[Shisho Series] Time Machine

Feb 11, 2013, 01:09 http://www.pixiv.net/novel/show.php?id=1994112

A Shisho Series self-parody. Well, it has been a long time since I ran out of ideas for parodies. Anyway, if I just start writing, something is bound to come up.

"Shisho, it's a parody." "That's painfully straightforward." "Say something funny."

Shisho lets out an annoyed yawn. "Horses supposedly have four horsepowers, you know." "I've heard that before."

Is he really that fond of such a lame piece of trivia? "Well then, let's read some fan mail from the readers." "Go ahead and read."

That's right. There was this option. I'm brilliant. Not bad for something I just thought of now. "First letter. Who is more of a useless scrub, Shisho from the past arcs or Uni from the present arc?"

Bam!

Shisho suddenly slammed the table. A table appeared, so this must be Shisho's rundown apartment. "I show a decent amount of psychic ability even in the past arcs! It's unpleasant to be lumped together with a coward like you all the time." "I'm feeling mildly unpleasant right now."

It looked like we were about to glare at each other, so I looked away. "The point is that's how the readers see it." "That's just because my master was so insanely powerful that it makes me look weak by comparison." "Huh. Does that mean Kanako-san ranks higher than you do now?" "Hmph?"

Logically, that was where it led, but Shisho wouldn't easily nod. Instead, he muttered, "It's not about who's higher or lower." Here it comes. He hates losing. "There are similar letters. Like, who ranks higher, Kanako-san or the current Shisho?" "What a vulgar question!"

Shisho yelled and slammed the table again. "Who on earth is that? I'll read out their name." "Wait, stop it. No, seriously, that's bad."

I defended it. I managed to defend it. I was out of breath. "Still, I wonder how it really is. Kanako-san's field of expertise seems broader. She looks strong with Western-style stuff too." "Hey. Are you going to keep going with that?" "Why not? We don't have any other material." "I can recite pi up to sixty decimal places." "That's information nobody asked for. Also, you got the kanji wrong." "Besides, our peaks are at different times, so there's no way to compare. You can't quantify psychic power." "What did you just say?" "Huh? I said you can't quantify psychic power." "Right before that. Peaks at different times? That's it!" "What's with you, suddenly standing up?"

I pumped my fist at my own idea. "Let's go to the past." "Huh?"

Shisho stared at me like I was an idiot. "We can do it. It's a parody." "Is that even allowed?" "Kyoko-san says things like 'totally barf-worthy', so anything goes, right?" "What are we going to the past for?" "To have a psychic showdown, duh. To see who can get to the truth of the ghost first. They have that in mystery novels, don't they? Where rival detectives cross paths on the same case and have a deduction showdown." "Ugh～"

Shisho looked reluctant. Is he scared of losing? "I don't want you to meet my master." Is that the reason? "It's a parody. A parody. Just take it easy."

Shisho crossed his arms and made a sour face. "I've already decided. Yep. We're time-slipping right now." "How?"

This guy is such a pain. "Anything goes. Fine, I don't care how. A time machine, or setting it up so we get caught up in Walk-san's special ability, whatever." "Wait. Let's leave Walk out of this."

Shisho suddenly started looking around the room nervously. "He's not here. Don't worry." I remembered. For some reason, bringing up anything related to Kanako in front of Walk seemed to be a taboo. Well, I had a vague idea why.

I stopped Shisho, who had gotten so paranoid he opened the closet to make sure nobody was inside. "Alright, let's go by time machine." What should I do about the time machine? Screw it, this will do. "The inside of this wardrobe is a time machine." "Oh. Doraemon style." "Sorry for being unoriginal. Here we go."

When I reached for the wardrobe drawer, Shisho started wandering around the room again. "What is it? We're going." "Well, if we're going, I can't go looking like this." Saying that, he started picking out clothes to wear. "Hey. Which looks better?" "Either's fine. Let's go already." "Hold on. Oh, and let's bring that too."

