'One of the Sages who created Gensokyo', she had said. Was there anyone other than Yukari Yakumo responsible for Gensokyo's creation? I glanced over at Renko and she seemed just as stunned by the title.

"You look surprised to hear that." Okina said, looking down at us from her elevated throne. "Did you not know there were other sages beyond Yukari? Well, I suppose that's to be expected. She's in charge of maintaining Gensokyo's day to day operations and I am a secret god after all. I suppose I couldn't expect most humans to know of my involvement." She chuckled to herself in a way that seemed completely without mirth, as if the unspoken joke were entirely at our expense. Her gaze was both condescending and piercing as she looked down on us. She seemed to me as if she could see right through us.

"Unless I miss my guess, based just on your appearances I expect you must be called Maeribel Hearn," she said to me, then turned her eyes to Renko. "And this scrawny twig of a girl must be Renko Usami. Just what is that purple hag playing at by bringing you both here, I wonder? It's no matter. If whatever crisis she imagines were to actually occur she'll have to show her hand sooner or later."

"-What do you mean?" Renko blurted out, having finally recovered enough to speak. "Do you expect that we're in some way involved with Yukari Yakumo?"

Okina rested her chin on her fist and quirked an eyebrow as she turned to Renko. "Is she not the one responsible for you being here?"

"We don't know. If she brought us here, she's never told us or explained why."

"You've come to Gensokyo from a long way away, child. I doubt that anyone other than Yukari could have brought you here, and for her to do that she must have had some purpose in mind for you."

I had to think back. It was almost hard to remember, like trying to recall words from a dream. We had had another life once, Renko and I, in a time and a place far away from here. Life in Gensokyo had become my reality. Trying to think of Kyoto and the... the Scientific Century, as it had been called, seemed impossibly far away. It was as if the memories I held were separated from me by a gulf far greater than the decade that actually divided us. Had that life we had experienced, living apart from eachother, attending classes in which we were taught the invisible and nonsensical ways in which the physical world and the human mind were believed to work really happened? Or had that dreary and claustrophobic fantasy of cities choked by painted jungles and crammed with strange people and strange desires been nothing more than a dream?

I tried to remember. Sumireko Usami's room, in Renko's grandparents' house, in the sleepy streets of Tokyo. An amber jewel with an insect suspended inside of it. A rift in space, filled with countless eyes. The youkai sage appearing before me in front of a dilapidated Hakurei shrine that seemed devoid of life. Her gloved hand dropping that same piece of amber into my palm before pushing me into a gap where I would then give that jewel to Sumireko in her childhood. These mysteries, once core to our very existence in this world had long been forgotten amidst the rhythms of our daily lives. Why were we here, 80 years and who-knows-how-many hundreds of kilometers from the Tokyo we had just left? What had become of the amber with the insect frozen inside of it, and where had it originated? Who was Sumireko Usami, and how was she connected to Gensokyo? And why in all the years we had been here had Yakumo Yukari, my look-alike and this world's Administrator refused to ever appear in front of Renko?

"What do you mean by a purpose? You make it sound like Merry and I are tools for her." Renko narrowed her eyes suspiciously but Okina nodded and smiled.

"Yes, that's a good way to put it. You are like tools. Or perhaps you are more like keys. The question is what sort of locks does Yukari intend for you to open? You've been here for a number of years now. Have you never met Yukari?"

I answered this time. "I have. Renko hasn't though. She seems to be avoiding even being seen by Renko."

Okina turned her gaze back to me. "I see. I don't doubt she has her reasons for that. I wonder though, would they be sentimental reasons, or purely practical ones? Well I suppose it doesn't matter one way or the other."

"Hold on, just a moment. You can't just sit there like you're the author of a detective novel and cryptically suggest that you have information concerning us and then not explain yourself. If you know why we're here, I'd ask that you please tell us. If you can't do that, then at least please tell us why you can't."

Okina laughed at that, a short, barking scoff of a laugh. "You think me the author of your misfortunes? Hardly. I'm merely a curious third party examining some of Yukari's little toys. Yukari is Gensokyo's Administrator after all and all that happens in this world follows the plot she has written. Even my curious intervention has been accounted for, I'm sure. I am not here to aid Yukari's plans, nor do I intend to sabotage them. Let her have her fun, I'm merely curious to know what she's playing at."

"But you do think we're here for a specific purpose. That the Administrator has something she wants us to achieve?"

"I believe so, if only in the sense that all of Gensokyo exists to serve a purpose of Yukari's design. It would seem that part of that grand design now includes you." Okina's smile broadened, crinkling the edges of her eyes, but although her smile was joyful it didn't seem the least bit kind. "Your curiosity is much akin to my own, child, even if you are peering into matters you could never hope to understand. I will tell you what I can."

