The next day, about an hour after breakfast, Sara heard a knock at the storehouse door. Sara was still sore over last night, and she said nothing to Reimu over breakfast. Why Reimu would want her at such a random time was beyond her; hopefully her brother had shown up, but it didn't feel like he was any of her concern.

When Sara opened the door, she nearly jumped upon seeing that blonde witch girl she saw the other day. She asked, "How's Reimu's shed treatin' ya'?"

Sara froze up at the random girl with the random statement. She looked at the witch eying all of Sara's stuff past her, and Sara said, "I-It's fine. Does Reimu need something?"

"Not quite," the witch said, leaning on the side of the door frame, "I've been hearin' about ya' whole brother thing, and I was wonderin': other than comin' to Gensokyo, have ya' actually thought of goin' out and lookin' for him ya'self?"

"Yeah," Sara said.

"Hmph," the witch said, "Rhetorical question, I guess." She walked inside and looked around at her stuff, saying, "I meant what have you actually done towards getting' him back? Because you just can't go from 'enter Gensokyo' to 'get brother back' like that. You gotta do all the borin' in-between stuff, first."

Sara watched the witch look down at the pile of granola bars, and she said, "I've been waiting for Miss Reimu to look for my brother, but there's nothing much else I can do but wait here."

The witched picked up one the bars, asking, "And how'd ya' say that's been workin' out for ya'?"

Sara didn't want to answer that question, or it'd reveal she didn't exactly think this far into her plan.

"Roman text," the witch said, looking at the bar packaging, "You musta came a long way to get stuck here."

Sara nodded.

"So," the witch said, tossing it into the pile, "ya' worked this hard to come all this way to get stuck in a shed full'a newspapers?"

Sara said, "Could you at least tell me what to do next? I can't exactly leave this shed."

The witch asked, "How'd you like some youkai huntin' equipment? I run a magic shop in the forest of magic, and it's pay-whatcha-want. If ya' up for some part time work, ya' not a power-hungry nutjob, and ya' willin' to build ya' own stuff, I could get ya' some spare parts."

Sara smiled. She said, "I can do all that. I'm up for any job if Miss Reimu will let me, and I can build my own stuff, and I'm more sane than most girls my age; after all, I did get this far on my own."

The witch chuckled at that last part. Sara gave her a questioning look, as if to ask what that laugh was all about. The witch just shrugged back.

"If ya' insist," she said, "So, what's ya' name again?"

"Sara Letrain," she said, bowing, "Nice making your acquaintance."

"Marisa Kirisame," she said, extending her hand for a handshake, once again catching Sara off-guard.

Marisa told Reimu she wanted to show Sara her magic shop in hopes of arming her in the event of an attack, but Reimu made them promise they would only be arming her for self-defense.

"I promise," Marisa lied.

Since walking would be too dangerous, Marisa asked Sara to sit on the back of her broom, warning her that they'd be flying very high and very fast: the extra height would give Marisa extra time to catch her if she fell off. Until Sara could be outfitted with the right magic to hear in-flight, Marisa had to use hand signals to tell her when they'd be speeding up, slowing down, turning, ascending, or descending. The flight was two minutes at most, soaring above a gold and red landscape of early winter trees, groups of fairies, and all manner of strange creatures in the far distance. Sara would have asked about the strange buildings, towns, and mountains in the surrounding area, but all she heard was the rushing wind. By then, Marisa gave the signal that they were descending, and Sara's heart went into her throat as they plummeted straight down into the forest, about to ram into a lone wood house.

Before ramming into the house, Marisa extended her feet forwards and "hit the breaks," and Sara jerked into Marisa's back as they screeched towards the house, stopping inches above the ground. Marisa stabilized her broom, they put their feet on the ground, and got off: Sara was still panting, but Marisa was just fine.

Marisa walked up to the door, and said, "Welcome to the Kirisame Magic Shop! Please, come inside and mind the mess."

