site 22: Miyuu Aikawa

Monday, February 22nd

Yuta Gamon, or Gamo, was a type of person I’d never encountered before.

Calling him an otaku wouldn’t be quite right. I had some otaku in my class, but he was more... to put it quite bluntly... just obnoxious.

Right now, he was muttering to himself as he fiddled with the switches on that radio he always carried around. It kind of looked like he was talking to the radio.

“What I’m saying here is that we need something with more impact than just an ordinary interview. Maybe we should just have Kirikiri Basara take over Myu’s Nicco-Nico Live Fortune-Telling. The best option would be to have her do a photo shoot in a bikini, but that’s no different than your average idol, and it’s not fair to ask an amateur to go that far. Hint, hint.”

“You don’t have to hint. It’s not happening.” I ignored him and took a sip of the “Prototype Ultra-Lucky Mango Lassi” that Master Izumi had just brought me. A sweet and sour taste filled my mouth. Oh, wow! This is really good. I don’t know what’s lucky about it, though.

Gamo must have been shocked by my cold refusal, because he sank into the sofa and sulked.

Whenever he asked for something, it was always crazy, but when I told him no, he always quickly dropped it. He was a little wimpier than I thought he would be. Maybe he was afraid of someone not liking him.

In other words... he was only tough on the internet? “I know, I know. This is just my personal wish, or maybe what I’m imagining. I mean, of course, I’ve imagined you wearing a swimsuit, but that doesn’t mean I’d actually want to do it. I’m not an idol producer or anything. But I know there’s demand for photos of you in a bikini. You know it, baby.”

“Don’t call me ‘baby.’” And anyway, it was winter. You’d have to be an idiot to wear a swimsuit when it was this cold out.

I felt cold pretty easily, so to me, that would be suicide. My body temperature dropped just thinking about it. It felt like I was going to start to shiver, so I pulled my hoodie over my head. I didn’t like the cold.

“Man, what’s the best way to do this? The nuance is really important here. Depending on the way we tell everybody that you’re working for us now, we could get loads of praise or start a huge flamewar. If we make it look like me and Myu-Pom are too close, the fans will get jealous, and the eggs on Twitter will start coming after me. Just me, you see. I want to avoid that.”

“I don’t think I’ve got that many passionate fans. I’m not really an idol or anything.”

“You don’t get it! You don’t understand your own popularity at all.” Gamo pointed his index finger right at my face in frustration.

I wish he wouldn’t point at people like that.

“Dancers and singers on Nico get a ton of attention! There’s even scandals involving them. You’ve got a ton of views on your account, and you’ve been on TV, too. You’ve got dozens of times more fans than your average idol. I know it!”

“Huh...” He probably didn’t have to worry about any of that, I thought.

Still, he sure liked to talk...

When I first met him at school, he was much more awkward. Like, I’d never seen a boy so shy.

When he talked, he always sounded so wimpy, too.

It was pretty tiring to listen to him, maybe.

Would being with him really open up the future? It’s not like I doubted my own power, but he didn’t look like the kind of person who would open up the future for me. I was feeling super-nervous.

“Gamotan, you’re worrying too much!” Narusawa, who had been dancing around the room and singing, said to him. Her huge breasts wobbled as she spoke. Those things were so big that, even as a girl, I couldn’t help but stare.

“You used to update Kirikiri Basara every day, but you haven’t for days! Everybody’s waiting for your update! They’re waiting! Ting! Ting!”

“She’s right. I’ve seen comments from people worried about you.” Gamo’s eyes went wide.

“Huh? The Basariters are worried about me? Seriously? I thought they hated me, but they didn’t! Man, I feel like I’m going to cry!” “Basariters” was his nickname for people who commented on Kirikiri Basara. They wrote negative comments about the occult beneath his articles. Their specialized knowledge was what made Kirikiri Basara such a unique site! ...At least, that’s what Gamo had told me.

“So what are the comments like, Myu-Pom?” It was hard to answer when he was staring at me with those shining, puppy-dog eyes, but...

Was it okay to tell him?

“Most of them said things like, ‘The admin’s out of stuff to talk about? Buh-bye.’”

Gamo said, “They’re not worried at all,” and slumped onto the table.

“Screw ’em. Screw the Basariters. I’ve got stuff to talk about. And you Basariters have been a bunch of wimps lately. The number of comments hasn’t gone up at all! And I haven’t seen Sarai show up once since Myu-Pom wrecked him.”

