, if you could think of it that way. Her teleporter mishap hadn't just cost her an arm. It had also flooded an entire wing of the kappa hideout. Kappa tech was waterproof, but it wasn't crushproof, and the flood had toppled experiments, splintered doors, scattered wardrobes, and flushed a very irate salmon into the communal glassware cabinet. Nobody had really bothered to give her an invoice before they expelled her, but she'd heard rumors that the damages were about fifty thousand yen.

At this rate, it would take her weeks to earn that much. With a sigh, Rumi flopped back against the dog, then fished in a pocket and popped another peppermint into her mouth. She couldn't be too upset, anyway. This was the first time in months that she'd slept under a real roof, the kind that didn't dribble water on her face when it rained too hard or the wind came from the wrong direction. The pile of tools and material Touko had provided had given her enough to experiment to her heart's content, and she even sometimes got to eat food that she hadn't just stabbed herself four minutes earlier.

"HEY!" Touko's voice echoed through the cave network. "GONNA BE HEADIN' OUT TO ROB ANOTHER HOUSE IN ONE HOUR, AND ANYONE WHO ISN'T IN THE FRONT ROOM AND READY IS GONNA BE TARGET PRACTICE!"

… okay, so, the banditry wasn't so great. But, in the words of a traditional kappa aphorism, if you laid a few eggs, somebody was bound to try making an omelet. You had to take the bad with the good.

Rumi sighed and looked back to her notebook. If she hurried up, she'd have time to double-check all the numbers before they left.

Hatate glanced down at the paper in front of her, shifting uneasily in her seat. "I really have to read all this junk?"

"It's only a few lines!" Sanae said. "Just this once, okay? It will be a big help."

Hatate frowned, drumming her fingers on the desk.

They were in the broadcasting studio, and over the past few days, Sanae had tried making it look like what she imagined a TV studio should. Nitori's drippily-painted station logo was hanging on the back wall, and she'd put away all the extra supplies and tools that had been laying around. She was pretty proud of the end result. The place still look outdated and ancient to her eyes, but in a good way. It looked like a lab out of some old sci-fi movie.

And right now, Hatate was sitting at the news desk, with Sanae leveling the camera at her as she awaited her decision.

"Alright," Hatate conceded with a sigh. "Can't hurt to give it a shot."

"Great!" Sanae flipped a switch on the camera, then hovered her thumb expectantly over the RECORD button. She hadn't found many excuses to use it, but she'd still fiddled with the device enough to learn how to record things, rather than broadcast them live. It was bound to come in handy sooner or later. "Whenever you're ready, then?"

"Right..." Hatate did not sound confident. "Here goes, I guess."

Hatate took a deep breath to prepare herself, and Sanae hit RECORD. Hatate held a paper up in her hand and read from it.

"Um, h-hello, Gensokyo! I'm Hatate Himekaidou, and I am a normal tengu. But now, thanks to the, uh, new, uh, Gensokyo Channel One... programming partnership... thing... I have my own news show, which will be broadcast to possibly hundreds of humans.

"A-and the best part is..." Hatate had been staring right at the script, but now glanced up. Seeing the camera again, she hurriedly looked away and shrank down in her seat, like she was trying to hide from it. "I get paid to do it. So if you have, uh... if you have... ideas for a television program and would like..."

Hatate trailed off, mumbling the words under her breath. Sanae frantically gestured for her to speak up.

Hatate's voice spiked back up to its normal volume. "... please come to the Gensokyo Channel One main office on Youkai mountain during... during morning hours, and maybe... wecanhelpyourdreamcometrue."

Hatate blurted out the last few words in one go, then slumped back in the chair, letting out a sigh of relief. She glared at the camera. "Is that it?"

"That was... definitely something," Sanae agreed, as positively as she could. "I was thinking that maybe you could try again and this time do it a bit more, um... confidently?"

"Like what?"

