When Hachiman follows the inexplicably floating woman into the kitchen, he finds her waving her hand in front of Yasumoto's, the cook's, face. Yasumoto, in the midst of chopping up vegetables, doesn't appear to notice.
Great, Hachiman thinks. I really am hallucinating.
But the woman, radiating irritation through her rigid posture even as Hachiman only has view of the back of her head, will not be so easily dismissed. She clicks her tongue and flies off through the next wall, into the cafe proper, her face thunderous in profile.
Yasumoto doesn't acknowledge Hachiman either, since her work demands her full attention. So, with nothing much else to do, he again follows the woman, but through the door, like a sensible person.
Now, he finds her suspended in midair just beside the threshold, watching the room with narrowed, baleful eyes. No one reacts to her presence, so Hachiman can only presume that the crowd, like Yasumoto, are unable to perceive her.
He feels a pang of disappointment. He hopes the medication he'll need, as part of his at-home care, won't be too expensive.
The woman says, "This is frustrating." Her horrible gaze slides over to Hachiman, who meets it squarely, despite his own misgivings. "I'm going to try to pick something up and wave it around."
Hachiman scowls. He deliberates his next move, but at this point, he's got nothing to lose. The difference between seeing things and engaging with them doesn't strike him as so very great, in the grand scheme of things.
"Wait a minute, would you?" he mutters, barely more than a whisper. Even with his wavering resolve to see this delusion through, it seems that his sense of embarrassment is still alive and well, which is heartening. Better than his mental state throughout middle school, if nothing else. "I'd rather not cause a scene. Let me go home first."
The woman, who evidently has no trouble hearing him, nods. "Fine."
Hachiman stares back at her, not glaring but not not glaring, for another beat, but then he gets on with it. His cut still aching unpleasantly, he goes and asks Kamiki the Elder if he can leave early because he feels like he's coming down with something, which Kamiki the Elder allows easily. Perfectly heedless of the ominously floating woman behind Hachiman, he assures Hachiman that they'll be alright to close up without him, since it's already almost the end of the day anyway. Hachiman, pretending not to be having the strangest day of his life, goes along with it all, and thanks Kamiki the Elder for his accommodation. Hachiman returns the apron.
Hachiman, Hachiman supposes, is coming down with something, most likely, so that's not a lie. Just not anything as straightforward to shake as a cold.
From there, Hachiman makes his escape from Crest Coffee before Yukinoshita can catch him, pursued by his new tulpa. He's standing around at an intersection, waiting for the light to turn, when the woman—who is still, and Hachiman cannot stress this enough, floating—speaks up again.
"Are you going to where your guardians are?" she asks.
There isn't anyone else around, just cars, so Hachiman answers her. Ideally, none of the cars here will swerve outlandishly and hit him, but even if one did, it would be infinitely better timing than it was when he was last run over. Then, he would at least be spared from conversing with a woman who doesn't exist. "No. My little sister."
The woman considers this, with roughly the same disapproval with which she seems to consider everything. Then, she asks further, "Where are your guardians?"
"Why would you care?" Hachiman snaps.
"I've been asleep for who knows how long," the woman snaps right back. "At least several thousand years, if I had to guess, by the state of the world. I might as well be on an alien planet." Her hands ball into fists, and her lour grows even more pronounced. She doesn't seem to like having to talk, Hachiman realizes. It's made her mood even worse. "If I can learn what it's like for children in this era, how they're taken care of, and by who, it'll tell me more about this civilization than almost anything else."
It occurs to Hachiman, privately, that the woman hadn't said parents. But the Stoneworkers, if he recalls correctly, are believed to have operated through a clan-based familial structure, and much of their childrearing must have been some manner of a team effort.
He still frowns at the woman, though. "How come?"
"No one is more categorically helpless than a young child," she informs him, like it's very obvious. "You're nearly an adult now, so it's far from the same thing, but it can't be helped."
Hachiman glares at her. He wouldn't be unsympathetic to her circumstance, if she were real, but she isn't. "My parents are busy." Not that he would go to them with something like this, anyway. He doesn't actually want to be institutionalized, so Komachi is the only one he can trust. Changing the subject, Hachiman goes on, "How're you going to pick anything up to wave it around, anyway? I saw you go through three walls."
"I'm not a ghost." The woman floats closer to the ground and holds her hand out to Hachiman, palm up. "I can choose to be intangible, or I can choose to be tangible."
