A few minutes later, Rintaro found himself standing in the doorway of the Future Gadget Lab. ‘Daru?’ he called out as he stepped inside. The main room was dark, but he could see light seeping from under one of the doors. There was a thump, followed by some soft cursing in a familiar, deep voice. ‘Are you okay, Daru?’

The lit door swung open, and out stumbled the large form of Itaru Hashida, known as Daru among his friends. ‘Aah, you startled me, Okarin,’ the self-proclaimed hacker said, rubbing his knee. ‘Wasn’t expecting you here tonight!’

‘Did you hurt your leg?’ Rintaro asked. Here you go again, inflicting pain upon your friends, thought a part of him, but he pushed it down. There were bigger issues at hand right now.

‘Meh, it was just that stupid desk. Always been too small for me!’ Looking past Daru, Rintaro saw a lit-up monitor on the table and immediately decided not to look too closely, lest he scar his eyes again with some of Daru’s… interests. ‘Never mind that – it’s been a while! What’s up, Okarin?’

‘I… well…’ He struggled to find the right words for a moment. ‘The past few days have been strange, and quite troubling.’

‘Heh! I told you, you were gonna get an allergic reaction hanging around all those normies–’ Daru stopped as he finally looked Rintaro in the eye and seemed to catch on to his expression. ‘Dude, you look like you’ve seen a ghost! What the hell happened?’

That’s not too far off the truth, actually, Rintaro thought. But, while the Amadeus project itself had been shown to the public, his participation in it was supposed to be confidential, so he couldn’t tell Daru about that. The other thing that had happened, though… ‘I found out some alarming things. Someone is spying on the Lab.’

‘Seriously? What are they after, the PhoneWave? My new research?’ Luckily, Daru seemed to understand how serious the situation was, which wasn’t always a given when it came to him. Rintaro sighed and reflexively looked to a workbench across the room, under which he knew lay a certain electrical appliance, the damn thing that had gotten them into all of this mess to begin with.

‘I really don’t know. There shouldn’t be anyone who knows about it in this worldline, at least not at this time. But this girl seemed to know more about me than she should be able to, so we can’t rule it out.’

Daru immediately perked up. ‘A girl? You’re saying a girl has been spying on us? Is she cute?’

Rintaro had to stifle a groan. He should’ve known that would be the part his friend paid attention to. ‘She’s bonkers, Daru. She talked about opening portals and fake worlds or something, and she wore this big hat and a cape with runes all over it…’

Daru chuckled. ‘Sounds like you, Okarin! Or, I guess, how you were…’ He trailed off awkwardly.

‘Anyway,’ Rintaro said, a bit of an edge creeping into his voice, ‘I wanted to warn you about this. That girl has been paying way too close attention to this place. I have no idea quite how much she knows about us, or if she’s working for anyone. We need to make sure this thing doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Again, that is.’

Frustrated, he kicked the air in the direction of the PhoneWave. That the Future Gadget Lab held things which needed to be kept out of the wrong hands was a prime indicator of just how far his life had slid away from what had once been its path, how far it had spun out of his control. The Lab was never meant to be such a place. In spite of the fanciful name his chuunibyou self once bestowed upon it, it had begun as just a hobby workshop where he and Daru tinkered with household appliances after school while Mayuri sewed costumes on the couch. They made things like a toy ray-gun that functioned as a TV remote and a bamboo camera drone that lacked stability control, and tried to sell these useless gadgets online to little avail.

Then one day, four months ago in the heat of late July, they inadvertently made something which was not only not useless, but quite exceptional. Rintaro and Daru had been trying to make a mechanism for remote-controlling a microwave using a phone, but it turned out that under specific circumstances this mechanism could send text messages back in time. Back then he had not realised the gravity of this discovery and had let his friends use it to improve their lives by adjusting their pasts. Unfortunately, their reckless messing about with the fabric of time caught the attention of a ruthless scientific organisation called SERN, who wanted to seize the technology for their own gain and in the process killed Mayuri, his oldest friend.

