by Nisioisin
She was just as suspicious a character as I am.
And the fact that “I’ll cry” was the best threat a legendary vampire could muster made me feel like crying.
It was too depressing.
“Phew… Okay then.”
“My my, what’s this? Thou hast forgiven me? Thou art most generous. In that case, I shall deign to forgive thee as well.”
“That’s not what I meant by ‘Okay then.’ And what do you have to forgive, anyway?”
“Hmm, ’tis a fine point. Well, I shall grant thee forgiveness for what happened during spring break.”
“You can’t forgive me for that in exchange for this stupid blunder!”
She was being too blithe about it.
Spring break needed to be left as is.
Even if things feel totally chill between us.
You’ve got to draw the line somewhere.
Got to take it seriously.
“Actually, this could be a valuable experience,” I said. “A one- or two-day time slip wouldn’t feel like the real deal, but coming back this far, now this is interesting. I might just have to forget about my summer homework, but it’s not so bad to immerse ourselves in the world of eleven years ago.”
“’Tis kind of thee to say so.”
“Assuming we can go back.”
Spending the rest of my life in this time would be more than unpleasant, it’d be…impossible?
Mission Impossible?
“Unfortunately, I don’t think those middle school girls will just go on taking care of all my needs.”
“To hear thee consider such an outrageous possibility affords a glimpse of the depths to which thy humanity has sunk.”
“When we get back to the present, how old do you think those girls will be? I wonder if they’ll remember me.”
“Mayhap.”
Be that as it may, Shinobu said.
While she seemed sincerely downhearted about her big blunder (so much so that I might not be able to start calling her Shinobu the Blunderer), she seemed to have recovered somewhat from the initial shock.
Her recovery was surprisingly quick.
Though it might’ve been for show.
“Speaking in earnest, I…believe that I can return us to the present?”
“Yeah?”
“Allow me to explain it step by step, beginning with Kita-Shirahebi Shrine. I made use of that place’s spiritual energy to bring us hither, but ’twas by reason of my arrival that such energy had accumulated in that ‘hangout’ for aberrations in the first place, as ye know.”
“Right, I remember.”
To review: because she, the king of aberrations, had come to this town, “bad things” were drawn to that place as if to a magnet─and if Oshino hadn’t noticed, a Great Yokai War might have broken out.
But that was another story.
Since Shinobu wasn’t arriving in this town for another eleven years (she was likely somewhere overseas, wandering around looking for a suitable place to die), Kita-Shirahebi wasn’t a hangout for aberrations or anything else, it was just one more moldering shrine─
“So it’s impossible, then. We can’t go back.”
“Jump not to such conclusions. Verily ’tis impossible to pursue the course of employing its spiritual store, but that merely dictates that I must needs draw on my own internal energy.”
“Internal energy… But you’ve lost almost all of your vampire power, so that energy doesn’t amount to much, does it?”
“’Twill be fine if thou canst but allow me a taste of thy blood. If thou so doest, I may open a gate with my own strength, and we may return the eleven years to the future.”
“Oh…”
I see.
So that was the plan.
“To travel into the past would be difficult even at the height of my powers, but even without my full strength I should be able to return to the future. If ’tis too trying to jump eleven years at a go, we may hop three years at a time and rest in between. Feel free to praise and admire me. A kiss of gratitude is also acceptable, if thou art so inclined.”
Shinobu closed her eyes and protruded her lips.
Going full tilt on the nymphomaniac highway.
“By the way, my lord, people toss off a word like ‘nymphomaniac’ as though ’twere nothing, but pondering the term and its implications leads me to fear for its continued use. Might it not get censored?”
“I’d like to joke that you will be, long before the word is, but your point is well taken. Though honestly, I don’t really want to get into it…”
It’s a wonder that Lolita is still widely available.
Masterpiece or not.
“Ah!”
“What, my lord?”
“I just realized something. Now, I mean eleven years before the present, the regulations were more relaxed. So if we go to the bookstore, I can get my hands on all the classic masterpieces that are hard to come by these days!”
That large bookstore didn’t exist yet and we needed to go a little farther afield, but the valuable lineup of titles was worth it.
“Ha! Classic masterpieces? Surely ’twill simply be pedo smut that ye purchase in this era of lax regulation.”
“Nope, nope!”
“Were this period’s boys’ magazines permitted to show tits?”
“Stop steering the conversation in that direction!”
Regulations aside, I would have no problem getting my hands on valuable out-of-print manga.
