LIGHTNOVELONLINE 1: Concrete Action
Yukari came for me when I was contemplating stepping in front of a bus.
Don’t misunderstand–I had no intention to actually step in front of a bus. I thought it over carefully as I laid atop my sheets, tossing and turning.
For one thing, I wasn’t certain that enough people still went outside to justify the existence of public transit. For another, I was one hundred percent certain that any bus I stepped in front of would stop before it hit me, as the driving AI would infer my intentions from my body language and gaze. Beyond that, delaying a bus (if it existed) would be an awfully cruel thing to do to an already stressed and shrinking working population. No, a bus just wasn’t realistic at all.
I’d have to think of something else.
I was a pragmatist. For example, I wholeheartedly believed starvation is a worse way to go than getting run over–but I had to admit that was a false dilemma, and I had a third alternative already lined up. I still had two kidneys. I could sell one. Bonus: that would help at least one other human, even as it bought me a few more weeks or months, so I might even feel pretty good about it.
These thoughts occupied me as I lapsed into the half-consciousness of the early morning. I turned over in my bed.
With a gut-wrenching fall I snapped out of slumber. I stumbled forward in pitch blackness. I was on my feet on hard concrete in an unfamiliar place, a void.
In front of me was a woman in a white dress with a purple tabard. She had red ribbons accentuating the many frills of her outfit. Her hair was ridiculously long and blonde. Not just ‘sit on it’ length, more like ‘I have to hire someone to carry half of this so it doesn’t drag on the ground.’
Also, she was floating in the air.
Those things aren't what clued me into her identity. It was actually the purple voids full of eyeballs, with little ribbons tied to their edges. They were hovering all around her. Strands of hair trailed off into a few. I’d only seen that sort of thing in one place–fanworks based upon Touhou Project, the bullet hell shoot ‘em up videogame. Oh, and also Full Metal Alchemist, a classic anime, but this was definitely a Touhou sort of lady. I could tell from the hat.
Most Touhou characters wear a hat that looks like a coin purse. They call the hats Zun-bo, after the creator of Touhou, Zun, who I figure is a guy who really hates trying to make his drawings feature correctly-sized heads. Hats can be any size, of course.
These are the thoughts that occupied me as Yakumo Yukari–that’s who it had to be–gently floated up and down. Sometimes I have a hard time focusing on what’s right in front of me.
She looked exactly like Yukari, the master of Gensokyo, except if Yukari were an actual person. Like a cosplayer that actually knew magic. She was leaning back as though reclining after a long day of work, in a portal instead of a chair. Was her butt just sticking out of the other end somewhere, or something?
Touhou characters have a very distinctive look. Their clothes have too many frills and folds and little details like runes and zippers. Also, the cloth features bright primary colors with a lack of exposed skin (depending on the artist). However, this was a real woman in front of me. To say I was a bit confused would be an understatement.
One of the floating purple eyeball-filled voids dropped a hand fan into the woman’s open palm. It made a distinctive whirr-bump when it appeared, a buzzing electronic sound. Teleportation, I thought. She demurely spread the fan and put it in front of her mouth.
“Yukari?” I asked. She had remained perfectly silent while I stared at her.
“I am Yakumo Yukari, yes,” she said, with a smile that touched her eyes. Her eyelashes and the fan fluttered. “We’ve just met, Mr. Thorne, so Miss Yakumo would be more appropriate, don't you think?”
“I’m sorry, Miss Yakumo,” I said, automatically.
Yukari was the most powerful being in Gensokyo, according to the lore. Probably. It was the sort of thing fans liked to argue about. I knew that if she were real she’d be able to kill me instantly. She’d portal a railcar right above me, maybe, or force me to go skydiving without a parachute, or portal my head right off my body. She could do all three at once. I needed to endeavor to be polite, is the point.
I looked around. We were in a featureless black void. “Am I dreaming?” I asked her. I tapped the ground with my foot.
“From a certain point of view, yes.”
Looking down, I could faintly see that I was standing on a substance that looked like concrete. Not a dream representation of concrete, but actual old stone that was worn by water, with rough bits exposed. A cement slab.
“A very strange dream, if so,” I said. I also noticed I was wearing jeans and a red t-shirt, my normal clothes.
Yukari dropped her fan into a portal and it disappeared with a whump. She rotated in the air, smoothly settling from her seated position into a standing one, then took one long step toward me. I realized that she was several inches taller than me, way over six feet tall. I looked up into her face.
“It is a dream,” she said, “but it is also real. Your other body is dreaming, but your spirit body is here, instead.”
