"Oh, I see! You're the 'little Naz' that the captain mentioned and your master would be 'big Shou.' Are you a mouse youkai? You're so cute!"

"Don't underestimate mice." Nazrin said, narrowing her eyes. "I may be an avowed pacifist, but the mice I command prefer meat to cheese. If you underestimate mice, you'll end up a meal."

"Ugh, what a creepy thought. My apologies, I meant you no offence. My name is Renko Usami. I'm the chief investigator of the Hifuu Detective Agency, whose offices you just barged into. That's my assistant Merry over there."

"Pleased to meet you," Nazrin said, with a slight incline of her head. I nodded back to her as well, but she had already turned back to face Renko, single-minded in her focus. "That tells me who you are, but not how you know any of this," she said bluntly.

"Well then, allow me to explain. I suppose you could call me the mastermind responsible for the emergence of the Holy Palanquin from the Underworld." Nazrin furrowed her brow at that. "I don't see how a single human could be responsible for releasing a ship that had been sealed beneath the earth for a thousand years."

"Well, as luck would have it, I ended up meeting the captain and Ichirin in the Underworld about three months ago. I heard of their plight and was able to work together with the oni, the reviled youkai of Former Hell, a mountain goddess from the surface and a hell raven empowered with the divine fire of Yatagarasu to come up with a solution."

Nazrin blinked, silently staring at Renko.

"I know it sounds a bit far-fetched, but ask the captain if you don't believe me."

Nazrin continued to gaze skeptically at Renko, but after a short while let out a sigh. "That doesn't sound particularly believable, but with how much you know about us it makes sense that you must at least have met Murasa, so I suppose that makes you an ally whether or not I believe your story."

"That's good enough for me."

"So then, can you give me that pagoda?"

"Well, I don't mind giving it to you, but there's one other issue..."

"Of course, your compensation. I'll pay you whatever you paid for it as well as a finders fee on top. How much do you need?"

"Oh, that's very generous of you, but actually that isn't what I was going to say. I actually have some other business to conduct with captain Murasa, but being as the two of us are just regular humans, we have no way to contact her or even go looking for her. Since you found this pagoda, I'm assuming you have the ability to find the ship too? Would you be able to bring my partner and I to go see her?"

"You want a mouse to carry two humans while flying?"

"Is that not possible? I was under the impression that for youkai like yourself, appearances had nothing to do with strength."

"I suppose I could manage. Neither of you looks too heavy. If I do that, you'll give me the pagoda?"

"I was planning to give it to Murasa myself, but I suppose that would be embarrassing for you. Hmmm. What if I tell her you found it for me, little Naz?"

"Don't call me that!" Nazrin said, leaping to her feet and once more thrusting one of her iron rods at Renko's face. "I won't be condescended to by a human. It would have been simple for me to just send my mice in here instead of knocking and have them devour you both then take the pagoda once they were done. I'm doing you a favour by even negotiating with you at all."

"Whoa, whoa, easy there." Renko said, raising both of her palms. I wondered how many times Renko had risked her life just on the basis of being overly familiar with youkai for no reason. I can almost understand the risks she takes for the sake of satisfying her curiosity, even if she goes way too far. This was simply being a daredevil for the thrill of it though. What did she gain by addressing youkai she had never met as an equal? Was it just part of how she ingratiated herself to them?

A tense moment passed in silence as Nazrin glared down the length of her rod at Renko, seeming to decide what to do next as Renko leaned away from the implement with a nervous grin. Then everything happened all at once.

Suddenly the door flew open.

"Renko, Merry! I'll save you!" came a cry from just outside.

A wavering blast of compressed air, dense enough to distort the light passing through it, shot through the doorway and collided with Nazrin, hurling her off of her feet and scattering the rods she was holding. She tumbled past Renko, dislodging my partner's hat and landing in an awkward roll before climbing to her feet and facing the door.

Sanae stepped into the room, wand in hand, pointed squarely at Nazrin.

"Sanae? What are you..."

"No time for questions!" She barked and waved her wand with a swift, cutting motion. At once a fierce gale sprung from nowhere and howled through our office, toppling bookshelves and scattering the pages of my half-finished manuscript. As the gale intensified the walls of the house groaned. Renko's shoes came flying out of the entryway, one of them heading straight for Nazrin's head. She dodged the blow and reeled back, glaring fiercely at Sanae.

"This was all a trap! You thought you could use that pagoda as bait to catch me, didn't you! Well I'm one mouse you won't take so easily!" She braced herself against the raging wind just as it sent her rods tumbling end over end toward her. She snatched the both of them out of the air with one hand as they flew past then leapt up, using their reach to hook the pagoda off of Renko's desk and into her other hand. As soon as she had it, she folded up, tucking herself into a tightly curled ball and floating off of the ground, letting the force of the wind carry her backward. An instant before she would have collided with the far wall, she kicked out with both legs, shattering the thin timbers of the storeroom and punching through to the other side. The wind howled as it swirled through the new opening.