That’s because none of your articles are any good... is what I almost said, but I stopped myself at the last second.

“Oh, you just thought that my articles were boring, didn’t you?”

“Myu? That’s not... ahahaha...” I tried to laugh it off, but... I don’t think I did a very good job.

“The reason we’re not getting many comments is that all the articles on you are breaking news.” There were three articles on me up on the site right now.

“The Whole Internet’s Talking About Teenage Fortune-Teller Myu Aikawa.” That was an aggregator article about me. And then there was last week’s advertisment post that was uploaded just before my livestream.

After that, there was another ad for me, about the TV program I was on.

“True, but except for the first one, they’re breaking news articles. They’re interesting when they happen, but maybe not interesting later.”

“That’s why the hit counter went crazy after they were uploaded, but it didn’t last. We need something more like a ‘Myu Aikawa Special’ that’s still worth going back to later. Which is why that swimsuit photo shoot—”

“It’s not happening.” Who knew if anybody would want to read an article about me, anyway?

Gamo thought I was a lot more special than I really was.

“At this rate, Kirikiri Basara is doomed! ☆ Saraba Basara! ♪ Saraba Basara! ♪” Narusawa was singing and dancing.

Did she get that from when I’d messed the name up? “All right, Ryotasu, go interview Professor Hashigami for us then. Remember how I just made you Special Correspondent?”

“Pohyahyah?”

“The new school year starts in April, so he’s gonna be busy, right? This is our chance.”

“Correspondent! ☆ Correspondent! ☆ Correspondents get the best deals! Yesterday they gave me half-off oranges at the fruit stand in Harmonica Alley! It was such a good deal that I bought a whole box! ☆ So now my fingers have been orange all day! ☆”

“No, um... Ryotasu? I’m not talking about oranges.” Gamo was seriously weird, but Narusawa was even weirder.

She would start singing or dancing, or saying weird things out of nowhere, but at times she could be astonishingly perceptive. But it also felt like she basically never listened to what anyone else had to say.

An... unusual girl like her would be sure to make waves at school. But I’d never heard anybody talk about her in the year or so since I’d started going to that school. I couldn’t remember passing by her in the hallway, either.

Maybe she was pretending to be a different kind of person at school? If she was, maybe she was like me. Like how I was both Miyuu and Myu.

“Come on, Gamotan, sniff my fingers. You’ll go ‘Waaah!’”

“Hey, stop it!” Man, those two are really close. They started messing around the minute you let your guard down. Maybe it was more accurate to say that Narusawa was messing with Gamo.

It was hard for a newcomer like me to interrupt them. And actually, it was really hard to say anything when they were flirting with each other like that.

Was I overthinking things? I didn’t want to spend the whole day just sitting here talking about nothing. We were supposed to be here to figure out Kirikiri Basara’s future plans. But Gamo kept worrying about the same thing over and over. And Narusawa was just playing around, and not really participating in the conversation.

We weren’t going to get anywhere like this.

“Um...”

“Mmm?”

“Is there some kind of rule that Kirikiri Basara uses to pick the articles it writes?” So I decided to interrupt them and ask a “new girl” question.

“You don’t talk about things that are old, or that happen outside Japan, right?”

“That’s right. If we wrote about old stuff, we’d just be another page about urban legends. There’s a ton of those already.”

“So that means it’s fine as long as it’s new?”

“It can’t just be new, though. First, it has to happen in Japan. Especially somewhere near the Chuo rail line in Tokyo. Ideally, it’s something that happens in Kichijoji.” That was a pretty narrow range, then.

“Why?”

“It makes it easier to go investigate it. Make sense?”

“Myu...” I immediately regretted asking a serious question.

“But Gamotan, Gamotan, you’ve never actually gone anywhere to investigate an article for Kirikiri Basara.”

“Umm... That’s because we’ve never really had to.” In other words, he was just lazy. He might not have been taking this web site as seriously as I thought.

I gave him a look that said “Work harder,” but he refused to look at me. Grr... Do your job!

“Um, also, we avoid things that are too complicated and hard to follow. I mean, if you write something complicated, only smart people can read it, right? That’s a terrible way to get hits. I want something that idiots can read.” The real reason was probably that he was too lazy to look stuff up. No, not probably. Definitely. I was starting to get a feel for who Gamo really was.

