Chapter Text
A knock at the door could be a dreadfully frightening thing under the right conditions. Regular visitors were already a drag, interrupting my important research work, or sometimes my side hustle, but never when I’m free. A certain duo has a specific knack for showing up at inopportune times, though when it came to me visiting the other world no time was a good time.
I’d like to go the rest of my life without a single extra interaction with that place, or anything from it. Wishful thinking at this point, I’d long since signed my death warrant. It wasn’t long before something over there got me.
Today’s knock at the door was a bit peculiar. Checking the security cameras, it was Sorawo visiting, alone. She usually at least shot me a text, or she’d have a gift of some kind. Instead, she stared at the door with a concerning expression, knocking in a rhythm. If it hadn’t been her I’d be scared out of my wits by now.
I remotely unlocked the door, “C-Come in Sorawo-chan.”
With a nod, she entered. I could hear her shuffling down the hallway, even steps trodding along like an NPC in a game walking along her preset path. A visit from her or that girlfriend of hers usually meant something was up, but this visit felt a bit more peculiar. She wasn’t acting like herself, none of the awkward stammering and creepy lines said in horrible attempts at humour, just silence.
As she entered the living room, thankfully still Sorawo and not some weird creature from the other world, she silently took a seat. No offer for tea, no strange lead-in to some crazy story, she just sat down and waited for me to finish my work. How considerate of her.
Luckily I didn’t have much to do today. Taking a seat across from her, I surrendered myself to the comforts of my armchair in preparation for her nonsense. “Go ahead Sorawo-chan, what’s going on today?”
Nothing. All she got was a blank stare and some shifty eyes.
“Sorawo-chan, I know you’re the quiet type but this is too much, out with it. You are planning to talk, yes?”
She gently shook her head no, a bit of an embarrassed expression crossing her face. That bit of emotion helped ease the nerves, her behaviour had started giving me the creeps.
“Well if you plan to silently sit in my living room be my guest, I have work to do.”
A partial lie, but mostly I just wanted her out of my house. Boredom does that to a person fast, and if she wasn’t keen on conversation she’d probably leave sooner rather than later. Hopefully… you never knew with that girl.
My ‘office’, if you could even call it that, sounded as it always did. Bizarrely quiet, filled with the clacking of keys and not much else.
I had to turn my head every once in a while to check if Sorawo was still there, catching her side profile as she… who the hell knows what she was doing. It looked as though she was taking in the room for the first time, casually glancing around out of a vague interest. Nothing was really grabbing her attention.
“Oi, did you have a reason for coming, or…”
She met my gaze without a response, holding eye contact until I spun back to my work. This girl had issues…
Her presence alone was distracting, at any moment she could drop some creepy tidbit about what was happening in her insane life, and there went the rest of my day, alongside a few more sleeping pills as I try to get through the night after whatever terrors she’d drag me through.
And on cue, my phone starts ringing. Caller ID says it’s Sorawo, but my self preservation instincts say it’s dangerous. Unfortunately, I side with caller ID this time. Surely she’d lost her phone, and this was Toriko calling me with it.
“Kozakura-san,” Sorawo’s voice called from the receiver, “I have a small request from you.”
“No.”
“I-It’s not dangerous, I promise.”
Somehow I didn’t believe her. Worse though, I might need her help more than anything. Slowly glancing behind me, Sorawo is definitely not on the phone right now. And yet she is.
“Just s-speak, and hurry, I'm busy.”
“Well… if you find like… me, but mute, can you just give me a call? She’s not scary but-“
“SHE’S SORAWO’S CLONE NOW SORTA!!!” Toriko called from the background, sparking a debate between the two over how the person sitting in my damn living room should be classified. Creepy, that’s the answer.
“Shut up, both of you… she’s here, come over. Now.”
I do my best to whisper that last part, but who knows what this clone can or cannot understand. Looking back again, it seems she’s gotten herself into a staring contest with Kasumi, a losing battle.
“Oi, watch the eye…” I know full well that a staring contest with Sorawo was a bad bad idea. I’m not sure if the same applied to this thing, but I wasn’t about to offer up my daughter as a lab rat.
I tried to shake off a bit of exhaustion, there’s no way I just called this stray ‘interface’ my daughter, maybe I’m just trying to rationalize the unfamiliar into familiar frameworks. Maybe it’s for the best, but if so I’m a pretty shitty mother.
