"Owwwww. My feet are asleep and my head's about to crack open. I'm ruined on both ends, Merry."
"And exactly who's fault is that, Renko? Even though this was all your idea, I ended up caught up in it too," I moaned, rubbing my head while limping along on numb and cramping feet.
After more than an hour of forced kneeling, Keine's lecture had finally ended with blinding impact as punctuation. We stumbled back to our office behind the schoolhouse and collapsed in a heap, Keine's words still ringing in our ears. "You knew you had class tomorrow but you still stayed out drinking so late you had to show up like this!? How do you think that looks to the parents? How do you think that looks to the children! You're supposed to be teaching them how to be good people!" We had had no defense to offer, kneeling in silence as our legs cramped up.
Even with our reprehensible irresponsibility in mind though, the headbutt had still hurt. A lot.
Renko was crawling toward me on her belly as I tried to muster the energy to sit up. "Merry, my head hurts. Let me sleep on your lap like you did with Sanae last night."
"No way. If I kneel any more my feet are going to fall off."
"Tch. Stingy."
"Suffer your pain on your own. It's your fault you got headbutted."
"You could at least call it a badge of honor. It's a wound I suffered saving Gensokyo from being consumed by an all-out religious war."
"Saved how? You didn't save anything, Renko."
"Yes I did! If not for the boisterous humor and conviviality of the great Renko Usami, master detective and socialite, Reimu would have been in a bad mood all night and never have agreed to let Kanako have her branch shrine."
"I don't think there's a single person in all of Gensokyo who would agree with that version of events."
"Well you're a Relative Psychologist, Merry, and I think that's what happened, so who are you to tell me any different? There's no such thing as objective truth, right?"
"How would things have gone any different if you had never been there? Marisa would have been the one to teach Kanako about Spell Card rules is all. Reimu still would have been the one to resolve the Incident, and Kanako would still probably have talked her into having a branch shrine on the Hakurei grounds in the end. Even if she didn't, what difference would it make, ultimately? It was a ton of fuss all over nothing. I can't believe I let you make me think this was going to be a real Incident for a while. I'm going to make this whole thing into another novel just so I can tell the story of your delusional failure."
"Wait a minute, Merry, don't tell me you think this Incident is over already."
"What?"
"The mystery of the Moriya shrine is still unsolved. There's still plenty to puzzle out." Renko sat up, one hand still massaging her forehead, but a clear and determined expression on her face as she turned to look at me.
I frowned back at her. "What mystery? Sanae explained everything to us last night. Are you still hung up on whether Moriya shrine is really the Suwa Grand Shrine from the Outside world or not?"
"Well, aren't you? The explanation Kanako gave us seems a little too convenient. There are a few other mysteries too, including some that we were given explanations for but that don't quite add up."
My partner retrieved my brush set and writing desk from the corner of the room and thrust them at me. I looked up at her incredulously. She continued to smile down at me, not flinching in the least. With a groan I rose up and gingerly settled into a sitting position once more, preparing ink and paper to make a list. By now I was completely accustomed to Renko's needs, and right now she needed me to record and organize her thoughts while she tumbled the pieces of the mystery around in her head.
Below is the list of mysteries Renko dictated to me at the time. I am writing this story after the fact, so in hindsight I can see now that there were things I recorded here that reflected some of the misconceptions we were both operating under. Rest assured though that the list below is exactly the same as the one I recorded back then.
-.-.-.-.-
Mysteries Concerning Moriya Shrine:
-Why was it moved to Gensokyo?
-Why was a large lake moved along with it?
-Why is it called the Moriya shrine?
-Is Moriya shrine the same place as Suwa Grand Shrine in the Outside world?
-If so, why is it only one of the four shrine complexes - the Akimiya that came?
-If Moriya shrine is the Suwa Grand Shrine, then is the body of water behind it Lake Suwa (or part of it)?
-If so, what happened to the Suwa Grand Shrine and lake Suwa of the Outside world?
-If Moriya shrine is not the same place as Suwa Grand Shrine, why do they look so similar?
Mysteries Concerning the Goddesses:
-Is Kanako Yasaka a form of the god Takeminakata from the Outside world, or the goddess who was worshipped as his wife? Or is she somehow both?
-Is Suwako Moriya the goddess Moriya from the Outside world, who was supposedly defeated by Takeminakata, or is she someone else?
-Why is Suwako sealed behind a boundary?
-Why did the goddesses come to Gensokyo along with Sanae?
-Have they vanished from the Outside world completely, or does some part of them remain in the Outside world as well?
Mysteries Concerning Sanae Kochiya:
-Who exactly is she? Is she a human?
