The Forest of Magic was full of trees, standing around in suspense. With no way to tell what they might do next, it was easy to go halves on the sentiment. And where people were in suspense, monsters, so to say, were prone to leap out of the tiniest shadows.

If Gensokyo was an illusively beautiful woman, then the Forest of Magic, with its many shaded crevices, was the soft, welcoming, slightly moist part of her you saw before you were swallowed whole. Say, her smile.

Gin plugged away at the trail, dogged to disregard how the shady, wooded path was quieter even than the open fields, despite no trees being in the process of falling down with somebody to hear them. Lady Akyuu might have heartened him with claims of youkai wintering, and the yardman might have corroborated these claims; there was, nevertheless, no suspending the pure, evolutionary dread of a sunless forest. Where every crunch of dirt beneath your strides may mask a toothy smile rocketing at you out of the nearest bush, words were yet another recreant noise.

And then, lest it escaped, was the stark fact that some youkai demonstrably were out hunting… even if their marks had been on man’s distinct components rather than bulk.

That fact had caused barely a ripple on Gin’s sheen of cold sweat; it more or less trickled away together with once the mist and the trees ceded way to the recipient’s withdrawn home.

Or, as it was now proving, a homestead. Inside the glade, monopolising the natural clearing, was a picturesque cottage, attended to by a modest vegetable garden, a stack of firewood and an open-air shed, harbouring a canvas-wrapped suggestion of an outdoor workshop. On the thatched roof, a definite if copper weathercock peeked about for patina seeds to gobble up. As Gin guardedly approached, there was a shimmer behind one of the milk-glass windows; and he’d not come within grabbing distance of the cottage’s iron-braced door when the knob was turned from within.

And then, an antedooruvian custom of things made of wood, it was swept aside to release a waiting youkai.

“A delivery, yes?” was its wholesome greeting.

What wasn’t wholesome was the youkai itself: a blond woman of average height, a clockmaker’s glasses on her nose, a plain headband keeping the shoulder-length hair out of the way and a blue craftsman’s apron with nothing underneath except a white, button-up shirt. A pair of long, graceful legs stuck out below, packaged in black knee-socks and culminating in a pair of somewhat graceless, leather clogs. She pushed the lensy aperture up to her forehead, revealing a distracted, if polite, and intensely blue-eyed stare. She was odd, but not unattractive – if, anyway, you were into clogs and woodchip play.

Also, she had a blooming sharp carving knife in hand. That could be bonus points in some quarters.

It wasn’t in Gin’s, who resorted to the patterned, “Gin Akamatsu. With the Hieda,” to cover up his nervousness. “You, er, are miss Alice—”

“Margatroid,” the youkai craftswoman chimed in. “Yes, yes, I am that. Sorry, I am up to my follicles in… well, no, you could never understand. May I have the bill?”

Snubbed, but not stubbed out, Gin marched up to the roofed doorstep and fished the slip out of his hanten’s hidey-cache. He elected not to note the name on it said “Moorgateroyd.”

Miss Alice thumbed down the contents, the occasional tremble of a lip intimating she had something of a difficulty with the yardman’s shorthand. “… Oh,” she said at the bottom. “There was a change in the rates after all. Phooey. Hover around a moment; I’ll go get my purse.”

So having adjured, the youkai woman swivelled on a clogged heel to return indoors, the present instance of which was shut in Gin’s face. Although, it begged a mention, not ahead an incidental eyeful of miss Alice’s comely backside. The craftswoman hadn’t a skirt to flip, even if her shirt had been long enough to pull double duty; it’d still failed to draw a veil over all of her butt or the navy-blue underwear riding up its middle. How she’d blithely ignored the cold despite the dishabille was a question that’d taken on a recursive quality. It, in fact, more or less sidled back – like a courier who’d in the previous hour witnessed a half-nude youkai having sex outdoors without freezing her nipples off.

Gin hefted miss Alice’s bundled parcel and balanced it conscientiously on his head. Good job she’d had any undies on at all. That track record had seen better runs.

Soon returned from the inlets of her cottage, miss Alice spared her purchases’ new perch one sardonic glance, then stirred her fingers about her purse for the dues owed and the owes dued. She poured the coins onto Gin’s offered hand, who then counted them out, judged their worth fair, condemned them to the abyss of his pockets (and interesting company), lastly to go to a knee and ease the youkai woman’s retrieval of her ordered items from the top of his head. There was an overall long-suffering slant to her bespectacled brow, but none which would’ve foretold long suffering in Gin’s imminent future. A spot of pain, maybe, should he not straighten up his game.

“Say, comedian,” said miss Alice, unfortunately, and against consistency, not placing the package on her head. “Care for a spot of tea? There are biscuits, if you would opt.”

For a clink of the hypothetical teacup, Gin stared down the aproned and previously terribly abstracted craftswoman. “… With you-kai?” he supposed.

Miss Alice’s expression changed by not one tiny tremor of muscle. “Amusing. With me-kai, yes, and I shall facilitate further inference by adding: because I sense another you-kai in the vicinity. Somewhere—” she threw her blue-eyed gaze over Gin’s shoulder, “—over yonder? It is faint, but I am seldom mistaken about these things. A magician must not make light of their surveillance. Ambushes are bad for our constitutions. It would be wise, sir courier, to wait it out… is what I insinuate. I can have a kettle on right now,” she assured.

Gin coughed, altogether not because of the cold. “I, er… may have bumped into her already. Well, not literally, but…”

The youkai dollmaker (she was that, had to be if Gin hadn’t mistaken his reading) lifted a brow. Somehow, it didn’t knock her massive spectacles off. “… Is that sooo?” she drawled. “Well, it isn’t one I would have recognised, and I recognise most of the natives on the daily – but all right. You do you, sir courier. Should you heed a word of advice, however, then do take this path, instead.” A slim arm in a grimy, white sleeve pointed to another footpath digressing from the glade. “It’ll circuit you by a place with a jizou you may pray to for safe travels. Have you anything to give in offering? If not… well,” miss Alice shrugged, “I do have the biscuits.”

She left the offer, together with the door, open wide.

Gin checked his nerves. When men were anxious, and the inside of his trousers was already, as it were, lined with anxiety, they were prone to slap the hand that petted them. Or, for Gin’s particular brand of anxiety, cause it to slap them with ungracious words. He’d be hardly the first man to get slapped by Alice Margatroid, too, who – yes, he recalled now – was said to have started fights for wishing her a “good morning” after 9 o’clock. It was also rumoured she harboured men stranded in the Forest at her home with no reimburse and a smile on her face.

The two, it had to be speculated, relating someway to the slapping.


( ) A tea at midday… kept the youkai at bay?
( ) A jizou’s blessing wouldn’t be near as distressing.

(X) A tea at midday… kept the youkai at bay?

Gin rescanned the dollmaker’s placid face and tuned his brainwaves into Channel Charity. Iffy though he found the institution, at least a hint was included in its name. It told you to be chary.

Switching foot to foot (for clearer signal), the courier thus ventured, “A spot of tea would be indelible, come to reckon it.”

Miss Alice’s expression wouldn’t have looked out of place on a kokeshi doll. It was wooden. “… Meaning?”

It was, miss Alice, what we comedians call a pun, or a play on words, wherein employed is the twofold meaning of “indelible” as referring both to stains and the unforgettableness of an event, Gin pouted inside. Outward, he swiped the crank call away. “Meanin’ I’ll bite,” he deciphered. “Or, well, drink. Hopefully. I made tea once, and you could drat well bite it.”

The dollmaker stared on. “You will bite…?”

“… Please,” Gin complied with a bow.

A much welcome and welcoming smile was perking up the edges of miss Alice’s lips once the courier’d had himself unrolled. “Should have ‘drat’ said so from the beginning,” she advised, quote marks nattily tweezing the perceived expletive. Then, she shrugged her aproned shoulders. “Come right in, in that case, sir courier – and do not overmuch mind the mess. In addition, this here is a western house. No need to take off your shoes. Wipe them on the mat, thank you.”

A wipe, a shake and a jiff subsequently, Gin found his comedian’s rear seated at a bleached, oakwood coffee table in miss Alice’s hearth room, rubbernecking. In the muted daylight, with buffed, unpainted furniture, dusty parquetry and one-and-a-half hand-knitted coverlet per square foot, the cottage seemed borrowed straight from that awkward moment in history just before ubiquitous needlework tried to smother its devotees and finally got the works. It abounded in embroidery. A doublet of doors barred off the backend of the youkai dollmaker’s retreat: one, it had to be guessed, leading into her bedroom, and the other – which, on account of the trail of sawdust, hadn’t – a place where the nitty-gritty of her craft was carried out. A wizened swad of aloe vera sat in a planter on the windowsill, defying anyone bold enough to touch its spines.

Miss Alice, aided by a pair of tongs, unhooked the kettle from the hearth to fill the teapot stationed on the table. She’d peeled the apron down, repurposing it as a makeshift skirt, and rolled up the grubby sleeves of, what at Gin’s temperature-related musings she’d confessed to be, her sleeping shirt. The Winter and its fleeting days, miss Alice had divulged, had made her callous about arranging to dress every morning, and the house was anyway plenty warm if the fire had been left on overnight. Nor was that callousness to be pared by the appearance of a guest. Miss Alice simply hadn’t a care to pare with.

Gin did. And then he grew an even bigger one when the dollmaker leaned across the table to pour his tea. The thin, button-up shirt strained precariously under her decently heavy and ostensibly unrestrained bust. Wrung out by the hearth’s heat, a sheet of sweat had glued the white fabric to her skin, bestowing on the chary courier more than just an outline of her bosom. Miss Alice finished brimming his cup, heedless that somebody close was now poised to win every prospective bet on the colour of her nipples.

