Chapter Text
Timeline α, May 27: Sorawo
Toriko was, of course, the big spoon.
As soon as I woke up, I knew that I wasn’t alone in the bed. Her right arm—the one with the normal hand—was wrapped around my waist. Her face was buried in my hair, and judging by the damp feeling, she’d drooled a bit. For somebody who was so much more fashionable than me in day to day life, Toriko Nishina was not an elegant sleeper.
I stiffened up with embarrassment as soon as I realized, then forced myself to relax again. Or tried to, at least. We were sharing a bed. We’d agreed to share a bed. I’d agreed to share a bed with Toriko.
I could tell myself that it was pragmatic. The two of us had only slept in the Otherside a few times, but I was already getting tired of that sleeping bag and the whole process of setting up a tent. When we’d found a dry, mostly intact building conveniently close to nightfall, it was only reasonable to sleep in there. Even splitting a bed was a big step up from trying to sleep with two centimeters of padding between my back and the ground.
That wasn’t the whole story, though.
Back when I was trapped in the interstitial space at her school, I’d seen a long history of our time together, as viewed through her eyes. I’d already known that I was kind of pathetic, but that had made it clear just how painfully obvious it was to her. Looking aside whenever Toriko shot me a lovey-dovey expression, making up transparent excuses to avoid sleeping with her or getting in the bath with her, dodging every attempt she’d made to put a name to our relationship beyond ‘accomplices’…
I wanted to be better. Toriko deserved better. So here I was, curled up in bed with her, trying to convince myself that I was totally comfortable and not, in fact, second-guessing every movement I made.
Maybe I should have gotten drunk again... It had worked in Okinawa, after all. Then again, that was in the same series of benders where we’d bought a tobacco-harvesting machine on credit because it looked cute. Getting myself into such a poor decision-making state here on the Otherside seemed like a bad idea.
Before I could brood on the situation more, Toriko stirred behind me.
“Mmh…” She squirmed a few times, letting out a long breath against the back of my head. “Moooooorning…”
“Good morning…” I said softly, and then considered. What were you supposed to say when you woke up next to somebody? Hell if I knew. “Um, did you… sleep okay?”
“The best I’ve slept in weeks.”
“Well, that’s good. I—”
Toriko's hand slipped under my shirt to brush her fingers across my belly, and my speech came to a crashing halt. That only seemed to make it more fun for her. With a mischievous little giggle, she applied more pressure, tracing one fingertip in a circle around my navel.
“You must be some kind of sleep good luck charm, huh? Maybe I should start carrying you to bed every night.”
By this point I was blushing so hard that I felt like I was glowing. My entire body was tense, and the only reason I wasn’t already scrambling out of bed was that I was consciously forcing myself to stay put. Do better for Toriko’s sake… do better for Toriko’s sake...
“Y-yeah. Well. … m-maybe the mattress is responsible? This feels surprisingly comfy for something we just found over here, doesn’t it? Like… ergonomic or something.”
“Uh-uh. It’s definitely all you. So~ra~wo~.”
Her fingers gave little vertical swipes against my belly to emphasize every syllable. If I tensed up any further I felt like my joints were going to start snapping. My heart was pounding in my chest.
“Th-thanks, Toriko. But… maybe we should get up now?”
As soon as I made a move to push the covers aside, she pulled me back more tightly against her. She even gave a pouty little groan, like a child refusing to give up her favorite toy.
“I’m comfy here.”
“You realize we’re still in the Otherside, right…?”
“Yeah, but it’s morning, and we’re only a few hours from the gate, right? We have all day, really.”
“I don’t know if we’ll get a lot done in bed…”
“Oh?” As soon as she made another, even more mischievous, giggle, I realized that I’d made a mistake. She pushed up against my back, pressing a series of slow, lingering kisses up the side of my neck. When she reached my ear, she lingered there for a few seconds, making damn sure that I felt every breath tickling against it. “I can think of some things we can do in bed…”
Her hand started moving again, fingertips brushing against my belly as it slipped lower…
The next thing I knew, I’d launched myself out of bed with a sort of warbling squeal. It seemed to happen on pure reflex, like jerking your hand away from a fire or something. I stumbled a meter or so before I managed to come to a stop and spin around, staring down at her in bewilderment.