-Why did she leave the Outside world behind and come to Gensokyo?
-Does she possess powers of her own, or are the abilities we witnessed just the borrowed powers of Lady Yasaka and Lady Moriya?
-Was she really beginning to be worshipped as a god in the Outside world?
-If she was, and if her powers were hereditary, have other members of her family been enshrined as goddesses as well?
-If not, why not?
Mysteries Concerning Youkai Mountain:
-Why has the Bunbunmaru Shinbun stopped being published?
-Where is Aya Shameimaru and what is she doing?
-Why are the tengu so afraid of Moriya Shrine and its inhabitants?
-.-.-.-.-
"Renko, after everything we went through last night and all the time Sanae spent baring her heart to us, are you doubting her story?"
I raised my eyebrows as I looked over to Renko. Perhaps it was unscientific of me, but I didn't want to believe that Sanae could have poured out the emotion we had seen from her last night as part of an act. To even suggest it was too cruel considering what she had told us.
Renko crossed her arms and thought for a moment. "No, I don't think she's lying."
"But you doubt the story she told us?"
"I'm sure everything she told us was consistent with what she had experienced. But the way she sees events may have been colored by someone who was manipulating her. Sanae has been living with those goddesses since she was a baby, I doubt she'd question any explanation they gave her."
"In other words, you think there's some secret hidden in the Moriya shrine that even Sanae doesn't know about then."
"There might be. Or I could just be missing something. That's why I need your help to reason these things out." Renko took a seat behind her desk and turned to face me. "Let's start by laying out the bits of the story we know so far and separating the information that's trustworthy from what's questionable. Here's what we know: Sanae was a child who could see gods. She was born into a family of wind priestesses who passed that role down along maternal lines. Those priestesses were servants and cultists of the god Moriya in the Outside world. Because she was unable to tolerate the empirical views of the Outside world, Sanae trained as a wind priestess herself even though doing so went against her grandmother's wishes. Being an unusually powerful priestess, Sanae began to gain a following of her own, not as a priestess of Moriya but as an object of worship in her own right. After that, for reasons we can only guess at, she, Suwako and Kanako came here, bringing their shrine and lake with them. Is all of that right?"
"Yes, I'd say that's a fair summary of Sanae's story."
"Overall, I'd say its a good story. It makes sense and all, but all of it's only from Sanae's point of view."
"Well, it's Sanae's story isn't it? Whose perspective do you think is missing?"
"Kanako's for one. What were her feelings or actions during all of these events? Consider her position. Sanae is a priestess in the service of Kanako and Suwako in the Outside world. Let's not worry about if this is at the Suwa Grand Shrine or not for the moment or who the goddesses might actually be. The important thing is she was in service to the two of them. If we think of a shrine as a place that houses a divinity and acts as a point from which that divinity can gather faith in the world, then what would it mean for Kanako and Suwako to have Sanae living there with them?"
"You're suggesting that as people started to worship Sanae in her own right, they were in danger of the shrine becoming dedicated to her rather than them?"
"Thinking of it that way casts things in a different light, doesn't it? Maybe Kanako and Suwako brought Sanae here to keep her from stealing the shrine where they lived in the Outside world. If that were the case, it would explain why Sanae was worried about having us see her fight or use her power, right? The last thing she'd want is for people here to start worshipping her instead of the goddesses again."
"Hmmm. If she was more worried about whether we perceived her as a goddess than whether we rejected her as a friend after seeing her power, it might explain her reaction. But it doesn't seem impossible to me that she was just lonely, either."
"Perhaps. But Sanae went out of her way to keep the fact that she had power or that others had worshipped her in the Outside world a secret from us. Kanako and Suwako didn't mention it either. They were all in on the attempt to try to keep it hidden."
"So then in other words, you think that by coming here, the three of them were trying..."
"To turn the living goddess Sanae Kochiya into just a regular teenage human girl. I don't know if they did it out of hope of giving her the freedom to live her life as she wanted to or because of the threat she would have posed to them as another goddess living in their shrine, but either way, I think that was the plan." Renko paused, thinking to herself for a moment then chuckled. "In a way the relationship between Sanae and Kanako is just like the relationship between Takeminakata and Moriya - Kanako ended up playing the role of the native god this time when all of a sudden an upstart new god shows up in the form of Sanae to kick her out of her own home and take what's hers. Then, just like what happened in the Suwa of antiquity, rather than warring with eachother, upon witnessing the power of the newcomer, the native faith joins with the new religion and the two form a new syncretic pantheon of divinities. It's just like they were building a new home for a found family."