"Ah! Wait!" Renko cried, scrambling to climb to her feet and grab her hat as the wind first checked her then died away, leaving her overbalanced.

"Yeah! You can't escape that easily!" Sanae shouted as she switched from propelling the wind to propelling herself across the room toward the new hole in our wall. She was about to dive through it when she suddenly yelped and threw herself backward, out of the way of a barrage of small, wedge-shaped light bullets that thudded into the tatami, leaving tiny burn marks. Sanae climbed to her feet and wove her wand through a complex pattern, drawing a pentacle in the air and leaving a trace of glowing light that followed her movements, each mote of sparkling color transforming almost immediately into a sharp-nosed projectile held taut in the air, ready to disperse as a wave.

"Sanae! You can't play danmaku in here, you'll destroy the office!" Renko cried, rushing over to her and laying a hand on her raised arm.

"But the bad guy is getting away, Renko!"

"We live here, Sanae!"

Sanae frowned, looking defeated, but lowered her arm, banishing the glowing bullets. She rushed back over to the hole in the wall and cautiously peeked out of it. "Awww, she's gone. Sorry, boss." She said, relaxing her stance.

I let out a held breath and looked around at the devastation. Dirt, clothing, pages of my writing and splinters of wood and plaster were all scattered in a chaotic mess. Our office had a new opening to the outside, perhaps a meter high and half as wide where both the plaster of the interior wall and the outer timber of the storeroom's structure had been smashed through. Sanae was standing near the hole, looking around as well, with a slightly sheepish expression. Renko was staring at her desk with one hand gripping her hair in exasperation. "She got the pagoda! I didn't even get paid for it!"

"That's not all," I said as I stooped into the corner, picking up a damaged book. "This belongs to Suzunaan. Now it's got dirt all over it and the pages are all bent. I'm going to get a fine for this, Renko."

"Why are you blaming me, Merry? I didn't do anything!"

"Sorry." Sanae said in a small voice. "I was just trying to save Renko."

"She wasn't being attacked, Sanae." I said exasperatedly. "But I see how you could have come to that conclusion, seeing an unknown youkai threatening her. For now, let's try to clean up and we can explain what was going on. Is there anything we can use to cover that hole in the wall?"

"We can extract the costs for repairs and fines from the captain along with payment for the pagoda once we find her," Renko said with a sigh. "No one here is to blame, this is all little Naz's fault."

We spend the next half-hour or so tidying up and ended up just flipping our kotatsu on its side and placing it against the wall to cover the hole for now. As Renko explained the situation to Sanae, I mainly spent the period worrying about how we were going to explain any of this to Keine. At least it had happened on a Sunday, when there was no chance of any kids being on the school grounds.

-.-.-.-.-

Renko's explanation to Sanae had been very sparse on background. She explained that she had bought a mysterious glowing pagoda at Korindo the other day and that Nazrin had come looking for it, but no more than that. A half hour later, once everything had been put back in order, I made three cups of tea and we all sat down on the floor around the spot where the kotatsu used to be to drink it.

"Well Sanae, what brings you here today?" Renko asked.

"Oh, that's right! I had something I wanted to tell you! June 24th has come early this year! It's international UFO day already!"

Renko and I blinked at her in surprise. We had both heard of UFOs, of course, a quaint set of conspiracy theories and related religious movements that had become popular throughout the latter half of the previous century after starting with American businessman Kenneth Arnold, who had made the first report of witnessing a flying saucer in 1947. That didn't do much to explain Sanae's excitement though. For one thing it was currently March.

She looked at us, seeming to expect a response. "Haven't either of you ever had a dream of a whole city losing power at once? Do you know what the fourth color of a traffic light is? Does the phrase 'a heart wrapped in aluminum foil remains unaffected by sixth-dimensional radio waves' not mean anything to you!?"

We continued to stare at her, growing only more confused. "Sanae, are you feeling alright?" Renko asked.

"Seriously!? No one reads Iriya in the 2080's? One of the greatest sci-fi series ever penned? Akiyama's name should be up there with Azimov's! One of the gods of the genre! Does this mean that he never ends up writing a sequel to EGF? Damn it!"

It took a while to make sense of what she was going on about. Eventually we were able to determine that she was referring to Iriya's Sky, the Summer of the UFO's, a series of light novels that had been extremely popular just before Sanae's arrival in Gensokyo. Renko and I were both, of course, later forced to read all four volumes. I will say they were quite interesting, if a little dated.

Once we got that much figured out, Renko asked her "So what's this about a UFO day?"