“So… am I awake, or…”
She leaned forward and pinched the bridge of my nose ever-so-slightly. It was the least amount of pain one could experience while still experiencing pain. “Do you still think you are dreaming?”
“Yes.” Yukari laughed and shrugged. She stepped back.
“Well, you can dream in Gensokyo, or go back to whatever nonsense you were concerned with before.” I had been a failure as an alignment engineer, recently-fired. I’d stay here for now.
“My spirit body,” I said, deadpan. “In addition to my real body? How does that make any sense?”
Yukari sighed. “You’re one of those. Some things are difficult for mortals to understand.”
“No kidding. I don’t suppose my ‘body spirit’ is still in the real world, if my ‘spirit body’ is here?”
“I take it back, you understand faster than most.”
“Oh… kay… well… why are we here, Miss Yakumo?” I was clearly dreaming, so whatever.
This version of Yukari was actually very beautiful, I noticed. On the other hand, maybe my dreaming brain had erroneously flagged some half-imagined idea as ‘a real woman’ and I hadn’t figured it out yet. Touhou characters are often depicted as beautiful. I wondered, just what kind of dream was I having?
“I’m here to make a deal with you.” With a sound her fan reappeared.
“Go on,” I said. Was it that kind of dream? I usually didn’t have those kinds of dreams, despite being a lucid dreamer.
“Would you like to immigrate to Gensokyo?” said Yukari.
“Not what I was expecting.” Voluntarily relocating to Gensokyo, instead of just being dropped there without my consent? How intriguing, an optional isekai. I looked around for a truck. There was just featureless blackness.
Gensokyo is a dangerous place full of deadly monsters called youkai, all of which coincidentally have the appearance of beautiful women–or chibi girls (depending on the artist). I almost asked Yukari what kind of Gensokyo I’d be going to, but I decided against it. It didn’t matter. Earth was doomed, in my estimation; any other place would be better.
“Can I have a moment to think about it?” I asked for no good reason.
“Yes,” she said. “Think carefully–”
“No need, done already,” I said. “Yes please, I’ll move to Gensokyo.”
My life sucked. I don’t want to go into detail; the failures of one's life sometimes seem like the most important thing in the world, so there’s some bias when reporting on them. But I had been an alignment researcher. I’d literally tried to help save my world, and all it had gotten me was impoverished and living in a closet. I couldn’t save the entire Earth or my third pair of pants, and I was just some dude.
Pretty much any world is better than that, I figured. As for Yukari’s offer, and my own life, I’ll just say that I was enjoying my dream of being in a featureless black void and I’d stay there forever if I could. Irrespective of meeting beautiful women.
“This is not a dream,” she reminded me. “It’s very real. So if you say yes, you’ll be transported to Gensokyo, for real, and have to deal with the consequences.”
“What might those be?” I asked.
“Who can say?” she responded, hiding behind her fan. “Some will be good, I’m certain, and some will be regretful. It is that way for all beings, at all times.”
“That doesn’t help me make a decision,” I said, as though I hadn’t already made it.
“Well, that’s what’s on the table,” she said. “Before we get into details such as consequences, there will be an interview.”
“An interview? Don’t you already know everything about me?”
“The only thing I know about you, Mr. Thorne, is that you hate your world and would like to try living somewhere else.” Ouch, but fair. I had tried to save it, and I had finally given up and resigned myself to waiting for the inevitable alongside everyone else. “Are you ready for me to ask you questions?”
“You know what, sure,” I said.
A portal opened before me. It was full of eyes with red sclera, but as I watched they disappeared one-by-one until there was only a single eye left. It stared at me, somehow looking angry despite just being a floating eye. Yukari herself continued to smile. I wondered if the eye was a magical equivalent of a recording device.
“First question. If your favorite flavor of ice cream had feelings, how would it feel about you eating it?”
“What —”
“I didn’t say you had to answer the questions, Mr. Thorne, just that I had to ask them,” said Yukari. “If you’d please, consider the question.”
Well, if chocolate ice cream had feelings, I should hope it enjoyed being eaten, or else I’d have to stop. I hadn’t had real ice cream in a long time, though.
“Next question. You have the chance to time travel, but only to disrupt insignificant events. Where and when do you go, and what events do you disrupt?"
I thought about AI reform, involuntarily, but anything related to that was obviously a significant event. I’d probably use time travel to avoid insulting Yukari at the start of this conversation, or maybe to go back and read the Touhou wiki more–but would that count as significant if it made me make fewer blunders? What did ‘significant’ mean here, anyway? Weren’t all events significant, in that they affected the future light cone?
