After school, Rumia spread her arms like an airplane and was the first one out the door. She spun around mid-stride: "Let's go eat roast bird on Youkai Trail next time. Holy shit."
"Holy shit. Bye-bye." Yimi waved her paw at her new friend in farewell.
"I told you, Youkai Trail doesn't sell roast bird... H-Holy shit." Mystia, afraid of being ambushed, waited until everyone else had left before daring to make her exit, tacking on the mysteriously viral phrase to avoid being left out.
"Haah..."
Mokou had tried to correct them, but was met with a chorus of chirpy rebuttals along the lines of "How come you get to say it but we can't?"
She'd considered slipping away from the situation, but past experience had taught her that dodging Keine's punishment only made the eventual reckoning worse.
Keine's hand descended onto the top of her head from behind. "Mokou. What exactly did you teach my students?"
Mokou fished a cigarette from her pocket and lit it, tilting her head skyward. "Has the sky always been this beautiful? I've never really stopped to appreciate it."
One advantage of this outfit's hood was that it concealed Yimi's cat ears without the uncomfortable pressure of a baseball cap. The villagers could still tell from her clothing that she wasn't ordinary, but at least they no longer went out of their way to avoid her.
Well—not until they spotted the tail, anyway.
"Temple school let out already? That's earlier than I expected."
She ran into a familiar face at the entrance to the Human Village.
"Black-White." Yimi pointed at her.
"I'm not 'Black-White'—I'm Marisa. You're more black-and-white than I am right now, you know?" Marisa bent down and gave Yimi's cheeks a gentle pinch.
It wasn't just the clothes; even the girl's hair was a black-and-white color scheme. And she had the nerve to point at Marisa and call her Black-White.
"Mmm, why are you here?"
"Just passing through. I was gonna head to Kourindou to buy another broom so I could go settle the score with those rabbits, but that Kourin jerk tried to palm off some stinky old mop on me."
Marisa glanced toward the Human Village. She still didn't like coming here much—not with things the way they were between her and her father.
"Never mind that. I'll walk you home. What did you learn at the temple school today?" Marisa took her hand naturally as they set off down Youkai Trail.
"Learned 'holy shit.'" The little cat answered with satisfaction. One step closer to becoming a Hakurei shrine maiden.
"Huh?"
Something about that didn't add up.
Yimi tugged at the hand holding hers. "Wanna go eat lamprey."
The little cat was very interested in fish.
"Oh, the lamprey stand? That only opens at night, I think. Plus the owner probably got out of class the same time as you—no way she's got her stand set up already."
Marisa patted Yimi's head. "Besides, last time I went there for some grilled food, I just casually asked why they only had tea and no sake, and she pulled out some fancy blue liquor she'd scored from the Scarlet Devil Mansion and tried to sell it to me. Good thing I snuck off without paying."
"Mmm."
"Hey—you two, the mother-daughter pair—over here, over here." A voice with a strange cadence materialized beside them.
The moment Marisa turned her head, the shutter clicked and their photo was captured.
"Nice, nice—very photogenic." Aya Shameimaru inspected her camera with satisfaction.
"It's you—the stinky crow who wrote that Reimu was dead! I couldn't sleep all night worrying!" Marisa reached into her hat for the Mini-Hakkero.
This particular crow had once featured Marisa in the newspaper, describing her as a kleptomaniac bandit who plucked valuables from every passerby. At the time, even Reimu had been convinced the donation box was empty because Marisa had stolen from it.
"Stinky crow." Yimi parroted, adopting it as Aya Shameimaru's official title.
Marisa's hand froze for a second.
"What do you mean 'wrote she was dead'? I clearly marked it 'suspected'—it's not my fault you people didn't read carefully." Aya waved her camera.
"Besides, the buzz around a news story fades fast. You have to keep injecting fresh material. One photo is nowhere near enough—please cooperate with a brief interview so I don't end up making any errors in my article."
"Like hell I'm doing your interview. Die, da☆ze!"
Aya nimbly dodged the deliberately low-powered blast—Marisa always dialed it back to avoid starting a forest fire. With her ability to manipulate wind, Aya's speed was among the fastest in all of Gensokyo.