Shisho shoved his head into the closet and pulled out a favorite occult item he'd recently acquired. He looked pleased, saying he was going to show off to my master. "Oh, come on. You can't bring things from the future. And meeting your past self is strictly forbidden." "Who decided that?" "Doc Emmett Brown said so in *Back to the Future*." "Ah, they were showing that on Friday Roadshow the other day." "Just hurry up and let's go." "Wait a second. Is anything wrong with me? My teeth. I need to brush my teeth."

Without listening, I yanked open the wardrobe drawer and shoved Shisho right inside. "Ah, it's lukewarm. Kinda gross. Whoa, it's so lukewarm." He's so annoying. Even Nobita never said that, where did he pull that impression from?

The inside of the wardrobe was a familiar subspace scattered with warped clock patterns, and Shisho and I were standing on a carpet-shaped time machine. "Can you even operate this?" Shisho tried to touch the instrument panel on his own. "Wait, stop! If you touch things while saying that, it's bound to cause an accident. Just stay still."

Okay, beep-boop. Unnecessary descriptions lead to accidents. The time machine started moving through the subspace with cheap artificial sounds. "Don't lean over!" Why is this guy like this? Though I kind of want to see him die.

After a while, it stopped, and a black hole opened at the top. "We're here." I grabbed the edge of the hole and pulled myself up like a pull-up. A dim ceiling was visible right above where I came out. Huh. What is this place?

As I poked my upper body out, I realized it was the drawer of a desk in some company office I didn't recognize. Other desks were lined up around it. It was pretty spacious. It really looked like some office floor. That's strange. Where is this? Now that I thought about it, I realized I hadn't decided where we would pop out. I kind of had the image of coming out of the wardrobe in Kanako-san's rundown apartment.

As I climbed out of the desk drawer, Shisho's face popped out of the drawer next. "What is this place?" "Beats me. Not a single person around."

It looked like daytime, but the lights on the floor were turned off, making it dim. The windows had bamboo-blind-style shutters pulled down, letting light filter through. "Company trip..." Shisho read the writing on the whiteboard by the wall. Near it was a machine that looked like a fax, its green standby light blinking faintly. Quiet. The interior was wrapped in an artificial-feeling silence.

I moved toward the window and slid the shutter with my finger. It made a cracking sound. Outside was bright. I instinctively narrowed my eyes. A large street was visible below. Four or five stories up—the floor we were on seemed to be about that high. Across the street were rows of buildings. Above them was a sky with floating clouds. A scenery I recognized. Wasn't the road down there the main street in front of the station? A straight road extending east and west from the station's east exit.

As I looked down, a sudden sense of incongruity struck me. And an unnamable chill. There are no people. Just thinking that. Clatter.

Shisho came over to me and violently rolled up the shutter. After looking at the outside scenery the same way I did, his expression gradually grew severe. Eventually, he let go of the window shutter and picked up a desktop calendar from a nearby desk. His eyes widened in a start. Then he ran back to the window, raised the shutter, and looked outside.

Shisho muttered in that exact posture. "You said it was a psychic showdown to see who gets to the truth of the ghost first." Those were my words before getting on the time machine. I certainly said that. Clatter.

When Shisho removed his fingers, the shutter slid back down with a sound. He turned to face me. His cheeks were stiff, or maybe it was just my imagination. "This isn't a joke. Not this." Right after saying that, he checked his watch and clicked his tongue. "Where's the exit?"

Shisho crossed the deserted floor. I reflexively followed him. There was a door. It was locked, but since we were on the inside, we could unlock it. Stepping into the hallway, it was equally deserted, with no sign of human presence whatsoever. Not a single sound. There was a staircase nearby, so we went down. Shisho was walking at a pretty fast pace. I nearly missed a step and felt a chill.

It seemed to be a tenant building with several companies inside. When we reached the first floor, a directory board listing company names caught my eye. "This way." There was an automatic door right in front of us. When we got close, it opened easily. Looks like the electricity was working here.

Stepping outside, the eerie silence of the building up until now vanished, and the clamor of various sounds echoed... Wait, it didn't. A chill ran through me.

