As the one-winged woman drew to a halt before us, all of the rabbits stood up and formed themselves into a straight line, standing at rigid attention. No introductions had been made, but it was clear that whoever this person was, she held a position of significant authority in the Lunar Capital.
"Lady Sagume, these are the intruders we captured," Shakka said, then saluted and scuttled out of the way to take her place in the lineup.
The woman, called Sagume apparently, looked us over emotionlessly and kept her mouth covered with one hand. The long silence drew on as the rabbits all watched with nervous expressions on their faces.
After a good minute of silent staring, Sagume took something like a notepad from her pocket along with a stylus and quickly scribbled something down. She showed it to Shakka, who looked at it with a worried expression, then passed it to Sakimuni. The peach-haired rabbit repeated the process, grimacing, then handing the notepad to Ringo.
Ringo read the note then sighed. "Alright" she said. "Everyone leave and disperse into the forest."
"Eh? What for?" The other rabbits cried.
"Because those are lady Sagume's orders," Ringo said with a shrug.
There was no further arguing with that. The rabbits all glanced at each other, then retreated in an orderly march toward the tree line. Once there, they all quickly bounded off in different directions. Sagume watched them go, then turned back to us. She continued to stare at us in silence, her mouth covered. It was hard to know how to react to that, and even my partner seemed to be at a loss for how to begin a conversation. Another minute stretched on, then Renko stepped forward and opened her mouth.
"I'm here, I'm here," called another voice before Renko could actually speak. "I rushed over as quick as I could."
Sagume hadn't opened her mouth. The voice that was speaking was someone else's, and one that was unexpectedly familiar to us. It sounded like it had come from just beside Sagume but there was no one there. Not at first, at least. As I looked at the space beside Sagume a fuzzy white something appeared in mid-air there, wriggling as if it were being squeezed through a pinpoint hole in reality. The fluffy little ball finished emerging and was followed by a long, floppy, red conical hat and finally, the smirking face of Doremy Sweet, Administrator of the dream world.
"Doremy?" Renko and I both cried in shocked unison.
"Oh good, you both remember me, that makes things easier. Hello again, earthling detectives. It's been a while." As she said this she continued to emerge from the hole in space, which flexed elastically around her as she climbed through it. When she was done emerging she floated before us just as she had in the dream world, never touching the ground, wearing the same black and white outfit decorated with fuzzy balls and paired with a long nightcap that she had worn the last time we had seen her. Aside from being the dream world's Administrator she was a baku, a nightmare-eating creature that, as far as we knew, could only be found inside of dreams. Which meant...
My partner stepped forward. "Hello again, miss Sweet. If the Administrator of the dream world is here, then I take it that Merry and I aren't really in the Lunar Capital?" Her eyes were shining with interest and one hand was already obsessively tracing the edge of the brim of her hat.
"Even when experiencing everything around you, you still think this is a dream?" Doremy asked. "It's a little worrying that as a human you can't tell if you're awake or not at the moment, but I suppose your partner has always had a terribly odd way of dreaming."
"A 'terribly odd way of dreaming?' What do you mean by that?"
"Nevermind. A slip of the tongue. It's just..." Doremy clamped her mouth shut and then looked us both over, scrutinizing us intensely. She seemed to be deciding just how much to say. "You're a little too certain that dreams are dreams and unrelated to anything else, miss Usami. Putting aside the question of whether or not you are asleep right now, you are experiencing these events with all of your senses as we speak, aren't you? Wouldn't it be typical for a human to treat this situation as real at least until such time as they awake? Simply deciding that you can ignore everything you're experiencing because it's 'not real' sets a dangerous precedent for your mental health, don't you think? Human perception isn't nearly so accurate and reliable as you seem to think it is."
Renko blinked in surprise, her hand going still, freezing where it had been fiddling with the brim of her hat. "I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised to hear someone in one of Merry's dreams saying something that sounds like it came out of her mouth," she said after a moment.
"It's not me sounding like her so much as it is that she sounds like me sometimes, I'd say. But that just means you should listen to her more often." Doremy said with a huff. Renko glanced over at me. What could I do but shrug?
If you try to draw a clear line between dreams and reality you'll loose your ability to distinguish between the two. That statement sounds like it should be a paradox, but it holds a measure of truth. Humans rely on their perceptions to construct their understanding of the world. Until we awake, there's no difference between a lucid dream and reality, as far as the kilogram and half of meat locked inside of our skulls is concerned. Both situations provide equally interpretable stimulus after all, so there's no reliable means of judging, especially for people like myself and my partner who regularly encounter nonsensical situations even while awake. Even back when we had lived in the Scientific Century, Renko and I had used the power of my eyes to visit the satellite TORIFUNE, where we had both been attacked by a chimera, but only I had been injured while Renko had been unharmed. Had we actually travelled there? For me the answer was clearly yes. But for Renko, who saw the whole excursion as a shared dream, it had been little more than an exciting diversion. A field trip of sorts.
