~Author's Note~
As you'll remember me saying several months ago, I needed a little extra time for a few of these prompts, the first of which has finally come to fruition. Day thirteen's prompt was "light", and computer screens use thousands of tiny dots of light in order to display stuff, and video games tend to make heavy use of computer graphics, so I decided to go for a comedy about our intrepid heroines playing Minecraft! Incidentally, cringe culture is dead to me.
~Worlds Within Worlds~
"What's this, then?" said Reimu, watching with her head tilted as Sumireko laid down a slanted black box and plugged it into the wide, shiny screen she'd set up earlier that day.
"It's a Play Station Four!" said Sumireko proudly. "I said we were going to play games like nothing you've ever seen before, and to my oath I have kept."
"This is so exciting!" Sanae squeaked as she distributed some soft cushions on the shrine's wooden floor. "I haven't seen a new console in ages! Is sixteen-bit graphics still the standard?"
"Sixteen bit?!" scoffed Sumireko. "Oh, you poor, sweet summer child, I have so much to teach you. Try sixty-four bit on for size."
Sanae didn't believe it. "I don't believe it," she said. "Sixty-four?!" she added, in considerable shock.
Sumireko nodded.
"And I thought the transition to seventeen-bit architecture was gonna be tricky..." breathed Sanae.
"Hi, everyone! Room for a pain in the neck?" a familiar voice shouted from outside.
Reimu started. "Come on, that was years ago!" she cried, with reddening cheeks.
"I know. I'm just messing with you," smirked Tokiko. She leaned against the wooden doorframe and set about unlacing her boots.
Marisa squeezed past Tokiko, peering over a wicker basket twice the size of her head. "Got the salted triangles!" she declared. A crowd of thick, lumpy, misshapen yellow crisps jumped from the basket as Marisa flumped down on a suitable cushion. "These things were so hard to get right! I can see why they're a delicacy where you come from."
"I don't know about 'delicacy'..." said Sumireko, casually retrieving a crisp. Her face brightened as she crunched it down. "Wow, these aren't bad!"
Reimu took a handful. "What are they made of?"
"Potatoes, cornflour, salt, pepper, butter, shiitake mushrooms, chanterelles, shimeji, kaentake, psychosyllabub, ice wraith teeth, fairy earwax, ground bluebottle chitin and gunpowder!" declared Marisa.
Reimu choked on her mouthful of crisps.
"Well, they sound lovely." Tokiko stomped over in her linen socks and sampled a slightly poisonous morsel. Her eyes lit up with delight as she ate it. "Wow, that's crunchy!"
"I'm glad you're having fun," said Sumireko, smiling wryly as she pulled a DVD case out of her blouse. "Now, if you'd care to direct your attention to the screen... Reimers, you took care of the potato, didn't you?"
Reimu nodded and gestured to a large round potato sitting quietly on a wooden plate in the corner. Two jump leads connected it to the back of the television.
"Great! That should be enough juice for a few hours." Sumireko slid the shiny metal disc into its slot with a satisfying clunk and turned on the console. "Everyone got a controller?"
Sanae nodded.
"A what?" said Reimu.
Sumireko rolled her eyes and handed her one of the vaguely boomerang-shaped plastic things with buttons and a couple of short, stubby joysticks on it.
"Oh," said Reimu. "Thank you."
"This isn't going to transport us to another world, is it?" said Marisa, eyeing her controller suspiciously.
"Maybe. Maybe not." Sumireko winked. "Depends how you look at it, really. Now let's get going!"
An orange sky above the snow-dusted mountains heralded the rising sun. Five women wandered through the breezy pine forest below, cheap wooden tools in hand and bonus chest balanced on Reimu's head, in search of a place to make camp.
"I thought you said this was sixty-four-bit," Sanae piped up, regarding the pixellated leaves with curious eyes.
"Oh, it is! Probably. I mean, this is an enormous simulated world made out of cubes, and you need a lot of bits for that," explained Sumireko.
"Cool. Um, how many levels are there?"
"Le... Levels?" Sumireko stopped in her tracks and burst out laughing. "Levels?! Oh, my gods, Sanae, what year are you living in?! Minecraft doesn't have levels! I mean, the very idea!" she guffawed.
Marisa and Reimu shared an uncomfortable look. The implication was clear; what was Sumireko on about?
