As there were still quite a few hours of sunlight left, Renko insisted we hike over to Misty Lake to try and talk to Cirno. We managed to find her, but it was still a complete waste of time.

"So Cirno, you saw a daidarabotchi the other day?" I asked her, once she decided to float down and see what we were shouting at her about.

"That's right, I saw it! A whole daidarabotchem. A dandarabotticelli. A diabaracoochie. One of those big youkai!"

"I see. Can you tell us what it looked like?"

"It was big!"

"Yes," I said, nodding along, my pen poised over my notebook. "Anything else?"

"It was REALLY big!"

"Cirno, can you remember any other details about what it looked like? Does a daidarabotchi look like a human?"

"No, it was big! Humans aren't that big, stupid."

I continued questioning her for a few minutes, but didn't succeed in getting anything useful out of her. Perhaps that's just the way a fairy's memory works. After watching me flounder and grow increasingly exasperated, Renko eventually interjected.

"Alright, Cirno. It doesn't matter what it looked like really, but if you saw the daidarabotchi again, would you recognize it?"

"Of course, it'd be the one that looks like a daidarabotchi!"

At least if we could find a way to show Alice's Goliath doll to Cirno, we should be able to determine if that was what she had seen or not. After that, I had quite enough of dealing with fairies for the day, and the two of us finally headed home.

-.-.-.-.-

"So what's next, Renko?" I asked as I handed her a bowl of miso soup. "After last time we don't want to do anything that will create more work for Reimu, I think."

"Well maybe not, but on the other hand wouldn't a youkai the size of a mountain be something to see? From a purely anatomical point of view that would be interesting, right? What would the bones of something that big be made of? Actually, do youkai even have bones?"

"Renko, you're being irresponsible again. You've already caused one Incident, remember? That didn't work out so great for you."

"Well then we just have to make sure we're not responsible if a daidarabotchi comes into existence. Really it would be Reimu's fault, after all. We'd just have to figure out some way to make something giant appear in the Forest of Magic a few times..."

"Actually, I've been thinking Renko. We've been assuming the daidarabotchi isn't real, but what if it is?"

"Huh? what do you mean. If it was, wouldn't we have seen it?"

"Well, you could have something that qualified as a 'giant youkai' without it being quite as big as Hisoutensoku. If it wasn't as tall as the trees in the Forest of Magic, we wouldn't have spotted it from here."

"What brings this on, Merry? We don't have any reason to believe there is such a creature other than Cirno's word, right?"

"That's what I was thinking about. Cirno couldn't give us any solid description of the daidarabotchi, but Alice's dolls are pretty recognizably dolls. They don't blink, most of them are blonde and they wear pretty dresses. If you saw something like the Goliath doll, wouldn't even someone like Cirno think 'big doll' rather than some type of youkai she'd never seen before? If Alice had her fight it, she probably even mentioned the name 'Goliath doll' at some point."

"In other words, you think Cirno may have gone into the forest looking for a daidarabotchi, fought the Goliath doll and then went and found something else? I suppose that's possible. Alice never even told us who won the fight after all. If it was Cirno, she probably wouldn't have even thought a big doll was noteworthy."

"But she also couldn't remember anything about what the giant youkai she claims to have seen looked like, so it still entirely possible that what she saw was Hisoutensoku. Reimu showed her the newspaper, but I don't know if Cirno understands what a camera is. She might not have recognized a picture of Hisoutensoku if it wasn't as big as the real thing."

"Hmm, I don't like that. If a youkai gets created because of that ad balloon then Reimu IS going to blame me. Maybe I should ask Lady Suwako to have a chat with her." Renko was silent for a bit, munching on pickled vegetables I had prepared while staring thoughtfully up at the ceiling. "You know, now that I think about it, Meiling mentioned seeing some sort of looming giant-like youkai too. We assumed it was just Hisoutensoku in the mist, but maybe there's something else at play here. What was it she called it, Taisui Xingjun?"

"I think that was it. I don't know what it takes to make a youkai, but regardless of what she and Cirno actually saw initially, they'd definitely saw something, and told others they knew about it. Even if they didn't see a daidarabotchi at that time, one might exist somewhere in the Forest of Magic by now."

