I went about explaining the village as best I could, with Renko adding the occasional comment or detail from the side. Sanae listened intently to my every word, which was gratifying, and markedly different than trying to explain the rules of grammar to a classroom full of children.
"So the entire society is self-sufficient then? I wouldn't think there would be enough farmland to support everyone."
"I've heard the fields and rivers are blessed with abundance by the local harvest gods that live near them. There are also some things that can't be produced here that are imported periodically from the Outside world. Like coffee beans."
"So there's already fertility gods here? Are they the gods enshrined at that run down shrine with the lazy miko?"
"I'm pretty sure they're different. To be fair, I don't know what god exactly is supposed to live at the Hakurei shrine. I've never asked. The harvest gods are regularly invited to seasonal festivals but I don't think they have a shrine. Just some little altars along the roads for offerings."
"Hmm, that sounds like a pretty tough market for us to find a place in then. We may have to find something different to offer..."
No matter what the topic, Sanae inevitably brought the discussion back around to the idea of gathering faith from the humans of the village. She seemed to have a bit of a one-track mind. Still, I could hardly criticize her in this case. Praying to gods for a fruitful harvest was a natural human instinct, probably as old as agriculture itself.
"The level of technology in the human village -it's about what things were like at the end of the Edo period, right?"
"Probably closer to what might be found in a rural village in the Meiji era. The products of human industry and mechanization aren't unknown, but they aren't widely available either. Sometimes craftsmen from the village take to styling their wares off of things that have drifted in from the Outside world and reverse engineer what they can. Take my boots, for example. Other times, things they find are either so far beyond the level of manufacturing available as to be unachievable or so alien in their design or purpose that nobody even tries. Most everything at Korindo is like that."
"Yeah, and whatever you do, treasure your toilet paper while it lasts." Renko added grimly.
Sanae nodded, a serious expression on her face. "I'll keep that in mind."
It may sound silly or uncouth to you, dear reader, but I assure you, to an Outsider, getting used to the bathroom situation here was a serious matter.
"Thank you for all of the information, you two would both make good teachers."
"Oh, we are, actually. Merry and I both teach at the village's temple school on the side." I was tempted to question Renko's characterization of our teaching positions as a side job, but I let it slide for now.
"A temple school?"
"Yeah, I teach arithmetic and Merry teaches Japanese. The school belongs to Keine Kamishirasawa who is the village historian and a volunteer with the neighborhood watch. There's no public schools here, so most kids just learn to read at home. We're doing what we can to teach them a bit more."
"Ah, it must be like a time travel story for you too then! Using your knowledge of the future to shape the minds of a new generation, that's admirable. Have you taught them any science?"
"Not yet, but I'd like to. It would be hard though without textbooks or lab equipment. We'd have to rediscover everything from first principles in order to properly convey it. Back in the Outside world I studied theoretical physics and Merry was getting a degree in Relative Psychology. We're a long way off from being able to reintroduce either of those disciplines."
"Relative Psychology?" she asked, sounding out the English words.
"It's something like a branch of philosophy." I hurriedly added. At the beginning of the 21st century, where Sanae had come from, Relative Psychology hadn't been established yet. While I didn't think introducing her to an esoteric academic philosophy was likely to cause a paradox, it would be a pain to explain.
"Well, it sounds like there's a lot of room for technological innovation and improvement then. I think there are a lot of blessings Lady Kanako can bring to these people," Sanae said, crossing her arms and nodding happily. Perhaps she was right.
-.-.-.-.-
While we were talking, the sun had made its way through the sky and begun to descend. At one point Kanako appeared again without warning, saying "Sanae, it's evening already. Don't you want some dinner?"
The three of us looked outside, surprised to see just how late it was.
"Is it that late already? There's so much more I wanted to ask about." Sanae looked troubled for a moment, then suddenly jumped up, clapping her hands. "Oh! I know, why don't you both stay here tonight? We can have a sleepover!"
