From the perch atop the branches of the maple tree that one of the two fairies had affectionately nicknamed "Cirno's Fort of Awesomeness" during her time spent waiting, any observable object or phenomenon was heard first and seen second. It was this way due to the imposing, rising slope of land that formed the basis of the mountain they were situated at the bottom of, and nothing from the other side could be seen on such a dark night. Daiyousei had been intimidated the first time she had heard the sound of a single entity confidently marching toward them, but her spirits had been regained after the person came into view and let her identity be revealed as Momiji Inubashiri the white wolf tengu of Youkai Mountain. Unlike the hostile youkai living on the premises who would often assault others even when unprovoked, Momiji was a decent guard who would only attack individuals causing trouble or trying to invade the mountain, and so she simply gave a brief greeting to the fairies before continuing on her patrol. From that point on, it no longer came as a shock to see various fairies and minor youkai appearing in front of the fort, even if they were the hostile type that required a dose of danmaku to be repelled.

Neither Cirno nor Daiyousei, however, had either heard or seen their target Reisen or their new friend Hina in the past half hour, and both of the fairies were beginning to get fairly bored at their stakeout position. "Well," Cirno yawned, "we've gone through 'I Spy', '9 Questions', and 'Tell Scary Stories to See Who Can Scare Dai-chan More'. What game do you wanna play next?"

"How about you fly above the treetops and see if you can spot either Reisen or Hina from there?" Daiyousei suggested. "It's been so long that they'll have to show up sometime soon."

Cirno shrugged with boredom, but began flapping her wings nonetheless. "Sounds like a pretty dull game to me, but I guess you're right." She let herself rise on the wind she created, and within a few seconds was able to hover a few meters above the top of the maple tree. From this point, almost all of that side of the mountain and its surrounding area could be seen by the fairy, and she spun around in a circle to look at it all. "Wow, the land looks really pretty from up here! We should stay up late and stargaze more often, Dai-chan!"

Daiyousei sighed impatiently and looked up at the floating fairy. "Okay, Cirno, but what about Reisen and Hina? Can you see either of them?"

"Oh… right." Cirno was not a curse goddess, and spinning, especially while midair, made her prone to dizziness, but she shook her head free of the feeling and scanned the landscape for either of the familiar shapes. The dark clouds that had been forming in the past hour had now dissipated, and the mountain was very easy to see now. The fairy wasn't very talented at picking out specific objects from far away, so it was fortunate for her that she caught sight of the green-haired goddess almost right away. At that moment, Hina was about fifty meters away from the maple tree and steadily walking in that direction. Cirno couldn't be sure from the distance, but it appeared as though the goddess's emerald eyes were trained directly at her. "Yeah, it looks as if Hina's walking directly this way."

"Walking? Wriggle told me that she was famous for always spinning whenever she travels from place to place," Daiyousei called in reply to her friend above her. "I know that she got the whole detail about Hina being nice and not evil wrong, but it doesn't seem like she would just decide to stop spinning for the heck of it."

"Well, we can ask her when she gets here, right?" Cirno answered. "Anyway, I don't see the rabbit girl anywhere, so I'm coming back down." She ceased the flapping of her wings and let them stay extended, allowing her to slowly float back down onto the ground. From that moment on, the two fairies stood at the base of the maple tree fort and awaited the curse goddess.

When Hina did come into view a minute or two later, Cirno realized that the goddess's eyes had indeed been trained on her, as they were at the moment. Normally this would not be something out of the ordinary, for one usually looks at whatever they are walking toward, but the way that her face seemed to be hiding a wild, savage hunger of some sort beneath its surface was very disconcerting, to say the least. If Cirno did not know better, she would have believed that Hina was eyeing her in the same manner a leopard would eye a gigantic piece of steak right before dinnertime.

"Good evening again, fairies," Hina purred as she slowly closed the last few meters separating her from them. Neither of the fairies were experts about subtlety, but the fact that the goddess's honest, kind voice from earlier seemed to have been swapped for a more sensual, mysterious one was a clue that things were not as they appeared. Hina smirked ever so slightly as she sized up both of the fairies, and she finally decided to stop walking toward them at a distance of only about a foot. "Are we both feeling quite fine tonight?"

"Err," Daiyousei began, glancing at Cirno with a distressed expression on her face, "j-just as fine as we were before, Miss Hina. Did you find Reisen?"

Hina made a low, sinister chuckle, and she spread her arms out to either side of her in a manner not unlike Rumia. Unlike her happy, innocent laugh from the last time she had encountered Cirno and Daiyousei, this laugh was almost exactly the type of evil, psychotic laughter that a twisted mistress of curses would be expected to have. "Oh, forget about Reisen, won't you? I think we can have a lot of fun without getting her involved!"

"What are you talking about?!" Cirno demanded, her face beginning to redden under frustration and confusion. "We need to find her so we can rescue Wriggle, Rumia, and Mystia from her crazy plot! There's no time to have fun and—"

"Shh," Hina interrupted with a whisper, putting an index finger to Cirno's lips. "I think both of you are a little bit too stressed about this entire situation, wouldn't you agree? I could relieve you of some of your misfortune, and it would make both of you feel simply wonderful!"

"What… the heck?" Cirno said slowly, glancing at Daiyousei and pointing toward Hina while spinning one finger in a circular motion aimed toward her own ear. "Have you gone crazy or something?"

"Crazy? Don't be silly!" Hina giggled, although her wide, empty eyes trained on Daiyousei would disagree. "Before you go fighting powerful rabbits or something stupid like that, you should let your new curse goddess friend help you feel nice. It would be my pleasure to do that for you!"

Daiyousei's heart began to accelerate under panic, and she slowly edged away from the advancing goddess. "T-that's very nice of you, Hina, but I think we're a little busy for that, so if it's all right with you, we'll just—"

"Oh, come now," Hina chuckled with a mocking smile on her face. She held one of Daiyousei's palms in one hand and softly began to stroke it with the index finger of her other hand. "No one in their right mind would refuse to let me take their misfortune from them. It's something any mortal would drop onto their knees and beg and grovel for."

"Stop it!" Cirno snapped, pushing Hina's hand away from her friend. "We don't have time for you to suddenly start acting all creepily seductive on us. If you can't help us Reisen, we'll just go out and find her ourselves!"

Hina feigned a look of disappointment, and she pretended to pout. "Is that how you feel? That's such a shame." She stretched her arms above her and yawned in a delicate, elegant manner.

"Sorry for cutting things so short, but we have to go now to find the rabbit," Daiyousei quickly said, smiling at a chance to escape from this uncomfortable situation. She grabbed Cirno by the wrist and was about to rush toward the mountain when she heard Hina chuckle in her evil way again behind her back.

"I wish you hadn't said that," Hina replied with a low, ominous, and amused tone. When Daiyousei turned around, her eyes were met with a pair of glittering green marbles radiating such a terrifying mood that it actually caused the hairs on the fairy's arms to stand on end. "If you had simply accepted my offer, I wouldn't have to use some force to keep you right here!"

Cirno tugged strongly at the hand that was clamped around her wrist and attempted to pull Daiyousei herself, as her friend had become immobilized under the piercing glare that she had seen. "C'mon, Dai-chan! We need to get away right now!"

"I'm so sorry," Hina cackled with perverted glee, "but I'm afraid that's not going to happen, little fairy!" Although Cirno was pulling Daiyousei as hard as she could, she simply could not distance herself more than ten feet from Hina before the goddess gracefully pulled out a slip of paper from her dress and began to recite its contents. "Bad Luck Sign 'Biorhythm of the Misfortune God'!"

