The trip to the mansion was a short one, and nowhere near enough time to prepare myself for the strangeness that lay within. A small stampede of rabbits had greeted us when the door opened, and Kaguya had quite cheerfully handed us off to her doctor friend, whose name I was told was Eirin. Eirin had accepted this with nothing but a resigned sigh, like having bewildered, gun-toting teenagers from another dimension foisted on her was a daily nuisance around here. Who knows, maybe it was. Now, we were in her examination room. Kaguya watched, while Eirin tended to Maribel with some help from her nurse.
Her nurse was also a rabbit. A girl with lavender hair, rabbit ears, and a poofy tail. In a suit. Because the night apparently hadn't been surreal enough already.
"It's not uncommon among injuries from youkai," Eirin said, as she filled a syringe from a small bottle. "Several of the more bestial types carry diseases, both mundane and magical."
"Ah..." I said, and tried not to get too distracted by wondering what a magical disease entailed. "I did clean her wound with some antiseptic..."
"Had it been blessed by a priest?" she asked flatly.
"Well, no."
"Then it didn't do anything. Udongein, hold her arm—yes, like that, thank you." Eirin poked the tip of the needle into Maribel's arm and injected the fluid. Maribel's condition had gotten worse since we'd arrived, and she was now slumped back in the chair, her eyes closed, breathing in quick, shallow breaths. She hadn't shown any awareness of the situation for several minutes.
"Is she going to be okay?" I asked, for approximately the ninetieth time. "It all happened so fast... she was fine this morning."
"Yes, this strain is like that," Eirin said, without an ounce of apparent concern in her voice. After watching Maribel appraisingly for a few seconds, she turned back toward the cabinets along the wall and started sorting through their contents. "It can take a day or two to reach the bloodstream, but once it does, it progresses quickly. She would have been dead by morning."
"So... is she going to be okay?"
"She will be fine." Confident, but without an ounce of soothing reassurance. It was a statement of fact. I wondered if the woman had ever heard the words 'bedside manner.'
"Eirin is very good at what she does," Kaguya said, trying to hide her amusement at the exchange. She stepped closer, a warm smile on her face. "Again, I'm sorry for frightening you earlier. I know that the circumstances are strange, but please, I'd like you to feel comfortable while you're here. Would you like any refreshments?"
I wanted to decline, but we had left camp before I'd even gotten anything into my stomach. Free health care already sort of stretched the bounds of traditional hospitality, so pushing it a bit farther didn't seem too unforgivable. Conversely, if there really was something sinister going on here, poisoning my drink seemed like it would just be needlessly baroque compared to their many other options. "Well, it was a bit of a walk..."
"A meal, then," Kaguya finished for me. "Inaba?"
"Ah, right. Coming right up, your highness."
The rabbit girl headed out of the room before I could even protest my request getting handed off to her. She seemed harried as it was. I'd also thought her name was Udongein, not Inaba. But even more pressing than those... "Er, 'your highness'?"
"A princess yes," Kaguya said, then paused in realization and drooped slightly. "You haven't heard of me?"
"No. Should I have?"
"I'm led to believe," Kaguya said, inclining her head as if bashfully accepting a compliment, "that my beauty is legendary among humans."
"Er, well. Nobody in the rest of the world really knows about Gensokyo, so—" And I paused, as several disparate parts of my brain clicked together. "Your name is Kaguya," I said.
"Yes."
"And you're ridiculously beautiful."
"Well, I wouldn't want to brag, but..."
"She would, actually," Eirin muttered under her breath, just loud enough for me to hear.
"Are you going to say that you're from the moon, too?"
I'd asked the question sarcastically, but Kaguya beamed. "Yes, exactly!"
"Er, so, are you...?" Four words in, I realized it was an irrelevant question. I'd already accepted that she was a murderer who could instantly heal any injury and lived in a house with a sapient rabbit nurse. 'Claims that she's the Princess Kaguya' was just one more item for a very tall pile. Any other day, I might have eagerly pressed her for details, but... "Never mind. So, is Mokou actually going to be okay tomorrow, or...?"