Gin mumbled a thanks to his hostess, who drew back into her chair with a carefree bounce, which went to show what you were capable of ignoring if you tried, or at least if you didn’t. She plucked the spectacles from her forehead, set them down on the table, slid the band out of her hair, shook the wavy locks straight, then replaced the band – all in one quaint series of gestures that further confronted and befogged what she was in Gin’s mind. The picture of miss Cook’s pendulous titties still sizzling on his retinae was one thing; this procession of youkai merrily mimicking humanity was another and doing his already un-Gensokyan outlook on the world not the tiniest favour. Or righteously a dis-favour, if you chopped it that way.

Unhappily for lady Akyuu, and against convention, miss Alice inconsiderately hadn’t thrown the courier down a basement bereft of windows, full of blood, rats and the hollowed-out bones of those who’d dared deliver her mail before. Instead, the blond dollmaker sat there, quietly content with the break to her routine, blue-eyed as a mermaid and dressed to kill, if what you aimed to kill was a man’s marriage. Gin swooped in to rescue his (future one) like an avenging angel.

“… So,” he opened up. “Wherever have the dolls gone? I’ve been told in no fancy terms Alice Margatroid would quicker go on a starvation diet than prepare her meals bare-handed.”

He at once wanted to murder himself for that one, but miss Alice wasn’t to bristle at so weak a prod. “Is that so?” she returned, eyeing him above her upraised cup. “Me, I have been told mongering rumours was the job of children and fishermen’s wives. Imagine that.”

“Imagining, ma’am,” assured Gin. “Is it true, though?”

That earned him a condoling smile. “It is true, though,” admitted miss Alice, following a steaming sip. “I would sooner not do housework with my hands if I mustn’t, and I have been on a starvation diet since… hmm, since I last forgot about it. Make no error, however, sir courier—”

“Gin is fine,” offered sir courier.

Miss Alice gave him a sardonic look. “… Make no error, however, Gin-is-fine – I am not without my dolls. Look above you.”

The newly renamed Gin did. Up on the rafters, within the shadowy space unfrequented by human attention, rows and rows of uniform-outfitted dolls perched in silent repose. Not one had been left without a sword, axe, spear, miniature lance, hook, toothpick or another otherwise choppy or jabby implement wired to their hands. And while these dolls were stationary now, Gin could see them in his mind’s eye: swarming down in a flash to pick the heck out of his teeth at the first sign of unsanitariness.

He put forth the most succinct rundown of his feelings on the matter. It was, “… Huh.”

Miss Alice set her cup down with a tink. “Obviously,” she added. “Those are my combat dolls; they are joined to me always via subdermal… oh, apologies, via sigils inked on the underside of my skin. I may not sever the link I have to them, even if I should want to, unless the soul-engines in their bodies… phooey, how do I illustrate this…? Ka-blooey?” The youkai artisan didn’t wait a replied confirmation that he’d understood the complex onomatopoeia. “They are so by design; magicians are not of the same durability as your garden variety youkai, so en-garde is by imperative our default state. These children are also what alerts me whenever somebody or some-thing enters my bounded ocular field. Which stands to mean, approximately, that—”

“The trees have eyes,” figured Gin. “I know what an ocular is; I’ve read books.”

“Oh?” said miss Alice, though it was a surprisingly pleased instance for a change. “Then you are higher-educated than my last visitor, who could not have told me what a brassiere was, let alone an ophthalmic thaumatite. To skip ahead then,” she indulged him, “the dolls whose absence you have noted so acutely are my household chore dolls. They differ structurally, to begin with – incorporating more articulacy for… gripping things.” She’d inflected the phrase the same Gin would inflect “working Sunday.” “They differ, furthermore,” continued miss Alice, “in their theurgical anchoring, wherein they link to meteorite rings I may, gratefully, take off at my leisure, rather than my body outright. Thaumic feedback of that density hour-in, hour-out could drive even a womb-born magician, pardon me, mad as a hatter.”

“Makes your noodle go ka-blooey,” recapped Gin. “Sad days.”

The surface of miss Alice’s tea bubbled dangerously when she blew a cackle straight into it. “Yes—ahem!” she swallowed it back. “… Yes, mm, rather. Goodness, please don’t do that,” she pleaded half-seriously. “My noodle might go ka-blooey in earnest.”

“Never knew laughter to split a man literally,” supposed Gin. “Youkai, though…”

“There are more humane methods to do that than with hot tea!” lamented miss Alice. “I am nearly glad my oral senses are atrophied. That could have made me a mute.”

Gin’s answering look could have made miss Keine of the history school forfeit the homework, but he was in truth very chuffed with having made the dollmaker laugh, even if in the process she’d let slip something less than cheerful. Then again, “atrophy” was a word that could have confused even the most lettered village yokel. Objectively, it sounded like something you ought to receive after spectacularly losing a sports match. In extreme cases, it probably was.

Ooh, that’s dark, Gin reproved himself. Let’s try that avengeance again, why don’t we?

“So, the chore-dolls,” he went on to, indeed, try. “Are they on doll-leave? In the neck of the woods, hallooing? What?”

Miss Alice relinquished the almost-disfiguring teacup to pick the top button of her dress shirt and fan her throat. “No. They are home. Suspended.”

“Suspended, yeah,” said Gin, peeking up and feeling a little suspended himself. “… Er?”

“Inactive for a time. On ice while I run some trials and—” her previous entertainment jellied into a silken frown, “—and, were I to be just on myself, errors. I am experimenting with mass-reproduction of instructions via theurgic link, you see. To wit, to make repetitive chores less… well, that. Shovelling snow from the roof, for a relevant example. There are essentially two ways I may complete such or a similar a task.” The youkai dollmaker faithfully stuck up two work-stained fingers. “I may take one doll and make as many passes as needed to push the snow or whatever else down. Or I may take five – a full hand, if you will – and do with that many fewer passes. It is busywork at the end of it either way; and if I can have my hand in something else worthier of my skills, then I shall not be shovelling snow. And so, I started to theorise…”

There was a compact pause as miss Alice reattempted the more civilised method of getting tea inside her body. It was wide enough for Gin to fit a certain reassessment.

It wasn’t because miss Alice was attractive… although, beyond the artisanal soot and smut, she blasted well was. The hair colour alone was unorthodox enough in town to turn heads, superseded only by the live genetic singularities that were redheads, and her remaining features exuded an occidental charm that’d belike been the main effector of aforesaid slaps. Foreigners weren’t unwonted in Gensokyo; there’d been a few Chinese, and western dandelions had already caused concern. A blond-haired, blue-eyed magician youkai with a name from the other side of the globe caused worse. It caused comments.

Not from Gin, whose concerns delved beyond the colour of her hair, eyes or other body parts. It went to her conviction. The same, open and unrepressed fixation on esoterica that’d captivated him in lady Akyuu the moment they’d met. Alice Margatroid, Gin had now gleaned, would have shared her findings with anyone possessed of an interest and an ear and done so with honest satisfaction… even if she was plainly used to adding water to her vocabulary. It was all very innocent when one discounted the stabby appliances.

“And you theorised out…?” prompted Gin.

“… And I recognised,” continued miss Alice, cup prudently rested on its saucer, “that those were all identical commands. Arise, lower arm, hold arm, forward, turn around, shift, arise, hold arm, forward, turn around… ad completum. After the maiden cycle, I am repeating myself. There is no longer a requirement for my input. Well, there is, but… what if there wasn’t? That idea had its run-around until it brought me this: a concept for another type of doll. Not an automotive one! A sort of reciprocating doll; a doll that would take my directives and relay them to a number of others down the link. It could never do in combat, where tactics and placement drift impulse-to-impulse – but for static, repeating motions? Imagine what a ‘drat’ face I made, then—” she cracked a deprecatory smile, “—when I got it keyed in and twelve of my best-attuned ‘chore-dolls’ all received the same, duplicate instruction to move into the same space at the same time. Just you guess what happened.”

“Dollecular fusion?”

“Close!” Miss Alice cuffed the tabletop. “I have them in the back, still, should you desire a doll with about twenty gosh-darned, pardon me, arms. The mechanics had been sound; it’d all worked. My mindset was what had been underinformed. I should have accounted for it, split my reciprocating doll’s thaumic pathways so that instructions could be passed at different timings, speeds…”

“… A kind of magick differential?” Gin chimed in.

The dollmaker blinked. “A… excuse me, a differ-what?”

“Oh,” the courier darted on to explain, “it’s the gear assembly on a car’s axle that—” And then the dart embedded itself in miss Alice’s blank look. Gin clicked his tongue like a lady and cussed like a courier. “… Uh, right, you probably wouldn’t—”

“—know a horse-car if it ran me over?” guessed the old-fangled, and moreover youkai, craftswoman. “… Or some other type, I suppose. What is it?”

“A big, wheeled hunk of metal?” Gin tried. “Gasoline instead of equine?”

Miss Alice’s brows wrinkled, and not with age. “An automobile… is it? I have read on automobiles; the principle is… How have you, though…?”

The brows climbed up. Gin’s humour was kicked arse-first to the metaphorical curb, bounced, flew over the windowsill and drove a coach and horses through Gin’s genealogical tree. The youkai dollmaker twinkled at him and showed altogether too much of her pearly teeth.

“Might it be?” she marvelled. “Might it actually be that you are an Outsider?”

Gin raised a hand in the universal sign for you stop that speeding car right now, good sir. “Naturalised, I’ll have you know,” he cautioned. “And I am, and have been, with the Hieda for on to a decade, so don’t get ideas.”