As soon as she heard these words and saw the ground around Hina display a swirling, sickly green pattern, Cirno gulped, feeling the contents of her stomach shuffle in a similar way. She knew that spell cards could often become very difficult to dodge if one was not careful, and it was even more nerve-wracking to be faced with an unfamiliar one she had never encountered before. Even so, she hid Daiyousei behind her back to keep her safe and firmly planted her feet into the ground, ready to face it head-on.

The first bullets to materialize in the spell formed a long, narrow string that wrapped around behind Hina and then extended immeasurably far past the fairy's right side, composed entirely of red kunai-shaped projectiles. Cirno held tightly onto Daiyousei's arm and quickly flew to the left to avoid the string, but her efforts were quickly halted when she encountered a second string of bullets forming just a few feet from her. Gritting her teeth, she tried to return to the right side and weave around the rapidly dismantling first string that was sending kunai in a straight line toward her. Although she was successful in braving through the first part of the attack, she was nearly instantly flanked by both the broken fragments of the second string and the formation of a third string. "Argh, what an annoying attack!" Cirno growled in frustration, searching desperately for an opening in the closing blockade of bullets that was surrounding her.

"Oh my, trapped right in the thick of things, are we?" Hina called out to the fairy with an amused tone of voice. "I would have thought that a fairy with such an ego would have more power behind her than this. It's a bit of a shame that you're already going to lose." She quickly twirled once more, creating three more strings of bullets around her to tighten the web that was closing around Cirno.

To the surprise of Daiyousei, who had been listening and observing all that had been going on while shivering behind her friend's back, Cirno returned the taunt with a laugh of her own. "Is that really what you think, Hina? You must be a lot stupider than I imagined, not having a clue about a fairy's ice power! Freeze Sign 'Perfect Freeze'." Taking a deep breath to prepare herself, the fairy released a great cyan wave of sub-zero temperature from her body. As it collided with the nearest red bullets, they each became frozen in place and completely ceased their motion, allowing the bullets around them to come in contact with their ice-covered brethren. This began a chain reaction of bullets freezing: each time one of the strings dismantled to aim its contents at Cirno, the pieces of it joined the continuously growing mass of ice. At last, every bullet that had been aimed at the fairy was encased in ice, and in the very center of it all stood a proud, grinning fairy. "Are you regretting insulting me now, idiot?"

Hina surveyed the battlefield of frozen bullets with an unimpressed look in her eyes and shrugged. "Well, that's a bit better than I thought your potential was, but still, I—Ow!" She cried out in pain as a sharp, frosty sensation suddenly assaulted her back, and she turned around to find the source of it: the green-haired fairy who was wearing a brave expression on her face and releasing a multitude of small, pointy bullets from either side which arced toward their central target.

"Take that!" Daiyousei yelled. Her voice, unfamiliar to being used at great volumes, cracked horribly at the shout and produced more of a humorous squeaking noise than an intimidating threat, but she continued anyway. "I-I don't like it when people try to trick me into trusting them, only for them to then betray me! It's not nice at all." As each of Daiyousei's attacks struck the goddess, they began to tear small holes in her red dress, forcing her to spin rapidly to deflect the bullets and avoid the complete destruction of her clothes.

"I don't like it when fairies poke holes in my dress," Hina responded in a faux-pleasant tone of voice while pretending to smile warmly, all the while advancing toward the fairy in an intimidating manner. "It's not nice at all either, and I tend to subsequently poke holes in the skin of whoever does it." Before she could act on her words, however, she once again felt several freezing-cold projectiles slamming against her back. "What the…"

"You fell for that?" Cirno laughed, nearly slapping her knee in humor. "You actually fell for it? Man, you really are such an idiot!" As Hina observed when she faced the laughing fairy, the multitude of red bullets she had released in her spell card had thawed out from their frozen state and proceeded to travel in random directions, some of them directly toward her.

Since Hina was not a tengu, she did not have a leaf fan that could be used to stir up tempest-force winds to blow all of the drifting bullets away. However, the crafty goddess was resourceful enough to brainstorm another solution to her problem within seconds. She began spinning at a lightning-fast speed, going from looking like a blur to Cirno and Daiyousei to actually seeming to stop and go backwards as their minds could not keep up with viewing each frame their eyes saw. As Hina held her arms out on either side of her body, she became something of a living windmill or fan that stirred the air around her enough to create a wind-like force that did indeed redirect the bullets aimed toward her to other directions. At last, when there were no more bullets aimed toward her, she gradually reduced her spinning speed down to a halt, although she held her head in her hands for a few seconds afterward as if she were dizzy from the rotation. "Nicely done, fairy," she called out, grinning ear-to-ear. "I guess it's not too far off the mark when you tell everyone that you're the strongest if you can freeze and redirect attacks like that."

"Well, of course," Cirno responded, puffing her chest out in pride. "I beat that magician Marisa to a pulp with these powers, so it was pretty inevitable that the same would happen to you!"

"Ah, but am I really just a pulp yet?" Hina asked, gaining a malevolent edge to her smile as she lowered her eyebrows. "I think I still have some solid matter left to me before I just become a glass of orange juice as you said." She revealed another spell card from her dress, and smirked triumphantly as she looked over the contents of its words. "Try to freeze this one, dear: Fate 'Old Lady Ohgane's Fire'."

At the word "fire", Cirno gasped and felt her stomach contort as memories of attempting to freeze fiery bullets and only getting terrible burns as a result during the Fairy Wars ran through her mind. As she glanced at Daiyousei's worried expression on her face from behind Hina, however, she steeled herself and bravely stood directly in front of the attack. "No problem!"

It was indeed a problem for a fairy based on the element of ice, however, as eight segments of conjoined fireballs formed around Hina in the shape of a loose octagon. Just standing about twenty feet from the large collection of fiery bullets was troubling for Cirno as a breeze carried the radiating heat directly into her face in the same way a blow-dryer would, forcing her to shut her eyes out of disorientation; she, like most of the denizens of Gensokyo, had never used a hairdryer in her life, and so the experience was quite disconcerting for her.

While Cirno began to wildly flail her arms about in front of her in an attempt to get rid of the harsh wind blowing in her face, she failed to notice that the octagon of fireballs was beginning to break down into long lines that spread out in every direction. Even though there were wide spaces between the lines of bullets like on a wire of Christmas lights, Cirno was too distracted and Daiyousei was too intimidated by the number of blazing projectiles heading her way to effectively dodge them, and as a result both of the fairies were pushed onto the ground with singed areas all over their dresses from fiery collisions.

"Urgh," Daiyousei groaned from the scorching pain that seemed to inhabit every part of her body at the same time. Even as she raised herself from her position of lying prone on the earth, all she could see flying toward her was another horde of flaming bullets in a broken pattern. Although the fire was composed of danmaku and thus would not cause the combustion of the trees or grass around it, it was still potent enough to cause a searing effect on its two victims that convinced Daiyousei to return her head to the ground, a feeling of defeat echoing through her mind. As she stole a glance at Cirno from the other side of the attack's center, she felt despair at the sight of the ice fairy being repeatedly assaulted by the blazing shots. The effect was almost comedic; Cirno's head was pelted again and again by the fireballs to the point of her getting a dizzy look in her eyes.

At last, when it seemed as though both of the fairies would either be knocked unconscious or burned alive from the attack, Hina returned the spell to her dress and let each of the blazing projectiles disintegrate simultaneously, transforming the chaotic sight of the Youkai Mountain forest battle to a rather peaceful, quiet one. "Very brave and commendable of you," she called with a sense of smug triumph in her voice as she began to advance toward Cirno, "but it was still rather foolish of you to think that you had a chance of winning, even with those impressive freezing abilities. Now that we've settled that, however, let's return to relieving you of your misfortune!" As she stood over the scarred and lightheaded ice fairy whose vision was filled with burning stars, Hina gently tugged on the ends of the very long crimson ribbon that adorned her hair, unraveling it to the point at which it lay completely straight in her hands.