Kasumi herself doesn’t mind staring holes into the… clone, who for her part has stopped the staring contest, looking at me with a bit of a dumb grin, like she’s apologizing? Again, I might be reading more into it than was there.
“There’s no way Sorawo-chan’s face could look sorry for her actions, no way…”
A more erratic knock at the door indicated the proper Sorawo had arrived, girlfriend (but not really) Toriko trailing behind her. “Is she still here?”
“Use your fucking eyes…” a weakly gestured over to Sorawo’s identical copy sitting on my couch. It was really uncanny, like she’d been copied and pasted exactly as she was. There was no way anyone could tell them apart, clones didn’t even begin to cut it. “Now please explain… why?”
“Well… I have a theory.” she began. Always a theory, always based on some internet post, always about 80-90% accurate. This girl was scary to talk to sometimes.
“Well, back at Satsuki’s ah… exorcism, my doppelgänger was there, and Toriko helped like… pull her back? Plus I promised something about taking care of the girls she messed with, which I guess means myself as well…”
“Basically, we think we turned a phenomenon into a human, a fourth kind but like… from the opposite direction!” Toriko chimed.
Encounters of the fourth kind took a human and brought them closer to whatever X factor the Otherside was looking for, and they’d managed to make a phenomenon like that step closer to humanity?
So the copy was now…
“Is she just… a person now? Not a hallucination or phenomenon?”
“Eh, probably?” Sorawo scratched her head, uncertain, “She slept at my place last night, but when I got back from class she’d wandered off somewhere.”
Once again the other world brought more questions than answers. Hadn’t these two JUST brought a small child back to the real world? Now they’ve gone and brought another Sorawo… one was enough.
“So why is she here?”
Another shrug from Sorawo prime, as she glanced over at herself for an answer. A second shrug.
“Maybe she just wanted to see you Kozakura!”
“Lots of stuff from that world wants to see me, doesn’t mean I wanna see it.”
“H-Hey…” Sorawo started, offended, “She’s still me you know.” As if that made things better. “Plus she’s a fourth kind now, not a phenomenon.”
So, in essence, a second Kasumi. The number of children I have to worry about keeps increasing. Now we’re at four, five if you count Runa Urumi (someone I can’t help but worry about).
Don’t fall in love, you’ll get saddled with more kids than you know what to do with.
“We’ll take her to DS Research for some examination, just to make sure there’s nothing off…”
“Sounds like a plan!” Toriko dragged the copy to her feet by the arm, “Let’s go Sora!”
“You named her…” Sorawo sighed, “Shouldn’t I be consulted on this?”
“No.”
As much as the both of us had been in this business for a while, it’ll always surprise me how easily Migiwa can roll with the punches.
“So… if I understand correctly, Kamikoshi-san has been seeing a doppelgänger of herself since the start of this arrangement.”
“Uh huh.” I can still remember the pictures she showed me way back when, almost a year ago by now.
“And she’s been seeing her since.”
Both Sorawos nodded in unison.
“And now, as a result of exorcizing Satsuki Uruma, she has been granted enough humanity to shift from phenomenon to fourth kind?”
“Yes, also her name is Sora now!”
Sora nodded, her source just groaned. As if she had a better plan for naming the girl, she was just jealous her little girlfriend was paying attention to someone else. It was kinda pathetic.
“Well, we can get to work on forging identity documents. Kamikoshi-san, I hope you’ll get along with your new twin sister.”
“I never agreed to this.”
“Sorawo-chan you need to get over yourself.”
A nurse came to guide her into the examination room, though not before trying to lead Sorawo herself away. I’d mentioned before, but having them stand side by side was even stranger. With twins you’d at least have slight variations in hairstyles, or other smaller details of their body. Not here, these two were entirely identical, even making identical facial expressions in unison sometimes. It was bizarre, another way the other world had managed to creep it’s little vines into ours.
A thorough examination should take some time.
Sora got brought out significantly faster than expected. There were a couple abnormalities in her body that prevented standard testing, but supposedly the largest hurdle was that she was entirely hollow.
“Literally, how is that possible?”
