“The fact that there’s been no change to your other little sister, Tsukihi, does seem key─I wonder about knowledge. Hey, Araragi, what’s one plus one?”
“Should I answer using the decimal system? Or in binary?”
“Stop being clever and just answer me, kid,” threatened Miss Hachikuji. A lady who was my senior─but she followed up with a gentle admonishment: “It’s a serious question, so could you give me a serious reply?”
The emotional turbulence made me queasy.
With the ten-year-old Hachikuji, my light jab would have kicked off a three-hour conversation, but I guess it was natural for this lady to have left behind what you might call the Hachikuji-ness of the Hachikuji I knew, now that she was eleven years older─she didn’t mangle my name even once.
If anything, I’d tried to mangle her earlobe.
While I felt a tinge of sadness, I’d be worried if she was still acting that way at twenty-one, so I accepted it.
“…”
But no, maybe this was a part of her personality that had been flipped around─the more I thought about it, the deeper I sank into the quicksand.
“Two. One plus one is two,” I gave a straightforward answer anyway, as embarrassing as it was.
“Hm. Okay, then what’s 100 minus 50?”
“50.”
“What’s 9 times 7, and 9 divided by 3?”
“63 and 3.”
She tested me on the four basic arithmetical operations, one at a time.
Those laws were the same wherever you were, though… At least, they seemed to be in this mirrored land. And so─
“Okay. I’ll ask non-arithmetic questions too,” Big Sis Mayoi said.
“Bring it on.”
“Maybe I should start with science.”
“Sure thing.”
“What is the biological species name of a seahorse?”
“Why would I know that?” Something a little more general, please?
“What’s the largest star in the solar system?”
“Saturn.”
“Is that so. Here, it’s the Sun.”
“Don’t ask me trick questions!”
“Excuse me? Is that how you speak to an older person? This is for your sake, you know.”
“…”
Awkward…
I actually knew that trick question and the correct answer. I’d replied with the ten-year-old Hachikuji in mind, but our banter wasn’t going anywhere. It made me realize just how important age differences are when you’re conversing.
“Also,” she said, “if you’re going to fall for it, the answer in this world is Jupiter.”
“Oh, right!”
I’d fallen for it on purpose but mistaken it wrong. I didn’t need to wait for my test results at this point, I knew my fate. It sapped my motivation to return to my world─not that I wanted to make this realm of contradictions my final resting place.
That said, as I confirmed more things with Hachikuji, this world didn’t seem too different, in terms of knowledge and common sense─even idioms like right-hand man and out of left field weren’t flipped around.
Even if most people were left-handed from my point of view, the logic here meant that they were called right-handed─hmm, this really was the Ozma Problem.
“Well,” I said, “I guess I’m lucky that causality, or the overall laws of nature, aren’t flipped around. How would I plan any course of action if my predictions and reasoning of X causing Y to happen had been turned upside down too?”
“Don’t let your guard down. It’s only true for what we talked about just now─but then, being too cautious might be counter-productive in its own way,” Big Sis Mayoi warned, touching my hair.
She didn’t know how to keep her hands to herself. As a healthy young man, I was sort of tickled.
“Well, to summarize, it looks like there’s only one way for you to get back to your world.”
“Just one? You sure narrowed that down quick.”
I wished she’d range a little further when it came to my options, but you can only ask a god for so much.
In fact, I was shamelessly receiving her divine favor for an offering of just four yen. I’d best shut up and listen with humility.
While I was perplexed after getting lost in another world all of a sudden, I was also enjoying this, improperly enough. Another world or not, it was Hachikuji’s first job as a freshly appointed (freshly anointed?) god. Listen with humility, humbly watch her work her magic.
So…how’s Miss Hachikuji gonna save me here?!
Perhaps to punish my mindset─Mèmè Oshino, who held that people just went and got saved on their own, would have sneered at me─the deity said, “Just get the former Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade to open up a gate.”
“…”
“What’s with the dissatisfied look? Wasn’t that Aberration Slayer a broken, anything-goes character? She should at least be able to create an opening in and out of this mirrored land.”
“Er, when you put it that way, I guess she could, but…”
I wasn’t sure.
There are theories that time travel is physically possible with a massive amount of energy…or so I’ve heard, but traveling between entire worlds fell outside the purview of physics classes.
I suppose it was possible, if time travel were a type of travel between worlds, or for that noble king of aberrations, the exceptional aberrational existence─at her peak.
Practically Majin Buu, the way she could do anything.
But not now, when she was a little girl─and even if we could address that, “Shinobu doesn’t exist in this world, though,” I reiterated─stating her absence. “Vampires can’t in a land of mirrors. Maybe you’re assuming that a thrall might do the same, but I’m telling you, I can’t. My being here means our link is as close to severed as it can get. Think of me as a plain human now that I’ve been separated from Shinobu, just like back in hell.”
“I’d never expect something so unreasonable─only the former Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade could open a gate.”