Before she could perform any sort of activity with the long fabric, however, it was violently punctured a total of three times with accompanied bangs that sliced through the silence. The ribbon was wrenched away from Hina's grasp by the force involved, and from its new position lying on the ground, the goddess noticed three perfect, bullet-sized holes formed along its length. Quick to notice the danger she was now in, Hina turned her gaze turned upwards toward eyelevel again and instantly found herself staring into the barrel of a black pistol about five feet away. Both Cirno and Daiyousei, even in their defeated state, instantly recognized the lavender-haired, rabbit-eared, scowling owner of the pistol as the one they had been searching for in their entire time at Youkai Mountain. "Like bullets in your ribbon?" Reisen asked while staring coldly down at Hina. "No? Well, that's okay; I'll just put the next ones in your head, you impostor!"

"Impostor?" Hina repeated, chuckling softly to herself as she grinned at Reisen. "No, you've got that wrong. I'm just—"

"Shut up." Reisen concealed her pistol and pointed her index finger directly at Hina's forehead, causing about ten ammunition-shaped danmaku bullets to be launched at rapid fire.

Although Cirno was quite shocked by the rapid course of events that had just taken place a few feet from her, Daiyousei was able to take the opportunity to crawl next to her friend. "Come on," she hissed from the position she had reached, seeing the goddess collapse onto the ground with multiple bullets lodged in her forehead. "Let's get out of here!"

"But Reisen's right there!" Cirno protested as she pulled herself off the ground. "We can't just leave without getting back Rumia, Wriggle, and Mystia!"

Daiyousei sighed and tugged on her friend's wrist. "We can deal with that later, but right now, I really don't wanna be the victim to whatever Psycho Misfortune Girl here has in store for us. Besides, do you really want to attack the rabbit who just saved us from someone weaker than her and expect to win? Let's just head back to the Scarlet Devil Mansion and get help there before we get incinerated or something."

Cirno grumbled loudly, but nodded. "You're gonna pay for brainwashing and kidnapping our best friends, got it?!" she shouted with a glare to Reisen. "I'm not gonna stop until you're punished like a bad bunny should be!" After voicing her threat, she gingerly tried her battered and charred wings to find that they were fortunately still operational, and subsequently took off back toward the Misty Lake and its mansion with her friend flying close by her heels.

Reisen heard Cirno's words echo through her mind, and she felt a tinge of sadness from its strong emotion. Memories of all she had done in the past twelve hours and ideas of the reception she would get from it began to flood her mind, and a feeling of being trapped in an inescapable dilemma overshadowed all. She wondered if there would indeed be a way to get out of the position she had now put herself in, but no simple solution came to mind. "This is such a mess I've gotten myself into," she murmured to herself in a melancholy manner.

As she noticed that Hina was beginning to stir from the ground, however, she firmly planted her foot on the fallen goddess's back and restricted all of her movement. "You don't seriously take me for a fool, do you? Get rid of that silly costume and show me who you really are." The girl received no response from the goddess on the ground, so she pointed her index finger at her head again. "Okay, I guess you want me to drill some more bullets into your brain then?"

"All right, ALL RIGHT!" the being on the ground yelled angrily in a voice that was much rougher and less feminine than that of the goddess it had been emulating. The image of Hina that it had assumed began to quickly dissolve into what seemed to be a thick black cloud to Reisen in a manner similar to pixelation, and what emerged from the cloud was a girl the rabbit had never seen before. Contrary to the tall goddess she had been imitating, the girl was rather small with similarly short hair that barely managed to reach her shoulders. On her body she wore a black dress that only reached her thighs, and much of the rest of her legs were covered by stockings in the same color. A snake adorned both her right arm and the long trident she carried, and sprouted out of her back were six wings, one half of which seemed similar to sharp red scythes and the other half resembling blue demon tails. With her sharp, red eyes, she glared daggers at Reisen. "There you go: my true form. Are you happy now, you little rabbit bitch?!"

Reisen was genuinely surprised at the sight of the new girl; she had been half expecting the identity of Hina to be a mischievous Yukari trying to play a prank on the fairies. "Who… who are you? What were you doing with Cirno and Daiyousei?"

The girl laughed sharply and planted her trident into the ground to use as a crutch to get back onto her feet again. "Oh, interested about me now, are we? Funny; half a moment ago I could have sworn you were talking about giving me a lobotomy. Well, anyway, just since you were so keen on invading my personal business like that, I'll tell you: I'm Nue, and I was doing my job of terrifying people."

"A nue…?" Reisen inquired curiously, attempting to run through her memory to access any information she had previously encountered about the species. "I thought those were all sealed underground centuries ago."

"Yeah, well, apparently not anymore, since I'm back, smart one," Nue replied harshly with a brandishing of her trident. "Anyway, it sounded as though those fairies had a serious bone to pick with you, so you should be happy I was trying to scare them into submission by playing on their natural fear of that curse goddess!"

"The fairies were doing nothing wrong, though!" Reisen argued. "Why would you want to scare them so badly?"

The nue shrugged. "Why do you hop around and eat carrots? Why does Murasa drown people when given the chance? It's the same reason why I aim to bring about unknown terror; it's what I'm meant to do, even if that means having to knock out a ridiculous-looking goddess, rob her of her spell cards, and then wear her outlandish dress to get the job done. And anyway, I wasn't planning on raping them or anything like that, if that's what you were thinking; I was just going to show them enough creepy illusions to scare them straight and quench my thirst to cause terror for the past eight-hundred years."

Reisen frowned and rubbed her tired eyes. "So you came back to the surface just to strike fear in people? Seems like every youkai in Gensokyo is just trying to do that nowadays, and nobody is succeeding."

Nue chuckled and smirked at the rabbit. "There's a bit of a difference between me and the average youkai. Namely, I don't mind skinning a few knees to get to where I need to be in life. I was following the development of this terrorist group trying to raze the current Gensokyo and its corrupt ways that a little fairy told me about, and I figured I could use the opportunity to my advantage to get a head-start in the art of fear."

"That's the group I'm a part of!" Reisen exclaimed. "You're going to join it?"

"Yeah, I sure am!" Nue said with a mischievous smile. As Reisen was preoccupied with staring at the youkai's face and her peculiar wings, she failed to notice that Nue was beginning to draw her trident back slightly as if preparing to use it. "The only problem is… you're not going to be able to tell anyone else in your posse about it!" Without delay, she whipped her arm forward and jammed the ends of the three points of her weapon deep into the rabbit's right upper leg area.
Reisen let loose a tremendous scream as her face contorted in extreme pain. Although the rabbit had sustained injuries in the past due to a variety of circumstances, she had never felt such a focused and concentrated sensation of pain in her life as she did now in her right leg. It was comparable to the feeling that the vegetables she chopped on a daily basis to prepare dinner at Eientei would experience if they had nerve endings after being sliced and fried in oil, she decided. Reisen brought both of her hands to the spot of the injury to try to stop the blood that was gushing out of the wound like a crimson water spring, but Nue continued to drive the weapon further and further into her leg, even twisting it slightly with a look of sadistic pleasure on her face.

When about half a pint of blood had trickled down Reisen's leg and formed a warm red pool on the dirty earth below her, Nue pulled the trident out of its fleshy burial spot and tossed a small black handkerchief at the rabbit, indicating for her to wrap it around the wound to stop the blood flow. Reisen, however, only stared at it with a horrified expression and chattering teeth as it fell to the ground beside her. At that moment, she lost all the confidence she had possessed while exposing the impostor and dropped to the earth on her knees in a submissive manner before the mysterious, cruel girl. "Like I mentioned before," Nue said nonchalantly, "I'm not afraid to skin some knees… or puncture them."

