Occultic;Nine: Volume 1

by Chiyomaru Shikura

  “You used to update Kirikiri Basara every day, but you haven’t for days! Everybody’s waiting for your update! They’re waiting! Ting! Ting!”

  “She’s right. I’ve seen comments from people worried about you.” Gamo’s eyes went wide.

  “Huh? The Basariters are worried about me? Seriously? I thought they hated me, but they didn’t! Man, I feel like I’m going to cry!” “Basariters” was his nickname for people who commented on Kirikiri Basara. They wrote negative comments about the occult beneath his articles. Their specialized knowledge was what made Kirikiri Basara such a unique site! ...At least, that’s what Gamo had told me.

  “So what are the comments like, Myu-Pom?” It was hard to answer when he was staring at me with those shining, puppy-dog eyes, but...

  Was it okay to tell him?

  “Most of them said things like, ‘The admin’s out of stuff to talk about? Buh-bye.’”

  Gamo said, “They’re not worried at all,” and slumped onto the table.

  “Screw ’em. Screw the Basariters. I’ve got stuff to talk about. And you Basariters have been a bunch of wimps lately. The number of comments hasn’t gone up at all! And I haven’t seen Sarai show up once since Myu-Pom wrecked him.”

  That’s because none of your articles are any good... is what I almost said, but I stopped myself at the last second.

  “Oh, you just thought that my articles were boring, didn’t you?”

  “Myu? That’s not... ahahaha...” I tried to laugh it off, but... I don’t think I did a very good job.

  “The reason we’re not getting many comments is that all the articles on you are breaking news.” There were three articles on me up on the site right now.

  “The Whole Internet’s Talking About Teenage Fortune-Teller Myu Aikawa.” That was an aggregator article about me. And then there was last week’s advertisment post that was uploaded just before my livestream.

  After that, there was another ad for me, about the TV program I was on.

  “True, but except for the first one, they’re breaking news articles. They’re interesting when they happen, but maybe not interesting later.”

  “That’s why the hit counter went crazy after they were uploaded, but it didn’t last. We need something more like a ‘Myu Aikawa Special’ that’s still worth going back to later. Which is why that swimsuit photo shoot—”

  “It’s not happening.” Who knew if anybody would want to read an article about me, anyway?

  Gamo thought I was a lot more special than I really was.

  “At this rate, Kirikiri Basara is doomed! ☆ Saraba Basara! ♪ Saraba Basara! ♪” Narusawa was singing and dancing.

  Did she get that from when I’d messed the name up? “All right, Ryotasu, go interview Professor Hashigami for us then. Remember how I just made you Special Correspondent?”

  “Pohyahyah?”

  “The new school year starts in April, so he’s gonna be busy, right? This is our chance.”

  “Correspondent! ☆ Correspondent! ☆ Correspondents get the best deals! Yesterday they gave me half-off oranges at the fruit stand in Harmonica Alley! It was such a good deal that I bought a whole box! ☆ So now my fingers have been orange all day! ☆”

  “No, um... Ryotasu? I’m not talking about oranges.” Gamo was seriously weird, but Narusawa was even weirder.

  She would start singing or dancing, or saying weird things out of nowhere, but at times she could be astonishingly perceptive. But it also felt like she basically never listened to what anyone else had to say.

  An... unusual girl like her would be sure to make waves at school. But I’d never heard anybody talk about her in the year or so since I’d started going to that school. I couldn’t remember passing by her in the hallway, either.

  Maybe she was pretending to be a different kind of person at school? If she was, maybe she was like me. Like how I was both Miyuu and Myu.

  “Come on, Gamotan, sniff my fingers. You’ll go ‘Waaah!’”

  “Hey, stop it!” Man, those two are really close. They started messing around the minute you let your guard down. Maybe it was more accurate to say that Narusawa was messing with Gamo.

  It was hard for a newcomer like me to interrupt them. And actually, it was really hard to say anything when they were flirting with each other like that.