The sound of miss Alice’s palm smacking her forehead rippled the tea in Gin’s cup. The laugh that followed nigh on made it crawl up the sides in embarrassment. “And to think,” scoffed the dollmaker, “that I was burning prana here…!” There was a break in the merriment as miss Alice thumbed the corners of her eyes and then noted the fixture of the courier’s jaw. “… I am sorry,” she promised, not sounding it, “but is this a sore subject?”

Gin’s expression could have been strained for kefir. “… No, no,” he groaned his surrender in the end. “It isn’t; I am what I am and nothing else. I just don’t like it when it seeps out after the effort I’ve poured into assimilating.”

“That does do you credit,” consoled him miss Alice. “What is more, it signals to me that I can after all take it easier – which does you further credit. Glory, sir courier; do turn that scowl upside-down.”

“… Yes, yes, all right, whatever miss client wishes,” he sighed. The scowl didn’t quite flip, but did flatten meekly under miss Alice’s blue-eyed enticement. “So,” he determined to at least find out, “may I know why my being an Outsider is so heartening?”

The youkai dollmaker dallied with the answer, realigning the band in her hair and giving a nice demonstration of how thin her shirt stretched over her bust when her arms were up. “… How do I word this without snubbing you?” she wondered at length. “Outsiders tend, innately, not to believe. That makes you all but innocuous to youkai… in isolation, anyway.”

“The deal with youkai feeding on the zeitgeist,” remembered Gin. “All right. I do believe, though; I know that youkai do exist. I’m looking at one.”

Or discrete features of her, at least, revised his ethics. Miss Alice disagreed, her blond head twirling left and right.

“To know, sir courier,” she explained, “is to observe and thereon acknowledge. To believe is to acknowledge prior to observing. Only one of these expedites the actuality of Gensokyo’s youkai; only one feeds into its tenuous, supernatural fauna. You may believe, yes, and yet your belief is empirical rather than spiritual. It is anathema of true faith and of no use. I have, as you will doubtless have heard, sheltered a number of stranded Outsiders in my home over the years. They, too, never did believe—”

“—right until they knew,” filled in Gin, trying not to dwell on it too long. “And my own unbelief,” he pushed on, “is reassuring, because…?”

“It is to me,” miss Alice gracefully replied, “because it means to me nothing you can do may do me lasting harm. I am youkai; and while my physical sheath may be frailer than most, even I survive wounds that would have laid low the strongest of men. It is my essence that stands the highest risk, and you Outsiders… you do never truly believe you can touch such things. Actually—” she perked up all of a sudden, “—why do we not confirm? Hover around, please.”

Gin didn’t. Albeit he did twist around in his chair to watch the dollmaker’s aproned hips vanish in the sawdust-littered doorway. The scantily-clad magician emerged soon, rearmed now with the same, hook-edged knife she’d brandished at the porch. She handed it to the courier in the pass, herself moving on to retake her seat. Gin held it up to examine the craftsmanship – coming out overall a shade disenchanted. The knife was old, even battered; its blade – whetted down to two-thirds of its original width. It was more a tool than a weapon and infinitely more of one than the common knife enthusiast’s “everyday carrier.”

Miss Alice chiselled in with a droll question of her own. “Might you know what this is?”

“… No?” hazarded the courier.

There was a pithy and pitying nod. “No. You probably wouldn’t, would you? This, sir Outsider, is an athamé. A witch’s ritual knife, in brief. We use it to… oh, phooey, to redirect and reflow the prana of beings living and unliving. Suppose, for a moment,” she went on with rising fervour, “that I came upon a scrap of wood from a possessed tree. With an athamé, I may repurpose its residual energies to my own needs. And as for animate objects… it is possible to incise, or outright sever, aspects of their being. To enfeeble the sacrificial lamb, to strip it of all guise of control, make it cry out to places of magick it had never seen… The potentials boggle the laic mind. Touch the cutting edge, would you kindly?”

Gin’s jaw dropped then clacked back close. “… What?”

“Touch the edge, please,” restated miss Alice. “Worry not; you are an Outsider. These tools wield no power in your hands. I am not telling you to cut yourself, mind; simply touch the edge.”

“Is this safe?”

“As long as you do not press too hard.”

And so, the kinky dollmaker looked on, chin shored up on her hands, how the overcurious courier daintily took the knife to the reverse of his palm.

And even if the sensation of a razor-edged blade on his bare skin was a cause for goose bumps, nothing elsewise adverse seemed to come of the dare. Gin, exhaling, checked his all-important companion appendage for damage, glad to find none.

“Can you feel it?” whispered the youkai magician. “Can you feel your spirit bleeding away?”

Gin glanced over to find the dollmaker grinning. “… Yeah, no cigar.”

She snickered. “Me neither! And that is the prosaic core of it, sir Outsider; you distrust the veracity of my athamé, and so it denies you its power. To your sceptical senses, this is but a length of metal. Oh, I warrant you might still give me a nasty et tu impression, but I would heal – and you would not live to see the break of light. If you’ll, however, return it to me…”

Gingerly, Gin held the knife out over the table. Miss Alice reached out to take it—

—and then rocked back in her chair. There was a yelp and a sharp, pained hiss. The athamé clattered to the tabletop.

“Ah, fu—” the courier caught himself. “Crud. I mean, crud, I’m sorry. Are you OK?”

Cradling her hand, the dollmaker gave her head a weak shake. “No. I mean, yes. I am… fine,” she murmured. “No blood was drawn. Just…”

A clumsy silence pursued the clumsy pass.

Grin groped around his skull for something to say. And then he did, his experience with lady Akyuu speaking up.

“Show me, maybe I’ll see—” he began.

And then rocked back himself as miss Alice near bowled over their teas to thrust the wounded hand in front of his face.

There was a startled, mutual stare.

“Er…” said Gin, feeling a little derailed.

The dollmaker’s blue eyes flew wide. “Wait!” she cried. “Wait, wait, wait. Shush. Say… nothing.”

A lesson already learned in the morning, Gin countermanded that order – and said not a nothing. The hand, at least, appeared to be unharmed and, in a challenge to the circumstance, smooth and kissable for a woodcarver’s. Miss Alice lurched. Then lurched again. And then once more. The lurches latched onto one another, so that her body lurched from lurch to lurch without ever, in fact, lurching from the spot.

After a few more lurchless moments, she appealed for outside aid. “… Sir Outsider?”

Sir Outsider, still dumbfounded, replied by rote, “Gin. Call me Gin.”

“Gin! Gin!” was the dollmaker’s instant and plaintive response. “Gin, please, tell me, Gin, that I can move again!”

“You—” he wavered. “… You can move again?”

Miss Alice rattled. Or, closer, her throat did over a curse. “Not like that! Command! Say it as a command!”

Gin breathed in. And then, yardman-like, barked, “… Y’ can move freely, bellhop!”

And she did move, did the blond dollmaker: falling back, with a bounce and a squeal, onto her chair again. A look of wonder and relief raced across her face… only to be chased by the stirrings of unrelieved wondering. Miss Alice spared her afflicted hand a glance and a thought and then knitted her brows above her nose. “… No, no, no,” she was then muttering under her breath. “Could I have…? Something cut, no two ways about… Me, though? It was my action; I moved, but… All right, Alice, no. This should be advantageous. No weakness unresearched. Help. Gin!”

The exclamation of his name brought the courier to bear. A species of bear, anyway. “Er. Yeah?”

Hunger – hopefully, for knowledge – set the dollmaker’s sky-blue eyes a-dawn. “Command me,” she requested, “to say something… indelicate. Something I would not. A faux pas or… something a scholar would never say.”

The bears in Gin’s head whirred. “… Is, uh,” he stumbled, “is there someone who—”

“Command!” reminded miss Alice.

“Tell me which of your colleagues you secretly admire and why!”

The dollmaker’s facial muscles seized. “I—” she seemed to force out. “I admire… and envy the wisdom and resources of master Patchouli of the Voile. She is a natural, older and far cleverer than I. I re-read our correspondence weekly. You have not heard this,” she spat.

Gin Akamatsu was bright enough to spot that miss Alice’s blush was as pink as the spiders that skittered after drunken couriers and stamped all over their moral spines. “I have not heard this,” he agreed. Then ventured, “May I inquire as to what the drat?”

The youkai magician flashed one of those sour, fleeting smiles women had to reaffirm that the blame, whosoever’s it happened to be, hadn’t been fully washed away but, bother it, this was more exciting anyway. “In my preliminary and incomplete surmise, Gin,” she obliged him and herself both, “the athamé, self-evidently, severed something of mine right then. Something like… will? Volition? No, I absolutely hesitated there, did I not…? At any rate, it is an opportunity to explore. Give me another command. Something… sillier? Give me cause to resist.”

A certain question reoccurred to Gin’s mind. It was never a safe one to have reoccurring and even less so within the same five minutes. “… Is this safe, are you sure, miss Alice?”

The dollmaker couldn’t be surer, keener or unconcerned about the problems of too-frequent reoccurrence. “This is a controlled environment,” she argued with a toss of her blond head. “Nothing you may do, we have established, can do me harm in the long term. This—” she motioned at the discarded athamé, “—was but an accident on my part and, pardon me, sir courrggh—Gin,” she obeyed, “but I give no faith to anyone who listens to you and mongers this sort of rumour. This is a new development; I must see whether resistance is an option now – for the eventuality I am attacked down this avenue in the future. Come, now, other men would be walking on air to make me dance and caper! Have some fun. Command me.”

