"Good evening, Maeribel Hearn. It's been a while, hasn't it?" She asked.
The lantern's flame sputtered, then brightened to reveal a face that looked just like my own. An intense, almost paralyzing sense of youkai presence washed over me. Yukari Yakumo rested her elbows on the table, then folded her hands, laid her chin on top of her interlaced fingers and smiled at me.
"Such terror in your eyes," she said, seeming to enjoy every moment of it. "There's no need for that. I only brought you here so we could have a little chat."
"...You brought me here. To get me away from Renko? Because you don't want to see her, is that it?"
"Actually, I'd like to see her very much but sadly some things are not to be. Instead, I will speak with you, and you will carry my request to her and speak my words from your mouth. May I ask that of you?"
A request. From Gensokyo's Administrator. Of all of the impossible things I might think of when it came to Yukari Yakumo, her making a polite request of me wasn't one I had ever considered. "I suppose it depends on what you'd like me to say," I replied.
Yukari produced a fan from nowhere and opened it, spreading it to cover her mouth. Above it, her eyes narrowed. "Oh my, I had heard from Okina that you had become quite fearless but I am indeed surprised to see you speak so boldly to your betters. You used to be so adorably withdrawn and timid..."
The fan closed with a snap. "Very well then, you will tell her this for me: I am the one who brought you here. For one purpose and one purpose alone. I wish to hire the Hifuu Detective Agency."
"Hire us?"
"Yes. To solve a mystery for me. That is what you do, isn't it?" Without the fan I could see she was grinning like a cat. The smile could have been a mirror to Renko's but there was a small, almost imperceptible difference. The sort of thing only someone who had spent as much time around Renko as I had might have noticed. A faint twitch of the lips, a subtle variation to the creases at the edges of her eyes. Her eyes expressed a complexity to her emotion that simply wasn't there on Renko's all-or-nothing face. A hint of some half-remembered pain that haunted the edges of her smug superiority. Beneath her eyes though, it was still the same troublesome grin I knew so well, written across the bone structure of an entirely different set of features.
"I'm just the detective's assistant, I'm afraid. Any requests for commissions have to be approved by the agency's Director. You'll have to ask her yourself."
"I can't do that, so you'll have to do it for me."
"...why? Why can't you let Renko see you?"
Asking that directly sent a trill of terror up my spine. I asked it anyway. The time for social niceties had fallen away somewhere in the previous decade that we'd been living here. Not that I would know what to do with any answer she gave me. I had no idea what to expect. At this point there was no basis for conversation if she couldn't answer that though. After all the hoops we had jumped through since coming here, how could we trust anyone who wouldn't even tell us that much?
"That's just the way things are. There's no point in trying to fight it, it's just the nature of the world. Now, would you like to record the details of the case?"
An unapologetic non-answer. I suppose I should have expected as much. "...Since Renko's not here, I can't make any guarantee that she'll take the case."
"Oh, that's terrible. If you don't accept this case I could be in quite a bit of trouble." Her statement was very much at odds with the amused smile she wore. "And of course, anything that spells trouble for me would certainly spell trouble for you both as well."
"...Why is that? What is it that would endanger all three of us?"
Her smile grew wider. I felt like a fish that had just bit down on a hook. "Sumireko Usami," she said. "You will need to find a clue that will lead you to her."
Of course she knew about Sumireko. Sumireko, whose room we had been brought to Gensokyo from. Whose jewel she had given me to deliver. The girl who, as far as we knew, she should have had no way of knowing anything about. The last mystery our little hifuu club had ever investigated. The one that had lead us here.
"Renko had the right idea investigating that drum tsukumogami. She was nearly on to something. Her instincts are solid, but sadly that girl is a dead end. She's just the tip of the iceberg poking out for you to see. Everything you really want to know is still hidden beneath the surface. I brought you here so that you could prepare yourselves for this case. Two girls from the Outside world, with limited, empirical points of view would never be able to reveal the truths that I'm asking you to find. You needed time to adapt. Even as you are now though, I wonder if you're ready for this challenge. Nonetheless, I'll ask it of you. It's too important to be left unattended to, and we're out of time."
She smiled as she said the words that acted as the starting signal for the next Incident. The words that would bring the story of the hifuu club into its final act. "There's someone who I need you to save."
-.-.-.-.-.-
It was the spring of Gensokyo's 129th year, 2014 in the calendars of the Outside world. The morning was tranquil and still. Birdsong warbled over the distant churn of the coursing river, a soft wind rustled through the trees and the Hieda Public Temple School was closed, as it was every Sunday. Most villagers were just beginning to leave their houses and while the cry of merchants and peddlers on the nearby streets were now starting to be heard in the distance, for the most part the village was quiet and peaceful.
