I awoke to find that it was already morning. Birds were chirping, the sun had risen and light was streaming in through the cracks around the shutters. I was back in my futon in the home I shared with Renko. I lay for a minute or two just blinking up at the familiar ceiling, feeling well-refreshed and enjoying the sensations of my body coming alive. I felt like I had had a great night's sleep. Was that Doremy's doing, I wondered?

It was only once I moved to stretch my legs out that I realized my right hand was clenched around something hard and smooth. I opened my hand to find a chunk of amber containing an insect suspended inside of it, laying there as inert and natural as if it had always belonged there.

"Ahhwwmmn. Good morning Merry. I feel like I had a really long dream last night."

Renko awoke beside me and rose sluggishly to a seated position, her hair in cowlicks that stood up at every imaginable angle. I didn't say anything, but all hint of her sleepiness vanished as soon as she noticed the amber glimmering in the palm of my hand. Instantly her eyes went wide and she lunged over toward me, first staring at the jewel and then at me.

"Merry! That's... so all of that was real!? Or it was really your dream!? You did cover my eyes while I was sleeping, didn't you!? We went to the Lunar Capital!"

I sighed. "Renko you can't blame me for everything that happened in your dream. And I can't have covered your eyes because I woke up holding this."

"You did dream of going to the moon though, didn't you?"

"...Well, yeah."

"I knew it!"

She quickly asked a few more questions that confirmed that indeed we had both experienced the same dream, at least from the time that I woke up on the beach. It was a shared illusion, an impossibility as far as rational thinking was concerned but having both experienced it, we had the grounds to be able to agree on its characteristics and thereby discuss it according to the tenets of Relative Psychology.

"Okay, first things first. Tell me what you couldn't tell Doremy in the dream, Merry. Where did you find that amber?"

"I don't know, Renko, I really don't. I was having a different dream before that one where I was in your grandfather's house, but not the one we knew."

"Not the one we knew? You mean my maternal grandfather's house? He died when I was in elementary school."

"No, no. It was the Usami house, the same one that Sumireko had lived in, but it was different."

"Merry you're not going to tell me it was a parallel universe or something, are you?"

"I don't know, Renko. Maybe. How would I know?"

"Oh come on, this isn't some lame sci-fi TV series. I know Relative Psychology favors the many-worlds theorem but that applies to perception, not actual objective reality, right?"

"There's no such thing as objective reality, Renko. It's all just an illusion constructed within an individual mind."

"Argh! Merry multiple universes make for terrible stories, they make every action and development pointless because there's always somewhere where none of that happened. Unless you're a deterministic observer who can view every possibility at once and choose the timeline you like from among the possibilities they're pointless except as a thought experiment."

"I'm not trying to tell a story, Renko. I just know that I was in the Usami house, but it felt different than when I had been there with you."

"Different how?"

"I don't really know. I was only there for a little bit."

"That's pretty vague, Merry." She puffed out her cheeks in annoyance. "It was definitely in the Outside world though, right?"

"I think so."

"So that raises the question of if this amber is the one that's supposed to be in the Hakurei shrine containing the spiritual power of the Outside world or a different one then... The youkai sage asked you to give a piece of amber like this to my great aunt once, right?"

"Yes, just after the end of the Spring Snow Incident."

"Presumably she wouldn't give you the one that was supposed to be in the Hakurei shrine, or if she had, someone would have noticed it was gone by now. So that one was probably a different amber. Maybe one containing the spiritual power of Gensokyo. The twin of the Hakurei shrine's shintai. That one, presumably, is still in my great aunt's possession."

"Assuming she hasn't lost it or sold it."

"So if we have this, and it's the twin to the one she has, then when she comes to Gensokyo she'll probably come right to us, right?"

"Maybe. Or maybe we'll be taken right to her. I have no idea how any of this works, Renko."

"That's true. When we first found the amber that transported us to Gensokyo, it did it without us trying to do anything or exerting any control over it. Hmm, I wonder what's going on here..." Her hand drifted up to fiddle with the brim of her hat but she wasn't wearing it, having just woken up. Her fingers closed around empty air, which seemed to startle her, just as if she had accidentally missed a step when climbing the stairs.

"Renko, we're in over our heads here. I think we ought to take Doremy's advice and just deliver this to the Hakurei shrine."

"...That might not be a bad idea. Reimu is the closest thing we have to an expert on the Great Hakurei Barrier, but if we just show up with this and it does happen to be the one that belongs in the shrine, she'll probably think we stole it."

"...We could go there while she's gone and just leave it on the veranda for her to find."

"It seems kind of dangerous to leave something like this unattended." Renko groaned and sat back, crossing her arms and looking up. It seemed on one hand like we had discovered a number of long-sought answers overnight, but on the other hand the real truth behind the mystery of our presence here was no closer to making sense than it ever had been.

"It really does seem like this jewel is a key that connects Gensokyo and the Outside world..." Renko mused, rocking back and forth slightly. "Based just on our experience with it, that is. But I suppose we can't really know if the jewel was responsible for anything that happened to us or if it might have been something else. We should try to think up some sort of experiment that we could use to substantiate our theories..."

Even if this stone had been responsible for transporting us to Gensokyo, why had it brought us 80 years into the past? We had no inkling as to the reason behind that, and even less of an answer to the biggest question of all: would it ever be possible for the two of us to return to the Scientific Century?