"Sumi, what are you on about?!" demanded Tokiko, showing less restraint.
"Levels are so last decade, people! There's an entire WORLD for us to explore!" ranted Sumireko. "Three of them, actually, but that's not important right now. It's not divided into levels. Everything we do affects the world, and we can do whatever we-" She broke off when she noticed a cream-coloured object bobbing up and down above the grass. "Ooh, an egg! Brilliant!"
"That's an egg?" said Reimu dubiously. In her experience, eggs didn't look so jaggedy around the edges.
Sumireko nodded. "Make sure you pick up anything else we could use."
"Anything? Oh, so this is like Morrowind!" said Sanae, getting it at last. "I love Morrowind. I still play that on my Xbox, as and when Lady Kanako remembers the electricity bill... Hey, did the Xbox Two come out yet?"
"Well, the Xbox 360 was popular a few years ago..." giggled Sumireko.
Sanae's eyes glazed over. She slowly toppled forwards and landed face-down among the leaf litter.
"Wow, you must be tired!" Sumireko felt bad for Sanae, but fainting would never not be hilarious.
"Um, girls? There's a green thing..." Marisa piped up. She pointed nervously to a tall, leafy-looking creature with a mournful expression that was stalking towards them on four stubby legs.
"A creeper! Aw, man...!" Trying not to giggle too hard, Sumireko hefted Sanae's limp body and bolted away between the trees, crashing through bushes and tall grass. A scream echoed through the forest ten seconds later. Reimu and Marisa shared another uncomfortable look.
"Can I help you?" said Tokiko brusquely, taking a step towards the creeper. It hissed and lunged towards her, only to end up squirming helplessly in a firm headlock.
"What a strange creature!" Curious, Marisa stepped towards Tokiko and the struggling creeper. "It looks like... Some kind of shrubbery!"
"It's got an attitude problem, whatever it is." Tokiko rubbed the top of the creeper's head with her knuckles, making it hiss in anguish. It began to flash with white light. "Hmm? What are you-"
The green creature exploded. Marisa hit the deck. The ringing in her ears gave way to silence as the smoke cleared, leaving Tokiko red-faced in a deep, messy crater which looked as if a dozen cubes of earth had been carved right out of the ground.
Reimu ran to the edge of the hole. "What happened?! Tokiko, are you all right?!"
"Yeah, just a little bit exploded..." Tokiko grimaced and wiped the soot from her eyes. "So when are you adding a kamikaze section to the spell-card rules?"
"Ah... Kamikaze attacks are something we discourage," said Reimu carefully. She reached out to help Tokiko up, but Tokiko just flew out of the crater. "Right. Well, we'd better find Sanae and Sumireko."
"They went this way." Keeping a tight grip on the stone axe she'd pilfered from the bonus chest without telling anybody, Marisa led them through the woods until she fell down a ravine.
"Oh, no! Marisa!" Reimu jumped in after her, using the chest as a terribly ineffective parachute.
"There should be a fence around this thing!" shouted Tokiko. "Wait, can we build one? That's something we can do in this game, right? Ladies?"
A few seconds went by in silence, then Sanae's voice echoed up from the ravine. "We found a portal! Come on, Tokiko, let's go through it!"
Tokiko squinted down into the dark, deep ravine until she spotted a bright patch between the cubic rocks. She cloaked herself in blue fire and dove into the crack. She found her four friends in what looked like a dilapidated brick cellar that opened out onto the damp ravine floor.
They were crowded around a square portal made of pockmarked yellow rock, curious for the most part, although Sumireko was caught between shock and resignation. The portal was an inky black void full of swirling stars that seemed to have more space to move about in than the frame would ordinarily hold.
"Sumi said there's a final boss on the other side of this! I can't wait to duel her!" said Sanae, bouncing up and down and clapping her hands.
"I bet she's cute!" said Marisa eagerly.
"I bet she's strong!" said Sanae eagerly.
"I'm sure we can take her!" said Reimu eagerly.
"Reimu just activated it. Just like that," Sumireko explained in a dull voice. "One tap with her orb and the portal's open. There aren't even supposed to be yin-yang orbs in the game!"
Reimu blinked. "Why wouldn't there be?"
"Because... Nobody programmed them in?"
"That is a bit weird." Sanae's brow furrowed. "Still, I'm not complaining!" she added, whipping out her purification rod. "Let's do it!"