Opening the door, out came a stench of smoke and the sounds of blaring rock music. Inside, it didn't look any more pleasant: giant piles of books, brewing equipment, and random items lied haphazardly all over the place. The house was pitch black except for a sunflower-shaped lamp wrapping itself around a lone red chair and a desk lamp by a cluttered work bench. On it were piles of chopped mushrooms, pots, vials, beakers, flasks, and burnt bullet-hole-ridden dolls that looked suspiciously like Reimu.

Marisa swiped one side of the desk, knocking a dozen books and beakers onto the floor until a sole yellow notepad remained. She grabbed it, picked up what looked like a wooden soldering iron, and began writing (or rather, burning) something onto the notepad.

"I'm willin' to trade ya' my old reactor parts," she said, "if you can go out into the Forest of Magic and grab me some phantasmal mushrooms. I got a guidebook somewhere around here, so ya' first task is showin' you got the focus to spot it."

Sara looked around at the huge piles of books, random gears and tools, and even artifacts like guitars, a jukebox, a coal grill with what looked like a rune above it to catch smoke, and what appeared be a missile warhead with the words "Lil' Mimi" scratched on the side. Sara asked, "You expect me to find it in this mess?!"

Marisa tossed the yellow notepad onto her desk and said, "That's what I meant by, 'Doin' all the steps in between.' I'll give you a hint: it's a big yellow and red book with a giant mushroom on the front. Look around and look for somethin' red n' yellow."

Sara looked around at the vast piles of stuff and froze up: this was all too much for her to look through, and even then, she only had the vaguest idea of what she was looking for. About two minutes passed, and she was still just staring around.

"I don't know where it is," Sara said.

"That's why ya' look for it," she said, leaning towards Sara, "If ya' can't find one book in this house, how ya' gonna find ya' brother?"

Sara sighed, looked at one pile, and then inched her way towards it. She got on her knees to dig around, only to find Marisa's floor was moist; as if somebody had soaked all of her wood floors in tea or something. She reached her hands into the pile and pulled out books on explosives, thievery, engineering, all manner of magic, and nothing on mushrooms. She also reeled in pain when she pulled out discarded teacups chipped in half, broken tips to metal tools, shattered glass beakers. She also reeled back in disgust when she found a dead rat and a living cockroach. During all this, Marisa was operating on some octagonal gadget at her bench, fiddling with the various whirlygigs and doohickies inside. Occasionally, she'd glance over to Sara on the sticky, rancid floor, searching in vein for that book.

Hours of searching later, Sara yelled, "I can't do it. It's impossible!"

Marisa chuckled to herself, got off her workbench, and said, "Luckily for you, I do the impossible."

Marisa took a deep breath, stared at the room for a minute without blinking, and then walked over to one of the piles. She picked up the corner of a red and yellow book, and on the front was a giant mushroom. The title read, "A Magicians Field Guide to Mushroom Spotting." Sara was slack-jawed: she didn't know if she had put it there on purpose or if she was really that good.

Marisa handed Sara the book and said, "How's that for impossible?"

Marisa then gave Sara a rundown on what she was looking for: some red and yellow mushrooms that gave off a horribly bitter odor. Marisa warned her that her spotting skills would only have to get better from here on out: to venture into the forest of magic, she'd not only have to be on the lookout for the mushrooms, but fairies and various youkai.

Marisa's payment policy worked like this: she'd give you a service, and then you'd pay what you want afterward. With little need for initial equipment and not wanting to become Marisa's permanent assistant, she asked for very little. To equip her, Marisa gave her an old magic reactor: essentially a block of wood full of various conductors for phantasmal gas and a trigger that would release heat when pressed, and a pair of wings soaked in anti-gravity material, which she fit under her backpack. Sara took to the wings quite easily: all she had to do was kick her legs or more her hands like she was swimming, and she'd float around as if weightless. Of course, they'd fall apart if she moved too much and Sara would have to snap it all back together, but it was something to help her escape with ease in the event of an emergency.

The price for initial equipment was one kilogram of phantasmal mushrooms.

