"Who are you?" I asked.

The girl looked up at me with a curious expression, but made no effort to answer. To me she appeared to be perhaps fourteen years old and had an odd purple string floating around her body, hovering in front of her in utter defiance of reason. Her broad sunhat was tied with a ribbon, but everything about her beneath that black hat was noticeably pale. Her skin tone, her lightly pigmented blue-green hair, a wide eyed face with an unreadable expression - they all gave off a distinct impression of just barely being there, to the point where if you weren't looking directly at her it was all too easy to forget you had seen her at all. Even phantoms I had seen had more of a sense of presence to them.

If Sanae had been here I don't doubt that she would have been excited to meet this girl, supposing her to be a Nen master or trained ninja or the like. As it was though, she didn't seem to be putting any effort into making herself hard to see, it was instead as if some aspect of her nature made her exceptionally easy to ignore.

"You're a human, aren't you? I didn't know there were any humans down here. Or that grown-up humans could see me. Interesting." She smiled innocently. In the depths of her eyes there was a deep loneliness though. It was not unlike my first meeting with Flandre, that same sense of carefree innocence and youth tinted by an unfathomable, unimaginably profound isolation.

Still ignoring my question, she posed another of her own. "Hey, it gets boring being alone all the time, do you want to play a game with me? See if you can catch me." Saying that, she took a step back. As if I was being drawn forward by a string I found myself taking a step to match, keeping pace with her. She took a step to the right, pressing up against the wall of the tunnel. I stepped to match. She turned and took three running steps then pressed against the opposite wall of the tunnel, crouching into the corner. Each time I saw her start to move then quickly lost track of her. It was like she was a pebble on the side of the road. Easy to disregard and completely unnoteworthy, but if you focused and looked directly at it, you could see her there. I had no idea why or how the conscious mind slipped off of her so easily, but as I was pondering it, I found that without noticing it I had again mimicked her movements and found myself crouching down on the left side of the tunnel, staring into her face. She clapped her hands excitedly. "You really can see me!" she cheered. "Hey, who are you? What's a human doing down here?"

I was about to answer when the sound of hurrying footsteps behind me caught my attention.

"Merry! There you are! How is a hikikomori like you so fast? Is everything all right? Why did you suddenly start running?" Renko rushed up to me, out of breath and laying a hand on my shoulder.

"I was chasing this girl..." I began.

When I turned back to look at where she had been, less than a hand's span from my face, there was no trace of her.

"Ah! Where'd she go? She was here just a moment ago." I tried to focus my senses, willing myself to see her again, looking for any hint of her presence.

"A girl? In this tunnel? I didn't see anyone come up here but you, Merry."

I was about to protest, but my mind thought back to the whole routine I had just been through with Renko regarding the existence of a wall. Clearly our subjective realities, constructed from the input of our senses weren't in alignment. There would be no point to trying to convince Renko -to an empiricist like her, my version of events would seem clearly delusional. I wondered if the girl I had seen might actually be the youkai Yamame had mentioned who had been pranking people by altering the appearance of things.

Yamame, carrying Kisume, who in turn was carrying the lamp came up behind Renko, brightening the area as they rounded the corner. "Miss Yamame, you didn't happen to see a girl run into this tunnel ahead of me, did you?" I asked.

"What girl?"

"She was wearing a black sun hat. She also had something like a purple cord floating all around her... I think..."

I tried hard to remember more of what the girl had looked like, but only those details remained with me, the rest fading from memory even as I tried to grasp them. It was like the woman from William Irish's Phantom Lady, impossible to pin down, though in this case it would be more like a 'phantom girl.'

"Huh, that kind of sounds like someone from Palace of the Earth Spirits..." Yamame mused, tilting her head.

"Really? That satori youkai?" Renko asked, turning to her.

"Umm, maybe?" Most people avoid the palace, myself included. From what I've heard though there's someone else who lives there, aside from Satori Komeiji. She's supposed to be kind of weird though, like she's not really there, or only there sometimes."

"What's that supposed to mean? It sounds like you're talking about an imaginary friend or something."

Yamame looked down into the bucket at Kisume, who looked back up at her, both of them sharing a conflicted, uncertain expression. "Well, that's really the only way to explain it. People say they've seen a girl from the palace wandering around in the city from time to time, but she's really elusive. Here one moment, gone the next. She always disappears as soon as you look away, even if you're in the middle of a conversation with her. Yuugi's certain she exists and says she's seen her both inside and outside the palace, and people claim to have seen her all the time, but if you try to show her to someone else... she's gone.