But at the same time, he was probably right. I’d read most of the articles on Kirikiri Basara over the past few days, and they were all quick reads that were easy to understand. That was probably really important.

“Also, there’s one thing that’s more important than anything else when I’m deciding what to write about on Kirikiri Basara.” One thing? Gamo paused dramatically, then looked at me, and then Ryotasu, and finally, toward Master Izumin behind the counter.

“Hey, Gamota. Why are you staring at me? Did you fall in love? Sorry. I’m not into guys, heheh.”

“You’re lying,” I thought to myself. But I didn’t say it.

Gamo said, “You’re lying,” in a voice so small I could barely hear it, and then made a “bleh” sound.

“You’re lying! ☆” Narusawa said, and then she started to dance.

Nobody really wanted to find out if he was lying or not, though, so we didn’t say anything more. As for Narusawa’s dance show... I decided to ignore that.

“What’s the most important thing?”

“How easy is it for the Basariters to rip things apart?” “Rip it apart” was a phrase that I saw used all the time on Kirikiri Basara. It meant to scientifically and logically disprove something... supposedly.

“So it’s best if it just seems a little shady. If it’s too serious, or too obviously a fake, it doesn’t do as well.”

“I see... I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

“Gamotan’s amazing, huh? He’s really thought about this.”

“I may not look it, but I’m a very popular blogger. Or at least, trying to be one.” Gamo stuck out his chest.

But—

“Does that mean that you think I’m a little shady too?”

“Oh, uh...” Gamo started to fidget and glance around the room.

“You’re trying to have the Basariters cut me up, aren’t you? That’s really mean!”

“No, no, wait. Your articles are different...”

I chuckled. “I was just kidding,” I said.

And it didn’t really matter to me what the Basariters thought. It would be kind of a shock if they were mean to me, and I might cry again, but I believed in my power. My goal wasn’t to be a famous fortune-teller.

“Hey, hey, Gamotan. How long is Kirikiri Basara going to stay shut down?”

“Ryotasu, I can’t remember you ever looking forward to Kirikiri Basara’s updates that much.”

“Sometimes there’s something that’s always there, and then it goes away, right? That’s when you realize how important it was to you. ☆” Even listening to her say that made me blush, and she said it with a big smile on her face. Narusawa was cute, but there was something else about her, too.

Gamo must’ve felt embarrassed too, because he was blushing bright red.

“I’ve got a stock of things to write about piled up. I’ve been so busy thinking about Myu-Pom that I haven’t updated the site, that’s all.” That’s what he said, but it sounded like an excuse.

“What do you have, for example?”

“I’m warming up an article on that ‘Gloomy Sunday’ song I heard from my radio.”

“Ding! ☆ It’s all warmed up! ☆”

Come to think of it, he’d said he still didn’t know what had caused that.

That was crazy, wasn’t it? A song, playing from a speaker when the power was off. Me, Gamo, Narusawa, and Master Izumin had all heard it, and none of us knew what the cause was.

In the end, we’d just settled on Gamo’s radio being broken that day. No one had ever come up with a better explanation.

I suddenly remembered the song’s melody, and shivered. Maybe it was better not to think about it too much.

“Samurai Gamonosuke? Is there anything else you’re warming up?” Gamo grinned in answer to her question.

He moved the radio to the side of the table and got out his laptop.

“Well for example, they say that God appears at Inokashira Park. Mostly on weekday afternoons.” He was saying something really weird.

“Ahaha, God appears at the park? And only on weekday afternoons? Man, that’s hilarious.”

“It’s not a joke. God doesn’t show up often, but it does happen.”

“Wow! I want to meet God!”

“Does it have something to do with that torii arch or something?” There was a shrine to the god Benzaiten next to the lake in Inokashira Park. I think I remembered going there with Dad when I was little.

But Gamo shook his head. “Oh, it’s not a serious god like that.”

I didn’t know that there were such a thing as a non-serious god.

“It’s a self-proclaimed god.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Okay, got it. I’ll put this as plainly as I can. The best way to describe him is... He’s a homeless guy, probably.”

Wait. Seriously? That was lame.

According to Gamo, this self-proclaimed god would appear at the park sometimes on weekday afternoons, and give crazy speeches in a loud voice.

“There’s threads on 2ch that follow him. He says stuff about the world’s destruction starting in Musashino or something. He’s one of those ‘I have to save the world from a conspiracy theory’ types of nuts.”

