Chapter Text
“Kamikoshi-san!”
Oh great, another lunatic. Every once in a while I’d get someone like this, someone completely out of their mind who decided that I was worth approaching. Like Akari. Or Benimori… or Toriko. Or, in this case, someone I certainly wasn’t about to start a friendship with.
I recognized the guy from my program, but beyond that I didn’t have a clue about who he was. I did know that he was probably coming to me for something stupid.
“Uh, er… yes, I’m Kamikoshi-san.”
He laughed, “Well yeah, can’t imagine there’d be anyone else walking around with a blue eye. By the way, rumors say it’s not actually a colour contact, is that true?”
“Well… um, what exactly did you call out to me for?”
“Ah, well there’s some strange happenings going on at the dorms-”
“Sounds rough. W-Well, bye.”
“Oh come on Kamikoshi-san!” a familiar voice snuck up on me from behind. Scary… Benimori scared me at times. “He’s legit, I think there’s an honest to goodness ghost at his dorm.”
“Sounds like someone else’s problem. I’m hardly a ghost hunter.”
“B-But, you’re the expert! You said it yourself, true ghost stories are your specialty!”
“If you have an infestation, you call an exterminator, not an entomologist. I’m… interested in archives. I can’t see ghosts, I can’t get rid of ghosts. I can hardly get rid of you people…”
“That hurts…” he sulked. Another thing that sounded like his problem and not my own.
“Oh come now, Kamikoshi-san has a point. Besides, she looks like she’s in a hurry. A date perhaps?”
I could hear the smirk in that girl’s tone. What gave her that impression exactly? I seriously wanted to knock her across the face for that one, but I guess that isn’t a very productive way to maintain a friendship.
“Sure, whatever. Bye.”
I let Benimori answer the guy’s follow up questions, she’s the one who said something weird in the first place.
The truth was, I didn’t have a date tonight, but I sort of wish I did. Not something where me and Toriko went out to a nice restaurant or whatever, I mean a date with the Otherside. The last time me and her had gone on a proper, and willing, expedition had been… well, too long ago.
Don’t get me wrong, the time we’ve spent together since properly working through our relationship struggles has been nice, but there was an itch that hadn’t been scratched in a while, and it was taking all of my willpower to not throw myself into the Jinbouchou elevator shaft alone.
“Ah, senpai!”
Again… why exactly was I popular on this campus? I may not be the most observant when it came to people, but I at least know that I’d become an urban legend of sorts at this university. Every stranger I passed by campus brought a chorus of whispers. ‘Is that her?’ ‘I think it is…’ ‘That eye…’ none were subtle.
And of course, Akari was always around to call out to me when I got within fifty feet of her. I swear that girl had some sort of tracker on me or something. No wonder Natsumi didn’t like me, in another circumstance it really did look like I was trying to steal her girl.
“Ah, hello Akari.”
“Hello senpai…” huffed a disgruntled looking Natusmi. I almost asked what she was doing on campus, but decided I didn’t really need to know that much.
“Hello to you both. Um… my classes just finished so-”
“Cool!” Akari beamed. “I’m just showing Nattsun around campus!”
“Ah… alright. I didn’t really ask.”
“And you didn’t really have to be a jerk about it, yet here we are.”
She made a good point. Wait, no, I didn’t even initiate this interaction, it’s not on me. “I’ll just… I gotta head out. I hope you have a good time around campus.”
“We will!” Akari cheered, “Plus we’re friends with a legend here at school, name dropping you senpai is an easy way to get some preferential treatment.”
“She’s not my friend.” Natsumi asserted. Really? I’d have thought we were by now, even if it was a distant friendship.
“You… can still name drop me. Just make sure they know I’m not a ghost hunter.”
“Mhm, you sure aren’t.” Akari winked, “Neither am I.”
“You aren’t either…”
“Ehehe, that’s right.” she winked again.
“No, I’m not playing pretend, we aren’t ghost hunters.”
