2.13: It’s All About DeliveryThe surface of the mirror rippled.

  Cold November air poured through as if someone had opened the door of a walk-in refrigerator in a curry shop. The faint tang of city pollution mixed with warm spices, grilled meat, soy sauce, and faintly buttery drifting on the breeze.

  My stomach cramped in rebellion, letting out a noise so loud Rui snorted behind me.

  One by one, we stepped through.

  The mirror wrapped around my skin like a sheet of transparent mercury.

  It felt cool and smooth on the skin, clinging for a moment with that same familiar neither-wet-nor-dry sensation. Then everything slipped away. The ntern glow of the Yōkai Council chambers, the polished stone under our feet, the sense of ancient eyes watching us… all of that vanished.

  A low electrical hum repced it. The sound of tires screeching against asphalt. A distant crosswalk tune pyed. Someone’s bicycle bell chinged.

  The scents in the air were delicious, the mild pollution notwithstanding.

  We stood in the middle of a narrow alleyway in Tokyo beneath a concrete arch with a rusted fire escape jutting ahead off a building. A convenience store’s back door was propped open half a block down, releasing a wave of fried chicken aromas so intense it nearly knocked me over. Eating some of that chicken might have triggered another spiritual awakening.

  I was weirdly hungry.

  Just like that, Tokyo welcomed us back.

  “I never noticed how Tokyo smells,” I murmured, blinking at the mottled bricks that the nearest building was built with. “It always seemed so clean before.”

  Natalia-sama inhaled deeply, her hands folding behind her back like a serene visiting dignitary. “All yōkai notice it the first time they cross into our world. As gloomy as the yōkai realm can be, it has one advantage. There is no manufacturing there. No cars. No electricity.” Her beautiful blue eyes twinkled. “No exhaust fumes.”

  Akuchi coughed pointedly. “I think I almost prefer the yōkai world. I taste the pollution as thickly in the air as I did when I first arrived.”

  “Pollution?” Ume raised one of her eyebrows. “Tokyo is much cleaner than it was seventy years ago.”

  Natalia nodded companionably to Ume. “It was a pleasure to witness Japan transforming into the great country that it is now. I worried that humans had lost their way, but tely the nd has been recovering its former beauty.”

  I resisted an urge to ask Ume and Natalia-sama how old they actually were.

  “What about the train we saw back in the yōkai world?” I asked. “How does that thing actually run?”

  “Consciousness power,” Rui said, already brushing dust off her skirt. “A lot of things there run on pure imagination. Because Japan loves trains so much, the yōkai world naturally dreams some into existence.”

  That… actually makes sense in a strange way.

  “Then what about food?” I pressed. “There was that little yōkai that really wanted it. Japan loves ramen, curry and sweets as much as trains. Shouldn’t the yōkai world be full of that kind of stuff?”

  “They try,” Natalia-sama said gently. “But imagination alone seldom reproduces taste correctly. Even powerful yōkai cannot conjure exact fvors without lived sensory memory.”

  Akuchi nodded solemnly. “Yes. Illusions sometimes fall well short of reality.”

  Ume patted her arm. “Your shapeshifting is no illusion.”

  “Yeah…” Akuchi ughed, shaking her head. “I can imagine what it’d be like if what I did was just illusionary. I pop a spell on everyone. People see a big bus where I stood. And then I somehow lift a hundred vampires on my back and charge off. I faint to imagine how trying that would go.”

  Ume giggled and Rui joined them, ughing. “I remember that. You really showed that nosey nddy with that stunt. It was pure genius! She fainted on the spot!” Her ughter was wicked. Natalia-sama and I looked at each other and we giggled with them.

  “It sure felt good to get back at her for all those years of discrimination and her awful gossiping about me behind my back, creating a new conspiracy about me nearly every month.” I nodded.

  “She got what she deserved.” Rui nodded, but she stopped giggling and jabbed a finger toward the street ahead. “Good news, everyone! I know exactly where we are. I recognize that shop over there! My office is only a few blocks from here. Four big ones to the right, then another right for two more. Come on!”

  She took off at a jog, her midlength bck hair swaying about her shoulders.

  I followed, going forward not only by urgency but driven by the smell of frying onions and simmering broth drifting from somewhere ahead. Every step I took made the scent stronger.

  We emerged from the alley onto a bustling commercial street. A bus sighed at a nearby stop, its doors folding open. Neon signs flickered even though it was day, their bright colors pulsing against storefront gss windows. Banners shivered in the light breeze.

  Pedestrians flowed around us in a constant stream of chattering. Students passed by in crisp uniforms, their shoulder bags thumping lightly against their hips.

  “Wait,” I murmured, gncing at them. “It feels like we were… um… over there for half a day, but it’s still morning?”

