東方プロジェクト二次小説・オリジナル小説サイト
Chapter 2:The Revolution of Usami Sumireko

[𝐃𝐨𝐜𝐮𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝟑 — 𝐔𝐬𝐚𝐦𝐢 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐤𝐨'𝐬 𝐃𝐢𝐚𝐫𝐲, 𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟑]

—[𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟏𝟗𝐭𝐡]—


The upper caste of popular kids in my class have started paying attention to me now.

Things have been going well lately. Recently, I was able to go a whole day without anyone trying to talk to me at all. They were still whispering loudly about me behind my back, of course, but their gossip is not even worth turning my head to listen to.

Some of the boys in my class have tried to talk to me too, but when I ignore them, they take the hint and walk away with their faces distorted by sneers of disgust. That's just fine by me. Being alone is nice. Shortly after the beginning of this school year I had already figured out that there wouldn’t be anyone in this class worth talking to. Hopefully before much longer all of the boys will give up speaking to me at all.

The popular girls could be a problem if their malice turns from ineffectual whispers to physically interfering with me. If that happens then I may have to take action. With my powers I should be able to hurt them in such a way that no one can prove it was me. They're just like monkeys, after all. Since they don’t understand language there’s no choice but to use force to discipline them.

I'm usually against corporal punishment. Teachers that hurt kids to vent their frustrations or demonstrate their power, however, should just drop dead though, since their lives are completely without value. In general, I’d say most teachers should just hurry up and die. In fact, I'd say that overall there are very few people living in the world that are worthy of continuing to live, and the best solution to the numerous problems plaguing humanity would simply be for all of the people living on this planet to go extinct. The Mayan calendar did predict that this year would be the end of the world, so maybe there’s still hope that it might happen.

Come to think of it, even the year before I was born was predicted to be doomsday by that old Nostra-whatever guy. For there to be so many predictions of a coming extinction shows that humanity has a latent desire to become extinct. It's only fitting that the majority of a species with such a desire should die off. The fact that humanity hasn’t gone extinct yet, despite having such a desire, shows that people are just incompetent. Such an incompetent populace is also worthy of extinction, but the endless cycle of unjustness, unworthiness and incompetence goes around and around in a loop forever.

The reason I am thinking such dark and pointless thoughts is simply because life as a middle-schooler is boring. I know many of my classmates from elementary school and they’re all terribly dull. Both those who went to my elementary school and those who I met here in junior high for the first time are all copy-and-paste people, who all have the same vapid interests, and all say the same boring things in the same annoying tone over and over.

I wish I were reading manga at my brother’s room right now. Kaoru’s a normal person himself, but he has three years more life experience than my classmates, making him much more interesting to talk to.

Unfortunately, my brother recently joined the computer club at his high school, and he seems to have met a few people there with whom he shares some interests. So recently he often stays for club activities until the school kicks them out. As a result of him coming home late, I’ve been able to sneak into his room to look through his collection of girly magazines more, but I’m already bored of that. I’d rather have him around to talk to than be bored and alone all the time though or to have to look at the sorts of things he’s into. He helps to kill time.

—

And so, I've recently taken to wandering around town after school every day. My first stop today was the bookstore, to see if they had any new books on the occult. They had a few volumes dealing with urban legends, but they seem to mostly just be compilations of creepypastas I could just find on the Internet. No one ever writes proper, scholarly books about urban legends. Maybe there's no money in writing a serious academic investigation of the topic. What a shame.

Regardless of the topic, books that do contain actual, worthwhile research tend to be really expensive. The fact that in the age of the Internet, we still have to deal with publishing companies locking up knowledge like this in expensive paper books is a terrible crime against human knowledge. Everything should be published for free on the web. At the very least, books like these should be available as e-books.

In the end, I left without buying anything and ended up going to a video arcade instead. I ignored all of the crane games and photo booths. For me, what I want is a way to vent my stress, so that means my coins ended up once again disappearing into a light gun game.

I shot up the scenery in 𝑅𝑎𝑧𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑆𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑚 until I got bored, then played through a few songs on 𝑀𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑐 𝐺𝑢𝑛𝑔𝑢𝑛. Ah, shooting a gun feels so good. I wish I had been born early enough to play games like 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐻𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑑 or 𝑇𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝐶𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑠 in the arcade, but those games are out of fashion now. Better yet, I wish I could have been born in America. I hear that over there they even let you skip grades in school.

All in all, I passed the time after school in a typical fashion. Nothing at all noteworthy happened until after I ran out of change.

