That night I had a dream. It was a terribly realistic, lucid and all-too-believable dream, and yet it was very clear that it was, in fact, a dream. How could it have been anything else when it took place somewhere that had once been real to me but was now more distant and dreamlike than any of the worlds we had visited?
It was a dream of the Outside world. Specifically, a dream of the place where all of this had begun for us. Renko's grandparents house, in downtown Tokyo. I found myself on the second floor of that house, standing in a hallway, with no recollection of how I had come to be there. The hallway was different than I had remembered, but it was still recognizably the same place, with the same floor plan, only the feel of the place was noticeably different.
It was night and no lights were on, so I couldn't tell if the hallway was any brighter or less cramped than I remembered it having been, but something in the character of the house had changed from how it had felt in my memories. It seemed more chaotic, more run-down.
What was I doing here? Had I crossed the Great Hakurei Barrier in my sleep? If I had, was this the Usami household of the modern day? Or the one Renko and I had vanished from in the 2080s? The dull, old-fashioned feel of the construction was just as I had remembered it, but I don't know if that had been the way things had appeared 70 years before I ever visited the house or not.
While I was pondering such questions I heard the sound of footsteps coming from a downstairs hallway. For some reason I immediately felt compelled to hide from whoever might be coming and found myself jumping up and fleeing down the hallway and through the sliding door at its end. The room I had darted into looked a lot like Sumireko's room as I remembered it, but it wasn't quite the same. It was free of the thick layer of dust that had coated Sumireko's sealed room and although it was cluttered just as hers had been, there was a certain sense of order to the clutter. Things here were arranged in a way to be used. Moreover, although there were two large bookcases filled with books here, there were only two rather than ones covering every available surface. Aside from the bookshelf, a bed and a desk littered with old electronics were jammed into the corner of the room with several bulbous stuffed animals were stacked on the bed. As I was looking about, the footsteps I had been hearing drew closer. They ascended the stairs and came into the hall I had just been standing in, where they stopped. I heard voices speaking softly and cautiously allowed myself to peek through the slight crack between door and doorframe. There were two figures standing in the hallway, but I couldn't make out any details about them in the darkness.
"Okay, this looks like the place. The room we want should be right around here."
"That doesn't look like it could be her room, are you sure that's not a storeroom? Or maybe her dad's room?"
"Well we have to return this somewhere. Where do you think we should put it?"
"She said it came from a dream originally. It would be best to return it there, wouldn't it?"
"If I could come and go between dreams and reality that easily, we wouldn't have to do all of this to begin with."
"There's no point in imagining the impossible..."
Somehow the voices of the two figures seemed far away, even though they were less than two meters away from me as I stood behind the thin door.
"Let's just put it all in one of those carboard boxes in her room."
"Would that be okay?"
"Who knows? It's supposed to be a key that transcends boundaries and connects worlds. For all we know that's exactly where this stuff belongs, right?"
"I guess, maybe."
At that point the two shadows turned and walked away from me, proceeding to the far side of the hallway and entering a room there. I didn't follow them as they left the door to that room open. I could still hear them speaking, though they sounded just as distant as they had before.
"There are three boxes here, which one should I put this in?"
"This one looks like it's just for books. This one's got everyday items. That one's for... occult stuff, I think. Toss it in there, I guess."
"What about this cloak?"
"What's that all over the inside of it? Runes?"
"She was wearing it, but I'm going to put it in with the occult things."
"This hat looks awfully familiar. Do you think the two of them really are related?"
"They'd almost have to be, but I'm not sure how. They couldn't be sisters and I couldn't say which one was more mature."
"Alright, that's it. Hopefully when we go back all of this will be resolved."
"So which one of them was responsible for all of this in the end, do you think?"
"It could be either of them. Or both. Or just her screwing around, she was there too."
"Guess we'll find out when we go back."
"Yeah."
I leaned away from the door and held my breath as the two shadowy figures left the room and came back down the hall. I waited until I had heard their footsteps descend the stairs and move far enough away that I could no longer hear them before I dared move a muscle. Then, slowly, moving as quietly as I possibly could, I stepped over into the room they had just left.
The room was clearly not anywhere that anyone lived, and looked like it was just being used for storage. In the dark the shapes of rectangular objects in the room might have been shelves for books or for something else. The smell of old paper in the air suggested to me I was in Sumireko's room though. Was that right? I couldn't remember which side of the hallway hers had been on. Inside the room, just past the doorway, three large, cubic cardboard boxes lay open on the ground. My eyes were drawn to the one in the middle.
There, on top of everything else a black cloak had been neatly folded. On top of it sat a very familiar looking black hat with a dingy white ribbon tied around it. And sitting next to that, all on its own, was the chunk of amber with the insect sealed inside of it. The same amber that had lead us to Gensokyo from Sumireko's room. The same amber the youkai sage had forced me to deliver to a young Sumireko Usami. Why was it here, and now? Where even was I at the moment, or when for that matter? The moment I thought that, the amber gleamed, catching the scant light filtering into the room. I felt my hand reaching towards it.
-.-.-.-.-
And then I woke up, in a stranger and even more dreamlike place.