Side Story: Return
Apparently, the vehicles that carried people between Celestial Foundations were simply called “lifts.” Yogiri pressed the large red button he found at the center of the lift’s console. That was supposedly all he needed to do, but there was no sign that the lift was moving after he pressed it. Of course, he didn’t really know what it meant to move between Foundations in the first place, so he had no idea whether that was strange or not.
“Oh, look! I think we’re moving!” Tomochika said, staring out a window.
Yogiri stepped alongside her and looked outside to see countless rainbow lights streaming by. “What are those? Stars? This is starting to give me kind of a fairy-tale vibe.”
“It would look lonely if there was nothing at all, so there’s a bit of visual flair for atmosphere,” Kouryu’s voice explained to them.
“Wait, you’re still here?!” Tomochika exclaimed.
“I can’t rest easy until I know you guys made it back safe, can I? If you changed your mind halfway there and turned around, I’d be in trouble.”
“I have no intention of doing so, but could we turn around if we wanted to?”
“If you really want to know, I’ll tell you. I can’t afford to be on your bad side, after all. I know you can use your power no matter how far apart we are. But this isn’t something I want to share so casually. If you really have to know, then ask and I’ll tell you.”
“It’s just idle curiosity, so if you’re that worried, you don’t have to bother. But it’s not just as simple as pressing this button again, is it?” The only button on the console was the one Yogiri had pushed to get them moving. It seemed to be the only way to control the lift.
“Feel free to press it as much as you like. It stopped working after you pressed it the first time.”
“You’re really that worried about us, huh?” Tomochika sighed.
“Anyway, please relax. I won’t bother you unless you call for me.”
“One last question. How long will it take us to get home?”
“It should feel like about thirty minutes. I think you’ve figured this out from someone else, but when you make it home, people won’t think you’ve been gone for a huge amount of time. I can’t give you a concrete number, but it’ll only be like a few minutes to a few dozen minutes have passed.”
“Wasn’t getting to your world instant, though?!” Tomochika said. Their class had been transported on the bus. Yogiri had been asleep at the time, so he didn’t know how it had happened, but Tomochika seemed to find it baffling.
After a while of watching the window, Yogiri got bored and took a seat. There was a table inside the lift, so they had a spot to rest.
Tomochika eventually sat down opposite him. “I really don’t get this Foundation and Axis stuff.”
“It’s totally outside our realm of understanding, huh?” Yogiri agreed.
I suppose this is the proper way one should use to travel between worlds, Mokomoko added.
“Oh, you’re still here?” Tomochika asked, looking towards the ghost now floating behind her.
Of course I am! Why would you think I disappeared?!
“I mean, you appeared after I traveled to another world, so I figured you’d disappear after we got back.”
I have always been guarding you. You were just never able to perceive me!
“But, like, what are you going to do now? Are you just going to be floating around me all the time? It’ll be pretty hard to live my life if I see you everywhere.”
Oh, this child still has not learned any respect for her ancestors...
But seeing something that no one else could certainly risked making things awkward for Tomochika. If she responded to events happening around her in a way that was different from other people, it could cause problems in her daily life.
No matter. Once we return, I will be able to travel around to some extent. I have no intention of spending every waking moment following you.
“Thank goodness!”
You seem far too relieved...
Tomochika hadn’t awakened to any sort of supernatural ability to see spirits. The only one she could see was Mokomoko. Yogiri was the same, but they had been uneasy about how it would all work out. They knew they could see a spirit once they realized that it existed, so if they encountered some spiritual phenomenon, they might end up being able to see the entity causing it. And if that happened numerous times, they might develop the ability to see spirits in general.
Hopefully I’m just worrying over nothing, Yogiri thought. At this point, he didn’t feel like there was anything to gain from dwelling on the matter.
“Did you know the world was set up this way, Mokomoko?”
Indeed. I knew of worlds outside our own, and of the Upper Level Information Layer that exists above them, though I was unaware that one could use the Celestial Axis to travel between worlds.
“So you were only able to exchange information?”
Precisely. While I was aware that something out there existed, I could not learn about the particulars. I thought perhaps they were information-based life forms, but it appears they were physical beings after all.
“I guess there are all kinds of worlds...”
Well...truth be told, you having knowledge of them is in and of itself a large problem...
“Not that I wanted to know any of this,” Yogiri replied. With him having no knowledge of these worlds, the chances of him affecting them were next to zero. But now he had learned other worlds existed. Though he wouldn’t proactively be attacking them or anything, the chance of them getting caught in the cross fire as he dealt with other issues had increased.
“This stuff about other worlds is interesting and all, but aren’t things going to be really difficult for us once we get back? What about our school trip?”
“I guess it’ll be canceled.”
I cannot imagine it will be that simple. A number of your classmates have died, after all, Mokomoko remarked.
“Oh, right,” Tomochika said.
