/jp/ - Otaku Culture

I wondered if there was a guidebook for what to do when your kidnapper isn't aware that they've kidnapped you. Maybe Agatha Chris Q would be interested in a novel about that experience? I was fairly certain that Miss Kosuzu from Suzunaan could pass the idea along, though perhaps revealing that I was being kidnapped by a major figure and without her even realising it was happening wasn't a good idea. Was I supposed to wake her up and inform her that she'd kidnapped us? Just try and sneak away? I already had a suspicion that wherever we'd ended up, it was not within walking distance of Gensokyo. The only real positive to the whole situation was that Chen did know that we'd disappeared somewhere, and hopefully she could inform Ran, who could then hopefully try and get us home. Not that I expected a particularly swift response. Given my luck, I half expected to be stuck wherever we were for a long while.

Once Yamame and I had managed to get ourselves under control, we got right back to figuring out just what the hell had happened to us. "Can she do those gap things even when she's asleep?" Yamame whispered to me. It appeared so, I whispered back. I'd figured it was something she needed to be awake to do, but clearly not. I wondered how we had even ended up here. Even for me, a gap opening up right in front of us in the middle of the snow somewhere in the Bamboo Forest of the Lost seemed a little bit improbable. Perhaps not entirely improbable, but definitely fairly improbable. "Should we, er, try and wake her up? Ask her to send us back?" Yamame whispered again. It was an appealing prospect if only for the fact that we could go home, or at least go back to being lost in the snow outside the Bamboo Forest of the Lost instead of being lost in who knows where.

Still, I thought that waking up the definitely powerful youkai so she could see two figures standing over her in the dark was probably an awful decision. At best, she'd freak out. At worst, she might try and kill us. No, best leave her be for now, I finally whispered, then signalled Yamame to come with me instead. There was a bedroom door, and it was thankfully slightly ajar, so we could try and leave the room without being heard. Just before we did try and leave, I looked over at the window again. The curtain was still covering it, but I could see some sort of lights out there. I wanted to go and take another look, but at that moment, Hearn rolled over in the bed and mumbled dreamily. "You're late, Re..." But she seemed to slip back off into the Dream World before she could finish speaking. I wondered if she was talking to Reimu in her dreams. Thankfully, she hadn't woken up, so I breathed a sigh of relief and tried to gently push the door open, wincing every time it let out a slight creak. After a few moments, it was open enough for us to slip through, and Hearn hadn't woken up, so Yamame and I tiptoed through the door and out into a dark corridor.

The corridor we'd ended up in wasn't entirely dark. There was moonlight spilling across the floor and onto the wall through a large window at one end, and at the other end the corridor opened up into a large room. There were doors across the corridor, and a staircase just a little to the right from the door that we'd exited from, heading downward. I looked over at Yamame and pointed at the staircase, but she shook her head. "There might be other people here." She whispered. That was a good point. Even if Hearn was asleep, it was entirely possible that Ran could be downstairs, and if we scared her, I imagined that we'd be in for a world of hurt before she got herself under control.

Instead, Yamame pointed toward the open room at the end of the corridor. Tiptoeing over, I was surprised by what I saw. It was a fairly spacious living room of sorts, though there wasn't a kitchen, and the building was clearly not made out of any materials I regularly saw in the village. The floor here was tiled, white slabs that I couldn't imagine would be very warm at this time of year. The room itself was cool, but not overwhelmingly so. I felt comfortable enough in my normal clothes, though I imagined that Yamame might be uncomfortably hot before long. The entire wall here was taken up by glass, though there was a door and it looked like it led out onto a balcony. A large couch was against one of the walls, with a small table and a big, rectangular box opposite it. I had no idea what the thing was, but it looked like the front of it was made of glass too, and it was dark at the moment. Maybe it lit up. It was a strange place to put a light, but I assumed it was some weird Outside World custom.