"Oh, yes. Please believe me when I say that I did nothing to her that she hasn't done to me hundreds of times before."
That left me with about ten million questions, but before I could ask them, Maribel's voice came from my other side. "Um, Renko? Where are we...?"
"Merry!" I whirled on her, and only barely restrained my urge to pull her into a hug. In the few minutes that Kaguya had kept my attention off her, she'd changed dramatically. Her face was back to its normal coloration, and her breathing had slowed down. Apart from looking a little groggy, I wouldn't have known anything was out of the ordinary. "You passed out, and it was looking pretty bad, so..."
"You collapsed while in the early stages of septic shock from a youkai-induced infection," Eirin said, with her voice raised to speak over me. Now that her patient was lucid again, she was all business. Without further introductions, she stepped in and grabbed Maribel's chin, tilting her head up and using a monocular to inspect her eyes. "I gave you something to repair the damage, and it seems to be working. And..." Her gaze flicked side to side as she inspected each eye in turn. "Your friend seems to have gotten you here before there was any brain damage."
"A-ah, um." Maribel tensed up under Eirin's ministrations, and when the doctor released her, she rubbed at the spot where she'd been holding her chin. "Well, thank you..."
"I'm going to give you something to weaken the disease," Eirin continued, stepping back over to the cabinet and grabbing one of the bottles she'd retrieved during her search. "It won't eliminate it, but it should stop it from causing any more problems while your immune system does its job. You'll need to avoid alcohol for the next two days until it's out of your system. Do you understand?"
"Well, yes, um, but..."
Eirin uncapped a fresh syringe, and Maribel stopped mid-sentence. Her eyes fixated on it.
"Good," Eirin said, oblivious to Maribel's reaction. She poked the syringe into a bottle and filled it with golden liquid, then turned back toward us. Only then did she notice that Maribel was frozen in anxiety. "... is something wrong?"
"I, um. Um. No, it's fine," Maribel stammered, suddenly very interested in staring at a spot on the floor.
"You did pounce on her before the poor thing could even finish waking up," Kaguya said, teasingly.
"Merry has had some bad experiences with doctors," I said. "She gets nervous, that's all."
"I see."
It was another souvenir of the TORIFUNE incident. Even after her stay at the sanatorium, Maribel had been subjected to an endless series of medical examinations and checkups, all searching for lingering effects of the virus. She always came back from them shaky and tired, but it had still taken me a month to catch on to the reason: after spending a week getting poked and prodded by doctors, just being in a doctor's office was enough to leave her anxious and uncomfortable.
As her girlfriend, I'd gotten used to accompanying her to the doctor for moral support. I knew the steps of this dance. I reached over and took Maribel's hand, interlacing our fingers. "Don't worry, Merry, we're safe here." I wasn't entirely sure of that, myself, but that wasn't what she needed to hear right now. "We'll go to find Mokou again in the morning. How do you feel, though?"
"Better. A lot better, actually..."
"The serum has a fairly powerful rejuvenating effect," Eirin said, stepping over with that syringe. "You'll be happy to know that any tumors you may have had are now in remission. Now, your arm, please."
Maribel eyed the syringe again. Her whole body tensed in protest, but reluctantly, she held out her free arm.
Eirin daubed the inside of her elbow with a disinfecting swab. Maribel squeezed her eyes shut and started breathing in short, anxious breaths. The needle pushed into her flesh. Maribel whimpered. Her hand clenched down on mine, and I squeezed back reassuringly.
The last of the medication disappeared into Maribel's arm, and Eirin pulled the needle back, already dabbing at the injection spot with a piece of gauze. "That should be all. Hold this, please."