“A-ah,” I stammered. “Um.”
She stared right back, with a flat expression on her face.
“Right. Okay.” Toriko lowered her eyes with a sigh. “Let's get dressed. We have a long day ahead of us.”
She sounded tired. Resigned. Like she was conceding her side of an argument that I hadn’t even known that we were having.
Except… I knew all about it now, didn’t I? I could pretend that I didn’t, but I knew why she was upset. I opened my mouth to try stammering out some words that would make this better, but I had no idea what those were. The moment passed while I was still fumbling for them. Toriko pushed the covers aside and sat up—her back turned toward me—then snatched her clothes off of the floor and started getting dressed.
We dressed in silence.
Only once we’d pulled our clothes on and shuffled out of the room did the bad feeling in the air start to clear. I idly looked over my Makarov, making sure that it was ready for the day. Or pretending to, at least. Toriko still did 90% of my maintenance on it. I didn’t know how to do much except load it. I’d be hopeless without her to handle that kind of thing for me.
“I was thinking last night…” I said. “This place is pretty cozy, right? And if I’m picturing the layout of this area right, it’s kind of in the middle of a few gates we use a lot.”
“Huh, is it?”
“It was about four hours to get here from that gate we entered through. I could just barely see the building with the Jinbouchou gate off in the distance when we were up on that hill, too. And I think one of the other Farm gates comes out a few kilometers south of here. We’ve never come quite this far west before, but other than that…”
“Huh…” Toriko sort of stared off into space, seeming to picture the surrounding terrain. “Maybe you’re right.”
“So what if we fixed this place up a bit and made it into kinda a safehouse? If we keep expanding how far we explore, we’re going to need to come out this way a lot. Having a place to sleep and store supplies would open up a lot of options. We could haul heavy stuff out here to stage it until it’s needed, or lay low if we’re caught in the Otherside when it’s almost nightfall. Stuff like that.”
“At this rate, we're going to spend more time working on buildings over here than we will exploring… but you might be right. We don't know any gates close to here yet, so if we got in trouble, it would be a long trip back to one.”
“Plus...” I hesitated for a moment, running my fingers along the aged boards on the wall. “… it's kind of cute, isn't it?”
“… cute?”
I could feel the slightest blush rising to my cheeks. “I-it's cute! It looked like a quaint little farmhouse from the outside. You'd almost expect to find an old lady out front feeding chickens or something…”
Toriko stared blankly at me. I worried that she was going to be annoyed or something, but her face broke into a grin. “Ehehe… this kind of thing is why I can never stay mad at you, Sorawo.”
“So you were mad…?”
She ignored the question, glancing around with a thoughtful frown on her face. “Still, if we're thinking about something like that… maybe we should take another look around and see what kind of shape it's in?”
I agreed, and we go to to work.
Usually we'd stick together if we were checking out a building over there, with my eye to spot problems and Toriko's hand to resolve them. We didn't feel like that was necessary here, though. After all, we'd already swept through the place last night, and decided that it was safe enough to sleep in. If anything in here wanted to murder us, it had ample opportunity while we were asleep.
So, we split up. Toriko took the top floor, where we'd been sleeping, and I went down the creaking stairs to check out the ground floor.
I wasn’t even to the bottom of the stairs before I heard noise from below. I pressed myself against the wall next to the door into the living room, listening for a few seconds to reassure myself of what I already suspected: it was just static.
Peeking inside quickly confirmed it. There was a chunky older CRT television sitting in the corner. It had been the one source of noise when we'd entered the house, turned on and tuned to static. We'd turned it off as soon as we'd found it. It seemed like it had turned itself back on overnight.
That was kind of concerning, but not something that I needed my gun for. After keeping a wary eye on the TV for a few seconds, I moved closer and crouched down to inspect it. My right eye didn't detect anything supernatural. It felt… wrong, though. I hadn't exactly spent much time watching static on old TVs, but something about it didn’t feel quite as random as it should have been. I kept picking out hints of patterns, only for them to slip back into the noise. Like one of those autostereograms, where if you stared long enough, your brain might suddenly assemble an image from it.