And she’d not been far wrong because, in her translucent shirt and not-even-a-real skirt, the youkai magician would have danced a particularly oriented dance pretty well. And if you believed that youkai couldn’t dance horizontally, then you hadn’t been out on the town’s rice paddies in Winter.

To add to that, Gin had a leg down in his trousers which, while crooked as a dog’s hind, certainly had no bone in it. Something, it was due no doubt, had to give.


( ) “Open that shirt. You might have as well, you hussy.”
( ) “Go take a bath, you dirty thing. I’ll keep… watch.”
( ) “Open the window. I’ll jump, and you can forget I was ever here. Ginronimo!”
( ) Write me in, baby.

(X) “Open that shirt. You might have as well, you hussy.”

And give it did.

And in his duncish, caveman brain, the thought uprose: “Why not?” (or near enough, cavemen speaking conventionally in clubese over other languages). Miss Alice was, to borrow a designation that would’ve slighted any self-avowed paranoiac, very trusting; still further, she was trusting and breezily dressed, an out-and-out come-on where cavemen were concerned. Gin knew he’d lost. He’d been warring manfully with his errant manhood to keep his zipper done-up since quitting miss Reimu’s place in rather a tizzy, and it was like tilting at windmills with a fighting trouser snake. You could get it lance-stiff and ready to joust – but then who was errant?

And now, with the occidental dollmaker eyeing him with bated breath, Gin harrumphed oh-so-delicately that lady Akyuu would have sounded a Ukrainian tractor in comparison.

“… Stand up,” he rumbled then, “jump once, then squeal like a baby seal.”

Miss Alice, who’d been on her feet, chair tipped backwards, hopped and bounced (and oh how she’d bounced) before the “seal” had even swum, now had her brows twisted in a perplexed knot. “… I—” she confided, “—am not acquainted with what that sounds like. Eek? Squee?”

It’s closer or farther how you go when you see a really cute one, except in reverse, Gin had all but said. Constructive as it could’ve been, something else had constructed itself in parallel. A semi-essential find. “So, you can’t—” he began.

“—fulfil demands I am unfamiliar with or unclear on,” concluded miss Alice. “Well. This is… mitigating. If I cannot be forced to perform magicks that lie beyond my repertoire, then that means my enemy must needs be familiar with it themselves. And, I have it on long experience, not many are.”

Gin coughed. “… Stop yourself doing it even if it’s exceedingly silly was what I was going to say, ma’am, but,” he surrendered, “I reckon your version is just as viable.”

The blond magician blew one of those discreet snorts that were a pan-linguistic equivalent of Oh, please. “Something sillier, please, Gin? I concede some magicians would not be caught dead doing basic calisthenics, but I do get out almost daily… yet.”

Gin palmed his face dolefully. It’d been the same with Ashi; the deeper a youkai’s ego dug itself, the bigger and sludgier the deposits of audacity it unearthed. “… Walk, then. Over there,” ordered the courier, pumping a thumb at the carpet in the middle of the hearth room. Miss Alice complied, clogs clicking against her bare heels. “Turn around,” Gin continued. “Yeah. Good. Now. Touch your toes.”

And she did. There was an unuttered impression that this was an imbecilic thing to have commanded, but the magician’s body blithely ignored it. The spellbound miss Alice bent at her waist to touch the reinforced tips of her clogs, showcasing a length of smooth, toned leg that could have wricked a lifelong boob-man’s neck in the streets. Gravity conspiring, the stopgap skirt which was her rolled-down apron flipped over – exposing the amply filled-out rear of the magician’s tight, navy-blue panties. And then, inside the gap between her outspread knees, a little above whence miss Alice’s upside-down face was leering his way in an unsatisfied manner, her large, heavy bust aspired to the conspiracy: very close now to resting atop (or, accurately, on the bottom of) her chin. Whoever’d sewn on the buttons of her shirt must have used steel spun yarn to do so. They didn’t give an inch.

Miss Alice muttered over (or, again, under) her drooping bosom. “… Told you,” she sighed. “More limber than your golden mean bookworm. Yes?”

“Ye—Yeah,” allowed Gin. “More, uh… limber.”

“That said,” the magician resumed, “I am growing a dash light-headed.”

The courier wrung out a nod. “Uh-huh.”

Miss Alice waited, holding her horses. The reins being her toes. “… Gin?” she moaned at length.

“Er. Yeah?”

“My eyes,” she pointed out, “are down here. This is enough, moreover. Tell me I may stand upright, please. I do not seem able to do so by myself.”

“… Sure,” he supposed. “Go ahead. You may move how you like.”

And she did that, also. On his chair at the table, Gin Akamatsu sat very still. It would be a thorough historian who could retrace the precise cause of his trousers going from mild overpopulation to violent expansionism they were exhibiting now because, between miss Alice’s unwinding with her hair delightfully mussed every which way and her braless assets shifting weightily inside her shirt, the reason may as good lay anyplace in the middle. Most historians anyway had some means of plugging up the guesswork, and, after all, the proceedings of an invasion tended by far to eclipse whatever politic or impolite event came before.

As for Gin’s, they went something like this:

Phase 1: note altogether impartially that the youkai magician looked bewitching in a ruffled ‘do.

Phase 2: observe that her nipples were still plenty visible through the thin, white fabric of her shirt.

Phase 3: remember acutely and with consternation the fact of having had sex with the Hakurei shrine maiden earlier the very same day – and an earth spider youkai the yester one.

Phase 4: let that phase 3 sink right in, you indiscriminate bastard.

Oh gods, a part of Gin managed to pray. He’d done it. He’d really done it. It was just now sinking in. Worse, because by the time miss Alice had tidied her hair enough to license a summary, phase 5 was already in full, dissolute swing in trouser country.

“… Funning around is fine,” granted the magician, wrapped in pique and indecent clothing, “but this is no further use, Gin. Yes, I’ll follow kinaesthetic instructions indefinitely in this state unless enumerated; so we have proven. This does not inform me how low it reaches into my psyche. Can you not conceive of something… more involved than children’s pranks? I might make a suggestion, mind, but I fear to skew the results.”

The tottering pillars of conscience, compromised already by the earth-shaking experiences of lately days, mouldered in fast-forward under miss Alice’s tropical gaze. The little mammalian part of Gin’s brain guiding him hitherto now yelled at him that he was so out of his league he wasn’t even kicking the ball anymore – and then vanished under a pile of genteel rubble. He was goggling like a dork, too. Miss Alice was appealing. He might not take that away from her – at least not any farther than her own slapdash domestic manner. And she was, over and above, a blasted youkai. That, too, was stuck faster than Gin’s pickpocketing skills.

The trouble with the two facts put side by side was that they weren’t supposed to be. Gin Akamatsu had lived and toiled and drunk in Gensokyo’s remote valley town for now close on a third of his life. He’d heeded the warnings of “monsters coming out at night” and, as the youkai dollmaker had boiled it down, never once believed them. Until he had. He’d internalised this mistake and carried himself since with the proud Gensokyan quake in the boots for any and all youkai in a rumour’s reach.

That quake felt somewhat a hollow formality when the previous hour had seen one of those boot-shaking youkai happily stuffed full of not at all cowed, human dick. Hollower still if Gin considered whose throat it was he himself had been down in once beforehand. And right now, miss Alice, with her bare legs and part-transparent dress shirt, was coring it like an apple about to be dunked in hot chocolate.

He nerved himself for the dip. “… Y’ know what?” he said.

The magician shaped a thin smile. “No,” she admitted. “Although, I much suspect I am all set to find out.”

“Yes. Yes, you are,” nodded Gin. “Open that shirt. You might have as well. You hussy.”

In less than a heartbeat, miss Alice’s face turned a furiously gouged, stone relief of one. And yet, even then, below her bulging neckline, the dollmaker’s hands flashed up to her collar.

One by one, the adamant buttons were relieved of their duty, deepening said neckline two inches at a time. What began first as a mere incision soon became a mighty cleavage once miss Alice’s fingers moved past the most crowded region of her shirt. Unfastened, its halves spilled outward to unveil the magician’s luxurious bust. Gin’s mouth went dry. A bare chest always commanded attention, irrespective of its owner’s sex; in this case, Gin’s attention was bolt upright long ahead the final button was undone. Laid bare, glistening with sweat, miss Alice’s breasts looked taken straight from a teenage boy’s wet dream: great, drop-shaped cushions of peach-coloured flesh, adorned on ends by plump, pointy nipples that seemed an even deeper pink now without the intervening fabric.

The dollmaker covered them up no sooner than the courier’s order had been carried through: the index and middle fingers employed in the task barely hiding her large areolae. The minimalist effort only served to make them sexier.

The Hakurei shrine maiden might’ve been unfairly stacked for her slight frame, but this youkai magician had her out-boobed by a magnitude. The forced exposure had put the final swell and polish on the whole picture, and Gin found himself inside a vivid fantasy of a topless miss Alice kneeling between his legs to sandwich his hard-on between those gigantic, sweaty tits. There was no way, simply none, by which his manhood may hope to stick out of the abyssal cleavage; it would swamp him from tip to root, and the courier would never again see his little friend until he’d been beaten down and miss Alice spread her breasts to show off the sloppy aftermath. It wasn’t a very good fantasy to have. It was, in reality, an amazingly bad fantasy to have right then, overstepped only by the added thought of those fiercely blue eyes glaring up at him as she fucked his hard dick with those pillowy tits.

Chiefly, because miss Alice really was glaring. “… Hussy?” she questioned in a shrill voice.

Gin wet his throat with the tea. “… Yeah,” he said, eyes affixed to where the magician’s fingers were pressed to her nipples. Several trickles of sweat were running down the round slopes of her breasts.

