From its inception, Gensokyo was created to be a paradise for youkai. Here monsters who have lost their place in the Outside world can live in safety, free from the existential threat of rationalism present in the minds of humans found anywhere else. To achieve this existence the youkai here subsist on the fears of a town full of humans who have been trapped in the Meiji era for nearly two hundred years. It would be hard not to come to the conclusion that the humans of Gensokyo were livestock of a sort, harvested for their fear and awe and every now and then their meat. A captive, complacent food source for predatory youkai born from the depths of superstitious terror.

In a place like that it is inevitable that there would be a certain percentage of the people who, like Rikako, would be rankled by this way of being and feel a desire to escape or overturn this hostile, exploitative order. People who would be driven to fight by their own righteous indignation. In the ten years that Renko and I had been living in Gensokyo, however, Rikako is the only human who I had ever heard openly express thoughts like that. Why was that, I wondered? Were most people satisfied with their day to day lives here, even knowing that they existed only to feed horrors beyond their comprehension? Or were there perhaps more objectors than we realized but none of them had ever spoken to us, either fearing the consequences of speaking their mind or having long ago succumbed to a resignation that nothing about this state of affairs could be changed? Or did the humans of Gensokyo perhaps actually prefer their way of life to what they might imagine the Outside world to be like?

I asked Renko about it after Rikako ran off. We didn't get a chance to talk right away, but not long after that Kotohime got called away by another member of the watch to investigate a rumor of a break-in at a business in the entertainment district and so Renko and I returned to the neighborhood watch office on Kotohime's orders.

"There are probably a good number of people with views like that," had been her response. "Probably mostly young people. Rikako is probably just more willing to speak her mind than most people would be."

"Well, if that's the case, then I think that would probably be the sort of person who would be most likely to have contacted Sumireko. Someone who was dissatisfied with life in the village might well be interested in a means of communicating with the Outside world, don't you think?"

Renko grunted thoughtfully and leaned back from the table, fingers fiddling with the brim of her hat. "Hmm, I guess that makes sense, but that still doesn't really narrow down our search that much. If people aren't willing to express their dissatisfaction with life in the village then we can't really determine who might have reached out to her. Unless you're suggesting we go ask Satori to come up here and read everyone's thoughts for us or something. I don't think she'd be willing to do that."

"No, even if we could do that, I wouldn't suggest that we do. That would be an invasion of privacy, Renko. Most people would consider learning someone else's inner thoughts without their permission to be pretty rude, which is why Satori lives in Chireiden with only Koishi and her pets, I think. Though now that I think about it if we wanted to do that we wouldn't have to go as far as Chireiden to find a mind-reader anyway. We could always just..."

"I sense someone with a desire to talk to me."

"Whoa! Miko! What are you doing here!?"

The third voice that had suddenly inserted itself into our conversation belonged to the crown prince, Toyosatomimi no Miko, whose head had just popped up from under the floor of the watch office, directly beneath a cushion on the opposite side of the table from Renko. The hermit prince of the Divine Spirit Mausoleum was indeed the person I had been about to name, With her ability to hear the desires of others, she might not have quite been a mind-reader, but she was close enough for our purposes.

"Oh, is that tea? It smells rather nice. Would you mind if I had some?"

"Kotohime's father is a tea grower, so they always have very fresh leaves here. I'll pour you some. What brings you to the neighborhood watch office though, your majesty?"

Miko climbed out of the hole in the floor she had emerged from, a hole that hadn't been there just a moment before and seated herself on the cushion opposite Renko, somehow maintaining an air of dignity the whole time. "I actually came here in hopes of calling on miss Kamishirasawa, but I gather that she is away on business at the moment."

"Miss Keine? What were you planning on talking to her about?"

"I take it you've heard about the matter of the amanojaku who's been stirring up trouble and rebellion lately? Such creatures are an impediment to the natural order of the world and as such an irritation to Taoists like myself and my master. Seiga had mentioned that she was considering leaving the senkai to go find this irritant and destroy it, and I rather thought it might be better for all parties involved if I were to find this criminal and deal with her myself before that happened."

Miko said that calmly, while wearing a placid smile illuminated by the soft halo of light that surrounded her at all times. So even Seiga was considering going out to catch Seija? I can't imagine what sort of torments someone like Seiga might have in store for a creature like an amanojaku if one happened to annoy her, but I was sure that nothing good could possibly come of a pair of ne'er-do-wells like those two meeting with eachother. Miko's motivation sounded entirely sensible to me.

