XXXXX Prefecture, 8:00 PM.
"Mary? Yo, earth to Mary..."
Maribel blinked, and focused her vision on the hand Renko was waving in front of her face. "Ah, sorry. I was just.."
"You were doing it again, weren't you? That... slipping, right?" Maribel's face was enough of an answer.
The two students of the nearby university were sitting across from one another on a cafe terrace. The dark-haired girl, Usami Renko, had laid her hat on the seat next to her, while the blonde, Maribel Hearn, left hers on. The co-founders of the Hifuu club, and also its only members.
"Look, maybe we should call it a night. Give things a break, right? Y'don't want to overexert yourself here. It's cloudy anyway so my ability is useless." Specifically, the ability to tell time by a glance from the position of the stars, and location by the moon. Bizarre by any standards, but so was the ability to see gaps suspended in the air, cracks and holes in an otherwise unseen boundary seperating this world from beyond. "And all things considered," Renko continued, "we've made a lot of progress, so we can afford to take a breather for a little while."
"No, let's go for it. I want to see this through." Maribel was firm.
"If you say so.." The concern for her friend was written all over Renko's face. Maribel put on a smile and touched her hand for reassurance, but in truth she was a little scared too. So far things have been fine, but she didn't like that the 'slipping', as they've come to call it, had gotten stronger.
Her ability seemed to be evolving, beyond one that can only perceive gaps. The ability to traverse them was rapidly becoming apparent to her, in addition to a peculiar side effect. She seemed to be having a hard time holding onto her identity as Maribel Hearn completely, feeling her psyche being torn and divided. She would get emotional pangs that did not belong to her, and a sense of vertigo despite her feet being firmly planted on the ground. And the visions.. sometimes her sight would shift completely, and she'd find herself in an entirely new location. Peering out of eyes that were anothers, yet felt like her own at the same time.
Maribel studied relativistic psychology, and firmly believed in subjectivity over objectivity. Even something like identities could be subjective, she thought. Your environment and its incoming sensations cue you into what identity to don, and you assert your will on the world based on your identity, but ultimately that identity is a made up one.
Maribel clutched at her shoulder bag as they left the restaurant and started on their walk towards the shrine.
In Gensokyo this was doubly true. The border between identities is a slippery one, as a certain gap-youkai would tell you. Gensokyo on some level exists as a projection of memories and imagination of humanity. To put it simply, without humans neither Gensokyo nor its denizens could exist in the way that we know it.
Maribel was not the only one experiencing the effects of such a connection with the other side. It manifested in the monstrous thirst for sake in some, the aptitude for tinkering in others, the emphatic abilities bordering on mind-reading in yet others. Too many examples to list.
Somewhere, a shrine maiden in red and white was sweeping the pathway to her shrine, idly glancing up at the stars and noticing that her visitor should have been here by now. She didn't much like cloudy days either.
Let's meet in a dream.
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I ended up writing a short Sealing Club fic, something I wouldn't have seen myself doing a few years ago. Lots of Maribel energy to channel off it seems. Also, happy belated birthday Aoshi! I did it in the style of the stories found in the music CDs. If I do a second installment, this is a prequel. Otherwise, please enjoy this as a short standalone piece.
A ZUN music-CD-esque title popped into my head and I went with it. Pretend this is the story to a ZUN music cd volume 7.5 (hah)