And the font in mass-market paperbacks won’t be so large that they’re hard to read!
And the font in mass-market paperbacks won’t be so large that they’re hard to read!
And the font in mass-market paperbacks won’t be so large that they’re hard to read!
And the font in mass-market paperbacks won’t be so large that they’re hard to read!
…There, I ended up repeating it four times for emphasis.
In any case, knowing that we could get back opened up all kinds of possibilities.
Should I buy stock?
Get rich?
If I bought stock in IT companies now, before the computer bubble, wouldn’t their value go through the roof?
Ahh, no good, I didn’t have any cash on me.
More than that, it was shameful for me to be dwelling on financial gain.
Got to be better than that.
“Well, whatever we do, since we’re here, we might as well have a little fun for a couple of days before we go back. What do you think, Shinobu?”
“If it works for thee, it works for me…but does it work for thy summer homework?”
“Frankly, now that I understand that the risk is so great, jumping back eleven years when we just wanted to go back a day, I don’t care anymore. I give up. Let’s put it on hold for now, and if we get back to our time safely, I’ll think about it then.”
“Hmph. Giving up? ’Tis more like thou art shelving the problem, but I suppose that’s only… Huh?”
When Shinobu trailed off in midsentence, I followed her gaze, wondering what was wrong─and saw that she was staring directly at the gates of the Araragi residence, where a little child was standing.
I take back what I said before. I take it all back, every scrap of it.
I identified him all right. It was plenty possible. Even at seven years old. Even eleven years in the past.
They say you know yourself better than anyone does─and the child standing there was Koyomi Araragi.
“Whoaaaa! Super adorable! Might I pounce on him from behind and give him a big hug?!”
“Go ahead and get yourself arrested already.”
Turns out that even in this era she was a dangerous little girl, liable to be censored at any moment.
Whose influence could it be?
008
So that’s more or less the sequence of events by which Shinobu and I ended up eleven years in the past, but once our way back was reasonably secure I was able to relax a little, and
I can’t deny that I even started to feel like I might as well enjoy myself a bit. Still, when it came time to get away from the Araragi residence and actually make the most of existing in the past, I bumped up against the stark reality that there was surprisingly little to do.
Even in the past, reality was the enemy.
I realized that, for the same reason I couldn’t buy stock, I couldn’t purchase any books.
I couldn’t muster up the motivation to go to the next town just to browse in the bookstore─and even if I wanted to watch some of the older, more aggressive TV shows, we weren’t so far in the past that there were still street televisions.
Now this runs directly counter to what I said before, but while it was definitely the townscape of eleven years ago, the level of difference only served to make me uneasy. It wasn’t different enough to make me nostalgic, to make me relish a beloved past.
This might sound churlish, but if we were going to blow it anyway, I wished we could have gone all the way back to the prewar period.
“If we did, anyone as suspicious as thee would be apprehended by the military authorities in the span of a moment and be subjected to torture without any regard for human rights.”
“Think so? That bad, huh?”
“Given half the chance, thy words become dangerous, my master, become risky. A more moderately lenient age suits thee better, methinks. Now then, hath Mister Donut come into being yet?”
“They were just celebrating their fortieth anniversary, so there’s no doubt about it─what’s more, I bet there are donuts that you can only find during this period.”
“Oh ho!”
“Sorry to say this after you’ve sunk your teeth into the idea, but we don’t have any money.”
“After I’ve sunk my teeth into it, my mouth stays empty?”
“Yup.”
There was actually a ten-thousand-yen note in my wallet, but it was a new one, so we couldn’t use it.
It would definitely be treated as counterfeit since they had Yukichi Fukuzawa on it both in the past and in the present unlike the new bills with Hideyo Noguchi or Ichiyo Higuchi.
I might not get tortured, but I could well envision the military arresting a mysterious high school student with highly advanced counterfeiting skills.
I figured that even if paper money was no good, we might be able to use coins, though they did have the year engraved on them.
I held on to a sliver of hope as I examined the coins I was carrying one by one, but they all had dates from the future.
Such sophisticated counterfeit coins.
“Hmph,” snorted Shinobu, walking ahead of me as though she were leading the way.
If pressed, I’d say that there were fewer seams in the asphalt than in the present. Not that it mattered in the slightest.
“’Twas an enjoyable lark at the outset, but hath this trip not rapidly descended into tedium? If so it must be, why could I not, if a hug be out of the question, adore thee from afar in thy shota form for a while longer?”
