Chapter 6: Sealed with a Kiss
Three days later, Marisa waltzed through The Wandering Eye's dining room under the eyes of her crow tengu captors. The schoolgirl witch clutched a black-and-white bundle to the breast of her uniform. As she twirled around, a curtain of gold swept behind her.
Alice's care package finally arrived.
The petite witch flew up the stairs, two steps at a time. At the top, Marisa froze, and dipped a hand into her purse.
The door to her room was wide open.
With her trigram furnace at the ready, Marisa slid along the wall towards her room. After scurrying past her daddy's room, the schoolgirl witch knelt by her open door. She set her bundle behind her, and then her purse on top of it. Only then did Marisa peek around the corner.
Someone scattered her sheets, flipped her mattress, and flung her magpie collection of Moriya hamlet mementos across the floor. The mess reminded Marisa of her cottage after the nasty magical mishaps caused whenever Alice tried to improve Marisa's spells. But Nanami prohibited any magic stronger than a spell card inside her saloon. The petite witch drew in a deep breath and padded around the corner.
A solid weight rammed the schoolgirl witch's midsection, slamming her against the wall. An unseen hand ground Marisa's face into the wall, while another caught her hand holding her trigram furnace and clubbed it against the doorframe's edge. Marisa's favorite weapon dropped from her numbed fingers.
"Where is the book?" her attacker hissed. Hot breath fogged in Marisa's ear as a hand grabbed Marisa's hair near the scalp.
But the schoolgirl witch remained silent, her attention focuses on her shoes.
A boot lashed out at Marisa's foot. The schoolgirl witch stepped over it and drove her heel into the ankle. Her assailant toppled over, yanking the petite witch to the floor.
Marisa rolled away, flailing to get her fingers on her trigram furnace. But her unseen foe yanked hard on the witch's Rapunzel hair, dragging her back towards the fight. Marisa grunted as her attacker fell and smothered her.
The petite blonde squirmed and jabbed and rolled, driven by instincts honed by ten thousand fights with her older brothers. She seized a handful of a familiar brown jumper and flipped her attacker away. Now free, Marisa scrambled to her feet and faced her foe, a wasp-waisted spiderette crowned with straw-colored braids.
"Not bad." Akikonomu Kurodani wiped a trickle of blood from her lip. "You must have brothers. Only a little sister wrestles so viciously."
Marisa searched for her trigram furnace with the corner of her eye. "Tell Yamame to stop wasting my time with small fry."
Akikonomu flashed her fangs in a predatory grin. "Why should she have all the fun?" She lunged at the petite witch.
Marisa dove for the wall, scooped up her trigram furnace, and rolled into a crouch. An actinic glow rid the bedroom of shadows as the witch aimed her furnace at Akikonomu. But the spiderette's lunge was a feint, and Akikonomu fled out the door.
The Rapunzel witch scurried out the door. She glimpsed Akikonomu's crown of braids bouncing down the stairs. Marisa vaulted the railing, flattening the spiderette below. The two blondes tumbled down the stairway and sprawled in a heap in the stairwell.
Akikonomu staggered to her feet first and broke for the door, weaving around the dining room tables. Marisa grimaced and rolled to her stomach. With one eye closed, the petite witch trained her furnace at the fleeing spiderette and drew on her magic.
The spiderette spy crashed through the saloon's swinging doors, chased by a sparking beam of blazing light.
Marisa crumpled to the floor and closed her eyes, waiting for the purple afterimage splotches to fade away. She soaked in the sudden comfort of the hardwood floor.
Moments later, a heavy stomp thundered through the ceiling.
Marisa roused herself from the floor and staggered up the stairs, clinging to the railing. The petite witch covered the first-floor railing with the bowl of her trigram furnace. Any spiderette foolish enough to linger would bathe in the soothing glow of Master Spark.
But the only person visible in the hallway was the salt-and-pepper figure of her father, cradling an armful of electric purple, bespoke tailoring, and ribboned tresses. Inside the neat bale, Patchouli Knowledge cast a glance over her shoulder, then hid her blush in Mr. Kirisame's chest.