Renko grinned excitedly. "It's like high school all over again. I wouldn't want to be a bother though, would that be OK?" She asked, looking up at Kanako.
Before the goddess could answer, I grabbed Renko by the shoulder. "Renko, what are you thinking? We can't have a sleepover now. We'll get a headbutt from Keine. We'll deserve it too, we have classes in the morning."
"It'll be fine, we just have to wake up first thing and have Sanae fly us back. It'll only take a minute for her and we'll be there looking perfectly innocent and ready to go by the first bell. Keine'll never be the wiser."
"But Renko, you can't just..."
"You need to be back in the village first thing in the morning? I can take care of that." Kanako said, interrupting me. At that point, any thought of dissuading Renko became hopeless.
"Victory!" Sanae declared, flashing a peace sign. "Thank you, Lady Kanako."
I sighed, my mouth still open, as I had been about to try to talk Renko out of staying. Renko grinned smugly at me. Closing my eyes I leaned my forehead against hers in resignation.
"If they're going to be staying, then we should prepare dinner for our guests."
"Right! We can continue this discussion over dinner. Let me just go whip something up for us all."
"Thanks much!" Renko said, pushing me off of her. "Make double for me."
"Renko, don't be rude. Sanae, I'll help you out in the kitchen."
"Oh no, I couldn't ask that of a guest. I've got everything under control. Help yourself to any of the books in the living room, I'm sure there are lots you haven't seen from the Outside world." With that she stood up and she and Kanako left the room.
How Renko could keep blundering into these situations, ingratiating herself instantly with the face of every new power to arrive in Gensokyo, and then emerging from the encounter unscathed, I couldn't imagine. In both the Scarlet Devil Mansion and Hakugyokuro she had done the same, walking around like she owned the place from the moment she first introduced herself.
"It's only polite to allow a host to demonstrate their hospitality, Merry." She said, still grinning insufferably.
"Even hospitality only goes so far, Renko."
"Oh, so I suppose you have no interest at all in trying to find out what's in that warded off area between the pillars then?"
"I should have given you a headbutt earlier instead of just leaning on you. Kanako saw us the second you started thinking about that, remember?"
"You could've, but you didn't, Merry. You could have made a scene and demanded we go home immediately. But you didn't. You want to know what's beyond that boundary too, don't you?"
I glared at her in silence.
"It's been a while since we've been able to do any club activities together, hasn't it?" she said with a smile.
"Club activity? Earlier you were trying to convince me this was an important case for the financial future of our detective agency. Which is it, Renko?"
Seeing the way she smiled at the thought of it, not with her usual troublesome grin, but with the genuine, warm smile edged with the childish excitement that exploring the unknown had always brought out in her, it was the only criticism I could mount. As much as I might protest, it was a smile I had been dearly missing for nearly two years.
-.-.-.-.-
"Thank you for waiting. Dinner is served," Sanae said with a bow as she opened the door.
We followed her into another room to find a table with a small gas burner sitting on it -a cooking appliance completely unknown in this world. On top of it was a cast-iron pot which was bubbling merrily and which was surrounded by heaps of chopped enoki mushrooms, shirataki noodles, baked tofu cubes, chrysanthemum greens and rolls of thin-sliced marbled beef. A spread like this could only mean...
"Sukiyaki!" Renko cried jubilantly.
"I bought this meat before I came here, and it will just go bad if we don't eat it, so dig in. It's previously frozen though, so it might not be top quality."
"Who cares? Merry, look at this feast!"
I was about to chide her for being uncouth, but before I could speak the rumbling of my stomach drowned me out. I have no intention of complaining about the salary Keine pays us as two teachers with no credentials, but our life was not an extravagant one and the lack of profitability of our detective's office did nothing to alleviate that. And so instead, I said the only thing I could:
"Itadakimasu!"
