"A wind priestess?"
"A religious servant dedicated to the god of winds. You can think of me like a miko if that's more familiar, but I don't serve as many gods as a miko, and I don't have them possess me directly."
She looked us both over, considering for a moment before tilting her head. "Forgive me for asking, but you are both human aren't you? You don't feel like youkai, but you don't look much like the other villagers either."
"We're humans, just slightly unusual ones. I'm Renko Usami," my partner said, bowing and grinning.
"I'm Maeribel Hearn... you can call me Merry if that's easier."
"Renko and Merry. Got it."
Sanae had been looking Renko over from the moment she had turned around. Now she looked even more closely, taking in every detail from head to toe. "I like the look," she declared. "very hard-boiled. Is it some sort of cosplay?"
"Not quite, but you're close. I'm a genuine detective. I run a detective agency in the village."
"A detective agency! With femme fatales and shady gangsters and all? Wow, I didn't know detective stories were real in Gensokyo too." Sanae was bouncing on the balls of her feet, nearly quivering with excitement I couldn't imagine the source of. "You look like something right out of Raymond Chandler!"
"Really? I was going for more of a V.I. Warshawski than Phillip Marlowe. Or maybe Akira Hamura."
"Warshawski? I don't really know..."
"You haven't read Sara Paretsky? How about Nanami Wakatake?"
"Er... no, sorry."
"Ah, you're missing out. There's a rich history of female gumshoes too!"
Listening from the side I could only sigh. Most people would have made the same assumption, I'm sure. The idea of a hard-boiled, hard-drinking, Chandler-style P.I. with a five-o-clock shadow was probably the most common conception of a detective. At least she hadn't expected Renko to show up wearing an inverness coat with a deerstalker cap and sporting a pipe and magnifying glass. Though picturing Renko in such a getup in my head was enough to make me smile.
"Uhh, I know Yusaku Matsuda, but you don't really look much like him."
"From Detective Story? That's really old stuff. Merry, wasn't that from the 1980's or something?"
"I'm not sure Renko. I'm not much of a TV buff. I think I only ever watched one episode. Sara Paretsky and Nanami Wakatake are both old too though." As soon as I said that, I caught myself. Both of the writers were old classics from my point of view, but at this point in time they were likely still working.
"Akira Hamura got made into a TV series too though. I binged it all back in high school."
Sanae looked at the both of us with a puzzled expression. "How do you two both know about the Outside world? I had thought that Gensokyo was sealed, with no way back out."
"Ah, that's because I expect the two of us have something in common with you."
She clapped a hand over her mouth, gasping in surprise. "You're from the Outside world! When did you come here? I can catch you up on what's happened since you left!"
I looked at Renko. If anything, we'd be the ones in the position to catch her up, being as our knowledge of the Outside world was around 80 years more advanced than hers could have been. I leaned over and whispered to Renko. "What do you think, Renko, should we tell her?"
"No, let's not yet. She's probably already got plenty of things to get used to here." She leaned away from me and raised her voice from a whisper to speak normally again. "We're more interested in you and your goddess at the moment, Sanae."
"Oh, of course!" she said, her smile giving way to a slight nervous blush. "I should take you to see her and our shrine. Can either of you fly?"
"Ah, afraid not. We're just ordinary humans."
"In that case, please take my hand, and hold on tight." Sanae extended a hand to each of us. I looked at Renko for a moment before taking it. Renko did the same. "Okay," Sanae said, exhaling and closing her eyes. "Let's go."
The next moment the wind suddenly began to blow fiercely. I could hear the rustling of nearby branches for a moment then all at once the roar was deafening as a vortex of whirling air swept up around us. Renko and I both instinctively grabbed for our hats and squinted our eyes against the sudden sting of wind and dust. Then all at once our bodies rose up. It was not as if the wind was blowing with the cyclone force that would have been necessary to fling us into the air, instead it was much like flying with Reimu, just noisier. Gravity had simply released us in an utterly impossible way and we had risen into the sky, standing vertically on a cushion of air that felt almost solid beneath us.
The wind died down somewhat, from a deafening howl to a low, steady roar. Sanae shouted over this, just barely audible. "Whatever you do, don't let go of my hand, OK?" We nodded. "Alright then, next stop, Moriya Shrine!" Beneath her feet a pentagram twinkled to life, glowing in midair. She kicked it and the winds shifted, blowing us now from behind. We began to glide through the air, picking up speed as we did, soaring faster and faster away from the hill on which the Hakurei shrine stood.
I watched Sanae flying ahead of me, the wind rippling her green hair like the waves of an ocean. Sanae was an Outsider, just like we were. How had she learned to fly like Reimu, I wondered? I can't imagine that in the twenty-first century there were humans in the Outside world who could fly like this. Maybe that had something to do with why she was here in Gensokyo now though.
Sanae Kochiya, the blue priestess who commands the wind itself. We had only just met her, but already something seemed off.