After repeated failed attempts at saving her using more advanced temporal inventions, Rintaro had eventually realised that Mayuri was doomed to die unless he could convince all of his friends to revert their changes to the worldline. Even after he painstakingly persuaded all of them, however, this only brought him to a worldline where Kurisu, another friend, was marked for death instead. He could not find a way to save both Mayuri and Kurisu and, after many more time leaps and loops of trying and failing, he’d gotten to a worldline where he’d ended up unintentionally killing Kurisu with his own hands, and at that point he had broken down and given up. Nothing he tried worked, and he could not handle even more blood on his hands. It had all been the fault of the hubris and recklessness of his chuunibyou self, so he cast that self aside. The mad scientist Hououin Kyouma was dead, and now Rintaro Okabe was left to pick up the pieces of his life and not make the same mistakes again.

Suzuha had been furious at him for giving up on Kurisu, had tried to get him to keep on looping, keep on trying, but he knew futility when he saw it, and he’d left the Future Gadget Lab alone for… what had it been now, three months? He’d tried to live a “normal” life, but it seemed that the madness of the supernatural would not leave him alone. He didn’t want to go through this again, didn’t want to let another vague glimmer of hope fool him. Rintaro slumped to the floor and buried his face in his hands.

‘Oh God, Okarin, I’m sorry! Is this a panic attack? What did Suzuha say I should do if this happens, again? Oh no, I can’t remember…’ Belatedly, Rintaro remembered there was someone else in the room with him. He sighed and clambered to his feet.

‘I’m… okay, Daru. Guess I just need few more sessions of therapy still,’ he said with a hollow chuckle. ‘But really, we cannot let our research be stolen, and I fear this girl may attack the Lab. We should talk to Suzuha tomorrow.’ He started to move towards the door, but then stopped. ‘Before I forget, this girl did something quite strange.’

‘What, did she raise an event flag?’

…Rintaro blinked. ‘She had a sort of glass ball with her, and appeared to be able to levitate it with her mind.’

‘What, like an ESPer? That’s an unexpected flag!’

‘I know it’s quite unbelievable. I suppose there might have been some kind of string that I could not see, or maybe there was some kind of machinery inside the ball, but even that would be technologically impressive given its small size…’ Rintaro had to pause and take a breath, he’d started to ramble in his nervousness to rationalise what he had seen.

‘Is it unbelievable, though? Aren’t you kind of an ESPer too, Okarin, with your Reading Steiner and all? And then there’s Faris-chan and her–’

‘I guess so.’ Rintaro grit his teeth. “Reading Steiner” was the nonsensical name he had once given to his ability that, when they altered the worldline with the PhoneWave, allowed him to keep his memories from the previous worldline instead of having them overwritten by the new one. None of his other friends seemed to be capable of that except to very limited degrees, so it was definitely an unusual ability and, he supposed, kind of an ESP. ‘But in any case, this means we don’t understand what this girl could be capable of, so we need to be very cautious. Daru, you hadn’t even locked the door of the Lab when I got here.’

‘Sorry, Okarin, I’ll make sure to do that next time. Unless… what you’re saying is if I leave the door unlocked I get to meet this cool ESPer girl–’ A glare was sufficient to shut him up. ‘Sorry, sorry, I’ll do it!’

‘Actually, to be safe maybe you should push some furniture in front of the door, too, when you’re alone in here. I’ll have to go talk about this with Suzuha tomorrow, she should have some knowledge of how to make effective fortifications.’ He glanced at a clock on the wall. ‘But, it is getting late now, so I should head off. I still need to eat dinner, actually.’

‘Wait, Okarin!’ Daru called out, stopping Rintaro in his tracks just after he started walking towards the door. ‘I just remembered, the Bit Particle Gun broke.’ Rintaro was lost for a moment, until he recalled that name. Future Gadget No. 1, the Bit Particle Gun, was that toy ray-gun they’d turned into a TV remote. Daru continued, ‘It just stopped working suddenly. I tried changing the batteries, but that didn’t help, so I think it might be something with the wiring. I looked at that, but couldn’t find anything obvious. Could you take a look at it?’

‘Uh, Daru, is this really important right now?’ The change in subject had been so abrupt it had nearly given Rintaro whiplash.

