Before we begin, there's something I'd like to make clear. The story you are about to read is quite different than any of the other casefiles in this series that you might have read. It is unique among the annals of the Hifuu Detective Agency, and for a variety of reasons.
Like the other stories, this record details the events of an Incident that affected all of Gensokyo -specifically, it records the story of the Urban Legend Incident. That story is definitely part of this record as it's something my partner and I became embroiled in. But there's more to this record than just that.
One day, in the summer of 2085, two girls found... or rather will find a notebook and a chunk of amber containing a preserved insect in a room that had been abandoned for more than 50 years after once belonging to one of the girls' great aunt. While those events have not yet transpired, a long time has passed since then in my perception. My partner, Renko Usami and I were once those two girls and the moment we happened upon that jewel we were forcibly pulled back through time, to an era before either of us had even been born.
The mystery of how and why that happened has lain dormant for more than a decade. Now, however, it has suddenly returned, and in a form more pressing than ever. Why were the two of us invited to this land of illusions, and by whom? In the future that we came from why had Renko's great aunt fallen into a coma while she was in high school and then later died? Just who is Yukari Yakumo, the youkai sage who has haunted me since my arrival here in this world but never appeared in front of Renko?
These are the questions that this record will be mainly focused on answering. This record is the story of the Urban Legend Incident. But moreover it is the story of two lost girls and what they discovered about themselves.
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I say that, writing as if this casefile were a simple, solved record, a cut and dry case with a clear culprit, a resolution and definitive answers. A book you could read through, guess at the truth of, finish to see if you were correct and then put down, happy in the knowledge that whether or not you had put the pieces together correctly everything made sense in the end and every inconsistency had been explained away.
That is not what this story is like. There are still many questions to which I don't have answers. I have made decisions that I will never be able to classify as 'right' or 'wrong.' Everything I see before me in this dreamlike world of fantasy remains just as unbelievable as it ever has, suspended, superpositioned on the border between dream and reality.
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As a student of Relative Psychology, I know we are all only what we make of ourselves. It is the act of self-determination that reifies our identities and gives us definition. It is our imaginings of ourselves that makes us what we are, however miserable or wonderful that may be. Thus, it is ironic that as a statement of my own self-determination I would like to quote words that were once said to me by my partner, long ago, in a far away place:
"Let's wake up! Dreams are things to be made into reality. The world of dreams can be as real as we make it be!"
Maybe, if you were to condense this whole story down into a few brief lines, that is what it would look like.
-.-.-.-.-
Forgive me, readers, I may have grown a bit unnecessarily poetic. I'll attempt to leave such self-indulgent ramblings behind and get on with the story I've promised you. This is the story of Maeribel Hearn, assistant to the great detective, Renko Usami. It is the story of their sad little occult hobby circle, the hifuu club. It is the story of an encounter between people who were never supposed to meet. It is the story of someone searching endlessly for someone she can't meet.
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It all began one year before what's commonly recognized as the start of the Urban Legend Incident, in a beautiful spring during which all of Gensokyo was abuzz over the widespread and destructive attempts by multiple parties to capture a fugitive amanojaku. It began with a case brought to the Hifuu Detective Agency by a mysterious visitor in the middle of the night.