Maribel pried her eyes open with a sigh of relief, and I released her hand. She pushed the gauze down with two fingers, looking glad that the whole ordeal was over.
"Now, then," Kaguya said, as cheerfully as ever. "I'm sure you two have had a long day. Should we go see how Inaba is doing on that dinner?"
Our night was a dizzying blur of new experiences. I would love to go into detail here, but honestly, most of it is kind of tangential to this case file. I'm going to put together entity files for most of the people we met, and I might make some kind of record on the mansion—Eientei, apparently—itself, so you can look for those once they're done.
To summarize: The meal was very nice, and within ten minutes of sitting down to eat, Maribel was as good as new. Her recovery from the disease was nothing short of miraculous. The change in our overall mood was just as sharp. Barely an hour before, we'd been cowering in the forest, waiting to die. Now, here we were, being served warm food while rabbits swarmed us to compete for Maribel's attention. It was almost enough to make me forget about the violent scene we'd been forced to watch that evening. Almost.
After an hour of answering questions about the current state of the outside world, Maribel and I were set up in a guest room. We took the welcome opportunity to wash up a little and change clothes and then settled into futons on the floor, with only moonlight trickling through the window for illumination.
When I woke up, at 7:13 AM, I was alone in the room. Well, apart from some rabbits, but I don't think those really count. They all got scared and scattered when I sat up, anyway.
I'm going to be honest with you: I was really curious about why the house was full of rabbits, but I was afraid it might be rude to ask, in case they were Inaba's cousins or something.
The night before, I'd been too busy dealing with the fallout of our evening to really appreciate the strange situation we were in. Now, waking up in this weird, otherworldly house, it was a bit harder to brush off. I had slept in a mansion that was hidden in a space-warping bamboo grove, which itself was in a pocket dimension to begin with, and where a casual murderer who claimed to be a moon princess lived, with her friends, a girl with rabbit ears, and a doctor.
Okay, sure. Why not.
I could hear conversation outside, so I crept across the room and peeked out the door. Down the hall, in the main room, Maribel and Kaguya were kneeling at a table. "Oh, Renko!" Maribel spotted me immediately and gestured me closer. "Just in time! We were about to have breakfast."
I straightened my clothes and walked out to join the two of them. A loose halo of rabbits were relaxing on the floor around them. I'm pretty sure that Maribel had established herself as a very good person to hang around, if you were a rabbit and wanted to be petted. Through a doorway, I could hear the unmistakable sound of cooking. I'd gotten enough of a hang for the household's social dynamics to guess that Inaba was the one who took care of that sort of thing.
"Good morning," Maribel said, as I settled down at the table.
"Morning..."
"Miss Houraisan was just telling me about the moon."
"... ah."
"She's from there."
"Oh, er... yes, she mentioned that yesterday."
"The moon. The Lunar Capital! With moon rabbits pounding mochi. An entire civilization!"
We had, of course, long suspected that there was a hidden civilization on the moon. It was one of those things that kept cropping up in the literature, and had a little more evidence behind it than you would expect. Most notably, the historic incident in which hundreds of people worldwide reported visiting the Lunar Capital in their dreams. (See: article by Tennenbaum and Ostermeyer, The Journal of Psychic Inquiry, July 2015 issue)
Now that we've got some firsthand accounts of it from Kaguya, I'll probably write a file on it. Once I'm done with this file. And the file on Kaguya. And Eirin. And Eientei. It could be a while, is what I'm getting at.
At the time, though, I just said, "I've always wondered how the rabbits are supposed to breathe up there."
Kaguya smiled. "I'd love to tell you all about it, but you have business to attend to with Mokou this morning, right?"
I glanced to Maribel uncertainly. It still felt a bit odd talking about this with Kaguya, since she had, you know, beaten Mokou to death in front of our eyes, but I didn't sense any hostility in the question. "We are, yes," I admitted. "I'm hoping she'll be able to help us with some problems."
