"It's a post box."

I'd been pretty sure even from hundreds of meters away. Now that we were up close, it was even more obvious. A metal cylinder in a familiar (if faded) shade of off-red, about a meter and a half tall, with a slot on the front. I hadn't seen many of this style in person, but the design was still iconic enough for me to immediately recognize it.

On the other hand, where it would normally have the postal mark, there was only an indecipherable glyph in faded white paint. Most of the paint was faded and chipped, really. It looked pretty weathered. Compared to the surroundings, though, it wasn't doing too badly. The only other structures around were some half-collapsed walls that traced out the suggestions of buildings, with the edges of concrete slabs poking up from the ground here and there. Like looking at an abandoned city a century or two after the apocalypse, and finding a lone mailbox still standing strong.

It might have been kinda inspiring, if I weren't certain that none of these structures had ever been used by humans. For all I knew, the Otherside had throw it together in this exact condition, ten minutes before we arrived.

"Is it?" Toriko leaned in to inspect it. "I don't think I've ever seen one like this before."

"Oh yeah, I guess you probably wouldn't, huh? This is the old style. They used to be all over, but you don't really see them much anymore."

"Huh. I was thinking maybe a fire hydrant, but it's way too big for that. Plus, there's nowhere for the water to come out. … I guess I feel a little silly now. We walked like half a kilometer just to see a mailbox."

"It isn't like we were doing anything important anyway."

I crouched down for a better look, myself. About a third of the way up the cylinder, there was a small door for the postal workers to remove the mail. Normally it would be locked, but this one was hanging ajar. I hooked a fingertip into the keyhole and gave it a tug. The rusty metal let out a low creak, but it opened without much resistance.

I'd been acting out of idle curiosity. I really hadn't expected to find anything. Inside, though, there was a lone envelope.

After staring for a moment, I grabbed it by a corner and fished it out.

"What's that?" Toriko asked.

"It's… mail. There was mail inside."

"Isn't stealing from a mailbox a pretty serious crime?"

"Yeah, well, I don't think that anybody's going to mind this one."

The envelope looked like it had been laying there almost as long as the mailbox itself. The paper was yellow with age, and mottled in water stains and smudges of rust. It felt dry and brittle under my fingers.

Turning it over, I checked the front. The stamp looked pretty normal, although I couldn't say what the art on it was supposed to represent, nor was the postmark legible. Most of the writing on the envelope had been dissolved into meaningless blotches of ink. The recipient address, though, contained a single fragment of intact text:

WO & NISHINA

Toriko had leaned in for a look, too. She was the first one to say what we were both thinking: "That looks like it was addressed to 'Kamikoshi Sorawo & Nishina Toriko', doesn't it?"

"It does. … think we should open it?"

"Well, if it's addressed to us, that's about as straightforward as things get… Does it look safe?"

I turned it over in my hands, giving it a good inspection with my right eye. "Seems like it."

I didn't hear any arguments from her, so I slipped my finger under the flap of the envelope. The ancient glue peeled away with a few crackles of protest. The paper inside looked old, but in much better condition than the envelope itself. I still took care as I slipped it out, then unfolded it.

The handwriting on the paper was wobbly and uneven, and looked like it had been written with a stick of charcoal or something. Like the kind of thing that a kid might make at school. Any kid that would write this, though, really needed some therapy.

People's bodies contain the same stuff they use in matches, unsightly wooden human dolls. There seemed to be some deep meaning hidden behind the words. Her laugh was like leaking air, which is why it was forbidden to use. Then, suddenly he said it hurt, and it was bleeding everywhere…

It went on like that, but I'd gotten the gist.

"… it's the usual Otherside gibberish," I said.

"Well, it would have to be, right? If we can read it over here, that means it came from this side."

"I'm not guilty of stealing mail, then."

"Uh-huh. Hmm… do you think we could sell that to Kozakura?"

"Probably. If we can read it on this side, though, it would look like complete nonsense in the surface world. Do you think that makes it more or less valuable?"

"It's gotta be more. That's haggling 101."