"If that had happened though, more people would have seen it, wouldn't they? No one else reported anything like that until Hisoutensoku went up."

"They wouldn't have reported it if they thought it was something else. A giant youkai might be mistaken for a huge tree in the forest, or even for Unzan if someone saw him near the temple. He can get pretty big."

"Yeah, and so can Suika. Alright, you've got a point, it's possible there's already a daidarabotchi out there, in addition to everything else."

After that though, we stopped discussing such things and drifted off into more mundane domestic discussions. I won't bore you with such trivialities, dear reader, especially given what happened next.

-.-.-.-.-

The next scene I will relate occurred later that very evening. After we had both gone to sleep, in fact. I remember becoming suddenly aware that I was dreaming. Even for me, it was odd to have such a clearly lucid dream. Nonetheless, I 'awoke' so to speak or came to consciousness with a distinct awareness that I was experiencing a dream.

I was in a rather strange place. It was a broad, perfectly flat plain of pitch-black earth, divided up into a regular grid by lines of glowing red light. The plain appeared to extend infinitely in every direction. Looking around, the space somehow felt 'unfinished' to me, like an empty expanse papered over with only the most simplistic of surfaces, something like a placeholder to be replaced later. I found myself reminded of vast sea of nothingness that lurked beneath the blue clouds of Makai.

"Oh hi, Merry."

I turned around to see Renko standing there, looking about amiably.

"Hi, Renko. Is that you, or are you just part of this dream?"

"Oh, is this a dream? That's an interesting question then. Would I know if I were part of it? If I'm not, then you must be touching my eyes, right? Did you flop your hand over my head while you were sleeping or something? Or are you still awake?"

"No, I'm pretty sure I'm dreaming. And you must be too. I don't think you'd be quite so pedantic if this were one of my dreams."

"Well in that case, do you dream of me often, Merry? Do tell. Maybe I can meet one of the other versions of me here. I wonder what they'd be like?"

"My dreams don't normally look like this, for the record. I've never seen a place quite this empty before. I think this might not really be one of my dreams, even if we're both asleep. I think maybe we're in the dream world, Renko."

"Really? I would have expected the dream world, if it exists, to be full of all sorts of fantastic dreamscapes. This looks completely empty, like the world of The 500 Million Year Button or something."

"Don't say that, I don't want to be trapped here alone for 500 million years!"

"You wouldn't be alone. You'd have me. 500 million years is a long time, but if I get to spend it with you, that wouldn't be so bad, Merry."

"Well I hope it's not that. The last thing I remember before this is going to sleep, so I'm guessing it's just the world of dreams."

"Alright then, if that's what this is, then what do we do? Whether or not this is one of your dreams, you're the one who suggested that such a place existed, Merry."

"I don't know. I wonder if I wandered across a boundary again by dreaming, like I used to?"

"Oh, if you have that could be interesting. Maybe this is like the concept of a morphic field -you dreamed up the concept of a dream world, then you dreamed and it came into being. If you were right and dreaming means that we're still physically in the same location but operating in a different, excited state of being, then it should be possible to measure and characterize the energetic differences between this existence and our normal lives! This has potential, Merry!" As Renko was saying this, growing increasingly excited, I became aware of the sound of footsteps behind me and turned to face them.

"Wow, even while you're asleep you never shut up, do you?"

The girl who had said this was wearing an odd, two-colored dress in black and white, decorated with a number of fluffy balls along its hems, and paired with an almost comically long Santa Claus-like hat. Her eyes were half-lidded, looking somewhere between amused and sleepy, and though she was walking, her feet scuffing the ground beneath us, she seemed to be completely weightless, more propelling herself along and floating towards us than properly walking and resting her weight on her legs.

"Maeribel Hearn, Renko Usami. Good evening to you both," she said. "Do either of you remember me?"

Looking at her, I felt the vaguest sense of familiarity. I had seen her before, probably, but in somewhere I could only just barely remember.

"...I think I met you once in a dream..." I began, uncertainly.

"I don't remember you at all," Renko said without hesitation. "But might I hazard a guess and ask if you might be a baku?"

"Oh, ding ding, very good. I'm Doremy Sweet, a baku, and Administrator of the dream world."