"Well. It isn't polite to say bad things about somebody when they aren't around to defend themselves—" The lavender-haired rabbit girl walked into the room and silently sat a pot of tea on the table between us, and Kaguya inclined her head in gratitude. "—thank you, Inaba—so I'll just say that you should be careful when dealing with that girl. She's very violent, I'm afraid."
"Is that why you... fought—" (killed) "—her? Self-defense?"
"It's a very long story. 1300 years, even. I wouldn't want to bore you with the details."
"Ah."
Inaba had been hovering near the table uncertainly, and now took the opportunity to interject, "Breakfast will ready soon, your highness. Um, will your guests be leaving afterward...?" She sounded hopeful that we would.
"I'll leave that up to them," Kaguya said, and poured herself a cup of tea.
"Oh. Um, well." I rubbed at the back of my neck and looked down, mentally grumbling. I'd already made the decision on that last night. If we were going to get to class tomorrow, we only had about twelve hours to get back to Mokou, convince her to help us, have her do whatever she had in mind, walk back to the barrier, and drive home. That didn't leave a lot of wiggle room for relaxing here, let alone studying the place in the kind of detail it obviously deserved.
I'd just like to say: If you think that 'I have class Monday' is a bad reason to leave a safe haven against the monsters that are trying to kill you, I would, objectively, agree. Subjectively, my parents would not be happy if I skipped weeks of classes. Since they were covering my tuition and a large share of my rent, it was very much in my best interests to keep them happy if I wanted to, say, finish college.
"We probably should leave after breakfast," I said. "Sorry. This forest is hard enough to navigate, and I'd really prefer to get back to the car before nightfall..."
"I can at least show you back to Mokou's house. After that, you're on your own, I'm afraid. She and I don't see eye to eye."
"So she isn't, um... dead?" Maribel said.
"It's been almost twelve hours. I'm sure she'll be fine." Kaguya took a sip of her tea. "Maybe a little cranky, though."
The breakfast, like the previous night's meal, was wonderful. Afterward, our preparations were pretty quick. I really would have liked a bath, but with no indoor plumbing, I guessed that it would take a while. So, after thanking Eirin and Inaba for their hospitality, we set off for Mokou's house, led by Kaguya.
Again, the bamboo forest seemed to cooperate with a native. I kept an eye on the sky this time, trying to judge whether there was some trick to it, but we really did seem to be heading in a straight line. Soon, we were on the narrow path that we'd seen last night... and in another ten minutes of walking, we passed the spot where the fight had happened.
Kaguya didn't even acknowledge it, but the damage was more apparent by day. There was a tract of broken and trampled bamboo, ending in the scorched area where the final battle had happened. In several places, the dusty dirt of the path was stained brown with dried blood. Especially in the spot where Mokou had died, the previous night.
The smell still hanged in the air, though. It made me glad I hadn't eaten much at breakfast.
And yet, there was no corpse. I took that as a good sign.
A few hundred meters farther down the road, Kaguya paused. "This is probably as far as I should take you, I'm afraid," she said, and gestured to a narrow footpath leading up a hillside. "Mokou's house is at the end of that trail."
I didn't relish the idea of walking in this forest alone again, but at least we were near a road. If we got lost, we could find our way back here easily enough, I assumed. A road had to lead somewhere. "Thank you."
"Thanks," Maribel said. "I guess this is bye, huh...?"
"Mokou will probably refuse whatever request you're making on principle if she sees you talking to me," Kaguya said, with a slight smile. "I'll wait here for a few minutes. If anything goes wrong, you can come find me, and I can at least least help you find your way out."
Maribel stepped forward and pulled Kaguya into a soft hug. Kaguya looked surprised, but returned it. "I'm sure we'll come back sometime," Maribel said. "This place is too interesting not to!"
"I'll look forward to it, then."