With about two hours until lunch, Sara ventured from Marisa's house on foot. The trees leading to Marisa's house were marked with star-shaped burn marks, and if she went too far, she'd have to turn back. Sara kept her eyes on the trees, only to hit her back against the trees she didn't see coming, snapping her flimsy wings in half, and she'd waste two minutes putting them back together. The other times, she'd drift over holes and over downhill slopes, not used to the fact she could easily float around with those wings. Eventually, she just stopped looking altogether, thinking, Screw it. I'll just look for the stars on my way back. I need the practice anyway.

With but an hour left, Sara eventually reached a grove of red and yellow mushrooms and the scent of a thousand skunks being teargassed to death: the scent, which Marisa had warned her, would make her vision go all swimmy if inhaled. Either way, to avoid the violent urge to vomit, Sara held her breath, gathered handfuls of mushrooms and stuffed them into her backpack, praying she could get the scent out in that hot spring near the shrine. Eventually, in her rush to grab more mushrooms, she had to take in another deep breath, and she gagged on the scent and saw all manner of purple and green spots when she breathed in the tainted air. Then she thought she heard voices: tiny little girls talking about the strange girl in the green outfit gathering mushrooms.

These weren't hallucinations: a group of little girls with translucent wings and red maid outfits surrounded Sara.

"Attention human," one fairy said to the dreary-eyed human, "We are claiming these phantasmal mushrooms in the name of the Scarlet Devil Mansion!"

Another fairy said, "Give us your mushrooms, or feel the wrath of the Scarlet Devil Mansion!"

Now luckily, fairies are quite easy to trick if you give them a riddle; Sara knew this from her earliest research, and even Marisa said to give them a riddle if she ran into any fairies. So, Sara yelled, "This sentence is false!"

One fairy asked, "Huh? How can it be false if the statement is true?"

Another asked, "What's false? And if it's false, how can it be true?"

The rest of the fairies got into a discussion, and one said, "Wait! Mistress Remilia warned us to ignore things like these!"

By then, Sara was already flying through the forest: where, she didn't quite know, but it was away from the fairies. She made careful, minimal movements as she glided a few feet off the forest floor as fast as she could normally run. The scent of the mushrooms in her backpack was nowhere near as bad as it was back in the grove, but still plenty strong. However, she could start to think more clearly, and then she remembered:

Oh crap! I forgot where I was going!

She looked around at all of the trees, looking for the star-shaped burn marks, only to find nothing. In the distance, she heard a scream, "Over there!" Glowing red and blue orbs of light flew through the forest like roman candle shots, leaving smokey trails as they burned past her. Sara ducked behind a tree, pulled out her box-shaped reactor, and fumbled for the trigger. With no grip or sights, she couldn't aim, resorting to the "spray and pray" method as she pushed the trigger and watched green and blue projectiles fly through the golden forest: each shot felt like the flimsy wooden reactor was going to explode, or at least burn her hand off. She saw the figures scatter throughout the treeline, and then she ran in the opposite direction, praying to find a house with a star-shaped burn mark on it.

The pattern continued for the next forty minutes: she'd run, she'd glide, she'd see the red and blue glows following her through the forest, she'd fire back, they'd scatter, and then she'd repeat over and over. Then, Sara finally found a star-shaped burn mark on a tree and followed the trail without looking back, gliding faster than she ever did before, reaching speeds up to thirty kilometers an hour. The glow of the blue and red orbs lit up the forest, just as Sara saw Marisa's small brown dot of a house in the distance. Thinking she was home free, she angled her back so she could fly backwards and aim back at the fairies. She fired a couple shots, they scattered again, and then the hard wood of a tree rammed into Sara's back, shattering the wings, squashing the mushrooms in her backpack and soaking her back in phantasmal juices, and knocking her to the leaf-covered forest floor in agonizing pain.