Leaning in closer, Nue gently gripped her victim's chin and raised it up to allow her to fully see her face. "By the way, I just went easy on you. Did you perhaps notice a gathering of black clouds around earlier today? That was me, following you and everything you did, keen on learning about this curious operation you're a part of." She stared into the eyes that were too full of tears to produce insanity-causing waves, and smiled sweetly. "You're such an adorable little rabbit, getting miserably pushed around and forced to help the one heading this, even though you desperately tried to talk her out of it. You got caught in a big spot of trouble, becoming the scapegoat of a plan you never wanted to be a part of and in fact were planning to resist, right? The fact that you're not suffering from depression if that's what your daily life is like is amazing. I wanted to climb out of my clouds and just give you a great big hug!" Since she did not have the opportunity before, Nue decided to validate her claim and wrapped her arms around Reisen's body, briefly holding her in a tight embrace. In reply, Reisen only whimpered softly to herself and shut her eyes. "Anyway, get this: I have my own agenda in mind, not the quasi revolutionary bull that cult of yours is into. I usually kill anyone who sees my true form, but it wouldn't sit right with me to murder such a pathetic little creature like you right now. Take this as a warning, though: if you get in the way of what I'm trying to do again, I'm not going to hesitate to send you to the hell I just emerged from, plain and simple. Of course, if you're just going to be like a wounded animal and slowly crawl around until you succumb to your injury, that's fine with me as well."

She examined the three reddened, wet tips of her trident curiously and gingerly rolled her tongue over them, lapping up a small portion of the liquid and smiling in a satisfied manner at the taste. Even though a nue is not a vampire and does not typically feed on blood, Nue felt that doing so would be an appropriate gesture toward the one who had inconvenienced her in the middle of her act of terror and shot danmaku projectiles into her head. Glancing at Reisen's wincing of utter dismay, she stuck her bloodstained tongue out at her. "Yeah, good luck finding someone in Gensokyo who will rescue you from the mountain in your condition or believe your crazy ramblings about how 'there's an evil nue on the loose', especially when your name now seems to be mud around here!"

Before Reisen could comment on the violent and disturbing act and speech of the nue, complain about the excruciating pain she was experiencing at the moment, or essentially say anything, Nue shrouded herself in another dark cloud and promptly fled the scene, only saying goodbye with a quick, whimsical "Later!" The rabbit was left alone in the middle of the dark, mountainous forest. While most others in her situation would likely attempt to pursue the fleeing nue or seek help, the conflicting and depressing thoughts and feelings in her mind compelled her to remain in place and accept the dolorous sensation brought on by both her predicament and the wound. Her only company was the terrible pain inflicted by the trident, but that itself was slightly dulled by an overwhelming feel of loneliness, as if the entire world as she knew it had decided to exit and leave her stranded in a sea of despair without companionship. Nue's recitation of what Reisen had done throughout the past day resonated in her thoughts, and she couldn't help but feel angry and frustrated with herself. "This… I shouldn't be doing any of this. I should have stayed firm and refused to be a part of this from the beginning." But she didn't, Reisen knew all too well, and that could not be changed now. Tonight was a night that would permanently change the existence of not only her, but many others in Gensokyo, she realized. It was these thoughts that allowed her to drown out the overbearing pain and sadness she would otherwise feel.

Even though Youmu knew full well that the night had progressed about six and a half hours since she had last stepped foot in Kourindou, she was still surprised and bewildered by how dark the interior of the old antique shop was at this hour. Although a lantern placed on the counter of the store produced a flickering light, it barely did anything besides projecting deep shadows on the walls. The gardener was in fact slightly glad that Yuuka had ordered her to sit down on a small wooden rocking chair in the center of the room, for she felt that she would certainly bump into or stub her toe on any of the piles of junk that were spread all around the store. Amazingly enough, the flower youkai had been true to her word of preparing tea, and Youmu currently sat in her chair while holding onto a piping hot cup of finely brewed green tea that did not appear to contain any poisons, sedatives, or unpleasant-tasting ingredients. Even while remaining a cruel youkai, Yuuka took care to make sure that everything she did relating to flora was prepared with the utmost quality, and that included tea. Youmu had dreaded the beverage when she was first escorted to the shop and "politely requested" to drink it, but the apparent innocence of it was a pleasant surprise.

Although Yuuka herself was not present in the store to watch over Youmu and the gardener was not physically restrained in any way, she knew better than to attempt to escape, spying a single sunflower in a pot that rested beside the flickering lantern on the counter. Although she could not be sure, it appeared to Youmu as if the flower was staring directly in her direction, and she swore that she could see a single grinning mouth on its face through the dim light of the room. It was an unwritten message that the flower youkai was still watching her which Youmu dared not to ignore. Besides the unsettling flower, there was also Koakuma to contend with, standing in front of the shop's door and eagerly awaiting the return of Yuuka, and Youmu knew that she would not be able to defeat the devil in complete silence to avoid causing attention.

"Oh, there she is!" Koakuma exclaimed enthusiastically after a few minutes of standing at the door. "Yuuka-sama's coming back, and it looks like she's bringing another unconscious body along with her."

"Wonderful for her," Youmu remarked dryly as she sipped her tea and shifted her weight from the right side to the life side of the chair. "You little treacherous wench," she added under her breath.

Koakuma turned around to face Youmu and cocked her head curiously. "You think I'm a traitor?" she asked with a small, innocent smile. "Why would you think that? I'm just expanding my activities and helping carry out the greatest upheaval of Gensokyo's unbalanced lifestyle the land's ever seen. Just because Patchouli's not behind it doesn't mean I can't do some good in the world, does it?"

"By going directly against your mistress's back, throwing her plan into turmoil? Sounds pretty traitorous to me," Youmu replied, disgust for the demon present in her voice.

"Hold on a sec." Koakuma sighed and rustled her wings with slight irritation, and she took out the indigo book she had used earlier in the night from one of her pockets and showed it to Youmu. "See this? It's a book that gives a brief history and lifestyle information about demons and devils. All of us Makai residents got one when we were first conceived into the world, and I decided to hold onto mine even after Patchouli summoned me as her familiar. I never have let anyone touch it, not even my mistress herself." She ran her fingers down the fore-edge, which, though yellowed from age, appeared to remain as pristine and free from imperfections as a brand new one, and then opened it up and began to carefully leaf through a few pages. "Anyway, the book describes the typical lives of devils like me: representing evil itself, torturing foolish and unwitting humans and turning them against their closest ones, seducing others as succubi and then possessing their souls, et cetera, et cetera." She closed the book with a rather loud thump, causing the light in the lantern to dance wildly for a second or two. "And then there's me: a devil familiar whose most exciting aspect of life is sorting books for her mistress day in and day out. Patchouli is a very kind mistress and all… but I just am tired of not being able to live in the exciting way my species is supposed to. Doesn't that make sense?"

Youmu frowned and averted her gaze away from the devil. "Perhaps for a little girl with an even smaller heart and no sense of fidelity, one who doesn't realize what it actually means to serve a mistress, it makes sense, but I can't see it fitting anywhere else."

"My, that's a rather bold claim to make," another voice, as lovely and charismatic as a politician's in public, echoed into the store. "If you insist that Koakuma doesn't know what loyalty to one's superior means, would you perhaps like to demonstrate it with your own mistress?" The beaming face of Yuuka appeared directly in the space outside the shop's front door, and she emerged into the dark room with the cheerful yet subdued Yuyuko in her arms, mud dripping off her kimono onto the ground.