Okina lifted her head from where it rested on her hand and leaned forward to speak. "There is a deep connection between the two of you and the woman you know as Yukari Yakumo. A connection too deep for simple words to describe, though I suspect you know this already to some degree. You are being watched over by Yukari's shikigami, are you not?"

"...You mean Ran? We've been told that we are, but to be honest I never feel like I'm being watched. She's only rarely showed up, despite the fact that we've been in numerous dangerous situations."

"Do not presume that you know all that Yukari does. If Ran is watching you, then that is the same as if Yukari were watching you herself. In all likelihood she has been watching you from the moment you first set foot in Gensokyo. But despite that close attention that she has paid to you, you have never seen Yukari yourself. Am I correct, Renko Usami? That is no coincidence. She has a good reason to avoid appearing in front of you. Several reasons, perhaps."

"And those would be?"

"I won't tell you." Okina smiled playfully. "I suspect there is also a very good reason why Yukari has been appearing in front of you, Maeribel Hearn. You have noticed, I assume, that she looks very much like you?"

I nodded.

"I'm not going to tell you what that means either. I have my theories, but I can't even be sure myself. I do suspect, however, that were I to voice my opinions to you here and now, that Yukari might very well try to kill me."

Okina's method of dropping hints then dancing away from saying anything substantive was infuriating. I would be lying if I said that I had never considered the idea that our presence in this world might be in service of some unfathomable purpose. My belief in that idea had faded over time though. If Yukari had intended for us to do something, we must have already done it and been discarded or else her use for us had disappeared. Why else would we be left on our own to do as we please? Who would go to the trouble of getting a tool ten years before they needed it? But even that line of thinking might well be mistaken. There is no inherent meaning to events save that given to it by the context deemed as relevant by an observer. If I found my existence in this world meaningful that had no bearing on whether or not the youkai sage might. Whether we had come to this world through her machinations, or through an accident that had somehow consumed the consciousness of Sumireko Usami fifty years before we were born, or simply because of random chance was ultimately irrelevant. What mattered was that we were here in Gensokyo now. If our existence was to have any meaning beyond that, Renko and I would have to create that meaning for ourselves.

To think otherwise, to imagine ourselves as pieces of some grand narrative spanning years, worlds and dozens of lives went beyond egotistical and drifted into the realm of delusional. It was an idea of the sort of megalomaniacal bent I would expect to hear coming from Renko, but it was no solid basis upon which to build one's life. Renko herself had admitted that her scattershot approach to assembling clues and discerning motivations was as likely to miss the truth as not. She had been right about where to find Kokoro's mask, but could we really know if any of her reasoning as to how it got there or what the intentions of the people involved were could be believed? Did it even matter? Whether or not Renko was right about any of the plots she had uncovered to date was ultimately irrelevant. Whether cause, effect and intention were understood or not, the outcome was the same. Incidents occurred, Reimu resolved them and the machine called Gensokyo went on ticking. Around those two immovable poles characters like Renko and myself, Sanae, the Moriya goddesses, Keine, Akyuu and numerous youkai whirled in our complex dances, sometimes rising and sometimes falling. Despite all of our convolutions the key elements were the same. Someone with power would try to make their mark on the world. Reimu would stop them. Somehow in the midst of the danmaku-lit chaos a compromise would emerge and Gensokyo would change just a little bit. A gear would shift here or a wound spring would unfurl just a bit. The machine would keep on turning all the same.

It didn't matter if Yukari had some purpose in mind for us. It didn't matter what jewels we had found in Sumireko's room. It didn't matter what Renko discovered or proposed or intimated or accused people of. Gensokyo was bigger than any of us. It was a juggernaut that couldn't be stopped. If the machine required that Renko and I should be here, it seemed unthinkable to me that either of us might be anywhere else. I looked over at my partner who was deep in thought, chin tucked to her chest and fingers dancing over the brim of her hat. I wasn't the sort to come up with complex schemes and delusional machinations to explain every observation. She was the great detective after all, and I am merely her assistant, here to record her leaps of logic and celebrate her inevitable triumphs. Discerning the meaning of events was something best left to big-brained realists like her. That didn't mean I didn't have questions of my own though. They might have nothing to do with the grand schemes and machinations Renko was imagining, but at the moment I couldn't bring myself to care.

"Umm. Miss Okina, your divinity," I began, haltingly.

"What is it, Maeribel Hearn?"

"I mean you no disrespect as one of Gensokyo's sages, but my partner and I are not toys, and we're not tools. We're people. I'm Maeribel Hearn and she's Renko Usami. That's all we are. No matter what anyone may have intended in bringing us here, we make our own choices. If someone wants us to do something they can ask us, or try to convince us or compel us, but simply placing us here and hoping for the best won't accomplish anything. I think you're mistaken about our role or any intentions you think Yukari might have. Quite simply I don't think any of us - Renko or I, or Yukari, or even you have as much ability to plan and shape the future as you think we all do."