For a moment, Sara's back was numb and everything else felt tremendous pressure, and then feeling returned with immense pain: the back of her neck felt scratched on the rough tree surface, and a massive headache pounded her head. In the distance, she saw the fairies closing in on her. She dropped her reactor when she ran into that tree, and flying was no longer an option with her wings shattered in two pieces. Instead, she got up and made a bumrush for Marisa's house. The red and blue orbs flew past her, and she ran harder. Her blood pumped as fast and hard as it could, her legs dug themselves into the piles of Autumn leaves, and then something hot punched her back, and her body fell down convulsing. Every muscle tightened and she lost all control. She couldn't breath, her sight turned into a bunch of purple zig-zags, and her hearing turned into a high-pitched ring.

When her hearing came back, she heard one of the fairies shouting, "We got her! Grab the mushrooms!" She could barely move, and she did not have enough control to stop the fairies from grabbing her backpack.

Sara heard distance fire, and then a scream as a green and yellow star-shaped orb careened into one of the fairies, then another, then another, and finally the one holding the backpack.

"Yo Sara," she heard in the distance, "You alive out there?"

Sara couldn't move, and she could only wheeze, "Barely."

Marisa ran over to her and helped her to her feet. She then grabbed the wet backpack and said, "Ya' bleeding on that neck pretty badly. Ya' got any mushrooms to drop off before we get ya' to the medicine dude?"

Sara, still woozy, just nodded. She could barely speak, only straining out, "They got crushed."

"That's fine," she said, "As long as we can boil it in a soup, it'll work. Unfortunately, we're gonna haf'ta boil ya' backpack. Ya' got anything of value in there?"

Sara didn't have anything of value in it, but she didn't want Marisa to boil it: since Brett asked to go camping when he was in boy scouts, he had all manner of camping equipment left over. Sara didn't have to buy much camping equipment because virtually everything, like the tent, the cooking supplies, and the backpack, all came from Brett.

Sara couldn't answer, and all she could do was watch Marisa drop Brett's backpack into a boiling cauldron.

Lunch was more uncomfortable than any other day before. Reimu gave Marisa and Sara dirty looks whilst pouring tea and serving their food.

"So," Marisa said to Sara, "The human village was pretty nice, huh?"

"Uh, Yes," Sara said, grabbing her tea, about to drink it.

Reimu asked, "What happened to your clothes, Sara?"

Phantasmal mushrooms are quite corrosive, so Sara's green outfit was ruined. Instead, Marisa had to swipe an outfit from the human village: a blue-and-brown patterned robe and some other undergarments I'd rather not mention other than they were too tight up top and too loose down bottom. Combine this with the fact she never liked skirts, the cold of winter, and thin material of the robe, she never felt more uncomfortable.

Marisa was going to tell her that they bought them from a store, but Reimu said, "And don't tell me the made-up story that you and Marisa bought them at a store or that your left your old outfit at Marisa's house. I would like to know what happened."

Sara said, "I ran into some fairies, and they ruined my clothes."

"How?," Reimu asked, occasionally glancing at Marisa, "You didn't accidentally fall into a pile of phantasmal mushrooms, did you?"

Marisa gave a weak smile, and Sara didn't know how to answer. Reimu continued leering at them both.

Marisa said, "Hey, if she's gonna learn self-defense, don't you think she should get some experience in the field?"

Reimu stared at Marisa and said, "You said you were arming her, not training her." She occasionally made glances back at Sara and said, "If anything, I don't think somebody already so rash should be training with somebody at least eighty times as rash."

Marisa gave Reimu a smirk, but Sara said, "I'm not rash! I think things through a lot more than most girls my age. I studied my butt off to get here, and with enough practice, I can protect myself."

Reimu said, "That's what every outsider says before they get eaten by a youkai."

Marisa had been leaning her head on one hand, looking at Reimu trying in vain to keep Sara calmed down, but then Marisa said, "Ya' know, Reimu, this isn't just some lost hiker or spoiled brat Yukari usually gaps in. Ya' say she's 'rash,' but put her in somethin' that scares her, and she'll think twice. She's got potential, but she's gotta balance herself out."

Reimu frowned at Marisa, knowing Sara would be in danger if she were to listen to to her any further.

Reimu said, "If you insist on training Sara, at least give her better equipment: I don't want any harm coming to her."

