Terakoya: the private school of the Human Village. Its teacher was Keine Kamishirasawa, half-beast, with long blue-and-white hair, a scholar's cap, and a long dress.
Her species said everything: hakutaku, the auspicious beast out of the Kunlun legends. That heritage was one of the main reasons humans accepted her so easily and felt safe entrusting their children to her classroom.
"Aaa-uu~"
At the moment Keine was standing with arms crossed, scrutinizing her good (girl)friend Fujiwara no Mokou. The cause of the scrutiny was the kitten Mokou had hoodwinked into following her here, currently perched on a desk earnestly trying to gnaw through a skewer.
Mokou's eyes slid guiltily to the side. She corrected Yimi's grip. "Don't hold it vertical—aren't you afraid you'll stab your own mouth? Turn it sideways like this… put it down for a second, you're dripping grease on your clothes!"
Don't be fooled by how cute some kids looked. Give them food and the messy side came out fast.
"Mn…"
Keine took Yimi's greasy little hand and sniffed it. "Sweetheart, what brand of cigarettes do you smoke?"
"Brand?" Yimi looked up, puzzled.
"It means the variety. What you're eating right now is probably the skewers Yamashita-ya sells, but the Inoue family also sells them. Their flavors are different and so are the prices—that distinction is what people call a brand." Keine explained patiently.
Yimi's ears twitched. She tugged at Mokou's clothes. "What brand of cigarettes… do I smoke?"
They hadn't gotten their stories straight beforehand.
"Crap! Your greasy paws got it all over my clothes! Wait—you sold me out?" Mokou hurriedly pried the dirty paw off and looked at Keine, tense.
Sure enough, a thunderous expression.
"Mokou. Sit. Properly."
"Hold on, give me five minutes, I can come up with another explanation—"
Keine yanked her in, face to face. "Didn't you promise me you'd quit smoking? And this time you're roping a child into it!"
"What child? She isn't even human! Three digits' worth of age, easily!" Mokou squirmed left and right, trying to slip free.
"Three digits?" Yimi held up three fingers, blank-faced, not understanding.
Whap!
Keine headbutted her into the corner of the wall, where Mokou folded into a heap.
Yimi opened her small mouth, hopped off the desk, and prodded Mokou.
> System: Achievement unlocked—No response. It's just a corpse. Reward: +5% portal energy.
"She's dead!" The cat gaped up at Keine, scandalized.
This wicked woman had murdered the food-giving lady!
"Relax. She wouldn't die even if the world ended. And I know my limits." Keine produced tissues and wiped Yimi's dirty hands clean.
Then she circled back to Yimi's earlier question. "'Three digits' usually means a number in the hundreds. One to nine is the ones place. Ten through ninety-nine is the tens place. One hundred is the hundreds place."
Yimi counted off on her fingers. "I'm… single digits."
"Mn. A bright little one." Keine nodded approvingly, then looked mildly surprised. "So you're a very recently born young youkai?"
A glimmer of interest came into her eyes. "Whatever the race—a child this age should be in school."
The terakoya had initially been founded for human children, but the children she had taught all unanimously reported her lessons as horrendously dull—even Mokou refused to sit in. As a result her student count was nothing close to what she had originally hoped.
Until, one day, Keine noticed a mischief-loving fairy sneaking into her classroom intending to pull pranks—also a child in appearance, also not particularly bright—and she found a new frontier.
A great many youkai didn't actually have to eat humans. So why were they bullying them? Because they had never received a proper education.
Look at their behavior—aside from somewhat different lifespans and a few peculiar abilities, they really weren't much different from human children.
So Keine had started rounding up the weaker, education-needing, child-shaped youkai and parking them in the classroom for lessons.
This one in front of her was right at the same age as a human kid. All the more reason to enroll her.
Keine crouched down, eyes crinkling into a smile. "Sweetheart, would you like to learn things?"
"No. I want to be the Hakurei Shrine Maiden." Yimi shook her head, refusing.
"Eh?"
Keine blanked.
"From what she said, the Red-White Enforcer seems to be planning to hand the role over to her. No idea what's gotten into her." Mokou was already at full health again, on her feet, brushing dust off her sleeves.
Whap!
Keine sent her back to the wall.
"Why, though—"
Keine glared at her. "How dare you even ask why—teaching a child to smoke is outrageous. And no swearing in front of the kid! You're kneeling there until you've thought about what you've done."
She turned back to Yimi. "I can't begin to imagine what those two are scheming, but even to become the Hakurei Shrine Maiden, you need a certain foundation of knowledge."
"Then I'll study." The kitten frowned. She hadn't expected becoming the Hakurei Shrine Maiden to be this much trouble.
Excellent!
"Of course, you'll also need training on the Hakurei side… let's do this: come here on Saturdays and Sundays. That way you can make friends with the other youkai and won't clash with the human children's schedule." Keine handed down her decision.
"Saturday and Sunday?" Neither word meant anything to the kitten.
"They're the two days humans usually rest. You'll learn about them in class. See? Without learning, things become inconvenient at every turn, right?" Keine kept patiently explaining.
The kitten nodded. "Humans also need to rest." She had only known that humans slept, too. As it turned out, there were actually two whole days they didn't have to hunt.
"…"
What a terrifying child.
This was what happened without an education. Lessons were now mandatory.
"Mn-mn, I see…"
From outside the terakoya window came the faint sound of a pen scratching across paper.
Keine's eye twitched. She wrenched the window open—and was greeted by the sight of a tengu who was at once popular and unpopular.
Gensokyo's newspapers were the tengu's domain, and the most notorious of them was the crow tengu Aya Shameimaru. She had a talent for editing wildly, blowing perfectly ordinary events into something sensational, and she could outrun anyone she annoyed.
"The next Hakurei Shrine Maiden has reportedly been selected—does this mean the current shrine maiden's days are numbered? With the role about to be filled by a non-human, has the long-rumored Youkai Shrine Maiden finally come to pass? What kind of scheme is the Youkai Sage plotting? In order to prevent Hakurei Reimu from raising the next enforcer into a thug, the terakoya teacher publicly poaches the candidate and issues a challenge to the Hakurei Shrine Maiden—"
Aya was babbling all of this while snapping another shot of the room. "Hold still, little one, that sulky expression is perfect for the cover…"
Keine's fist clenched. "First Card—"
"I'm outta here!"
In a blink she was gone.
How had she even noticed they were here?
Then again, no one really took Bunbunmaru Newspaper as fact… right?
Keine ruffled Yimi's hair. "Why don't you go tell Reimu yourself? I trust she won't refuse."
"Reimu?" Yimi remembered that the little curio shop owner had called her Red-White Reimu.
Time to head back and find Red-White again.