“Third, how would you change the Spell Card rules to include interpretive dance?"
I wouldn’t, because dancing isn’t fun and I wasn’t sure of the spell card rules anyway. Changing rules you don’t understand is a bad idea. Also, damn, I really was going to miss that wiki–I had no idea what the rules even were.
The questions continued for a while. At one point I zoned out, but Yukari snapped her fingers and asked me to pay attention. I started to get tired of it at about the time the questions slowed down.
“Finally, what’s the ordered pair of: the worst question I could ask you for your chances of passing this interview, and the answer to that question?"
Fuck, that was hard. Probably something where I misunderstood the question and answered it in a way that made me look bad. Like, ‘should we be concerned about allowing you to immigrate?’ and I answer emphatically yes, because that is the security mindset.
On second thought, she could ask me what color I thought her underwear was. There’s no good answer to that question. I could explain how most Touhou characters probably didn’t wear underwear, because they were youkai and could choose arbitrary appearances. If you were simulating the appearance of a beautiful woman, you wouldn’t bother simulating underwear (depending on the artist).
“That concludes the interview,” she said.
“Shouldn’t I get a chance to ask some questions, too?”
“Very well. Ask away.” I actually had many, but the one that I asked first surprised me.
“Why are you spending so much effort to find an immigrant to Gensokyo?”
Yukari looked up and to the side, then back down at me. “Next question.”
“You didn’t answer–”
“That wasn’t the arrangement we had, Mr. Thorne.”
“What.”
“You may proceed to ask them, and I will proceed to not answer them, as you did not.”
“What’s the point, then?” I asked. She gave me a winning smile.
“None whatsoever.” She snapped her fan shut, and got to her feet. “You understand very fast indeed.”
“I’m not going to immigrate if you don’t let me ask questions,” I lied. She froze, for a moment, then began to pace.
“Well. Perhaps I can elaborate about the rules for a recent immigrant to Gensokyo, then? I may even answer your questions about that particular topic.”
“Alright,” I said. “What are the rules?”
“There are three big ones. First if you die in Gensokyo, you’ll be forced to return to your life on Earth.”
“Can I just die instead?” I was joking, of course. My life on Earth wasn’t that bad, minus the hunger and poverty and powerlessness and being doomed. I had some things I enjoyed. I lived in a house with a fairly featureless closet, for example, one that my roommates knew was mine, one that could approximate a black void very well.
“No, that part’s non-negotiable. Second, you will be required to participate in weekly festivals at the human village, where you will spend all your time. You will not be permitted to leave the human village, at all, except with an escort.” The red eye continued to stare straight into my soul.
“What characterizes the festivals?” I asked. Were we talking games like popguns, or human sacrifice?
“Watching a parade,” she said.
“Like, a…”
“A cultural festival. Most residents of the human village enjoy them, or will learn to soon enough.”
Ominous. “Sounds fine to me,” I said.
“Third, you will have to have monthly check-ins to ensure that your time in Gensokyo is going well.”
“That’s actually four rules,” I said. I go home when I die, I must be there at festivals, I must have an escort to leave the village, and I must report to… someone.
“Fine then, there are six big rules, and the last is that you don’t correct me when I’ve miscounted.” I decided against asking what the fifth rule was just then.
“Understood. Uh… who will my check ins be with?”
“Me, of course,” said Yukari. I turned to look at her. She was still pacing around in the void; she had circled me three times. When I turned back, the gap with the eyeball was still staring into my soul.
“None of that sounds too bad, actually,” I said.
“We don’t ask much of our citizens.”
“I feel like there’s got to be a drawback.” It was probably something awful, like I was being prepared as a meal for a youkai, or I’d be transformed into a youkai, or she was just messing with me before ending my life, or Gensokyo was actually a land full of nervous dweebs like myself instead of beautiful women.
“He knows,” said the eyeball in front of me, and I jumped. The portal widened and a girl stepped out. She was much shorter than Yukari; a youkai with pink hair and a blue dress. The red eyeball was an exterior organ of hers, attached to her head and wrists by long arteries.
Yukari was facepalming. “Miss Komeiji, you can’t reveal yourself every time the human we are interviewing has a true insight. It sort of defies the point of asymmetric information.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Yakumo. It is in my nature.” She didn't look sorry. She had a serious case of resting bitch face, just like her extra eye. I saw the edge of her mouth quirk up in a smile, and she winked, and then she was approximately a hundred times cuter.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. Satori and Yukari had nothing to do with each other, in the lore. Did they?