A piping growl hissed out of the youkai dollmaker’s chest. It could’ve terminally ruined the plumbing of a casual molester, but Gin had the hindsight valve to stave off the leaks. “Hussy!” she repeated, incredulous. “I’ll have you put wise, I do not go out and—”

“Ma’am,” said Gin, a man of exhausted finesse. “A recap for you, if you will. You opened the door in nothing but your underwear, an apron and a shirt. You bade me inside ‘for tea and biscuits,’ neglected to put on more layers, then got all sweaty in front of the hearth. Your breasts – which, may I add, are gorgeous? – have been starin’ me in the face through that blasted shirt the whole meanwhile. I understand preoccupation, ma’am. I do. This, though? I’m feelin’ unbearably like I’m being seduced, here.” When the rosy citadel of femininity that was miss Alice omitted a rebuttal, only puffing up her cheeks, Gin boorishly went on. “And,” was his last and bluntest argument, “you didn’t pause for a second before undressing. Yeah? Tell me why that was.”

A twinge of distorting willpower presaged the youkai dollmaker’s answer. “I have… done this before.”

“… Done what?”

Miss Alice cracked an oily smile. “That was not a command, sir cour— Gin,” she reminded. “No, no—” she shook her blond head to ward off his prompt errata, “—do not. I am ill pleased by this, but I will tell you. Yes. Yes, bother, I have seduced men before,” she confessed, nose wrinkling with conceit. “There are not too many diversions to pursue out in a cabin in the middle of the woods, and fewer yet when one must likewise divert an overnighting guest. Conversation would have been my first pick, but… brutally, sir Gin,” she sighed, “scant few of you Human Village hayseeds possess the requisite mental capacity to hold one. Most, however, if not all of you, do have a certain other aptitude… even if some do perform it better with guidance than without. It is, either way, more engaging than yapping my head off at an intellectual ditch.”

“So,” Gin translated, “you… er, sleep with your guests?”

“Sex,” corrected miss Alice. “Shall we not be affronted by the term? Yes, I do have sex with my guests on occasion. It is less awkward than sitting around in silence or focusing on my craft while my afeared guest paces a ring in the bedroom floor, attempting in great vain to stay awake. Sex is more enjoyable when compared, and I have yet to hear a man tell me he would rather I did not give him something else to fiddle with. I am youkai as well,” she noted; “the assorted risks are, therefore, not a factor for me. This, I have found, brokers the deal more often than not.”

… Fuck, thought Gin. Yes, concurred something else under the table, do fuck.

The sleazy secret out, miss Alice resigned her prissy fingers from the job of covering her nipples. They issued slightly redder and more prominent than before. Absently, in the fashion of maids who knew the boys were peeping, the magician weighed her left breast atop one hand – the tit-flesh flattening delectably against her palm – only to then drop it and let it stretch from the gravitational pull.

There was an astute amount of smile on miss Alice’s lips when at last she peeked up his way. There were even trace contents of smug.

The courier hardened his heart. And not in the least because other areas of him couldn’t humanly get harder. “… I reckoned,” he told the dollmaker’s hypnotic bosoms, “we had a drat decent one going on, though. Conversation, I mean.”

A snooty cackle jiggled his two plump confabulators. “Granted,” miss Alice said for them. “You are a very well-trained listener, albeit you’d do weller to contain the grimaces when the topic is ill to your like. I do not… reckon this matters now, either or; we are past that stage. You have shown your true colours. The question we ought now to ask is: what-ever remains for us, sir Gin?”

A frugal reply sculled the wit-numbing fog of arousal between Gin’s ears, pretending to be repartee but actually telling him to shut the heckle up, because the bare-breasted magician was now investigating the ties of her apron-turned-skirt with one hand. A moment later, the cloth tumbled down her legs to bunch up on the floor. Miss Alice stepped out of it with cool disregard, leaving that much less to Gin’s imagination. Although, his brain made a beeline for the alps anyhow once the blond youkai calmly retook her seat at the table. Her breasts slumped on the top when she reached for her still half-full cup.

Inside the patch of sticky silence, Gin undid the belt of his trousers. “… Ma’am?” he began.

The magician’s cup clinked down on its saucer as it and Gin exchanged her blue-eyed attention. “Yes. Sex. Of course it is,” she acknowledged, fanning a hand. “I will tell you, however, what, sir Gin: I, myself, shall do nothing. Nothing of my own volition; nothing I have not been told to do. Commanded to do. Am I trepanning deep enough? This was, and yet is, an experiment. Command me, sir Gin, and I shall attempt to resist. Whatever I do not… Well, let us say, I am at the mercy of your good graces.”

There was an implied loftiness in the sentence, as though nothing Gin could come up with would be relevant in the long run, but he didn’t care. The trousers were by now at his ankles, and his underpants were packed tighter than hand luggage on an expensive flight. Miss Alice could have winkled him out of them with a flick of a fingernail.

It stunned him still how little the youkai he’d met made of the business of sex but that was, perhaps, Gensokyo short and sweet. Youkai toyed with humans; they seldom gave a drat to having left those humans worse for wear afterwards. Then, once the humans ran out of straws, they hired on a big, scary shrine maiden who gave that drat back with lavish interest. The rising fumes of burnt youkai would soon attract stories and hearsay, from which the same youkai would inevitably be reborn. The circle closed; and on Gensokyo went on its merry round of existence. It was that kind of story.

He mused, very briefly, on whether someone might some day tell the story of where and how the famed magician, Alice Margatroid, received one unimportant courier’s pent-up spunk.


( ) Nowhere! Gin reckoned and the road beckoned. It was this kind of story.
( ) “I’d like your good graces around my dick. And by that, I mean your tits. Allow me to fuck your tits, miss Alice.”
( ) “Come. Sit on my lap and let’s do some mental exercises. Start by thinking about your biggest secret fetish.”

(X) “Come. Sit on my lap and let’s do some mental exercises.”

The courier looked the magician’s way. It would’ve been tricky to be casually nude at her size, and miss Alice wasn’t even making an attempt. Nurseries would have paid mint to have her carry their most inconsolable wards for just ten minutes. A certain other establishment in town which Gin, ignobly, knew would’ve shelled out for a whole night. That he’d not had to mortgage his soul was as dumb of luck as he’d been picking up this delivery. A blasted cabin in the Forest of blasted Magic. Gods.

As for miss Alice herself, she abode his undecided ogling with even-tempered usance; eventually, with body language screaming, against all propriety, “I could pin you to the carpet and have you licking my carpet in a jiffy, but that’d be too much bother,” she once more took up her cup. After taking her fill, relaxing her shoulders, the magician set it back down – in doing so, laying her supple breasts out fully on the table. They slouched – then spilled outwards – like two skins full of warm milk, ready to be drained. Those mouth-watering, coral pink nipples being the spigots.

Good heavens, thought the stupefied Gin. It was a godsend to be into all kinds of breasts. Ashi’s little nubs had been yummy-looking as hell, and the Hakurei’s had felt incredible pressed to his abs, but miss Alice’s brought to mind somebody of whose body, for reasons of morality, Gin had vowed not to daydream… too often. Here, in any event, was another amiable youkai – another craftswoman – another buxom blonde – with jugs almost rivalling Yamame’s and the amour-propre to flaunt them. The ace in the hole being, it was Gin in the room with them this time rather than some big-dicked, shaven hunk with a delayed ejaculation problem.

Then his own dick, which was jumping up and down in his underpants as though to pull him under the table for a private word, ousted the shaven hunks from the equation. That left it with itself and miss Alice – two things which, Gin squared with, they could absolutely do with adding together. Maybe even multiplying.

He tried dividing his attention between his eyes and his tongue. “… Ma’am? May I’ve your att’nshn, please?”

Miss Alice listened to his urgent Courierish and replied in her own language. “Finally. Yes, I hear you. Have you made up that colourful mind?”

Unlikely, Gin’s conscience muttered under the debris. “… Yeah,” said his mouth. “Should be some’n intellectual, actually. Come here,” he ordered, riding his chair away from the table. “Sit on my lap. We’ll make-do some mental exercises.”

Miss Alice could have been said to surge from her seat were it not for the fact that her boobs had usurped that function from the outset, condemning miss Alice to merely sallying forth at undignified speed. She rounded the table, over five feet of sex on legs, until arriving at Gin’s side. A muffled cackle was spared for the location of his trousers.

“Taken off the pantaloons already, have we?” she mocked, swinging one of those legs over his lap to stand astride it. “You forgot a piece.”

And then, both hands on the courier’s shoulders for support, miss Alice sat down.

It was a careful process, because the youkai magician must have known enough men to learn that they were deceptively mobile things, apt to compress and catapult themselves out the nearest window at a squeeze. Her breasts, doughy and covered in perspiration, passed an inch before his nose, soon to drag their nipples down his lamentably clothed chest, while the magician’s complacent face slid into Gin’s viewport. A punch of nerve-racking arousal stalled his breath when she brushed the soft front of her panties on his stiff bulge… before pointedly drawing her hips farther out along his lap. In a brief lapse in manners, miss Alice’s sleeved arms looped flirtatiously behind his neck, until, reviewing the situation, she returned her palms to a tactful rest atop his shoulders. Heat poured forth from her open shirt like from a human – or, anyway, youkai – thermophore. So did her smell: the full-bodied tang of a woman after an unslept night. It made Gin want to double it down. With his on top.