“Can I see him, too?”

“It’d be hard for a student to go on a weekday afternoon. There’s no real schedule for when he appears, too. The day of the week and time are mostly random. Some days he doesn’t show up at all.”

So we’d just have to hope we ran into him by chance, huh?

“So once spring break came around, I was going to go looking for God. You know, if we had an article titled ‘Interview with God!’ it would get a ton of hits.”

“Wouldn’t the Basariters get mad at you? You’d be tricking them.”

“Haha, you don’t get it! You don’t get it at all, Myu-Pom.” He sighed at me in irritation. It was kind of aggravating to have someone mock me so openly.

“You never heard of the Bourbon House threads on 2ch? It’s the same thing as that. There’s kind of an unspoken harmony between the people who trick someone with a thread title and the people who enjoy being tricked. Knowing the Basariters, they’d love it.”

Is that how it works?

“Hey, instead of covering that weird god, let me give you a special local story.” Master Izumin had finished wiping his glasses. He came out from behind the bar and grinned.

“A friend told me about this weird shop they found in Harmonica Alley.”

Harmonica Alley was a tiny little shopping street near Kichijoji Station. Most of the place was bars, so it was busy morning and night.

“Harmonica Alley, huh?” Gamo reacted immediately.

“Is that the House of Crimson?”

“Oh, yeah! That’s the name of it! Gamota, did you know about it?”

“Who do you think I am? I’m the admin of Kirikiri Basara, the NEET God himself. That’s one of the other stories I’ve got warming up on the pile. Let me see here—” Gamo started to fiddle with the touch pad on his PC.

“Here it is. This place, right?” He turned the LCD screen of the laptop towards Master Izumin, with another big grin on his face.

I saw a black background, with “The House of Crimson” written in bright red letters.

It looked like he was displaying the store’s homepage on an internet browser.

“Yes, that’s it!”

“What kind of place is it?” Gamo tilted his head a little in confusion.

“A black magic agency... or something.” He didn’t sound very confident.

“An agency?”

“I don’t really know. Master Izumin, do you know anything?”

“They place curses on people with black magic, supposedly. I heard that unless you bring them a lock of hair from whoever you want cursed, they won’t accept the job.”

“Huh... I’ll write that down.” Gamo started to tap at the keyboard excitedly.

Hmm... Cursing people, huh? Could you really make a living doing that? Were there a lot of people in the world who wanted to curse someone?

That was really bad, right? Just imagining it made me want to shiver. If someone put a curse on you like that without you knowing, how could you protect yourself? Since I had my power to see “visions,” it was kind of hard for me to laugh the idea off.

“Anyway, if they need hair, shouldn’t they be putting that on the homepage? Are they serious about this? Do they think anybody’s going to come to their store these days without even the tiniest bit of explanation? And what do they need hair for, anyway? Don’t tell me the devil’s going to run a DNA test.” As he typed the information into his PC’s notepad program, he seemed to be mad about something I didn’t really understand.

“But you know, Gamota, wouldn’t that keep out people who weren’t serious? Only people who really want to curse someone would come to the store, right? It’s pretty hard to get somebody else’s hair, you know.”

“What kind of reputation does the House of Crimson have?”

“Oh, yeah! Get this!” Master Izumin sat down in a chair. He seemed intent on joining in the conversation. He looked like a muscle-bound man, but he was acting like a gossipy old lady. “A friend of a friend said that somebody got hit by a car because of one of their curses!”

“Wow, you’re kidding me. The minute you said the words, ‘friend of a friend,’ my trust in your story plummeted to zero.”

“What do you mean, zero?! Are you saying I don’t have any friends?”

“You said ‘a friend of a friend,’ but the question is how many friends you’re skipping in between.” Gamo was shaking his head, as if he couldn’t believe Master Izumin didn’t understand something so simple. Sometimes he could be really self-confident, and kind of a jerk.

“‘A friend of a friend’ makes it sound like somebody close to you, but it might be a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, right? Everyone knows not to trust ‘friend of a friend’ stories. That’s an old rule.” It felt like I was hearing an incantation from another world. I wished he wouldn’t repeat the word “friend” so much.

“Oh, I see.” Master Izumin looked super-ticked. But he quickly smiled mischievously.

“By the way, this is something else a friend of a friend told me, but the owner of this black magic agency is supposed to be a pretty, young girl.”

“What... did you say?” I thought I saw a different glint in Gamo’s eyes.