Reimu was the last to step into the portal. As soon as her toe touched the scintillating abyss she was gone, yanked between dimensions in the blink of an eye. She emerged in darkness with cold, smooth rock beneath her feet and darkness smothering her eyes.
"Um... Hello? Marisa? Anyone?" breathed Reimu. "Are you there?"
"Oh, hi! It's a bit dark, isn't it?" Marisa's familiar voice brought Reimu a fair bit of comfort.
"Very dark. Tokiko, can you light yourself up again?" whispered Reimu, who had no idea why she was whispering.
Tokiko nodded, although nobody could see it. Fierce blue flames erupted all over her body, bathing the surrounding rock in light and dazzling her friends. Squinting down at her feet, Reimu could see flat pockmarked stone which looked rather like the portal frame, although Tokiko's light gave it a discomforting teal glow. She took courage as her eyes stopped hurting and looked up ahead. Leaning on a sheer wall of the same cratered stone, Sanae gave her a cheery wave.
There was stone to the left and right, too, and stone behind her. With a rising sense of alarm, Reimu lifted her gaze to the ceiling. Solid rock. They were trapped in a wide rectangular cave, deep beneath the earth, and there was no return portal in sight.
"Looks like we're trapped," said Reimu, certain that she wasn't a little bit worried.
"You're right. And it won't be long before we eat all the oxygen..." whimpered Marisa, who only had a vague sense of how breathing worked. She rounded on Sumireko in an angry panic. "Hey! You promised we wouldn't be transported to another world, and now we're trapped here! What are you going to do about it?!"
"Come on, don't start blaming me! This always happens!" cried Sumireko, raising her hands in a gesture of peace. "The turning up underground in the End, I mean, not the being transported into the game for real. But it's fine, we just have to tunnel our way out. Anyone who's got a pickaxe-"
"Oh, why didn't you say so before?! MASTER SPAAAAAAARK!"
Sumireko tried to cover her eyes, but the fiery orange glow through her hands and eyelids was still enough to dazzle her. The air quickly grew hot as love-coloured energy bounced between the walls, assaulting her ears with a mighty noise. Her nose wrinkled at the acrid scent of burning end stone. She felt a tug on her sleeve and the next thing she knew she was lying face-down, her cheek flat against the cold yellow stone.
"Wow, the author really learned a lot from that 'appealing to the five senses' essay he read on tumblr!" observed Sanae, just about making herself heard over the cacophony.
"Aaaaugh, my spine!" screamed Sumireko, catching several heavy chunks of rock with her back. Thankfully, the onslaught didn't last much longer.
Marisa coughed and wafted away some smoke. She let out a gasp of joy as a cool breeze rushed in from up above. "Look, everyone, we're free! I did it!"
Everybody crowded around Marisa at the entrance to a short, wide tunnel, still smouldering where the master spark had carved it out. They could see towering pitch-black pillars reaching into the dark blue sky far above, crowds of tall purple-eyed creatures wandering aimlessly around them.
"Those are endermen. Make sure you don't look them in the eye," Sumireko warned her pals as they clambered out into the faint starlight.
"Why not?" asked Tokiko, looking one in the eye.
"Er..." Sumireko laughed nervously as the enderman materialised behind Tokiko in a burst of purple sparks. "That's why?"
Tokiko cried out in alarm as the enderman smacked her head with his slender chitinous forearm. She grabbed the arm, swung its dismayed owner around a few times and hurled him into an obsidian pillar. "What a cheeky bastard," she said archly.
With a long, breathy growl, the enderman shook the concussion out of his head and came running at Tokiko.
"Oh, back for round two?" Tokiko set her fists on fire and charged. She took a swing at the enderman's skinny thigh, but her knuckles met nothing but thin air. "What the-?!"
The enderman rematerialised and kicked Tokiko in the wing. She grabbed his leg and bit it off at the knee. The enderman screamed like a vacuum cleaner trying to endure a tornado. Tokiko spat out black flesh, smiled a sweet, sharp smile dripping with purple blood and introduced the sobbing enderman's skull to her boot.
"Boy, it feels good to cut loose once in a while!" laughed Tokiko. She noticed the looks of shock and amazement her friends were sporting and stuck out her tongue. "No offence to anyone who invented an entire combat system to get away from that stuff."
"None taken," said Reimu, and then a dragon crashed into her.