I was walking around on the music games floor, debating whether or not to exchange another thousand-yen bill for coins. I'm not sure what made me stop in front of the 𝐷𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑀𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑎 machine, but I noticed a woman who looked to be a college student, or around that age anyway, walk up and sit down at the cabinet. She was a sort of androgynous-looking redhead wearing a navy blue checkered shirt with a purple tie and a tailored white jacket draped over her shoulders.

The moment she took off her jacket and picked up the sticks, I was riveted to the spot and couldn't look away.

I've seen people play 𝐷𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑀𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑎 before plenty of times, and even admired those who can play something so fast-paced with skill. What she did at that console was more than playing a game though. Her sticks moved like living, dancing creatures, hitting every beat perfectly and even adding rhythms freestyle that weren't in the score. It was magnificent to behold. Watching her sit among the electronic pads surrounding her, it was clearly more than a music game to her. It was very much a live musical performance. Watching her profile as she worked her way through the setlist, she was, without a doubt, having more fun than anyone else in the arcade the whole time.

Honestly, I felt like it was something more than that too. Mere technique wouldn't have impressed me to the degree that this woman's playing did, no matter how much heart she put into her performance.

More than anything else, it felt like magic.

In a matter of minutes a crowd had formed around her, watching her play with excited fascination. The moment she finished the last of her songs with a full combo, the crowd erupted into a spontaneous burst of applause.

She stood up from the machine and bowed to the applause from the crowd. She then pulled her e-pass off of the cabinet and slung her jacket over her shoulder as she stood up.

Without even thinking about it, I found myself following her out of the arcade. It was the first time in ages I had been so genuinely captivated by another person. You see, I had attempted to prank her as she was choosing the last song of her performance and the results of that attempt were extremely interesting. I had to know who she was.

And so, I followed her out of the arcade, where she led me into a McDonalds. I was completely blindsided when, after ordering a combo meal, she turned to me and said "You want anything?"

"Huh?" was all I could manage to reply.

"Go ahead, order whatever you like. You want something from me, right?"

And that's how I met Miss Horikawa Raiko for the first time.


—[𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝐭𝐡]—


Yesterday I wrote about meeting Ms. Raiko for the first time, but I didn't have time to record all of the details, so first let me correct that before moving on. We sat and talked for a bit while sitting in the McDonalds.

"You're a middle school student?" She asked.

"Technically, yes." I muttered, around a mouthful of tsukimi burger. She was sitting with an elbow resting on the table and her chin resting on the back of her hand, watching me eat with a bemused expression.

"Well, I guess I must have been playing pretty well if I’ve gotten myself a middle school girl as a stalker. What's your name?"

"Shouldn't you give yours before asking someone else's?" I snapped without thinking.

"I just bought you a burger. How about I get yours first?"

"Thank you for the meal, I guess. I'm Usami Sumireko."

"There you go. Pleased to meet you, Sumireko. I'm Horikawa Raiko, technically a college student."

Maybe it was a bit naive of me to give her my real name like that, but she had earned my respect with that performance, so acting respectfully is natural, right?

"So," she began, the smile on her face curling up to the corners of her eyes, "why were you stalking me? You've been following me since I left the arcade, right?"

"Do I have to answer that?"

"I’m the one asking the questions here. If you were just impressed by the way I can spin a stick, then I’ll give you another show then you can go home. This one will cost you though." She tapped out a quick rhythm on the table as a demonstration and I couldn’t help but smile.

"Miss Horikawa, you're a professional drummer, aren't you?"

"Just call me Raiko. I guess you could say it's what I do, but I'm not sure you could call it a job."

"Well, your performance was spectacular. It was kind of captivating? Spellbinding, almost."

"Spellbinding?"

She let out an exasperated breath as I finished my burger, crumpled up the wrapper and sipped on my coke. I looked her in the eyes, wondering if she had seen through my prank. Probably. The fact that she was talking with me like this probably meant she knew what I had tried to do.

"The real reason I followed you… Is because I thought you might be... A kindred spirit, let's say."

"A kindred spirit? Are you looking for people to start a band or something?"

"No, no, it's not that—" As I said that I took the wadded up burger wrapper and put it on top of my palm. While keeping my eyes locked on hers, I used my telekinesis to loft the balled-up paper across the restaurant and into a waste bin.

Raiko watched as the wrapper went in. Her eyes tracked the projectile precisely, but her expression never changed. After a moment she let out a sigh. "I see. When I was choosing songs for that last number back there though, were you the one who tried to change my selection?" she asked.

