After we finished helping Kosuzu get everything squared away at Suzunaan it was already beginning to get dark, so we headed home. With the current situation involving increased youkai activity we couldn't risk being outside the village after dusk. We came in the door and I sent Renko to fetch some water while I stoked the hearth fire back to life to put on a quick meal for us.

When Renko came back in the door carrying our two buckets her brow was furrowed with concentration. She didn't say anything as she came in, which meant it was up to me to figure out what was bothering her.

"So Kosuzu was acting a little odd today, don't you think?" I ventured.

"Definitely. I would have expected her to be a lot more excited to find that her youma books had turned into tsukumogami. That girl loves youkai."

Renko and I had been monitoring Kosuzu for long enough by to know her tastes and habits. She didn't quite share Renko's recklessness or disregard for her own safety but she was hopelessly fascinated with most anything youkai-related. Like Renko, I would have expected her to be thrilled to have her store be filled with tsukumogami.

"Does Kokoro have a mask for curiosity? Maybe she's lost it now and all the curiosity in the village is draining into her."

"That's impossible, Renko. If your curiosity had been drained away there'd be nothing left of you." I said as poured water over the rice and put the pot on the hearth. "We have some salted fish left, do you want ochazuke?"

"Its autumn, anything will taste good. Back when Kokoro lost the mask of hope I still felt confident we could solve the case though and I slept well at night. Maybe it would take a while for enough of an emotion to drain that people notice."

"Or maybe you're missing the part of the brain that handles anxiety and fear. Can you put the tea on while I put a salad together?"

She moved around me to fill a kettle while I got the cutting board out and pulled out some daikon and tomatoes. "My emotional makeup is completely normal, remember? Kokoro said so herself."

"If she views someone like you as being 'normal' in any way then I'm not sure I trust her judgement." I felt bad for saying that. If Kokoro had heard me she'd have switched to wearing her uba mask.

"Well either way, you're probably right. Mamizou was saying there's something else going on and I bet whatever is happening to make weak youkai more dangerous has something to do with all these extra tsukumogami too."

"So you think the missing instruments grew legs, climbed out of that storehouse on their own, ran off and are now planning to attack the village? If we hadn't seen what we did at Suzunaan today, I'd think you were being delusional, even for you."

"They were drums, a biwa and a koto, right? Those aren't convenient instruments like a flute. I don't think I've ever even seen anyone in the village play a koto except for at the festival. The ones in the storehouse are apparently quite old, but I bet that just means they stay locked up in there for months at a time every year and don't even get looked at or maintained until the autumn. If instruments like that were to go tsukumogami, they'd probably want to at least find an owner who would take better care of them, right?" she asked as she set kettle on the stove.

"Well who would that be in Gensokyo? Do you think they ran away to Korindo? Or are you planning on going to talk to the Prismriver Ensemble again tomorrow?"

"You read my mind again, Merry. I was just about to suggest that. I suppose if we're doing that we should also see if we can talk to Choujuu Gigaku as well."

I don't think I've mentioned Choujuu Gigaku before in my writings but at the time that this was happening they were the biggest name in Gensokyo. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who didn't have a strong opinion about them one way or another. The band was a two-person youkai punk rock duo that had been formed by Mystia Lorelei and Kyouko Kasodani, though calling them musicians might be a bit of a stretch in my mind. From the sounds we had heard echoing over the walls of the village past midnight on some nights the two of them didn't seem to have much in the way of musical training, but they did have passion, Kyouko's overwhelmingly loud voice and a battered electric guitar that Mystia must have found somewhere. That was about as much as I could say in their favour.

"I can't imagine Choujuu Gigaku would have much need for a koto or a biwa and I'm kind of terrified of the idea of them adding drums to the group. They're loud enough already." I sighed as I sliced the tomatoes.

"If the instruments have turned into tsukumogami I wonder what Keine will do with them once we find them."

"Musical instruments are expensive. I imagine she'd just get Reimu to seal them and keep using them."

"Would anyone be willing to play a living instrument, you think? Even one that had been sealed? I bet she'd throw it away."

"Well if it had become a tsukumogami that would be dangerous, wouldn't it? That's how you get tsukumogami with a grudge against humans like that poison doll we met on the hill of the nameless."

"You mean Medicine? She's not so bad anymore. She's been helping out at Eientei and visiting with Yuuka lately."

"She tried to kill us, Renko."

"So have lots of youkai we know. You can't hold that against them, Merry." She winked at me as she added tea to the strainer.

Medicine was the name of a tsukumogami doll we had met only a handful of times. We had first encountered her near the end of the Sixty Year Cycle Great Barrier Incident, where we had learned of her ability to manipulate poisons in a rather direct and distressing fashion. Since then she seemed to have met Alice Margatroid and Yuuka Kazami who both lived relatively close to her and they had apparently taught her not to immediately attack humans on sight. She could occasionally be seen at Eientei, where she worked with Eirin to assist with the creation of certain drugs, but I had never been inclined to try to talk to her again. She had told us during our initial meeting that she had once been a regular doll who had been abandoned by her owner.