She was Komeiji Satori, the mistress of the palace of Earth spirits. In terms of power she ranked somewhat beneath a scary bird and a plunderous cat (her pets), so she was far less of a threat than Yukari herself. Not to undersell her pets, I’d run if I ever encountered one of them. I found I wasn’t as scared of Satori as Yukari.
She wasn’t as pretty as Yukari, either. The eyeball and the veins were positively gross in real life–they were pink lines on paper, but they were translucent and weird in the flesh.
“I am the primary Immigration Officer and Silent Interviewer for Gensokyo,” said Satori. “My third eye is completely normal. Having only two eyes is weird.”
Also, she was famous for her ability to read minds. Fuck, I thought. Sorry.
“It’s okay,” said Komeiji Satori. “It’s hardly the worst thing people think upon meeting me.” I immediately thought of worse things, and the eyeball continued to glare at me. Suddenly, I understood her ceaseless consternation.
Satori herself turned and looked at Yukari. “He’s an excellent candidate for immigration, if you disregard the fact he has an intuitive ability to rank fetishes in descending order of depravity.”
“Perhaps you meant in ascending order of depravity?”
“No.”
“You’re supposed to save things like that for the debrief,” said Yukari. She was giving Satori a frustrated look. Satori was a lot shorter, probably five foot nothing–whereas Yukari might be able to dunk without jumping. I was impressed with Satori’s ability to keep a cool head. Perhaps she could tell that Yukari wasn’t going to hurt her, by reading her mind.
“If you paid by the hour instead of by the candidate, I would be more willing to waste time on frivolous questions,” Satori said.
“An immigration officer…” I said, incredulously. “You’re being paid? By Yukari?”
“And what, you aren’t?” asked Satori. A small smile curled up at the edge of her mouth and she winked at me again. She’d probably have to do it a lot before it stopped being cute. “I’m earning extra money with my free time, of course.”
“But, what would you even use money for?”
“Feeding my pets.”
She was probably talking about Utsuho Reiuji, the hell raven, and Rin Kaenbyou, the corpse-stealing cat. They were famous for being stronger and way more idiotic than Satori herself.
“Them’s the ones,” she said. “Although Rin’s smarter than you give her credit for.”
“Why not make them get their own jobs, or something?” I asked.
“Because then they’d be slaves, not pets, and also I’d feel wrong inflicting their work ethic on anyone else. They never do their chores, you know.” Her third eye narrowed. “Have you ever kept a pet?”
As a matter of fact, I had kept a goldfish for a few years. I had loved him and named him Shiny Get. It had been a very sad day, when Shiny had finally gone belly up, and I’d held a funeral in my backyard. I’d been thirteen and my friends had laughed at me for caring so much about a fish. However, Shiny Get deserved at least that much; he’d been loyal, and stalwart, and had never talked back…
I didn’t think any of that willingly.
“Aww,” said Satori. “Yep, this one should be stamped for approval. Please stop imagining Yukari naked, though.”
Yukari opened her fan. “Please refer to me as Miss Yakumo.”
“Sorry,” Satori and I said simultaneously.
“Very well. We shall allow him to immigrate to Gensokyo.”
“I’m glad,” I said.
“Also, I’ve thought of an actual fifth rule,” she said. “Or a warning, rather. Your understanding of Gensokyo is nothing but a derivative work. The characters and setting may differ from the original in ways you find disturbing.”
“Uh…”
“Too late! Welcome to Gensokyo!” Yukari disappeared into a portal with a warping sound, as did Satori. There was a flash of light. I covered my eyes.
It was very bright: it was the middle of the day. I looked around. I was in the forest, standing near a cobblestone trail. A black ball of shadow was slowly drifting away from me, getting smaller as it did.
Rumia, I thought. One of the weakest youkai in Touhou, whose power was the ability to make darkness. I wondered if Yukari was paying her, too. The only other feature of hers that came to mind was that she ate human flesh. I looked down.
The concrete slab I was standing on had a plug in it with a rebar handle.
“Did Yukari… summon me to the top of an exposed septic tank?” Nobody answered; nobody was around. I turned around and saw an outhouse. “Damn. At least she didn’t summon me into the bathroom itself.”
On the trail nearby I saw a sign, an arrow pointing to the right with the words “Human Village” written on it. I went that way, because I didn’t have an escort. Also, the black-spot-that-I-presumed-was-Rumia had gone to the left, and she might eat me if I followed her.