"Well that's an odd story. Could she be the unidentified youkai who's been responsible for pranking everyone too?"

"I suppose she might be, but I don't think so. That stuff usually happens down here, close to the Lake of Blood, in these caves and the lower rise of the city. The girl from the palace shows up all over the place."

"Interesting. What did this girl look like, Merry, can you remember anything more?"

"I'm trying to. She was really pale... and lonely-looking. She seemed surprised that I could see her, like she was a ghost or something."

"We've seen plenty of ghosts, Merry, they look normal. We just met captain Murasa."

"Well, you know what I mean. She was like a shadow in a room with lights at lots of different angles. Diffuse and barely there."

"Whoa, she sounds like a Nen user, or some kind of ninja or something! She must be a Zetsu master. I wonder if she knows Emitter or Enhancer techniques too?"

I sighed. Sanae's influence was clearly affecting Renko, to the point where she was now comparing the events of our life to old manga like HUNTER x HUNTER too. I wondered just how similar the two of them might have turned out if they had had the opportunity to attend school together somehow, whether in Sanae's time or Renko's. At any rate, I won't bother explaining the details of what she was going on about here. If you happen to be curious, seek out Sanae at the Moriya shrine. I'm sure she'll let you borrow her books, though they only go up to the middle of the Chimera Ant storyline.

"Well, at any rate," Renko continued, ignoring me as I rolled my eyes at her, "she sounds interesting. I'd like to meet her too if I could. Do you think she's still around somewhere, or does she teleport away?"

"Who cares?" Yamame asked, brushing past the two of us, still carrying Kisume in her bucket. "Maybe you'll get to run into her at the palace. But either way you two have a date with a satori. Let's get you back to Former Hell so Yuugi'll let me eat you. Unless you'd rather stay in these tunnels in the dark and wait for something to come out of the lake and eat you instead."

Renko and I glanced behind us then reluctantly pressed ahead, following Yamame and the lantern up the tunnel -where I immediately saw the figure of the girl in the black hat once more.

"Oh! There she is!" I called, pointing her out. As soon as I raised my arm, she turned to head farther up the tunnel then vanished.

"I didn't see her. She really must be elusive. You seem to be better at finding her though, let me see through your eyes, Merry." Renko leaned in close, putting her face beside mine. Sharing my boundary vision with someone else by covering their eyes with my hand is a trick I had picked up years ago, but I couldn't tell you how I learned it. It was just an idea that had occurred to me at some point. Renko was the only person I had ever tried it on, but the first time I tried it, it seemed to work at once. The mechanics of it were something I had never explored, and it seemed like Renko was seeing the exact same things I was, but even if that were true and I was able to somehow transmit the sensory input of my own eyes to her, her mind was still her own and the interpretation and meaning her mind gave to that data was entirely unique. It was one of the core precepts of Relative Psychology that two individuals could never truly experience the exact same thing in the exact same way.

"Renko, we're in a dark cave with rough stone floors and winding passages, heading uphill. I'm not going to cover your eyes and try to walk here, you'll trip for sure."

"Alright then, Merry. I guess there's no helping it." Stepping in front of me she turned her back and squatted down, arms looped at her sides as if she was carrying two invisible barrels. "Hop on! If I give you a piggyback ride, you can blindfold me with your hands and I'll steer us both."

"I'm not doing that, its embarrassing! You're still drunk, aren't you? Ah! There she is again!" I said pointing over Renko's shoulder frantically as the girl once more drifted in, then out of my vision. "She went further up the tunnel."

"She keeps moving forward, right? Maybe she's trying to lead us somewhere."

"Could it be the palace? That's where Yamame said she's from, right?"

Renko and I looked at eachother for a moment, then she smiled and threw her arm forward. "Alright, follow that Zetsu master! Merry, go! I choose you!"

"Don't command me like I'm a dog, Renko!"

"I was actually thinking more like a Pokémon."

"I'm not that either!" I shouted, but I did it while running, taking off in pursuit of the mysterious shadow of a girl who kept appearing then disappearing from my sight.

We quickly passed Yamame and Kisume by, leaving them behind and proceeding ahead. Renko snagged the lamp from Kisume as we rushed past, turning and shouting behind her "Just follow the tunnel, I'll leave this at the entrance when we get out. We'll see you at the palace!"

"Hey! Come back here with that! If you're going to the palace, I'll take you there myself! Don't run off into the city, someone else will eat you!"

Yamame was yelling something to that effect behind us, but the pounding echoes of our own footfalls drowned out her words as we sprinted along, engrossed in the pursuit of a girl who only sometimes seemed to be there.