  Just seeing students heading to school made it obvious—time clearly hadn’t behaved normally in the yōkai world.

  “I did mention that,” Natalia-sama reminded me gently. “Time passes differently there.”

  I stared, my mind reeling.

  Right. She did say that… but knowing it and experiencing it are very different things.

  Ume tugged my hand, guiding me along. I inhaled deeply, trying to take in everything at once now that I was paying attention.

  Potted shrubs lined the sidewalk, their neat pcement creating a natural border alongside the yellow tactile paving meant to help the visually impaired. The pavement was warm and textured beneath my shoes, humming faintly with morning life.

  My stomach growled again… too loudly.

  Immediately to our right stood a curry house, its sliding door open as steam wafted out in imaginary glorious spicy clouds. Bright pstic models of perfectly crafted cutlets, piles of rice, and golden sauce sat in the dispy case, each one glistening with an unrealistic perfection that the restaurants actually tended to deliver on.

  Next door to it was a Sukiyoo, known for its delicious beef bowls. Its windows were slightly fogged with broth-scented humidity, and the air outside shimmered with the smell of sizzling beef.

  My knees nearly buckled.

  “Rui,” I whispered desperately. “Rui, please. Let’s stop here and eat. I’m starving. I will die of starvation in front of a pstic curry pte right now!”

  “Nope,” Rui said without slowing even a millimeter. “Get your butt moving, drama queen. We’ve got work to do, baka. The exam is in a week. No detours.”

  “But—”

  “No detours.” She grabbed my hand and tugged me forward.

  Oniiii…

  My stomach whined loudly enough that a passing saryman reeking of overwork and too little pay gnced at me with pity… and something else in his eyes that I didn’t want to think about.

  Ume rubbed my back sympathetically. “You poor thing… I could go for a pte of curry myself. CooCoo is the best… after mine, of course~.” She giggled behind one hand.

  Akuchi sighed dramatically. “If you starve to death, I’ll avenge you, Mistress Sumire!” She shot Rui a gre sharp enough to cut her down where she stood.

  “Why can’t you just take a moment to feed our bellies?” she yelled. “Skinflint! FLAT ONE!”

  Rui stiffened. Her shoulders rose. Her eye twitched.

  Uh-oh.

  She stomped back toward Akuchi, slipping into full oni mode, shadows sharpening around her like a physical aura of incoming violence.“That’s the second time someone has called me that today. If you don’t want me to jam that signpost up your butt—”

  She jabbed a finger toward a nearby metal sign rising out of a tree-pnted isnd.

  → REAR DELIVERY ENTRANCE

  Akuchi made a noise somewhere between a squeak and a dying tea kettle.“RUUUUIIII—!!! You can’t threaten me with THAT!! That’s… that’s a targeted attack!!”

  Ume covered her mouth, her shoulders trembling with barely restrained giggles.Natalia-sama’s ears twitched in a faint, scandalized flicking…

  Even I nearly died on the spot.

  Rui blinked once, smirked, and continued as if the sign weren’t the most humiliating weapon she could’ve chosen.

  “—then shut up, baka Tanuki! We don’t have time for any of this compining. We’ll eat ter once things are settled at my office.”

  Akuchi clutched her tail protectively, shrinking back.“Unfair… threatening to weaponize public signage like that…”

  “Let’s just go!” I blurted, half-ughing, half-panicking as I rushed ahead before Rui and Akuchi escated their tiff into public supernatural homicide. I barely knew where I was going, but I’d found Rui’s office once before… surely I could recognize it again… probably.

  I tried to be strong.I tried to let the lingering ughter carry me forward.But then my sense of smell was assaulted.

  There were too many restaurants on this street.Too many delicious smells.Too many sizzling, simmering, steaming temptations.

  My resolve sted maybe four steps.

  We walked four long blocks down the main street past barbecue restaurants with sizzling piles of marinated meat on dispy, a bakery whose warm sweet, yeasty-bread scent nearly destroyed me on the spot. I could have devoured half a loaf without chewing and, adding insult to injury, there was a ramen shop whose broth smelled like heaven boiled into a bowl.

  “Rui…” I whimpered at one point. “Rui, please, the pork cutlets are calling to me—”

  “EXAM,” she snapped, reminding me.

  My stomach snarled like a wild dog.

  Akuchi whimpered in sympathy. Ume patted me harder.

  We turned right for two more blocks, and Rui’s office building finally came into view. It was a slightly crooked gray structure… old, weathered, and wedged tightly between a cheerful flower shop and a pawn store whose windows dispyed guitars and antique clocks like they were waiting for a collector with too much money and nostalgia.

  As soon as my eyes found the entrance, my blood ran cold.

  Shinohara Spiritual Detective Services — 8F

  It wasn’t the sign that terrified me.

