Renko had managed to convince Rin that we might be able to do something to help her with her problems and, at my insistence, we had escaped from the oven of the underground stairwell and returned to the first floor of the palace. The heat hadn't seemed to bother Rin at all, but I was grateful for the far more moderate temperatures in the palace as we stole, sweat-stained and silent, into a room near a back door in a different wing than the room I presumed to be Satori's office.

"Are we safe from being discovered here?" Renko asked, hanging her coat and hat on a rack near the door.

"Miss Satori is really smart, but she can only read the minds of someone she can see with her third eye. As long as we don't go near her, we should be fine," Rin said. She then turned and glared at Renko. "What about you though? You're not a satori, so how did you know about my plan? You look just like a regular human, but I've never talked to one who wasn't crying or screaming or dead before."

"I really am just a human." Renko said, raising her palms placatively again. "I didn't read your mind, I just deduced the truth from your words and actions."

"Deduced?"

"It means I figured it out by making logical guesses. Reasoning is the most fundamentally human activity, it's what separates us from other animals. The ability to put one's self in another's shoes and imagine their motivations or predict their actions is the glue that holds society together. I suppose in that way, it's what separates us from youkai too."

"Renko that sounds positively deep. Who are you quoting?" I asked.

"It's an original Renko Usami thought! Is that so hard to believe?"

"It almost sounds like you couldn't remember P. D. James' 'The greatest mystery of all is the human heart' and are just paraphrasing pretentiously."

"That's what makes it an original, Merry."

"Well I'm a youkai to begin with and a cat youkai at that, sister. So you seem weird to me." Rin snapped, still looking pouty. I felt like I could understand why she seemed annoyed. For one of Renko's wild and long-winded assertions to hit the mark seemed unlikely and wrong, even if everything she was saying was true. When it was coming from Renko, being correct just didn't make sense.

"Ultimately, human reasoning and youkai reasoning aren't all that different. That's probably a result of youkai being creatures created from human fear. Youkai think in the same way that humans do, they just have entirely different values and morals. That's a discussion for later though. For now, miss Rin..."

"Just call me Orin. No 'miss'." She said. "My name is Rin Kanebyou, but that sounds weird, and no one calls me that but miss Satori."

"That's adorable. Okay, little miss Orin. Like I was about to say, the how of it all really doesn't matter does it? The important thing is I figured it out, and Satori will figure it out even faster, so we need to find a way to solve your problem before that happens, right? Now, just so I can understand what we're up against, were all of my guesses right?"

Orin glared silently at Renko then leapt onto the seat of a high, leather-bound stool in the room, perching on top of it as if ready to pounce. Renko and I made our way to a low couch nearby and sat facing her, looking over a small glass and wrought iron table.

"I'll take your silence as confirmation. As you noticed, my partner and I aren't youkai hunters. We can't fight you, and we couldn't hope to overpower your friend. For Merry and I though, our most powerful weapons are our brains. If you can give me all of the details regarding your friend's case, we'll do our best to come up with a clever solution that can leave everyone happy. Of course, being a professional detective agency, you can rely on our discretion on the matter and rest assured that anything disclosed in this conversation will remain strictly between us. We at the Hifuu Detective Agency pride ourselves on maintaining the highest standard of professionalism."

"Hifuu Detective Agency? That's a weird name."

"Think of it as a two-for-one deal, you get both Merry's talents and my brain for one reasonable fee. Maybe when this is all over you can come up to the surface and visit our office in the human village. We're always on the lookout for new cases and new ways to make the world more interesting."

Orin stared at us for a moment then groaned and shook her head, lowering her face into her hands. "I wanted to reach someone strong who wouldn't understand anything that was going on, and instead I got someone weak who understands way too much and wants to know more. Did I screw up somehow?"

"Well, I may not be what you wanted, but I'm here to help. Why not at least see if there's something I can do? It'll make you feel good just to be able to talk to someone about it, I imagine." Renko said as she leaned forward with an earnest, open expression.

Orin stared Renko in the eye for a moment then sighed in resignation. With an expression like she had just swallowed a fly, she started to explain. "My friend's name is Okuu. She's a hell raven. Hell ravens and hellcats like me are native to Hell. We've been living down here since before the oni came. We were just regular animals to begin with, but when Hell closed down and moved its operations elsewhere, there were still a lot of leftover corpses down here for a while and no one but us scavengers to eat them. After a while of eating dead people we became youkai, and then we became friends. We were down here in the dark for a long time before miss Satori and all the other youkai showed up. When Satori and Koishi moved down here they taught us how to talk and took us in as pets. After a while they gave us jobs maintaining the flames in the remnants of the Hell of Blazing Fires. That was pretty good for a long time. We had lots to do, and got to work together, and had miss Satori, and her sister and all the palace pets to play with. But then everything went wrong when that goddess appeared."

