by Nisioisin
Or was it this conversation with Shinobu?
Or maybe I should stop worrying about today and rewind a little further. My clash with Kaiki and my battle with Kagenui probably didn’t help, either.
Looking at it that way, it wasn’t just my summer homework. While the lot of the student is to study, I seemed to be perpetually avoiding it.
Or maybe the story, itself, is avoiding a lot.
Maybe it’s all been just idle chatter.
Maybe what you’ve read between the lines, beneath the surface, has been insufferable.
“Ahhh,” I lamented, “I wish that clock would just break down right now and start going backwards.”
“Forward it goes.”
“If I put the batteries in backwards, do you think it’ll run backwards?”
“What can they be teaching thee in science class?”
The clock on the wall was digital anyway.
It would enter occult territory for it to run backwards.
“In thine eighteen years of life, for ye need not six hundred, hast thou not learned at least that much?”
“But if I smash that liquid crystal panel part, don’t you think p.m. might become a.m.?”
“If that shall solve anything, then by all means.”
“Shit, if only I’d noticed yesterday…even this morning. With two hours left, there’s nothing I can do.”
“Hahaha. While ’tis a shame not to feast on Mister Donut, I feel sated by the sight of thy miserable countenance.”
“What a sadistic little girl…”
No, but really, what was I going to do?
In Koyomi Araragi’s case, unlike for Sengoku, a scolding wouldn’t be the end of it.
Due to my devotion to wickedness during my first two years of high school (You couldn’t really call it devotion or wickedness. Hanekawa’s willful misapprehension aside, I just used to cut class all the time. My conscience is clear), my reputation in the teachers’ camp couldn’t be worse.
Even Hanekawa and Senjogahara’s “image change” was laid at my door (though that I can’t really refute); in other words, failing to do my homework could bring about a marked drop in faith in me within the staff room and seriously impede my school life thereafter.
A scolding would be the end of me.
Seriously, my prospects for graduation would be in jeopardy.
It would be a hell of a punch line to my exam prep if I got into the college of my choice but didn’t make it to graduation.
“I’d have to live the double life of a college student and high school student!”
“No, thou wouldst simply be denied entrance to the university.”
“Nobuemon, get out your time machine. I’ve got to pop back to yesterday.”
“Play with words like Mr. Fujiko to thy heart’s content, but listen thou, leave off shortening it to Nobu,” Shinobu said as though she really hated it.
She never took to the helmet and goggles Oshino had given her, but she didn’t seem to mind the name Shinobu Oshino.
“All right then, Shinobu. Get out your time machine.”
“Like I can,” said the vampire, before suddenly glancing out the window. “But if thou wouldst fain travel in time, I shall not withhold my cooperation.”
“Huh?”
“Thou wouldst return to yesterday, correct?”
And she returned her gaze to me.
Laughing her gruesome laugh, as always.
Extraordinarily carefree, as though it were all a game, she invited:
“Let’s!”
005
Two hours later─that is, around midnight on the morning of August twenty-first, precisely as summer break ended─Shinobu and I found ourselves on the grounds of the Kita-Shirahebi Shrine. This was where Kanbaru and I had come a while back to place a mysterious talisman at Oshino’s request─and where I had been reunited with Nadeko Sengoku after all those years─a place Oshino likened to an air pocket within the town.
A hangout for aberrations.
Hadn’t he also called it something like that?
The truth is that even now I don’t really understand, but that’s just it─the only thing that was clear, painfully so, was that the place was poorly understood.
“Precisely by virtue of which ’tis the appropriate place─ultimately, any would serve, but I thought perhaps a locale with which thou art acquainted would suit thee best.”
“Hmm. While I’m certainly acquainted with it, honestly, I don’t have good memories of this shrine…”
I’d had a terrible experience.
Terrible things had happened.
With Kanbaru, with Sengoku─and.
“If only,” I said, “it were a childhood acquaintance.”
“Wherefore?”
“When you’re at my level, just saying ‘childhood acquaintance’ makes the heart go pitter pat.”
“A life lived in vain.”
“How dare you!”
“The term is also used for the same sex, is it not?”
“Same sex? What would be the point? He comes to wake you up in the morning?”
“True, come as they may…”
“Something wrong with the ruins of that old cram school?”
“Aye, that place remains somewhat spiritually disordered thanks to that rampaging onmyoji Yozuru Kagenui. I might fail and time warp us five hundred million years into the past.”