"...But, as I was saying," Miko continued, "I had no sooner given up hope of finding miss Kamishirasawa here than I sensed the two of you nearby with a desire to speak to me. So, what can I do for you both?"

"Ah, well that's most kind of you to take the time to come and see us. I suppose we do have a question. At the moment we're interested in trying to find people who are dissatisfied with the current order present in Gensokyo. We suspect one of them might have been in contact with someone from the Outside world."

Miko frowned at that momentarily, her eyes flicking down to the black armbands that we were both wearing. "Hmm. That's a bit of a strange request but I don't sense that you have any desire to oppress political dissent or the like. Just for my own reassurance though, the neighborhood watch hasn't become some sort of secret police, has it?"

Renko's eyebrows shot up and she fumbled to tear the armband off of her sleeve. "No! Not at all. This isn't a matter that's in any way concerned with public safety or the suppression of alternative points of view. This is strictly a personal inquiry, not one instigated by the watch."

"Well, I see from your desires that you're not so much interested in who this person might be as the person in the Outside world that they're in contact with."

"Most perceptive, crown prince. As usual, we can't hide anything from you."

"Hmm. I'm afraid it wouldn't do for me to be seen aiding the watch with an invasive inquiry like this even if you are acting independently. And so, rather than assisting you directly, I will use my abilities to cut through the confusion that you yourself are experiencing with this matter and give you a suggestion. Where you go from there is up to you." The prince smiled at each of us in turn.

"A suggestion?" I asked.

"Yes. I don't know who this person you're looking for is of course, but I sense that your thoughts on how to locate them are jumbled, and perhaps working at cross purposes. Let me clear that up for you. The both of you are originally from the Outside world, are you not? You have been in Gensokyo for long enough at this point that you are thinking more like a person from this side of the barrier than you once would have. My suggestion to you is that you turn your line of inquiry inside-out."

"Turn it inside-out?"

"That's as much as I should say. Self-reflection is an enriching practice. Thank you for the tea, Renko. If you'll excuse me." Saying that, the prince scooted back from her seat and lifted up the floorboards again, raising a section of the floor as if it were a hinged hatch. Without another word she slipped into the space below the section she had lifted up and disappeared as it slid back into place, perfectly flush and unbroken behind her. With my eyes slightly dazed by her sudden disappearance I reached over and tapped on the floor. It was completely intact, with no sign that it had just split open to admit her back into her senkai.

I looked up at Renko, who was muttering to herself and fiddling with the brim of her hat again. "...Turn our line of inquiry inside-out... Oh! I get it! She's completely right! We really must be too used to Gensokyo to have missed something so simple!" She shot up from the table, banging her knee against the underside of it but seeming not to even notice.

"What's wrong, Renko?"

"It's so simple! We were looking into what sort of tool could be used to contact the Outside world from Gensokyo. But it's much simpler if we think of this problem from my great aunt's side of things!"

"From Sumireko's side?"

"Exactly. Merry, imagine you're a teenager in highschool again. Moreover imagine you're a teenager who's into the occult. We've been forgetting our roots as an occult circle! If you suspected that a world full of fantasy like Gensokyo existed, how would you go about contacting it if you were still in the Outside world?"

I thought for a moment. "Well there's lots of ways, I suppose. I could look for a tear in the boundaries, or I could try dreaming about it..."

Renko looked at me with a disappointed expression and let her shoulders droop. "That's a very Merry answer," she said despondently. "No one without your eyes could do something like that."

"Well what if your great aunt had eyes like mine? Maybe that's how she learned about Gensokyo in the first place."

"Oh, hm. I suppose that's possible, but it seems unlikely. Grandfather wrote about her being a psychic but he never said anything about her seeing things that no one else could. Let's assume for the moment that she couldn't do that. If you had psychic powers, but you couldn't see barriers, how would you go about finding Gensokyo, Merry?"

"I don't know, Renko," I said with a sigh. "How would I?"

"With this!" she said, reaching into her pocket and drawing out a coin purse. Here in the village coins from the Outside world were largely used as currency, but because of their rarity no attention was paid to their denomination. Coins were simply coins. The one Renko had pulled out was a simple 10-yen coin with a year from the previous century stamped on the back. It was nothing particularly special. "We could use this for divination. Didn't you ever hold seances or read fortunes during sleepovers back in high school, Merry?"

"I can't say as I did. Why would I want to?"

"Well I'll show you, Merry. It's the thrifty occultist's most trusted method of contacting other worlds. With just this and some paper you can summon up Kokkuri."