(5) Rinnosuke Morichika ～ Curious Fellow of Curios

A man not of man
Conducts business in the rain
What’s in store today?

On the edge of the Forest of Magic laid a curious shop named Kourindou, operated by an equally curious man. The owner, a certain half-youkai half-human named Rinnosuke Morichika, was a collector and dealer of items that fell in to Gensokyo from the Outside World.

While that might seem amazing, and one might think that such a shop might be popular, it was in fact the opposite. Selling a random assortment of junk, combined with the fact that the shop was located next to a forest unvisited by any sane human being, meant that the store was mostly deserted except for its poor owner. Most of Rinnosuke’s days were spent idly, huddled next to his kerosene-fueled heater.

He didn’t mind idleness; while Rinnosuke did his best to sell his merchandise, he didn’t mind days of peace where he’d get to spend time with his curios. Today began as a day of peace too.

Knock, knock. It seemed that his peace would be short-lived. Rinnosuke didn’t get up from his chair to greet his customers like any other shop owner would do; most of the time, the people entering were not customers, much to his annoyance. He preferred to wait patiently to see who’d enter before giving them a greeting.

“Mister Morichika, are you present?” The door opened to reveal an actual customer, and Rinnosuke jumped up to greet her.

“Ahh, welcome! Welcome, Miss Sakuya!” Rinnosuke had taken quite a liking to the residents of the Scarlet Devil Mansion, especially Sakuya. She was one of his rare regulars who actually came by to actually conduct business with him. She usually came to buy items to fulfill the mistress’ odd whims. Thankfully, for Rinnosuke’s profits, the mistress had unending whims.

Behind Sakuya came one usual and one unusual sight. “Welcome, mistress, and…” He saw a newcomer, who looked most unusual for someone who seemed to be human. Rinnosuke was a curious man, with a curious mind that never stopped working, and he had already theorizing who this woman could be. She’s wearing… what were these called? Jeans, right, jeans! That means that she must be from the Outside World. Humans from the Outside World are not protected, thus youkai are able to attack them. The Scarlet sisters sometimes eat and drink humans, but… Why would they bring their prey along to here? She’d be on a platter, not on her two legs. Why would they bring a human from the Outside World into a shop that specializes in Outside World goods? Through flawless logic, Rinnosuke blitzed towards a satisfactory conclusion. They want to sell her since she’s technically an item from the Outside World!

“I’m terribly sorry, but Kourindou doesn’t deal in the field of human trafficking.” Rinnosuke gave a deep bow to apologize. “But, since you’ve already come here, maybe you’d be interested in buying something from my shop?”

Sakuya, Remilia and the outsider stared at each other, very much confused about what Rinnosuke was trying to imply. The outsider stepped forward, intending to clear his misbelief. “Mister Morichika, I’m a new maid in the Scarlet Devil Mansion, not merchandise.” She bowed down. “My name is Licorice Meidou. Glad to meet you.”

“Ah!” Rinnosuke got closer to the woman upon realizing the situation. “You’re from the Outside World, yes?”

Licorice scratched her head. “I think. Probably.”

Rinnosuke couldn’t help but clap his hands together in excitement. “Oh, how wonderful! It has been a while since I got to take a close look at a live specimen.” He danced around Licorice as he examined her. “A woman with pants… That’s pretty rare. And that hair, and… Interesting.”

Remilia perked up her ears upon the mention of the word ‘interesting’. “What’s so interesting? She’s just a mortal.”

“Indeed. Indeed, she is.” Rinnosuke suddenly realized wearing pants didn’t exactly make her that interesting compared to the other people in the room. In fact, unless she had some hidden power, Licorice looked decidedly ordinary and uninteresting. “Anyways, if you aren’t here to sell someone, then what is the purpose of your visit?”

“We need a suitable outfit for her.” Sakuya pointed toward Licorice. “The Outside World should still have maids, right? I assume that you might have a few of their lost outfits in stock.”

“Yes, I do have a few articles of women’s clothing-” Rinnosuke coughed to interrupt his own sentence. “Not in a creepy way, mind you.” He liked collecting any sort of curio: curious items also sometimes included clothing. “I should have a suitable maid outfit in stock somewhere in the back. Wait one second and…” He looked directly at Remilia. “Please don’t mess with anything while I’m gone.” Then he went through a door and disappeared from view.

The mistress spent no time before she ignored Rinnosuke’s request entirely. She looked around, picking up random objects and playing with them. Licorice loitered similarly to the mistress, though she acted a bit more maturely by not picking anything up. Sakuya headed toward a nearby bookshelf, keeping an eye on the errant pair.