‘Well, I couldn’t find any other remotes in the Lab, and I’d have to spend a lot of time searching in shops for one that works with this old TV, and the new season of Blood Tune is coming out in a few days…’

Rintaro sighed. Despite his intellect, Daru never seemed to have quite grasped the concept of “priorities”. But he was also Rintaro’s friend, and Rintaro knew he’d been neglectful of their friendship in the past few months, so this not particularly bothersome chore was the least he could do. ‘Okay, fine, I’ll see what I can do.’ He took the Bit Particle Gun from Daru’s hand and shoved it into the pocket of his jacket. Maybe a little fiddling about with electronics would be a good way to take his mind off his recent stress. ‘Now, I really should get going. Please make sure to stay safe, Daru!’ After a final exchange of waves, Rintaro closed the door of the Future Gadget Lab behind him.



By the time Rintaro got back to his university apartment, it had gotten so late that he couldn’t be bothered to cook a proper meal, so he just heated up a cup of instant noodles. While eating, he sat down at his computer and disinterestedly browsed some news sites until he remembered something. That strange girl Sumireko had talked about opening a portal to something called “Gensokyo”. He’d definitely heard that name before, somewhere in his visitations of various forums about the paranormal and supernatural, but he couldn’t place exactly what it was, and given her display of apparent telekinesis he couldn’t help the nagging feeling that there might be something important hidden within the girl’s arcane ramblings. After all, even the ostensibly nonsensical roleplaying conversations he’d used to have with Faris usually held “real” information in disguise.

He typed the name Gensokyo into a search engine and was greeted with a list of @channel forum threads. Upon closer inspection, it appeared that most of them had been started by a user calling themselves “Secret Sealing Club’s First President”. Rintaro recalled that one of the chuunibyou titles Sumireko had introduced herself with sounded a lot like that, so that user was probably her. The predominance of her posts suggested that this was a topic she was passionate about, but possibly that few others were.

Rintaro scanned through one of probably-Sumireko’s threads, but found the subject matter hard to wrap his head around. He figured he could get a grasp on it if he read through all of the threads from top to bottom, but he didn’t want to do that at this time of night. For now, he was able to gather that the name Gensokyo referred to a location, a supposed place where mythological creatures and phenomena were hidden from sight from the rest of the world.

As he scrolled back up to the top of a thread, his eyes landed on the top-right corner of the screen, where he saw that @channel had automatically logged him into his old account, which was named simply “Hououin Kyouma”. He groaned. As recently as a few months ago, when the Future Gadget Lab had been just a hobby workshop making useless trinkets, he had been a classic chuunibyou case, pretending to be a mad scientist called Hououin Kyouma who would fight a sinister Organisation and overthrow the social order of the world with his genial gadgets. However, in retrospect, back then he didn’t truly know what those things meant, the whole thing was just an affectation. Now that he had actually fought a sinister Organisation and done things that unintentionally could lead to the social order of the world being overthrown, the performance of Hououin Kyouma felt childish, almost offensively so. Furthermore, his delusions of grandeur had made him naive and arrogant, and now he wished he’d had more clarity and caution at that time, then maybe he would have noticed the danger before it was too late and his friends would not have suffered as they had.

Even with time travel, there were some mistakes he could not take back, but at least he could prevent Hououin Kyouma from making any more. He had resolved to stop pretending to be who he was not. He’d thrown away the stage mask, as it were, and decided to live as who he really was: Rintaro Okabe, a university student living in Tokyo.

Rintaro brought his mind back to the present, shook off the scowl that had formed on his face and moved his cursor to the settings icon, in order to find where he could change his username. However, as he did so he noticed that the “private messages” icon was lit up, with an indicator showing he had ten or more unread messages. Clicking on it revealed they were all from “Secret Sealing Club’s First President”. Great, more Sumireko to deal with.

Looking back at what he had seen today, Sumireko Usami did not necessarily seem like someone who was evil, but she reminded him too much of Hououin Kyouma. Additionally, though he couldn’t claim to understand her yet, much like his Reading Steiner she seemed to have some kind of ability beyond the norm, and he feared what kind of disaster her delusions could lead to.

Rintaro glanced again at the long list of messages, decided it was too late at night to deal with this, and shut the computer off. The events of this evening had exhausted him. He collapsed onto his bed, not even bothering to take off his day clothes.



