The tension in my muscles, which had gripped my entire body and sent me into a state approaching paralysis, was suddenly released, and I fell noisily out of the bed upon which I lay, a bed not too dissimilar to the one that I had previously been sleeping on. Judging by the very real agony that I felt upon my elbow colliding painfully with the hard, rocky ground, I could at least tell the difference between my current situation and my erstwhile brief traipse into the past, which now felt as if it had all been a dream. I curled up into a ball and rubbed the base of my arm, where the pain was now multiplying seemingly exponentially.
"Are you alright?" A figure in the corner of my eye rushed over and placed a hand on my shoulder.
"I'll be fine." I looked up and found a pair of worried red eyes gazing back at me. "Satori?"
"Yes, it's me." The little maiden helped me to my feet.
"Where are we?" I asked, looking around. I was in a room slightly bigger than Patchouli's, but the walls were made of jagged rock instead of wooden boards, and the only source of illumination came from a lamp swinging on a handle embedded into the wall across the room from where we stood.
"We are in a resting room in the Nuclear Furnace." Satori gestured for me to sit on the bed, and plopped herself down next to me. "You collapsed before Moriya could complete the spell. We heard you falling onto the floor, so Moriya decided to end the spell prematurely to prevent any further damage from being done to your body. Afterwards, we brought you here."
"Well, I would not say the spell didn't work at all," I commented.
"How so?"
"I saw a really strange dream. A dream that seemed almost as if it were based on reality, but one that revealed certain secrets about my current predicament that I would otherwise have never discovered." I gestured to Satori's third eye, which was as always strapped to Satori's chest. "Would you like to see?"
"If you will excuse me." Satori shut her other two eyes, and the third eye opened, blinking once before closing again. "I do not see anything."
"You don't see what I just dreamed?"
"I… No, I do not. But not only that. Between the moment the spell was activated, and now… There is nothing." She scratched her head. "Which is unusual."
"Unusual?"
"Normally, when a person sleeps, their mind remains active in some way, processing and digesting information as if it were watching a stage play, all whilst the body rests. Therefore, when I peer into their memories, I can see those strands of information being projected onto the theater of the slumbering mind, even if the person themselves does not remember it. But your mind seemed to have completely forfeited its ability to retrieve information throughout the duration that you were unconscious. It is as if you were dead, or… simply not there at all."
"How long was I out for?" I asked.
"Around ten minutes," came the response.
Ten minutes. That matched up with the amount of time I had spent in Patchouli's room – unusual in itself, since dreams tended to distort a person's sense of time, stretching it from seconds to minutes, or even minutes to hours.
Maybe I really had traveled back to the past; still, that theory remained a stab in the dark and nothing more. I knew that I needed to learn more about the magic that I could use, especially the spell that Patchouli had mentioned, before I could find any definitive answers to the growing number of questions that were emerging in my head.
The door to the room opened, and the head of Suwako protruded from the doorway. Upon seeing Satori and I, she sighed with relief.
"How are you feeling?" she asked.
"As well as can be expected." I gave her a reassuring smile, though my heart nonetheless clenched with unease. I did not know if what had just occurred was what Suwako had intended, and I felt that if I asked her directly she would not be forthcoming with her answer. "What happened with the spell?"
"I cannot say. Usually, we would be able to record your thoughts onto a screen outside the room, and then we would be able to sift through it. This time, however, something prevented us from doing so. The magical recorder we were using did not manage to detect anything."
I glanced at Satori, and she nodded back at me, as if to signify that what Suwako had said was true. I told Suwako about the dream I had just had, and as Suwako listened, her eyebrows began to furrow.
"It is very likely that what you saw was no dream at all," she said after I had finished. "The contents of your 'dream', coupled with the lack of visible activity from those ten minutes… Perhaps you did go back in time. But if you really had gone back in time, and revealed yourself to Patchouli as you said you had done, you would perhaps not be alive today. I hear the Scarlet Devil Mansion has a particular taste for flesh of the… more human variety."
"But how else could the 'dream' be explained?"
"Who knows?" Not the words I would have expected to hear from the mouth of a goddess, but then Suwako Moriya was no ordinary deity. "Do not seem so surprised," she added as if reading my mind. "I may be a goddess, but my purview extends only to the elements of the world that I am able to control. Beyond my abilities and corporeal form, which are indeed divine in strength and nature, I acquire knowledge in the same way that any mortal being might. As such, I cannot obtain knowledge about something that has never before been observed."
"Do you think Yasaka might know something about it?"
"She has mastery over the dimensions, but that extends only to the space inhabiting the heavens and the earth. Time is a whole other matter entirely. Not that there is a particular lack of entities with control over the spinning cogs of time, of course…"
Suwako did not finish her sentence, but the words left my lips before I was even aware of them.
"The maid," I said.
Suwako nodded. "The maid."
"Then if I were to seek answers, I would have to go to her."
"Precisely. Though, given the notorious intrigue that surrounds that place, and the unusual manner in which they dealt with you, I would give any notions of coming anywhere near the Mansion a thorough reconsideration. You have been there before, so perhaps you would be able to sneak in. I suspect that would not do you any good, however, given the power of the beings that guard that place."
"That would indeed be a problem. I could hardly walk in there and expect its inhabitants to acquiesce to my demands."
"It is a question without an answer, for now. You would be best served going over what that 'dream' of yours has taught you. Then one day, perhaps, you might be able to figure it out on your own."
"I will do that."
"Then I will see you out of this place. I apologize for causing you this unnecessary trouble – I had hoped for a more satisfactory result, but I suppose the mystique of the human mind is still beyond my understanding. Of course, that is what lends it its beauty."
We were led out of the Furnace control room, back over the walkway, and out into the cool air of the Palace courtyard. Suwako and Satori bowed, and with a deep intake of breath, I willed myself to depart from Former Hell for the second time in as many weeks.