Renko raised her head and looked over at me. Okina's eyes widened in surprise.

"What's this? Do you not have any interest in your own fate? 'Why am I here' and 'What will happen in the future' are fundamental questions that every human asks. Surely you think yourself more than a cog in the machinery of life. All humans do."

"Miss Okina, are you at all familiar with the science of Relative Psychology?"

She said nothing but I could see from her expression that the words didn't mean anything to her.

"For the sake of argument I'll just assume you hadn't heard of it. It's a philosophical premise based around the idea of absolute subjectivity. Human beings can only experience the world through their senses. These senses are flawed, however, and we rely on our brains to stitch together the sensory data our organs supply us with using our inherent biases to establish a subjective reality that we inhabit. Thus, each individual necessarily inhabits their own unique world, slightly different than anyone else's. Each of us can only interpret the world in the ways that are unique to us -we can attempt to imagine what it would be like if we were someone else, but no one can actually experience someone else's world. We are, each of us, inviolable. Despite this inability to communicate the world we experience to others, we all struggle to assign meanings to the worlds we inhabit. We contextualize and draw connections between the stimuli we experience then craft narratives to give those connections meanings and importance. That is the nature of consciousness - we are that which contextualizes. The nature of society is the phenomenon of sharing the contextualization we have established with others and coming to a consensus. If two people can agree on the nature of something then they have a means to discuss it. That process extends only so far as we let it though. If an individual refuses to let the context that another person has come with be applied to their concept of a thing then they have no means to discuss that thing. If I choose to define myself as a human then I can find common ground with other humans and live amongst them. By the same token, if I were to believe myself to be part of a scheme hatched by Gensokyo's Administrator, I might well become that. But I don't. I reject that conception of myself and determine my own function. I can't be made to act as a tool."

"That's a noble but sadly naïve belief. Do you truly think yourself to be immune to others' influence? Do you imagine that every moment of your life up until now has been determined solely by your will alone?"

"Of course not. No one is that strong. I recognize that my subjective experience of the world is constantly changing under the influence of external forces. But in the end only I can choose whether or not to recognize a given force as an external pressure or an internal one. I alone decide where the boundary between what lies within and what lies without can be found. I'm in Gensokyo right now because Renko asked me to come with her. I chose to accept that invitation and in so doing defined myself as Renko's partner on this journey. Conversely, when you brought us here I had no say in the matter and as such I don't see myself as a willing visitor to this realm you've brought us to. You can force me to be here against my will, but you can't change the way I think of myself. Each of us is only who we choose to be. It's only through the act of contextualization that we each decide what's us and what's an outside influence. Or what's real and what's a dream."

I paused to take a breath and glanced over at Renko. She was looking over at me with an odd expression. "Merry..." she started to say. I didn't let her finish. I was afraid if I stopped I would loose my nerve.

"So, miss Okina. You can suggest whatever you like. You can attempt to convince us or to impel us or to hold us against our will, but no matter how you or the youkai sage see us, no matter what purpose you imagine we might fulfil for you there is only one truth to our existence and that is the truth that we have chosen for ourselves. My partner and I are the hifuu club. A sad little occult circle consisting of only us two. You may imagine some greater purpose for us according to your interests and try to shape us into something else, but to do so you would have to change our fundamental nature. As we exist right now our only purpose to reveal hidden secrets and in so doing make the world a more interesting place. That is what I have chosen for myself. I'm Maeribel Hearn. A detective's assistant. Partner to Renko Usami, the great detective whose delusions of grandeur I will listen to and record. No matter how much the circumstances around us might change, we're both still the same old hifuu club as usual."

I wish I could say my grand speech had a point. Looking back on it now as I write these words I feel like there was a purpose to what I was saying then, but reading it over now it sounds like I was merely pontificating on the basis of some imagined moral high ground. The words I spoke at the time poured out of me without much thought behind them. They were the voice of my pent-up frustrations at being treated like an object by everyone around me - a pawn in the schemes of masterminds, an accessory on the arm of someone more interesting in the eyes of those with power, or a boundary-detector to be employed by anyone with a need for one. Directing all of my aimless rebellion at Okina was probably incoherent and certainly not the wisest course I could have taken. In the end, my will petered out and my speech ended without any grand capstone or witticism to sum up my thesis. Keine would have given my essay a C+ at best.

As I wound down, however, Okina was watching me with what seemed like keen interest. "Very well," she intoned. "I'll refrain from making any further pronouncements or speculations on your nature. You may decide for yourselves what will become of you. I am just as eager as you are to see what your futures hold."