The Ender Dragon's wings stretched out like sails, covering the stars. Her ridged purple eyes burned with a deep, ancient hunger. Flames wafted from her jaws as she swept around in a wide arc, high above the bare rock and the pillars below. She drew in a breath and charged again.
"Scatter!" screamed Sumireko. Her friends didn't need telling twice. Marisa hauled Reimu onto her feet and they soared out in all directions. The dragon roared and furiously beat her wings, narrowly avoiding a painful nose-dive. Her burning gaze fell once more upon Reimu, who was sorting her spell-cards in the shadow of an obsidian tower. The dragon shot towards her.
Surging along like a meteor, the dragon looked almost unstoppable. So had many youkai, but Reimu tended to stop them anyway. She gripped her wand and took aim. "Divine Arts: Omnidirectional Dragon-Slaying Circle!"
Reimu's divine power set the air alight in red and white. Hundreds of amulets battered the Ender Dragon's scales, but she didn't so much as flinch as she ploughed on. Her jaws snapped shut on thin air as Reimu dashed away. The beast's tail lashed towards her at incredible speed. Reimu barely had time to react. The razor-sharp tip raked her skin.
"Oh, my gods! Are you all right?!" yelled Marisa, diving towards her soulmate.
"No! Thanks for asking!" replied Reimu, bleeding from a nasty gash on her stomach. "I think she's immune to danmaku. We have to- Marisa, watch out!"
"Wha-?!" was all Marisa could blurt out before a column of purple fire struck her head-on, bathing her body in pain. She screamed, flopped down on an iron cage at the top of a pillar and frantically patted out the flames.
Sumireko bit her lip. "Um, the first thing to do is-"
"Believe in ourselves!" declared Sanae. "One Incident-Resolver can only do so much, but together we're invincible! Let's unleash our power all at once!"
Tokiko nodded. "For freedom!"
Sanae thrust her wand into the sky. "For love!"
Sumireko shrugged. It was just a game; they could try her strategy later. "For the future of both our worlds!"
"Now! Our combination spell-card attack!" Three voices rang out as one. "Light of Eternity: Sacred Triptych Breaker!"
The air seemed to catch fire as thousands upon thousands of bullets burst forwards and hammered on the Ender Dragon's scales. Sumireko, Tokiko and Sanae hovered side by side, arms outstretched, sweating as they poured their energy into the attack.
"Great thinking! Let me give you a hand!" Still giving off a few wisps of smoke, Marisa took aim. "Love Sign: MASTER SPARK!"
"Spirit Sign: Fantas- oww... F-fantasy Seal!" agreed Reimu.
The dragon leapt over the beam with a roar of defiance and batted at Reimu's luminous orbs, but the bullets were clearly taking their toll. Her head hung low as she drew heavy breaths.
Eight beams of shimmering light pulsed out from the obsidian towers, startling Marisa into a dive that almost became a splat. The beams poured into the dragon's skin, restoring her scales to a shine.
"Ah... Thing is, we have to destroy the crystals first," said Sumireko. "Otherwise she'll just regenerate."
Reimu shot her an annoyed look. "Couldn't you have mentioned that soon-" Reimu was unable to finish her sentence because the dragon chose that moment to swallow her whole.
Sanae's jaw dropped. "How could you?! Eating people is illegal!" she cried, bristling with righteous indignation.
With a mighty roar, the dragon swooped towards Sanae and gulped her down as well. Sanae and Reimu's muffled screams could be heard inside her scaly abdomen.
"The crystals! We have to destroy the crystals! Move!" yelled Sumireko, making a beeline for the nearest pillar. A fireball singed her hat as it whooshed overhead. As soon as she set eyes on the scitillating purple orb capping off the pillar, Sumireko threw out a dozen zener cards, trusting that at least one of them would hit it.
The dragon swooped downwards. Sumireko felt smooth scales sweep across her skin as she swerved to avoid the mighty beast, only to have her ears battered into submission by a deafening explosion. Her cards must have hit home. With renewed confidence, Sumireko launched herself at a short, stout pillar crowned with an iron cage and thrust her arm between the bars.
Some dusty corner of Sumireko's brain was reminding her that it was impossible to reach through iron bars in Minecraft without rewriting the source code, but she ignored it and sprayed the shimmering crystal with fire. The ensuing explosion seared Sumireko's fingers and almost broke her wrist. She fell from the tower amid twisted pieces of iron and hit the ground bum-first with a howl of agony. Her whole body was in pain by then. What was it people did in such times? Regroup? The word sounded right, but it made little sense for one girl to regroup with herself.
