So it was me on a crutch, dragging myself so unceremoniously through this rather ancient-styled kind of "school". I ended up on a crutch because the fall I got from the incident earlier had dislocated my left foot, and there's no ignoring a dislocation whenever touching it makes me scream.

I get this vibe that the Asian side of matters, even for schooling, are intentionally drab if only because they didn't want all those unnecessary attention things, and that must've been an inferiority complex stemming from their utmost love towards a leading figure; in the Orient's case it's usually their emperors and kings. Across the building, I could hear children rambling off lines in Japanese almost in unison, so I figured it was some kind of textbook thing they're supposed to learn.

Guess stuff like diction never goes away, huh...

"If you'd excuse me, sire, wandering parents are not allowed inside the study halls," spoke a lady wearing a rather odd kind of cap.
It definitely looked a lot smaller than what that crazy-ass Miss China wore, but perhaps it was her large head that made the hat look real small.

"Uhh... sorry, I still don't speak that much Japanese. Konnichiwa."
"Ah, one of the devil tongues," she muttered. "Are you an outsider?"

Outsider, huh. I can't tell anymore. "I can't really tell, but it's a long story explaining anyway."

"You're a curiosity indeed," she cooed. "My name is Kamishirasawa Keine, but you can just call me Keine."

I seem to recall that the word meant "no" in another language... uhh.. that's it. "Keine? Nein? That sounds pretty German. Your English name is literally 'no'?"
"You're a humorous one, indeed," she chortled, "but no, my name is to be read in a different manner from whatever other languages. You really are an outsider, then..."
"Seriously, are 'outsiders' so much of an attraction to this world? Grab and pluck anyone from the outside and you get one, me figures," I quipped.
"The fact that people are interested in Gensokyo, or get dragged into it in the first place... these alone make for interesting newspaper articles," smiled Keine. "I'm the principal of this school, by the way."

"One devil of a lady herself too..."

I guess. "Just wondering though, what does come out of all these learning? With all due respect, I've only seen one other group of humans and that's the household of the Child of Myare... or something."

"It's up to the children. Of every batch that graduates at twelve, two of ten students go to the Kirisame House of Higher Magicks to learn magic, and the rest are scattered between ten different fields like agriculture, linguistic, historical learnings, or even journalism under the crow tengu's numerous newspaper publications. Every child has the right to aspire for the betterment of self or others in their own unique ways. Sometimes, the youkai bring their offspring here to study, but we have to segregate them in physical--"

"Whoa, whoa, I get the drift," I interjected. "So this is an all-purpose school, I'd guess. Like a combination of elementary and middle school."

"You may say so. Say, you have free time for a couple of days, maybe a week?"

I looked around for Suika, and saw nobody. "I guess. It's not that I am about to pack and leave in a few days. But if you're gonna ask me to teach, I absolutely suck at anything but martial arts."

"Why, that'll work just fine! Could you stand in as our physical instruction teacher for the next few days?" Her voice was totally sharp, totally expecting me to say yes, I swear.

"WHAT? I have a broken foot and I don't even know the language! How the hell do I---"

"It's fine! I'll just encourage the children to speak in the devil's tongue! The students don't get active exposure to the language and end up floundering when they get employed at the Devils' mansion anyway, so you'll have to give them the exposure they need."

"Uhh... what just happened, Pasonya?"

Beats me, how the hell should I know someone wants me to be their P.E. instructor out of the blue?!

"T-Then what about your own teachers and instructors?"
"Well, Mizuki's gone out hunting for the week, and Satoyama's injured his right arm when a timber fell on it. That's why we're short of a physical instruction teacher."
"Don't you have a... curry-cue-lem or something like that, for this sorta thing? Like, something for me to follow up on."
"You mean a 'curriculum'? We do have one here, just not for physical instruction. The two teachers are the sports type, though. Do you know what Kemari is, by the way?"

She pointed me towards the courtyard, in the direction of a ball that looked rather peculiar, but nonetheless it is a ball. Its material seems to be of a form of sturdy wood, but it sure was light. It was rather reminiscent of a time when I played soccer with friends in the abandoned parking lot. Without thinking of much, I flipped the ball into the air with my active right foot and started to balance it, to which Miss Keine did nothing but clap all the way.

Then it dawned on me like a sledgehammer smacked right in my head, just as I was amusing Keine with skills on the ball which I honed from years of playing street soccer. I knew I didn't want to go back to that place I once called the "real world", just maybe stay in this little place and settle down for the rest of my life, which by any conservative estimate seems to be upwards of three hundred years.

"But neither you and I knew what's in this for us."

Indeed. Back in that world, I am somebody. I started to miss the days where my skills at the arena made for excellent morning discussions by mixed martial arts enthusiasts, where my fists sometimes got people talking when I know they're clamming up about something I shouldn't know, and so much more. Here, I get a strong feeling that even if I do so much as attempt a kick, I will have to analyse every inch of my opponent to even try getting one shred of advantage from attacking opponents. Indeed, the only fistfights I've been in have been lucky escapes, but while people still have their interest in me as an outsider, I get this strong feeling that I really should at least do something... either to reciprocate the assistance, or to actually affect this world somehow. That, and the nagging issue of being the "last male Konpaku"... what was it with this lady Yuyuko or something that made her want me to visit her?

