"What is going on here?"
The question slipped out of me the moment I stepped into the space we had—optimistically—started calling a dōjō. The word felt generous now. The room looked less like a training hall and more like the aftermath of a polite but determined explosion.
"Huuuh?"
Victoria's voice drifted up from somewhere near the floor, muffled and slow. I followed the sound, stepping carefully between a leaning rack of weapons and what appeared to be… cookware.
Weapons.
Pots.
Pans.
"And other random items," I finished, stopping beside where she lay sprawled on the mat. Something that looked suspiciously like clothing—or an idea of clothing—had been tossed aside nearby.
"Quiet," she murmured. "Head hurts."
I knelt without thinking, placing my palm against her forehead. Warm, but not feverish. She was tired in the way that came from pushing past edges a human wasn't meant to find yet.
I stayed perfectly still, afraid that even breathing too loudly might shatter whatever fragile rest she'd fallen into. I didn't know how long I sat there. Time softened. The room hummed faintly, as if the objects themselves remembered the friction of their sudden creation.
Eventually, she stirred.
"Heiwa," she said, blinking up at me before awkwardly lifting herself off my lap. Half her face bore faint lines from the mat—temporary markings, like impressions left on parchment.
"Better?" I asked.
Then, gesturing broadly at the chaos, "Explain."
She squinted around the room, as if seeing it for the first time.
"Miss Li Hua said I should practice making things. I guess."
Her gaze snagged on a stack of metal bowls, then a blade that had no right being next to them.
"It… got away from me."
"We're supposed to visit Miss Hazel's tea shop," I said carefully. "I was told to come get you."
I studied her more closely. The tightness around her eyes. The way her shoulders refused to settle.
"How are you feeling?"
"Mentally exhausted," she admitted with a sigh.
"And what are we going to do about these?" I asked, lifting a Qiang from a pile. It hummed faintly in my hand, still warm, like it hadn't decided whether it was finished existing yet.
"Hm. Mr. Mumei-shi taught me something that might help."
She bent, pulling a book from beneath a scattered bundle of scrap metal.
"What's with the book?" I asked.
"It's to record things I've made."
She flipped through it, her fingers lingering on pages dense with diagrams that looked more like clockwork than calligraphy. I peered over her shoulder—page after page of sketches and corrections, some entries crossed out, others amended in the margins.
"A… smartphone?" I frowned at the strange word, the English syllables feeling clunky in a usual sentence. "What is that?"
She grimaced and held up a smooth, rectangular slab of black glass.
"A failure."
I turned it over in my hands. Cold. Sleek. Utterly silent.
"How is this a telephone? There is no crank to wake the operator. No mouthpiece. It looks like a tea tray for a very small doll. What makes it 'smart' if it cannot even ring?"
She took a long, slow breath—the kind that warned me one more question might actually cause a system crash.
"It's supposed to… never mind. It needs things that don't seem to be available. It's a ghost of a machine."
"You look like a ghost yourself," I murmured.
"Want to see something cool?" she asked suddenly.
There it was—that spark. Stubborn. Prideful. Exhausted but refusing to be small. She didn't want to be seen as fragile.
She wanted to be seen as in control.
Before I could tell her to stay down, she stepped into the center of the room.
And then—
Everything shifted.
Not shattered.
Not displaced.
Overwritten.
The walls, the floor, the objects themselves recalculated their positions. The spear in my hand didn't move; reality simply decided it was no longer there.
A terrifying, silent efficiency.
"The Thēsauros appears as inevitability, not access," she murmured, quoting Mr. Mumei-shi.
Then, softer, "I don't really understand it either."
The room was suddenly—unnervingly—tidy.
But the cost was immediate.
Victoria didn't just sway. The color drained from her lips. Her eyes went glassy. She had spent her last scrap of energy on a parlor trick.
"What happened?" I asked sharply, catching her by the shoulder before her knees hit the mat. "Where did the spear go?"
"Mental fatigue," she whispered, a weak, self-deprecating smile touching her face.
She'd won the moment.
Lost the ability to stand.
"That settles it," I said. "We're skipping the tea shop."
I guided her down the hall, her weight leaning trustingly into me. In her room, I handed her water and helped her lie down.
"I've informed everyone," I said. "Mr. Mumei-shi says sleep will do some good."
She winced, then laughed faintly.
"Miss Li Hua advised you should do tasks in batches next time."
The afternoon sun hung bright and indifferent outside—too warm, too ordinary for how strange the day felt. I sat reading one of the books I'd grabbed earlier, though the words blurred into meaningless ink.
Then—
The cicadas stopped.
The vacuum-like silence was the only warning I got before Shinkage appeared.
No sound.
Just presence.
At the same moment, I heard movement at the gate—not a polite knock, but the frantic, heavy stumble of someone in trouble.
I nodded once to Shinkage—no words exchanged—and walked out to meet whoever had arrived.
"You owe me."
Miss Lakshmi stood there, breathing hard, eyes sharp with panic barely held together.
"Where is—" I started.
She cut me off.
"Help me get Halle back."
Behind me, Victoria's voice—steadier now, but alert.
"Heiwa? What's the problem?"
And just like that, the quiet layers of the day were scraped thin again—
another truth ready to be written over.