"Oh, hello, Youmu," Yuyuko greeted as she turned her head toward the girl sitting in the chair. "I hope you weren't being rude to this nice lady after she invited you to a tea party, especially since she brought me right to you when I thought I'd have great trouble finding you." She looked up at Yuuka and returned her smile with an equally joyful one. "Thank you again for doing that, by the way."

"But of course; it was nothing," Yuuka replied pleasantly, causing the two women to giggle softly between themselves. Koakuma snickered as she observed the scene, and Youmu sighed exasperatedly at her mistress's inability to take a dangerous situation seriously. "Now, why don't you take a seat in… I don't know… Youmu's lap? It's easier to keep an eye on the two of you that way." The flower youkai strode confidently toward the center of the room and dumped Yuyuko on top of her gardener's body.

Even though the ghost weighed little due to her species, Youmu still groaned as her body accepted the weight. From this new angle, she noticed that no hand emerged from the ghost's right sleeve. "Lady Yuyuko… what happened to your arm?"

Yuyuko smiled mischievously at Youmu and began to roll her sleeve up to her shoulder, revealing that the appendage simply ended in a rough, jagged cut at the elbow. "Oh, right. I do believe that young night sparrow was hungry tonight and decided to try spirit flesh for once. That's not really the most appropriate thing to say first, however; shouldn't you be apologizing for running away from Hakugyokurou against my wishes and then shouting so utterly crassly at me earlier tonight?"

"Oh, so that's the 'ideal' way you show fidelity to your mistress, Youmu?" Koakuma remarked sarcastically with an expression of triumph one only gets while watching another person make a hypocritical statement. "I could have sworn you were just getting on my case about lesser offenses toward Patchouli."

Before Youmu could reply with another irritated jab at either her mistress or the devil, Yuuka cleared her throat loudly, allowing all three of the others in the room to direct their attention toward her. "Forgive me for intruding on your personal relationship, but it almost seems as though you two ghosts have a bit of a conflict going on amongst yourselves. Please, do feel free to talk to each for a little while and get it worked out. I have to take care of an errand involving the next stage of the plot I'm sure you two are well aware of, but I'll be back before long to find out just why the two of you have been following us this evening."

"The plot?" Youmu echoed in confusion. "You mean, you had a hand in trying to kill Remilia?"

"Not a hand, little one," Yuuka replied with a chuckle. "No, no, no. As you won't be leaving here any time soon, you may as well know who the savior of Gensokyo from its corrupt ways will be: me. The vampire's death was but the beginning piece of a plan to set Gensokyo free from its corrupt ways, as I'm sure Reisen must have mentioned to you in the letter I asked her to write. Incapacitating Yukari, forcing Ran into compliance, writing the letter on Yuyuko's personal stationery… all these were little acts I devised and ordered, as will the next step be." Catching a look of confusion and one that appeared to be a combination of awe and delight from Youmu and Yuyuko, respectively, Yuuka smiled patiently. "In case you're wondering why I'm telling you this, I don't mind if everyone trying to oppose me on this learns that I'm the instigator; it's not as if they'll willingly run up to me and attempt to beat me into submission, unless they're like Tenshi. Nobody in their right mind wishes to face me if it's at all possible to avoid doing so, and so I can make the reform of Gensokyo as peaceful as possible." She yawned softly and opened her umbrella toward the ceiling. "But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here. I'll return shortly. Koakuma, do make sure that the guests don't gain the desire to leave our new humble abode, please."

"Of course, Yuuka-sama!" Koakuma chirped, and she proceeded to pull up a similar chair herself in front of the two ghosts to watch over them.

As Yuuka strolled over to the back of the store where several closet doors lay partially closed, all the while maintaining her eerily grinning stare at the ghosts, Yuyuko looked down at the girl she was sitting on and had dripped mud on and smiled eagerly at her, slightly jumping up and down in her lap like a young child. "Isn't this such a thrilling twist, Youmu?" she said excitedly. "I mean, finding out that Reisen was only answering to a higher power and then discovering the ringleader of this psychotic circus, the big bad mistress herself, and we're the ones she decides to capture herself! I almost feel honored have such a front-row seat on which to watch her big plan right now."

It was at that moment when Youmu finally gave up trying to maintain a serious image in such a grim situation as being held hostage by a possibly sadistic youkai while in the company of her mistress, and she managed to spurt out a weak chuckle to quell Yuyuko's bouncing excitement. "Y-yes, I guess it is pretty interesting, even though I suspected Yuuka was behind a lot of this the moment when she first captured me."

"I'm glad you agree with me," Yuyuko said, her voice gaining a sly edge to it, "but don't think for a moment that kissing up to me is going to make me punish you any less for being such a disobedient girl earlier tonight." She twisted her body around in order to get a glimpse at the one she was sitting on, sliding off the lap into the remaining space on the chair, and playfully tapped Youmu's nose with her index finger several times, making sure to use the arm that was still intact to do so.

Youmu shuddered from the thought of this, especially knowing that her punisher was only a few millimeters from her at the moment, but this was quickly broken by a painful, constricting sensation that began to course around her torso, almost as if a snake had wrapped itself around her. Looking down, she noticed that the sunflower pot on the table beside her had sprouted a thin, reddish-silver, winding vine that had sprouted countless red seeds on it. Almost as if possessed by a poltergeist, the vine was quickly binding Youmu and Yuyuko to the chair by their stomachs, and its continuous and unceasing motion that produced a tighter and tighter grip seemed intent on cutting off circulation.

"It's bittersweet," Yuuka explained matter-of-factly as she shut one of the closets in the back and strode back toward the entrance. "Quite a tenacious and adorable little plant that loves to strangle trees to death, and this particular strain I bred seems to work to a similar effect on humans and youkai. Of course, I don't expect it will exactly kill you, per say, but I think it will provide a bit of a hindrance for trying to leave. Enjoy the time to yourselves until I return!" Leaving Youmu to shift her body weight uncomfortably under the tug of the vine, Yuuka sauntered toward the front door of Kourindou, swiftly opening and closing it in one swift motion as she exited.

It had been far too dark in the insufficiently lit store for either of the ghosts to even get a glimpse of the flower youkai in that moment. Even if the single lantern had been extremely strong, however, Yuuka would have still been shrouded in darkness as she proceeded toward the exit. The power of Rumia to produce a bubble of darkness around herself, after all, always worked, even when she herself was bound and gagged by bittersweet vines that also wrapped up her friend Wriggle like a Christmas present against her back, completely terrified, and held by the top of her hair in the firm grasp of Yuuka. The only comfort the two close companions could feel in that moment was the warmth of the other's body where their backs touched, but it did little to quell their nerves as they were carried off by the flower youkai into the night toward parts unknown.

"N-no, don't bother trying, Sakuya." It did some good for the otherwise silent and deserted library to be filled with the sound of a voice again, even if it was a quiet one ridden with anxiety as the vampire mistress of the Scarlet Devil Mansion currently possessed. Sakuya considered it a relief to see that her mistress's complexion had once again turned a pale white color from the pink, human-like tone it had been earlier before Yukari had reversed her accidental handiwork, but the fact that it was as pallid as skim milk and complete with nervous, constantly twitching and shifting red eyes was rather unsettling to her. As she attempted to grip the doorknob of the small door located covertly in the very rear of the library behind a bookshelf that seemed to carry more dust than books on it, Remilia grasped her wrist with an unsteady, trembling hand. "I have the archive room door locked to everyone but me with magic like the kind sealing Flandre away."