And she was blasted heavy. None of that modest airiness of, say, Ashi’s or lady Akyuu’s, was to be had here; miss Alice was a ripe, comely, fully mature woman with all the weight that status pulled. Her phenomenally large and rather more than sultry ass pinioned his thighs to the chair: firm and springy under the covetous fingers the courier had wrapped around its hemispheres. The mountainous bust sticking out of the undone shirt must’ve accounted for a fifth of her body weight at least; he envisioned for a moment what it would have been like having them laid in his lap, pooled around his hard-on. There were even fewer doubts up close that he’d never, ever stick out far enough for the curvaceous dollmaker to suck on and play with his tip. He’d really, really not have complained.

As he was lapping his imagination’s tongue all over the magician’s exposed areas, something else cropped up he’d not noticed from afar. A tiny, off-white, stone pin piercing was nestled inside her sunken bellybutton. It had a subtle look of occult, as if, when you touched it, you’d erupt in warts. Gin crinkled his brows. More witchery stuff…

Miss Alice heard his misgivings firing. “Moonstone,” she obliged. “Only a little trinket. Not primed to curse you or anything.”

Gin coerced his eyes up to her face which, other than the frame of tousled, blond hair, could have featured in a children’s picture book. “… A charm?” he questioned, having lately bumped his head on just such a thing. “Against… what, accidents?”

“A periapt, if you so crave technicality. Although it works as good as a philtre, I have found… Colour me surprised, sir Gin,” she said, faithfully a little impressed, “but you are read well beyond the happy medium for a Human Village bumpkin. Are you a crouching scholar? Or apprenticed to somebody I should know, perhaps?”

A wet dog would have been humiliated to see Gin shake his head. “No, no, no, no—” he spluttered, “—altogether positively, ignorantly not. And I could’ve done well without half the reading someone’s… I’ve had hoisted on me. I’m just a runner. Knowin’ too much could do me in. Can’t run with an egghead, y’ know?”

“A pity, to be sure. I suppose you are that, though. A runner…”

Scenting the compliment beneath the term, Gin groped for something equal to give back. “… And you,” he did at length, “are very, very much a woman, ma’am. Very.”

Miss Alice’s expression went strange for a moment. “Hnn. Yes. I suppose I am. It does good to remember that.” There was a vaguely admonishing smile, and the moment’s spell broke. “We have, I believe,” said the dollmaker crisply, “veered somewise off the track. Was there not something about… mental exercises? Yes?”

A bottle of gin of the sloshiest persuasion couldn’t have flushed him out of the magician’s very warm, very female charms, but he endeavoured at least to finish his own chance thoughts. “Er. Yeah. I jus’ want to say, before everything… good heavens, you’re a bomb and a half.”

There was what registered as a look of polite incomprehension before miss Alice smoothed it out. “Hum. Thank you, I suppose…? You’re no stick yourself. You runner. And on the topic of exercise…”

And Gin knew that no power in Gensokyo could forestall the magician’s thirst for knowledge on the athamé’s effects, because knowledge was – in Gensokyo especially – a function of power, and like was always drawn to like in the end. The trouble spot of knowledge was, of course, that with it came enlightenment… and the attention of things, dark things, which liked it better nice and dim, thank you very much. This may not be miss Alice’s care, who lived beneath the sheltering gloom of the Forest of Magic and was a dark thing herself but, in Gin’s now-home-town, the potassium flash of a Tengu informant’s camera could alert all the little birdies on the grapevine. And then a fine reckless youkai-botherer he would look.

Then again, wasn’t he? Lady Akyuu had known him to talk to anyone or anything equipped with a passable ear. Also, there was a conspicuous volume of youkai right now seated in his lap, tits bared and forward, staunchly unbothered despite being bothered. And she’d been right, blast her with a hose: men would dash themselves on tradition to watch her do a pole dance, youkai or no. Or dash themselves on debt to have her dance atop their pole. Sexy and receptive as she was, it should’ve been a no-brainer that trading favours for favours was, in fact, a mutual interest. Instead, Gin had been braining himself – omitting, what miss Alice herself had remarked on, that he’d doffed his pantaloons at the first promise of nookie.

Well, not anymore. He’d got her to show him these splendid tits; he was palming her exuberant ass through her thin panties. Compliance in the crime of obtaining knowledge was scant little to give in exchange.

“… Can you,” he conducted his part by inquiring, “think of something that I name?”

The magician’s stare turned flinty. “Can I?”

“Yeah. Can you think of… say, a computer? Or a laser printer?”

“Can I?” she repeated.

It’d been sharper that time. Gin kicked himself in the metaphysical shins. “Right. Think of a laser printer for me, miss Alice.”

The blond magician mulled – then nodded in reflection. “Hn. No. Nothing,” she announced. “I have no concept of this ‘laser printer,’ so there was no compulsion. Same case as with the… baby seal, was it?”

Gin paused just briefly. “All right. Yeah. That stands to sense,” he then agreed. “How about this? Try and picture what a laser printer could be.”

And now were the magician’s eyes talking. A moment later, and she spoke haltingly, “I know what print is. And a laser is… it is light condensed enough to burn. Therefore, logic supplies, a laser printer would be… someone who singes print onto pages with luminomancy?”

Miss Keine of the history school would have envied Gin his stoicism. “… Close,” he allowed. “No cigar, but still a nice fa— yanno, never mind,” he decided. Ashi’s loan was stacking. “Compelled this time, I reckon?”

Miss Alice gave a serious little nod. “Yes. Yes, I was. The terms were both familiar, and so I could connect the dots.”

“What was it like?”

The magician licked her lips. Against everything in coincidence, it wasn’t by and large too erotic. There was an undertow of consternation to it. “All very… normal. An involuntary, yet very natural thought which you do not recognise as intrusive until you have consciously retraced it. I was aware, of course, of what you had asked of me, but when the idea struck, it was… it was a very attractive quandary all of a sudden. Not so now; I realise the question was underhanded and my guesswork, pardon me, away with the fairies. You are an Outsider – in which event it is, presumably, some manner of machine. Yes?”

“Well up-to-date for a youkai,” ventured Gin, “are we?”

Miss Alice was savvy enough to sense the tug of war. “A long tooth may still be filed,” she retorted, cocking her head and smirking. “And yet, I figure there was a reason for your pick…?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Yeah, see… seems it’s all in there, innit? In your noggin, I mean. Y’ can’t outstrip your own faculties. I gave you an alien concept, but you only took pieces of it what you already knew and smashed them together. Nothing you couldn’t’ve reckoned on your own. So, you didn’t think the impossible – so to say. Impossible for you, anyhow. All there so far?”

“Quite there,” agreed the magician. “And so, by extension…”

“Hardly likely,” Gin obliged, “that you’d do the impossible, either. Impossible for you-kai, anywho.” He shrugged, jogging her slim hands. “Like not bait a runner man.”

The dollmaker’s smile warmed into a (laser) beam. “Look you,” she cooed, “but you are having fun. Why, I’ll wager there is more a-concocting behind that oafish face as we speak. Isn’t there just?”

Gin fell silent. The coo had stung in its truthfulness. His lady Akyuutude was oozing out of the cracks. He sat there, feeling a soured flush of boyish pride that he was about to prove her allegations right.

On the flip side… two could tug at that war.

“… Yeah,” he replied. He thumbed the band of her navy-blue panties and lowered his voice, resolving, “Yeah, actually. There is, now we’ve confirmed all that. This is your next charge, ma’am. Think, and think hard, about the biggest, deepest, most secret fetish that you have. Starting now.”

The memory of lady Akyuu first taking him inside her flitted in and out of Gin’s background thoughts. The same, precipitous list of decorum was now making short work of miss Alice’s unflappable front. There was the doe-in-headlamps look, the slight hanging of the bottom lip, the fugitive glazing of the eyes before control reinstated itself… Miss Alice shifted in the courier’s lap – although it would’ve been a therapist’s hell to determine whether it had been in discomfort or straight otherwise. The two locked gazes: not like lovers, perhaps, but for sure like two adults who’d someway forgotten they were half-naked, turned on and perfect strangers.

Interests of the moment spoke – and Gin together with them. “… Thinkin’?”

The magician’s wayward bottom lip was caught between her teeth. “… Yes,” she said then, quietly. “Yes, you lecher. You prick.”

The courier dared a smirk of his own. “Good. Keep at it.”

And keep she did: glowering at the crouching scholar Gin with what a stand-up one may have construed as vindictiveness. He knew wiser. Her thighs were indecent liars: tensing and drawing together when he slid his hands down their length, just the ends of his fingernails touching. A soft breath whispered out between miss Alice’s teeth, hotter and shallower than its parents. Gin pushed his palms back up the immodest thighs, thumbs trailing along their inner slopes then wiggling into the dimples on either side of her panties. He stuck his remaining fingers under their band – and hiked them up. A vivid outline of the magician’s puffy mons was imprinted on their front, right below the suggestion of a matronly bush.

He did it twice, thrice, three times thrice again, stretching the silken fabric farther and farther, the front tapering so narrow her pubes were peeking out the sides. They, too, were honey blond.

There was a flinch when Gin let the elastic snap back flush around her hips, shaking the magician’s opulent breasts. The bouncy motion hooked the courier’s attention like a hungry trout. He made an uncouth grab for one of the plush tits, cupping it from below in one greedy palm. The sumptuous thing overflowed: its soft, pliant mass slumping and filling out the spaces between his fingers. Gin let it slip his grasp, as miss Alice had done herself before – and enjoyed the Newtonian aesthetics of the massive boob flopping and sagging under its own weight. He seized it again very soon – head-on now – trapping the blatantly erect nipple inside a circle made of his thumb and index finger. The breast fought bravely, its skin slippery with sweat, but failed to stop Gin from lifting it all the way up to his mouth.

