Chapter Text
Bored. Arataka drums his fingers on his knee and squashes his face even harder into the window. If this was any more than a twenty-minute drive he would be dying right now, but at least they’re almost there. The bus stops (screech) at a traffic light in the latest teeny tiny nowhere town, and Arataka peels his cheek off the glass to look out at the teeny tiny nowhere shopfronts. Everyone looks incredibly folksy and weathered because probably every one of them is a farmer. Outside the corner store an old woman is leaning on the doorframe, talking to a guy with a truly heinous bowl cut. Hairstyles that ugly should be illegal, seriously.
The bus pulls forward again and Arataka smacks his head into the back of his seat. Next to him Kurosawa rocks back and stabilizes herself, but doesn’t look up from her game. She’s playing Pokémon. What is she, eleven? They’re in middle school. Arataka does play kiddy games too, but he has the dignity not to do it in public.
Finally they arrive at Gouda Farm. Arataka practically jumps out of his seat as soon as Kurosawa gets into the aisle. He’s so ready to actually get to walk around for once. He might even be able to ‘accidentally’ get lost so he can explore the parts of the farm they’re not showing the class. Are there secrets on farms? Probably somewhere. If all else fails he can at least climb a tree or something.
The guy who runs the farm is waiting for them out front of the gate. Arataka usually pictures farmers as, like, middle aged men with a little bit of a stoop, but this guy is young and super built. He looks like he could fill in for an entire ox or lift up a car or something. One of his sideburns alone could lift up a car. “Good morning, class 1-5,” he says. “I’m Gouda Musashi, and this is my family’s farm. Your teacher asked me to show you the work I do here and talk to you about how it’s important to the economy. We’ll be walking through one of my fields on the way to the house, so follow me.”
Gouda starts talking about how sweet potatoes are a super important crop for the local economy, which is pretty pointless in Arataka’s opinion since he could just look this up online. He hangs back at the end of the blobby line of middle schoolers and picks a blade of grass to try to make into a whistle. Once he gets bored of that (he’s never figured out the knack of grass whistles) he picks one of the sweet potato leaves and starts shredding it. The worst part is they’re just fields so it’s totally flat and there’s no way he can claim to be lost if he sneaks off. So he picks a rock and kicks it in front of him all the way to the house, which is a totally normal farmhouse.
Gouda introduces his parents, who are sitting on the porch and says there are only a few workers here right now because it’s not harvest time. Apparently he has another building where they sleep during the harvest. Arataka has no idea if that’s normal or not. While they’re walking past the house on the way to the barn, he gets up on his tiptoes to try to peer through the window. There’s just a normal kitchen with normal trashy knickknacks inside. He decides he’ll get lost after they see the barn.
Luckily, it’s in a grove of trees, so after Gouda shows them his farming equipment and cows and giant bags of chicken feed and stuff Arataka lags behind the corner of the barn until it’s quiet again. First he goes back in and looks around at the equipment Gouda didn’t explain. Some of it looks totally arcane and he can’t even guess its purpose. Some of it looks like torture devices. He has fun for a couple minutes imagining what it does, and then he gets distracted when something meows.
‘Something’ is obviously a cat, but it takes him a minute to figure out where it is. It’s sitting on the top of one of the empty stalls looking at him, a gray and white, kind of fluffy cat. “Hey,” he says. The cat meows and jumps down, and it comes and rubs itself against his legs. “Is it true that you do that so I’ll be your territory and not belong to any other cats?” he asks it. “Because I’m not sure if I should be flattered or not. This is all very sudden.” He’s always flattered when an animal approaches him, unless it’s a gross and/or scary one like a horse. He holds out his hand for the cat to sniff and then starts scratching it between the ears. “So, what do you do for fun around here?”
The cat just purrs.
After a little while he goes out of the barn again and starts looking for a good tree to climb. They’re all pretty good—they’re old twisty oaks with lots of branches, and he manages to climb three of them before he’s found out.
“What are you doing here?” asks a voice from the ground. Arataka jumps and almost loses his grip on the branch he’s holding.