"A goddess?" Renko asked, with genuine interest.

"Yeah, a mountain goddess, from the surface. She dug a big hole all the way down here, and just popped out on the edge of the sea of flames. She had a bunch of weird ideas, but she seemed friendly, for the most part. She did something awful though. She gave Okuu something really horrible to eat."

"Well, this is getting interesting. So there's a passage to the surface from within the sea of flames. I have a suspicion I might know who this mountain goddess is too. Please continue though. You said she fed Okuu 'something horrible.' What was it exactly?"

"It was an eye. Not that eyes are bad mind you, human eyes can be tasty if they're not too rotten. But this one wasn't human. She called it a 'yatagarasu.' Okuu ate it, and when she did, she changed. She became way more powerful, and able to control some kind of divine fire. She was still just Okuu though, and she's really not the brightest. She's just a hell raven, and shouldn't have power like that, but now that she does... I'm not sure if she's trying to see how far she can push it, or if she doesn't know how to control it, but it's too much for her. The sea of flames is getting way too hot. The temperature of the Hell of Blazing Fires keeps getting worse, and I can't even go to the parts near her to talk to her any more."

"Wait a minute. You said that the goddess called this eye a 'Yatagarasu?' Isn't that the name of one of the messengers of Amaterasu, the sun goddess?"

"Yes, that's right." I added. "I think Yatagarasu was supposed to be a three legged crow who lived on or in the sun."

"So now there's basically a second sun inside the Earth? This is like those wacky old hollow earth conspiracy theories. Let's not derail the story though. You were saying Okuu got some kind of new power over fire from eating the eye. I assume she's planning on using that power to do something naughty?"

"I think so. Like I said, I can't really go near her now. But the last time I could, she was talking about how things used to be back when this was a proper Hell. We always had lots of bodies to pick at and the flames were bigger and hotter. I think maybe she wants to get things back to the way they were. And to get plenty of human corpses again... I think she's going to try to make a new Hell of Blazing Fires on the surface. I think she thinks if she does, then things will go back to how they were before... Like I said, she's not the brightest. She's really strong now though. I don't know if she could make a whole new Hell or not, but I don't doubt she could set the whole of the surface on fire while she tried."

Orin clenched her fists tightly at her side, shaking slightly. "The thing is, Okuu stays in the Hell of Blazing Fires or here in the Palace of the Earth Spirits pretty much all the time. She doesn't really know what other youkai are like. She's really strong, but if she goes up to the surface, she'll start a war. I've only ever been up there a few times, but I know there's a lot more youkai up there than there are down here. If she tries to fight everyone living on the surface... she'll die, sister! I don't want that! I just want my friend back! But if the oni find out about her, a city full of them would probably kill her too if they knew what she was planning. Okuu's too stupid to think of that though. And if miss Satori finds out about her..."

"I see. Even if Miss Satori could understand your dilemma, she couldn't keep it secret from the oni."

"Exactly!" Orin said, pounding her fist into the padded seat of the stool. "Okuu is my friend! I've known her since before I could talk! Because of that stupid goddess she's in danger now, and she's too stupid to know it! She's pure-hearted and innocent though and because of that she's either going to blow up the world or get herself killed. I'm not a good person like her, but I'm smart at least, so I broke the rules..."

"...And sent those earth spirits up through the geysers created by the intense heat Okuu was unleashing to try and attract some attention, right?"

Orin said nothing more, just nodding with her face turned down toward the ground.

Renko made a show of pondering the situation for just a moment, then stood up and walked over to where Orin was perched to lay a hand on her shoulder. "Orin, I think we can help you. We have no hope of stopping Okuu by force of course, but I think we can successfully come at this situation from a different direction."

"A different direction? What do you mean?" Orin asked, turning her face up to look at Renko.

"Tell me more about this goddess you met. The one who bestowed Yatagarasu on Okuu. What did she look like, for example?"

"Ummm she was tall... and she had a big rope on her back, somehow."

Renko sighed and I placed my palm over my face. Neither of us were surprised to hear it, but somehow it still hurt to have our suspicions confirmed.

"What is it?" Orin asked. "Do you know that goddess or something?"

And so, in the sense that the anomalous phenomenon that had initially brought us down to the Underworld was the presence of earth spirits above ground, you could say that Orin was the mastermind behind this Incident. But if your question was who should bear the blame for the events that set the whole affair in motion? There could be only one suspect. A mountain goddess that the two of us knew very well by this point, and whose broad ambitions wouldn't have hesitated to attempt to harness a terrible power such as Orin had described.

"Yes, Orin, I'm afraid we do," Renko said. "I'm afraid we're quite well acquainted with Kanako Yasaka indeed."