“We’d die.” Five hundred million years? Whatever epoch that was, it definitely wasn’t hospitable to our survival. “To begin with, is it really so easy to time warp? So far I’ve gone along with what you’ve been saying, but doesn’t that only exist in science fiction? I just can’t get on board.”
“Art thou a moron?” Shinobu looked truly appalled as she said this. “If aberrations may exist, why not time travel?”
“…”
Why not, indeed.
“There are even time-traveling aberrations,” she said. “Let me see, the one with a name like…Gashadokuro.”
“That could only be Gashadokuro.”
And I don’t think Gashadokuro even can.
It’s not such a timely yokai.
You can tell just by looking at it.
It’s just a skeleton.
“Even supposing Gashadokuro could do it, I’m pretty sure a vampire can’t. I’ve never heard of it, anyway.”
“’Tis true, a vampire cannot. But I have been dubbed the king of aberrations, the aberration-slaying aberration. Nothing lies beyond my powers.”
“Are you sure? Sounds kinda fishy to me.”
“Oh? We do not have to do this. I do not wish to do this. Thy tearful request to return to yesterday hath moved me to assay it, more out of curiosity than anything.”
“…”
Well, I wasn’t that serious about returning to yesterday.
Would I have liked to? Sure, definitely, but it wasn’t like I’d brought it up because I thought it was actually possible. Tearful, I was not. I mean, a time warp… Wasn’t Shinobu just bluffing?
Having blurted it out, she just couldn’t go back on it now, right?
Who was being tearful here?
Fairly sure all along that she was hoping to fool me in the end with some kind of illusion, I hadn’t said anything until now, and yet…for her part, not looking remotely embarrassed, Shinobu was methodically going ahead with her preparations.
Amid the darkness, she seemed to be examining the area around the torii gate.
And “examining” was the word; she wasn’t putting up talismans or hanging ropes or anything, just feeling around like a famed detective might at a crime scene in a classic mystery novel─but I had to admit, the vibes she gave off were somehow imposing.
Even as I thought, You liar─I did consider it for a moment, that one-in-a-million chance.
But traveling in time seemed to be on a completely different level from flying or running at incredible speeds or packing an earth-shattering power punch.
“’
Tis the same.” As though she could read my mind─actually, since we were connected via my shadow, to some degree she indeed could─Shinobu spoke without even pausing in her inspection. “With a massive amount of energy, time travel is possible. Even thy modern science vouchsafes it, at least theoretically.”
“But isn’t that limited to traveling forward in time? I’m pretty sure returning to the past is theoretically im─”
“Are not past and future much the same?”
“…”
Ah, the words of wisdom that people who’ve lived forever spouted.
I thought it was totally hokey but found it hard to rebut her self-confident pronouncement.
“As the years pass, the distinction between yesterday and tomorrow loses all meaning.”
“That’s a relatively serious condition that afflicts people starting in their thirties.”
“All right.” Shinobu glanced back at me. “This torii will do.”
Whether or not it would, she didn’t seem to have tricked it up in any way─it was still nothing but a decaying old torii.
Even in my mostly human state, the rickety gate looked as though I could knock it down with one kick─is a way of speaking that might invite divine retribution.
But it didn’t feel like there even was a god there to hand it down. At least, if I were a god, I’d scamper away from such a me-forsaken shrine at the earliest opportunity.
“Thou art yet distanced somewhat from humanity, imagining thyself as a god.”
“Listen, maybe it’s inevitable to some degree, Shinobu, but stop reading my mind whenever you feel like it. What if a dirty thought pops into my head?”
“Let not any dirty thoughts pop into thy head.”
“Ahh, that won’t work. If you tell me not to, I’m just going to have more of them. My imagination spreads its wings when your collarbone peeks through the open shoulder of your dress.”
“That much, at least, remains within tolerable bounds.”
“…”
Was there any demand for little girls who were fine with smut?
Even if there was, well, better not to supply.
“It sounds indecent only because thou sayest ‘little.’ Little blond girl, little blond girl, the ring of it is overly precious. In the past, thou didst simply call me a blond girl.”
“Yeah. But the word ‘girl’ is too general, things got confusing.”
The fact is that I started using different terms so I could differentiate between Shinobu and Hachikuji.
There’s a behind-the-scenes peek for you.
Incidentally, in that schema, Ononoki is the young girl.