The doctor seemed at a loss, “It doesn’t make sense, but that’s how it is. Even stuff that’s visible like her teeth don’t exactly… exist unless we’re looking at them. Her body parts only seem to exist on a need to use basis, thus any internal organs and blood simply… aren’t there.”
A fully operational human being without blood or bones or organs. A literal surface level copy of another person.
It sent a bit of a shudder down my spine. Sora herself looked a bit uncomfortable with the information too. How much did she know about herself? About the other world? She hadn’t said a word on the trip over, maybe she couldn’t speak at all. Or maybe she could only speak in the strange language of that world. Apparently she’d tried to sign her name somewhere, only for her writings to end up as unreadable symbols, the type that Satsuki had in her notes.
Migiwa took me aside. “If I’m honest, I’m not sure we have the time to look after this one. If it’s not too much to ask, could you possibly…”
“Possibly what? Get involved with another entity more than I have already?”
“Another fourth kind. You taking in the young girl was a big help, so if you could spare a room for this one too…”
I almost countered that Sorawo should take her own ah… ‘sister’ at her place. But shoving someone into the protection of a maniac broke college student didn’t seem like the best plan.
At least she was quiet. She played with Kasumi (just keeping her attention that long counted as playing in my book), and she probably didn’t have a gun. Maybe that was a negative, who knew with these people.
I guess Sora was my newest housemate…
In complete transparency, there was one more reason I would have preferred Sora to be… anywhere else. This is, of course, not something I’d ever be completely transparent to Migiwa about, or anyone really.
Satsuki hadn’t been my first love, far from it, but she had left the biggest impact on me. Hell, she left a big impact whether or not you met the woman, but actually working side by side with her meant it was impossible not to get sucked in. God knows I tried.
And just when I’d mostly come to terms with her disappearance, in walks Sorawo. Satsuki Uruma with none of the presence, but every bit of insane determination. Barely sees others as people sometimes, throws herself into the nightmare dimension just because she can, and the singular solid blue eye, just like her.
I couldn’t ever tell her that, she’d get rightfully pissed, but it’s impossible not to see that woman in her. Toriko must see it too, she’d have to be willing herself to turn a blind eye, or maybe her stupid puppy love was enough of a blindfold.
The same puppy love she’d held for Satsuki, following her everywhere, dedicating herself all to Sorawo. She couldn’t help but fall for the same woman again. Not that I could help it either.
Sorawo was already a doppelgänger, a Satsuki who wasn’t quite as far gone, and damn it if I’ll try to keep it that way. If that meant taking in her hollow copy then so be it.
There’s also a very small chance Sora was aiming for Toriko all the same, what a lucky girl.
I want to die.
“Here, this will be your room.” I dropped Sora’s bags into the second guest room, which were mostly just some of Sorawo’s clothes. Just enough to last her a couple of days until we got her some of her own. “The kitchen’s free to use if you need it. Do you need to eat? Can you?”
All I got was a blank stare from someone who didn’t fully understand her own biology. Was she even a biological creature? They weren’t able to get a blood sample back at the lab, apparently stabbing a needle into her vein just… poked a hole, nothing came out, and it closed up on itself pretty quickly. Disturbing, though I’ll take it over some of the other nonsense that world could throw at me.
This setup was absurd, like some shitty light novel. “I’m living with my unrequited crush’s supernatural clone???”
But that’s where my life has found itself, living in a world of pure fiction. I’ve adopted a child who speaks exclusively in quotes from my only friends, rationalizing only gets me so far.
For her part, Sora tried sitting on her new bed, breaking it in, but mostly just trying to look busy. She found the whole ordeal just as awkward as I did, huh?
“Listen, unlike Kasumi-chan, you don’t need babysitting. You’re a grown woman, no?”
Sora nodded, tapping her chest to affirm she was a grown woman. She… probably didn’t mean it like that, I had to try to avert my eyes nonetheless.
“So, you can stay here, but I’m a busy woman and I expect you to handle yourself and not cause trouble, got it?”
Another nod, that’s all she could really manage come to think of it. It suddenly dawned on me the true challenge at hand, and it had nothing to do with anything supernatural. I was now, in essence, living with a mute woman, one who didn’t seem capable of writing either. Coupled with Kasumi’s selective mutism, nonverbal communication was about to sweep through the Kozakura household.
“Eh, I’ll take it…”