A heavy thump brought Sumireko out of her semantic ponderings. The Ender Dragon had touched down in front of her, her oblong jaws trailing pink smoke and a scrap of Tokiko's dress. Sumireko edged backwards and cast her eyes around for Marisa, but the sight of her broom lying in splinters at the foot of the tallest pillar confirmed the worst. How was she to be the last one to get eaten?
In a voice like thunder, the Ender Dragon spoke. "Well, well, I see that you have finally been brought to a stop, and by gravity of all things. Good. I have been waiting a long time for this moment, Sumireko."
Sumireko's jaw dropped. "You know my name?!"
"Of course." The dragon smiled as best she could with a long snout. "I have known you for years, little girl. I watched as you punched down your first tree. I witnessed the first skeleton who shot you from behind. I saw the three-block-wide Nether portal you spent an hour trying and failing to ignite. I was there in spirit while you dug out an entire chunk, just to see what happened. And I wept as you hunted my children for their pearls."
Sumireko smiled nervously. "Um... Sorry?"
"I saw the first house you built, the curving roof you tried so hard to get right, the statue of Sailor Moon you left with a bald spot after you ran out of yellow wool," the dragon continued. "And of course, I peered into your little corner of the Outside World while you were drawing that comic. The Adventures of Otenba-no-Kagemura, wasn't it? Something about a half-blaze, half-enderwoman with a shimmering tuft of pink hair hanging over her left eye, and her forbidden love with-"
"All right, no need to mention that!" Sumireko's cheeks were about as pink as her character's hair.
"I mean, really, she could have done so much better than Herobrine's twin sister!" The dragon laughed briefly before her expression turned grim. "You know, Sumireko, when compared to your happy childhood, my own existence hasn't been so great. I have faced hundreds of millions of people such as yourself, all safe behind their keyboards or their controllers, and I have died billions of times. Countless people from countless worlds, all determined to slay me for no reason other beyond the fact that I was there."
"And now, you come before me." The dragon spoke with such relish that Sumireko found herself very afraid. "You, who dance between worlds, were foolish enough to come to the world beyond your own and then try to enter mine. Oh, what a grand and intoxicating innocence! I am a goddess! You cannot kill me-" she scowled at a muffled cry from inside her stomach. "Shut up in there, green-haired girl. Dagoth Ur won't sue me for copyright infringement if he knows what's good for him."
"I need to play Morrowind one of these days," muttered Sumireko.
"Unfortunately, you won't be alive for long enough." Abruptly, the dragon's maw split open. Sumireko felt burning breath on her skin as she lunged desperately to the side, flattening her nose and jarring her left arm as she rolled and took to the air. Fireballs roared past her. The dragon's jaws snapped shut on the hem of her dress, bringing her to a jarring stop. Sumireko's glasses tumbled from her eyes as she tore free.
The dragon drew in a deep breath and unleashed a roaring column of purple flames. This time, Sumireko was too slow. The fire seared her skin and clothes. The pain was staggering, enough to bring tears to her eyes. With what little strength she had left, she curled up beneath a sturdy obsidian pillar and sat there, hugging her knees and trying not to cry. Where had the afternoon gone wrong? She'd never been sucked inside her own games console before, let alone assaulted by a dragon.
A loud crack sounded above where she was sitting. Sumireko looked up. Her heart leapt into her throat. Against all logic and reason, the pillar was bending slowly towards her. "You cannot hide from me, Sumireko! This world and all within it are mine!" the Ender Dragon roared. Her wings were beating hard as she pushed against the pillar with all her strength. Ten seconds of effort were enough for it to snap.
"W-we're not on a first-name basis!" yelled Sumireko, diving out of the way just in time. A rough landing added two bruised knees to her list of injuries.
The dragon snorted. "You may call me Jean," she declared, swooping towards her prey. "I wonder how many times you will be able to say it before I claim your life..."
Sumireko's head was spinning. How could the Ender Dragon break obsidian? How could the pillar fall down instead of just sitting there with nothing holding it up?! There was no way she could take on a final boss who wouldn't follow the rules. What would the papers say? "Teenage Girl Found Dead During Nap, Spirit Assumed Lost Inside Console In Parallel Dimension"?!