"So you did notice then! How perceptive!"

Just as I had given the ball of paper a push just now, I had done the same in the arcade, tapping the cymbal to change the selected song just before Raiko had hit play. It hadn't worked. My mental push against the surface of the drum pad had never registered. My telekinesis had been deflected before it could affect the drum.

"You’re probably only the second psychic I’ve ever met."

"I'm surprised to meet someone like me so close to home. Well, I suppose someone was bound to notice sooner or later." she said, returning my smile. As she did the straw of her shake bent itself into a knot without her ever touching it.

Telekinesis. It was the first of my abilities that I had awakened. The power to manipulate objects using only the power of thought. In the past, I had been clumsy with it, sometimes even moving things without intending to. I had refined both my precision and my power over time though. Right now, I've tested myself with weights of up to 100kg with no trouble and I can be precise enough to push a button on the TV remote. It makes cleaning or rearranging the furniture in my room a breeze.

There's one clear limit to telekinesis that I had theorized before, however. When two people with telekinesis try to interfere with the same object at the same time, only the first one to target that object can affect it. Any other telekinetic attempting to interfere with that object while someone else was manipulating it would just be repelled. I had discovered this concept back during the very first time I encountered someone with a similar power and now the theory I had held in my head since elementary school had finally been proven. It was a truly momentous moment.

Probably the reason I had been drawn to Raiko in the arcade had been that I had sensed her using telekinesis. She must have been using her mind to hit the drum pads as soon as she saw any note that she missed while playing. Using psychic powers to cheat at a video game? It was almost laughable.

Of course using telekinesis is not much different than using your hands or feet: precise movements require skill and practice. As such using her mind to get a full combo on 𝐷𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑀𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑎 was certainly cool, but was it really a suitable use of psychic power?

"So what now?" she asked, tapping her straw back to normal so she could drink out of it again. "Are you going to introduce me to some secret society of psychics or something?"

"Oh, is there such a thing?"

"If there is, I've never heard of them."

"I haven't either. The idea of a shadowy organization controlling everything from behind the scenes is a little cliché nowadays. But admittedly, I do like conspiracy theories. You'd look good in one of those 𝑀𝑒𝑛 𝐼𝑛 𝐵𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑘 suits."

"So you were just curious to meet another person like yourself?"

"Well, the idea of having someone I can talk to about this sort of thing seems nice. There are things I could only ask someone with similar powers."

"Oh? Like what?"

"Well, for example, do you have any recollection of how you gained your powers?"

"Hmm…Nope. I've been doing things this way for as long as I can remember doing them," she said with a smile. A fry popped out of the container in front of her and sailed into her waiting mouth. It might seem like an incredibly lazy way to eat to most people, but I'm experienced enough to realize just how much finesse that would take. Such fine movements are usually easier to do by hand.

"I see..."

"How about you?" she asked.

"Hmmm... I was definitely able to do it since I was in kindergarten. I'm pretty sure someone gave me these powers though."

"Gave them to you? Is there a secret organization out there handing out psychic powers to children?"

"I don't know. Wouldn't it be cool if there was something like that though? It'd be like something out of an urban legend or a conspiracy theory."

"It certainly sounds improbable enough to be one." She rested her chin on her hand once more, smiling at me in astonishment. It seemed that if anyone had given Raiko her powers then she couldn't remember them. I sighed and thought back to my own childhood memories. Even for me, everything was fuzzy. It had been dusk when I had been left alone in that park... Someone had spoken to me, silhouetted by the twilight... Who was she?

"Well in the 19 years I've lived so far, I’ve never lived in a lab in some sketchy facility or been pursued by a mysterious organization or overheard my parents having an ominous conversation about me or anything. I just use my ability to play the drums. It's not like I could power up and destroy a city block with just my aura or anything."

"Have you tried?"

"No, but it's a thing that happens a lot in manga, right? The main character will be in a life or death situation and their ability will awaken and let them mow their enemies down with ease, right?"

"Oh, right."

"My power's only about as strong as my hands. I guess if I wanted to kill someone I could push them down the stairs or off of a train platform or something."

"...Have you ever done that, Ms. Raiko?"

"Do I seem like that kind of person?"