He pushed out his tongue… and then lapped it, sloppy as a dog, round and round the pink areola. Miss Alice’s hands pinched his shoulders, speaking mute volumes of her sensitivity. Then the whole of her spoke rather louder when the courier took the saliva-slathered nipple into his mouth – and sucked.

A murmur of frustration pierced the sounds of lewd slurping, and Gin peered up to find himself the laureate of a scalding look from beyond any barrier of decency. The inciting smile on the magician’s lips was only raising the temperature. Holding onto the eye contact, Gin groped for the other of miss Alice’s gorgeous tits – picked it up – and gave its equally stiff nipple a suckling kiss to match. It was salty and, much like its twin, softened and swelled like an obscene hickey the longer his lips were clamped around it. Indecision made him switch to the first breast – its peak hot and slimy with his spit – and apply the same trick. The urbane magician squeezed her eyes shut and let loose a raunchy moan. The impassioned harmonics made Gin’s underpants rife with anticipation.

Too late, he thought he should’ve done the same to miss Reimu in the morning. Too late, he realised he’d never even copped a feel of the shrine maiden’s youthful tits. The bloody Geisha ball had commandeered all his focus. And then, he’d whistled over a chance to… well, maybe not a chance to see, but sure as shooting a chance for an opportunity to maybe talk Yamame into letting him see her brown-tipped marvels in exchange for the kidnapped bra. That one didn’t bite as close as the former but, Gin was finding, titillation didn’t exactly make him the goodest of boys.

On cue, because karma loathed even a would-be homewrecker, he sensed one of miss Alice’s hands disengaging from his shoulder to sneak on its own down between her spread thighs. A moment’s frantic fumbling later, and the navy-blue panties were pulled aside – unveiling the wealth of downy, blond pubic hair and the magician’s priceless – although, if you went by what she’d said, freely lent out – precious thing. The deft craftswoman’s fingers wasted no time; they sought out miss Alice’s happiness button and ushered it out of hiding. That was when Gin, having ruefully unhanded one of her breasts, intercepted her at the wrist.

“Whad’dya think,” he rumbled, peering up, “you’re doin’ down there, ma’am?”

The dollmaker’s glare could’ve sparked flash paper. “… Look y—ooou,” she attempted to coo again, which ended up a crow instead once Gin reapplied twice the suction on her remaining nipple.

He let it pop out of his mouth with a moist smack. “… Am lookin’,” he assured the flurried miss Alice, “so what? I didn’t tell you to do that, did I? And what was that you said? That you’d do nothin’ by yourself? Well?”

Thunder lashed the magician’s brows into a nautical knot. The hand in Gin’s grip was crushed into a delicate fist. “Look!” she snapped, her released breast jiggling from the zest involved. “Pardon me, but bloody Nora, I do not care anymore! Very good? Very well? I am going spare up here! I have my usances, fine? I cannot fathom how you guessed I loved my teats sucked either, but congratulations – you have it. You have it terrifically. Now let me touch myself, you daft man!”

Gin stared over the runny breast. Usances, huh… He changed tack. “… That some’n you do, then? Touch yourself while fantasising? How often?”

Miss Alice’s cheeks coloured a darker red. “I only acquiesced to sex; I am not telling you—!”

“Tell me,” the courier cut her off, “how often you masturbate, miss Margatroid. And keep thinking.”

The dollmaker’s eyes struggled, but her mouth yielded, “Three or… ffffour times a week. More… Mmmmore on nights of full Moon.” She gave him a big, friendly, murderous smile. “And I do not, before you wonder,” she added, “use my dolls for it. That would be a desecration of the craft.”

“What do you prefer?”

“A guest, should one be available,” she provided dutifully. “A synthetic, rubber man or my fingers elsewise – what does this matter? I am a woman and we do have needs; I’ll warrant even that hick Marisa does. Kirisame – you have heard? I taught her the kava elixir; I ought to know.”

Sure, argued a piece of Gin’s mind someplace in the rear of his braincase. Sure, but Marisa Kirisame is a human as far as you can throw her, and I saw her thrown not once when she duelled others in town. You’re not – and too corpulent to throw either way. Gin gave it a mental smack. It was arguing too much for a piece of the same brain that’d rammed it down one youkai’s throat and ordered another to present her tits.

Idly, musing on the best response, the courier nipped the fuming magician’s nipple between his lips. Good heavens, but she made for an adorable grouch. On a whim, he hunched forward – the abused nipple springing free – and ran his tongue up the sweaty valley of her cleavage. Not a noise of protest was raised. Not even when the courier had moved on to stuff his oafish face in the side of her neck. Nor when he imbibed at length and volume the scent of her unwashed, shoulder-length hair. Miss Alice smelled; there were no three polite words for it. And the raw, rich aroma of her body was making him harder than a free sample of Chanel Grand Extrait ever could.

The nonchalant disregard for clothing, the easy flirting, those massive tits that loved being sucked… The woman named Alice Margatroid had either been bred for sex, or Gin had a type after all – and the type was candid, busty blondes with fast and loose morals and esoteric pastimes.

He punted on the former… and not because the girl he’d crushed on for years applied to only three out of the five.

At any rate…


( ) … miss Alice’s hands were better employed elsewhere, and his fingers hadn’t enough friends.
( ) … there was something very much nearby she might better use to masturbate.
( ) … the thesis had been proven. The mystery that remained was: could female magicians get blue balls?

(X) … there was something very much nearby she might better use to masturbate.

… well, yeah. Something indeed nearby was plumping for more give-and-take exercise. Or it would have – had it not long reached its limit on plumpness. It’d worked that limit, too. That morning, it’d been doused in a young shrine maiden’s nectar; the previous – covered from tip to root in a spider youkai’s warm spit. The seeds had, as it were, been steeped. Now, Gin was getting unambiguous notices from his resident plougher that the time was high to plant them. Under the magician’s pierced bellybutton would be perfect.

He wrenched her insubordinate hand away from the blond jungle of her crotch. Miss Alice stayed put, looking daggers as the courier extricated his nose from her warm and fragrant hair. She clearly believed they ought to have discouraged a courier from further dawdling. They didn’t. Gin ditched the breast he’d been pinching and fondling as he’d sniffed the sweaty magician and reached down to tug at the band of his underwear.

And then, with little in the way of nicety, he shoved miss Alice’s captive hand inside.

Surprise squeezed the craftswoman’s fingers close around his wood-stiff shaft while, up above, her gorgeous, blue eyes blinked her astonishment. Gin released her wrist, leaving the slim hand trapped together with his hard-on inside the crowded underwear. His own, meaty athamé flexed and swelled inside the witch’s hold, each pulse of his furious heartbeat prying her fingers a little apart. He thrilled at the helpless quirking of her learned, pastel lips.

Gin wasn’t a sadist. At least, he hadn’t ever spanked a girl bright red before Ashi. Nor was he a brute. He’d let lady Akyuu to ride him at her own pace against every impulse to pound her like a little Dutch wife. He’d never seized a woman by the chin and pulled her into a slovenly French kiss, let alone while her hand was stuck in his underpants and testing the pliability of his dick. At least none who had been miss Alice right then.

The coy magician dislodged his tongue from her mouth then sidestepped the attempted reengagement. “… You would rather I touched myself with this, then?” she whispered, lips flush on the lobe of Gin’s ear. At the same time, she pumped the tightened fingers down his shaft: stripping the glans and coaxing from the rest of it a dangerous, dangerously pleased twinge. An impish smile impressed itself briefly on the courier’s cheek.

Gin opened his mouth. Gin shut his mouth. Never before had he lent an ear to a woman at once so prim and blatantly randy. Lady Akyuu may have toed the line between the noblewoman and ignoble girl, but for no longer as a rule than propriety was obliged. Miss Alice didn’t just edge that line; she regularly jerked it off so it stood firm and impassable whenever she came near. All that rubbish about research had been smokescreen stuff, and the magician had said as much herself: that her male guests were tantamount to toys. Wilful toys, some of them – if you gave the accounts the trust – and certainly more so than a certain, overstrained and over-clever courier.

That courier hadn’t in fact the tenacity of even miss Alice’s rubber companions. Those ribbing words, wrapped inside their salacious whisper, knocked the bull out of his head. Gin grouched under his breath something which would’ve translated to “Misery me, fine then!” in miss Aliceish then hoisted himself up, magician ass on top, to peel down his underpants. The blond bombshell gripped his hard shaft like a lifeline across the manoeuvre. Gin hadn’t settled back down when miss Alice leaned away, examining her bounty and saviour crammed all in one long, rigid, veiny package. There may have been the coquettish glance and a flash of the tongue across the lips, but of those, Gin had had his fill.

He had instead an obstinate, throbbing want to show miss Alice what it felt like being a toy.

“… Get on it,” he growled the distracted woman’s way. “Get on top of it, put it in. Now. All the way in. No stoppin’. That want you want, innit, hussy?”

The repeated slight narrowed miss Alice’s inhuman eyes ahead the command took hold of her aroused body. The stacked magician crept up to her feet above Gin’s lap: shuffling forward, swamping his face between the huge, slippery, stiff-peaked breasts and never once allowing his dick to slip her expert grasp. Visions of sweaty tit-flesh undulating before his eyes, Gin felt it all the keener when the invisible lips of miss Alice’s womanhood were pressed wetly to the very tip of his glans. They oozed the lusty heat of her insides… as well as something else quite tangier and more tangible.

Gin steeled himself… even if, inward, he wanted those unseen lips stretched around him and smooching his cavemanlike crotch sooner than the previous minute.

Miss Alice, bent on the last say being hers, spoke – her voice vibrating through to Gin via those stupendous breasts. “… You are very fortunate, Gin,” she said, “that I am, as a matter of fact, a tremendous hussy. You cock.”