"Like, usually, when people read things on TV, they're really..." Sanae ducked out from behind the camera and took a moment to steady herself, calling upon the spirit of every television reporter she'd ever watched back home. "'Good evening! I'm Sanae Kochiya, with Gensokyo Channel One news, live from our studio on Youkai Mountain! Today's top story is, um…' Well, you know. Like that."

Hatate gave her a blank stare.

"Go on, try it!"

"Why would you even say all of that? If they're watching, they already know it's the news, right?"

"Well, um, maybe. But it's… tradition, kind of! Like having a big headline on the front of a newspaper."

Hatate did not look convinced. Sanae stepped back behind the camera and zoomed in on her face. "Go on, try it!"

Hatate looked balefully to the camera, then sighed. "Hey, uh, I'm Hatate Himekaidou, of… Gensokyo… Whatever… Thingy." She waved one hand vaguely in the air. "Tonight's news is… you know..." She trailed off mumbling.

Sanae stopped the camera and hesitated before saying, "I'm not sure this is going to work..."

"Hey, look! I only said I was going to give you the news! You're the one who started expecting me to read it in front of some box!"

"I guess that's true... Um. Well, for now, we can have somebody else read the stories, okay? Until you feel comfortable doing it yourself, I mean! If we did that, do you think you'd be able to do your first broadcast tomorrow? That should give you enough time to put together a story or two, right?"

"Oh, yeah, easy. I've pretty much already got the first story lined up, so it oughta be really easy to make it into a story for the news. This kinda stuff only needs to be a few minutes, right?"

"Well, it depends on how important the story is, but most of them aren't very long. What's the story?"

Rather than answer immediately, Hatate started fidgeting with her camera. After a few seconds, she turned it around and offered it over. "These guys."

Sanae stepped closer. Onscreen was a picture of a few… well, they looked like tengu. They definitely had the masks, at least. They all had crossbows slung over their shoulders, and most of them were hauling something else. Behind them, Sanae could just make out a dirt path. The rest of the surroundings were too dark to see much. "Um," she said. "Who are they?"

"They apparently call themselves the 'Tengu Anti-Human Militia,'" Hatate said, turning the camera back around. "They've been robbing lots of humans lately."

"I didn't know youkai did that kind of thing."

"I'm kinda surprised you haven't heard of them. They're causing a lot of trouble up on the mountain. The great tengu are going nuts trying to figure out who it is."

"Huh..."

"I guess as long as it isn't an incident or somebody killing humans, shrine maidens don't care about this kinda stuff, huh?"

"No, it's not that...! Just... I've been really busy with the radio station." Sanae flashed her a smile. "Don't worry, I bet Reimu's going to take care of it! … but if you've got a picture of them, don't you already know who they are?"

"Eh? No, it doesn't work like that at all. I use thoughtography."

"Thoughtography...?"

"I can take a picture of anyone, anywhere..." Hatate gave a proud smirk and flipped her camera shut. "But I kinda need, like, a good idea of what I'm going for, y'know?"

"Oh! Like Hermit Purple!"

"... Huh?"

"Um, never mind. So there are a bunch of youkai attacking people?"

"Robbing them or something, I guess. In the old days, we wouldn't care about this kinda thing. It happens every generation or two. A bunch of dumb kids feel like they've gotta prove something, they cause trouble for a while, eventually they calm down and, you know, stop being dumbasses. But now, we've got all this… reputation and stuff to think about, so they wanna make sure everybody knows tengu society isn't behind this. Kinda boring, but it's enough for a story, right?"

"Right! That's pretty good for a first broadcast." Sanae grabbed the camera and hit the record button again. "Anyway, let's try that commercial one more time, okay?"

Hina's house wasn't much to look at. It wasn't something she'd built so much as conglomerated: A few pieces of wood here, an added chimney there, and over the years what had started out as a tiny shack had turned into a cozy cottage, albeit one where no two boards were quite the same color. Inside, it was much the same, with every knickknack, trinket, or interesting memento she'd ever found scattered around many pieces of secondhand furniture.