Yeah, no, I didn't want to see any image that this thing might show me. I turned it off, and unplugged it for good measure. Looking around, I didn't find much of interest in the rest of the room. A few faded cushions were scattered around on the floor, and a mess of feathers where another had been ripped open. Sunlight filtered in the dirty window on the wall, casting everything in grimy colors that made me feel like I was submerged in dishwater.
I peeked out the window. A teru teru bouzu was hanging outside. I leaned in closer to peer at it, rubbing off some of the dirt for a better look. Where the face might have been, there was a messy scribble of lines that didn't look like much of anything. Peering more closely, it looked like the string around its neck might have been made out of twined hair.
Creepy, but not dangerous. After making a mental note to come back and take it down later, I moved on.
There was a closet that I didn't remember noticing the night before. I eased the door open, and… an avalanche of paper surged out. I darted backward, pointing my Makarov into the darkness, but there wasn't anything there. On closer inspection, the objects inside were calendars. It was an entire closet of calendars; everything from modern kitten-themed ones to ancient things printed on yellowing paper. After pushing as many of them as I could back into the closet with my foot, I shoved the door closed and moved on.
There was a bathroom, where an improbably-dusty men’s suit was neatly laid out in the bathtub. For the hell of it, I tried turning on the faucet. Nothing came out, which was just as well. I was never comfortable eating or drinking anything from this side anyway.
Just as I was moving on to a room near the back that seemed to serve as a storage area, I heard a few hollow thumps toward the front of the house.
I froze in place, straining to sort out the sounds around me. I'd hoped that it might be Toriko, but… no. I could hear the ceiling creaking as Toriko moved from room to room above. Another few thumps sounded, and I could hear them more clearly now. They were arrhythmic and punctuated by scratching sounds, like somebody trying to claw their way through wood. They were nearby. Whatever had found us, I was alone on the ground floor with it.
I considered my options. With Toriko upstairs, shouting for her wouldn't do me any good. If there was something dangerous down here, it could reach me well before she did, and shouting would just alert it to my presence. Plus, we had just slept here. Certainly we'd know by now if it was dangerous… right?
On the other hand, it wasn't like it was likely to be an animal or something. I double-checked my gun, and disengaged the safety before advancing on the source of the sound.
It quickly became apparent that it was coming from the kitchen. As I approached, I pressed myself up against the wall to peek into the room. Like the rest of the house, it looked pretty normal, if old-fashioned. Cabinets lined the walls, with a sink built into one of the countertops, and a fridge stood in the corner. Most of the middle of the room was taken up by a small dining table. Nothing much of interest.
Except… it was becoming clear that the noises I was hearing were coming from one of those cabinets. The cabinet door shuddered in time with them, occasionally swinging open a centimeter or so before drifting shut again. I stepped into the kitchen, not taking my eyes off of it for a moment. Taking up position on the far side of the room, I trained my gun on the cabinet door and debated what to do.
The door made the first move.
A shove from inside flung it open with enough force to smack against the cabinet. A black shape exploded out, flailing violently as it advanced. I yelped, and only the fact that Toriko had drilled me on trigger discipline stopped me from blasting the wall in shock.
After a few steps, the thing came to a stop, adjusting its posture and getting its bearings.
It was…
My first thought was that it was a normal bird. A crow or something. It stood almost half a meter high, which was an imposing amount of bird to be stuck in the small kitchen with me. It shrugged its wings a few times, seeming to flex them to smooth out feathers that had gotten ruffled in its escape from the cabinet. As it settled down, I realized that it was a bit weirder than I'd initially thought.
It had two heads.
They stuck out at different angles atop its neck. One head was pretty normal-looking, seeming like a natural extension of the rest of its body. The other head was coated in bone white feathers, which came to a ragged end at the top of its neck. Both heads, though, tilted around a few times before locking their eyes onto me.
It felt very… intentional. I sensed a deep intelligence within them. Was something off about the eyes? They felt a bit more human than a bird should have had, but I can't say I'm an expert in bird eyes. I kept my pistol pointed at it, wracking my brain to figure out what I was looking at.