She darted to Yimi's side in an instant. "Little one, how old are you? What kind of youkai were you born as? Someone spotted you in shrine maiden garb yesterday. Why are you wearing the same outfit as the black-white mouse... the Black-White Magician today?"
The cat answered with guileless honesty: "One year old. My mama gave birth to me. Black-White gave me the clothes."
"I see, I see." Aya scribbled furiously in her notebook.
"Per our interview, the next-generation Hakurei is only one year of age. The clothing was deliberately gifted by the Black-White Magician. When questioned, the subject clutched the Black-White Magician's hand and stated her mother gave birth to her. However, as our sources indicate, only non-human growth cycles could produce such rapid development—corroborating her distinctly inhuman features."
"Furthermore, multiple witnesses who have observed the Hakurei Kitten report that she carries no youkai aura whatsoever. It is well-documented that many magicians practice alchemy, for instance using one's own blood essence to create a homunculus in a bottle..."
"Get lost!" Marisa straight-up hurled the Mini-Hakkero at her head.
Aya dodged and shamelessly sidled right back up to Marisa, holding her pen out like a microphone: "Miss Black-White Magician, what exactly is this child's relationship to Miss Reimu?"
"What relationship—even I don't really..." Marisa found herself stumped.
At first she'd assumed Yimi was Reimu's successor. As Reimu's best friend, Marisa's character was generally decent aside from a few minor flaws, and she'd never once thought "someone like you doesn't deserve to be the Hakurei shrine maiden."
But even without that connection, Yimi could still live at the shrine as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And this was Reimu, famously the most tight-fisted person in Gensokyo.
It was also because of Reimu that Marisa had naturally come to see Yimi as her junior. After all, she and Reimu used to be the youngest generation in Gensokyo.
Aya nodded and kept writing: "The Black-White Magician indicates the child shares an 'unclear relationship' with the current Hakurei shrine maiden. As we all know, under normal circumstances two girls cannot produce a child together, therefore..."
"When did I say any of that?! Stop making stuff up!"
"Thank you for the information—goodbye!" And she was gone, streaking across the sky.
"..."
This couldn't go on.
Marisa grabbed Yimi's hand and strode toward the shrine. "That does it. We're finding Reimu right now. We're storming Youkai Mountain!"
"I've been wanting to pin that crow down and beat the daylights out of her. Let's call this the 'Rumor Incident' and be done with it! I'll pluck her feathers as proof I'm alive and well!"
Marisa and Reimu had gone to pick a fight on Youkai Mountain, leaving Yimi with cat food and instructions to watch the shrine.
After seeing them off, Yimi poked Genjii's shell with the gohei again.
This time he didn't even poke his head out.
Was he hungry?
The kind-hearted Yimi poured a small packet of cat food into the pond.
Genjii: "..."
With that task accomplished, Yimi retrieved the catnip she'd planted the day before and chewed on a sprig.
It had more of a kick than ordinary cat grass. Anything from Yuuka, the Flower Master of the Four Seasons, was bound to be good stuff.
Yimi resumed her experiments with automated propagation via the Third Magic. But for someone who hadn't even formally studied magecraft, trying to innovate from scratch was proving immensely difficult.
"Whatcha doing?"
She was so deeply focused, a first for her, that she didn't even notice when another little cat crept up behind her.
"Chen."
"Catnip? Did you plant this? It's actually different from regular cat grass, you know." Chen crouched beside her, studying the pot. "But if you come to Mayohiga, I've got as much as you could ever want. You could stay there all day."
"As much as I could ever want?" Yimi's mouth watered for a moment before she shook her head. "I'm staying at the shrine."
This cat was going to be the Hakurei shrine maiden.
"Mmm, Lady Yukari did say that... but you could still come visit! There are lots of our kind there." Chen pressed her lips together and produced a dangling cat toy, waving it enticingly at Yimi.
Yimi's eyes tracked the toy left and right. She couldn't resist swatting at it.
It had been a while since she'd had a proper playfight with another cat.
Then a brilliant idea struck her. Chen's home was covered in cat grass. If Yimi could double the supply, and then take a share of the doubled stock home with her, that would mean she'd have... so much cat grass!