Didn’t he just say he didn’t believe friends of friends?

“So that’s got you interested, huh? You’re shy, Gamo, but you love girls, don’t you?”

“O-Of course I like them. But don’t get the wrong idea! I’m not some man-slut pickup artist. I don’t really want to date a real girl or anything. Definitely don’t get the wrong idea.”

“Really?”

“That’s right. I’m a NEET God, for one thing. But if the black magic agent who’s cursing people turned out to be a pretty, young girl, wouldn’t that be cool? It’s not every day you run into a girl who ticks that many boxes. If I write about her on Kirikiri Basara, it’ll mean a ton of new hits. And all that affiliate money, too!”

“Hmph... Gamo, you’re even worse than I thought—”

“Hmm? Worse than you thought how?”

“No, I won’t say it,” I chuckled.

He was even more easy to please than I thought he was. But that didn’t mean he was an idiot. He’d said something similar when I’d joined Kirikiri Basara’s staff. In a way, he was consistent. I couldn’t respect him, but I could feel that he was acting in accordance with his beliefs.

“Still, you know... Black magic? Devils? If there really were something like that, I’d want to be friends with it. That would be kind of cool. It would make me more popular as a blogger, right? Man, I want to see a devil. I really want to see a devil.”

I could see Narusawa slowly creeping up behind him. Our eyes met, and she put her finger to her lips as if to say “Shhhh!” Gamo hadn’t noticed her.

What was she doing? I watched, excitedly.

Narusawa pinched a few strands of his hair with her pretty fingers.

“Huh?”

“Pluck? Pluck! ☆” And then she yanked them out, hard.

“Ow!” As Gamo writhed in pain, I could see ten or so strands of hair in Narusawa’s hands.

“Hey, what are you doing, Ryotasu?”

“I’m your correspondent, right?”

“Huh?”

“Pan-paka-pan! Correspondent Ryotasu is off to do her duty!” Narusawa raised Gamo’s hair high above her head.

“Um, where are you going?”

“You know where I’m going, silly! Somewhere I can use this hair! ☆”

“You don’t mean...” Narusawa pointed her finger towards Gamo’s laptop.

“Black Magic Papacy! Bam! Ba-bam!”

Agency, you mean...

“Wait, why is today the only day you actually want to work? Is it the Myu-Pom Effect?” Gamo looked confused.

“Why me?”

“I mean, you know in anime and manga there’s always rivals. You two could be trying to show off to me, to show which of you is really the true Basara Girl.”

I understood that a Basara Girl was like a Bond Girl, but I wasn’t interested in being one at all.

“Anyway, Ryotasu, can you give me back my hair?”

“But isn’t this your big chance, Gamo?” I made a suggestion.

“Huh? How so?”

“If your hair gets you cursed by a devil, you’ll get your chance to become friends with one, right?”

“Oh, um... Y-Yeah. I am the NEET God, after all. Ahaha... By the way, Ryotasu, are you really not going to give me back my hair? Why don’t we go to Woodberrys right now? My treat?” Gamo’s face was twitching.

Ahaha!

Narusawa refused, saying only, “I’m a correspondent!” After that, she moved super-fast.

Maybe she’s this fast because she’s used to ignoring what everyone else wants, I thought to myself as I stared up at the sign for Harmonica Alley.

“We’re here! ☆” I still couldn’t believe we’d visited the shop that very day. Talk about super-bold.

“Maybe I’ll go home... I’m so nervous, my stomach is hurting.” It wasn’t that bad during the livestreams, but now my heart was pounding in a really weird way.

“Nope! ☆ Myu, you’re part of Kirikiri Basara, too! ☆ Kirikiri! Come on, Kirikiri! ☆” Narusawa made a cute pose at me in front of the crowded entrance to Harmonica Alley.

The people’s stares as they passed by were physically painful. If anything felt like it was getting ripped apart, it was my stomach.

The sun had already set. Harmonica Alley’s cramped street was filled with salarymen on their way home from work.

I always passed by this place on my way home from school, but I’d never actually gone inside.

I was a minor, so there was no reason for me to go there. And I had this weird idea that if I did, I might get creeped on by middle-aged drunk guys.

Narusawa had been in such a hurry that I hadn’t even had time to change out of my school uniform. That worried me, too. I felt totally out of place. If any of the teachers saw me here, they were sure to get mad at me. And if the police saw me and took me in, that would be even worse. Narusawa wasn’t wearing her uniform, and if you didn’t look too closely— or closely at all, really— she could kind of pass for an adult.