Then again, could it be said that the rules of the game mattered with Marisa throwing her lasers around like a disco ball and Tokiko eating endermen alive? Aside from flying and a spot of magic, Sumireko hadn't begun to test her own powers.
As the plan took shape in her mind, Sumireko felt her strength returning. She pushed off the ground, zipped down between Jean's legs and dove beneath the End, flying as close to the craggy base of the island as she could. Jean followed her, keeping low to avoid bashing her wings on the rock.
Sumireko reached out with her mind and felt for a cube of the cream-coloured rock. She wrenched it away from its stony brethren and hurled it at Jean's face. The dragon let out a pained growl as it bashed into her snout.
Sumireko broke into a wide grin. "You felt that, didn't you?! I'm not powerless, Jean!"
"Good. I would hate to defeat you without a challenge!" Jean roared and charged towards Sumireko. Sumireko chucked a radio tower at her. Jean's eyes widened. She plummeted into the void, her roars of defiance barely audible above the screech of twisting metal as she batted the tower with her wings.
A sudden fear gripped Sumireko's heart. If Jean was consumed by the void, what would become of her friends trapped in the dragon's stomach? Would they become nothing before they could fly to safety? Sumireko was almost relieved to see Jean flying back up with a murderous look in her eye and a sharp piece of iron embedded in her left foreleg.
The plan had worked, but Sumireko wasn't about to take any more risks with the Void. She soared back up over the End, Jean hot on her tail. Sumireko made a beeline for the nearest obsidian tower, grasped the iron cage at the top with her psychic powers and hurled it over Jean's snout. The weight of the cage combined with the disorientation brought Jean tumbling to the ground.
Sumireko knew she had to act fast. She summoned a roaring torrent of water and sprayed Jean furiously, making her gasp and splutter. Sumireko had only a second to press her advantage. Summoning all her strength, she launched herself towards Jean and unleashed the brightest, purplest beam of energy she could muster.
"OW!" cried Jean, falling onto her back. The Ender Dragon may have been dazed, but Sumireko's magic didn't seem to be doing much damage. She needed something with a little more kick to it. Sumireko kicked Jean several times in the face, then chucked another radio tower at her.
Jean groaned loudly. "Sumireko, can we talk about this?"
Sumireko pulled out her plastic gun and slid a red hihi'irokane bullet into the firing chamber. "Sorry, it turns out we can't. Because you see, Jean..." she wracked her brains for a suitable quote from one of CaptainSparklez's music videos, but came up wanting. "...Um. Bang?"
A million beads of light winked out as the high-definition liquid crystal display turned black. Sumireko laid down her controller, sighed heavily and flopped down among the cushions and dazed warrior-maidens.
"Oh, gods... Who turned on the lights?" groaned Sanae, shielding her eyes from the evening sun.
"Are we still in that dragon?" Reimu squinted up at the roof. Her face lit up when she realised where she was. "Wait a minute! We're back!"
"And not a moment too soon!" said Tokiko earnestly. Her wings had reacted very badly to the acid. "Sumireko, please tell me you don't want us to go in there again."
"Of course not," said Sumireko earnestly. "Actually, I was thinking we could try Skyrim next! You'll love it, Sanae. It's even more like Morrowind, except snowier. Maybe we'll get to go to Sovngarde! Ooh, or maybe the Soul Cairn! I wonder what Serana would think of us..."
"Wonderful! It's been so long since I talked to my cousin Alduin the World-Eater."
Sumireko jumped. A tall, beefy woman with piercing eyes and a curtain of jet-black hair that fell to her ankles was leaning against the wall, talking casually as if nothing unusual had happened.
"I wonder whether he's got around to eating the world yet..."
"Um," said Sumireko in a small voice, "who are you?"
The tall woman smiled at her. "I think you know well enough, Sumireko. And incidentally, I can't wait to see that comic book!"
"Wh... WHAT?! Jean, I literally just killed you!" screamed Sumireko.
"Which wasn't very nice, but what's one murder between friends?" said Jean charitably.
Sumireko put her head in her hands.
Marisa nudged Reimu under the ribcage. "Who is she?" she whispered.
"I don't know..." Reimu cast an appraising eye over the tall stranger. "She seems all right, though. I wonder if she's hungry."