  It was the thing lurking in front of the building.

  My ancient enemy.

  My personal doom.

  The elevator.

  A phantom ache jolted through my crotch. My stomach twisted… not from hunger this time.

  Memories smmed into me with the force of a spiritual freight train.

  I’d said something much the same that Akuchi did a little bit ago…

  Maybe it’s a good thing she’s not sporting those exaggerated enormous balls anymore.

  I couldn’t help wondering if Rui-chan had actually kicked Akuchi a few times before we’d met.

  I remembered the first time I came here.

  Inside, there was no shared genkan, just a narrow hallway lined with mismatched doors. I jogged down it in my full sentai regalia until I found the elevator.

  When I got there, I was shocked. It was… ancient, to say the least.

  The metal frame was etched and dull with age. The button cracked. The call light flickered. Above it was an actual metal lever indicator. It was the kind you see in old bck-and-white movies.

  But the ficus pnts on either side were healthy. That was promising. Nobody who kept their ficuses alive was truly evil… probably.

  I pressed the button gingerly. The light sputtered on. After several clunking noises, the elevator dinged. The wrought-iron door rattled aside, revealing a narrow, snted interior.

  “Oh, Kami, please don’t let this be my coffin,” I whispered.

  Despite my worries, I stepped inside…

  And smmed straight into something surprisingly solid.

  I staggered, pinned against the doorway. I spun around, looking wildly for the obstacle.

  There was nothing to see.

  Before my brain caught up…

  A small fist cracked the top of my helmet.

  “Idiot! Don’t you look down when a cute girl is stepping off the elevator?!” a shrill voice scolded. “What kind of chauvinistic moron are you?!”

  The impact stunned me. My vision sparkled… they were actual literal sparkles. When I blinked the static away, I finally saw my attacker.

  The girl standing inside the crooked elevator was small… maybe ten or twelve years old, give or take a year. Her style hit me first… she had on a loose bck T-shirt tucked into a short skirt, casual makeup highlighting her warm brown eyes, and hair cascading around her shoulders in dark, glossy waves.

  Wait a minute… why is a kid wearing makeup, especially competently…

  Then I noticed something else strange about her: her shirt.

  A bold white calligraphy design sprawled across the chest in elegant swirls:

  I’m not weird. I’m just yuri.

  Seriously?

  My brain registered the words. My brain recognized the joke.

  My brain absolutely knew the correct socially acceptable response.

  But when I’d collided with her a second earlier, what I felt had been more like…

  A wall.

  An unyielding, perfectly ft brick wall.

  And instead of commenting on her shirt, like a normal polite human being, my overloaded, traumatized, barely-functional mind shut down completely and crashed into a chaotic BSOD kind of a disaster.

  “F-FLAT!!!” I blurted.

  It echoed up the elevator shaft like a cursed chant meant to summon demons.

  Her expression froze.

  I saw her emotions fsh on her face. Blushed. Annoyed. Offended.

  In moments that evolved to an annihition-tier rage. And it all happened in three seconds ft.

  Ft… Ft… Ft…

  If emotions had levels, she just unlocked Super Saiyan Murder Mode.

  Fmes practically erupted behind her. I swear the temperature rose.

  “You…” she hissed.

  One heartbeat ter, she became a blur.

  I had survived a noh-face attack.

  I had outrun trained officers.

  I had performed parkour over a kiosk gate.

  But I was nowhere near ready for an angry tiny girl with righteous fury bzing in her eyes.

  Her foot shot upward.

  “Baka!!”

  Her kick connected with a part of me that Kami himself had designed to be emotionally and physically vulnerable.

  SNAP. CRACK.

  The world inverted. My vision burst into starry fireworks.

  I flew backward like a bargain-bin sentai stuntman someone unched with a catapult.

  Fireworks should have been exploding. They certainly were going off in my brain.

  The wall caught me. Hard.

  Everything else faded.

  My breath hitched as the memory dissolved. I stared at the elevator in front of us as if it were an apex predator.

  “This is where it all started,” I murmured. My voice sounded distant, even to me.

  Rui yanked on my arm. “Baka. It started on the train on Halloween, remember?”

  “I meant a turning point,” I muttered. “We left here together after we butted heads. You needed work. I needed… hope.”

  Rui scoffed but her cheeks tinted pink. “I had plenty of money. What you said just got to me. And you were just irritating enough that I started pitying you. You never gave up,” she added quietly. “No matter what I did.”

  …

  “Is that the only reason you helped me? Why fight for the family legacy if you don’t need money?”