A yogen no tori. That was it. They were one of a whole category of creatures that seemed to only pop up once or twice in old stories to announce some looming disaster, then offer a way for people to save themselves. Not entirely unlike a kudan…
I was still trying to wrap my head around this thing when it spoke.
“You're so lucky, Sorawo. He forgives you.”
I froze up, my fingers tightening on the pistol grip. The sound was nothing that ever should have come out of a bird's body. It sounded like authentic human speech, in perfectly fluent Japanese. The only oddity was that each mouth spoke in a subtly different pitch, giving it the slightest bit of unsettling polyphony.
More than that, though: it sounded like Toriko.
“He's sorry that you've had to wait so long. It will all be better soon though, okay?”
There was no mistaking it. It wasn’t just Toriko’s voice. It sounded like her. The same speech patterns, the same cadence, everything. If I hadn't just heard Toriko moving around in the other room, I'd have no idea what to think. Even knowing that, it was hard not to let the voice skew my perception of it.
“W-what… what are you? Why do you sound like Toriko?”
The bird hopped forward, tilting its heads around to peer at me. “You haven't forgotten him, have you?”
She sounded amused. … I was already thinking of this bird as a 'she,' based solely on that voice. “What are you talking about?!”
“… Sorawo?” Toriko—the real Toriko—called down the stairs. “Is somebody down there…?”
I couldn't answer, but the reassurance that Toriko’s soul hadn’t gotten stuffed into a bird or something did help me come to a decision. I rested my finger on the trigger. I focused my right eye on the bird, but didn’t see anything amiss. It was, as far as I could see, a normal bird. A normal, two-headed crow that was capable of fluent human speech.
As I hesitated, it was muttering to itself: “You're so lucky… you're so lucky...”
Toriko started down the staircase, creaking with each step.
“Whatever you're talking about, I don't care!” I lied.
The bird looked me dead in the eye. “As if you didn't know.” It breathed out a soft sigh, exactly like Toriko did when she was teasingly feigning exasperation. “The Red Person will see you soon. Please wait right here for him, okay?”
I pulled the trigger.
Timeline β, May 27: Toriko
“You're lucky,” the nurse said. “You're so lucky. The doctor will see you soon. Please wait right here for him, okay?”
Her voice sounded flat, and it was a pretty weird thing to say in the first place. I shot her the subtlest concerned glance that I could.
She seemed to realize that she was coming off as pretty strange, too. After a moment of confused indecision, she turned and walked out the door. It shut behind her, and I was left alone in the examination room.
Alone in an exam room. Again. It was practically the theme of the past few months of my life. Some of these posters with colorful diagrams on the progression of osteoporosis were even starting to look kind of familiar. Within a few more visits, I'd probably have them memorized.
Fortunately, I was only waiting a few minutes before the doctor entered, carrying a laptop.
“Miss Nishina?” he asked. Once I'd confirmed that I was, he turned it around, showing me the laptop's screen. “Here are the results from your last round of x-rays.”
X-rays hadn't used to mean much to me. Recently, though, I'd seen enough of them to start getting a feel for what I was looking at. It was my leg. My lower right leg, to be exact.
There were three barely-there horizontal lines traced across my tibia and fibula. Each one was… well, the doctors called them fractures by convention, but even they had realized that there was more to it. The breaks were straight lines, like my bones had been sliced by an incredibly sharp blade. The bones in my right leg had been chopped into four chunks, and the surrounding flesh didn't show so much as a bruise.
Around the bones were the less hazy shapes that I'd learned to interpret as the metal bits that were holding my leg together now. Twelve plates—two per fracture per tibia—dozens of screws and pins, and an elaborate gantry around the outside to help hold everything in place. The entire contraption had taken multiple rounds of surgery to install, and still required daily adjustments to keep my bones exactly where they belonged.
“They're still healing well. If you compare them to the x-ray from last time—” he paused to pull it up. “—you can see that the fracture lines are lighter than they were before. That's good news. Means the bone is knitting back together. You're lucky; you're a quick healer.”