I swallowed nervously. I'd be lying if I said I'd never thought about it myself. It would be a perfect, undetectable crime. I wondered if Raiko was being honest with me. If she was, then my power was definitely much stronger than hers. If I'd wanted to, I could have caused any of the cars driving past on the street outside to crash into the boutique across the street, or torn the billboard off of the roof of the building. If I really wanted to, I could become a force of destruction terrorizing this city.

Even if I could get away with doing such things though, what would happen if I did? That’s why I’ve never actually done anything like that, no matter how much I’ve thought about it. My abilities might not leave any evidence that modern science could detect but doing stuff like that would just be boring. Despite the fact that I sometimes think about destroying all of humanity, it’s not like my powers are anywhere near 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 strong.

Honestly doing the sorts of things that you can do in video games or read about in novels is a sign that someone is lacking in imagination. Anyone can play a game like 𝑅𝑎𝑧𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑆𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑚, but someone with powers like mine should be using them to do something completely unprecedented. Something you couldn’t experience in any form of entertainment.

"You said your name was Sumireko right? Well if you’re a psychic too then you should think carefully about what sort of things you use your powers on. If you use your powers carelessly you’d be wasting them."

"I’ll keep that in mind. Do you think getting a full combo on 𝐷𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑀𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑎 counts as a good use for them?"

"Well, it attracted a big crowd, so I think it’s not a bad use."

I couldn't help but laugh. Even if her full combo on 𝐷𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑀𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑎 had only been achieved through psychic cheating, her performance while playing had been a masterful bit of entertainment. I guess using your powers for something harmless like that wasn’t necessarily a waste.

She took one last pull of her shake then stood up, tossing her cup into the trash can with no mental assistance required. I crammed the last of my fries into my mouth, washed them down with my coke and stood up to join her.

"Alright then Sumireko, let's go." she said.

"Go? Where?"

"To karaoke, of course." She winked at me, and I could only blink in confusion.

After that, we sang for almost three hours. As for today, nothing interesting happened. That’s all.


—[𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟐𝟏𝐬𝐭]—


Looking back at what I wrote yesterday and the day before I can’t help but smile bitterly at myself.

I guess I was excited to meet another psychic. Since it was an important occasion I ended up writing everything out like I was in a novel, but really that’s way too unnatural for a diary entry. Especially the long explanation of how my powers work. I’m not planning on showing this to anyone so why would I bother? Sticking stuff like that in is just how authors trick people into excusing long bits of exposition.

Any novel that features anything like that is so obviously just trying to trick the reader. All notes, journal entries, letters or the like that show up in fiction always seem so unnatural. Who would believe that anyone would write notes like they’re a professional novelist? And why do they always include so many explanations if they’re supposed to be written for just one or two readers? People in novels and games always write like they’re intending to leave clues behind for the protagonist to read. Who would even bother writing the sort of long letters and diary entries you see in novels to begin with? Novelists forget these sorts of things because they write all the time but being able to write something that goes on for pages and pages takes a certain level of skill.

That conversation I wrote down isn’t an accurate record anyway. How could it be? I didn’t make an audio recording of our conversations and I can't claim to remember every word we spoke perfectly. The novel-like dialogues between myself and Raiko in yesterday’s entry and the entry from the day before are much less awkward than any real conversation would be, so they’re almost fictional, really.

Who even keeps hand-written diaries any more? Everyone just uses Twitter and Facebook now. Nobody’s writing novels on those platforms. At most you might see someone write out a few lines of a comedy sketch in meme format.

Really these pages from yesterday and the day before are a perfect example of how unnatural it is whenever you find a diary entry in a novel. Let’s put it into practice.,Any writer should realize how weird the practice of writing something that includes extraneous explanations that make it accessible to strangers is.

If I wanted to write a proper diary entry, this is what it would look like:

June 21. Math pop quiz. One answer wrong. Teacher is a joke. Lunch, locker was touched. Probably 7 and 12. Will observe, if right, direct report.
Brother got home early and picked up a new manga. Been holding onto it, won't let me read it. Being a jerk about it.

DM’d Raiko on F. Texted me something about her father's drums going missing. Somewhat interesting.

My diary used to look like that. It would make no sense to anyone but me, and no one would want to read a novel full of those, but that’s fine since this is for my eyes only. If I come back and read it in a few years, even I may not know what it means. I don’t mind that, I’m not the type to fondly reminisce over the past.

From now on, my diary entries will be more like that and less like light novels. Maybe I’ll write something like that again some time. It was actually kind of interesting, but in order for me to do that, something interesting like meeting Raiko again would have to happen.

I think I'm going to have to watch and investigate her some more.