As we spoke, Toriko had set her bag down in front of her and started digging through it. She didn't stop as she asked, "Hey, do you have a notebook or something?"

"I do, but… why?"

"It would be rude of us to not write back, wouldn't it?"

I stared at her, but while Toriko's tone was joking, she also seemed intent on going through with it. We'd come here right after class, so fortunately for her, I did have some school supplies in my backpack. At this point, I barely even bothered to separate my day-to-day belongings and my Otherside exploration gear. Since we needed to be ready for it to attempt contact with us at any time, I always had my gun on me, and usually enough supplies to keep me safe in a pinch if I got dumped over there. That was too much to carry in my pockets or something, so it all got consolidated into the bag I used for school on most days. If I ever forgot my bag on the train, I was in big trouble.

That was a problem for future Sorawo, though. For now, I found the notebook I was using for my cultural anthropology seminar, flipped open to the first blank page, and offered it over.

Toriko pulled a pen from her own bag, scooted the notebook in front of her… and paused.

"Hmm… what should I write, though?"

"How should I know? It was your idea, wasn't it?"

"Well yeah, but…! You know… our theory is that the Otherside entities are trying to talk to us, but we've never really tried to talk back. What if writing them a letter is all it takes to get them to stop messing with us?"

"I kinda talked to T-san, and Satsuki. And you tried to talk to Satsuki that one time, with Runa's cult."

"Oh. Yeah."

Even now, Toriko looked uncomfortable at the thought of categorizing Satsuki as an outright Otherside creature. I'd messed up. There was no way I wanted her dwelling on that, for about a dozen reasons.

Instead, I hurried to offer her a distraction. "If they understood Japanese writing well enough to talk to us, I don't think they would have sent us such a meaningless message. Why don't you draw something instead?"

It worked. Toriko stared at the paper with renewed purpose. "Like what?"

We argued about that for a while, before deciding on a cat. They were one of the most universally-recognized animals among human cultures, and a bit more easy to identify than a drawing of something like the sun. With that in mind, Toriko got started.

She was surprisingly serious about it. Her tongue poked out the corner of her mouth as she traced out the contours of the body, then added the finer details, and finally started swiping the pen around to sketch fur.

"I didn't know you were so good at drawing."

"Mom was an artist. Have I told you about that before?"

"You have. A bit." Normally, I'd forget anything that anybody told me about their mundane history within days, but with Toriko, it seemed to stick with me for way longer. "She was a manga artist, right?"

"Mmhm. She gave me some drawing lessons, but… I was never as good at it as I was at shooting. I guess that's pretty weird, huh?"

It was. It totally was. But even I had enough tact to not say that to Toriko's face.

The final result wasn't a professional illustration or anything, but it was a lot nicer than anything I could do. It was pretty cute, too. I felt kind of bad about the idea of dropping it into a rusty mailbox in the middle of nowhere, but that was the plan.

Sorry, kitty, I thought, as Toriko did just that.

She slipped the folded paper into the box, and it seemed to disappear inside without a sound. With that, Toriko recapped her pen and offered my notebook back.

"I hope that doesn't backfire or something," I said. "I just realized, what if whoever's in charge sees that and thinks, 'oh, they want more Ninja Cats'?"

"It's not like they're running a mail order business. I think it's fine."

"Hmm… now I wonder how they could interpret—"

A soft clunk came from the post box, and I stopped mid-sentence. We both froze up, looking toward it.

"Was that…?"

"I think it was, yeah."

"It came from inside, didn't it?"

I nodded silently.

After a moment, Toriko recovered enough to take action. After readying her pistol and disengaging the safety, she gestured me toward the box. She was serious and focused, with quick, economical moves. It was a real contrast to the usual goofy Toriko who'd been joking about cat drawings barely five seconds earlier. It was kinda cute, in its own way.

I reached for the door, and Toriko mouthed a countdown. One… two… three. On three, I threw the door open and recoiled from it. Toriko whipped her pistol up to point at the door.