And now, looking quite out of place, the television sat on a stool in front of her.

Getting it hadn't been as difficult as she'd worried. The line at Suzunaan had stretched out the door, but once she queued up and the other customers noticed her, half of them quietly excused themselves. A decent amount of those who remained, she'd recognized as disguised youkai. When she got to the front, the girl running the shop had taken a few minutes to answer her questions before making the sale, and Hina was the proud owner of a new television.

She'd been watching it for hours now, and it seemed like every program was weirder than the one before it. More important than the plots, though, were the people. As a connoisseur of human misfortune, Hina couldn't get enough of drama, and now, she had a direct feed of it to her living room, twelve hours a day. Better yet, the people didn't mind that she was the one watching them. She could sit here and be a part of their lives, and nobody minded. Even if they were images on a screen, that wasn't a treat she got very often.

The credits to her fourth or fifth program rolled, and Hina considered whether she should turn the television off to save power. Before she could reach it, though, another program came on.

"Hello, Gensokyo! I'm Hatate Himekaidou, and I'm a normal tengu. But now, um, thanks to the new, uh, Gensokyo Channel One programming partnership, I, I um... have my own news show, which will be broadcast to possibly hundreds of humans."

Hina listened with rapt attention.

After four nights of robberies, Rumi had gotten used to the rhythm. Maeri would pick out a target and give them directions to it. They'd sneak down the mountainside, scout the place out, and attack it. Afterward, they'd make a break straight for the river and dive in, sneaking back to the hideout under the safety of water.

Rumi would feel much better if they could sneak down the river too, but Maeri had made the fairly good point that people might get suspicious if the 'tengu' always showed up dripping wet.

Tonight's walk back upstream felt even longer than usual. The kappa formed a tidy procession as they slogged into the cavern and piled their new acquisitions near the door for later sorting. The eclectic mix of goods looked quite out of place in the cave: a small bag of precious stones, a crate of pottery, a few jugs of sake, a quiver of arrows, two bows, four waterlogged kimono, and even an entire bale of rice. Rumi had been in charge of the kimono, and had almost finished spreading them out to dry when a thunderous WOOF echoed through the cave. The dog dashed out and leapt at her, and she had barely enough time to brace herself before he tackled into her tummy, almost bowling her over.

Maeri looked over from taking stock of the new acquisitions, a notepad in hand. "I think that dog's still getting bigger."

"Is he...?"

"He's still growing." Maeri turned to thrust her pen accusingly at him. Her dress for the day was an even more elaborate pile of frills than usual, and they didn't stop shaking back and forth until seconds later. "He's going to get even bigger."

"Really...?"

Ririsa grunted as she dropped off her load, then butted into the conversation. "Yeah, probably fill the whole place and crush us. It happens all the time."

"That... that doesn't actually happen, does it?" Rumi eyed the dog anxiously. Like most things that weren't fictional science, Rumi wasn't very knowledgeable about dogs or sarcasm.

"I've heard they can get really big in the outside world," Maeri continued, ignoring the topic at hand. "Somebody I know said she found a human who had wandered across the barrier once, and the lady had a dog bigger than she was."

Maeri quieted down as Orisa approached and slid her own load of stolen goods into the pile. She leaned in and gave Orisa a kiss on the cheek, ignoring the annoyed grumble this drew from Ririsa. Orisa returned the kiss, then leaned in to peer over the dog."What's his name?"

"I haven't decided yet." Rumi reached down to ruffle his ears. A satisfied rumble came from deep in the dog's throat. "Maybe Tarou?"

"That's boring. ... Robo."

"Robo?"

"A better name."

"Tarou's a good name too..."

"It's boring," Orisa repeated, in the barely-mumbling tone she used for everything.

"I think it's cute!"

"Robo is a pretty weird name for a dog," Maeri interjected. "... and Tarou's a boring name." She looked up from her notebook again. "He looks like a Miki. Or a Jasper. Not Tarou."

"A big dog like that needs a tough name," Ririsa said. "Spike, or something."