“So,” I said, “this tori─”
“O ruddy darkness, which ruleth over chaos! I beckon thee, orb that maketh sport with the ebb and flow of time! Repeat but the final light that in turning turns, and pour forth thy thunder to fill the heavens! Walkers in blackness, swimmers in ash! With the sin-drenched and unspeakable name, make thyselves to convey us hence!”
“You start chanting an incantation?!”
I’m floored!
That is, it really brings me back!
You don’t find that anymore!
That register was in vogue, what, twenty years ago?!
Shinobu kept on chanting (in Japanese, for whatever reason) what seemed like a very long incantation─and somewhere, some unknown wheels started turning, because.
When I glanced─within.
Within the torii.
That simple tumbledown square threatening to collapse at any moment─had become a blank wall of blackness through which nothing was visible.
I drew back in horror.
My mind recoiled.
I was beside myself.
I hurried and circled round the torii to look through from the other side, but everything looked normal, so very normal─the grounds, the path up to the main shrine, and the building itself all peered back at me.
Continuing my circuit of the torii, I stepped back onto the precincts─and once again, I could no longer see the steps on the other side. There was only darkness─
“No, not quite darkness… It really is like a wall, or…what? A portal to another dimension or something.”
“And so it is,” Shinobu said lightly. An affirmation so unhesitating that it seemed impossible for it to be a lie. “It appears to have gone well, for a first attempt. Still got it, even if the greater part of my power hath been lost since I became a little girl.”
Had there been a multitude of clocks floating around like in a Dalí painting instead of just a black wall, ’twould have been perfect, she coolly tossed off.
“Still got it,” she says…
Not that she was wrong.
“Well, actually, if you’re able to summon up other dimensions, can you even say you’ve lost your power?”
That was comfortably in the cosmic-scale, solar-class range.
I seem to remember Hanekawa saying that even with nuclear energy, it’s impossible to bend the space-time continuum─and if that’s the case, then just how powerful was Shinobu, casually conjuring up not a time machine, but something more like Doraemon’s Anywhere Door, just by chanting a single retro-sounding incantation?
Hold on just a second.
In our understanding of this world of ours, however much we may worry and lament, at the end of the day we’re guaranteed a modicum of security, aren’t we?
When did they revise the rules?
“’Tis not my power. Else, there would be no need for such chanting. I told thee at the outset, ’tis the power of this place. I simply converted into thermal energy what that disagreeable Aloha brat spoke of as the assembled aberrations’ raw spiritual energy.”
“Enough with the pseudo-science.”
Spiritual energy sounds just about as fishy as true friendship, in my humble opinion.
“’Twould have made a tasty and nutritious meal. But I let it go for the sake of thy plea─nay, in exchange for thy promise of Mister Donut.”
“Your personality makes any tsundere antics have the opposite effect.”
Leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
“Yet we must make haste,” urged Shinobu. “I doubt I can open such a gate a second time. If we dally but another minute, forsooth it shall close forever.”
“Forsooth…”
The language of the elderly can be a bit obscure.
Or rather, I doubted people 500 or 600 years ago actually talked like that.
If you traced it back, it was probably just some local dialect.
That aside, the word “gate” gets a perfect score on the shadiness test. It doesn’t sound even the slightest bit credible. I’d be more likely to travel through time if I jumped into the drawer of my desk.
“Still, one minute? Hang on, I’m not prepared for this, mentally speaking.”
“Ye need no preparation. Ye need but to jump.”
“Huh? That’s all it takes?”
“Ye need not set thyself in any way. ’Tis only time travel.”
“…”
Somehow, Shinobu’s breezy, offhanded manner was contagious.
I began to feel like a real coward for being unsure and on a different wavelength from her, like a middle schooler invited out by classmates for some late-night antics might.
Yeah, I was probably too worked up about it.
After all of the madness I’d been through in the past six months, there shouldn’t have been anything left for me to fear.
It’s only time travel.
Better just go with it.
Idly popping back to yesterday and taking care of my homework lickety-split─when you think about it, that’s not nearly as dangerous as being assaulted by a vampire─right?
“Okaaay, let’s go!”
I triumphantly thrust my fist in the air like I had the brain of a rat.
“Onward ho!”
Shinobu was getting into the spirit of things as well. She acted nonchalant, but she did say it was her first
time, and maybe she was actually pretty elated.