“Ghosts, monsters, doesn’t really matter right? Whatever they are, we can defeat them together.”
Ah, saying it that way made me nostalgic. Not for my time fighting the Otherside with Akari, but with Toriko. Whatever we went through, I could always count on her being right there.
That said, it might be worth trying to get comfortable surviving on my own. You never know when you might get separated, or lost, or sucked in without realizing.
“I’ve got to… go.” I thought about making up an excuse, but leaving it vague was probably best. “Have er… have a nice campus date?”
Just using the word date threw off Natsumi’s idle malice towards me, I figured if it worked on me it would probably work on her. We were pretty similar in a few ways, enough that we didn’t get along great.
“Alright!” Akari tugged a bewildered Natusmi away by the arm, “See you another time senpai!”
And just like that, I’d managed to make it past my final obstacle, and escape the university campus.
I really have improved at social interaction over the past year. Maybe for a normal person, holding two short conversations with people wouldn’t be much of a milestone, but I think my mindset had finally shifted enough for me to recognize the change. I was more comfortable around people in general, I’d actually made some friends, and strangers approaching me on campus had gone from a potential threat to just some annoying guy asking me to ghostbust for them.
I’d stepped back from teetering on the edge of snapping, allowing people into my life… however gradually that might have been.
I’m sure Toriko would be proud. She’d pat me on the head for finally recognizing it, she’d praise me for making friends, make some jealous comment about how she still had to be my number one. As if it could be anyone else.
Maybe if I asked directly she’d take a trip with me over to the other world. No, there was no maybe about it, she definitely would. I just… wasn’t quite ready to mess with the flow we’d found recently, even if said flow didn’t include quite everything I wanted. A part of me wished the Otherside would just snatch me up so it didn’t have to be my decision. Ah, be careful what you wish for.
I didn’t quite notice what was off until the third right on the way to the station, by then I should have escaped the sparser building density into an area that was more compact, but the surroundings seemed firmly locked in place. Actually, looking at it more closely, the buildings around me looked to be sinking into the ground.
I quickly checked to ensure my feet weren’t suffering the same fate, but they seemed firmly planted on top.
By now the scenery was entirely flat concrete, stretching out as far as the eye could see. This clearly wasn’t the grassy fields of the Otherside, but even by the strange standards of the interstitial space, this didn’t feel quite right.
A slightly familiar sound was echoing around me. Strangely enough, it sounded natural. Normally when this world made a strange noise to scare you, it didn’t have a particular source, but this felt distinctly human. Someone was crying, and scanning around, they seemed to be down a set of stairs that led underground.
Logically, heading down there was a terrible idea, but the sobbing was getting on my nerves a little.
Under the flat concrete world, a cave system populated by shoddy looking rock formations acting as bridges, and an upside-down city hanging from the ceiling. Wherever this person was, they were a bit deeper in. If this were reality, I wouldn’t trust these rock arches in the slightest, but the Otherside used shaky foundation as an aesthetic, a visual designed to get you scared. Not for me, I knew this place’s tricks.
Deeper and deeper, crawling through broken windows and traversing down the buildings, the sobbing got closer and closer. At this point, it occurred to me this really could still be fake. A lure set by this world to see if I’d fall for it. Look how stupid this girl is, she really went all the way down there for it? That thought made me want to break something. But I couldn’t lose my temper, not in front of a child.
The crying that resonated through the cavern originated from a random 17th floor cubicle, curled up in a ball trying to wait for the tears to pass her by.
She looked to be elementary school age, though a bit older than Kasumi. Her hair hung down to her shoulders, but her outfit was a bit more rugged than one might expect from a small child.
All that didn’t really matter though. The most notable thing about this girl was that she was the spitting image of Toriko. In fact, I’d seen some of Toriko’s pictures of her youth, this was definitely her.
She must have heard my approach, as she hesitantly glanced up at me. The fear in her eyes washed away as she saw me, presumably because I wasn’t a monster.
