"What is that thing, some kind of toy drone?"

"What? No, it's a UFO, clearly. Look, if I let go if it, it flies on its own!" Sanae demonstrated by releasing the chunk of wood, which immediately began to float away from her, changing course at sharp angles and flying in long, slow, zigzags across the room. She had to lunge to grab it before it could float out of the hole in the wall. "See?" she crowed proudly, holding the chunk of wood up. "This is better than Roswell! Sanae Kochiya, mankind's first point of contact with an alien species!"

"We already know several extraterrestrial aliens though, Sanae."

"What? Since when?"

"For several years now. I told you about the Eternal night Incident. All those people at Eientei came from the moon. In fact, if we consider The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter to be fact, then first contact with extraterrestrials would have happened about 1300 years ago." I considered Renko's statement. According to Eirin the Lunarian people had once been human, even if they no longer considered themselves to be. She had never told us where moon rabbits like Reisen had come from though. She, at least, must count as an extraterrestrial life form. If that was the case and aliens not only resembled humans but found it easy to understand and communicate with them, then Stanislaw Lem must be spinning in his grave. If a world like Gensokyo where sentient, non-human beings like fairies and youkai were common place could exist then maybe a world like Solaris was even more distant than he had imagined.

"That aside, this is interesting." Renko continued. "Gensokyo is a place where fantasies and delusions from the Outside world are made manifest, so it makes sense that UFOs might show up here, but what is this thing really? It looks like a proper Adamski-style UFO, but it's too small to be a spaceship with anyone inside it and it doesn't seem to really react to stimulus with any sort of intelligence. Just from the size and that coloring I would assume it's some sort of kids toy. There's probably a quadcopter under its shell or something."

"A quadcopter? Those are those things farmers use to spray pesticides and the like, right? The little radio-controlled helicopters? Do they make those for kids' toys?"

"Oh, uh, not in your time, maybe. I think they were just starting to come out back then. But later on, yeah, they were common. Maybe this is a prototype that someone abandoned and it drifted into fantasy. Help me try and get this shell off and we can look inside."

"Okay!"

I looked at the two of them, completely baffled as they carefully examined the chunk of splintery wood, looking for a seam. No matter how I looked at it, it didn't resemble a UFO in the slightest to me. Between its ability to float on its own and the soft glow it was giving off, its identity seemed obvious -it had to be one of the lost fragments of the Holy Palanquin's mast.

"Umm, Renko. Can I talk to you for a moment?"

"Huh? Sure, Merry. What's wrong?" Renko said, handing the chunk of wood back to Sanae and taking a step towards me.

I leaned over and whispered in her ear. "What are you doing, Renko? That's a chunk of the Holy Palanquin's mast, isn't it? How are we going to get that to Murasa without Sanae noticing?"

She leaned back from me with a shocked expression then leaned in again to whisper. "What? Where? Did you see a piece outside or something?"

"No, that UFO of Sanae's. It's clearly a floating, glowing chunk of wood."

"Is that what it looks like to you?"

"Does it look like something else to you?"

We both leaned away and looked at eachother for a few seconds, incredulously, then turned to Sanae. She was still staring at the chunk of wood in her hands, turning it over carefully while staring intently at it, the tip of her tongue poking out of her mouth.

"Alright, that thing Sanae is holding right now. You're saying that is a piece of wood?" Renko whispered.

"Of course it is. It doesn't look anything like a UFO."

Renko looked back at it then looked back at me.

"Alright, I think I see what you're trying to do here, Merry, in making this into something we can use rather than some sort of new problem, and I understand that perception has power in Gensokyo, but if you're trying to take advantage of the fact that this is an object that not many people have seen to define its reality as something counter to its nature, I don't that it will work that easily. If there was a world where people could take the cat out of the box, but still not agree if it was alive or dead, wouldn't that just lead to a state where nothing had meaning?"

"What? I'm not doing anything like that. It's just a piece of wood, Renko. A broken piece of wood that floats and glows. What else could that be but part of the mast?"

"Okay wait. You're being serious aren't you? You think that thing is made of wood? What about the..." She paused suddenly, looked over at Sanae, then grabbed me by both shoulders and scooted me over to the corner of the room farthest from her and lowered her head again, whispering hurriedly. "Wait a minute, Merry. Do you remember back when we first met the captain in the Underworld and we got pranked by an unidentified youkai?"