Marisa rolled her eyes. Then, as though her father and his newest squeeze were never there, the schoolgirl witch marched past, retrieved her bundle and purse, and slammed her bedroom door behind her.
In a corner of the Wandering Eye's dining room, Marisa tapped a stack of cards against the hardwood table, then dealt five on top of the fanned deck in front of her. With a glower, Marisa examined the hand.
Four of a kind, Non-Dimensional Laser.
Casting a moue, the witch flicked the failure away. The remaining cards in her hand returned to a stack curing over her trigram furnace.
Marisa pushed back from the table, nursing her bruises with a bottle of red wine. After nearly a week in Sanae's hand-me-down sailor dress, it was a relief to return to the proper frilled apron and fashionable dress of a cute witch. But the twin ambushes of the spiderette and Patchouli kept the magical girl on edge. After downing another swig of the dry wine, she surveyed the saloon, idly swirling the bottle in her hand.
While the dinner rush was still hours away, a bashful wolf tengu male in scarlet over white kasane robes sought Reisen's favor on the opposite side of the dining room. The bunny nurse, once more a matchmaker, turned her ruby eyes upon Marisa. The schoolgirl witch shook her head and draped her thick braid over her shoulder. Marisa then Reisen's gaze as it cut to the stairwell.
Patchouli glided down the stairs like a forget-me-not petal on the breeze. Marisa plucked a spell card from the tray and waved the librarian over with the glowing card. As Patchouli approached, Nanami shoved a fistful of coins at an unseen figure behind the bar.
Marisa examined the librarian's uncharacteristically natty dress. Instead of her normal rumpled nightgown, Patchouli flaunted a tailored purple jacket with a silk satin sheen, drawn tight over a matching gored skirt and a high collar white shirt. "When did you raid Mary Poppins' wardrobe?"
"First impressions are crucial in business," Patchouli simpered. She sat and folded her hands on the table.
"You ran the old 'Crash into Hello' routine on my father." Marisa's spell card smoldered, then faded.
Patchouli's grin widened. "The classics still work."
"I get it, you read a romance novel once. That doesn't make you an expert." Marisa flicked the fizzled spell card across the table.
"Just like wearing a hat doesn't make a girl a witch?"
Marisa closed her eyes and counted until her temper faded. "Please tell me this is nothing more than a convoluted scheme to get your books back."
Patchouli cast a moue and lowered her eyes. "Right now, it's only business. I hoped-" The alchemist sighed. "He's very devoted to the memory of your mother."
Marisa shrugged. That was always her father's problem. In her mind's eye, the petite witch found herself once more leaving her family's house with all her worldly goods on her back. A long pull of red wine banished the raw memory. "When did you decide to throw yourself at the old fool?"
"He wrote me first, to learn more about the Golden Room. As he should." Patchouli said with growing confidence. "Ninety percent of the work for a treasure hunt is in the library, and no one in Gensokyo knows her way around a library better than me."
Marisa swallowed her retort with another sip. Despite the alchemist's obsessive vigilance, there were still a dozen unguarded passages into the Scarlet Devil Mansion's library.
"As soon as he told me that he saved every one of my letters, I added a couple drops of perfume to my signature. And when he confessed to saving the envelopes, I sealed each new letter with a kiss. I even told him so when I signed my letters with 'SWAK.'" Patchouli deflated. "It's a shame no one here knows the old courting games."
"Don't get your hopes up. He'll only disappoint you."
Patchouli leveled her frostiest glare at Marisa. "You should treat your father with respect."
"I've heard it before." Marisa waved away Patchouli's advice. "'When your father is alive, observe his will.'"
"'Honor your father and your mother so that your days may be long in the land.'"
"Wait until you know him better." Marisa raised the bottle to her lips and waited. Crestfallen, she looked down the neck, then upended the green-glass bottle over the floor. Only a single red drop fell. With a pout, the witch set it on the table. "Tell me why the old man is crazy about this Golden Room."