Did you honestly forget?
“Of course not! But...I guess it’s something I just sort of accepted, since we couldn’t do anything about it!”
“Maybe it’s not my place to say this, but you’re pretty tough, aren’t you?” Yogiri commented.
“That’s not really the kind of compliment a girl wants to hear!”
Well, a good portion of her psyche has been compartmentalized for combat. The Dannoura Way covers most of that. Besides, the current Dannoura Way prizes emotional refinement as much as physical!
“You make it sound like I’ve been genetically modified or something.”
Unfortunately, the best we can manage in the present age is selective breeding. We cannot risk going beyond that in today’s society.
“What exactly were you doing in the past, then?” Yogiri asked, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.
“Anyway, let’s put all that depressing talk behind us!”
The deaths of your classmates amounts to no more than “depressing talk”?
“What do we want to do when we get back? We should talk about that instead!”
“After we get back? I guess I have a lot of games to catch up on.” Though it wasn’t like he didn’t enjoy his portable games, Yogiri’s real desire was to play on the big screen.
“Going back to your hunting games?” Tomochika asked.
“I only played that one because it was popular at the time. Normally, I play RPGs.”
“What we just went through was basically a fantasy RPG, but you didn’t seem all that excited about it.”
“I think I was pretty excited,” Yogiri replied. From monsters, to beastkin, to dungeons, to otherworldly sights...though he hadn’t caused much of a fuss at seeing them, he had found it all quite intriguing.
“You didn’t show it at all!”
“What about you? What do you want to do when you get back?”
“Hmm...maybe go clothes shopping?”
“Didn’t you buy an awful lot of clothes on our trip?”
“Even if I brought them back with me, I couldn’t exactly wear clothes like that back home!”
“Oh, is that it?” It felt like bringing things back from another world would cause problems, but whatever the reason, it seemed like they had made the right choice in not doing so.
“What about you, Takatou? What kind of clothes do you wear?”
“What kind of clothes? I mean, basically the same as always. Like a T-shirt and jeans.”
“Yeah, I guess a lot of guys are like that.”
As their conversation wandered, from what stores they wanted to visit to what foods they wanted to eat, the scenery outside the window changed. The sparkling lights flying by disappeared.
“Does that mean we made it?”
“I wonder. It’s kind of hard to tell what’s going on.” It still didn’t feel like they’d moved at all, so it was hard to gauge whether they had stopped. As they puzzled over the problem, the door of the lift opened on its own.
“I guess that means we’re here?”
“We don’t have much choice but to get off.” Picking up his bag, Yogiri stood up and walked over to the door. The view outside was the same dim corridor they had seen before boarding the lift. But nothing would change if they didn’t disembark, so Yogiri stepped off the lift, followed soon after by Tomochika. They still seemed to be in the Celestial Axis, as the area looked identical to the one Kouryu had brought them to earlier.
“So, assuming we’re here...where’s the exit?” Yogiri asked. There didn’t seem to be any way out.
“We maintain control of the Celestial Axis. You cannot simply enter and exit as you please.”
Yogiri turned towards the new voice and saw a woman in an ancient-looking robe. It seemed even older than the Heian-era clothing Mokomoko wore.
“Who are you?”
“I am a god.”
“I see. You look like someone who’d show up in Japanese mythology. You’re from Earth, right?”
“Correct. This is the world you two came from.”
“Is it okay for a god to wear such culturally specific clothing?” Yogiri asked.
“There are far too many gods in this world to count. I am responsible only for a small part of Japan.”
“Huh...so there really are gods...” Tomochika seemed impressed. They had met people claiming to be gods in the other world, but that had been an entirely different world, so it hadn’t quite felt the same. Meeting a god from her own world felt real in a whole different sense.
To be fair, even I am rather close to a god in some ways, Mokomoko commented.
“Among the countless gods, I suppose there are some at such a low level. However, they hardly matter.”
“Apparently, you’re really low level,” Tomochika echoed.
I hardly matter? Mokomoko asked, despondent.
“I kind of want to go home. Can you get us out of here?” Yogiri interjected.
“Of course. But just in case, I must ask you: as of right now, it is still possible to return to the world you just came from. Are you not interested?”
“Not at all.”
“I see. That is rather aggravating. Here I thought I had finally gotten rid of you.”
“Wait, does this god actually dislike us?” Tomochika asked.
“Worry not. The gods of the present age hardly ever interfere with human endeavors. The most we can do is tilt your fortune-telling to a negative light.”
“That’s still kind of annoying!” It seemed she was saying that asking anything of the gods was next to pointless.
“This is your final chance. Once you leave the Celestial Axis, you will have no option to return.”
“That’s fine.” There was nothing for Yogiri to think about.
“Then I shall send you inside. Are you happy to appear in the place you vanished?”
