A warm curtain of sunlight came washing upon a sleeping Hoomaikai. Her body lamented its pain by being heavy to the point of not moving at once when she wanted to shield herself from the light seeping inside her eyes. She finally opened them and found herself on a soft bed inside an unknown house. A thin film of dust pressed down on the furniture, which made the quality of the bed worrisome. With her mind still dizzy and under the impression of haven been captured by the strange shadow of last night, she let out her voice, which echoed like a tired moan.
With time, she managed to wake up her mind and understand that she needed to figure out where she was. There wasn’t much in the room that screamed whether she was safe or not, other than the paper window. She opened it as the wood of the structure groaned also its sleepy cry until the sight of calm familial homes built here and there mixed with stone roads holding up joyful families was painted before her. It was all so calm that she felt like she could look at this sight day in and day out eternally.
Finally, she tried her chance with the door, and it opened quite easily. There, a set of stairs led her to the first floor, where a table was ready with a few fruits to take a bit off. She didn’t dare take a nibble, and while this warm sight managed to calm her heart, she was worried sick about Tsuki. She had forgotten almost everything the last time something similar happened. Would the past still haunt them with the same fate? At the very least, Hoomaikai understood that something had changed this time. Maybe Tsuki would still remember Hoomaikai.
Hoomaikai went past the table toward a set of stairs leading to a basement. She could hear something coming from down there and thus advanced onward. The wooden structure changed to dry old stone, and Hoomaikai was welcomed into a large room filled with books and papers of all kinds. In the center, someone was working at a desk, which offered almost no place for how cluttered it was. She somehow remembered the one that was working because of the long, unruly hair that was the color of blood.
"Hello?" said Hoomaikai, unsure if it was wise to make herself known. The only response that came from the other person was them pointing to a room on the right while continuing to work on something unknown.
Hoomaikai weighed asking more or just looking inside the room she was pointed to and chose to take a gander at the room. She pushed open a metal door that grated over the stone floor and found Tsuki sleeping with a strange talisman floating above her head. The girl was breathing calmly, but her already sickly white skin was even worse. Hoomaikai came close to feel Tsuki’s pulse. The rhythm was fine, but the strength of the flow was inconsistent. Wondering what the talisman was for, she returned to the person working by the desk, and as soon as she did, she was given a large stack of talismans and instructions. The person at the table returned to their work by dipping a pen into some ink. Thus, Hoomaikai returned to the room Tsuki was in to read in more detail the instructions she had been given.
She only started reading and quickly became confused: "‘The past is dream, the future is hope, all that is exist only in the present.’ Hmmm what? How does that even help? Why even start by writing this?" She rightfully didn’t understand why this passage was the first thing written in the instructions, and even as she read on, things didn’t make much sense. The instructions used terms Hoomaikai had never seen or heard before to describe the use of each talisman she was given.
Only when she was done reading did she start to understand the opening passage. The talismans weren’t to heal per se, but to somehow layer two versions of Tsuki together. This was something Hoomaikai didn’t understand—how and why it was the desired course of action. The theories presented were simply too strange and lacked concrete evidence. Evidence was also impossible to be given as it related to the concept of time itself. Some might say that time flows in a circle or that it flows along its singular intended path. Yet, the idea vomited constantly in the instructions was that time didn’t even exist. Hoomaikai decided it was simple drizzle, as she could count to ten and proclaim that ten seconds had passed.
Instead of thinking about the implausible concept, Hoomaikai started placing the strange talismans where they had to be placed. The reason she simply followed the instructions was because of the quality of each talisman. She had learned a bit of everything with her background in sorcery, such that she understood that the skill put into inscribing each piece of paper was above anything else she ever saw. They might even be more impressive than the gods she fought while she was Kanga. Whoever that scribe was, she should know a lot more than herself.
The work she did was quite hard; some talismans needed to be placed in the air by using another one that locked their position. Just being off by a millimeter was enough to make the whole thing not work. But with time and patience, she managed to create a multi-level array of strange talismans that encapsulated a sleeping girl.
Hoomaikai was expecting something to happen, but nothing changed. There was only a calming blue light produced by the delicate paper that infused the room and nothing more. She went back to the desk, wondering if the scribe there could help demystify what was going on. So, she opened the heavy metal door that groaned once again against the stone floor to then be welcomed with a sea of raging waves. The ground was robed from under her feet, and she was forced into the water, her head going fully under the cold liquid before reemerging to a waveless sea. A small wooden boat floated just by her side, which she quickly swam toward to get out of the water.
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The girl had been stranded at sea for a few hours already and had seen no sign of life since then. Even the sky was an eternal sun that didn’t dare move an inch from its throne. During that time, she found a few things of note inside the small boat. One of them was the same cursed instructions she followed when making the arrays of talismans. The opening phrase about time was on full display and annoyed her to the point that she wanted to vent her anger and fear by throwing it overboard – which she didn't do as it would be foolish. The other things present were rations as well as a moldy book called The Book of Chalk.
The book was so damaged that almost nothing could be taken from it, but the few blobs of untouched paper helped her piece together a sort of puzzle. To do so, she had to remove the unusable pages, which she threw off to the sea to eat while putting every readable part in a safe place. Luckily, there wasn’t any wind to steal her work or any wave to disturb her mind. One piece of paper at a time, even as insignificant as a simple word still visible, she managed to empty the book, which seemed to refresh its lack of pages with purely white ones. With all the pieces of her puzzle laid out on the floor, she tried to understand the story it tried to tell. Strangely or sadly, it seemed like only the most heartbreaking lines survived: either the book preserved them or it was filled with simple sadness.