Rintaro woke up in the middle of the night and at first he wasn’t sure why. He immediately had a bad feeling, though. He opened his eyes, and something was definitely wrong. There was something at the foot of his bed that shouldn’t be there, but he could not see it clearly. He blinked. It was a person. He saw a lot of purple, and long blond hair. This was bad. He tried to get up, but he couldn’t. His mind knew that he needed to get up, as soon as possible, but his body did not respond.

Oh wait, he’d heard about this. Sleep paralysis. If you got sleep paralysis, you were not supposed to open your eyes, because you’d see hallucinations. Well, he’d already messed that one up. He squeezed his eyes shut. He heard a strange sound, like something made of cloth was being ripped apart.

It’s just a hallucination, it’s just a hallucination, it’s just a hallucination, he repeated to himself. The sound stopped. Now he felt something, like something was touching him, but he couldn’t tell what or where. It changed to a feeling of weightlessness, and he couldn’t feel the bed under his back anymore. Hallucination, hallucination, hallucination.

For some reason, even though he had just told himself not to, he opened his eyes. Just a little bit. He couldn’t tell quite what he saw, but it looked like a hundred eyes were staring at him from the darkness. Okay, that was a mistake. He closed his eyes. He didn’t feel the touching sensation anymore. He could hear his heart thumping in his chest, but nothing else. Was it over? He was not going to open his eyes again to check. He started to count in his head. Deep, slow breaths. There was nothing there, it was just a hallucination.

Gradually, he managed to steady his breathing and his heartrate. It took minutes, maybe even hours, but eventually he managed to drift off again.



When Rintaro next awoke, thankfully it appeared the nightmare was over, and the night too. He could feel the warmth of sunlight on his face. He opened his eyes and saw the clear blue sky. Wait a minute, the sky? What the hell had happened to his ceiling?

Chapter 2

Wednesday, 1 December 2010



Rintaro Okabe closed his eyes. Opened them. Closed them. Opened them again. However, what he saw did not change: there was undeniably no bedroom ceiling above his head, only an expanse of sky. The surface under his body did not feel like his bed, either.

He lay stock skill, all of his senses on alert. His mind raced through several scenarios of abductions, but reached a catch. Namely, he was lying on the ground somewhere outside, and it would rather peculiar for kidnappers to keep a captive in such a position.

Rintaro wiggled his fingers cautiously and to his relief found that he was no longer paralysed. Gingerly, he sat up and examined his surroundings. He was in a small clearing in a forest, a bed of orange flowers underneath him and tall trees marking the perimeter. Well, there was certainly nothing like this within a sleepwalking range of his apartment, so someone else had to have placed him here. He considered whether somebody could have gotten hold of the PhoneWave and caused this, but that required an electronic device as a target, so there was no way it could have sent a message far enough back in time for the city of Tokyo to entirely vanish. Thus, it seemed most likely someone had physically taken him, but then why leave him here of all places?

The confusion he felt upon waking in an unfamiliar place gradually changed to a sense of dread. Who the hell was responsible for this? Had the Rounders somehow managed to find him after all? Was someone after him because of the Amadeus project? Or was his predicament the fault of that stalker girl who might be an ESPer? He couldn’t decide who or what the most likely culprit was, and his train of thought only highlighted how many potential threats were hovering at the edges of his life, no matter the barriers he’d tried to construct over the last few months. It only got more unnerving the more he thought about it.

Now is not the time to have a panic attack, Rintaro forcibly told himself. After all, speculating on what had caused his present situation wasn’t very useful if he didn’t fully understand what that situation was. He began looking over himself for signs of injuries. He was still wearing the black shirt and trousers from the previous day, which had now gotten a bit wrinkled from lying on the damp ground. He was pretty sure he’d taken his jacket off before going to bed, but now it lay on top of him, draped across his torso and legs. It was like someone had placed it there as a makeshift blanket, but what would the meaning of such a gesture be?

Though he’d woken up with the warmth of the Sun shining on him, Rintaro now felt a chilly breeze of early winter blowing through the trees and started to put on his jacket, when something in its pockets bumped against him and he had an idea. He quickly went through the pockets and to his relief found his phone was there. Calling emergency services seemed like a good idea in this situation, he only had to hope there was reception wherever he was now. However, he did not get to find out whether there was, as no matter what buttons he pressed the phone refused to activate. Of course. When he had gotten back to his apartment last night, he must have been too tired and distracted to remember to put the phone in the charger, and now the five percent battery had gone down to zero.