"...sir... sir? I need your name, sir."

"Paso---"
"Konpaku Yuuji!"
"Paso-KON!"
"Hn? You said Paso-kon or something, did I hear wrong?"
"Ah no, uhh, I mean, Konpa, wait, no, Pasonia, that's it! Pasonia Seltia Keros is the name."

It was all that voice-in-my-head's fault I got my own name so wrong, as the lady gave me a weird, blank stare hearing me struggling to get my own name out of my larynx. What the hell were you thinking?

"Sorry, couldn't help it! We *are* one half each of Konpaku Yuuji anyway."

***

The boss, I could tell, didn't really like that clak-clak-clak that my makeshift crutch made, but Keine had paid him a week's rent at the inn in advance on my behalf, in exchange for me going back to "school" to teach kids stuff you can do on a crutch or something. I couldn't be bothered by that enough to say gomenasai to him. Almost like back at the Shrine, I opened the door and instinctively avoided Suika's horns from impaling my face with a sharp body swerve to the left.

"Oh, you're back."
"Yea, I am. You almost impaled me."
"Couldn't help it, sorry. Accidents do happen."

***

"So what's on your mind today?"

That was the first thing Suika asked me, as once again we shared a single gourd of sake under the moonlight, right outside the inn.

"What do you mean, what's on my mind, Suika?" I replied, trying to figure out how she actually managed to read my head. I didn't know she was that much of a clairvoyant.

"I saw you and Keine talking today, then you drifting into your own wonderland while she spoke about your duties as a teacher. She had that tendency to rattle off right off the bat once she begins to talk, or at least any youkai worth respect would have already known, so anyone who could actually drift off in the middle of Keine's speech had to be really bothered by something."

"I just realised I am a total nobody here, Suika," I admitted, if only because she is the only person I can fully trust in the whole of this Gensokyo. "The best thing an adult can get today, in this world, just happened to me."
"What'd you mean?"
"I got myself a job. If this goes on my next step is get married and have half-kids or three-quarter kids."

"Welcome to reality, kid," she cooed. "Most humans are nobody here, and most babies are nobody here. But you're an oversized baby, and you got Meiling riled up so bad she nearly tore the Shrine apart, so take that as your positives."

"I'm not looking for that sort of positive, Suika... If that can be counted as a positive, I'm probably going to try suicide."

I could tell she was faking a frown at me. "Then how positive do you want to be?"

"I want to be someone who can actually speak his own mind freely and stuff. But I get this feeling that even if I do start talking about my own history and stuff, people are gonna drop off, or they can't understand me, or they can't emphathise with me or protest against my decisions. The basic issue is, everyone only appreciates the fact that I'm an outsider, and either I had been blind or I've just awakened to the idea that the term 'outsiders' always tended to mean 'temporary, useless people'."

"Welcome to reality again, kid. Given you, I doubt you want to be a useless person either."

"Totally. But with me on crutches... and for how long I'm not very clear... I'm as good as useless."

"We can begin by talking about yourself," Suika suggested. I was quite resistant to the idea.

"Myself, Suika... Well, to be honest, I was probably no more than a hooligan some ten years ago. Street kid, smoking, hanging out with what the people in armchairs and on newspaper forums say is the wrong crowd."

"It's all relative," Suika quipped, "but not that I'd care that much."

"The only reason I continued to exist in that world I considered real... was because everyone else were subscribing to dogmatic lives. I wanted to live a little differently from them, not so much that they would totally outcast me, but deep down I never felt like getting close to them. It's the same in people from all over the world, rural or urban. The poor dream of a life led by the middle class, the middle class wants to be high class, the high class wants to be luxurious, and the select few rich nuts in the world do nothing but torture the rest of the classes in whatever manner they see fit. I got really sick of it, but still, I'm in that reality. I had no real parents in my life, they were at least legally dead by the time I grew up enough to understand what death is. I scrimped, I saved, I grabbed hotdogs from stands from goodness knows how many times, beaten up half-dead by stallowners or their shallow hoodlum friends about once a week, until I met Mr. Andersonn."

"Who's that?"

"He's my class teacher when I was Grade Three. He taught me a lot, and he too disliked the world. I think I saw him as a father, he took that place where a figure of a father once stood empty, and till today it still is. Sadly, good shit didn't last too long."

"What happened?"

"That year, he was transferred to Columbine High School to teach; they say that he's good enough for a high school if he can counsel kids like myself. I remembered he told me the day before he transferred school: 'Son, this might be the last time I see you. I ain't got a good feeling when I move from place to place in this effed-up world, and I might just get shot and you'll see me in a grave real soon.' I was pushing him away thinking he was joking; I still remembered when it happened it was late Winter, and I was like 'Mr. Andersonn's gotta be kidding me, I'll see you on the flip side during vacation.' Turns out that last meeting with him was really our last meeting for this wretched lifetime of mine."

"So what happened to him at the end, really?"