“Are you…” she choked out, “Are you also stuck here?”
That was a good question. Now that she’d voiced it, I wasn’t exactly sure how I was supposed to get out.
“I’m… well, maybe, but there’s usually a way out of these places.”
That didn’t seem very convincing to her. I got down on one knee and tried my best to speak a bit more calmly to her.
“Hey, it’s alright, I’ll make sure to get you home.” I offered her my hand, “It looks scarier than it is, trust me. Let’s head out of the cave and see if we can find a way out.”
Slowly, she reached out to take my hand. Maybe she thought she was hallucinating, maybe I thought the same, but the sensation of our hands together indicated to us both that the other was real, it felt grounding.
Not that this kid Toriko would be of much use, but it’s nice not being alone.
“Um, where are we Miss…”
“That’s… a difficult question. It’s another world, where supernatural stuff can happen.” Like younger versions of ourselves passing through time slips, apparently.
“C-Can I fly?”
“Huh? No, why would you think that.”
“I just wanted to if I could… since this place was already magic.”
I had a strong negative reaction to hearing this place described as magic, but I held back on correcting her. I wasn’t about to get into a shouting match with an eight year old.
Getting down here was easy. Climbing back up was a bit trickier. For what it’s worth, young Toriko was surprisingly capable of climbing and leaping when she needed to.
“Mama is in the army!” she’d say, “So I’ve been training extra hard to keep up.”
Regardless of her reason, it made the climb bearable to not have to babysit a useless toddler the whole way up. It also helped that we didn’t run into any entities on the way up. This girl herself was probably the entity, I likely wasn’t going to be able to bring her out.
But on the off chance I could… well, I’d have to try.
Climbing the insides of ruined buildings was difficult, but possible. Encouraging young Toriko across the shaky looking rock arches was a lot harder.
“But what if it falls…”
“It won’t, it just looks unstable.”
“That’s because it’s unstable.”
“It’s not, it’s just trying to scare you.”
“It’s working.”
“It’s the only way across.”
We’d mostly avoided them so far, but the way up to the surface was in sight. Just cross two little bridges and we’d be free. After that… was a problem for me in five minutes.
Toriko crawled across the arch, trying to spread her weight as much as she could. One she’d gotten past them both, I ran to follow. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t die.
“See? Not so bad.”
“That was horrible…”
She took my hand, clenching tight to distract from the fear, and I guided us both up the stairs to… a city street?
Looking behind us, the stairs we’d just ascended were gone.
“Alright, we’re out.”
Oh… oh we’re out. Both of us.
I looked down to my left at the smiling child, a child torn from the past with no home here in the world of the present. She was smiling.
“Woah, I really am in Japan now… Ah, I think Mom took me here once! Can you bring me back home, I know the way.”
A world without her family.
“Hey kid, that’s… not going to be possible.”
“Huh?”
The best way to tell a lie was to incorporate enough truth to seem plausible. I wasn’t about to tell her both her parents are dead.
“This… is the future. You’re in the future.”
Confusion filled her face. “So I couldn’t fly… but I was in the future? Wait, how do you know it’s the future, what if it’s the present?”
“It’s… I just know you in the present Toriko. You’re 21, you go to university around here, and you certainly aren’t a 7 year old child.”
“I’m ten.” she countered, lost in thought. “So… I’m an adult now?”
“You are ten. The you of this time is an adult.”
Starry eyed, she smiled up at me, “I want to meet her! I want to meet me!!!”
“No! Have you ever seen a movie about time travel? Never meet your future or past self, that’s a recipe for disaster.”
“Then bring me home to see Mom.”
“S-Someone else lives there now.” Not entirely true, but close enough. “Listen, I’ll take you to my apartment and figure out how to send you back or whatever.”
“Miss, I don’t even know who you are.”
“Ugh, I’m… Sorawo. Sorawo Kamikoshi. Your future ah…” lie and say lover? No. Accomplice? She might not get it. “Your future… partner.”