Deep Within...

Bella knew that she is having one of her vision dreams again...

But that usually happens only when she dozes off or falls asleep. This time, she's having one while wide awake...

Or at least, it feels like to her that she is wide awake...

At first, all Bella can see is pitch black. This happens at the first minute or so of every single visions she had before, so she's very much used to it.

As expected, bright lights begin to appear after about a minute or two of pitch blackness. The bright lights don't hurt her eyes, but she instinctively cover her eyes anyway, like she has always done in her previous vision dreams.

It isn't very long before the bright lights recede, and Bella finds herself standing in the middle of a bustling village.

A village that wouldn't look out of place in Feudal Japan.

Bella is stunned by what she is seeing. In all of her previous visions, people were only seen as faceless silhouettes in clothes. But here, she can actually see the full details of the face of everyone strolling through this village. Could her connection to whatever is causing these vision dreams be getting stronger?

While Bella is pondering about that question, she suddenly gets interrupted by a villager bumping into her.

"Be careful, miss." That villager tells her with a rustic Japanese accent.

"Sorry." Bella apologizes.

The American girl is surprised even further by that. That is actually the first time someone directly and physically interacts with her in a dream vision, and even talks to her, however brief that may be.

To test that the interaction earlier isn't just a coincidence, Bella crouches down to pick up a marble that rolled over to her from a group of children playing with marbles. She is astonished to find that she can indeed pick it up. The children even noticed her picking up their marble, and asks to have it back, which she obliges by rolling it over to them.

She starts to think that maybe these dream visions are not dreams after all...

Bella then notices two particularly peculiar children run past her. One has light red hair with twintails adorned with what appear to be jingle bells, another has purple hair with a flower-shaped ornament. Both children are wearing some kind of traditional Japanese clothes, and the redhead seems to be dragging the purple-head toward some place. Bella could see something intriguing about those two, specifically the fact that they seem to be radiating some kind of faint aura...

And that's when the American girl suddenly finds herself cold and soaking wet all over...

...

Renko's Room; The Flat

The first thing Bella sees upon opening her eyes is Renko carrying a water bucket.

"Oh, thank goodness you're alright." Renko says as she breathes a sigh of relief.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out what just happened.

"Did you just dump a bucket of water on me?" Bella, wiping her face with her hands, asks.

"You suddenly stopped moving altogether, and didn't even react to my shaking you..." Renko explains. "I became worried, so..."

Bella just sits there, totally silent for several seconds as she look straight into Renko's eyes...

Then she begins to laugh.

Renko wonders if the water dumping has loosened a few metaphorical screws in Bella. "Um...what is so funny about this?"

Bella stops laughing. "The fact that my vision can be stopped by something as simple as this." She explains to the astrophysics major. "That being said, I do need a towel and change of clothes..."

...

After spending about 10 minutes drying her hair, Bella changed out of her soaking wet dress and mob cap, putting on a simple t-shirt and shorts, and tying her long blonde hair into a ponytail.

"Are you sure you're not just having a dream during a...well..." Renko asks, then clenches her left hand into a fist and gently taps the side of her own head. "...that?"

It takes Bella a few seconds to get what the astrophysics major is talking about. "No, I'm sure I don't have any 'loose wiring' in my brain." She dismisses Renko's skepticism. "In fact, I'm sure I have some 'extra wiring' that most people don't have." The American girl adds. "Weren't you the one who believed my 'seeing things' story within less than an hour of meeting me, and took me to see a pen friend who spend his entire life believing in the supernatural, in the year 2064?"

Renko opens her mouth, but quickly shuts it as she realizes the point.

"So what term do you Japanese refer to this type of personality as?" Bella says, now in a teasing manner. "Is it...Chuunibyou?"

Renko scoffs for a bit before breaking into laughter. "I admit," She says as she ceases laughing. "I am a little bit of a chuuni. Adam, on the other hand, is what I would say is a chuuni to the bone."

...

"Achoo!"

Adam sneezed right as he entered his flat and closed the door.

"Did Renko just talk about me right now?" The English Esper wonders while wiping his nose. "Must be Renko. Oh, that bloody Junior-Second-Grader-in-a-university-student's-body..."

...

"By the way, where did you learn about the term 'Chuunibyou', anyway?" Renko then asks Bella.

"Social media." Bella answers directly, suppressing the urge to laugh about the exact details.

Renko knows exactly what the American blonde is talking about, being a social media user herself. Failing to suppress the urge, she laughed about it.

"I guess the only thing funny about the United States getting kicked out of the UN for banning China itself-" Bella comments, still resisting the urge to giggle. "-is that anime fans joked that the POTUS who imposed the ban is a gender-bent Takanashi Rikka." She fails, and started giggling at the thought. Then she stops. "But let's forget about the details for now."

Renko then sits down right next to Bella on the sofa.

"You said you 'see things', right?" The astrophysics major starts another conversation. "What did you see this time?"

That was a lot for Bella to recall, so she took a deep breath before describing the details of her latest vision and how it was different than all of her previous visions.

"So you were able to interact with the environment, and the people can interact with you?" Renko repeats what she was told.

"More or less..." Bella says. "But neither has happened in the previous vision, so it's pretty strange for me."

"Especially when you suddenly became unresponsive." Renko says. "Back on topic. You said you were in a Feudal Japanese village?"

"It looked like Feudal Japan, but yes, that's what I saw." Bella continues. She then puts her right hand to her head. "Ugh, this is hurting my head. Maybe I should just write it down..."

"That is a lot to process, so you should just take it easy." Renko suggests. "The semester doesn't start until next week, so you have plenty of time to think about it."

Bella nods in response. "Maybe in the meantime, I can go read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and compare the vision I just had with Dorothy Gale's adventure. Maybe I'll find some similarities that might explain my visions..."

...

Bella's Room

That night...

Bella wasn't able to take it easy at all. At least, her subconscious is too curious about the interactive vision dream earlier today to let her fall sleep. The American girl remains wide awake while laying on her bed, unable to take her mind off the vision dream. She has many questions about it that she want answers for...

Why does she have these vision dreams?

What are these vision dreams trying to tell her?

Why did she have that vision dream earlier today that happened out of the blue when she is wide awake?

Why she can interact with the environment and people in that vision dream when she hasn't been able to in the previous ones?

Who is that red-clad girl she saw in Renko?

Most importantly: why do her vision dreams all take place in what looked like a Feudal Japanese village?

Bella tried to take those questions off her mind and go to sleep (even resorting to boring herself to sleep by reading poorly written Hunger Games fan fiction on her phone). But her subconscious' refusal to do so, and the silence from much of Manchester (or Great Britain for that matter) being practically deserted at nighttime made it impossible, forcing the American girl to stay awake.

It is going to be a looong night...


And so Bella's connection to Gensokyo becomes this little bit stronger...

Whew. Finally got around to submitting this chapter, which was delayed for two months because of real life matters. (Especially with how an update to my home's wifi router cost me my access to Fanfiction Dot Net)

Yes, I know that some of you people headcanon Renko and Reimu to be related in some way like how Maribel (aka Bella here) and Yukari are related in some way. But, that was NOT what I had in mind. If you want to see what I have in mind for Renko and Reimu's relation in the YMC-verse, you're gonna have to read on to find out.

Also, I mean no offence to fans of The Hunger Games when I have Bella decide to bore herself to sleep with bad fanfics of it. I haven't even checked out any Hunger Games fanfics, so I don't even know how many of them are actually bad.

"And that, as they say, is that."

Afterwords end here.