“I guess that’s a good question. If we suddenly appeared back home, things would look pretty suspicious. Yeah, that works.”
“Very well.”
The scenery in front of them instantly transformed.
“Ah! Gah! It’s so cold!” The gusting snow seemed to rob Tomochika of much of her vocabulary. With all that had happened, they had almost forgotten that their school trip had been to go skiing. Being sent back to the place they vanished from meant they were going to appear in the snowy mountains.
“I probably have some clothing for this weather in here.” Yogiri pulled a sweater out of his bag. It made sense that they’d have prepared for this climate if they were going somewhere so cold for their trip.
Tomochika followed suit, hurriedly digging through her things for a down jacket. “So, where exactly are we?”
“Hmm...we were in the other world after going through a tunnel, so we’re probably pretty close to there?”
Fool. You are back on Earth. You can just use the GPS on your phone, Mokomoko quipped.
“Oh, right.”
Yogiri pulled out his phone and checked their location. Luckily, they still had reception, so he was able to find out they weren’t that far from the ski resort.
“The date is the same as our school trip’s...and it’s about 7 p.m. That’s probably close to when we were expecting to arrive, right?” Having connected to the network, his phone was able to synchronize its date and time again. As Kouryu had mentioned, barely any time seemed to have passed in this world.
“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Tomochika replied. They could check the paperwork for their trip to find out for sure, but they had better things to do than stand around in a snowstorm and read. The two began walking towards the ski resort.
◇ ◇ ◇
They made it to the ski resort and asked for shelter. The story they came up with was that the bus had crashed, the two of them had been thrown outside, and they had barely managed to make it out themselves.
The bus had left this world, and a number of the students who had been on it were now dead, so any sort of search effort would turn up a lot of questions, but for now they just needed to get through the present. Yogiri was sure the Institute would handle the rest. They wasted no time worrying about the law when they acted, so they could smooth things over if the situation became difficult.
Naturally, the school trip was canceled, and the Institute sent a car to bring Yogiri and Tomochika home.
“And how exactly are we getting out of this?!” Tomochika exclaimed.
“The ninjas will probably figure something out,” Yogiri answered.
“These ninjas sound incredible!”
As they sat in the back of the car, Yogiri’s phone rang.
“Hellooooo! You guys doing good?” It was Carol.
Assuming Tomochika would want to listen in, Yogiri switched to speakerphone. “You guys made it back too?”
“Almost everyone who was still alive made it back! We’re at the ski resort!”
It seemed they had only been half an hour or so behind Yogiri and Tomochika. Considering the difference in the passage of time between the two worlds, they had apparently made it back almost simultaneously, but there was a bit more of a delay with the god letting them back into Earth.
“‘Almost’?”
“Hanakawa decided to stay on the other side!”
Their homeroom teacher, the bus driver, and the surviving classmates had all made it back.
“What was Hanakawa thinking?!” Tomochika cried.
“Well...if he wanted to stay, I guess they couldn’t force him to leave.”
“Hi, it’s Ninomiya. I’ve made contact with the Institute. They have already started moving to take care of the situation, so no need to worry.”
“That’s good to hear, as long as they don’t erase my memory!” Carol chimed in.
The cover story the Institute decided on was that the bus had fallen from a rural road. A number of the occupants had died in the crash, and since there were no bodies to show, they would provide dummies to take their place.
“Wait, they can erase people’s memories?” Tomochika asked.
“Sounds likely to me,” said Yogiri.
The Institute had plenty of technology the rest of the world didn’t know about. It wouldn’t be strange if they had some sort of drug that erased your memory.
“Sounds like an evil organization to me.”
“Yeah, Asaka said the same thing.”
“Okay, see you guys at school!”
“Are we seriously going to be able to return to school like normal?”
“Back when I was in elementary school, a full bus of us got kidnapped, but we ended up making things work.”
“What kind of life have you had?” Tomochika muttered.
The car ride lasted through the night, getting them home as the sun rose in the morning.
“All right, see you later. I’ll talk to you again once things have calmed down a bit. Since we’re friends now!” Tomochika left first, getting off at her house.
After a bit more driving, Yogiri made it back to his apartment. Waiting out front was the woman who had stood in as a parent for him—Asaka Takatou—and their dog, Nikori.
“I have to say, I have no idea what’s going on here. What happened?!”
Asaka was one of the few people who knew about Yogiri’s true nature. She had likely been told more of the behind-the-scenes details than anyone else, so it made sense that she was extremely confused.
“It’s, uhh, kind of hard to explain. But it wasn’t that big of a deal.”
“Really? I’m glad to hear it.” Asaka was used to these kinds of things happening at this point.
“Anyway, I’m back.” Though it seemed a bit late, Yogiri still felt it was appropriate to say it.
Asaka responded with a bright smile. “Welcome home.”
And finally, it truly felt like he had come home.
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