Kogasa Tatara, the umbrella tsukumogami who haunted the cemetery north of town, was another youkai arisen from an abandoned object. In her case her grudge against humans only seemed to go as far as wanting to startle them. I wondered if that was due to her nature as an umbrella or just because her powers weren't nearly so lethal as Medicine's.

I finished chopping the daikon and passed the cutting board to Renko. "Can you just put all of that into bowls? I'll make a dressing then get started on the fish. The rice should be almost done." She swayed her bony hips around me in the small kitchen as we traded places. "If what Mamizou said is true and there are getting to be a lot more new-born tsukumogami lately, that could be bad. If everything old in the village were to wake up at once, I'm sure that would cause a lot of problems."

"It would be a complete uprising. A revolt of all of man's tools. Rather than being used by humans, tools would stand up for their rights. Labour unions in every fireplace, contracts for all of your dishware," she said bombastically, smiling as she set the bowl full of salad greens and chopped vegetables down beside me.

"Humans are already slaves to tools though. Whenever you get a really useful new tool you almost immediately start wondering how you ever got by without it."

"Saying that reminds me of back when we first came to Gensokyo."

"It was a big culture shock. How many times did you try to check your phone in that first month?" At this point thinking back on the technology of the late 21st century was nothing more than nostalgic for us. Our memories of lives lived beneath the invisible gauze of electronic networks and social media seemed at once alien and nostalgic. What strange habits we had once had.

"Well, nostalgia aside, whatever Mamizou was talking about is worth investigating too, I think. It may be that if we look into the phenomena with the weak youkai we'll end up finding our missing instruments as we go."

"We have even fewer leads about that. Just Mamizou's word to go on, really. How would you suggest we go about investigating that?"

"With the Hifuu Detective Agency's proprietary high-performance anomaly detector, of course."

"I'm not an 'anomaly detector,' Renko! My eyes aren't a youkai radar or tools for you to use as you see fit. I just see boundaries sometimes is all."

"Well whatever you want to call your ability, it's never lead us astray. I'm sure if we keep poking around you'll eventually spot something hidden. Once we start pulling at that thread it's just a matter of time before we discover some hidden truth about this world."

"You mean it's just a matter of time before you come up with some bizarre new delusion," I grumbled, letting out a sigh as I finished flaking the salted fish and added it to the bowls with the rice. I mixed the mirin, soy sauce, dashi and hot green tea and poured it over the rice to serve. A simple, hearty supper in about 20 minutes. Not bad if I do say so myself. Even if I couldn't predict where Renko might be dragging me on any given day, at least I was becoming confident that I could keep us well-nourished when we got there.

I picked up the bowls and turned toward the table where Renko was sitting, smiling up at me over two cups of steaming tea. I had only managed to get as far as taking two steps toward her when the front door suddenly flew open with a bang, however. There had been no knock nor any announcement. At this hour of the evening and here at our home rather than the office I could only think of one person it could be. I looked past Renko to the door, expecting to see Sanae as Renko craned around to look too.

Instead, two people I had never seen before rushed into the room. They spread out, one charging at either of us. I didn't have time to even ask a question, much less put our bowls down before one of them reached a hand out toward me and I felt my arms be pulled down and pinned to my sides. Something like a red cord had wrapped itself around my body, immobilizing my hands. The bowls clattered wetly onto the floor. I barely had time to register the sight of one of the figures rushing forward and wrapping their arms around Renko before the person in front of me hit me full on in the chest with their shoulder, knocking me to the ground. I felt the weight of their body pinning me down for only a moment before I was wrenched over and pressed face down into the wooden floor.

"I've got her, sis!" My attacker said. "It's definitely them, the humans who were snooping around on us."

"Okay, but what do we do with them now, Yatsuhashi?"

There was a beat of hesitation. "Well, they don't actually seem very strong... I don't think they could have hurt us..."

"But this is a revolution! We've got to show them that we're on top now!"

"Right, we're on top!" I felt the weight of someone's foot press down on my back, but without much force behind it. "...So how do we show that?"

"Let's take them with us! When we find the master of this power we can show them off as a prize!"

"Yeah! Let's drag 'em out of their house and use 'em as we see fit!"

The weight came off of my back and a second later I was forcefully yanked off of the ground and back onto my feet. I caught only a brief glimpse of the young-looking, brown-haired girl who was grabbing me before she whirled me around by the shoulder to face back toward the door. In front of me I saw Renko, tied in a kneeling position with her hands pinned to her sides the same way mine were and her face shoved against the table by the arm of a strange girl. Floating in the air just above the hand she wasn't using to press down on Renko was something just as unexpected as it was unmistakable: the four-stringed oval shape of what appeared to be a neckless biwa.