After we finished our goodbyes, Maribel and I set off down the path. It was a narrow, winding one, with underbrush clawing at us from both sides. It snaked its way up the hill, until we could see out over the forest below. From here, we could even see Eientei, a small bamboo-free depression in the canopy in the distance. Soon, Mokou's house came into view.
It was a tiny, quaint-looking thing, somewhere between an old traditional-style house and a European cottage. The outside walls were a mix of shoji and wood, with a few windows in the wooden sections. There was an awning on the back, and a small porch out front. The roof was sloped, and a small chimney poked up from it.
It stood in the middle of a small clearing, and around it were scattered various signs of inhabitation. A line between two trees had a few articles of clothing drying on it. There was a pile of firewood along one side of the house, and nearby, a heavily-scored tree stump with an axe buried in it. A fire pit stood in the back, and around the edges of the clearing, a few persimmon trees stood.
It was... picturesque, I guess would be the word. It looked like it belonged on a cheap postcard.
There was nobody around, so I approached the door and knocked. "Miss Fujiwara? Are you home?"
No answer. "I'm, um, Sumireko Usami's granddaughter."
Still nothing. I knocked again. Nothing. I tried the knob, and while the door wasn't locked, a quick peek inside assured me that if anybody was in there, they weren't in sight.
"Maybe she's really dead...?" Maribel asked.
"Well, her body wasn't there, and she's supposed to be immortal..."
"Maybe she's sleeping. Being killed is probably pretty exhausting."
"Maybe." I knocked harder. There was no answer. I debated my next course of action for a moment, but we'd been through too much to leave empty-handed. Opening the door, I stepped inside.
The inside of the house was a bit less photogenic than the outside. Clothes were scattered on the floor, and tools were propped in some of the corners. The furniture looked like it had all been hand-made; hand-made well, but the wood was left raw and unlacquered. I crept my way through the house until I found the bed. It was unmade, but nobody was in it.
I didn't want to trespass any farther, so after calling her name one last time, I made my way back out of the house.
"No luck?" Maribel asked.
"It doesn't look like she's in there..."
Maribel glanced back down the path. "Do you think I should go ask Kaguya to wait a bit longer?"
My mind flashed back to the previous evening, as I considered the possibility that we might have to find our way out of here without a guide. "That would probably be good, yeah."
She went. By the time she returned, I'd finished searching the grounds for any clue to where Mokou was, and taken a seat on the wood-chopping stump. At least, I think that's what it was used for. They show people chopping wood on stumps a lot in old-timey movies, don't they?
After twenty minutes of waiting, we started debating whether or not to give up and have Kaguya lead us out. Maribel briefly raised the idea of asking her for help, but it seemed like a hard sale to me. Hey, judging by the way you beat somebody to death with a rock last night, you can hold your own in a fight. How do you feel about your odds against a meter-tall armored spider?
We were still debating this when Mokou walked out of the brush.
Even though I'd seen her die barely twelve hours earlier, now, she looked mostly fine. There were some faint red lines on her face, like still-healing wounds, but it was a pretty damn good condition for somebody who should have been dead. She shot us a single look of disinterest. "... lost?"
Only then did I notice that she was carrying a rabbit.
It was a wild hare. Brown. Not like the ones in Eientei. Which was fortunate, because judging by the red stain along its side, it had been shot. Mokou had a bow slung over her other shoulder. I think it's safe to guess who had shot it.
"Oh, no," I said, and tried not to show my discomfort with the hare. "We were looking for you, actually. You're Fujiwara no Mokou, right?"
"Uh-huh." Mokou laid the rabbit out on the porch. "Don't touch that."
She stepped into the house, and Maribel and I exchanged uncertain glances. Seeing Mokou by day, she looked a bit scrawny. Sure, she'd done the flaming fist thing the night before, but she didn't really look like somebody who could take on one of those chimeras, let alone the Dark Thing. Kaguya had beaten her in a fight, and she didn't exactly act like a trained assassin. I wondered if my grandmother's trust had been misplaced.