The sukiyaki was delicious. Sitting next to my partner, who embraced gluttony with abandon, it looked like I ate almost nothing, but I was nonetheless extremely grateful to have my belly feel comfortably full in a way that was uncommon for us. Amidst this happy atmosphere, the conversation was lively, with Sanae asking probing questions, Renko expounding at length and Kanako listening intently from beside her, eating her own portion of Sukiyaki and drinking sake from a small bottle.
"Oh, I see that gods eat food just like humans do." Renko observed.
"We do, but not for survival." Kanako said, matter-of-factly. "This food is an offering of faith in material form and sake is the liquid form of a minor touch of a god's power. Do the harvest gods of this land not join in the feasting in the human village?"
"They do. That makes sense." Renko said with a nod. We had seen the local harvest gods eating, drinking and dancing at the harvest festival we had attended, but we had never seen them doing anything else. If Keine and Akyuu hadn't pointed them out to us, I wouldn't even have guessed they were gods.
The sun had vanished completely by the time we finished our meal and contentedly leaned back from the table with a sigh.
"Thank you for the food."
"Thank you for all the compliments. I suppose I had better get to the dishes before it gets much darker."
"Oh Sanae, don't worry about that, I'll take care of the cleanup." Kanako said.
"Are you sure, Lady Kanako?"
"You've still got more questions to ask your guests, don't you? Go ahead now, since they have to leave at sunrise. I'll take care of the washing up."
"Thank you very much. In that case, come this way, if you would. I'll show you to my room."
I had never seen a goddess clear a table or do the dishes before. I wondered if leaving things as they were was alright.
Sanae seemed to notice my hesitation. "Don't worry about it, we swap chores in this household all the time. She'll just have me take something for her later." Her tone was casual, but I can't imagine there were many humans with the opportunity to swap chores with a goddess.
As we followed her down the hallway, Renko remarked "your relationship with Lady Yasaka seems closer to than that of a parent and child than that of a goddess and her shrine maiden. Is that normal in your order?"
Sanae paused in her march down the hallway, then slowly turned around. "In a lot of ways, Lady Kanako basically is my mother," she said, scratching self-consciously at her cheek. "I've been able to see her since I was a baby, and she's always been by my side."
Renko and I looked at eachother. A priestess for whom the gods were like family. Would she have lived this way in the Outside world too? The early 21st century, where Sanae had come from, had been described in the history books Renko and I had read as the dark ages of the final dying gasps of objectivism. Outdated ideologies and political theories had been clung to even as they had been disproved, leading to a clash of empires over the last of the old world's dwindling resources. Similarly, academia had hewed more and more feverishly to the precepts of empiricism and the mad pursuit of a singular, objective Truth that applied universally even as it became more evident that such a thing was impossible. In a world that rejected so many things, so many ways of being, would a girl that treated gods like parents have been tolerated by society? I couldn't imagine the answer was a pleasant one.
Even coming from the end of the 21st century, as I had, I could imagine what she had been through -after all, I had lived through similar discrimination myself. Even in the Scientific Century where understanding and acceptance of alternate interpretations of reality and spiritual research were advancing, my abilities and beliefs would have branded me a heretic. The things I had seen, the things I had done and even my very appearance marked me as impossibly different, even in an age that claimed to accept all information without bias. Other than Renko, no one had ever even believed my claims, much less studied them, or attempted to offer any explanation of them.
Sanae, of course, didn't have someone like Renko. What would her life have been like, I wondered, inhabiting what was essentially a different world than those around her, being cared for by figures no one else believed existed. Might that have been enough to convince her to leave that world behind in favour of this one? To eschew reality for this world of fantasy in which I too now lived, cut off from my origins, with only Renko to act as a reminder that I had ever lived any other way.
Thinking of how much the two of us had in common, it hurt me to deceive Sanae as Renko seemed intent on doing. I hadn't said anything untrue, per se, but clearly Renko intended on leaving the priestess with the impression that we had come from a point in the Outside world's history much closer to her own time than from 80 years in the future.
For the time being though, maybe that would be for the best. Sanae would have a lot to adapt to in this new world. What she needed now was someone who could show her around, not someone to confuse her with further complications.
