Sanae looked down and blinked several times as she concluded her story. "Sorry," she muttered. "I guess I completely ruined the mood with that. I shouldn't have gotten either of you involved in any of this, but I was so happy to have met you that I hung around your office all day. I thought about going in to watch you teach, but I didn't want to look like a stalker..."
Looking at her now I couldn't help but feel sorry for her. Coming to this world had been a shock and a trial for me too, but I had had Renko next to me the whole way. Even back in the Scientific Century, where I often thought of myself as being alone I had had Renko. Renko, who was worse at reading the room than Sanae ever would be, who ignored every social cue or any polite attempt to distance myself from her, who had smashed down the walls I had built around myself and stolen her way into a friendship before I could even realize what was happening.
Sanae had never had someone like that. Meeting her here, we had thought that she was a normally upbeat, excitable person, but all of that had just been the thrill of making a friend for the first time for her. She had come now to a world where her powers wouldn't make her an outcast though, a place where she could not only be accepted, but flourish. She just had to have the courage to reach out.
"Well, you're doing much better than Renko. She wouldn't have ever questioned whether or not she was ruining the mood and definitely wouldn't have worried about being seen as a stalker. If she was in your shoes she probably would have just walked right into the classroom and sat down with the kids."
Sanae smiled. "No way, really?"
"Hmm, let's ask. Renko what do you say?"
Renko had been creeping up towards us for a little bit now, padding softly across the tatami, her previous lethargy forgotten in the face of these new and interesting details. Now she stood almost directly behind Sanae.
"Well, I have some objections about the specifics and I think Merry is casting my motivations in a disparaging light, but you're probably not wrong about the general facts." As she said this, Renko had approached Sanae from behind and wrapped her up in a gentle hug.
"Ah! Renko! I didn't see you come up! We weren't trying to talk about you behind your back. Or make this all about me. I just didn't mean to... I'm sorry!"
"Relax, Sanae. I appreciate getting to hear you open up a little, even if I have to hear it with a side of Merry's badmouthing of me. Once you get to know her, you'll find she's always like that."
I smiled at Renko. "Feeling better now? Done wallowing in self-pity?"
"Give me a little credit, Merry. What kind of friend would I be if I ignored Sanae when she's pouring her heart out like this?"
"I don't know. What kind of friend would you be if you were the sort to wake up in the middle of the night to go prowling around a friend's home looking for hidden secrets?" I teased.
"You see, Sanae, this is the sort of thing I'm always having to put up with," Renko said, leaning forward and putting her weight on Sanae's shoulders. "Isn't she terrible? We've been partners for years now, and after I go to all of the trouble of drawing out a borderline hikikomori like her, this is the thanks I get."
"While I enjoy getting out of the house with you every now and then, I never asked you to take me to an entirely different world, you know. Try not to put too much faith in anything Renko tells you Sanae. As you have seen, she gets some crazy ideas, and her curiosity is just the sort to send countless cats to their deaths. She's the sort of person who would open Schrodinger's box and poke the cat to see if it was awake, thereby collapsing the waveform and dooming all of the other potential cats in the function."
"You can't blame me for what happens in other potential universes. How do we know the Renkos in those worlds would've even performed the same experiment? I'm just a humble great detective. I understand the limitations of my own perceptions and limit my interpretations to what I can confirm with observation. That's why I make a point of investigating things. If I never opened the box out of fear of what might be found inside, then I'd just be stuck interpreting the world through guesses and unscientific mythologizing. It's necessary to open the box to determine if the cat is alive or dead and I don't think it makes me a bad person for wanting to know. After all, if it's alive it'll probably want feeding."
"You see? She's completely unapologetic. One day you're going to open Pandora's box, Renko."
"Well, wouldn't you? How else can we confirm if it's full of evil? That could all just be a lie to conceal some great secret for all we know. Even if it was, it would be interesting to see if whatever the box contained could be physically observed and measured."