Hachiman regards the woman's fingers with a profound skepticism. The light turns green, so he avoids having to find out if he can make physical contact with her by crossing the road, and she doesn't press him on it. They continue on the way to his house, Hachiman walking, the woman flying. It's… distractingly cool, actually, the aerodynamics of a humanoid body through nothing but air. Her effortless weightlessness calls to mind clips he's seen of Lum from Urusei Yatsura, which Hachiman promptly shoves back into the recesses of his psyche, because the last thing he needs is to give back into his Eighth Grader Syndrome impulses.
Look where giving in to those impulses has already gotten him.
"If it's up to you, why didn't you just, I don't know, poke Yasumoto or something?" Hachiman questions before he can think better of it, to avoid thinking about all that other stuff. After a beat, he adds, "The cook lady."
"It's not so urgent." The woman glowers ahead, not at Hachiman, but just in general. "Even in such a minor way, I'd still need a very good reason to transgress anyone's physical boundaries without explicit permission, not least of all because I find the human form completely disgusting."
That gives Hachiman some pause. The woman must be quite invested, then, in proving her existence to him. Not that he has much faith that she'll have any luck with it.
He huffs, not exactly a laugh. "People are pretty gross."
She nods, just once, her motions and her whole posture tight with dislike. Hachiman wonders, if this is a manifestation born from his own imagination, what it all says about him.
XXX
When they get to the house, Hachiman lets himself in with the house key, and the woman lets herself in through the wall, because of course she does.
"I'm home," he calls out, as he's trading his shoes for the house slippers in the genkan.
"Welcome back," Komachi, obligingly, calls back.
Hachiman walks over into the living room, where she's sprawled on her stomach on the couch, reading one of her magazines. Komachi has a short, messy bob of unruly hair, and really, she and Hachiman look a good deal alike, except that Komachi still has hope for the future in her eyes.
"I thought you said you were gonna be out until after five," Komachi comments, idly, not looking up from the magazine. Then, she startles, and scrambles to be sitting up and blinking rapidly at Hachiman from over the back of the couch. "You didn't get fired, did you?"
"I was there with my club," Hachiman reminds her, annoyed. Valiantly, he ignores the woman, who floats into the kitchen. "And frankly, if I could get fired from my club, I'd do everything in my power to make that happen."
"Well," says Komachi, with an air of diplomacy to her. "I'm glad to see my big brother again sooner rather than later." She grins at him, and with one hand, she aims an obnoxious finger gun at him. The other hand is still holding onto her magazine. "How many points did that earn me?"
"Enough to offset the points you lost for immediately assuming I got fired," Hachiman informs her, equally as diplomatic. Before Komachi can start to haggle with him, he follows his tulpa into the kitchen, where he goes and retrieves a spoon from one of the cabinet drawers. He turns back around to face Komachi, and he waves her over using the spoon. "Anyway. Komachi, come over here for a second. I have something to show you."
Komachi discards the magazine haphazardly onto the table and makes her way over, her curiosity successfully piqued. "Yeah?"
"Yeah," Hachiman says. "A magic trick."
He makes meaningful eye contact with the woman who doesn't exist. The woman who doesn't exist, catching on, flies over to where he and Komachi are. When Hachiman holds the spoon up to her in offer, she accepts it, and she waves it around, just as she'd said she would.
Komachi's jaw drops.
"Woah!" she exclaims, proceeding right away to flail both of her arms all around the spoon, looking for the strings. She phases right through the woman's arm. "How are you doing that?!"
Hachiman swallows. He stares at the spoon, and at the woman, who stares back at him. Flatly, he explains, "I woke up the ancient, invisible god of an extinct culture from the inside of a rock, and you can't see her, but I handed her the spoon."
Komachi rolls her eyes. She gives up on finding the string. "Fine, don't tell me. But I bet I can find it online."
If only, Hachiman thinks, pained.
"Anyway," Hachiman repeats. He takes the spoon back from the woman, who makes no move to object, puts the spoon back in the drawer, and pushes the drawer closed. With his back to Komachi, Hachiman goes on, "I'm home early because I think I'm coming down with a cold, so I'm going to my room."
Komachi yelps and jumps back, away from Hachiman, warding him off with her hands. "You should've opened with that! It's my friend's birthday next weekend, I can't get sick!"
It should be Hachiman's turn to roll his eyes at Komachi and quip back with something, probably about how idiots can't catch colds, but he just doesn't have it in him. He can't bring himself to look at Komachi, so he just huffs to let her know that he's not really mad, and escapes up the stairs.