"I don't see why anybody else gets to name him," Rumi said. "He's my dog!"

"We were all there when we stole him."

"I'm the one who asked for him, though...!"

"Robo," Orisa repeated, insistently.

"We can call him a fur coat if you all keep squawking about it." Touko's voice somehow pierced into the conversation, even though she was all the way on the other end of the cavern.

"Not big enough," Orisa said. "Not even a dog like that. Takes a lot for a coat."

"We'd make it work," Touko grumbled.

"Three or four dogs, at least," Orisa continued, more quietly. "More if you want boots."

Touko took her time in approaching the group, only visible as a silhouette in the dimly-lit edges of the cavern. She stepped into the light, and all four watched apprehensively as she approached the coffee machine and filled her mug. She took a sip, and gave everybody a look that challenged them to try hurrying her. Nobody did. The 'grumpy and drinking coffee' look was a classic among kappa, and the argument seemed like a poor choice of hill to die on. "So," she said, "I'm gonna be real generous and assume that since you all have enough time to argue about a mutt, none of you have anything you need to be workin' on tonight."

A wave of guilty murmurs rose from the group. Nobody quite dared to meet Touko's eyes. Even Ririsa who, if the rumors were true, had once faced down the Hakurei shrine maiden for nearly fifteen seconds.

"Well, it'd hardly be fair for me to keep all the work for myself, now would it?" Touko grinned a grin that would probably cause holy symbols to tarnish in her presence. "Ririsa, why don't you run on down to the human village and see what news you can pick up?"

Ririsa grunted. "Can do. … dressed like a human, right?"

"Yeah, dressed like a human, because get this—you're gonna be around humans and trying not to pick a fight. It's a little thing I like to call 'subterfuge.' Go on, get moving. Maeri." Touko turned toward her next victim. "Double-checked all our plans for the big bang yet?"

"I'm working on it," Maeri said. "I'm pretty confident in the numbers, but whoever does it will need to be quite a fast runner. It's all downhill from the site, and the water—"

"One problem at a time. Orisa—how are the disguises holding up?"

"Good. Sturdy material. Wings aren't comfortable yet. Adjusting the harnesses."

"Rumi." Touko turned toward her. "Had any breakthroughs on them bombs yet?"

"Well, um..." Rumi hadn't realized that she was tensing up until Touko's eyes had fallen on her, but now that they were there, she felt like her heart was trying to squeeze down her throat into her stomach. "Not really... I'm running out of things to try, and the farms we've robbed so far, um, haven't had much stuff for me to experiment with... I'd thought they would, but..."

Rumi trailed off, expecting an outburst, but the others were mostly nodding in understanding. It was only common sense to keep a few kilograms of scrap and some drums of highly reactive chemicals on hand. You never knew what you'd need, after all. The human houses they'd raided didn't have so much as a single thermite welder. It really made you wonder how such a species got by.

"So what, you need more material?"

"Well... I can make a lot with what I have, but I need more ideas."

"So what you're sayin' is you can't do the job I hired you on for."

Rumi squirmed under Touko's gaze like an ant being tortured by a sadistic child. "Um, well... books usually help. If I can see what kind of ideas they've had in the outside world, it's easier to figure out what will work..."

"Books?"

"Uh-huh."

"Fine. What've you got on that front, Maeri?"

"Oh, ah." Maeri quickly fumbled a heavily-stained notebook out of her pocket and flipped through it. "For outside world books? There aren't many options, I'm afraid. Kourindou, but that's under the gap youkai's protection. Bad idea, probably doesn't even have the kind of stuff you want anyway. Oh, there's also Suzunaan. That's right by the river, even, so it should be easily accessible."

"Well, you see?" Touko said. "That right there's the power of teamwork. Just warms my heart, really." She pushed herself up from the table and yawned. "Start puttin' together a plan of attack for it. The farmhouses won't go nowhere if we leave 'em along for a night. Tomorrow, we'll take a break and hit this Suzunaan place."