Later that day, knowing Sara needed much more equipment if she was going to survive, she decided to spend the entire rest of the day gathering materials for stronger wings, a better reactor, and perhaps a helmet to protect her head. The price would be ridiculously high, yes, but Sara was going to build a full-proof system, envisioning herself as a female Tony Stark, only without the proper radio to blare "Iron Man" as she worked. Besides, Marisa didn't have enough scrap metal for a full suit, and she urged Sara for something lightweight, graceful, and beautiful.

When Sara brainstormed ideas how what to develop, Marisa told her, "Consider ya'self lucky, because every outsider I've seen never thinks through their weapons: they want swords and so-called practical magic, and then they disappear in the forests never to be seen again. For combat in Gensokyo, only the prettiest attacks win battles. Forgot swords unless ya' gonna use them to block or cut bullets. Forget crazy practical magic like mind control, invisibility, whatever: in Gensokyo, barrage fire is king. If ya' can't spam bullets, you're as good as dead. If ya' can't dodge bullets, you're as good as dead. Here, you will encounter beings who've made firing walls of bullets of way of life for hundreds o' thousands o' years, most o' which have never or rarely lost a battle. As a human, you are at the bottom of Gensokyo's food chain, but if you're ready, you don't have'ta be. To make sure ya' don't get riddled with bullets, you'll have to out-dodge, out-fly, and, naturally, out-shoot everyone ya' meet. If you can do that, then congratulations: you are one'a the few humans who can freely travel Gensokyo, look at danger in the face, and say, 'I'm not afraid. I am a youkai hunter. I can face death, fight it, and win.'" Sara smiled at the speech, and when Marisa added, "Ya' know, in Gensokyo, that's actually happened before," she laughed.

On the first day, Sara developed a new pair of wings: metallic bars arced in two crescent shapes from a phantasmal mushroom core tied to her back, soaked in the same anti-gravity material Marisa's broom and her previous wings were soaked in. When turned on, bright blue streams of magic poured out the back in the shape of wings; it was cool to the touch, but created enough gravitational force for Sara to carry back hundreds of kilograms of scrap metal and spare parts from Marisa's house with ease.

For the next three days, Sara worked on making the wings stronger and faster, she fashioned a padded helmet with rear-view mirrors on the corners, and then she took Marisa's pitiful spare reactor, took it apart, and reverse-engineered it into a rifle. It had iron sights, a stock, and after watching distant barrage fire battles on her trips to and from Reimu's shrine for food, a multi-directional barrel. As neat as it looked, and as neat as the bright yellow test shots looked pelting the forest out back of the shrine, Sara had nowhere to test it. She worked on it for a few days, watched the shots splinter the trees and knock down those maple leaves, but one day, Reimu heard the shots and approached Sara.

Reimu asked, "How does that thing fare against fairies?"

Sara said, "I never tested it."

Reimu went, "Hmph," and said, "Well, I hope when it comes to the time to defend yourself, it will work. You're smart enough not to go out and test it, aren't you?"

Sara nodded, praying for a moment to use her new gun, or at least test her wings.

Then, on her trip over to Marisa's house to gather mushrooms for her, Marisa told her, "Gotta run: we got some strange spirits up on youkai mountain, and they need investigators. If ya' think ya' can handle rowdy fairies on ya' hunt, just drop the mushrooms on the inside of my house." She didn't have to mentioned Reimu would kill her if she brought Sara with.

Sara acknowledged her, readied her gun, and traveled out into the forest, hoping to find some fairies to shoot. She glided slowly through the forest, scanning through the yellow and red landscape for something to shoot. All she heard for the next hour was the rising sounds of barrage fire rippling down the mountain. With a gun in hand, a helmet on her head, and off in another country, she wanted to feel like she was at war: not in a scared sort of way, but the kind of excited way a teenage tomboy who watched too many Call of Duty videos on YouTube would feel. In her head, she pretended Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" was playing in the background and she's get a chance to show those idiot fairies her new firepower. At one point, she glided down to the ground so she could walk slowly and dramatically, smiling the whole time as she thought she was in a war movie.