  Was I overthinking things? I didn’t want to spend the whole day just sitting here talking about nothing. We were supposed to be here to figure out Kirikiri Basara’s future plans. But Gamo kept worrying about the same thing over and over. And Narusawa was just playing around, and not really participating in the conversation.

  We weren’t going to get anywhere like this.

  “Um...”

  “Mmm?”

  “Is there some kind of rule that Kirikiri Basara uses to pick the articles it writes?” So I decided to interrupt them and ask a “new girl” question.

  “You don’t talk about things that are old, or that happen outside Japan, right?”

  “That’s right. If we wrote about old stuff, we’d just be another page about urban legends. There’s a ton of those already.”

  “So that means it’s fine as long as it’s new?”

  “It can’t just be new, though. First, it has to happen in Japan. Especially somewhere near the Chuo rail line in Tokyo. Ideally, it’s something that happens in Kichijoji.” That was a pretty narrow range, then.

  “Why?”

  “It makes it easier to go investigate it. Make sense?”

  “Myu...” I immediately regretted asking a serious question.

  “But Gamotan, Gamotan, you’ve never actually gone anywhere to investigate an article for Kirikiri Basara.”

  “Umm... That’s because we’ve never really had to.” In other words, he was just lazy. He might not have been taking this web site as seriously as I thought.

  I gave him a look that said “Work harder,” but he refused to look at me. Grr... Do your job!

  “Um, also, we avoid things that are too complicated and hard to follow. I mean, if you write something complicated, only smart people can read it, right? That’s a terrible way to get hits. I want something that idiots can read.” The real reason was probably that he was too lazy to look stuff up. No, not probably. Definitely. I was starting to get a feel for who Gamo really was.

  But at the same time, he was probably right. I’d read most of the articles on Kirikiri Basara over the past few days, and they were all quick reads that were easy to understand. That was probably really important.

  “Also, there’s one thing that’s more important than anything else when I’m deciding what to write about on Kirikiri Basara.” One thing? Gamo paused dramatically, then looked at me, and then Ryotasu, and finally, toward Master Izumin behind the counter.

  “Hey, Gamota. Why are you staring at me? Did you fall in love? Sorry. I’m not into guys, heheh.”

  “You’re lying,” I thought to myself. But I didn’t say it.

  Gamo said, “You’re lying,” in a voice so small I could barely hear it, and then made a “bleh” sound.

  “You’re lying! ☆” Narusawa said, and then she started to dance.

  Nobody really wanted to find out if he was lying or not, though, so we didn’t say anything more. As for Narusawa’s dance show... I decided to ignore that.

  “What’s the most important thing?”

  “How easy is it for the Basariters to rip things apart?” “Rip it apart” was a phrase that I saw used all the time on Kirikiri Basara. It meant to scientifically and logically disprove something... supposedly.

  “So it’s best if it just seems a little shady. If it’s too serious, or too obviously a fake, it doesn’t do as well.”

  “I see... I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

  “Gamotan’s amazing, huh? He’s really thought about this.”

  “I may not look it, but I’m a very popular blogger. Or at least, trying to be one.” Gamo stuck out his chest.

  But—

/>   “Does that mean that you think I’m a little shady too?”

  “Oh, uh...” Gamo started to fidget and glance around the room.

  “You’re trying to have the Basariters cut me up, aren’t you? That’s really mean!”

  “No, no, wait. Your articles are different...”

  I chuckled. “I was just kidding,” I said.

  And it didn’t really matter to me what the Basariters thought. It would be kind of a shock if they were mean to me, and I might cry again, but I believed in my power. My goal wasn’t to be a famous fortune-teller.

  “Hey, hey, Gamotan. How long is Kirikiri Basara going to stay shut down?”

  “Ryotasu, I can’t remember you ever looking forward to Kirikiri Basara’s updates that much.”

  “Sometimes there’s something that’s always there, and then it goes away, right? That’s when you realize how important it was to you. ☆” Even listening to her say that made me blush, and she said it with a big smile on her face. Narusawa was cute, but there was something else about her, too.