“Well, if I were really that lucky, maybe this wouldn't have happened in the first place,” I joked weakly.
“That's true. All throughout the literature, I haven't been able to find a single case similar to yours. However you fell to get your legs to break like that, it was a one-in-a-million chance.”
I gave a shallow nod, but didn't say anything.
It hadn't been a fall, of course. It had happened during my most recent excursion into the… the other place. Apparently Kozakura's associates all called it the Ultrablue Landscape, so that was the only proper name I had for it. It had kind of hurt, learning it from her instead of Satsuki, the one that I'd actually explored the place with. But it was the name I had, so it was the one I used.
Something about the name always felt wrong to me. Wrong in a sad way. I can't explain it, but there it is.
Anyway, I'd been walking down a slope in the UBL. Everything had seemed fine. I was only out on a short excursion to check if some of Satsuki's old supply caches were still intact, traveling through a pretty familiar area. And then… zap! Well, okay, I never heard a zap. There was just a flash of pain so extreme that I immediately collapsed. When I came back to my senses, I was sprawled out on the ground, with one leg that no longer worked. Trying to move it, I felt the very, very bad omen of recently-broken bone grinding against itself.
I'd laid there on the ground, whimpering in pain, for who-knows-how-long.
I was half a kilometer from the entrance when it happened. That was a long way to drag myself back.
The climb up that ten-story ladder, with one leg to support my weight and the other dangling uselessly, shooting pain up my spine every time it moved, was so much longer. Only a deep, primal, adrenaline-based sort of fear kept me moving. I knew that if I let myself collapse there, it was all over. In retrospect, the entire experience was a long, murky blur, with only brief snapshots of memories. None of them were good.
It was maybe my fifth time exploring the place alone, and I'd managed to hurt myself so badly that I barely escaped. I'd never felt more pathetic. I'd lost so much time that I could have spent looking for Satsuki, and if she was in danger…
I realized that the doctor was still talking to me.
“… encouraging though. You'll want to continue limiting how much weight you put on it, and keep up with your physical therapy. If it keeps healing this quickly, we should be able to remove your external fixator in a month or so. In the meantime, do you have any questions for me?”
I didn't. He wrapped up the visit, and after checking out at the receptionist, I hobbled off toward the train station.
As strange as my injury was, they'd insisted on having me go to an orthopedic specialist, which meant it was a full 45 minutes away. I'd had two appointments with him per week early on, so I was getting really accustomed to this ride. At least I only needed one crutch now—an elbow crutch, one of the smaller ones. When I'd first gotten out of the hospital, I'd been in a wheelchair, which really hadn't made the long journey fun.
If I'd had any money, I might have hired a private nurse. But I didn't.
Nor did I have any friends to push it for me.
Nor did I have my parents.
… it was a long ride, with thoughts like that going through my head. My only interruption was a stop about 2/3 of the way through to change trains. As I lowered myself into my seat on the second one, I barely managed to avoid just collapsing. Traveling always seemed to leave me exhausted now. The doctor said it was because my body was using so much energy for healing, but I hated it. I could get around pretty well now. In theory, I could start going back to the Ultrablue Landscape to search for Satsuki. But I'd be no good to her if I passed out a hundred meters from the entrance. Or if I blew my leg up again, for that matter.
I got off of the second train, a mere few blocks from my apartment, and hobbled on home. I was used to the weird dance of shifting my weight around while I unlocked the door, then pulled it open.
As I shut the door behind me, I noticed that the mailbox was full. Something had been stuffed through the mail slot, and it was big enough that the lid couldn't quite close. I lifted it and carefully extracted the contents.
There were a few usual things—bills, flyers for local businesses—but the most of the space was taken up by a single big envelope. One of those yellow ones for shipping stuff on the cheap. Judging by the bulk, it had quite a bit of padding inside. The flap had been wrapped in half a dozen layers of tape, haphazardly criss-crossing itself. It was correctly addressed to me, but the return address didn't list the sender's name, and the postmark…
The postmark was definitely weird. The seal itself was some kind of two-headed bird; not one of those imperial eagle types, but one standing in profile, with both heads positioned to look toward the viewer. There was a circle of text around it, but the text was written in completely unfamiliar characters. I stared at them for a few seconds, trying to discern if they weren't some alphabet I'd at least seen before, but nothing. And the return address was within Japan, so why would it have gone through a foreign country's mail system anyway?