Patchouli froze, her mouth agape, as she stared at the schoolgirl witch. "Didn't you go searching for it? Everyone said that was why you hired that team of kappa miners to excavate those geysers on Youkai Mountain." The librarian coughed demurely as it was Marisa's turn to stare. "I guess we can rule out that rumor.
"The Golden Room is the last missing part of Abbess Hijiri's ship. When she first appeared in Gensokyo, Nue claimed it was the cabin where the Jeweled Pagoda of Bishamonten rested for the full thousand years of the abbess's imprisonment. She also bragged that she had seen it fall from the ship." Patchouli shrugged. "Everyone thought she was trying to coax free drinks from the boys. At least until Ichirin, a yamawaro, and a kasha backed her story."
"Funny, isn't it, how often everyone is wrong?" Marisa dealt out another round. Full house, Master Sparks over Sungrazers. A dead spider's hand.
"Your father wrote exactly that in his first letter." Patchouli grew animated, gesturing wildly as she spoke. "See, everyone focused their search on where the Star Lotus burst from the mountain. Not your father. He reasoned that the earthquakes, the kappa miners, and the Moriya shrine's reactor construction shifted the earth enough to pull the Golden Room into the heart of Youkai Mountain. But he needed help to track the changes to the mountain's caves since the abbess was unsealed. So, as the preeminent researcher in Gensokyo, of course, I said yes."
"You just wanted a pen pal." Marisa muttered.
But Patchouli no longer listened. Instead, her face lit up as her attention drifted over Marisa's shoulder.
Marisa swept up the fan of spell cards and darted for the stairs. But her father's hand fell on her shoulder, and she was well and truly caught.
"You might have learned that if you weren't avoiding me for the last three days." Mr. Kirisame guided his daughter back to her seat.
"I've avoided you for far longer than that." Marisa dropped petulantly into her chair and crossed her arms. "What other secrets are you keeping from me?
"Come to dinner with Miss Knowledge and me tonight, and you might find out." Mr. Kirisame sat next to his daughter.
Marisa glowered, sizing the gussied-up librarian for a proper hexing. "Only if you take me with you on your next hunt for the Golden Room. Youkai Mountain is too dangerous to explore alone—or with Patchi." The danmaku witch gave her deck of spell cards a quick riffle shuffle.
"We'll see. The tengu might not let us leave before the mountain's constant tremors hide the Golden Room once more." Mr. Kirisame stroked his chin. "But there might be another way."
"Those puppies are pushovers." Marisa danced a spell card across her knuckles. "So when do we leave?"
The salt-and-pepper shopkeeper turned from the prodigal witch. "I'm sorry, Miss Knowledge, but I lost your letters along with my journal on the mountain. I only hope that those earth spiders have not found them yet."
Marisa covered a bruise on her shoulder with her hand. "They're still looking."
But the petite blonde was overlooked as Patchouli took Mr. Kirisame's hand. "Maybe the tengu found them in their investigation. And if not, I can always scry for your journal with my magic."
"Thank you. I'm sure your magic will be most helpful."
Marisa dropped the object in her hand. A red mist blocked her vision. She was the magician of the family, not this purple pretender. And her daddy never, ever said those words to her, not even when she tried so hard to be helpful. No, it was always "Listen to your mother." The witch slammed the table. As the silverware clattered, a seven-point star circumscribed by actinic light spiraled from the spell cards in her hand. The air crackled—
"Hey, I'm right behind you!" a flirty voice cooed in her ear.
Marisa whirled around and found soft lips pressed against hers. As her magic circle blinked away, the petite blonde shoved hard against the kisser.
Koishi Komeiji staggered back, staring quizzically at Marisa. Pink flooded the silvery satori's cheeks. "I'm sorry, Marisa, I thought you were a boy." The Yellow Rose of Youkai Mountain tapped her head with her knuckles and stuck out her tongue. A coin fell from her fist.
Marisa knocked over her chair as she lunged for Koishi. But the silvery satori laughed as she skipped out of The Wandering Eye, with the schoolgirl witch on her heels.