Why did… whatever this is have to happen the one time I forget to charge my phone? I’m always careful about those kinds of things, Rintaro thought. Now he was stuck in an unknown place and had no way to call for help. Frustrated with himself, he tossed the effectively useless piece of plastic onto the flower bed before pocketing it again. He decided to inventory the rest of what he had with him, which turned out to be not very much. He still had his wallet, which surprised him. Whoever had kidnapped him hadn’t robbed him? So perhaps their goals were unrelated to money? Rintaro wasn’t sure what to make of it. Still, the plastic cards and spare change weren’t immediately useful.

The other notable item he had was the Bit Particle Gun that Daru had asked him to fix. Amazing, more useless plastic. He couldn’t find anything else in his pockets, aside from a ballpoint pen and some scraps of paper, like a flyer from the Amadeus presentation last week. Altogether, not the greatest kit for surviving in a forest.

Eventually, Rintaro concluded that he did not have any physical injuries and got to his feet. He brushed dirt off his shirt and trousers before pulling on his jacket, having returned his items to various pockets. As he started to think about what his plan of action should be, he spotted a puddle at the edge of the clearing and walked over to use it as a mirror. He saw he had more stubble than usual and his short black hair had gotten a bit messy, but overall his face also appeared to be unscathed.

With his phone dead, staying put where he was wouldn’t accomplish anything, so Rintaro decided he was going to explore in order to find his way back to civilisation. Rintaro carefully looked around the perimeter of the clearing. The forest seemed about equally dense in every direction, not giving him any clues as to which way he should go. The homogeneity would make navigating difficult, too. He figured if he walked in a straight line for long enough he would eventually reach something, be it the edge of the forest or some navigationally useful feature like a path or a stream, but even doing that would be a challenge.

Rintaro ultimately decided he would walk outwards in a spiral pattern, which would allow him to keep using the clearing as a landmark while investigating the surrounding area. Without anything better to do and with a subtle sense of panic creeping up every time he stood still for too long, he checked one more time he hadn’t dropped anything in the flower bed and set off.



Half an hour later, a sense of panic was advancing on him even when he was walking. Rintaro still had a pretty good idea of where the clearing was relative to his position, so he wasn’t lost, but he hadn’t managed to find anything in the forest, either. The trees and shrubs looked the same wherever he went. He had spent a few moments examining the plants to see if that could give him any clues on his location, but he didn’t know enough about the subject area and the only thing he’d managed to conclude was that all of the greenery looked vaguely like it could be found in a Japanese forest.

I should relax. I’ll find a trail or something soon enough. Whoever put me here had to get here somehow, so there must also be a way back, he told himself. Regardless, his heart was pounding, and not just because of the physical exercise.

Not helping his anxiety was a particular unsettling sensation the forest was giving him. He couldn’t identify precisely what was causing it, but he distinctly felt like he was being watched. A memory of the eyes he saw in his nightmare appeared in his mind, but he pulled his thoughts away from it. That had been a hallucination, it could not have anything to do with what was happening here in this forest.

Several times Rintaro glimpsed movement out of the corner of his eye. It seemed like small animals scurrying off, but he had not been able to see them clearly. Or any animals, for that matter, which he thought was a bit strange for a Japanese forest.

Rintaro was considering whether he should climb a tree so that he could look over the canopy and get an overview of the forest – not an idea he was very enthusiastic about, because even with his recent participation in a tennis club he doubted he was agile enough to pull that off – when he saw a sparkle of light ahead of him. Another clearing? He quickened his pace, and found the source of the light was entirely different from what he expected. In front of him was a group of mushrooms that were glowing in a bright cyan colour. Not only that, the mushrooms were huge, the largest nearly a metre across.

I may not be an ecologist, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t mushrooms like this in Japan, Rintaro thought. In fact, he hadn’t heard of mushrooms like this existing anywhere on Earth, and he was pretty sure that ones that looked like this would garner media attention. Had he just discovered a new species? A small part of him became excited at that prospect, but was quickly overridden by the observation that this didn’t help him much with getting out of the forest, apart from giving him another landmark to use for navigation. He stayed a few metres away from the mushrooms, since they definitely looked like they might be poisonous.