Mokou stepped back outside, now holding a length of twine in her hand. She picked the hare up, and tied the twine around its hind legs as she walked. Unsure of what else to do, Maribel and I followed. She crouched down at the edge of the clearing and stepped on the end of the cord, holding it down. "It's obvious you want something," she said. "So you might as well say it."
"Oh, well. I am..."
Mokou lifted the hare by its head, pulling away from the rope to pull its skin taut, then scored a cut across its back.
I faltered. "A-ah, that is, my name is—"
Mokou dropped her knife and gripped the fur on either side of the cut, then pulled them apart, ripping the skin free and baring the muscle and bone beneath.
I averted my eyes. "My name is Renko Usami. I'm Sumireko Usami's granddaughter."
"Oh, Sumi?" For the first time, Mokou showed some interest. She looked back over her shoulder at me. "How's she doing these days?"
"Er, she disappeared almost fourteen years ago."
"... oh." Mokou seemed a little taken aback by this, and frowned thoughtfully. She kept peeling the rabbit's skin back, with a slightly disgusting tearing sound, until most of its body was bare. I'd never seen a freshly-killed animal in quite that condition before. It didn't look disgusting so much as... naked. Like some kind of freshly-hatched larva. "... fourteen years. I'm slipping. So you don't know where she's at?"
"I was five at the time, so... not really. Apparently she said something about going to explore another plane or something. Nobody's seen her since."
Mokou considered this, then nodded her approval. "Sounds like something she'd do, yeah."
Before I could respond, she grabbed the hare's head again, pulled the neck taut, slipped her knife through it, and decapitated the animal. The body fell to the ground, with what little blood hadn't already drained out oozing from its stump neck. "The thing is," I said, trying again not to look toward her.
Mokou grabbed one of the hare's ankles and snapped it. It was a sickening crack-pop sound. I flinched. "The, uh, the thing is..."
Another ankle. I felt my stomach tense up in preparation to leap out through my mouth. "I'm in a bit of trouble."
Another ankle. I swallowed to keep my breakfast on the inside. My only consolation was that there was only one more left. "And grandma said that you might be able to."
One last pop. I allowed myself to relax.
"Yeah?" Mokou said. She yanked at the fur, pulling it—and by extension, all four of the rabbit's feet—off. She hurled this into the forest, then plunged a knife into the creature's stomach and dragged it down. Its guts spilled out.
"To help," I finished, past my gagging.
Mokou sliced the guts off, then hurled them into the forest. Her hands were bloody now, but she wiped them on her pants. Start to finish, the process had barely taken thirty seconds. I gather that she was an expert at it. Gathering up the headless, skinless, gutless, footless hare, she stood and gave me a skeptical look, then glanced to Maribel, who was facing the other direction altogether with her hand over her mouth. "And who's this?"
"This is, um, Maribel Hearn—" I took my time to pronounce her name as well as I could, "—my associate. She's the vice president of the Sealing Club. Like the one grandma founded."
Mokou gave a disinterested grunt and carried her vaguely rabbit-shaped meat chunk toward the back of the house. I followed. "And Sumi said I'd help you, huh?" she said.
"Yes. There's a letter..." I patted my my bag, searching for it, and tried to remember what all it had said about dealing with Mokou.
"Help you with what?"
"There are these monsters... we think Merry—er, Maribel, that is—somehow brought them here, or created them by accident. At least one of them has tried attacking us directly."
"What kind of monsters?"
"Some of them are weird genetic hybrids. Er, that is, a gorilla with a tiger's head. Things like that. There's also some kind of giant spider thing that can hide in shadows, and... a monster that opens eye-filled holes in mirrors or something."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
I did have to admit, it sounded pretty dumb when I put it like that.
"It's true!" Maribel said, and hiked up her skirt, showing off the bandages on her thigh. "This is from the spider one. It nearly killed us."