"Huh? What do you mean? Oh! You mean when Yamame walked into the wall?" The event I was thinking of had occurred the past winter, while we were in the Underworld, just before we met Koishi Komeiji for the first time. Renko and Yamame had both been absolutely convinced that the entrance to a tunnel and a flat section of wall had switched places. To me the proper location of the entrance had remained as plain as day, but both of them had been utterly mystified to see me walk into it. Once I had shown them to the correct entrance, the illusion vanished and they were able to see things as I did, but up until that point, it had been almost impossible to convince them of reality. According to Yamame, events like that were known to happen from time to time in the area around the chamber where the Holy Palanquin had rested. It was presumed to be the work of an unknown youkai pranking people in the vicinity.

"Exactly," Renko whispered. "If the unidentified youkai who was doing that back then is the same nue that Murasa thought was responsible for damaging the mast on the Holy Palanquin, then maybe she could have done the same trick on the pieces of the mast -made them look like something they're not."

I nodded, then paused for a moment. "So then which of us is right? Is it a UFO or a piece of wood?"

"I'd guess it's probably whatever you see it as. You didn't mistake a wall of stone for a tunnel before so I think the nue's tricks don't work on you, Merry. It's a scary thought though to think that the two of us might be experiencing the world completely differently."

"According to the precepts of Relative psychology, we probably always were. What you call blue and what I call blue are probably an entirely different set of electrochemical signal patterns in our individual brains, but we've been socialized to agree that objects that stimulate those thought patterns have a characteristic we can agree on. If I could pluck a thought out of my head and put it in yours, it probably wouldn't make any sense, since our thoughts are just a series of references to neural pathways and stored stimuli that can only be contextualized in the storage networks of an individual's brain."

"Hey you two, can you really not control yourselves? You'll have plenty of time for private discussions later. Right now we've got an alien invasion to thwart, right?"

Renko sighed theatrically, letting her shoulders heave and turned to face Sanae. "You're right. Business before pleasure, even if that pleasure is Merry. Let's start trying to figure this out. Where did you find that UFO, Sanae?"

"A fairy near the Hakurei shrine was playing with it. When I asked her if I could see it, she started shooting danmaku at me, so I walloped her. You can do that to fairies here, right? I've seen Reimu do it a few times."

"Yeah, I don't think it's actually possible to hurt fairies, generally speaking. This fairy though, what did she look like? Did she have two friends with her by chance?"

"Yep, a red one, a blue one and a yellow one. Do you know them?"

She was undoubtedly talking about the three fairies of light. It seemed like the three of them had been dutifully collecting fragments of the mast, despite my doubts. I made a mental note to apologize to them the next time I saw them, even if it hadn't been my fault that they happened to run across Sanae.

"Wait a minute, this was near the Hakurei shrine you said. Sanae, did you tell Reimu about these UFOs or the treasure ship while you were there?"

"Oh, no, I didn't bring it up."

"Ah, good," Renko said, breathing a sigh of relief.

"After all, they were already talking about it before I got there."

Renko paled immediately.

"She and Marisa were both there, discussing whether the rumors were real and what kind of treasure was on the ship. I was just starting to tell them about the UFOs when they both got up and left to try and find the treasure ship. They left to chase material riches in the middle of my explanation! Rude, right? But while they're distracted with that we can concentrate on the important business of this alien invasion!"

Renko took a shaky step toward Sanae, then turned and took another toward me, pacing in a small circle with a panicked expression on her face. This was a big deal. The Hakurei miko was already on the move and the Holy Palanquin was nowhere near ready to journey to Makai. It seemed the Incident and its attendant resolution had already begun with Renko, the ostensible mastermind behind it, none the wiser.

"Sanae! We have to get to that treasure ship! Before Reimu and Marisa!"

"What? Really? I'm glad you're getting motivated now, but what about the UFOs?"

"You said all the fairies on the mountain have been talking about the treasure ship, right? If that rumor was spreading then I bet other fairies might have been looking for these UFOs as well. We might see a bunch of fairies playing with more of them on the way. If we do, it's critical that you shoot them down, Sanae. We need to capture as many of the UFOs as we can. Here, give me that bag, I'll hold it." Renko said, snatching the block of wood out of Sanae's hand and stuffing it into the bag. "This is an emergency dispatch, Sanae, we need to head out at once!"

Sanae looked surprised for a moment, staring down at where Renko had grabbed the sack away from her. A second later her face bloomed into an excited smile as her eyes twinkled. "Yes ma'am!" she declared, snapping a stiff salute, "UFO interceptor Sanae Kochiya ready to scramble!"