  Gamo must’ve felt embarrassed too, because he was blushing bright red.

  “I’ve got a stock of things to write about piled up. I’ve been so busy thinking about Myu-Pom that I haven’t updated the site, that’s all.” That’s what he said, but it sounded like an excuse.

  “What do you have, for example?”

  “I’m warming up an article on that ‘Gloomy Sunday’ song I heard from my radio.”

  “Ding! ☆ It’s all warmed up! ☆”

  Come to think of it, he’d said he still didn’t know what had caused that.

  That was crazy, wasn’t it? A song, playing from a speaker when the power was off. Me, Gamo, Narusawa, and Master Izumin had all heard it, and none of us knew what the cause was.

  In the end, we’d just settled on Gamo’s radio being broken that day. No one had ever come up with a better explanation.

  I suddenly remembered the song’s melody, and shivered. Maybe it was better not to think about it too much.

  “Samurai Gamonosuke? Is there anything else you’re warming up?” Gamo grinned in answer to her question.

  He moved the radio to the side of the table and got out his laptop.

  “Well for example, they say that God appears at Inokashira Park. Mostly on weekday afternoons.” He was saying something really weird.

  “Ahaha, God appears at the park? And only on weekday afternoons? Man, that’s hilarious.”

  “It’s not a joke. God doesn’t show up often, but it does happen.”

  “Wow! I want to meet God!”

  “Does it have something to do with that torii arch or something?” There was a shrine to the god Benzaiten next to the lake in Inokashira Park. I think I remembered going there with Dad when I was little.

  But Gamo shook his head. “Oh, it’s not a serious god like that.”

  I didn’t know that there were such a thing as a non-serious god.

  “It’s a self-proclaimed god.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “Okay, got it. I’ll put this as plainly as I can. The best way to describe him is... He’s a homeless guy, probably.”

  Wait. Seriously? That was lame.

  According to Gamo, this self-proclaimed god would appear at the park sometimes on weekday afternoons, and give crazy speeches in a loud voice.

  “There’s threads on 2ch that follow him. He says stuff about the world’s destruction starting in Musashino or something. He’s one of those ‘I have to save the world from a conspiracy theory’ types of nuts.”

  “Can I see him, too?”

  “It’d be hard for a student to go on a weekday afternoon. There’s no real schedule for when he appears, too. The day of the week and time are mostly random. Some days he doesn’t show up at all.”

  So we’d just have to hope we ran into him by chance, huh?

  “So once spring break came around, I was going to go looking for God. You know, if we had an article titled ‘Interview with God!’ it would get a ton of hits.”

  “Wouldn’t the Basariters get mad at you? You’d be tricking them.”

  “Haha, you don’t get it! You don’t get it at all, Myu-Pom.” He sighed at me in irritation. It was kind of aggravating to have someone mock me so openly.

  “You never heard of the Bourbon House threads on 2ch? It’s the same thing as that. There’s kind of an unspoken harmony between the people who trick someone with a thread title and the people who enjoy being tricked. Knowing the Basariters, they’d love it.”

  Is that how it works?

  “Hey, instead of covering that weird god, let me give you a special local story.” Master Izumin had finished wiping his glasses. He came out from behind the bar and grinned.

  “A friend told me about this weird shop they found in Harmonica Alley.”

  Harmonica Alley was a tiny little shopping street near Kichijoji Station. Most of the place was bars, so it was busy morning and night.

  “Harmonica Alley, huh?” Gamo reacted immediately.

  “Is that the House of Crimson?”

  “Oh, yeah! That’s the name of it! Gamota, did you know about it?”

  “Who do you think I am? I’m the admin of Kirikiri Basara, the NEET God himself. That’s one of the other stories I’ve got warming up on the pile. Let me see here—” Gamo started to fiddle with the touch pad on his PC.

  “Here it is. This place, right?” He turned the LCD screen of the laptop towards Master Izumin, with another big grin on his face.

  I saw a black background, with “The House of Crimson” written in bright red letters.