For Renko, dreams were dreams and anything that happened in them amounted to nothing once you woke up. Numerous classic sci-fi stories even played with the idea that reality as we perceived it might be a dream -or else a virtual reality construct, a psychically induced hallucination or some other such explanation. In those stories, even if it was revealed that everything the characters had experienced up until a certain point was fictional there was still an ultimate, rational reality that they could awaken to. In reality that was the fictional part of those stories though. The concept of a solid, observable reality that always conformed to the same stable and defined rules was the true fiction. Renko should have known that better than most people, in my opinion. How long had physicists struggled to create a convoluted and nearly unintelligible theory to explain why physics worked one way at the molecular scale and a completely different way at the quantum scale? People willing to accept that things worked fundamentally differently in different circumstances should be among the first to grasp the possibility that there were certain circumstances in which the rules of reality were different, but no less 'real.'
"Well, putting aside the question whether Relative Psychology is a proper way to view the world or not, there's still the fact that we appear to be standing on the moon at the moment. I find it much easier to believe that I'm dreaming right now than to assume we crossed the distance we would have had to in order to get here at superluminal speeds."
"You see, applying that kind of analysis only leads you to the wrong conclusion. You should be observing and theorizing based on observable reality," Doremy said in a chiding tone, shaking her head the whole time. "Saying 'travelling faster than the speed of light is impossible so this must be a dream' is unscientific, miss detective. That said, I'm surprised to find you in the Lunar Capital too. I wouldn't expect you to be here. It's not supposed to be possible for earthlings to reach this place through dreams unless they already know about its existence. Ultimately though, none of that is important right now. It doesn't matter how you got here, the fact of the matter is that you're here now and that causes problems, especially since I've already got lots of other things to deal with."
"Oh?" Renko asked excitedly, "Is there trouble in the dream world again?"
"No comment. Besides, if there were, you know I couldn't tell you about it, you'd just think of it as something in a dream, unrelated to anything 'real.' The best thing you could do, detective, is to wake up right now and realize that the Lunar Capital and everything you saw here was just a silly dream."
As Doremy said that, Sagume reached out and tugged on Doremy's sleeve. The baku turned back to look at her and nodded, even though Sagume hadn't said anything. "Yeah, I'm getting to that," she confirmed. Then she turned to address me.
"Maeribel Hearn. You have something strange right now, don't you?"
I felt the pit of my stomach sink. The weight in my hand, the hard, smooth object I had been carrying this whole time suddenly felt much more massive. I opened my clenched fist and looked down at the jewel I was holding. The amber was still there, with the insect embedded in it still frozen in time. It almost seemed to be glowing faintly in the Earthlight.
When Doremy saw what I was holding she let out a slow, uneasy breath. She sounded almost shaken by its presence. She recovered quickly and looked up at me with an uncharacteristically stern expression.
"Where did you get that?"
"I'm not sure. In a dream just before now, I think."
"Miss Hearn. Whatever you do, you must not bring that thing with you when you dream. It will cause lots of problems if you bring it into the dream world."
"But I found it in a dream. I was dreaming just before now when I was in the Outside world, wasn't I?"
Doremy sighed and looked down for a moment before meeting my gaze again.
"...You don't know what that thing is, do you? You have it, but you don't know what it's capable of."
I glanced over at Renko. How could we possibly answer that? We had our guesses that it might have been responsible for pulling across time into Gensokyo, but even that was mere speculation. Any abilities the jewel might have had were a complete mystery to us.
"Doremy, do you know what this amber is?" Renko asked, leaning forward, her hands once again playing with the brim of her hat. "To be honest we've been trying to understand it for a long time now."
"It's something extremely dangerous is what it is," Doremy replied. "Something the two of you shouldn't have. We'd all be better off if you could just wake up and put that thing back where it belongs."
"What do you mean?" Renko asked. "It belongs in the Outside world, doesn't it? That's not somewhere we can go."
Doremy and Sagume looked at each other uneasily. After a moment some form of decision seemed to be agreed upon between them and Doremy turned back to us.
"You're just going to cause more problems for everyone involved if I don't tell you anything, so I'll tell you just the part that you need to know." Doremy said, glaring at Renko. "That jewel is something linked to the spiritual power of the Outside world. It's the Hakurei shrine's shintai."