You might expect that within this quiet village there might be no singular spot more quiet than the small office that almost no one ever visited which occupied a disused storehouse on the grounds of a school that was closed for the day. Normally this building served almost no purpose, being only a repository for two girls with more curiosity than sense to be stored when they weren't teaching classes or getting into trouble. It also functioned as a breeding incubator for numerous birds who, having nested in the eaves of the storehouse long ago, had now colonized much of the roof into their own elaborate avian machine which seemed every spring to produce ever more tiny songbirds.
You might expect such a thing, but on this occasion you would be wrong. At the moment that office was playing host to the same two girls who typically frequented it, but both were currently dressed in their night clothes and filled with nervous excitement and one was sweaty and flustered from having run across town in a panic.
That would be my partner, Renko Usami, the great detective, who was now questioning me with unconcealed interest. The other girl in the office was me, Maeribel Hearn. Renko had run here first thing in the morning in search of me after I had vanished without warning (and against my will) from the room we shared last night. I wasn't surprised to see her (though I had hoped she might have thought to get dressed or bring me a set of my own clothes before rushing out of the house.) In a way we were both here at this time and in this state because of a visitor I had met with here in the office last night. An unexpected guest, who hadn't asked my permission before secreting me away from my futon to meet with her here in the dead of the night. Or rather, I should say an 'unexpected youkai.'
"She wants us to save somebody? Is that it? Is that all she said?" Renko blinked quizzically at me.
"'There's someone who I need you to save.' That's what she said to me, Renko. That's all she said. That and 'the rest is up to the hifuu club to solve.' After that she disappeared from right in front of me."
Sitting across from me, cross-legged on the tatami at our little table, her feet still dirty from running here from our house, she lowered her head and cradled her chin in her hand. Her finger twitched and her left foot flexed as she thought hard with a serious expression on her face for a minute or two. Eventually, she looked up.
"Merry are you having an affair with the youkai sage? I mean, I could hardly blame you for cheating on me with someone who's supposed to look as pretty as you do, but at least have the courage to tell me about it. All of this running around and hiding behind my back, is it really worth it? Why doesn't she want me to see her? I wouldn't be mad. Maybe the three of us could even do something together. Does your Renko really mean nothing to you?"
She likely might have continued if I hadn't silently leaned across the table and landed a chop right in the middle of her forehead. My partner seems to be pathologically incapable of treating any situation with an appropriate level of seriousness. I consider myself opposed to the idea of needless violence on the whole, but I am also opposed to the thought of anyone getting romantically involved with the youkai sage. She's a cruel, terrifying person.
"What can I say, Renko?" I asked, settling myself back into position on my side of the table. "She really doesn't want to meet you. Maybe jokes like that are the reason why."
"That's not fair, she's never even heard my jokes. She's got no reason to hate me, but she's appeared in front of you numerous times. I don't even know if Akyuu's seen her as often as you have by this point."
I had my own hypothesis as to why the youkai sage had never appeared in front of Renko except on the one occasion when she had been blind. I of course had no way of testing my hypothesis though, nor could I hope to interpret any results my testing might have produced. Unlike my partner, I harbor no delusions of grandeur. As such, I fully suspected that my hypothesis was nothing more than a childish fantasy. I wouldn't be mentioning my theory to Renko either. It would only serve to exacerbate her already tenuous grip on reality.
"According to the youkai sage we're supposed to look for a clue that will lead us to Sumireko Usami."
"She didn't say that the person she needed us to save was Sumireko though, did she? That seems deliberate. It might be someone else. We might even have to save someone from Sumireko for all we know. How many people are there in Gensokyo, I wonder?" She scratched at her head.
The population of the human village was actually a bit larger than you might expect for a remote mountain village, but it was still too small to be considered a proper city. At most it would be the size of a larger rural town in the Outside world. Big enough that you wouldn't expect everyone in town to know everyone else, certainly, but small enough that the opening of a new business anywhere in town was always significant news to be talked about for the next week or so. This might have been more a result of the segregated nature of the town, as it was divided both physically and culturally into different districts, each housing a different class of people who tended to only associate with others of their kind. In this way the presence of the occasional Outsider such as ourselves could easily go unremarked upon in the village and it wasn't all that uncommon for a youkai to sneak into town in the same manner. It almost seemed like the isolation and lack of communication between the different communities that made up the village was by design.
I'm rambling again. What was Renko saying?
"...no matter how I look at it we have too little information to go on. Did the youkai sage say anything else? Anything at all?"
"Well I was half asleep at the time, but let me recall... Yes, there was one other thing, I think..."
Renko had the right idea investigating that drum tsukumogami. She was nearly on to something. Her instincts are solid, but sadly that girl is a dead end. She's just the tip of the iceberg, poking out for you to see. Everything you really want to know is still hidden beneath the surface. I brought you here so that you could prepare yourselves for this case. Two girls from the Outside world, with limited, empirical points of view would never be able to reveal the truths that I'm asking you to find. Even as you are, I wonder if you're ready for this challenge. Nonetheless, I'll ask it of you. It's too important to be left unattended to, and we're out of time.
