Well, it was nothing more than wishful thinking, and things naturally didn’t turn out as I wanted─the detail I wanted to check at home ended up being a swing and a miss. I thought meeting my parents once they came back from their jobs might strengthen Miss Serpent’s divine hypothesis (hy-apotheosis?) about this being an inside-out world, but their work was going late, and neither would be returning tonight.
Talk about bad timing… I did get what info I could from my little sisters and Oikura, but my parents, like Tsukihi, weren’t too different from the people I knew.
I couldn’t say for certain until I saw them, but then again, even if it wasn’t at Tsukihi’s level, neither was the type to have a hidden side… Of course, I’m sure part of it was the fact they were adults, and my parents.
You could turn their personalities inside out, but if you covered it all up with “adulthood,” they wouldn’t seem any different… I had to admit, I was a bit relieved. The feeling wasn’t as strong as with Hitagi, but I didn’t particularly want to see who my parents were on the inside.
I began to regret not taking Miss Hachikuji up on her kind offer if this was the outcome. In addition to not wanting to impose too much, I’d refused because my good sense told me that while a ten-year-young girl was one thing, staying the night with a twenty-one-year-old Hachikuji was out of the question.
The wall between minor and adult wasn’t nothing, but if you just looked at the numbers, only three years separated us─seeing Mayoi Hachikuji as a woman didn’t come easily at this point, but I still needed to draw a line.
Yes, I knew how to behave myself.
Or so I thought, but after I got out of the bath and saw there indeed wasn’t anything strange about my bathroom mirror and felt dejected; after I put on an optimistic mask and decided to go to bed because everything might be back to normal when I woke up in the morning; once I entered my flipped-around room─
“Koyomi! Oh, you. You’re gonna catch a cold if you don’t dry off your hair. Not that it’d make you any less hot! Haha,” Oikura said from her top bunk. She was wearing heart-patterned pajamas and reading a book of sample math questions.
…Come to think of it, I hadn’t entered my room in this world, but I should’ve seen it coming.
Since Oikura lived with us and we only had a limited number of rooms, the kids─me, Karen, Tsukihi, and Oikura─had to form two pairs. Apparently, I was with Oikura.
Not spending the night with the older Miss Hachikuji was making me use the same bunk bed as Oikura, who was my age… I began putting together a sneaky escape to the sofa on the first floor, but it ended in failure.
“Whaaat? Why, why, why? Did I do something wrong?! Are you mad, Koyomi? Stop it, don’t act so distant! What, are you seeing me as a girl now?!” asked Oikura, or someone else I didn’t recognize, squashing my plan. As much as I dreaded an extended war, I didn’t have a solid idea of when I’d be returning to my world, so I had to be careful not to act too suspicious.
Witnessing Oikura in such high spirits was probably insulting to her, but this Oikura didn’t totally satisfy the theory that I was in an inside-out world where the internal was made external. There was the very practical matter of having to observe her… Talking to her made it clear that we did indeed live in the same room, but we at least respected each other’s privacy when changing and the like, so I gave up resisting and got into the lower bunk bed.
As sad as it is to admit, I felt a little excited about getting in a bunk bed for the first time in so long… Back when I was little and sharing a room with my sisters, I’d insist on the top bunk (Karen, Tsukihi, and I rotated each night between a bunk bed and a single bed), but the bottom bunk was interesting in its own way. Knowing that someone was sleeping right above me felt odd─even apart from the said person being Oikura.
“Hey, Oiku─Sodachi. Do you know anything about mirrors?” I asked upwards after turning off the lights. I wouldn’t say I was going all-in, but I should make effective use of anyone as smart as her.
With so much I couldn’t say, my question had become pretty straightforward. Despite the complete change in her, Oikura’s answer wasn’t perfunctory and went beyond flipping things around.
“I guess I remember hearing that they never reflect an image accurately,” she replied sleepily. “Because while mirrors reflect the light that hits them, it’s impossible to reflect all the light. How did it go again? Normal mirrors are only about eighty percent reflective? They always end up absorbing some amount of light. So─mirrored images look blurrier than the real thing.”
“…”
“We might look at ourselves in the mirror, but we only ever see a blurred image…can only know a blurry version of ourselves. Inaccurately, with a dim outline…”
I was intrigued and wanted to hear more, but it seemed Oikura had fallen asleep.
Mirrors aren’t precise with their reflections.
Info that could turn into the first step of a solution, or maybe not─perhaps it was a careless question if my goal was to keep up appearances.
It also felt like I was hitting some kind of limit… Relying too much on gods like Miss Hachikuji and Miss Serpent didn’t seem right, maybe I should take this opportunity to visit Kanbaru’s home tomorrow with Oikura? No, probably not.
Find a partner.
That’s what Black Hanekawa said─but that partner didn’t exist in this world.
Someone I could rely on in a situation like this, without forethought…not even about the trouble I might cause. She really was the only one for me in the end, I thought, and before long I fell asleep too.
As I did, a dreamy notion went through my mind: I’d forgotten and couldn’t remember, but maybe, back when I was a grade schooler and the Araragis had taken her in for a time, I’d drifted off to sleep with Oikura like this.
✦ ✦ ✦
Someone woke me up right away.
Like they were waiting for me to fall asleep.
For a moment, I was in that state where I didn’t know if I was asleep or awake, in a dream or in a daze, but even after that moment passed and I woke up, I didn’t know what was going on.
“Shh.”
There, standing by the bed with her index finger up against her mouth, the lights still off, was none other than the shikigami tween of unknown whereabouts, Yotsugi Ononoki.
It was Ononoki.
No, that wouldn’t have been so confusing on its own─it was the usual level of eccentric (and harassing) behavior for her. Normally I’d have the mental composure to feel nice and relieved that she’d made it back home safe─but.
There was a reason that didn’t happen.
“Kind monster sir, you need to get up without making a sound. Without waking up Big Sis Sodachi. Put on clothes so that you can go outside,” Ononoki said, her tone uninflected, unfeeling, and flat─spoken with such little expression on her face that I knew exactly how she looked even in the dark, unlit room. That was why.
No expression, no emotion, just words, just standing there.
She did have that outfit on with the pants, but I was certain that she was the Yotsugi Ononoki I knew.
“…?”
What was going on? Why?
Why did yet another exception have to pop up just as I’d gotten used to this world and started doing my best to analyze it─where was the emotive Ononoki?
Then, this Ononoki said something to exacerbate my confusion.
In, of course, a flat tone.
There was no feeling behind her words, but they were as shocking as could be.
“Stay quiet and just follow me, monstieur. If you do, I’ll take you to Shinobu─to the Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade who exists in this world.”