  It looked like he was displaying the store’s homepage on an internet browser.

  “Yes, that’s it!”

  “What kind of place is it?” Gamo tilted his head a little in confusion.

  “A black magic agency... or something.” He didn’t sound very confident.

  “An agency?”

  “I don’t really know. Master Izumin, do you know anything?”

  “They place curses on people with black magic, supposedly. I heard that unless you bring them a lock of hair from whoever you want cursed, they won’t accept the job.”

  “Huh... I’ll write that down.” Gamo started to tap at the keyboard excitedly.

  Hmm... Cursing people, huh? Could you really make a living doing that? Were there a lot of people in the world who wanted to curse someone?

  That was really bad, right? Just imagining it made me want to shiver. If someone put a curse on you like that without you knowing, how could you protect yourself? Since I had my power to see “visions,” it was kind of hard for me to laugh the idea off.

  “Anyway, if they need hair, shouldn’t they be putting that on the homepage? Are they serious about this? Do they think anybody’s going to come to their store these days without even the tiniest bit of explanation? And what do they need hair for, anyway? Don’t tell me the devil’s going to run a DNA test.” As he typed the information into his PC’s notepad program, he seemed to be mad about something I didn’t really understand.

  “But you know, Gamota, wouldn’t that keep out people who weren’t serious? Only people who really want to curse someone would come to the store, right? It’s pretty hard to get somebody else’s hair, you know.”

  “What kind of reputation does the House of Crimson have?”

  “Oh, yeah! Get this!” Master Izumin sat down in a chair. He seemed intent on joining in the conversation. He looked like a muscle-bound man, but he was acting like a gossipy old lady. “A friend of a friend said that somebody got hit by a car because of one of their curses!”

  “Wow, you’re kidding me. The minute you said the words, ‘friend of a friend,’ my trust in your story plummeted to zero.”

  “What do you mean, zero?! Are you saying I don’t have any friends?”

  “You said ‘a friend of a friend,’ but the question is how many friends you’re skipping in between.” Gamo was shaking his head,
as if he couldn’t believe Master Izumin didn’t understand something so simple. Sometimes he could be really self-confident, and kind of a jerk.

  “‘A friend of a friend’ makes it sound like somebody close to you, but it might be a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, right? Everyone knows not to trust ‘friend of a friend’ stories. That’s an old rule.” It felt like I was hearing an incantation from another world. I wished he wouldn’t repeat the word “friend” so much.

  “Oh, I see.” Master Izumin looked super-ticked. But he quickly smiled mischievously.

  “By the way, this is something else a friend of a friend told me, but the owner of this black magic agency is supposed to be a pretty, young girl.”

  “What... did you say?” I thought I saw a different glint in Gamo’s eyes.

  Didn’t he just say he didn’t believe friends of friends?

  “So that’s got you interested, huh? You’re shy, Gamo, but you love girls, don’t you?”

  “O-Of course I like them. But don’t get the wrong idea! I’m not some man-slut pickup artist. I don’t really want to date a real girl or anything. Definitely don’t get the wrong idea.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s right. I’m a NEET God, for one thing. But if the black magic agent who’s cursing people turned out to be a pretty, young girl, wouldn’t that be cool? It’s not every day you run into a girl who ticks that many boxes. If I write about her on Kirikiri Basara, it’ll mean a ton of new hits. And all that affiliate money, too!”

  “Hmph... Gamo, you’re even worse than I thought—”

  “Hmm? Worse than you thought how?”

  “No, I won’t say it,” I chuckled.

  He was even more easy to please than I thought he was. But that didn’t mean he was an idiot. He’d said something similar when I’d joined Kirikiri Basara’s staff. In a way, he was consistent. I couldn’t respect him, but I could feel that he was acting in accordance with his beliefs.

  “Still, you know... Black magic? Devils? If there really were something like that, I’d want to be friends with it. That would be kind of cool. It would make me more popular as a blogger, right? Man, I want to see a devil. I really want to see a devil.”