Lukewarm or not, whether it did it or not, this setup─or rather fact was something I needed to accept.
Having been told this, I took a look at the gate to find that it said “ ” Left and right were indeed inverted. I wasn’t going to fish them out to check, but when I’d thrown my offering into the box, something had felt wrong─I suspected that left and right had been flipped for the number on the coins.
As for my difficulties riding the BMX to the mountain, the bike’s structure had been mirrored─the left brake controlling the front wheel and the right brake controlling the rear more than sufficed to make it a new experience, and if the town had been flipped around as well, that explained how I’d gotten lost. Of course, hearing it from Mayoi Hachikuji, the once-lost girl, felt backwards in its own way.
I confused hot for cold when I washed my face because the handles had switched places… And everyone’s voice sounded somehow reverberant─or reversed, for the same reason.
Right. In hindsight there’d been hints all over the place, and as a professed fan of Doraemon: Nobita and the Steel Troops, about a mirror world, I should’ve noticed sooner.
An upside-down world.
Karen, Ononoki, Hachikuji─were inverted here.
I also needed to accept that Shinobu wasn’t in my shadow. Vampires, who aren’t reflected in mirrors, didn’t exist in this world.
It was a world with a different worldview.
I still didn’t get what was up with Tsukihi. She’d only worn her yukata in the wrong order.
“B-But,” I objected, “going from my big all-out fight with Ogi, which had me going to hell and back, to something this lukewarm…”
“I think it’s fine,” Miss Hachikuji answered with an encouraging smile. “Chilled-out mascot characters have been all the rage, so what’s wrong with a chilled-out world? A churld.”
She was trying to encourage me…but “churld”?
It sounded so lame.
If you’re curious, Miss Hachikuji’s line here and the ones that follow were all still reversed. I concede that it’s hard to read, so I’m using my narrator privileges to translate them.
“Ogi, huh,” she muttered meaningfully but continued with a shrug. “I got carried away and said you’re ‘inside a mirror’─but I don’t know. For us, this is the normal world, and that side is in a mirror, to match your perception. If you’ll allow me to spin this, I don’t think it’s as lukewarm as you think. Aren’t you in a pretty bad spot?”
Her assurance that it wasn’t lukewarm freaked me out just as much. “Wh-What do you mean?”
“There’s no way for you to return to what you’d call your original world, is there?”
“…”
A way to return?
Ah. Distracted by the lukewarm setup, I hadn’t gotten around to wondering about that. If I was in another world, then I had to go on to return to my world─how?
The Araragi residence’s bathroom mirror.
If I’d been pulled into “this side” when I touched it, returning from there seemed like a possibility. But right after I sensed something was off, I checked it myself─and found it to be a plain mirror.
Or found it had returned to being a plain mirror─I couldn’t come and go between worlds simply by touching its surface.
Had a temporarily opened gate been closed, or was it a one-way path? I started to fret.
I was no Hanekawa, but I’d been stranded alone in a foreign country─even at a sunny tourist destination, being in another culture can be unsettling.
Yes, this reminded me of how I’d been sent to different realms, whether by traveling through time or by going to hell. The very rules of the world were different…
A world with different rules.
People I was familiar with becoming different made this more than a matter of, say, just trying to stay calm. The fact that Karen was shorter than me, for example, scrambled one of the factors that defined me (my complex over being outgrown by my sister) and messed with my ability to maintain my ego and sense of self.
…I guess I wasn’t unhappy about getting to meet the grown-up Mayoi Hachikuji again, even if it was under these circumstances─then.
“Hup.”
Then Miss Hachikuji pulled me close, not with another rough hug, but gently, as if to embrace my head.
“It’s okay, it’s okay. No need for you to be so scared. You’re okay, Araragi, I promise.”
Based on nothing, but it’s also a divine pronouncement, assured Miss Hachikuji, patting my head repeatedly.
I felt embarrassed, almost as if I was being nursed, and wanted to pull myself free─I was too old to be comforted like this, I’d just graduated from high school a day ago─but reconsidered and let her have her way with me.
This was another world, even a kind of illusion reflected in a mirror, but that’s how much seeing a grown Hachikuji meant to me. I was like a kid brother for this twenty-one year old, but having known her ten-year-old self best, it felt like seeing a daughter grow up.
In that sense, we were on totally different emotional pages, but even the ten-year-old Hachikuji had always comforted me, saved me. This wasn’t much of a change.
“Still, what to do?” Miss Hachikuji freed me at last and began wandering around the shrine grounds─a little too restlessly for a goddess. Circling around with me as her focal point, she asked without slowing her pace: “You traveled back in time by eleven years once, to rescue me from my traffic accident. Remind me, how did you go there, and how did you get back?”
Her history, the tragedy eleven years ago and such, seemed not to have changed─I guess this Miss Hachikuji died back then, too?
By the way, if we’re being precise, traveling eleven years into the past to rescue her was a reason we made up after the fact, after we ended up in the wrong year by accident. We were just trying to go back by about a day so I could do my summer homework─but I saw no need to go out of my way to correct her.