“Alright! Time for me to become a drunk! ☆ Mumuu!” Narusawa started to pretend to stagger around like a drunk.

Was this really okay? The only reason I’d come was because I was worried about her being here alone. I’d told Gamo he should come too, but...

“I’m the one who’s going to be cursed. If I come too, there’s no point.” He’d given that excuse and refused to come. It was plainly obvious that he was scared.

I’d come along since I didn’t have a choice, but... Umyu! I couldn’t stay standing here forever! It was do or die time, maybe!

“Okay, let’s go!” I motioned for Narusawa to follow me and stepped into Harmonica Alley.

I’d memorized the map of the alley after looking it up online. We took the shortest route to our destination, the House of Crimson.

When we arrived, all we found was a tiny sign and a plain-looking entrance. The sign only read, “Black Magic Agency — House of Crimson.” If someone came here without knowing anything about it, they’d be too scared to get close. Especially since going inside meant walking up a gloomy, dimly-lit staircase.

I looked up the stairs. There was a door at the top. I could see the dim light of the shop from the small window.

“Okay, Narusawa. All ready? Okay? Just follow the plan.”

“Yup. ☆” Narusawa grinned and gave a little cheer.

This was the plan: Narusawa and I were supposedly both in a relationship with Gamo, who was cheating on us both. But when we’d talked about it with each other, we’d decided that we’d put a curse on him to make him pay for what he’d done. Gamo had come up with this plan.

I’d said that I personally didn’t like it, because it made Gamo out to be much more popular with girls than he really was. He’d gotten mad and told me to come up with my own plan, then.

“Knock, knock, knock! ☆” Narusawa went up the stairs first. They were so steep that I could see up her skirt from where I was standing.

I looked around to make sure there were no men nearby, and then sighed. Narusawa needed to be way more careful. Could you believe it? Normally you’d at least try to hide that.

“Hello! ☆” Narusawa opened the door with a laid-back greeting.

I followed right after her. “Come on, don’t greet her like that...” There was no way the owner would believe that we were poor girls who’d been cheated on now.

I felt like the plan was already blown, but I followed her up the stairs anyway. Of course, I kept a close eye on the hem of my skirt.

The inside of the shop had a ceiling that was a little low, but it wasn’t as cramped as the staircase. Since it was a black magic shop, there wasn’t much light, and there were all kinds of creepy merchandise everywhere.

Wow... this place really felt evil.

Black magic and fortune-telling might seem similar, but they were totally different. All these different tools were meaningless to me, and I didn’t really like places like this that were supposed to feel mystic and foreboding. I always wanted my fortune-telling to be cheerful and fun.

It felt kind of hard to breathe, maybe. It felt like being underwater.

“Welcome to the House of Crimson.” I suddenly gasped as I heard a voice speak to me.

She sat silently in the back of the store.

—She was very pretty. That’s how it felt to me, from the bottom of my heart. She was really pretty. She had long black hair, elegant features, and a sad expression. It was like looking at a doll, somehow.

Was she the store owner that people were talking about? Oh, wow, she was a lot younger than I thought. Was she maybe not that much older than me?

The owner of the store stood up and brought us chairs from the corner of the shop. “Please, sit down.”

Narusawa and I sat down across from her. I didn’t want to stare, but she was just so pretty that I couldn’t help myself. Narusawa sat next to me, her eyes shining as she looked at the five stuffed animals on the shelves behind the girl.

“They’re so cute! ☆” She hadn’t forgotten the plan, had she?

The girl poured us herbal tea. I thanked her and took a sip, and sighed as it warmed my body.

The owner of the store said her name was Aria Kurenaino.

“This is your first visit, isn’t it?” She began to explain her system as a black magic agent.

She told us that her “dolls,” the super-cute stuffed animals on her shelf, would do the actual work of cursing someone for us. She told us that there were three packages, depending on the price we wanted to pay. And that the more expensive the package, the more effective the curse.

There was no way for me to know how much of what she was saying was real and how much was fake, but the idea of stuffed animals carrying out the curse made things seem a little less brutal for the client, and maybe a little easier.

“Which package will you choose?” All three packages were expensive. For a student like me, even the cheapest package was expensive.