"Late April that year, he got shot dead... By two crazy kids, no less. He was freshier than a freshie at the school, I heard, and was actually making friends with the general student crowd, with teachers these days you don't actually get that a lot. I have had a fantastic teacher and I was immensely proud of his existence. But those two kids made him no more with guns that don't have a sense of right and wrong, that always sought a blame that wasn't the person who wielded the guns."

"If he's as fantastic as you said he was, I'd try asking Shikieiki about it, but go on."

"After I attended his funeral all alone - technically speaking, not alone, since there was a mass procession for all victims at once, but, dare I say, I'm the only kid who can count at that time - I began to take to a life on the easy side, easy if only because it's easier to escape than to face whatever's in front of me. Not so much of bullying, but to do all the dangerous stuff that parents in normal families will keep their children out of, like weed, like smoking, and brawls, even substance abuse. It took me about three, four years maybe, before I found the next most important person in my life: My martial arts coach."

"Coach?"

"I remember the first time I met him I was high on weed and he tossed me full-powered into a wall. He nearly broke my spine for that. He was one of those traditional Oriental guys, always with a cigar in his mouth, but he was proud of a philosophy he calls a "constant connect with sanity". He never was as great as Mr. Andersonn because of his stuck-up old-man attitude, but other than Mr. Andersonn, nobody else talking within my earshot actually made sense, as though they're just regurgitating lines without thought because the lines are cool and off a movie, or something. More importantly, his existence triggered in me a sense to improve myself. I still retain bad habits, I occasionally still punch a wall at full might if I'm really pissed, but at least through him I now know that I could re-channel that into something else other than a wall. It was through him that I stopped blaming people for the plight I'm in, but that said I still disagree with the general dogmatic attitude and contentment of society at the things that didn't matter the most."

"You do have some pretty originality to yourself, then. Most of the people who arrived from the outside world usually wanted to go back ASAP. Compared to them, you're actually adapting pretty well. Why so hard on yourself, take a step back and relax."

"But I am billed as the 'last male Konpaku'. Other than possibly carrying on this precious lineage, do I still have any more use? I did not want to be seen as a person whose sole role for hundreds of years is to produce offspring, that would certainly suck as a potential resume."

I belched deep from the gourd again. "Can't we get to this Hagukyaku---"

I was promptly horn-slapped by the horned girl before I could finish the last syllable.

"You mean Hakugyokurou. Call it the White Jade Tower if you're still struggling with our language."

"Ours? Theirs? Who invented the Japanese language anyway? English is called the devil's language, but is it really that? How about Chinese? How about Korean? How about the hundred-odd languages in the world, Suika?"

"You're drunk. Your words don't even make any sense any more."

I thought of her words for a while, and then I agreed with her. "You're right. I'm dead tired. I don't know what to do anymore. Guess I'll take it all one day at a time."

Slowly, but surely, I feel myself drifting off to sleep. Any surface to lay my weary head then seemed to be heaven, it didn't matter where.

***

"Why are we leaving?"
"I can't stand the sight of that pompous bastard Youki any more. I'll much rather move out than ever see him again."
"Don't, Yousuke! Please don't! You know you cannot step out of the Hakurei Border! Yousan's already---"
"Yousan was weak all his life! He didn't ever had the guts to stand up for the Konpaku family if his life depended on it, and all he knew was to make merry. Serves him right he was killed trying to get to the Border!"
"But what about our son, Yuuji? Surely you wouldn't---"
"He's coming along with me. I don't want him to come back here ever again. I would very much rather perish than be in the same world as Youki!"

I could feel it. There was a strong pulling sensation, almost like the one that nearly crushed me at the Border.

Then it was rain all over.

Then it was... Mister Rodriguez? This seems... seems like something that once happened to me... but I don't know any more. I know I am dreaming... but what if it's real...

***

By the time I woke up again, it was aroundeight in the morning. I know this partially because I actually still had my digital watch with me from the outside, like a last connect to the outside world. Suika was nowhere to be found in the inn, so naturally I assumed she had gone away again looking for other things to do.

"Yuuji, so that was how it all started. Now I know why we've been apart this long."

Ya don't happen to be talking about my dream? I'm somewhat surprised you can see them. I don't want to be sure of anything yet though, not at least until we reach White Jade Tower to clarify things.

"You have a point there..."

Picking up my crutch, I only had two things in mind; one is to get rid of that hangover, and two is to get to school to perform a rather farcical role of a physical education teacher. Considering I'm on crutches you'll really wonder what Miss Zero is thinking about when she hired me for the job, but it looked like the better way to spend a week than lounging around doing absolutely nothing.

"Nya, behind you! Suika's firing something outta her palms!"

Suika, suddenly and without any warning, launched a fireball at me from behind. It missed me by centimeters but totally gutted a road sign just right outside the inn, causing a few shrieks and manic screaming. I knew it wasn't the end of whatever crazy matter was at hand.

Certainly not by a long shot, judging by the girl with horns.

"It's time for me to test your mettle, kid," she smirked dangerously, as though she wouldn't be satisfied unless she took down the entire inn along with me. "Superdense Conflagration!"

I don't know what the "Superdense" meant, but I know I had to get out of there before the "Conflagration" hit me.

To be continued...