"Yes, UFOs. You guys were members of an occult club that investigated strange phenomena, right? I bet you know all about them. There's all sorts of Unidentified Flying Objects, right? Cigar shaped ones, spherical ones, wing-shaped ones, but the best are the Adamski type, right? The classic flying saucer-shaped ones, with little bumps on the bottom and the like!"

"Oh, uh actually, the hifuu club didn't actually do all that much investigation of UFOs. That's a phenomena that mostly disappeared with the broad adoption of portable digital cameras, so I'm not too knowledgeable about..."

"You know what I'm talking about though, right? Tell me at least that much survived! You've heard of flying saucers and little green men?" Sanae said, clenching her fists as she leaned forward.

"Uh, sure..." Renko said, hesitantly.

Sanae leaned back and closed her eyes, seemingly trying hard to contain her excitement as she nearly vibrated in place. Her voice rose an octave. "I saw one!" she squealed happily.

"A UFO?"

"That's right! And not just one! A whole flight of perfect Adamski UFOs! It's a childhood dream come true! That's not all though! I saw something even stranger! Way up high above the UFOs there was a much bigger ship flying! I didn't get a good look at it, but it looked like an old wooden sailing ship! I bet it's the legendary flying treasure ship!"

Renko glanced at me with a worried expression. "A flying sailing ship, you said?"

"That's right! Have you heard the legend of the treasure ship that sails through the clouds? It's a tengu story but the kappa know it too. Lately all of the fairies have even been talking about it. Supposedly there's an ancient ship that's always flying somewhere in the sky loaded with unimaginable wealth, but it always hides in the clouds."

"Never heard that one yet, have we, Merry." Renko said, looking nervously over at me. I shook my head as Sanae continued excitedly.

"That's not important anyway. The treasure ship would just be a bonus, really. The big news is those UFOs! Martians are real in Gensokyo, Renko! We're probably about to be invaded by space squids or something!"

"Oh! Well, no need to go after them just yet, Sanae. They haven't done anything hostile, after all. Maybe it'll just end up like The War of the Worlds and they'll all die from catching the flu or something."

"You think? Well then we have act before that happens! This could be the best Incident ever! If we can find their mothership, I can blow it up, like I'm the hero of a shoot 'em up game! The Moriya shrine will be famous as the shrine that saved the people of Gensokyo! If you guys can help me figure out their weak points or something you'll become famous too! 'Renko Usami, the brilliant mind that discovered the invading aliens' secret weakness!' How does that sound?"

"Well, recognition would be nice, but isn't an invasion by aliens the sort of thing the Hakurei miko is supposed to deal with?"

"Lady Kanako says there's no reason to assume that these problems have to be dealt with by her. If we can beat Reimu to the punch we can break her monopoly on the profits of youkai extermination!"

"Lady Kanako said that, did she? I'm guessing that's why you decided to immediately attack that youkai who was just here instead of talking?"

"Everyone here expects a shrine maiden to exterminate youkai. If I want to gather faith for our shrine, I have to meet those expectations, don't I? So let's go already! This is a job for the Hifuu Detective Agency, right boss? Where do we start? Investigating the treasure ship? Tracking down that rat that was just here?" Sanae asked, climbing to her feet and moving to pull away the kotatsu that was blocking up the hole in the wall and look outside.

While she was up, I leaned over to Renko, whispering "wouldn't it just be easier to explain everything to her?"

"We can't, Merry. Even if we wanted to, we swore to Kanako we'd keep everything about the Underworld a secret until she made her power generation plan public. Do you want to get cursed?"

"Is something wrong, Renko?" Sanae asked as she tugged the table top out of position and peered out through the hole. "You seem low-energy. Are you not feeling well?"

"I'm just not sure if this is a case our agency should take. I've never heard of this treasure ship before, and UFOs are supposed to be notoriously difficult to prove the existence of. People who think they've caught them on film or found a piece of one usually end up just having seen combusting swamp gas or found a weather balloon or something, right?"

At this, Sanae began chuckling happily and put the table top down, taking slow, deliberate steps toward the entryway. "I thought you might have said that, so I arranged a little surprise," she said, stooping over to pick up a bag she had left beside her boots. It was an old rice sack, apparently mostly empty, but with something solid and hard clearly inside.

"Is that a camera? Did you snap a UFO photo, Sanae?" Renko asked, climbing to her feet and moving closer to inspect Sanae's prize.

"I did something even better. Prepare to be amazed!" she declared, digging her hand into the sack and fishing about inside. "I captured a real live UFO!" she said, throwing the bag aside and revealing the object she had retrieved from within.

What she held in her hand was an inert chunk of wood, slightly larger than my hand, oblong and splintered jaggedly on both ends. It glowed faintly, with a light similar to that emitted by the pagoda.