It felt a bit silly to make a dramatic production out of opening a post box, but the Otherside had burned us for such simple acts as leaving a tavern or falling asleep in a taxi. Nobody could blame us for being paranoid. Besides, we had heard movement in there.

This time, though, there wasn't anything to shoot. Sitting inside the post box was… a box.. A plain brown cardboard box, sealed with packing tape, and with a shipping label affixed to it. It was exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to receive in the mail. Although, there was no way that anybody ever could have crammed it into the slot on this post box. The thing was about the size of a toaster. Somehow, I didn't think that the Otherside cared about such details.

"… we've gotta open it, right?" I asked.

"Definitely. Here."

Toriko reached inside to retrieve the box. As large as it was, she had to wiggle it through the door a few centimeters at a time. Once it was out, she readied her knife and worked the tip beneath the edge of the tape, then started carefully slicing it open. The sharp edge glided through it without a trace of resistance.

"I did get these knives to use on the Otherside, but I really expected that we'd use them for something more exciting…"

Once she'd sliced the tape open, she folded the flaps up and peered inside.

"Hmm… it's a jar or something? With—oh. Ew."

"What is it?"

"Well…"

Setting her knife aside, Toriko reached into the box and extracted the contents. As she'd said, it was a jar made of clear glass, barely small enough to squeeze into that box in the first place. The lid seemed pretty securely fastened… which was fortunate, because inside were bugs. Well, mostly bugs. On the bottom of the jar sat a layer of tiny corpses: brightly-colored insects, spiders, scorpions, and even a small snake. It had to be dozens, if not hundreds, of dead animals.

Toriko's face scrunched up in disgust as she got a good look at it. She sat it between us, then scooted back to put some extra space between it and her.

Now that I had a more clear view of it, I could see one other detail I hadn't noticed before. Inside the jar, a single thing was moving. Creeping across the top of the pile, without an apparent care in the world, was a single caterpillar. It was covered in a thick layer of branching bristles, which made it look like a little shrub or something.

"Why would somebody fill a jar with dead bugs?"

"Huh? It's kodoku, isn't it?"

The answer came to me automatically. So automatically, in fact, that I didn't remember that this wasn't completely common knowledge until Toriko shot me a confused look.

"It's a kind of magic where you make a bunch of small animals fight each other, until only one is left. That survivor is supposed to be really powerful for casting curses and stuff. Usually you'd use poisonous insects and stuff, but sometimes people just go for whatever's creepy. It shows up in true ghost stories a lot."

"How do people come up with such weird things…" Toriko shot the jar an uneasy glance. "So that caterpillar is super cursed?"

"Maybe? If the Otherside copied the idea from ghost stories, it's probably not great. I think we're safe as long as it's in the jar, though."

Toriko still looked reluctant to take her eyes off of it, like it might strike as soon as she stopped watching it. "Hmm… but this one's obviously pretty weird too, right? If we could sell it to DSR, that's like a two-for-one deal. Not bad!"

"We'd have to carry a jar full of dead bugs back into the surface world, though."

"Yeah. Plus, if we showed up at Kozakura's house with something like that, she'd definitely blow her top."

"She'd chase us off with that shotgun," I agreed. "Hmm, but…"

I glanced at the post box again. Nothing had changed about it. Scooting closer, I gave it a more thorough inspection, peering through the mail slot and up through the door at the bottom. Nothing in there glowed silver in my sight.

"… your letter disappeared," I said, as I straightened back up. "And then this package appeared. Do you think the two are related?"

"I didn't know I was signing up for a pen pal. If it is, though, do you think it spits out another thing every time we put a letter in?"

"That's what I was wondering. If it does…"

Our minds were working in perfect sync. "… we'd never have to go hunting for stuff to sell to Kozakura again. We'd be set for life."

"Maybe? We still don't know for sure."

"Well!" Toriko clapped her hands, like she was a grade school teacher trying to get the attention of a bunch of kids. "Another letter! Why don't you do it this time?"

"Why me?"

"It's more fun that way. Besides, I want to see your drawing!"

"Fine, fine. What am I drawing?"