“Sakuya!” Remilia ran toward Sakuya, holding a little plastic toy pony with a lavender body. “Can we buy this?”

“Mistress, we’re here to buy clothes for the new maid.” Sakuya returned to staring at the bookshelf to signal that she wasn’t going to listen to the mistress. Remilia kept tugging at her skirt regardless.

“Come on, it’s just a little horsie.” She pushed the toy into Sakuya’s face. “Pleaaase?” Sakuya kept perfectly and elegantly ignoring the mistress. “Hmph. Fine, Kourindou is going to disappear off of the face of Gensokyo if you don’t buy me this horsie!” Sakuya kept a poker face despite being threatened with immediate destruction. “I’m going to count to ten. One…”

Licorice suddenly felt the air feel hotter and heavier. It wasn’t the rising tension in the room: the air around her began turning crimson with each passing second. She felt a sense of imminent doom, and our heroine ran toward the door to save herself.

“…four, five, six…” The air only got heavier and heavier. Licorice found that the door was stuck due to the changing air. She knelt down on her knees and began praying as quickly as she could in the last four seconds of her life.

“eight, nine…” One second passed. “…nine-and-a-half, nine-point-seventy-five…” Remilia seemed more annoyed every second. She paused when her math skills proved insufficient. The air in the room still smelled of doom and gloom. It was unbearably hot for any ordinary humans. Licorice had retreated to a corner, laying in the fetal position while waiting for her imminent death. She felt like she might suffocate at any moment. “…what comes after nine-point-seventy-five?”

Sakuya was equally stumped by this question. “…I don’t know how to calculate that, mistress.” She was the perfect and elegant maid, not the perfect and elegant mathematician. They awkwardly stood around as the crimson air emanated throughout the room. Sakuya held her hands up as she raised her fingers up and down, trying to calculate the middle point between 9,75 and 10. “Uhm… It should be… Somewhere around nine-point-eight?”

Remilia shook her head. “I need exact numbers. Estimates aren’t good enough, Sakuya!” She had forgotten the immediate destruction of Kourindou due to immediate mathematical problems. The mistress held her little hands up as she similarly attempted to calculate this middle point.

A cry came from the corner of the room. “For the love of God, it’s nine-point-eight-hundred-seventy-five!” Licorice was still in the corner, shaking while in a fetal position. She was too frustrated by the scene in front of her to stay inconspicuous. “You’ve lived for hundreds of years, how the hell do you not know simple fractions?!”

Remilia and Sakuya had turned around to find their new maid crying in the corner. They had forgotten her existence up until that moment. Remilia turned around to Sakuya. “Didn’t she sound exactly like Patchouli just then?”

Sakuya nodded. “Indeed, mistress.” It seems that they were in agreement over something that Licorice had no idea about.

Remilia threw the toy pony to the floor. She had clearly lost interest, and her need for entertainment had been fulfilled for now. The air in the room quickly returned back to normal. The mistress didn’t intend to destroy Kourindou anyways: this place was too fun to delete for the sake of a toy pony.

The door to the backroom opened once more. “I’ve found something that might suit her.” Rinnosuke came out of the room. The first thing he did was look around to see if his shop survived. Everything in the room was fully intact, much to his surprise. Except for one blatant outlier in intactness: Licorice, who still laid shivering in the corner. Rinnosuke had many questions, but he was a man who very much followed a philosophy of “don’t worry too much”. He turned around to Sakuya, and extended the second-hand maid outfit to her. “Will this do?”

Sakuya unfolded the outfit to properly examine it. “It’s a bit too big, but I can just resize it to fit Licorice.” She took out a 1947 issue 1000-yen banknote and handed it over to Rinnosuke. “This should be enough.”

Rinnosuke gladly accepted the banknote: currency out-of-circulation in the Outside World was, ironically, in-circulation in the land of Gensokyo. “Thank you for your patronage.” This payment was more than enough for some simple clothes, especially considering the fact that some people didn’t pay anything to take items from Kourindou.

“Licorice, we’re going. Come on now, it was just a bit of stale air.” Sakuya got the poor newbie maid up to a standing position.

“Ah… I almost died back there.” Almost dying was, to put it lightly, not a fun experience for her. “Can’t the mistress be a bit more careful with… the crimson fog, or whatever that was?”

The mistress cackled in response to her poor maid. “What, it’s not my problem if your puny human body can’t handle such simple magic.”

Sakuya also imparted a droplet of maidly wisdom. “What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. Maybe you’ll be able to handle the mistress a bit better now?”

Licorice heaved a deep sigh. “I’d rather not have to handle anything of that caliber again…” Unfortunately, for our poor heroine, fate had many things for her to handle.