Those first couple of days are a blur. You don't leave the apartment. Your flurry of experiments makes that earlier attempt to conduct a séance over your TV look calm and reasoned. You flip through channels looking for one that Maribel might be able to slip herself into. You try out spells you found online after ten minutes of research. You spread half a dozen novels on the floor in front of you to give her more options to work with.

None of them accomplish anything.

Two full days pass before you have to leave your apartment to get food. Nobody notices you, and you can't get the cashier to even glance in your direction. You don't have any money anyway, so you write yourself a reminder to pay for it and slink out the door.

Two days after that, you're walking down the street when another pedestrian steps out of your way. It almost slips by without you noticing it, but after a week of this, the slightest acknowledgment feels amazing. You rush home and check the TV again, to find only disappointment.

Little by little, reality reasserts itself. People start recognizing you. You get a new phone. A TA emails you to ask why you haven't been coming to class, and you bullshit an answer. It keeps your hope up—if your existence can bounce back from the brink of oblivion, maybe Maribel's can too—but she still doesn't return.

Memories of her do, though. One night, while eating dinner, you realize that you can remember the interior of the TORIFUNE. You remember the day you met her, that club recruitment fair she teased you about. A search of the university's student roster still insists that a Maribel Hearn has never attended. There's no evidence to back you up. Much more confusingly, you can still remember your other life, the one where you never met her before she entered your TV. Two sets of memories war in your head, and it's hard to say which is true. Is either of them, really?

Life moves on, with no help from you. You don't really want it to. There's no stopping it.

A week later, you're solid enough to go back to class.

After three weeks, you reluctantly turn off your TV for the first time since her disappearance.

Just to be safe, you write down every single fact you know about Maribel, from your shared history to her approximate height to the soft little laugh that melted your heart, and tuck it all away into a single giant case file. You did promise that you'd remember her. It kind of feels like giving up, though, and it redoubles your resolve. Over the next few days, you make a dozen posts to occult message boards looking for people with similar powers, anybody who can reach into fiction, anything that might let you track her down. It doesn't turn up anything useful. You spend evenings in the Old Adam for the same reason, and come away empty-handed.

You debate heading back to that abandoned office building to check if the monster's other victims have recovered, but decide against it. Neither answer would bode very well for Maribel's return.

The quarter ends, and midway through cramming for exams, you realize that you've gone a whole day without thinking about Maribel. It makes you feel guilty, and you spend the next hour rereading your notes on her, straining to remember every conversation, her face, how it felt in that fleeting moment when she held you.

Sometime halfway through the next quarter, you have the same realization again. It reminds you of a small research project you've been meaning to do—you look up Maribel's parents, stay up late one night so you can make a trans-oceanic phone call. It takes a few minutes of negotiation before you both end up speaking equally-bad English. "I don't have a daughter," her father explains to you, annoyed. "Please do not call again."

By the end of the school year, your existence has fully reasserted itself. Your bank account pops back up one day, with all of 38 yen in it.

By the end of the Summer, everything is back to normal, more or less. You resume Sealing Club activities. You even get a booth for the fall club membership drive for incoming freshmen.

It is, just like the last two times you tried this, a bit of a disaster.

As a one-person club, the committee that handles these things doesn't assign you much priority. You get stuck way at the end, in between the Kyoto U Amateur Curling Team (3 members) and the Entomology Club (2 members.) In the first 45 minutes, only three students wander past. None of them give your sign ('THE SECRET SEALING CLUB – UNRAVELING THE OCCULT MYSTERIES OF THE WORLD!') more than a quick, pitying glance. And you've been to these things before. This is the busy part of the schedule.

After another twenty minutes, you pull your laptop out. You can at least catch up on the latest episodes of Cryptid Mysteries Uncovered.

The intro drones on, with the narrator monologuing about the latest evidence for panspermia, and thus, apparently, for a race of space-dwelling Bigfoots who colonized the asteroid belt 2 billion years ago. It's the kind of nonsense that you'd usually eat up, but it's only halfway holding your attention at the moment.

It isn't so easy to ignore it when the video starts stuttering, though. You pause it and sigh, flick back out to check the signal strength. Your bandwidth is fine. It must just be a quick hiccup.

You pull the video back up, and find that it's now split down the middle by an eye-filled gap.

In the several seconds that you spend staring at this, several thoughts flicker through your head. They range from 'what the hell' to 'maybe the video is just like this.' They all intensify greatly as the gap folds open.

An arm casually reaches out of the screen, with a silky white glove on its dainty hand. It pats at the surface around it, prodding the keyboard a few times before it finds purchase.

You scramble back away from your laptop and glance hurriedly around, but nobody else even seems to notice this. The Curling Team members are having a vigorous argument about the best strategy for something called 'tick shots.'

The tip of a very silky umbrella—the word 'parasol' pops up from somewhere deep in your memory—jabs out next to it. A hand follows.

Soon, a figure rises up through the gap. Your laptop deforms to accommodate this, like rubber. A familiar, floppy hat. Golden hair and eyes. A very, very elaborate dress, so puffy that it practically explodes outward the second that the lower hem is out of the gap.

She bends and, improbably takes a seat on the edge of the gap, with her feet still dangling inside it. "Really, Renko," she huffs. "You should get a bigger screen. It's hard to step through this thing in a ladylike manner."

"I. Uh." Your attention's sort of been so fixated on the... situation with your laptop that you haven't given a moment's thought to your own position. You're scrunched back in your chair, your hands braced against the seat and prepared to shove you out of it at any moment so you can run off screaming. "What?"

She tilts her head and shoots you a mock pout. "That's all the greeting I get? That's cold, don't you think?" She smirks and leans forward, propping her chin up in one hand, while the other reaches out to cup your cheek. The material of her gloves is impossibly smooth against it, and something about the gesture makes you flush. "You did promise to remember me, Renko."