"Marisa."

"Yeah."

"That was a stupid case you found."

"Well, it seemed to amuse you at least."

Nitori was silent. Back to absentmindedly looking at the floor.

Marisa gave Nitori a sympathetic pat on the head, "Well, I think I might have something a bit more challenging for you then."

Nitori gave Marisa an apathetic sideways glance.

"There's a watermill that isn't working."

Nitori gazed back down into the floor, sighing, "They'd fix something like that before I even got out there."

Marisa whispered into her ear, "The grain disappears completely."

Nitori's ear twitched slightly, and then she rolled over, turning away from Marisa, "Why am I still alive?"

"Well, apparently, today it's so you can look at a watermill."

Nitori stared at Marisa for a while.

Marisa sighed and patted Nitori's head, "Look, you can come back and lay on the floor if there's nothing interesting, alright? I didn't promise anything."

Nitori grimaced, "Fine."

She threw some grain onto the mill, noting again how it mysteriously went in on one side, and nothing on the other.

"I know you already probably took it apart a million times now, but-"

The man nodded, "I understand, you got to see it for yourself."

Nitori nodded.

"Well then, I'll leave you to it. If you have any more questions, let me know."

She plopped down her backpack on the ground, and got to work. After a bit of inspection, she wasn't even sure if she needed to take it apart. It wasn't like a watermill was very complicated machinery. She gave it an overview.

Over there is the shaft carrying power from the river. Here are the gears that redirect the energy to the main shaft to the millstone.

She blinked, That's it. Nothing very complicated here.

As the wheel turned, she inspected the bed and runner stones. yet again, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

Well, I suppose the next step is to pull them apart, and inspect them individually. Maybe it's just some crack or grain formed on the stone that...

She was lost in thought.

"Nitori."

Marisa rubbed Nitori's head, "Nitori!"

She blinked awake, bags underneath her eyes.

"I, uh, got some food."

"No need. There are bags of flour here."

"Nitori, you can't...just eat raw flour."

She was already staring at the millstone, immediately lost again the moment she 'woke up.'

Marisa sighed, "O.k., well, I guess I'll just...come back later then."

"Mm."

Marisa paused at the door, as if to wait for a complaint, but left, feeling somewhat dissatisfied, whispering, "You know, for a gal who makes me care for their listlessness, you sometimes leave me feeling envious."

The gearing had been detached, leaving the millstone still so Nitori could inspect it, and now, having come to the problem again, she found she was just as stuck as when she had fallen asleep. In this moment, Nitori placed her palm on the surface of the millstone. She absentmindedly gazed at the millstone. She wasn't thinking about anything. She didn't even notice she was breathing. She was so spaced out that if someone had told her that she had died for the past half hour, she would believe it.

"Ow."

A pause.

"OW!"

She lifted up her hand suddenly, as one would do if they if they had accidentally brought their hands to a fire. She looked at her hand, and found tiny red welt marks against where it has been sitting on the stone. She looked around and grabbed some rotted woodchips. Carefully, she broke it off into small thin picks of wood, and then she carefully propped them up like a house of cards on the millstone.

And now, she waited. Within a few seconds, one of the picks of wood had suddenly snapped in half. She then began searching for a scale in her pack, and by the time she found one, half of the wood had disappeared.

"I need something else," she murmured to herself, looking around. She needed something that would clump together easily, and be easy to weigh.

She looked down at the floor.

Within moment she had stripped one of the loose wooden floorplanks, shaving off its ends and weighing them as she noted the time and weights of the pieces of wood at different points on the millstone-at times going back to using some of the flour to compare the rates of decay in-

"Hey! What the hell is going on?!"

The millowner was back.

Nitori stared at him with a look that screamed, "What's the problem, mister?"

"Don't rip up my floor!"

Nitori stared at the floor, "Ah."

She looked back at the millowner, "I'll shore some a new plank, don't worry about it."

"Why is the flour open?"

"I had to eat."

"You can't just eat raw flour."

Nitori was off again as the millowner shook his head, "Look, what's going on?"

"It's alive."

"Excuse me?"

"The millstone is alive."

"How?"

"Don't know. But it has the sole desire to consume."

The millowner frowned, "How terrible."

Nitori grinned, "How beautiful."

"Excuse me?"

She looked up at the millowner, "I mean, it can just go on like this, forever! No other care in the world. No existential pain at all."

The millowner blinked, "Well, no, it can't go on like this. I hate to state the obvious, but if the millstone is defective, then I have to replace it. Getting food on the table is more important, lady."

Nitori gave an indignant, knowing sigh. She wanted to protect the millstone. She didn't know why she felt so attached to it, but she did. Well, she had some idea. At some deeper level, she wanted to be as simple as the millstone. She almost felt of it as a superior to herself, as odd as that sounds.

She looked at the millowner, "Do you have any rubbish?"

"Excuse me?"

"I don't think you have to get rid of this millstone, and if you give me some rubbish, I'll demonstrate."

The millowner nodded, "I'll get some chaff."

When he came back, Nitori carefully arranged the chaff on the millstone, to mimic the same demonstration she had performed earlier with the wood.

Within a few seconds, the chaff pile shifted and moved, "Ah," the millowner uttered in a startled expression.

Nitori nodded, "You see, it can disintegrate rubbish very handily for you. If you do enough and train it, it'll generate more heat more efficiently than if you burned it."

The man nodded, "I see. It's not very fast with the chaff compared to the grains though."

Nitori took out her notes, "That's why I was using your grain and wood here. If you keep giving it chaff, it will eventually come to prefer it. You dont even need to have it attached to the gearing and moving here. If you just place it on the stone, it will consume it."

The man nodded, "Even a stone can be trained to like garbage if they have to swim in it enough."

Nitori sighed, what the man had just said made it apparent to her that she didn't like this solution. She turned to the man, "Maybe it would be best if I turned it back to consuming the flour, at least then its life would be a little bit more noble-"

The man slapped his hand on Nitori's back, smiling, "NO. No. That's quite alright. This is a fine solution that we can make use of."

After some pleasantries, Nitori and the man helped clean up the mess again, and she left back to her place, with a couple bags of flour as thanks.

As she passed down the road a ways, she looked back towards the mill and grimaced.

Does such a driving will really come so easily to beings? You just do something enough and that's enough to want to do it? Like a dog wagging its tail?

And is that really a good thing? Learning to like garbage like that?

She didn't like her solution. It...it ground her the wrong way.