Even so, Sakuya felt that a minor act of disobedience to release the defiant attitude she had been gaining toward her mistress in the past hour would not be horribly stepping out of line, and so she began to twist the knob in her hand, partly expecting it to remain firm and resist her motion. Instead, the knob's rotation was unrestricted, fully turning around once, and the added force of Remilia clutching Sakuya's arm like the safety rail of a lifeboat in the center of a typhoon caused the door to push open and welcome the two into the room behind it.

Seeing the door to the archive room swing open without needing to be unlocked first caused a tremor within Remilia's stomach, and she gulped similarly to how one whose secrets have been just exposed to the entire prying world would as she peered into the pitch-black, cramped, dusty room of shelves attached to the walls and piles upon piles of papers. Without wasting a moment to comment to Sakuya about how the door was unlocked, she launched herself into the little room. Although her skin tone seemed more ashen than ever given the latest discovery about her predicament, she used her keen vampire night vision instead of light reflecting off it to guide her to the correct document. "If the paper we found outside my study door was indeed a fake, the real deed must still be in here."

Sakuya quietly stepped into the dark room behind her mistress and began to quickly scan through the labels atop the shelves. If there were any hidden interesting facts or incriminating information about Remilia to be found, she concluded, they would be in the archive room, and it would be much easier to find such things when the vampire was anxious and distracted rather than alertly staring at her like during the spring cleaning period. It somewhat amazed and horrified her to realize what her first thoughts about being in such a room of secrets was, but she rationalized it in her mind by reminding herself of the way Remilia had responded to Ran's death and her reason given for being concerned about the deed's appearance. She began to quietly whisper the names of each label she found as she passed them. "Monthly blood storage levels, human victims list, Flandre's instability tracking levels, fairy maid attendance… Nothing interesting."

Remilia, meanwhile, had attacked a pile of yellowing papers under the label of "Absolutely Mundane and Not Important Items" and was quickly leafing through them, not bothering to keep the minor level of organization that had existed earlier. "If I remember correctly, it has to be somewhere between Meiling's employment contract and the statement of Yukari's real age—all twenty pages containing the full number." She grinned sheepishly and glanced at Sakuya with hopes that she could playfully joke with her servant to familiarize the atmosphere between them this night, but she noticed that the maid was busy flipping through other archive items and did not seem to respond to the humorous statement at all. "Heh, that's, uh, a joke, Sakuya… you know?" Remilia laughed nervously at her own joke in an attempt to calm herself down, but it did little to the hurricane of emotions happening within her mind, and the abnormal, absentminded, delayed murmur from her maid acting as a response only made matters worse. Turning back to the pile of papers, she continued to flip through the dividing tabs in the stack until her finger ran along one labeled "Scarlet Devil Mansion Deed". Unsurprisingly, as Remilia pushed all of the papers above it to the side, she found the contents of the tab to be completely empty. "Well, just as I suspected and feared, the deed's nowhere to be found in here."

"I guess the one I found is the real one, then," Sakuya said, briefly glancing over her shoulder in the dim light at her mistress's facial expression of fear. As she turned back to the shelves she was next to, her eyes briefly caught sight of one of the documents of the "Absolutely Mundane and Not Important Items" pile that Remilia had scattered all over the room. This one particularly caught her eye due to the fact that it was titled "April 22, 1997 – Keine Kamishirasawa". Sakuya had to briefly stop and ponder about this document, for she knew that neither she nor Remilia had met Keine, were-hakutaku guardian of the Human Village, prior to the Imperishable Night incident four and a half years ago, and she could not even recall the Scarlet Devil Mansion being situated in Gensokyo as early as 1997.

Before Sakuya could approach the document that had piqued her curiosity, however, she was interrupted by Remilia uttering a loud, aggravated shout. "Damn!" The vampire turned to her maid and frowned in an irritated manner, a welcome change from the nervous look Sakuya had seen on her before. "That glass Koakuma accidentally shattered while cleaning in here a week ago still has a couple of shards lying around, and I scraped my arm against one on this pile! I thought you told me you cleaned them all up already."

Sakuya let all of the rebellious thoughts and curiosities about the mysterious document in her mind leave for the moment, and she assumed an apologetic, subservient bowing stance as a perfect and elegant maid should, scanning her mistress's arm for any blood from the wound but only finding a superficial scratch on it. "My apologies, my lady; I had wrongly believed that I had gotten rid of them all. If I recall correctly, I believe you had kicked a few around into inaccessible corners while leaving the room."

Remilia smiled nostalgically and began to look back into her memories as well. "Yes, I guess I did do that then. After all, I was really mad at Koakuma, and so I stormed toward the door without caring about messing up anything…" As she continued to remember what had happened, her face suddenly contorted into a mixed expression of guilt, dread, and knowledge, and Sakuya retreated a few steps back in case what would inevitably be revealed was too terrible to avoid hitting the nearest living creature over. "…forgetting to lock the door behind me! How could I have been so stupid, Sakuya?! Koakuma obviously broke the glass on purpose because she knew I'd forget to lock the door in my rage, and so she just swiped the deed later on!" She slapped her forehead in frustration, and the hand that did so slowly slid down until it was covering her eyes. "It's my fault; I know that I forget to do important things like lock doors when I'm very angry, and yet I neglected to realize that wretched little devil was playing me until now!"

Sakuya pondered the situation for a few seconds. "Patchouli told me that she was working with Youmu to track where Koakuma is headed; since the little devil is bound to tell us what her purposes with stealing the deed are, maybe we should go see her."

"I guess we can do that," Remilia agreed in a calmer tone, "but we'd better seal away the real deed right now before it falls into the wrong hands… again, I suppose I should say. Like Flandre's… I… mean…." A shiver went down Sakuya's spine as she heard Remilia's speech regarding her sister trail off, and it was elevated as she watched her mistress turn her back to her while quivering almost violently. "Sakuya." This time, her voice was eerily calm, and Sakuya felt as if it was a powder keg that could be set off by a cricket rubbing its legs together in the wrong way. "I did lock the door to the basement after angrily leaving Flandre's quarters this evening, didn't I?"

"My lady, I assume so, but I was not there to—"

"I must have," she responded with false confidence. "The archive room door is one thing, but I would never forget to seal Flandre away from going upstairs, right? No, no, I'm getting worked up over nothing; this is silly. Isn't it, Sakuya? Totally hilarious!" Remilia began laughing as forcefully as she could, although it began to sound more like choked-back crying than what it was intended to sound like.

"Please, get a hold of yourself, my lady," Sakuya said as coolly as she could, but finding that her voice too was choppy out of anxiety and fear. "Let's just handle this with a calm mind."

Remilia gave no verbal response, but Sakuya could see that her eyes indicated what she would do next. Ignoring both Sakuya and a fairy maid (the same one Flandre had first encountered in her journey outside the basement) who had stuck her head into the room with a concerned expression on her face, she dashed out from the archive room into the main area of the library, attempting to reach the deed where Sakuya had placed it on one of the great wooden desks in the center as soon as (in)humanly possible.

When she reached it, however, she was met with the worst she had anticipated. Standing in the doorway leading out of the library was none other than the young vampire sister herself, Flandre Scarlet, clutching the coveted deed tightly to her chest. "F-Flandre!"

"Hi, Remi!" Flandre shouted to her sister in a faux-friendly tone, grinning triumphantly as she felt the paper being safely contained in her hand. "Whatcha doing? Oh yeah, I remember now: trying to seal away the evidence proving that your little sister shouldn't be forever locked in the basement like a cute Frankenstein's monster, right? Sounds like fun!"

Remilia produced a horrible choking sound as if Flandre had wrapped her hand around her sister's throat, and she took a moment to inhale deeply. "Flandre, you don't understand what's going on. That couldn't be further from my intention."