I slowly stepped out under the sun. Right in front of me was the familiar main street. The cluster of buildings in front of the station. The six-lane road running between them. Broad daylight. Yet, why are there no people? Not a single person. It was like wandering into a world without people. Not a single shadow of movement. It's quiet. Disturbingly so. It even felt like the air wasn't moving at all.

Glancing at Shisho beside me, I caught him swallowing hard, his throat moving. What is this? "Uhm, this is a parody, right?" I checked, just in case. The unexpected turn of events was starting to scare me. "Thomas Harris. Do you know him?" Shisho said, staring ahead with a stiff face. "......The guy who wrote *The Silence of the Lambs*, right?" Why did he bring up a name like that out of nowhere? "There's a novel called *Red Dragon* that depicts a past case in *The Silence of the Lambs*. In the preface, the author Thomas Harris mentions the cannibal Dr. Lecter and says this: 'Most of the time in my work I was invisible to the characters, but I was very uncomfortable in Dr. Lecter's presence. I couldn't be sure he couldn't see me.'" "Ah." A creepy story. But what does that have to do with our current situation? "He's that kind of guy."

Shisho spat out the words, glaring down and to the front-left from in front of the building facing the main street. At the end of his gaze was a strange figure. In the middle of the main street—a road that served as the city's artery, where countless cars would normally pass—there stood a single figure draped in a loose black cloak. Its face was unnaturally white. A mask. It was wearing a mask.

At that moment, a sudden sense of déjà vu washed over me. No, not déjà vu. An actual memory. Noise ran through my head, and a scene from a video surfaced. Inside the station concourse, a figure in a white mask performing something alone. That mask. That mask? What is this?

The terrifying event that occurred in that video had nothing to do with that person directly. That's why it was fading from my own memory. So why here, of all places? "Shisho." When I timidly turned to look beside me, Shisho had a drained face and said, "A different one." It seemed like he saw right through what I was thinking.

The figure in the white mask stood lingering in the middle of the empty, spacious road. Even though it was right under the sun, it looked strangely hollow, as if shimmering heat waves were rising only from that spot. "Who is that person?" When I asked, Shisho let out an exasperated breath that sounded like "Ha," and continued. "You can actually see that as human? You really are a scrub."

With that, he stared through the roadside trees toward the left where the masked figure stood. The mask shook. Up and down. While hanging its head, it was trembling slightly. Is it smiling? Just as I thought that, the shadow of another moving object entered the edge of my vision.

A large young man. He was walking toward us from the right side of the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets. I was surprised. I recognized him. When Shisho took me to a mountain temple to buy a cursed video, this was the man who greeted us. That white mask had appeared in that video. What is this? Is it a coincidence? No... "Kurotani."

When Shisho called out, the man looked surprised. He was younger than in my memory. He gave off a somewhat violent atmosphere, the kind you'd rather not get involved with. The man called Kurotani approached us and opened his mouth. "What's with you, your vibe suddenly changed. How'd you pull that disguise off?" Ah, I started to say *well, we came from the future via time machine*, but Shisho stopped me with one hand. "Talk later. Kill him." He shot those sharp words at Kurotani, pointing in the direction of the masked figure. "Hurry!" "Huh?" Kurotani's expression changed. It turned menacing. "Kill him. If you let him meet that person, it's over. We can still do it now." "Violent, aren't you?" Kurotani grinned crookedly. But his eyes weren't smiling at all. "Uhm... this is a parody..." I muttered, but was completely ignored. "Anyway, hurry up and—"

Just as Shisho got that far with Kurotani, both of them froze. The masked figure that should have been in the middle of the road dozens of meters to the left was somehow now on the street directly in front of the building we were in. I must have looked away for just a split second. How did it move? Not human, no way, in broad daylight like this?

Amidst the bizarre spectacle where every single streetscape in view lacked anyone other than us, it felt completely detached from reality. The mask stood in the middle of the road, looking right at us. Kurotani gave a whistle and started walking in that direction with his hands in his pockets. Even as an amateur to fights, I could feel a chilling murderous intent rising from his back. "Damn it."

Shisho muttered that, grabbed a heavy iron sign for a job advertisement or something nearby, and started walking alongside Kurotani, dragging the weighted base across the asphalt. Was he planning to use that as a weapon? Stunned by the unexpected, tense development, I stood frozen, repeating "Eh," "Eh."

