Sumireko Usami. For us it was a nostalgic name. A name that had started us off on the road that would lead us to this world and the place we now occupied within it. If we had never heard her name back when Renko and I were just the hifuu club then we never would have investigated the rumors of her supernatural powers or explored her room in Renko's grandfather's house. Because of that we never would have found the notebook with the mysterious title of Hifuu Club Activity Record and we never would have encountered that amber jewel with an insect trapped inside of it. We would never have been swallowed up by a gap between barriers and we would never have emerged in the library of the Scarlet Devil Mansion here in Gensokyo.

We had been so busy living our lives here that even trying to think about our previous existence in the Scientific Century was now something I found disorienting, like trying to determine if something in a dream had really happened or not. After all the time we had spent here, I had long ago simply assumed that both Renko and I would live out our lives as villagers and eventually die here in this world for things forgotten by humans. It was a fate I had made my peace with long ago. For us to be anywhere else, or even to have been anywhere else for more than a visit at any point in the past seemed almost impossible. This was Gensokyo, the place where we lived and the place where we belonged. Here was our life as teachers at the temple school and part-time detectives. Here were our friends -Keine, Sanae, Mokou, Reimu and Marisa. Our odd little found family of sisters, each of us trying to make our own way in this world. If I could have chosen to return to the world of my birth right this moment I wouldn't have wanted to. As much as I might complain about her moment-to-moment choices or motivation, running around Gensokyo and exploring with Renko was precisely what I wanted to be doing with my life. To me, it felt like the natural state of things.

But here was Raiko. And with her, the rumors of Sumireko Usami. This girl who brought us right back to our starting point in this world. An element whose mere presence suggested that all that we had experienced in the last decade amounted to nothing more than a long dream. Who exactly was she and what was her connection to us? Or to Raiko for that matter?

After talking to Mamizou we were left once again with more questions than answers. We had learned a lot about how the process of transferring a tsukumogami's soul from one tool to another could potentially work, but we were still just as confused as ever as to whether such a thing was actually possible. If it was, then there was no reason to doubt anything Raiko had said and her intentions were probably just as she had said they were - to help the Tsukumo sisters do as she had done. If she had been lying about any part of it, however...

I suppose in the end the choice about whether or not to trust her wasn't ours to make anyway. It had been two days now though and we hadn't seen any sign of either of the sisters or of Raiko. We had never discovered any motivation for Raiko to lie to us either, so it was only the underlying improbability of the act she was proposing that made her statement suspicious. As we sat together in our office after classes I looked over my students' papers for the third time then sighed in defeat. I was too distracted to properly correct them.

"Hey Renko do you think Benben and Yatsuhashi are alright?" I asked.

"I think that what I think about it doesn't matter much one way or the other," she said, echoing my sigh and scratching her head. "I can't think of any reason why Raiko would lie to them or to us, but I also don't see any reason to trust her, either about transferring spirits into new bodies or about my lookalike. That said, Benben and Yatsuhashi were willing to trust her, so I guess we'll have to do the same."

"So then you believe that Raiko's user in the Outside world is friends with Sumireko Usami?"

"Well I believe she's friends with someone. Just because that person looks like me doesn't mean that they're necessarily my great aunt though. People here tell me I look like Reimu, but I don't think we look alike at all."

"The only person who said that to you here said your temperament looked like Reimu's, not that your face did. This person who looks like you though, who else could she be but Sumireko?"

"Who knows? I doubt even Raiko could tell us. From what she was saying I think she can only see the Outside world, not interfere with it."

"Your great aunt Sumireko fell into a coma when she was in high school, right?"

"That's what my grandfather's files said. She was a first year at the time, so she must have been about 15? She was born in 2000, so that would be sometime next year."

"Do you think that coma could have had anything to do with Gensokyo?"

"We have no way of knowing. If it did, she never mentioned that to anyone else. Even if the person Raiko's been seeing in the Outside world is my great aunt, I still don't see how she could have anything to do with us being here."

"Seriously, Renko? That would be a pretty big coincidence, don't you think? We just happen to run into a tsukumogami, who just happens to be connected to someone in the Outside world in a totally unprecedented way. Through that connection they just happen to know someone who just happens to look remarkably like you. When we came to Gensokyo it was because were exploring the room of a relative of yours and when we met Okina in the summer she implied we were brought here for a specific purpose. Aren't you usually the one to leap toward connecting dots like this?"

"All of those things are connected to us, but that doesn't mean they're connected to eachother, Merry. Who are you trying to say is responsible for us being here? My great aunt for having that amber in her room or the youkai sage for making you give it to her? Were they both being manipulated by Okina? There's too many suspects and no evidence yet. This mystery revolves around us, but we don't have enough information to be drawing conclusions. I've still never even met the youkai sage, so I couldn't begin to guess how she might be involved in all of this. What do you think is going on here, Merry?"

It was too big a question for me to wrap my head around. People, events, and possible motivations swirled around my head in chaotic, irregular orbits that sometimes brought them into contact with eachother, but I couldn't see the shape of any grand scheme. Would there be a moment when everything would collide, or were these objects simply passing by eachother, unaffected by even the gravity of each others' passage? I was neither a great detective nor a physicist. I had always left questions like these to Renko. The sort of mysteries I usually pondered myself weren't any better though. One question in particular stuck in my mind, completely unanswerable: if through Raiko we could discover a way to return to Kyoto in the Scientific Century, would we even want to?

"I don't know what to think..." I said hesitantly.

"Well that's the heart of it. The Hifuu Detective Agency has been in operation for ten years now. We can't ignore a mystery like this one, it's just the sort of thing this partnership was founded to investigate."

I sighed again. "Well then what do we do, Renko? Every time we find a bit of information it only brings up more questions. We don't even know if anything we've been told can be trusted. Raiko, Yukari, Okina -I don't think we can completely trust any of them. How do we investigate a mystery like this?"

"We start by solving the mystery that's right in front of us to begin with. We need to resolve the current, ongoing Incident."

"Which one? The tsukumogami Incident is handled one way or another. It seems like Raiko's going to get away with whatever it is she's trying to do since no one is trying to stop her and every tsukumogami other than her and possibly the Tsukumo sisters that was created by the mallet will probably be returned to their original state. As for the original Incident with the mallet, Shinmyoumaru has been captured and the mallet is recharging. What else is there to solve? Are you intending to try and find where Seija went?"

"Well that's one of the questions I'd like to see answered, but there are still several other mysteries that have been bothering me as well. And I think it's time we got to work finding some answers." Saying that, Renko stood up and retrieved her trenchcoat from the peg on the wall. "Come on, Merry. Let's go." She offered me her hand, grinning down at me with her usual troublesome smile.

"Go? Where?"

"To the Hakurei shrine of course! Where else?"