Flandre laughed sharply, and though the sound was high-pitched, childish, and cute to Remilia's ears, it instantly silenced her with its connotations. "Honestly, Remi, I'm kind of insulted you think I'd be fooled with that. You know I wasn't born yesterday; maybe you've lost track of the time, but it's been 500 years! And anyway, you pretty much spilled your guts out about this whole thing to Sakuya in your study without checking to see if I were listening after you forgot to lock my door again, didn't you? Not your brightest idea ever, I have to say."

"That's what I was about to tell you, Miss Scarlet!" the fairy maid shouted as she zipped across the library's sky, nearly colliding with Remilia as she came to a halt. "Flandre forced me to tell her where your study is, and I guess that's where she went right then. I wanted to tell you earlier, but I was afraid she was still listening… it doesn't really matter at this point, though."

Remilia and Flandre both glared at the timid fairy maid who began cowering under the two fiery stares, and then Remilia turned back to her sister with earnest, pleading eyes. "Please, Flan; I promise you with my entire heart that I'm not lying to you now. This situation is very complicated, but if you come and sit down here, I would be happy to explain it to you."

Flandre smirked nastily and began to mock her sister's vocal tones. "'…and then snatch the precious deed out of your grubby little fingers and have Sakuya happily escort you back down to the basement, where you'll spend the rest of your long, undead life rotting away until you're nothing but a moldy pile of bones with a broken mind. That's just because I love my little sister Flandre so very much, yes.'"

A couple of tears began to drip from two scarlet eyes onto similarly red cheeks from the harshness of the words, but Remilia quickly wiped them away with her arm. "Damn you, Flandre!" she shouted hotly. "Can't you listen to your older sister for once? I swear on Sakuya's life that I'm only trying to help you here. Please, just stop being stubborn for one minute and hear me out on this!"

Flandre walked out of the doorway of the library, back down to the foot of the steps, and stared at her sister eyes as her wings began to unfurl behind her. "I have listened to you for once. That was the time you said, 'Don't worry, Flan; it will only be for a short while. You just need to stay in the basement a little bit until you learn to control your emotions so no accidents occur. Trust me on this; you'll be out in no time.' That was half a millennium ago, right?" Her facial expression lost all traces of a smile, and she curled her lip back to expose her fangs before she proceeded to shout at the top of her lungs, "SO FORGIVE ME IF I DON'T WANT TO FUCKING LISTEN TO YOU AGAIN!"

Before Remilia, stunned into complete silence by her sister's sudden outburst, could react by angrily scolding her or pleading with her some more, Flandre leapt into the air, using the library table as a sort of launching pad for her feet, and proceeded to approach the great window on the side wall after dodging a couple of tall bookshelves in her way. Before the young vampire could actually reach what she considered to be a gateway to freedom, however, Remilia managed to catch her breath and look at her sister in horror. "Flandre, stop this at once! Nothing good can come out of exposing the contents of that deed to the world."

"Go to hell." Flandre quickly scanned the window for the latch that would lock it in place, and deliberately locked it once she did.

Wasting no time once she realized what her sister was about to do, Remilia turned to Sakuya, who had quietly emerged from the archive room to stand next to her mistress. "Sakuya! Stop Flandre from flying through the window, and bring her back here to me right now!"

It was a very simple command, and one that would be no trouble for one like the time-stopping maid to fulfill. All she had to do was freeze the flow and carry the unmoving Flandre back to her mistress, subduing her with a few knives during this time. That was, of course, if she indeed wished to carry out the orders. The part of her mind that had served Remilia for years now was berating her for even debating this and ordering her to obey her mistress by stopping Flandre at that moment, but the part from which her rebellious thoughts had spawned from earlier was arguing that it would be immoral to crush the little vampire's last hopes of avoiding a miserable fate by complying with the order. It was the truth that Flandre deserved all of the wealth, glory, and freedom that her sister did, and Sakuya felt as though she could not try to cover that up with a clean conscience in her heart.

Perhaps, Sakuya realized, she had spurred the conflicting thoughts in her mind as a subconscious method to stall out the time until Flandre did indeed crash through the great window headfirst. Sure enough, while the maid was still lost in thought, an almost euphonic smashing sound resounded through the library as millions of tiny shards of glass caught the light of the moon outside and glittered like twinkling stars as they showered the floor. At that point, she could only watch as the glowing prisms of Flandre's wings slipped into the darkness of the night and began to fade away before being completely enveloped by the black.

"Sakuya, you idiot! Why didn't you stop her?!" Remilia didn't wait for an answer to her angry reprimand, however, as she opened her black bat-like wings to the world to prepare to fly after her escaped sister.

In all likelihood, she probably would have been able to catch up with Flandre if she had begun to pursue her at that moment. Being inexperienced with battling, the younger sister would have lost the inevitably ensuing danmaku duel, and she would subsequently be brought back to the mansion. There, Flandre would be told about Remilia's reasons for locking her away in the basement for all this time and why she was overly concerned with the contents of the deed being revealed. The smooth, eloquent words her older sister would articulate would certainly not fail to convince her that she was indeed in the wrong for attempting to escape, and she would then willingly, albeit sadly, return to the basement on her own accord. It would be an ending to the conflict between the sisters if Remilia had started after her sister right at that very moment.

Putting a firm end to this path of resolution was the swift foot of Hong Meiling, who made her secret presence in the library known by delivering a sharp kick to Remilia's back, forcing the vampire face-first onto the ground before she could get airborne. "Yaaaaaah!" she cried out as if to summon more strength into her kick before elegantly hopping back a step to land on her feet standing above her fallen mistress.

"Meiling?" Remilia groaned, tenderly rubbing the spot of injury on her back as she turned her head around, a look of disappointment in her eyes. "Koakuma and Flandre weren't enough, so now you're turning against this house as well?" She turned her head back toward the floor as to hide her face from both of the girls, but from it, her scarlet eyes began to gleam brilliantly as she continued to gently touch the wound.

"Miss Remilia," Meiling answered in a strong and defiant tone, "I have nothing personal that would cause me to betray you. However, Flandre told me the full truth about what she is actually owed according to this mansion's deed, and what you plan on doing about it. I'm sorry, but I can't stand by and support you on this."

Sakuya admittedly felt surprised that the gatekeeper she often looked down upon would have similar feelings as herself and have the bravery to act upon them in the presence of her mistress, but seeing Remilia fallen on the floor with Meiling standing over her instantly changed that. "My lady," she said calmly as she began to brandish six silver knives in the gatekeeper's vision, "shall I eliminate Meiling now?" As she stared down the gatekeeper who was doing her best to appear calm and brave even while shaking in fright, she brought the knives into a battle formation, only waiting for the quick approval from her mistress to unleash a devastating blow with them.

"No." The response, albeit short, was voiced in a very hungry, lustful tone, and Sakuya could see a very ravenous look spreading over her mistress's face as she turned around again with a foreboding smirk. It was the same expression she had displayed a few hours earlier, only it was now outside the safety of her bedroom and within range of an exceptionally appropriate victim. "No, go out, stop Flandre, and bring her back to me." She wrapped her arm tightly around Meiling's leg, almost to the point of cutting off the circulation, and stared up into her eyes with a look of utter delight and anticipation. "It's better if I give Meiling the appropriate punishment now. It's been oh so long since I've had the pleasure of performing it, so I think it would be quite fun to finally use it as proof of what happens if you attempt to betray me!"

"I think that's what she wants you to do," Sakuya responded quickly, "as a way to stall you until Flandre gets sufficiently away. Let me quickly incapacitate her now so you can head after your sister right away." Although she primarily felt anger for Meiling at her sudden action, the part of her that sympathized with her actions did not want the poor gatekeeper to be subjected to Remilia's horrifying "punishment". In fact, witnessing the girl tremble terribly as she watched the hungry vampire viciously attach herself to her leg made even the loyal part of Sakuya feel a twinge of sympathy for Meiling.