Narusawa didn’t seem like she’d listened to the explanation. She just stared at the dolls, and answered without a hint of hesitation.

“I’ll take the Devil’s Ritual! ☆”

“What?” She picked that not because of the price, but the number of dolls! The Devil’s Ritual used all five dolls, but it was the most expensive, at 66,600 yen.

With Aria sitting right there, I couldn’t say anything about it, so I just sat there in shock.

And I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Narusawa take almost 70,000 yen out of her wallet. Was she really going to pay 66,600 yen?

Was Narusawa from a really rich family or something, maybe? Why would a girl like that be hanging out with Gamo?

“Understood.” Aria took the money and slowly nodded.

She spread out a sheet with a magic symbol drawn on it on the table. And then she put the five dolls on top of the symbol.

Narusawa poked the green-striped doll in front of her on the head with her finger. I was terrified that Aria might get mad at her.

“So what’s your request?” Aria didn’t smile, but that only made her seem more alluring and beautiful.

It felt like she really could use black magic.

“Samurai Gamonosuke cheated on me! ☆ Please curse him for me! Thanks! ☆”

“Ahaha... um... Narusawa? I don’t know if she’ll be able to understand that.”

“Poyah?”

Don’t say “Poyah.”

I figured that even Aria must have been confused by that, but when I looked, her expression hadn’t changed.

But even if her expression hadn’t changed, her tiny white hands grabbed one of the dolls— a weird-looking one with a white bag on its head that she called Lilith XII— and began to fiddle with it. That was her only reaction.

Was she trying not to laugh or get mad?

“Um... I think we should explain it better... We were, ummm...” I tried to think of a nicer way to put it, but I gave up.

“Let’s try to explain more about the man who cheated on us, okay?” I whispered in her ear, and Narusawa put her finger to her cheek and began to stare at the ceiling. But she only made that thinking pose for a second.

“Gamotan is a year older than me. He’s also a year older than Myu. We became friends two days ago! ☆” Aria’s hands began to move faster as she played with Lilith XII. If it could speak, it might have been screaming in pain.

“Um, so you see...” I interrupted. “There’s a man named Yuta Gamon, and he was cheating on me and Narusawa here. And he calls me Myu-Pom, too. And so we talked about it, and we decided that we were going to make him pay.”

“...”

The only sound in the room was my voice echoing off the thin walls. Why did I feel so tense?

Aria wasn’t looking at us. She was looking down at the boy doll, or maybe girl doll, in her hands. She still had no expression on her face. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

I couldn’t tell.

Was it a good idea to explain things like I just did, anyway?

I gave her Gamo’s name. What if she really cursed him? I couldn’t tell.

I was really worried. What was I doing here? Was it a good idea to test her like this? I didn’t know.

I didn’t know, so I couldn’t help but look... at a vision of Aria.

—Open, Yesod.

I didn’t actually have the cards in front of me, and without them, the visions were less clear, but...

I imagined them in my mind.

I imagined myself flipping over the 9th card. That was all I had to do.

That was all it took for the vision to appear.

I saw a dimly-lit place that looked like it was filled with fog. There were countless silhouettes of people floating around me.

I was beneath dirty water. The filthy mud floating up from the bottom cut off the moonlight on the surface.

No way... This was...

“Myu?”

“Myu?!” I came back to my senses.

Narusawa had her hand on my shoulder and was looking at me, worried.

“I-I’m sorry... I’m fine.” I shook my head and tried to forget about the vision I’d just seen. I felt someone looking at me.

Aria had raised her head and was staring at me. I had to say something.

“I-I was so shocked... It was such a shock that he was cheating on me...” My voice was shaking, but I think that helped me fool her, maybe.

“I understand. Then I will now perform the ceremony.” Aria’s voice was firm.

Evidently, she’d believed us. Afterward, I watched in silence as Aria performed some kind of black magic ritual.

But later, I couldn’t remember what she did at all. I was thinking of something else the whole time.

My vision of Aria... the way she was down at the bottom of the water.

I’d seen the same vision before. It was when I’d tried to find the livestreamer who’d done One-Man Hide And Seek.

—Why? Did she have something to do with the man who’d gone missing? Or was he killed by her curse? I was terrified, and my whole body was freezing. I clutched my arms tightly around myself until the ritual was over. I wanted to get out of this shop as soon as possible.

I didn’t have the courage to speak or to stop the ceremony, so the contract to curse Gamo was made.