Was she being so forthcoming because of how much laid ahead of us? She’d said no more small talk, but were we already on the main topic? Or were we still on the runup─I did hope this was at least the prologue.
“I’m your Ogi Oshino.”
“Could you not phrase it that way? Our distance is already awkward enough now that I’ve learned your true identity.”
“How cold─you might be surprised to hear this, but I’m grateful to you in my own way, okay? You risked your life to save me from the Darkness’ judgment, and I’d like to pay you back for what you did.”
Her tone was far too hollow for me to believe her, but I couldn’t ignore her if she put it that way. I was surprised though, I’ll admit.
“My double… Does that mean you came into this land of mirrors along with me? I guess you could come to this side as yourself, unlike Shinobu, a vampire… But that does bring back another problem that I thought was solved. In that case, where did the inside-out Koyomi Araragi that should exist in this world go?”
“…”
Oh? Even if it was standard operating procedure for Ogi not to give a straight answer, going silent was unusual─she loved running her mouth just as much as her uncle, or maybe even more than him.
“Ogi?”
“Has anyone talked to you yet…about the reflectivity of mirrors?” she asked, fixing her eyes on me after I called her name─with those black orbs that sucked you in.
“Has anyone… As my double, aren’t you aware of my every deed? Oikura told me.”
“You’re misunderstanding something. It’s not as if I grasped everything about you─there’d be no point in my existence. Overlapping and failing to at the same time is what allows me to be my own critic.”
Miss Oikura, you say? Just the kind of role she’d play, Ogi laughed. “Yes, the reflectivity of the average mirror is about eighty percent─you could say the rest is blurred, but also that the twenty-or-so percent is whittled away in reflection, and sentenced to death.”
“Sentenced to death…”
Right.
We always tend to focus on the larger proportion, on the eighty percent, but if we looked to the remaining twenty percent─well, no, we can’t see it.
Because there’s no light there. It’s absorbed, never reflected back.
“So…Koyomi Araragi never existed in this world to begin with?”
I belonged to the twenty percent that didn’t exist? No wonder I couldn’t find him no matter how hard I looked. Searching for something that exists is simple compared to searching for something that doesn’t─you can seek something that is, but how do you find something that isn’t? I was part of the light absorbed by a mirror and not reflected─no, wait.
That couldn’t be it─I’d seen myself in the mirror before being sucked into it yesterday, and that’s where this whole story began. When I was more vampiric and mirrors didn’t reflect me, you might’ve said that, but not anymore. Even if you ignored that line of reasoning and accepted that I was part of the twenty percent that was left un-reflected, you could still ask, So what?
It wasn’t as if I’d been sucked into the mirror because I was the light it didn’t absorb─because then a lot more than just me would have been sucked in.
“…Is this another hypothesis of yours, Ogi?”
“No, no, you’re jumping to the wrong conclusion. I’m not trying to dredge up hypotheses, nor your emotions for that matter… Well, how should I put it. You’ve jumped to the wrong conclusion, that really is the best way to phrase it.”
Hearing this was vexing─jumping to conclusions. Yes, doing so one too many times might be to blame for my predicament. Hadn’t I jumped from one conclusion to the next throughout high school?
“But it’s not as if I dislike that impatience of yours,” Ogi said. “And your kindness, I suppose, how you sympathize with the excised twenty percent.”
“…”
She then beckoned me over─what a presumptuous girl, summoning her senior, but I couldn’t complain when I was used to Kanbaru doing just that. I stood up and moved over─only now noticing that the seat my double had taken was Oikura’s.
God, she really did like staging every last detail.
“Heyyy!” she called out as I approached, motioning for a high five─what the heck?
“Heyyy,” I complied.
A nice smack filled the room.
“So, what’s this about?”
“Well, you know,” Ogi said. “You and I are mirror images of the same person─flip sides of each other, yes, but we can’t put our hands together like this with a mirror between us, right?”
“…”
I’d had that thought before. When and where?
Strictly speaking, when we talk about a mirror’s face, we’re referring to the silver coating applied to its backside, so there’s always going to be a gap equal to the depth of the glass between your hand and your reflection’s, even if you try to make them touch─
“It was when Ms. Toé washed your back. Could you not pretend something that shocking never happened?”
“Oh, was it? It totally slipped my mind since it was nothing to me… Anyway, is that important?”
“We’re talking about a mirror’s thickness, stop playing thick yourself. What I’m saying is that if you want to enter a mirror─if you want to travel to the land of mirrors─you first need to physically pass through the glass.”
You first need a portable portal like a pass loop, Ogi used one of Doraemon’s secret tools as an example.
I wasn’t so sure about minding physical phenomena in the context of a feat as fantasyish as entering a mirror, though…
“Fine,” I said, “it’d be one thing if I was reflected on water or on polished iron, but with a mirror, the glass acts as a gate I need to pass through first. I get what you’re saying, but…so what?”
“So what? So that’s the answer─don’t you remember what I told you when we were stuck here before?”
“Hm? You told me a whole lot of things. To be specific?”
“Vampires.”
Vampires can’t enter a room without permission.
Right, she’d said that─which is why we’d been trapped, or why we couldn’t get out. And the characteristic meant that as someone with a vampiric aspect, passing through the glass in the first place was much harder than entering a mirror… Even if I could leave my vampiric aspect on the other side in order to do so, it’s not like humans can pass through glass. Then again, that rendered everything moot.
In which case, what was this girl trying to say? It felt like she was still toying around with hypotheses…or were we in fact closing in on the solution?
“It’s not good to overthink things, but you shouldn’t be thoughtless, either─you’re right about that, Araragi-senpai. Also, you’re thinking about this the wrong way around.”
“Hm?”
“You may not be able to pass to the other side of a sheet of glass, but even a vampire can be pulled into it from this side.”
“Hm?”
“You know how we just discussed all of it being a dream? Well─that’s not the case, but what about this? I don’t think you can disprove the idea that this isn’t the real world yet.”
I didn’t follow. Was she switching topics again without me noticing, maybe going back to an old one? “No, Ogi… If this were the real world, the other side would be the counterfeit. Whether I’m in a dream or in a mirror.”
“Don’t think of that side as inside a mirror, think of this one as outside it─now do you understand?”
“I don’t. You’re only making this more confusing─inside, outside, isn’t it all the same?”
If we were outside a mirror, didn’t that place my previous world inside a mirror, after all? Actually, no─there was one last possibility I had to consider.
It would never come from me, but had been prompted by Ogi─the opposite of it all being a dream.
If I’d always lived in this land of mirrors but been expelled from it─but no, wasn’t that only a matter of perspective? It wouldn’t change the fact of me being me and barely functioned as an answer to Ogi’s question.
So long as I couldn’t pass through a sheet of glass, I couldn’t enter or exit any land of mirrors─pulled into it? Like pulling up a drowning man grasping at straws?
Sure, I couldn’t swim, but splashing around in bathwater and checking its temperature wasn’t beyond me─no.
Even if you could pull something in through its surface, or that of a mirror across a pane of glass, from the other side─what exactly had I offered a hand to?
“The twenty percent, that’s what,” Ogi said. “The light that should’ve been absorbed and never reflected─you scooped it up and rescued it. You opened the gate and brought it to this side for safety. You ended up making this world into the land of mirrors. You haven’t come to it─you pulled it in. Almost like they say the ancient gods pulled all of Japan together as one.”