Rintaro heard a twig snap behind him and spun around. A typical set of trees and bushes greeted him. He couldn’t spot any movement, though he did hear some faint rustling sounds. There was a pause, and then an even fainter sound that almost seemed like a giggle. Irritated and battling his nerves, Rintaro walked forward, but there was still no visual evidence of any kind of animal being there.

I can’t understand this forest. A total absence of birds, giant glowing mushrooms and whatever these little things are that keep skittering around the bushes. What the hell is this place going to throw at me next? he ranted internally. He really needed to get out of here. He turned back around to–

‘Hi there!’

One second Rintaro was standing upright, the next he found he’d thrown himself backwards into the bushes. He realised he was yelling and forcefully shut his mouth. Having regained control over himself, he focused on what had scared him in the first place: the sudden appearance of a person.

In front of him stood a young woman who looked to be of high school age like Mayuri or Sumireko, a little bit younger than the university freshman Rintaro. She had short blond hair with an off-centre red bow, and wore a black vest and skirt over a white shirt. White socks and black Mary Janes completed her outfit. Those were not hiking clothes, and overall she seemed rather out of place in this gloomy, untamed forest. What was this girl doing here?

Belatedly, Rintaro remembered that she had spoken to him. ‘H-hello,’ was all he was able to utter in reply, as his voice was still caught in his throat from the surprise.

‘Did I give you a fright?’ the girl asked, perplexingly cheerful. He cautiously nodded. ‘Tee-hee, Kogasa will be jealous!’

Rintaro wasn’t sure what to make of that statement, so he decided to cut to the chase and ask the girl about where they were – after coughing a few times to clear his throat, that is. ‘Could you please tell me–’

The girl interrupted him in a nonchalant manner. ‘Your disguise is really great!’ What disguise? ‘I really thought you were human, right until I got really close to you. It’s only the scent that gave you away!’

Rintaro raised an eyebrow. ‘Excuse me? I am human.’ And what the hell did she mean scent, anyway? He may have lost a lot of his dignity with his ridiculous reaction to the girl’s arrival, but he was not just going to let someone call him inhuman and smelly.

‘Hahaha, I’m not falling for that one! But you don’t have to pretend around me, y’know? I’m a youkai too!’ She grinned broadly, and Rintaro felt a shiver run down his spine. The darkness made it a bit difficult to see, but her teeth looked strangely sharp. But regardless, this girl was calling herself a youkai? He was immediately reminded of his conversation with Sumireko, but this was an entirely new level of chuunibyou. However, this girl didn’t have the pompous air typical of chuunibyou, she had said it as if it was perfectly natural. She continued, ‘Your disguise must be really good for fooling humans. I was only a few seconds away from eating you when I realised you were a youkai!’ A comment about his human status died on Rintaro’s tongue. Had he really heard that right?

‘E-eating me?’ He almost tripped over himself again, but managed to grab a tree just in time to steady himself. What on Earth was wrong with this person? Her sharp teeth glinted in the light from the mushrooms.

‘Yeah, you look like you’d make a decent meal! A bit bony, but with that young flesh that always tastes the best, y’know? But then I saw through your disguise. Imagine eating another youkai, ewww… Okay, I may have nibbled Mysty’s wings once, but that was one time and I was very hungry and she got healed, I swear!’ That last part was rattled off under her breath while she stared somewhere off to the side. ‘Still, very good disguise, you’d really pass as a human!’ Her cheery smile was back in full force. Rintaro, meanwhile, was investing a lot of effort in not throwing up, and he was sure he was pale as a sheet.

Not only was he nauseous, he was also terrified. This girl was batshit insane! Nonetheless, he came to the realisation that something which had made him appear non-human was the only reason he had not just suffered a brutal attempt on his life, so he decided he’d better not challenge that idea while this girl was still in attacking range. He considered just running away, but he had no idea where to go and this forest had way too many things he could trip over.

‘Do you… eat humans often?’ Perhaps the worst attempt at small talk ever, but Rintaro figured a little more information would be useful to parametrise just how dangerous his situation was. That, and he feared that if he did not keep this girl occupied she might try to eat him after all.