And then, the proviso delivered, miss Alice’s hips began their slow descent.

Gin groaned into the magician’s lowering bust as her hussy womanhood enveloped his glans and stumbled past the bared ridge. The sheer warmth and the touch of her walls sliding down vised his jaw and clapped his palms possessively on her part-unveiled ass. Miss Alice’s complacent smile once more entered Gin’s viewport, closer the deeper and deeper his erection sank inside her, but the courier hadn’t it in him to take the mickey out of the sexy church mouse. The act alone: of finally penetrating the haughty woman – an acquaintance of half an hour at most and a youkai besides – rendered repartee a distant, second muse. The loose, big-titted blonde kept smiling, pushing her womanhood farther and farther down his triumphal arch, every meaty inch of it passed between her soft labia an additional, little sin.

Those built up, up and up, the lower miss Alice pushed her child-bearing hips… culminating once her ass alighted on his thighs and his dick berthed fully with its tip jammed up against the magician’s cervix. Gin breathed out…

… and came.

The orgasm punched into his groin, heavier than even the curvaceous, blond youkai, sending a savage twinge all up his hard, overtaxed length. In its wake, the first, powerful spurt of hot, uncured semen gushed into miss Alice’s inhuman womb. Gin kicked, head swimming from the intensity of it: the wonderful, feeble sensation of his pent-up stress venting in blissful spurts. It broke him. It really did; the unfinished business with the shrine maiden, the titillation of his crush, witnessing what he had in the woods and the open, dissolute flirting of miss Alice had chipped away at what was then stripped raw by a single stroke of actual sex.

A part of Gin felt pathetic. The rest was too engrossed gawping at the magician’s swaying teats and filling her womb to care.

A minute. It couldn’t have been longer than a minute of emptying his load inside miss Alice’s pierced belly, but brighter minds had disputed the relativity of time. The same, it left him drained: waist aching and somehow weaker than after his sandbag-hauling incident. Gin flopped on the chair, a spent fish and a landed dick all in one with a disjoint of jumbled thoughts to boot. With severe reluctance, as if releasing a cute earth spider from his home without bonking her properly, he ripped his gaze from miss Alice’s amazing, vulgar tits and crawled it up to her refined, well-bred face.

There was only a little bit of scorn to be had there.

“… Quick,” she opined.

Gin snorted, too woozy to bite back but hoping to heavens the damn woman would not see her period for another nine months. “Would y’ b’lieve,” he mumbled, “that I’ve been holdin’ this’n since blasted morning?”

“Way that went,” sneered the blond magician, “and how much you put in there, I would have wagered a month at the least.”

“… Jolly,” was all the homecoming lucidity brought for a souvenir. He was suddenly in a mood wherein people used to build pyres. He knew why that was. He was people, too.

Then miss Alice must have cast a charm because the courier felt a right fool for thinking to burn such a body. The lightness in his undercarriage hadn’t diminished the magician’s allure; even now, Gin would’ve betted all those curves could have encompassed Gensokyo if straightened out. Same for that smile. Miss Alice, like Reimu, was an undercover prize.

A sighing, disappointed undercover prize, but one nonetheless. “However…” the prize then announced, bucking up the courier’s attention. “This is a bit… inconvenient.”

A less ballsed and more on-the-ball courier may have caught the magician’s fingering of the moonstone piercing in her bellybutton. Gin hadn’t. Not, at least, until what came next had already turned previously.

There had been an itchy sensation. An insurgent movement under his bulldozed triumphal arch. And then, in mere moments, the arch was returned to its most resplendent state: bolt upright, thick as a spade’s haft and kissing up to the magician’s recently conquered womb as if proposing a convention. The clarity of mind, accorded ordinarily by the refractory period, didn’t come with the deal, but… that could as well have been miss Alice’s own spell. The busty magician dismounted Gin’s reinvigorated dick, labia trailing, strings of unlucky sperm binding her bushy groin to his shaft.

She matched his foggy stare, like a good-morning blowjob in an opened dress shirt.

“A periapt,” she satisfied the token explanations. “I told you, did I not? Worry not your egg-head; it carries no adverse effects… chafing discounted. And now, Gin,” she announced, all smiles and mother’s menace, “until this debility runs its course and I may resume unto normalcy, you and I are going to stay right where we are…”

“… And have more sex?” guessed Gin, sarcasm vying with hope.

The blond magician shook, cackling.

“No,” she corrected. “We’ll fuck.”

They did, too. On the table and by the windowsill with the aloe vera’s vegetal spectatorship. On miss Alice’s bed and braced by its posts. Contumely and compliments flying in the same formation.

The excuse train had arrived at station sex and sat at rest. Once asked, without even being bid, the magician had divulged her secret preferences: the choicest positions, acts and ways for a courier make her feel a proper hussy. With the periapt’s unsporting support, Gin had obliged. The chip of moonstone, miss Alice would clear up upon his second happy ending deep inside her, was no devilry to apprehend; it’d but store the energy he had expelled and give it back when compelled. A minute loss in transference was alas involved, and the sperms – regrettably starved, making for an imperfect solution… albeit superior still to, say, the practitioners of the Tao’s. The blessing’s disguise was so thin, it could as good have been disguised as an erotic pole dancer. The pole belonging to one plucky courier.

The gash sliced by the athamé in the youkai’s soul had mended in short order; shorter, actually, than Gin had puzzled out he could command miss Alice give him that tit-job he had wanted. Thus, a grand dream had died… even if, appeased, the buxom magician had agreed still to beat him off on those tits: angling him perpendicular to her chest, pumping her hand up and down his shaft and inadvertently brushing his tip on her cleavage till it had run sticky and white.

That had been an hour and a cold jog in the past… and might’ve been a dream itself for how un-sexed Gin felt trotting under the Hiedas’ depot gate. The juggling of energy had bedevilled him notwithstanding miss Alice’s guarantees; he wasn’t tired per se, but worn numb. He’d gotten his rocks off yet not gotten his rocks off, and the rocks were – somehow, somewise – wised to the cheat. The realest segment of it all seemed the minute-long, almost throat-deep French kiss the blond magician had pulled him into at her cottage’s door. That part, Gin determined to pin up somewhere while filing the rest away. There was a drawer in his scrupulously cleaned, Gensokyan outlook for just such experiences. It was marked: “Tell No One.” It had a post-it beside: “Smash in Case of Drunk.” He’d no idea who’d stuck that on.

The yardman received the dues and fees (sans Miss Cook’s skimpy panties) from Gin’s pocket, smacking the courier’s palm in return with a sheaf of envelopes.

“No more ‘eavy liftin’ today, Aka-joker,” he said with a slant on his face that could’ve passed for cahoots on a donkey’s. “Jus’ run-o’-the-mill paper-millage, what the lady’s wont to call’t.”

“I’m not grousin’,” supposed Gin, wary now to stash the documents from where he mightn’t by chance pull out a lusty bird youkai’s underwear. “Wasn’t holding my breath, either, but…”

The yardman, plopped on an empty keg behind a money-counting table, gave him either a wink or a blast of stye. “Should be all round yer area. Sorted’t meself.”

Gin cocked a Gin. Or, at least, the upper regions of him. “… You know where I, uh, live?”

“‘Course,” shrugged the gruff man. “Where y’ go to squeeze out the hangover, ‘nyhow. Y’ learn these things, directin’. Iffen I’ve mistook some, jus’ tell me on the morrow. Gonna sort ‘em different future-time. Catch? No need f’ thanks, bellhop. ‘S what I do.”

“Appreciate it?”

“That, you’d be’er. Word a’ warnin’, by the bye,” he added in response to Gin’s tactical pirouette. “Careful not to bother the lady. The Hakurei’s come down vistin’ a tit ago. Still in there, last I ‘eard. ‘S why I’m handin’ out papers.”

Gin froze and thawed so fast several gods would’ve had questions. “… Something,” he hazarded, “um, wrong with the delivery?”

“Yeah,” said the yardman, causing another localised thermodynamic singularity. “The rod what you gave ‘er. Somethin’ wrong with it.”

“The… rod.”

“The lightnin’ rod. What she ordered? Come, bellhop, d’ you not seriously rattle the parcels some ‘fore deliverin’?”

Gin Akamatsu gawped for a moment, and then confessed, “… Try not to. In case they rattle me.”

Unlike miss Alice’s, this blessing wasn’t dressed at all. Gin, who had herded lady Akyuu’s tolerance into lush, uninhabited pastures, had discovered there pockets of time and space inimical to lowborn lifeforms. “Vivi,” one was called; “important guests” was a whole another, pock-marked blotch on the map. Other contentions were afoot, too; at this while, Gin couldn’t help but imagine he had to positively stink of sweaty, busty magicians. A hard whiff under his hanten confirmed reality to have far outdone his imagination.

So Gin Akamatsu disbursed the afternoon’s stationery among the house Hieda’s business partners nearby the bachelors’ yard. So he repaired to his foursquare home, stoked the stove, stuffed the hanten, sweater, shirt and trousers in the laundry bag nailed to the outside of the window, and scrubbed himself down at the washbasin. Then, in a fresh(er) shirt and clean(er) pants dutifully clad, the courier sat for the second time today on his own bed and did what bachelors his age did every evening.

He plotted to kill time.


( ) Wasn’t there a side-gig for him to recce out someplace?
( ) Check out what scraps the hyenas had left at the market for him and the night owls.
( ) Just in and whatever the case, hunker down and hope no angry religious solicitors come.
( ) There were magicians out there, but none in here. Someone must keep it so.