“That depends who you are,” he says, clinging to the branch to look down. It’s another guy with an ugly bowl cut, or maybe the same guy from town. Is it a popular hairstyle around here? He’s wearing a high-collared gray coat that’s probably way too warm for today, but he doesn’t look suspicious. He mostly looks like someone Arataka couldn’t pick out of a lineup, and that’s even more suspicious than if he had any notable features. Besides the dumb haircut. “I’m not going to just trust any adult, you know. I’m not stupid.”
“Oh,” says the man. “I work here. I just came back from grocery shopping in town. Are you from the middle school group that was coming today?”
“Yeah, that’s me,” says Arataka. He should probably start lying before the guy asks him any questions, because he’ll look less guilty that way. “I kind of got lost, so I tried to climb a tree to see if I could see where my class went but then I got a little bit stuck.”
“Let me help you down,” says the man. He stretches out one hand as if that’s going to be at all helpful when Arataka is three meters up a tree, and then—woah. Arataka feels like he’s suddenly floating, like gravity stopped affecting his body at all, and everything looks kind of blue and extra shiny. When his knees touch the ground and gravity comes back, he falls onto his hands and stares at the grass in bewilderment.
“What the fuuu—heck was that?” he manages, looking up at the weird farm guy.
“Ah.” The man rubs the back of his neck and avoids meeting Arataka’s eyes. “Sorry. I forgot—you’re from the city, aren’t you? Most people around here are already used to my psychic powers. Grandma Amane said half the town threw away their ladders in the last five years, but I think that’s an exaggeration.”
“Your what? Your psychic powers? Did you levitate me?” The man is nodding, so Arataka says, “Can you show me on something else? I didn’t get to see what it looks like from the outside! Please?” He’s pulling the ‘dumb excitable kid’ card but he’s also actually excited. Psychic powers! He definitely didn’t think those were real!
The guy looks kind of confused, but he reaches out his hand again and a bunch of rocks come up from the ground and start orbiting him, all glowing bright blue. He smiles down at Arataka, and offers him a hand up—when Arataka stands, he realizes the guy is actually pretty big. He’s not Gouda big, but he’s pretty broad in the shoulders and he’s taller than Arataka will ever be. His face is really round, though, so he kind of looks like a kid who happens to be really large.
“I’m Kageyama Shigeo,” he says. “I work with Musashi and his parents. By the way, it probably would have made more sense to go back to the house and ask Mr. and Mrs. Gouda where the tour was, rather than climbing up a tree.”
“Pleased to meet you, Kageyama-san,” says Arataka, concealing how much he wants to roll his eyes. “I’m Reigen Arataka. I go to Salt Mid.” They walk in silence for about fifteen seconds, and then Arataka says, “So what do you do with your psychic powers? Are you a superhero? Please tell me you don’t just change light bulbs for people.”
“I don’t change a lot of light bulbs,” says Kageyama. “Most people don’t bother to call me for small things like that. Mostly they ask for my help with spirits who are troubling them. I exorcise evil spirits, but there are also a lot of spirits who just have trouble coexisting with living humans who shouldn’t be exorcised. When it’s one of them, I mediate between the human and the spirit to try to reach a compromise.”
“Wow! Could I come and watch sometime? I wouldn’t interfere at all. I’ve just never seen a spirit before.”
“Um.” Kageyama looks kind of flustered. Success. “You probably can’t see spirits at all, since you’re not psychic.”
“But I’d get to see something, right? You could explain your methods and what you do—it’d be like a farm tour, but instead, a psychic tour! I’d be learning lots of stuff about your contribution to the local economy!”
“Um,” says Kageyama. “I don’t know…” He’s losing him! Time to turn up the pathos.
“Pleeeeaase? It’d really make me happy and I’d learn so much and I could write a report for school on how cool you are. Or I could never mention it to anyone if it’s a secret, I promise!”
“I guess so?”
Hook, line, and sinker. “Great!” gushes Arataka. “When would be a good time for me to come? I have a bike, so you wouldn’t have to worry about anything.”
“A weekend would probably work the best for you…” Kageyama says, looking lost. “I suppose I’m free all day…”
“Perfect. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Oh, and there’s my class, I’d better get back to them!” Arataka grabs Kageyama’s hand and shakes it vigorously, then sprints off to the back of the tour group before he can change his mind.