"Nope," Remilia replied happily, slowly licking her lips and grinning to expose her fangs to the others. "I'm going to punish Meiling. That's it."

"B-but," Sakuya nervously protested, "going as far as to drain her dry of her blood is a bit harsh for this, my lady! I think a quick and sound defeat would be much less cruel."

Remilia frowned, and her scarlet eyes began to blaze like wildfires as she shifted her glance toward her maid. "You're not going to talk me out of this right now, unless you're offering yourself up in her place. Blood will satisfy my thirsty body tonight, even if death must result from it!"

These words rang into Sakuya's ears like a funeral bell toll, and it tossed her stomach into a horridly wretched mess of a dilemma. In her heart, she knew that Meiling was acting in the moral right by resisting Remilia and attempting to help Flandre: acts that Sakuya herself wished to perform if she only had the courage to disobey her mistress now. Furthermore, the terrified, pleading eyes that stared at her, begging the maid profusely to save her from the fate she had just condemned herself to, made her conscience throb intensely with guilt. Sakuya knew that it would be horribly wrong of her to do nothing and simply allow Meiling to suffer an involuntary blood donation for bravely taking action and protecting the younger vampire she loved.

But I can't, she thought to herself. I can't simply throw away all of Miss Remilia's trust in me for the events of one night, even if it means Meiling must suffer as a result. She frowned, gritting her teeth, and shook her head. How can I even think something like that? It sounds so utterly selfish and uncaring of me. Meiling might be a lazy, useless gatekeeper, but she still puts a lot of faith in me as a friend. And then I'm to assume that I should just throw her to the wolves… er… vampire, like nothing at all?

Even if I were to try to help Meiling and attack Miss Remilia, strange as that sounds, her rational, strategic side chimed in, how would I ensure that the two of us would manage to fend off the resulting attacks? My lady is certainly most powerful in the dead of night, and during a time in which bloodlust has taken control of her mind… how could I hope to avoid being defeated and subsequently drained of blood by such a force as that?

"Well, Sakuya?" Remilia asked impatiently, as one forbidden to eat while staring down a juicy steak in a restaurant would. "What say you? Are you going to let me have a refreshing gulp of your plasma to save poor little China's, or are you going to get a move on and bring Flandre back?"

Damn you, my lady, Sakuya thought bitterly to herself at the decision posed at her. Of all the times to be craving blood, why did it have to be right now? She laughed softly at how unlikely it would have been for her utter that phrase in almost any context prior to this night. "Well… I…" She glanced nervously at both Meiling's pitiful awaiting of an impending doom and Remilia's lustful smile.

"Yes?" Remilia asked, beginning to grow slightly irritated at the time it was taking Sakuya to answer. Blood was out there, after all, and it was unfair that she should be deprived of it for so long.

Sakuya lightly embraced Meiling in a friendly manner, though it seemed to convey more sadness and pity than friendship. "I'm so sorry about this, Meiling," she whispered in the gatekeeper's ear. "It's just… there's no way I could hope to defeat Remilia, and—"

"I-i-it's okay," Meiling stammered back, quiet defeat and a surprisingly insightful knowing in her voice. "I understand; you don't need to justify it. I was prepared for this sort of thing to happen when I agreed to help Flandre, anyway."

"Even so," Sakuya murmured regretfully, "I feel horrible leaving you like this. I hope you can forgive me about this in the future."
"There's nothing to forgive," Meiling replied solemnly. "You're doing the only thing you can do in a situation like this. Don't worry about it!"

"If you kick yourself free of Miss Remilia's grasp and then use that head start to your advantage and run like the wind, you could make it out of here before she… well…"

"I'll keep that in mind, Sakuya-sama," Meiling replied with a quick smile before gently pushing her companion away. "Better go now before the mistress changes her mind and decides to try biting us both!"

Sakuya didn't want to admit it, but she did feel great compassion for her friend at that point, although it made it all the more harder to abandon her. "I'm sorry, Meiling!" she repeated once more before turning back to Remilia. "Um… I guess I'll just… get back Flandre."

"Good girl!" Remilia replied victoriously as she got back onto her feet, all the while keeping her grip on Meiling's leg strong. "I have to say, I was hoping a bit that you'd defend Meiling here so I could have a taste of that fabulous mortal blood coursing through your veins. Still, I imagine that disobedient youkai blood is almost as good!" Reaching up, she shifted her hands to hold on tightly to Meiling's arms, and briefly turned to the fairy maid that was still standing quietly and observing all that was going on. "Lock all the doors leading to the outside. If my prey decides to start playing a futile game of cat and mouse, I'd rather it remain indoors."

"Of course, Miss Remilia!" the fairy answered quickly, and began to fly over the sea of shattered glass to the library door. "Nobody will get in or out without your permission, I promise!"

Trying not to build up her guilt of letting Meiling down any further, Sakuya withdrew without another word, elegantly stepping around the minefield of jagged shards as she, too, approached the exit.

The only two who now remained in the quiet, moonlit library were a vampire mistress lusting terribly for some blood to pass by her lips and a gatekeeper who, despite being scared out of her wits and deprived of her last possibility of escape from this nightmare, managed to keep a strong, unwavering expression on her face. Remilia began to slowly push Meiling back toward the posterior section of the library, all the while keeping her grasp on her arms strong. Little pieces of glass crunched and crackled beneath their feet, but each ignored the pain in favor of paying attention to what would come next. "Well, then, Meiling," Remilia said in her rich, lovely tone of voice, "let's not waste any more time. Your punishment shall commence now!"

[A/N]: Hello once again, all. The end of my by-far longest chapter up to this point has come (I had to again cut out one scene until next chapter, and even with only 3 scenes to it, I can safely say this is chapter the one I have spent the most time on so far), and with it, a new title to the story has emerged!

I guess I didn't explicitly say it earlier, but my previous title was just a placeholder, since I couldn't really think of an appropriate title to the story yet. Over the course of the last few months, however, this title came to me, so say hello to Temporal Quintessence! Like many titles, it may not be clear from right now why the title is called what it's called, but I hope that you'll keep it in the back of your mind as you read the upcoming chapters and begin to puzzle it out.

As I mentioned earlier, this chapter would feature the debut of my favorite character, and so it has! Nue Houjuu, the devious little imp, joins the fray. I like her so much, but I might not remain that way by the time the end of the story arrives. Since the plot here takes place between Subterranean Animism and Undefined Fantastic Object, this could be considered a prequel to Touhou 12, in that we learn exactly what Nue might have done as soon as she left the underground and before she learned of Byakuren's group. So, remember that this isn't the rational, yet mischievous Nue that we're familiar with, somewhat tamed by the peaceful Buddhist's ways; this is the ancient, sealed-away youkai girl whose primary motive is to strike fear in all she meets. Be afraid, readers. Be very afraid.

The situation growing between Remilia and Flandre has boiled over into action, and a fight seems imminent on the horizon! Who is the protagonist and antagonist of the battle? Either way, Meiling is the one I'm rooting for. The poor girl has spent way too much time as the butt of everyone's jokes (the particular role of which I seem to have subconsciously designated to Reimu in this story, oddly enough), so it's high time she has a few awesome moments. Keep strong, China! …Err, I mean, Meiling!

As usual, look forward to the next chapter, where we will learn what happens next to Meiling, Sakuya, Remilia, Flandre, Cirno, Daiyousei, Youmu, Yuyuko, Reisen, Patchouli, Eirin, Marisa, Alice, and Suika (you didn't forget about her from Chapter 2, did you?)! See you all then!