What was this smell?
“So?” she asked, drawing her nails away.
“I’ve never smelled anything like this.”
“So, what was the rain scene like for you?”
“Nothing.”
Her arms retracted. The change in the shape of her eyes was probably her head tilting.
“I didn’t imagine anything,” I clarified. “There wasn’t any scene in my head like you described.”
“Wonder if I should’ve put a bit more on.”
She repeated her previous action and then extended her fingertips again. Considering how this would go—but hoping my imagination was wrong—I once more brought my face to her fingers.
“Yeah, it’s an interesting smell, but I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. It’s like having an itch somewhere that I can’t scratch. It’s like my brain doesn’t know how to react to it.”
“I wonder if there’s just nothing in your world that corresponds to this.”
“That’s a possibility.”
I was disappointed that I hadn’t picked up on anything. This had proved to be a pastime of Chika’s that I simply couldn’t enjoy in the same way, without my even getting the chance to determine if it jived with me or not. Still, the sensation of not being able to comprehend had itself been a valuable experience. It was yet another piece of solid proof that Chika was likely not a being of this world.
“Well, what kind of scene do you get from this scent, Chika?”
Chika silently brought her own fingers up below her eyes. I now knew for certain where her nose was. The structure of her face truly seemed humanoid in nature.
“The forest.”
“Yeah?”
“There’s a girl walking through a dense forest while a light rain falls, light enough that most of the droplets are absorbed into the canopy before they ever reach the girl. After a short time, there’s a loud sound from somewhere. The vibrations from that sound shake the canopy, and the rain that was caught on all the leaves and branches falls down at once, drenching the girl. That’s what I picture.”
I tried to picture this myself. I could imagine my own version of the scene, but I doubted that the details—the color of the leaves, the girl’s expression, the amount of rain in Chika’s imagination—were the same. Of course, perhaps that was the nature of this form of amusement. A creative work always leaves some amount of space open for interpretation, so perhaps this form of entertainment, one which produced stories from scents, was meant to offer a much higher degree of freedom of interpretation than a novel would. Or perhaps there was simply some extra dimension that the residents of Chika’s world took from scent that I wasn’t privy to.
“Would everyone in your world get rain from this scent?”
“The rough idea might be the same, but whenever I try to describe in words what I imagine, it always takes me a lot longer than other people, maybe because I always try to feel out the little details. I think I tend to take my time with enjoying it more than other people do.”
This was in line with all I knew of Chika’s personality so far, so I could see that.
“How is it made?”
“There are people called ×××××××× who make scents, with which they craft stories over time. It’s an incredibly specialized profession.”
I ignored the part that I could not hear, assuming that it was the name of the profession and likewise assuming that I still would not catch it on repetition. I asked her if it was a profession that she herself aspired too, but she seemed to just cock her head.
“I wonder. I mean, if there was no one who could make something that would be utterly perfect for my room, I would want to make it myself. But when you do it as a career, you have to think about how other people are going to receive what you make, so I don’t think I’d be suited to it. I only live for the things that I personally think and feel.”
“I see.”
I appreciated this thought process of hers, or at least, I found it interesting. I realized that there were a few ways in which both our philosophies aligned. For some reason, this reminded me of something else.
“Oh, right. Chika, there was something I wanted to ask you about.”
“Sure, what’s up?”
“About the weather and your relatives.”
I told her what had occurred to me on that rainy day, which I had been thinking about ever since. Put simply, I wondered if there were things besides this bus stop that overlapped in the places we were both in. I had started to even consider that the two overlapping worlds might be mirroring one another, based on the phenomena that had been occurring. This was such a wild leap that I was almost embarrassed at myself when I first thought of it, but it was worth bringing up the possibility to Chika. As predicted, she showed not the slightest hint of ridiculing or shooting me down—not so far as I could see, anyway.
“It was cloudy for seven turns of the sun in my town too. So it might be possible. The same with the lightning. Would be nice if we had a little more proof, though. Has anything else happened around you lately?”
“My school’s gone on break.”
“I haven’t really had any kind of break in a while.”
Right. Chika had told me before that she already graduated school, so that was unlikely another parallel. It would probably be difficult for her to understand something she wasn’t experiencing firsthand. Was there anything else that had happened in my copy-paste of a daily life?
“Is there anything you’ve done that you wouldn’t normally do?”
I was exasperated at myself—the first thing that came to my mind at her question was something that Chika would probably find utterly inconsequential.
“No, well…huh, probably not?”
“I see. Hmm…”
Chika scrunched up her eyes, moving her hands back and forth on her thighs. I’d initially assumed this to be a habitual motion, but perhaps she was just cold. Either way, the conversation was at a standstill. I thought for a moment and decided it would be best just to bring up the thing I had thought of previously. Better to grasp at any possibility, rather than just wasting time.