I sighed and shook my head in exasperation. Sanae turned, looking blankly from me to Renko and back again as Renko continued to drape herself over Sanae's shoulders. Renko met Sanae's confused expression with her usual cat-like grin and pushed herself back up to stand straight.
"Well, putting aside Merry's uncharitable characterization of me, she's basically right. We're glad to have you as friend, Sanae. Not because you're a miracle worker, and not just because you're someone we can talk about the Outside world with. Right, Merry?"
"...I can agree with you on that much."
"Ummm, thanks?" Sanae said, sniffing as she turned towards Renko. "I didn't really follow any of what your were talking about though."
"Well, there'll be plenty of time to get you caught up. You want to know more about us and about Gensokyo, and we want to know more about you and the Moriya shrine. I think the three of us will have a lot to talk about. As friends."
Sanae closed her eyes tightly as her shoulders began to shake. Renko was silent for once as she held her tightly, patting her back gently as she cried. I took a step closer so that I could lay a hand on her shoulder as well.
The two of us could never really know all the things Sanae had had to deal with up until this point in her life. The inviolability of her own subjective experience of those events would always remain closed to us. But we didn't need to have lived through what she had in order to empathize with her, and I doubt Sanae would have wanted us to have to go through what she experienced even if we could've.
All she really wanted was a friend. Someone who would value her as Sanae Kochiya, the person, not Sanae Kochiya the wind priestess or saint Sanae, the miracle worker. Whether it was gods, wind priestesses, monsters or ghosts, Gensokyo accepted all sorts. There was enough room in this world for all kinds of people. If we were going to make this place our home, how could we have any less room in our hearts?
-.-.-.-.-
"Feeling better now?" Renko asked, perhaps 20 minutes later.
"Yeah," she said, rubbing her eyes. "Sorry about all that. And about your shirt."
Renko looked down at her chest, pulling the damp fabric away from her skin. "Nothing that won't come out in the wash." She said with a smile. "With everything you confided in us though, I'd feel bad if Merry and I didn't come clean with you as well."
"Come clean? Have you been keeping secrets too?" Sanae stared curiously at Renko, who cleared her throat and considered her words for a moment before speaking.
"Well, it's not really secret, but there's a detail we haven't mentioned that you should probably be aware of." She turned and looked at me for a moment and I nodded to her in confirmation. "Merry and I are from the Outside world, but not the same Outside world that you know."
"What do you mean?"
"We're from the year 2085." I said plainly, cutting to the chase.
"What?"
"In the world you came from the year was 2007, right? We came from almost 80 years in your future. We've been here for four years now, but it was the summer of 2085 when we left."
Sanae stared open-mouthed at Renko for a moment, seemingly at a loss for words. After a moment, she recovered and blurted out "You're a real life Mikuru Ashina! Does that mean there are aliens and psychics here too?"
Once again she was referencing media from the early part of the 21st century. This time though, I was at least vaguely familiar with the property she was referring to.
"Well, you're the outgoing one, so you'd be the psychic," Renko responded before I could comment. "Merry's a bookworm, so she'd be the alien."
"Who are you calling an alien? You'd be Haruhi in this analogy for sure. Especially the part where she's incredibly annoying."
"Haruhi Suzumiya still exists eighty years in the future?" Sanae asked with a gleeful expression.
"Its still a fairly popular franchise among those interested in Relative Psychology," I admitted, slightly abashed.
"Hey Merry, what would you think of renaming our detective agency the 'SOS brigade?' It could be Sanae's Organization to make the world Sufficiently interesting."
"How could you possibly manage to come up with a cringier name than we're already using Renko?"
"Wait, why would you name your agency for me? More importantly, we'd need two more people to join to use that name. There's so much I should ask you though! What happens in the future? Is Haruhi still being published?"
"classified information!" Renko responded.
Sanae clapped her hands and laughed, the earlier feelings of grief and sadness forgotten in a wave of relief as the three of us went on talking and laughing for quite a while, in just the way that three girls might be expected to in any era.
Thinking back on it now, I would say that it was then that Renko and I truly became friends with Sanae.