She reached a mushroom grove, loaded up on mushrooms through the horrible stench, reached another grove, loaded up, looked around for fairies, moved onto the next grove, listened for something nearby, and by the time Sara got back to Marisa's house to drop off her mushrooms, nothing happened.

I didn't run into a single fairy. How am I supposed to test this equipment?

On her way back to the shrine, Sara looked out into the horizon to find a mountain lit up in barrage fire with several tiny figures chasing eachother; the incident Marisa had talked about earlier, and one both of them knew would land Sara in serious trouble if she were to participate in.

Of course Sara wasn't going to participate in it: she only made it her goal to shoot down one fairy.

Rather than move any further towards the shrine, Sara leaped out of the forest with Deep Purple's "Hush" blaring in her head; her ears popped after rocketing into the sky, but there was nothing to hear but the rushing wind.

Approaching the mountain, rowdy fairies chased and shot geometric patterns of magic at all myriads of humanoid figures, using large flowers like makeshift rifles. Sarah pushed against the wind to slow down, then she steadied her rifle and aimed at the roaming fairies; their bodies were easy to spot against white snowy peaks and grey cliffs. She pulled the trigger, watched the magic fly up to the cliff side at the swooping fairies, and watched the fairies pop into dust upon impact, dropping all sorts of munitions and items. She laughed to herself upon realizing what just happened, and then she kicked her legs against the wind to fly around the other side of the mountain to find more fairies. Going up the mountain where the real battle was taking place was too dangerous, but taking pop shots at fairies down the side of the mountain was too fun.

Up the mountain, tucked away in a small ridge, a youkai magician, who had been summoning spirits for her own personal winter vacation home, was flying away from the usual youkai hunters like Reimu and Marisa. She fired wildly up the steep cliff at the pursuing Reimu firing down the mountain, both in a steady freefall down the mountain at high speeds, both weaving around eachother's shots. The rest of the magician's fairies surrounded the rest of the hunters, distracting them and keep them from turning the one-on-one duel into a two-to-three-on-one.

About this time, as the giant ball of swirling bullets, chaos, and fairies barreled down the mountain, Sara was circling around to the exact same side to chase down an "easy target." She couldn't hear it because she was flying at an excess of eighty kilometers an hour. She didn't hear the mass of shots firing until Reimu's amulets were leaving streaks of red and white light by her. Sara looked up, gasped, and kicked her legs away from the mountain. In her rear-view helmet mirror, the magician nearly clipped her and then disappeared down the cliff, just as a wall of yellow and purple stars flew up the mountain in a dizzying spiral. She wasn't on the right angle to fly up quickly enough to get out of the way, but remembering that numbing pain from when she got shot in the forest, she wasn't going to allow herself to get hit. She kicked to the edge of the pattern's spread, where she had plenty of room to dive between the purple and yellow stars, all spaced several meters apart. When she was out of range, she looked back down to find Reimu diving between bullets spaced only a few feet apart, wondering how she was even able to dodge that. Around her, the other hunters were gunning down fairies chasing Reimu, and Sara, unable to say anything, just followed their example and shot at the fairies. This time, they were in range, and they were shooting Sara right back. Sara was getting far more practice than she could ask for: enough to terrify her to want to run away, but now there was nowhere to run.

For the moment, she ducked and dived around the volleys of multi-colored light, flying at angles that made blood rush straight into her head and give her vertigo on a moment's notice. Sara was never really prone to motion sickness, but this was giving her a run for her money: at many moments, she forgot which way was up, which direction she was flying, or if she was even really moving, falling, or spinning. She wanted to focus on the fairies to both dodge their fire and keep a sense of "up," but against the solid surface of the cliff side, the red and yellow forest floor below, or the solid blue sky, there was no up: just a spinning bunch of lights traveling in all directions and the fairies and hunters shooting them, the pressure in Sara's aching head, and the urge to throw up. Still, she was getting confirmed kills: she fired, hit her fairies, and watched them pop and drop their items and whatnot down the cliff. Flight after flight of fairies came swooping in, and Sara mentally and physically prepared herself for another dizzying dogfight.