Komachi likely just figures that he really does feel bad, so she calls up after him, "I'll bring up chicken soup later!"
As Hachiman is pulling the door closed, it makes him laugh, just a little. At least Komachi won't really have to worry about what to do with a Hachiman who's lost his mind.
No, Hachiman hasn't lost his mind. He just feels completely bonkers. Because there's a magical, floating god phasing in through his wall.
"That's a lot of points, right there!" he yells, for Komachi's benefit, through the door. Then, Hachiman stumbles to his bed and collapses face first onto it, on the edge of hysterics all over again. The woman, for her part, floats over to glare at him from nearer by.
She doesn't say anything. It's up to Hachiman, then.
"What even are you?" he demands, muffled by his pillow. He wonders if he's in shock. "Why are you here?"
"I'm a god," the woman tells him. "And I'm here because…"
She trails off, so Hachiman props himself up on his elbows, to look at her. She's scowling.
"I really hate your language," she complains, but she doesn't dwell on it. The woman crosses her arms and watches Hachiman down her nose. "We had an understanding with the people you call the Stoneworkers. A pact. But those oaths that we swore also made it so that when they fell to their own worst inclinations, as all human civilizations are eventually inclined to do, we were bound not to interfere." Her eyebrows pinch more pronouncedly together with disapproval. "I've been asleep since. I can't imagine that very many of the others are awake now, if any of them are."
Hachiman's hands ball into fists in his sheets. He wriggles over onto his back and sits up. "The Stoneworkers didn't exactly leave behind any successor cultures."
The woman huffs. "No, I didn't think they would. But however it happened, the people that we had our agreement with are all gone now." She shakes her head. "So I don't know what I'm here for. Frankly, it's not my place to decide on my own what the gods' relationship with humanity should be now, in this new world."
The Fifty-First God, whose domain is Antimony. Antimony is the fifty fifth element, so it stands to reason, for Hachiman, that there should be at least one god per element.
No, he scolds himself, emphatically. No, no, no, no, no. We're not going down that road again. I'm not in middle school anymore.
"Why did you come to an agreement with humans in the first place?" Hachiman questions, suspicious.
"Why else?" The woman raises one eyebrow at Hachiman. "We needed blood."
Hachiman chokes. "Excuse me?!"
"I won't," she says, flatly firm. Before Hachiman can keep protesting, she continues, "Sacrifice is the heart of faith, and faith is the heart of our power. Blood is symbolically resonant, so it's what's best, and it's not like I'd be asking for very much of it." She inclines her head to Hachiman. "A few drops onto a piece of paper, and then burn the paper."
There's a tasteless query about human sacrifice on the tip of Hachiman's tongue, but then he reflects on how, really, the Mesoamericans had never actually had a monopoly on the idea of sacred sacrifice. Every religious movement he can recall has it baked into the theology somewhere, as part of the bargain that exists between men and gods: I'll offer you wine, or animals, or this witch I set on fire, and you'll protect me from the uncertainties of life. I'll fast or give up sex forever, or build temples, or go butcher those stinky heretics, so promise me answers. In the grand scheme of things, Hachiman supposes that an emphasis on the symbolism of blood shouldn't concern him more than, say, some Shinto shrines' emphasis on the symbolism of saliva, or Christianity's purported preoccupation with the symbolism of sex. Not to mention how just about everything pop media has fed him about broader Mesoamerican blood symbolism had turned out to be hogwash.
I guess I should pick up lancets at the convenience store, Hachiman thinks, miserably. Except then he frowns and thinks instead, No, wait. I'm not going to do that. That's insane.
Hachiman scowls back at the woman. "And why should I help you?"
He really hopes that the answer isn't, because otherwise, I'm going to explode you, terribly and not in a cool way.
Fortunately, the woman nods, like Hachiman is making sense. "As a human, you live your life at the mercy of your own biology, don't you? If it's only been a few thousand years since the last time I was awake, evolution can't have made all of the things humans worry about with their bodies obsolete. Illness, injury, and the deterioration of the flesh to time; for you and for your loved ones, I can make all of these, largely, non-issues."
Transhumanism?! Hachiman instantly worries about. But, no. That would be ridiculous. Not that he believes that anything this woman tells him is the extent of her abilities, though, still.