"It attacked us outside of my house, and nearly beat the door down trying to kill us. We... think they're hunting us. Us in particular, I mean."
"Huh." Mokou sat down at the edge of her fire pit. It already had a pile of bamboo pieces, bark, and discarded tree limbs in it, and a flick of her fingers sent a tongue of flame streaking toward it. The spot where it landed burst into flames. She did it so casually, I almost didn't realize that I'd just seen a display of a superhuman ability. As the fire spread, she shoved a pre-sharpened stick through the skinned hare and draped it across the pit, dangling the meat just above the growing fire. "So let's say I believe any of this. What do you expect me to do about it?"
"I know it's a big imposition, but we were hoping you might be able to protect us until we can figure out how to get rid of them," Maribel said.
"Protect you. In the outside world?"
"Um, yes."
"For who knows how long."
"... yes."
Mokou gave us another look of disbelief and turned her meat over. "And Sumireko told you that I'd just say yes to that, no questions asked?"
"Well, she listed a few people on there, but. She said that you..." I faltered, as I realized that what I said next was going to sound very silly. Because it was. "She said that... you owe her some favors."
"Some favors."
"The letter was fifty years old," I said more quietly. "She didn't really go into specifics."
"... fifty? What year is it?"
"2069."
"Huh." Mokou poked at her meat a little, ignoring us for the moment. I could see that the heavy burden of 'some debts' at some point fifty years ago wasn't exactly weighing on her conscious.
"Look," I said. "Think of it this way. While you're outside, Merry and I will probably have to pay for your food, and you'll have free lodging in my apartment." Somewhere outside of Gensokyo, my bank account was crying in pain. "It will be like a free vacation!"
"Please, Miss Fujiwara," Maribel said. "We don't have anywhere else to turn, and we might die if you don't help us."
Mokou eyed the cooking rabbit, and I like to think she was weighing it against the promise of outside world food. She rested her elbows on her thighs and looked into the fire thoughtfully. "It's not like I've got anything better to do around here," she reasoned. "A decent look at the outside world might not be bad."
I stayed silent.
"Be a nice chance to get away from Kaguya for a while."
Again, I stayed silent. Crazed murderer or not, Kaguya had shown us a lot more hospitality than Mokou had so far.
"... I don't know about owing her anything, but if Sumi pops back up in a decade and finds out I let her granddaughter get killed, she'd be pretty pissed," Mokou reasoned out loud. She sighed. "If I said yes, there's something I'd want to do out there. Mount Fuji. Have you heard of it?"
"We... have, yes," I said, carefully. It sounded like some kind of weird trick question.
"Think we could go there?"
"Um," I said. This didn't seem like a good time to explain the Mount Fuji tourism industry to her. I really doubted that she knew what an ecological fee was, for starters. "Climbing season ends soon, but we can probably fit it in?"
"Can you, or can't you?"
"... we can, yes." I'd skip classes if I needed to.
Mokou pondered over this. She pulled her rabbit from the fire and inspected it. It had been charred to a crisp along the outside, and the flesh was still crackling and bubbling with juices. She seemed satisfied. Without waiting for it to cool down, she bit into it, pulling a strip of meat right off the ribcage with her teeth.
"You get me to Fuji," she said, before she was quite finished chewing, "and agree to bring me back here when you're done with me, and you've got yourself a deal."
"Oh. Oh, um, wow. Do you need to check your calendar, or...?"
She scoffed at me across her chunk of half-burnt hare. "Kid, I'm immortal. I have a few billion years of free time to work with."
"Oh. Right."
"How long before you need to leave?"
Her completely casual, almost disinterested, acceptance barely even felt real. I guess that when you're immortal, you can afford to take things as they come. I mean, it's not like she was going to die, right? "Preferably within a few hours."
"Great." Mokou took another big, juicy bite of hare, and stabbed the stick back into the ground. "I'll start packing."
