“Wait a minute,” I said as a sudden realization struck me. “Iguma-san, you live here in Hakodate, right?”
“Uh, yeah? Didn’t I literally just tell you that?”
“Well, yes, but I mean… It’s a weekday, isn’t it? So what are you doing wandering around out here in the middle of downtown?”
It was a Tuesday morning—which didn’t matter for me, since I was on a class field trip, but she should presumably have been in school right now. And she probably wouldn’t be wearing her uniform if it was a day off, nor would she ever be simply heading home at this hour barring extremely unusual circumstances. In which case, the most likely explanation was that she was simply playing hooky.
“…None of your business, kid,” she said tersely.
Somehow, I got the feeling I hadn’t done much to win this girl over in the short time I’d known her. I wanted to believe this had little to do with anything I’d said or done and was more a testament to our innate incompatibility as individuals, but it was hard to say.
“So what’re you gonna do now, huh?” she asked.
“Well…” I mulled it over for a moment. “I think our only real option here is to try to get to the bottom of what caused this.”
“Yeah? And how are you gonna do that?”
“I…haven’t quite figured that part out yet, sorry.”
“Great, real useful…”
Sheesh… Again with the needless insults.
Without another word, Akira turned on her heel and started walking away.
“H-hey!” I called after her. “Where are you going?”
“Gonna see if I can find anyone else. I’ll do my thing, you do yours.”
“Huh? B-but…”
Common sense dictated that it was a very bad idea to split up in emergency situations like this—especially when there seemed to be some sort of supernatural element at play, and there was no telling what might happen next. Plus, I felt like there was probably still more intel we could stand to share with one another.
But there was nothing I could do to stop her. Obviously, she had to have heard me stammering in protest of her sudden departure—yet she’d ignored me all the same and gone waltzing off into the city. I lost sight of her almost immediately, and before long her footsteps faded too—leaving me standing there in front of Hakodate Station, all alone in this eerie, otherworldly silence once more.
Granted, I probably could have chased after her and forced the issue if I really wanted to. The only reason I didn’t was because I knew she and I would almost certainly never get along no matter how hard I tried. Our differences were simply far too great to reconcile, so I had no choice but to find my way through this all by myself. I’d never made a habit of counting on others in the first place, so that suited me just fine.
“Where do I even begin, though…?”
I’d said we needed to figure out what caused this—but the real question was how. I had no idea where to even begin looking for answers. After all, this strange time-stopping phenomenon—or “timefreeze,” I supposed I could call it—had come on so suddenly and without warning that I couldn’t even begin to fathom what might have prompted it. It was as if some unseen deity had pressed the pause button on reality, or I’d stumbled into an alternate dimension containing a perfectly preserved, one-to-one replica of the entire world, exactly as it stood at that precise moment.
Like getting trapped in a giant diorama, almost.
Just then, I finally found the words to pin down a strange sensation I’d been feeling on my skin for a while now—or one I realized I hadn’t been feeling, rather. There was no wind blowing right now. Not even the slightest, gentlest of breezes. Could it be that the weather was just exceptionally calm? Surely not. Even on windless days, you could still feel the air shifting slightly around you. And I had a feeling that this lack of airflow had a lot to do with why I felt trapped—or even suffocated, almost—in this strange world out of time, despite ostensibly being outdoors. There was definitely something extremely unusual going on here that defied all rational, scientific explanation. That raised the question: Was any of this actually happening, or was it all in my head?
What if my escapist tendencies had latched on to my desire to be set free from the class trip, causing me to dissociate into some sort of fugue state where I was seeing vivid hallucinations? It was a pretty unsettling thought, but no more ridiculous an explanation for this phenomenon than chalking it up to something supernatural. I remembered reading once about a neurological disorder called Alice in Wonderland syndrome, which apparently could cause drastic changes in a person’s perception of size, their body, or their surroundings—or even disruptions in their sense of time. Of course, I was pretty sure “the perception of time having come to a complete stop” was not among the symptoms I’d seen listed, but the basic gist of the condition seemed in the right general ballpark for what I was experiencing right now. Though if this really was all just a hallucination, that still wouldn’t explain how my brain had conjured up that local delinquent girl I’d encountered in front of the station.
“Hrmmm…”
It was no use; I wasn’t getting anywhere just by thinking about this. And as I stood there at a loss for what to do next, I heard my stomach growl—which reminded me that I still hadn’t eaten lunch yet.
“Maybe I should grab some food first…”
Something told me I wouldn’t be having any epiphanies on an empty stomach, at the very least. And so I started making my way down the main drag, past quite a few food establishments that looked rather cozy and inviting. It was almost noon, so most restaurants were already open for the day—but unless I could find one where both the kitchen and the waitstaff had miraculously not been frozen solid, I couldn’t so much as place an order. But where could I find myself some food, in that case?
“Whoa!”