"Hmm… The AP-1?"

"What? You drew a cat and I've got to draw a weird-looking vehicle? No way."

"Okay, then… why don't you just draw a cat, too? That way we're even."

"It's going to think that we're obsessed with cats…"

I didn't have any better idea, though. I still felt self-conscious as Toriko watched my amateurish attempts to draw. I decided to keep things pretty simple—a rectangle with two legs, a tail, a ball for a head, and a triangle for the ears. After drawing eyes, a nose, a mouth, and some whiskers, I was done.

"There. It isn't as good as yours, though."

"Aww… I think it's cute! If the Otherside doesn't take it, I'll hang it on my fridge."

"Don't say weird stuff…"

I leaned over and reached past her to slip the letter into the slot on the post box.

It had barely even disappeared inside before a heavy clunk came from within.

I eyed the door at the bottom. "That was fast."

"Yeah… Another package, I guess?"

"Seems like it. … it's like we're playing with some kind of Otherside gachapon machine."

We went through the same routine as before—Toriko readying her gun, me opening the door. Inside was a long, lumpy parcel of some kind, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with twine.

After checking it with my eye, I pulled it out of the post box. It was twenty-five or thirty centimeters long, but only about half as wide as my hand, and bent near the middle. Kind of like a big banana, I guess. Whatever was inside, though, was a bit lumpy. Fortunately the shipping label was faded, so we weren't stuck trying to decipher more strange Otherside text.

Once it was clear that we weren't in danger, Toriko put her gun down and silently offered me her knife. I accepted it, and started slicing through the twine that was holding the paper together. There were only a few pieces of it, and as each one came off, the paper loosened up a bit. Finally, there was nothing stopping me from peeling it open to reveal the contents.

It was a doll of some sort. A plastic one, but dated-looking, like it was from the eighties or nineties. The skin was smudged with dirt and had brown blotches stained into it. It looked like it had formerly been wearing clothes, but they were all gone, leaving the featureless curves of doll anatomy. Past the hips, where its legs should have been, it had a fish tail. The tail was made out of fabric that looked like it had, at one point, been a sparkly violet-and-blue. Now it was just a muddy brown-gray, with the occasional speck of glitter still clinging to it.

Above, its long hair was dried into a few clumps, and the face was a bit… melted. The material looked like it had oozed downward before resolidifying, while maintaining most of the same features. On one side, it had an empty eye socket. In the other was a sphere of something hard and yellowed, like an old tooth.

"Urgh," Toriko said. "That thing's creepy."

"It is…"

I was in a hurry to get it out of my hands, so I put it right on the ground, next to the kodoku jar. The two very cursed-looking items could hang out together. Far away from me.

I'd barely even let go of it before I noticed the sound.

It was low and muffled, like listening to somebody mutter to themself in another room. Now and then, a word or two would get enough emphasis to barely understand.

"mumblemumblemumble… down in the… mumblemumblemumble… gray eyes… mumblemumblemumble… breaking…"

The voice just kept going. It was definitely coming from the mermaid doll. Despite the doll's generally feminine appearance, the voice that we were hearing was rough and deep. And angry. It sounded like somebody who was trying to work up the nerve to assault the person they hated, or something.

"You… you hear that too, right?" Toriko said, without taking her eyes off of it.

"Yeah…"

"That doll didn't look like it had any batteries in it or anything, did it?"

"Nope…"

We stared at the thing in a shared, uneasy silence, as it kept rambling to itself. This one was definitely, undoubtedly not a mundane object. DSR would have to pay us money for it.

Assuming we could get it there without incident. And that Kozakura didn't actually pull out her shotgun and eject us from this mortal coil. Considering that the thing was unsettling to us, the odds didn't seem great on that second one.

"The letter was a little creepy," Toriko said. "Then that bug jar was pretty creepy, and now this…"

"I'm doing okay for money right now, actually. I think the letter should be enough."

"Yeah." The relief in Toriko's voice was palpable. "Me too. Let's just go, and maybe we can… come back for more later if we get short on cash."