He coughs into his fist to clear his throat, but it's the fist attached to the forearm he now has tattooed, so the tattoo peeks out when his sleeve hikes down. It gives Hachiman pause, and he makes a face at it. After a moment, he pulls his sleeve all the way down, for a better look at the tattoo. With a sinking feeling in his stomach, he examines it.
"Yeah, okay," Hachiman says, quietly, his eyes still on the green, geometric shapes snaking from his wrist to his elbow. "So it's like healthcare, right? You tax me, and eventually, when I need your help, I'll have it."
The woman nods again. "I can fix the cut on your finger right now, as a demonstration. If you want me to."
Hachiman's attention snaps back to the woman. He blinks at her. "Huh?"
"The cut on your finger," the woman repeats, unimpressed. "Do you want it fixed or not?"
Hachiman knows, bone-deep, that he doesn't want to risk this entity doing absolutely anything. But at the same time, a tiny, traitorous part of himself is horribly curious.
Reasoning that it's better to have more information on what he's signing up for, Hachiman exhales, and holds out his hand. The cut still hurts a bit, unpleasantly, but not as much as before. But, that could be the adrenaline.
"Fine," says Hachiman, tightly, with much suspicion. "Show me what you can do."
The woman remains unimpressed with him, but she cooperates, and raises her own hand with her palm down and her fingers splayed. Doubt and the early vestiges of regret only just begin to needle at Hachiman when suddenly, there's a series of short flashes of green light about his fingertip, as if cut into the air by an invisible, impossibly sharp blade. There's a brief, nicking pain, and then, no pain at all.
Hachiman, holding his breath, brings his finger right up to his face to inspect. His uncut, perfectly intact finger.
Hachiman exhales slowly, disbelievingly.
Dryly, the woman tells him, "Your prayers have been answered."
Hachiman bristles. "I never prayed to you! And anyway, I still don't even know why you're making this offer to me. I'm just some guy, all I did was wake you up."
She does seem to mull this over. The woman recrosses her arms and reclines somewhat in the air, thinking. "By waking me up, you became something that in the past, we would have called my high priest. That mark on your arm is proof enough of that."
"Your—" Hachiman wheezes. "Your what?"
"My high priest," she reiterates, annoyed. "But it might not be right to put it that way anymore, since the situation has changed. Still." She eyeballs Hachiman dubiously. "Functionally, what it means is that offerings that are made by and through you are more efficient, in terms of what I get from them. It's just a matter of streamlining things."
That's a bunch of crap, Hachiman thinks, with conviction. But he's not going to argue with the strange, floating woman about this one, not right now. Not when he has more pressing troubles.
"Can't you pick someone else?" he asks, though he's not hopeful.
The woman shakes her head. "Not so long as you're alive."
"Right," Hachiman manages, strangled. Once more, he coughs into his fist, and then he waves his forearm at the woman. "I don't suppose there's a way to at least get rid of this tattoo on my arm, is there?"
The woman contemplates this. "You could chop it off," she proposes.
Hachiman scowls. "Would the tattoo just appear on another part of my body?"
"Yes." She nods.
Hachiman shakes his fist at her. "What good is that, then?!"
The woman pins him with a look, like Hachiman is, somehow, the difficult one. "You asked me how to get it off of your arm."
Hachiman collapses back onto his back on his bed, defeated. The woman, to whom this is of no consequence, floats over to his windowpane.
"Anyway." She glances back at Hachiman over her shoulder. "I'm going to go find a library."
Hachiman sits back up. "Wait."
She does, staring back at Hachiman, still from over her shoulder.
"Ever since the Stoneworkers," he goes on, "This is the first time you've been awake, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"And…" Hachiman rubs the back of his head, awkward. "The others. They wouldn't have been involved with any later civilizations either, right?"
"That's highly unlikely," the woman says. "If any of the others had been up and about in the periods you have in mind, it would have been very obvious."
"I see," Hachiman manages, strained. "And there aren't any other… types… of gods, that are going to be my problem?"
"I would be very surprised if there were."
"I see," Hachiman repeats, still strained.
The woman flies off and out of the house through the windowpane. His hopes for a peaceful adolescence dashed all around him, Hachiman flops back onto the bed. At least, he consoles himself, he has it on good authority that ancient humans were entirely capable of stacking rocks in a heap without supernatural aid. At least, he can still feel superior to the breed of pseudo-archaeological conspiracy theorist who refuses to accept that ancient people could do that.
Later, Komachi does come up with chicken soup, and their cat, Kamakura, comes up with her. If nothing else, Hachiman thinks, he has that much going for him.