Suddenly, Shisho pulled something out of his back pocket. He threw it toward me, saying: "If we get taken out, run away. No, forget that, just run immediately. That man and woman should be somewhere around. Hand this over. Apparently only a woman can use it."

I managed to catch the object flying in a parabola. It was a small dagger with bizarre, southern-style faces carved all over its sheath. It was the occult item he had smirked about wanting to show off to my master before leaving the room. He had smuggled it along even though I told him not to! Saying something like that here—did it mean this was a cursed object with a hefty background? "Ah, no, wait. Not that. The other one. The vampire's counterpart. That one's better. Hand it to him."

Saying that, Shisho turned back toward the road and walked away, the screeching sound of the base scraping asphalt echoing in the windless silence. Watching his back, a flashback suddenly struck my head. A night park. A trash can next to a bench. Blood flowing onto the ground. Those sights overlapped with Shisho's back. A terrifying memory and premonition made nausea rise up in me. "Go!"

Chided without him even looking back, I jerked into action and immediately started running. My feet, which had started heading toward the alleyway, changed direction the next instant, and I leaped back into the very building I had just come out of. Let's just go home. This is too scary. It's not like I'm abandoning Shisho to run away by myself. It's just a past event that's already over, and Shisho is the weird one for getting driven by a strange obsession to get involved. It's fine. In times like this, we just need to go back to a time slightly before we boarded the time machine and stop ourselves from going to the past. Then everything is solved.

Running up the stairs, I was struck by déjà vu again. Doraemon. The movie *The Great Adventure into the Underworld*. A scene where companions are scattered by powerful enemies in the magic world adventure setting, and Nobita tries to go back to the past with the time machine to stop himself from creating the magic world in order to reset everything. Right after getting out of the time machine, a demon named Medusa swims through the temporal subspace and chases them into the real world—a trauma-inducing development for a child's heart. Such a scene popped into my head, and I chuckled bitterly at how ridiculous it was.

Arriving at the fifth-floor floor, I rushed down the deserted, dark hallway and grabbed the door I had left unlocked earlier. Twisting the doorknob, a dim room lined with deserted desks spread out before me. My heart started racing. Which one was it? Who was it again? Which desk connected to the time machine?

I scanned the floor, trying to remember. It was definitely on the island near the pillar, right around the middle... At that moment, my entire body was pierced by the greatest fear of my day. The desk was gone. In the island of desks facing each other in sets of three, the middle one had vanished abruptly, as if it had never been there from the start, leaving a missing tooth. Running up to it, I remembered clearly. Right here. The desk that should have been here is where we came out. Why. Why isn't it here?

Panicking, I opened the drawer of the desk to the left. A paper file was inside. No clock-patterned subspace. I opened the one to the right, and stationery rattled. It's not there. It's not there!

I went around opening the drawers of the desks on the opposite side of the island and other islands one by one. Not there. Not there. There's no exit anywhere. My heart began to pound heavily. This is bad. This is bad. This isn't a joke anymore. I instinctively gripped the small dagger entrusted to me by Shisho.

"Who are you?" A voice suddenly called out from behind. When I turned around, a little girl was sitting on the desk in the middle of the floor. Swinging her legs, she tilted her head and said, "Didn't you look at Archer somewhere?"

With a clatter, I stepped back in panic and bumped my lower back against the desk behind me. The thing in front of me looked just like a doll. Yet it spoke and moved. The girl suddenly looked toward the window and muttered: "He seems to come to here."

I looked over there in response. But nothing seemed amiss. When I turned back to the front, the girl had vanished. Abruptly. As if she hadn't been there from the start, leaving only the deserted desks. What is this! I panicked at the nonstop barrage of incomprehensible things. I shouldn't have come.

The moment I thought that, a gross splashing sound suddenly echoed through the silent world. It was coming from the window. Just a moment ago, there hadn't been any anomalies. Looking closely, outside light was filtering through a tiny gap in the shutter. I swallowed hard and slowly approached.