‘Nah, not any time recently! My friends might get upset. Or worse, that mean shrine maiden might try to beat me up again! But I still get by feeding off fear, and Mysty makes really tasty food!’ That was… good? He supposed? However…

‘You just said you had been planning to eat me, though,’ Rintaro remarked, unable to stop himself. A second later, his mind caught up and informed him that he really shouldn’t be snarking at someone who might be a cannibal.

‘Well, I’m just feeling really hungry, okay?’ she huffed. ‘Maybe I should go to Mysty’s food stand… actually, I will!’ She promptly turned around and started walking away. While part of him was glad to be away from this unnerving individual, Rintaro realised he still had very little information on how to get out of this forest and back to Tokyo, and this crazy girl at least seemed familiar with the area.

‘Excuse me?’ he called out. ‘Before you go, could you give me some help? I’m afraid I’m a bit lost.’

‘Is that so?’ the girl sing-songed as she turned back around.

‘Yes, I’m not very familiar with this area. Could you tell me, where are we right now?’

‘The Forest of Magic,’ she stated plainly. That was a weird name, but it didn’t tell him very much.

‘Okay, but where is the forest?’ He made a broad, sweeping gesture with his arms.

‘In Gensokyo, duh.’ The girl raised an eyebrow.

Rintaro nearly lost his footing, even though he had been standing still this time. Gensokyo? The mythical location that Sumireko seemed obsessed with? It was actually a real place? And somebody had chosen this supernatural locale to abduct him to? A rationally-oriented part of his mind (which sounded ever so slightly like Kurisu) told him that this girl could just be lying, and that it was suspicious that this all happened only one day after he had learned of the concept of Gensokyo. But that train of thought could not explain all the weirdness of this forest.

Rintaro was not quite as surprised by this revelation as an ordinary person might have been – his experiences with time travel, along with the recent events with the Amadeus project and Sumireko, caused him to develop somewhat of a tolerance for seemingly impossible phenomena – but he still could not prevent his astonishment from showing on his face. The girl looked confused at his confusion.

Suddenly, her face lit up. ‘Oh, you must be new to Gensokyo, right?’ Rintaro gave a vague mumble of assent, not trusting his voice at this moment. ‘That’s cool! I heard about youkai from the Outside before, but I hadn’t met–’

‘Do you know Sumireko Usami?’ he blurted out, anger involuntarily creeping into his voice, but not at the girl in front of him. If this really was Gensokyo, then the person who barged into Rintaro’s life the previous day, showed off ESP abilities and said she wanted to open a portal to this place would seem to be the prime suspect for causing his spiriting away. How dare this Sumireko use me in her experiments, he thought as he tried to deduce why he had been sent here.

However, the self-proclaimed youkai in front of him shook her head. ‘Nope, doesn’t ring a bell.’

‘About yay high, brown hair, glasses, big hat, purple chequered clothes?’

‘I don’t think I’ve met anyone looking like that.’

Hmm, that doesn’t really give any evidence for or against Sumireko being my kidnapper. Regardless of that, there was another issue he needed to address. ‘Could you tell me, where can I leave Gensokyo?’

‘I dunno!’ she replied immediately. Rintaro resisted the urge to facepalm.

‘Do you know anyone who might know?’

‘Eh, maybe that shrine maiden? But she’s really mean to youkai. She’d probably beat you up if you tried to talk to her!’ She paused, putting a finger on her chin in an exaggerated thoughtful pose. ‘Oh, Mokou might know! She lives in the other forest and is always guiding people around. She’s a bit weird as well, but not as bad as the shrine maiden.’

‘I see.’ Rintaro committed this information to memory. It wasn’t as directly useful as he’d hoped, but it was a start, at least. The question now was what to do with it. He couldn’t yet be sure whether the place he was in was really the mythical location Gensokyo – though it was certainly a weird place – but in any case it wasn’t Tokyo, which is where he was supposed to be. He needed to find a way back, and to find out how he had ended up here in the first place.

Though… against his better judgement, he could not deny that this place was interesting, very much so, and part of him wanted to learn more about it, to understand it. Gensokyo, a place hidden from the world where the supernatural roamed freely… the potential of such a concept was endless. What strange creatures might one come across? What unnatural phenomena might one witness? The scientific part of his mind saw countless possibilities, so much potential for discovery. Not only that, but amongst the mystical secrets of this place might perhaps be the key to accomplishing what he had so continuously failed to do with his technology; that is, to break free from the converging worldlines that always led to his friends getting killed.