I was starting to get a bad feeling about it. Like it was a postal bomb, or one of those anthrax letters. But who would target me? I was just some college student. There wasn't any reason I'd be high enough on anyone's radar to do something like that.
So, I took the envelope into my kitchen, got a knife, and carefully sliced through the layers of tape.
From within, I pulled… a wad of newspaper, as big as both of my fists combined. It was yellowed with age, and wrapped around itself in loose layers. I sat it on the counter and started peeling them off one at a time, like I was opening a head of lettuce. Soon, there was an entire stack of them next to me.
About halfway through, I realized that I wasn't looking at any ordinary newspaper. The outermost sheet was mostly taken up by a faded black-and-white photo of a man sitting on the beach. He was holding a dirty shovel in his lap, stroking it like it was a cat, and looking at the photographer with a confident sort of malice. The caption beneath it read: “Until the dawn comes, he is nowhere. The wind rips through the trees and chills your teeth. Once they've seen the beacon, you must never return.”
O… kay...
I stared at the weird picture for a second, trying to come up with some explanation for it. I grabbed the stack of papers that I'd already peeled off and started flipping through them. The earliest ones looked completely normal. One of them even had enough detail on it for me to guess that it was a local paper from somewhere in Wakayama. As the layers went deeper, the pictures and writing got weirder.
Past that photo, the innermost layers started unnerving me. The pictures were uncomfortable, everything from desolate landscapes to the interiors of ruined buildings, photographed at unnatural and claustrophobic angles. Every single one gave the feeling that something awful was happening just beyond the frame. I peeled them aside as quickly as I could, but tried to keep them intact. At this point, it felt like they might end up as evidence in some kind of criminal trial.
Finally, the package's actual contents fell out of the newspaper wad and clattered onto the counter.
It was… a pair of glasses.
After a few seconds to make sure that nothing creepy was going to happen—hey, from a package like that, can you blame me?—I picked them up and turned them over in my hands. They were pretty thick, with a half-rimmed frame that ran along the bottom of the lenses. The frame itself was a deep brownish-red that bordered on black. But also, they were… messed up. Most of the frame was rough and misshapen. The lenses had black smudges on them. On the right side, all of the plastic had melted away, leaving about ten centimeters of wire bared.
They'd been burnt. Turning them over, I noticed that those long arms on the sides—they're called the temples, apparently—had something stuck to them. A layer of crunchy, black, burnt material was stuck to the inner side of the non-melted temple. The earpieces were spotted in thicker patches of it.
Only after I'd poked it a few times did I realize what I was looking at. These glasses had been in a fire. The black stuff was stuck right at the spots where they'd be touching the wearer's head. If whoever was wearing the glasses had been burnt while wearing them…
YUCK.
My hand reflexively jerked away. The glasses tumbled across the countertop, and I hurried over to scrub my hands in the sink. And then washed them again, and again. My stomach churned every time I remembered the feeling of that black ash beneath my fingertips, and I just barely managed to keep my lunch down.
When I couldn't detect a single speck of black on my fingers anymore, I reluctantly toweled my hands off and looked back to the glasses.
I should have thrown them away, but I couldn't quite bring myself to do so. They felt… important. As creepy as this was, there was no way it was a pure accident. Somebody, or something, was trying to send me a message.
With several layers of paper towels wrapped around my fingers, I gave them another inspection. Lifting them up, I looked through the lenses, but saw only the blurry view that I'd expect. I didn't really find anything new. In the end, I put them in a plastic baggy and stuck them deep at the back of a drawer I rarely used, with those newspapers neatly folded beneath it.
Only then did I manage to relax a bit, and not by much. I still obsessively checked my door every few minutes to make sure it was locked and bolted. When I settled in to do homework, I did so with a loaded gun by my side.
I hadn't been able to go to the Ultrablue Landscape for months. Had it decided to come to me instead?