The story seemed to be a journal of a certain Girl who had slowly lost all those she loved. Each loss seemed to have affected this person greatly, which helped Hoomaikai infer that the writer's loved one had been good to her. The last part saddened Hoomaikai the most, as the girl was offered a deal by a nefarious someone. The girl was forced to betray the last few people she held dear due to war and fled to the sea after the fact. This strange journal did help Hoomaikai understand that this boat was that of the girl who had betrayed her loved one.
Now, her eyes turned back to the instructions. That statement, which described time as nonexistent, was still too complicated for Hoomaikai. Other than this, there was only an explanation of the talismans’ workings. It wasn’t much, and the important parts that could explain what happened to her were deliberately missing. "The past is dream, the future is hope, all that is exist only in the present… I exist; thus, this is the present. If something doesn’t exist, I guess it should be in the present or the future. But also… how can I tell this isn’t a dream? If that were the case, I wouldn’t exist? That doesn’t make sense…"
Hoomaikai tried her best to figure out the meaning of the sentence but didn’t get far before giving up. Instead of making her brain work, she decided to make her body work by creating a bolt of lightning. Then it flashed to her, quite literally, as the small bolt she intended to create turned out to be larger than she intended – almost as when she was Kanga at her strongest. Not wanting to think more about the sentence related to time – even if she was so close to understanding the working of the universe – and jumped inside the sea while protecting her body with a shell of lightning.
She used the shell to protect herself against the water pressure and broke apart the water molecules to carefully create oxygen. Quickly, the sun’s light vanished as she went deeper into this endless abyss of solitude. Not even a fish showed up, but one thing did, and it was strange currents filled with voices. Hoomaikai understood none of them as they spoke in an unknown language and were drown in the zapping sounds of her protection. After some time, the voices vanished all together, and in the depths below her, a large palace of pearls and mirrors presented itself. This time, a current pushed her back up such that she couldn’t get any closer to the palace, and she responded by exploding the hydrogen she created when breathing to push herself down. She turned into something like a falling star that fought against the atmosphere in the sky. Her skin was flayed and cut, yet she moved forward, not knowing what waited for her.
When she was only a few hundred meters from the large structure, an invisible bubble stopped her advance. She was tired of it all and used her magic to constantly smash against the barrier, which started to crack and, with one last punch, broke open. She was pulled forward, not into the barrier but into the stone room overfilled with books and with a desk in the middle. It was as if she had always been there and that what she saw was an illusion. The person that used to be at the desk was gone, and when she looked back into the room she came from, so were Tsuki and the many talismans she had placed. She took a deep breath to calm her nerves – which made her smell the saltiness stuck to her cloth – and ran upstairs after hearing a sound.
"Ah! Maikai! You’re finally up!" said Tsuki, who was seated with bread and jam on a plate. "This girl here is Yuu; just tell her what you want to eat for breakfast, and she’ll make it."
Hoomaikai turned almost robotically to the person Tsuki was pointing toward, and she recognized her as the one who was making the talismans. This red-haired person then spoke to the shocked Hoomaikai, saying, "Just come and eat; I can’t answer your question right now. Please leave a message after eating, and I will answer you at a later time. Thank you; have a good day."
"Yes~ I have a message," added Tsuki. "Yuu, your puppets need a bit more work. Who even talks like that?"
"Responding: I, this puppet model, thought you would have vomited everything you knew to your comrades like an overly excited brat. I had no trust in your secrecy and must commend how you only participated in confusing your friend even more. Congratulations are in order."
"Message! Yuu, your puppets are scary!!"
Hoomaikai looked at this back and forth, rightfully confused. Still, she sat down next to Tsuki and asked if there were any eggs, of which Tsuki complained as it was one of her allergies. In the end, Yuu never ‘came back’ to explain what happened, and the two girls left the warm house feeling full and healthy.
"Hey Tsuki, do you remember yesterday? What you did at the end with the golden fan… do you feel okay?"
"Ah, you mean that?" responded Tsuki, who pulled on the brown cloth tied around her left wrist to manifest a delicate golden fan. Now that they were looking at it closer, the artistry needed to make something as beautiful as this wasn’t something Tsuki had. Still, it didn’t stop her from twirling around to act like the lady she watched yesterday… but she failed to put any glamor into her movements, which looked too rigid. Hoomaikai tried her best not to laugh at this impromptu dance and turned red when she found out other people were looking at them with wry smiles. What more, she was now realizing that Tsuki got outside without any protection against the sun and rushed her forward to someplace in the shade.
❀
Accompanied by Hoomaikai, Tsuki came back to the building she was now working at, only to find that it was closed for a few days. It was simply due to a question of security caused by a sudden increase in popularity. Last night, the workers got to know a few people from distant places, and some of them were less than savory. Since most of them were important people and couldn’t really receive any punishment for fear of worsening any kind of relationship, such as trade, the owner of the pavilion decided it was best to close door until those strangers needed to return home.
Thus, Tsuki was given an awesome pay for her work last night and given leave for a week or so. She did want to go spend it all, but she felt a small ball of fear bundle up in her throat. That vision The Morrigan gave her still haunted her. In it, she was leading a large army yet knew nothing of the art of war. This incited her to go back to the military school where she was first given a place to sleep to now become a student. At the same time, she managed to find Lotus who was buying incense as well as tea leaves in the market and asked it how she could use her fan. This man, dressed as a girl – a practice he did to earn money and pay for his mother’s medicine – accepted Tsuki’s demand with a warm smile.