Rintaro clenched his fists. Another side of his mind told him he was getting ahead of himself once again. When would he learn? This supposed Gensokyo might just be some random forest inhabited by a few nutcases. And even if it really was the place of legend, that could just as easily turn out to be bad for him as good. There could be many ways he could get himself killed here – such as the maybe-cannibal he was still standing close to – or end up getting his friends hurt again. Didn’t he know by now not to let himself get swept up in delusional fantasies like mad science or the supernatural? His fingernails dug into his palms. He should just get out of here as fast as possible, before he made things worse. But yet he could not help being curious…

His agonising, tangled decision-making process suddenly received an interruption when his stomach growled. Ah, that’s right. He had not eaten anything since last night, and he hadn’t eaten much then either. For that matter, the only liquid water he’d seen in this forest had been a few murky puddles, so he also hadn’t drunk at all yet. That probably wasn’t a good thing. Maybe, instead of pondering on how to get back to Tokyo, it would behove him to first take care of his body.

‘You said you were going to some kind of food stand, right?’ Rintaro asked the girl, who had been idly looking around while he was occupied with his internal debate, seemingly unbothered by the stall in their conversation.

‘Yep, Mysty’s place! Her food’s always delicious!’ She had been facing away from him, but sharply turned to look at him over her shoulder. ‘Hey, do you want to visit too? Mysty’s always happy to see new customers, she doesn’t get very many.’

‘Yes, I would like that. It has been a while since I last ate.’ Rintaro gave a smile that he hoped looked friendly despite his lingering nervousness.

The girl chuckled. ‘Is that so? I did say, you look a bit bony!’ She spun around on the ball of one foot. ‘My name’s Rumia, by the way. What’s yours?’

‘I’m Ri–’ he started to say, but stopped himself. Wasn’t it a common element in various myths and fairy tales that you should be careful with your real name? That telling it to a supernatural creature could give them some kind of power over you? Of course, he didn’t really believe that this girl was actually a youkai as she claimed, and there was probably some rational explanation for the weird things in this forest. Still, one could never be too careful, especially in new, unpredictable circumstances like this. He should come up with an alias of some sort to use here. And quick, before the pause grew unnaturally long.

‘Hououin Kyouma,’ were the words that came out of his mouth. Why the hell is that awful name all you can think of? He began yelling in his mind a moment later, though he was careful to keep his outward expression neutral.

‘Oh, like “phoenix”? That’s a pretty cool name!’ Rumia said with an earnest grin.

‘Thank you,’ Rintaro replied through clenched teeth, affecting a polite smile even as he felt the urge to punch himself. Why couldn’t he think of anything else? Why couldn’t Hououin Kyouma just stay dead?

‘Anyway, Kyouma, we need to go…’ She turned her head slowly as she scanned the trees, until her eyes landed on something. ‘…that way!’ Rumia pointed her arm in a direction that to Rintaro did not look different from any other. She walked forward a few steps, before stopping and… lifting into the air, much like Sumireko’s glass ball. Once she had reached a height of about two metres above the ground, she spread her arms and started to float slowly towards where she had pointed, without bothering to look back at Rintaro.

Huh. Maybe she really is a youkai. Or an ESPer, at least, he thought. He felt like he should be more surprised about this than he was, but it seemed his capacity for surprise might have shorted out a bit after all that had happened to him in the last few days. He stared at the hovering girl for a few more moments, before hurrying to catch up with his ground-bound feet.

Just want to say that I greatly enjoy this story and I am excited to see where it leads. Thank you for writing this.

SERN when?

>>68738

This is at the beginning of Steins;Gate 0 timeline (specifically, at the point indicated by the dates at the beginning of each chapter), so rather than SERN, a different organisation is a more immediate concern. But yes, we'll check in with what is happening in the Outside in Rintaro's absence in due time.

Will we get the real Kyouma in this fic? Epigraph/0 Okabe is fine enough but the original was as legendary as it got. Especially for a VN character.

>>68783

I don't want to give too much away, but Okabe will get character development in this fic, like he does in S;G0 itself – though obviously it will not be identical because the circumstances are very different.