“Just because. Don’t say such creepy things,” I replied, following along behind Shinobu, since I didn’t have anywhere in particular to go. “I mean, it’s just one more facet of the time paradox. I have absolutely no memory of meeting my future self or a little blond girl when I was six or seven, so it would be an issue if he noticed us, even from afar. It would contradict the future.”
“What? ’Tis not as though thou canst recall everything from thy childhood. Hardly can I recall the events of yesteryear.”
“And that’s all right with you? Not even ten or twenty years ago, but…last year?”
“To tell it true, after about the age of thirty I ceased to recall things in terms of years.”
“Thirty! What are you talking about, that’s not even that different from a human!”
“About a third of the time, the name Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade slips my mind. Honestly, ’twas a relief to shorten it to Shinobu Oshino.”
“I hate to remind you, but it was because of that name that your existence became sealed and bound to my shadow.” The girl just kept on getting dumber. “The young Araragi of this time was a pretty smart kid, if I do say so myself. Smarter than I am now, I’ll bet. Forget about remembering or not remembering, if we’re not careful he’ll see right through us.”
“A child so discerning? Art thou not simply viewing the past through rose-colored glasses?”
“Nope. In fish terms, he’s a Napoleon fish.”
“And is that impressive? Speaking in such terms doth not make him seem clever at all… I do not think there is a single fish with the reputation for cleverness.”
“Well, the same Araragi is now total whitebait.”
“Thou reversed time on thy own.”
“Actually…” I stopped walking and looked back─that is, cast my gaze back toward the distant Araragi residence, even though it was already out of sight. Shinobu may have been leading the way, but she was still bound to my shadow, so when I stopped walking she was forced to as well. In reality she wasn’t leading the way at all, it was just that because of the position of the sun she had to be in front of me. “Putting aside whether or not I’d remember, I’ve heard a theory that if you time warp and meet yourself, you’ll both be completely vaporized. It’s a vague recollection… Something like matter and anti-matter, or maybe like a doppelgänger, but either way, you’re supposed to avoid encountering your past self.”
“Hunh? Is that not merely an SF convention? Not enough people have actually time warped for any theory to be developed about it.”
“Sure, that’s true… I can’t deny that I’m just quoting stuff straight from sci-fi novels, but just to be on the safe side…”
I didn’t want to be vaporized in the past.
There was also the possibility that only he would be, but if my past self vanished, wouldn’t my current self still get vaporized? Yikes, I was lost…
This time-travel theory stuff was so convoluted.
It was full up with complications and far-fetched nonsense.
I wondered if the idea that time travel to the future is possible, while time travel to the past isn’t, simply owes to laziness on the part of sci-fi authors who can’t resolve the tangled paradox.
“Don’t blame them, my lord… Always passing the buck.”
“Yeah, well, this situation makes me want to pass the buck!”
“Calm thyself. There is likely no cause for thee to be concerned.” It couldn’t have been out of worry that fast realizing that there was nothing to do, I was feeling uneasy once again─but Shinobu said, “I admit to thee at this late date that, up until now, I did not understand what ye meant by time paradox.”
“Huh?” I was taken aback─by her confession. “Um, but I explained it properly, and didn’t we have a whole conversation about it?”
“I feigned understanding, nodded my head in all the right places, and just played along while thine every word went in one ear and out the other.”
“Hey!”
My anime character intro had all kinds of bizarro captions, like that I was the only designated quipper in the series and so on, but I’d been reduced to the plainest possible comeback.
Hey.
“Shinobu, in a novel that’s mostly talk, in what you might even call a conversation drama, there’s no room for a character who just nods along. You said that at last you can admit it to me, but sorry, the statute of limitations isn’t up on that one yet.”
That was just a few hours ago.
What, was the statute of limitations a few seconds?
“And yet, those few hours are what counts,” Shinobu insisted. “Behold, the sun is sinking, and the twilight hour is nigh.”
“Don’t talk as though it’s the end of the world.”
“What I mean is that while I may have lost my power, ’tis the time when I, as an aberration, am revitalized. At long last my eyes are open, at long last my head is clear. The strange and perplexing matter th
ou hast spoken of makes sense to me now.”
“Sorry, so very sorry, but what I’ve been saying isn’t all that complicated.”
“Let me get straight to the point,” Shinobu said, folding her arms, raising her face, and looking down on me, in that tricky way of hers, even as she looked up at me. “Fret not, for there is no danger of a time paradox.”