  “It’s not the only reason. I had something to prove to myself.” Rui looked away, her voice dipping. “Because I wasn’t good enough then. Not like Dad. Mom supported him with artifacts and research. I only inherited scraps of what she knew. When they died, I… shut down. I read manga all day. Then one day…”

  Ume pced a gentle hand on her shoulder, squeezing softly. “It wasn’t so bad. Because of that funk you were in, we met in that manga store.”

  Rui groaned. “Don’t go on—”

  Ume giggled behind her hand, her eyes sparkling with mischievous warmth. “There’s no way I won’t share our story RuiRui.”

  “Noooooo!!!” Rui pouted.

  Ume smiled sweetly, “We fought over the st volume of a series we were both reading at the time. RuiRui called me every insult imaginable when both of our hands nded on it at the exact same time.”

  “You deserved it,” Rui muttered. “How dare you try to steal my beloved manga? If I hadn’t fought, I’d never have known what happened to Natsuki and Hinata in volume six! It was a really dramatic cliffhanger.”

  “I felt the same way. I had to know what would happen next.” Ume sounded almost dreamy. “And we were both very determined to find out. Our little scuffle escated until we were throwing manga at each other.~”

  Akuchi gasped, her ears twitching. “How much damage did you cause?”

  “A lot. You know how RuiRui gets.~” Ume smiled serenely. “It ended with us getting kicked out. But she smuggled out the book we were arguing over in her jacket.”

  “And I paid them back ter,” Ume added primly, lifting an index finger.

  “Good girl,” Natalia-sama said with an approving smile. “But what about all the manga you damaged?”

  “…” Ume giggled softly.

  Rui looked deeply guilty.“We’re still banned!” they said together.

  …

  …

  “Anyway… I understand what it’s like to have merchandise stolen.” Ume said, breaking the silence. “The poltergeists in my store sometimes break things overnight, but it always feels worse when some shoplifter walks in and casually steals a shriveled hand…” Ume shook her head and shrugged lightly.

  I shivered, imagining the bizarre relics in her antique shop. “Who would even steal that? Were they caught red-handed?”

  Ume only smiled… slow, mysterious, and absolutely unhelpful.“None of my shriveled hands are painted red, but I think I might have had an oni hand a few years ago that had a dark red pigment in his skin and…”

  I immediately regretted asking. I plugged my ears.

  La!

  We finally moved to board the elevator at st. Rui pressed the inner bit of the exposed button carefully, while I stared at the two broken halves of the casing still lying on the floor.

  The moment I broke the button fshed before my eyes…

  CRACK.

  Two sad halves falling onto grimy tile.

  I bowed deeply. “I’m sorry!”

  Rui looked at me with a clueless expression. No one understood what I meant. I wasn’t sure I wanted to expin.

  Natalia-sama patted my shoulder kindly. Ume made a sympathetic noise. Rui rolled her eyes. “Well whatever you’re agonizing over, let’s go, baka.”

  We stepped inside the deathtrap together.

  The door smmed shut with a metallic shrieking. The elevator lurched upward like a dying beast.

  Akuchi clung to the railing. Ume pressed closer to me. Natalia-sama’s ears fttened subtly.

  Rui giggled. “It’s not that bad! The only disaster I know of was the time I rode it with you down, Susu. You screamed the entire way.”

  “You did too! And for the record, I didn’t scream the entire time!”

  She shot me a shut up gre sharp enough to cut gss.

  “Okay, okay… maybe I was doing all the screaming,” I admitted.

  “Old Screamy is perfectly safe,” Rui said proudly. “Our maintenance man ensures it remains terrifying without ever being actually dangerous. It’s really impressive.”

  Natalia-sama groaned softly. “That is not how maintenance normally works.”

  Ume winked. “But it is very charming.~”

  Rui beamed and immediately threw her arms around Ume.

  “Soulmates!” She kissed her soundly.

  I sighed.

  So much for all that about loving me. The oni loves literally anything with breasts…

  The elevator screeched to a halt. The grate rattled open.

  And Rui’s office door—usually locked—was wide open.

  …

  She stiffened, pulling away from Ume, and sprinted inside. We rushed after her.

  Standing near the bookshelf inside we saw something that I never suspected was there.

  A secret passage hiding behind the bookcase, slid to the side.

  And in front of it stood someone tall.

  She looked strangely familiar.

  But seemingly older.

  Fiercer.

  She made Rui look like she was who she would be if she wasn’t drawn as a chibi caricature.

  …

  Her chocote-brown eyes held a hard, focused look. Her glossy bck hair was the same shade as Rui’s. Her arms were crossed beneath breasts Rui would kill to have. A simple sleeveless camisole fit close, practical and unbothered, paired with a short skirt that left her legs bare. The look made her feel a bit like a delinquent.

  I froze.

  “Who…?” I whispered.

  Rui’s voice dropped into a low growl.

  “Aika… Shinohara.”