During their downtime, Marisa flew up to Sara and said, "Not bad for a blind run!"

Sara held her hand against the bare part of her forehead, panting from all of those quick hairpin movements. Sara asked, "How the hell do you dodge all of those bullets so closely together?"

Marisa said, "Practice n' focus. Remember how I found that book in the middle of that mess?"

Sara instinctively nodded, but with the heavy helmet on her head, it only made her headache even worse.

"Same principle," she said, "different situation."

Sara still couldn't wrap her head around it; what she was doing right now, just downright ducking out of the way of the fairies completely, was working, and diving between bullets was nigh impossible. For her, it was too risky to dive into the line of fire, so she kept to the corners of their line of sight, and there was nothing really wrong with it.

Thirty minutes of floating up in the air, longer than any practice flight she ever had or all of her skydiving experience combined, Reimu had shot down that magician in the yellow and purple robe. The fairies dispersed in time, and the rest of the youkai hunters laughed, cheered, and rallied up in a village on the mountain. Sara followed close behind Marisa, landing on an open-air bar with the rest of the hunters she met earlier, surrounded by cheering white-haired and black-haired beings with a mix of long ears, wolf tails or bird wings, and red tokin hats characteristic of tengu. One approached Sara and thanked her for a good job, but Sara said, "It's nothing; I was just passing by." Then she remembered part of Japanese etiquette involved beyond modest about your accomplishments, and many of them just thanked her more.

Reimu landed behind her with the body of whoever caused this incident and lied her down by a table to recover. As this happened, she stamped her feet over to Sara and asked, "What the hell do you think you're doing up there? You could have gotten yourself seriously injured or quite possibly killed!"

Sara said, "I-I was just getting some target practice in between Marisa's house and the shrine."

"Youkai Mountain is in the opposite direction of both the shrine and the Kirisame Magic shop," she said, glaring at Sara, "Now, make your way back to the shrine immediately and don't even think about leaving."

Sara bowed and said, "Yes, ma'am. I'm sorry."

Sara had only just readjusted to being back on the ground, and now she had to jump back into the sky and fly her way back, sulking, worrying about Reimu scolding her when everyone got back; perhaps she was even going to boot her out and send her back across the Hakurei Border.

Sara lied down at Reimu's table for roughly an hour, staring up at the wood ceiling; she was thankful to have that helmet off and lying still, but all she could do was worry about what Reimu would say or do. Then, she heard laughter and walking outside, and one by one, everyone entered the shrine, smiling at Sara. Even the girl in the yellow and purple robe and some of her minions were there, covered in bandages.

No doubt they're looking forward to whatever Reimu has in store for me, she thought.

Reimu entered calmly and told her to wait while she prepared tea and an "announcement." Everyone asked Sara, "How was it up there?" Sara told them all she was scared, stressed, and still dizzy. She said she was nowhere near ready for a battle of that size: she survived by good luck and fast flying.

Reimu returned with snacks and tea, and everyone dug in and discussed the nature of why the culprit did what she did with those spirits. Sara didn't care: this was beyond her and she probably wasn't going to see any of these people again. She just wanted to get this announcement thing over with.

Then, Reimu called for her special announcement, and she asked for everyone to raise their teacups. Sara stared at the stone-faced Reimu and listened.

Reimu said, "For having survived her first incident, despite being ordered to stay back, I would hereby like to recognize Sara Letrain as a resolver of incidents."

Sara's worry turned to confusion as everyone shouted, "Cheers!"

Sara said, "Wait. I thought you were angry."

Reimu said, "Of course I'm angry, but you made it this far: if you can help out with and survive and incident, as far as I'm concerned, you're an incident resolver. So, relax and celebrate, Sara: you've earned your title."

Sara eased herself into a smile: part of this post-incident party was for her. If she made it this far, finding Brett was in her near future.

For the moment, she enjoyed the snacks, the tea, and the palling around. It wouldn't be long before Christmas, and Sara didn't want to just spend it alone in the middle of a Japanese fantasy land.