"...That's what she said."
Renko covered her face and leaned back, groaning in frustration. The 'drum tsukumogami' that the sage had mentioned was of course Raiko Horikawa. We had met her the previous autumn, and she had told us that her user in the Outside world occasionally associated with someone who looked a lot like Renko. We assumed that must have been Sumireko Usami, but that was all that we knew about her. If you want more details about that meeting, see my previous casefile.
Sumireko Usami is how this had all started for us. She was Renko's great aunt, a girl who had been born at the dawn of the 21st century and had, at least according to Renko's grandfather's diary, possessed psychic powers. In her teenage years she had fallen into a coma from which she had never awakened, but before her death she had almost seemed to predict that Renko and I would enter her room someday, having left a notebook with the name of the hifuu club on one of her shelves. She was one of the prime suspects in our having been ripped from our own time and place and brought to Gensokyo.
I had met her once, but at that time she was only a child. If you're curious about the details of that meeting, then I'd refer you to my second casefile, which also details the events of the Spring Snow Incident. The things that happened on that occasion were so vague and dreamlike though that I'm not entirely sure I didn't hallucinate them.
At any rate, by this point it seemed irrefutable that there had to be some connection between Gensokyo and Sumireko's coma.
"Well it would make sense if it were Sumireko that the Administrator is asking us to save, wouldn't it? It must be some time in the next few years that she falls into the coma, right?"
"That's true, but in that case why did we come here a decade ago? We shouldn't need to understand everything about this world just to save someone from getting killed by it. If Sumireko is who we're supposed to save, wouldn't it have made more sense to send us directly to now, or to whenever Sumireko is in danger?"
"Well this is all the youkai sage's plan and she's supposed to be more than a thousand years old, according to Akyuu. Maybe to someone like her a decade seems like a negligible difference."
"We can't just assume that her actions are illogical without good reason. Whimsy, carelessness, incompetence or impulsiveness could all explain her actions away, but without solid evidence I'm not willing to accept such a boring explanation. She's the mastermind who designed this whole world, Merry. There has to be a reason for her actions. Otherwise a great detective like me wouldn't be able to use logic to figure it out."
I sighed. "Renko, People get murdered for no reason in the Outside world all the time. What kind of detective is only willing to accept the solution to a crime if they find it interesting? Do you think that's how a police detective would operate?"
"Of course not, Merry. But lucky for us, I'm not a cop. I'm a member of the hifuu club, sworn to uncover the hidden truths beneath reality and make the world a more interesting place." Renko laughed and puffed out her chest proudly. I couldn't see how it was anything to be boasting about. "Understanding why my great aunt fell into a coma is something I'd like to do for my grandfather's sake if no one else's, but for all we know that may be inevitable. I'm not sure that it would be possible for us to change the timeline like that. We can try, but it's quite possible that there's someone else who the sage intends for us to save. She said that what we wanted to know was 'still hidden beneath the surface...' Maybe by that she means that the person we have to save is someone whose death wouldn't be known of in the Outside world. It could be someone like Reimu! Or Marisa!"
"Renko if there's something out there that was likely to kill either of those two, what exactly do you think we could do to save them? If anything, it would be the other way around. Reimu's usually the one saving us."
"You said she told you that we'd need to look for a clue that would lead us to Sumireko, right? Maybe that clue is someone here in the village who knows her. That could be the person we have to save."
"This is like Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery. All 20,000 people in the stadium are potential suspects."
"That's bad news for you, Merry. How are you going to write 20,000 names on your list of suspects?"
"Are there even 20,000 people living in the village?"
"I would think that would be around the uppermost possible limit for the number of people in Gensokyo as a whole. If we're considering every youkai, ghost, fairy and god as a potential person of interest as well then this is going to be a tough case."
Renko and I both thought for a moment then independently and simultaneously leaned back from the table and groaned in frustration. As we did so, the door to the office suddenly slid open. Standing behind it was our part-time assistant Sanae, with a big grin on her face that quickly became a look of surprise.
"Good morning you two! I thought I heard you in here. I was just coming by to tidy up your branch shrine when I heard you talking. Why are you both in pajamas? Are you sleeping in your office again? Did I interrupt something?" Despite asking that, she stepped into the room without invitation and closed the door behind her.
"Good morning, Sanae. Oh! Hey Merry, we'll need to add living gods to the count too, that's another possible suspect."
"Living god or not, I think she still counts as a human. But I don't think she'd be anyone we need to save, or the killer for that matter."
"The killer? Save? What do you mean? I haven't killed anyone today. What exactly am I walking in on here?"
"Come on in, Sanae. Have a seat. We'll explain it all then maybe you can fly us home to get some clothes and something to eat."
