Through the Circle

Harajuku was an exciting place, but it was not a simple one to navigate, even at the best of times.

When Mirai had sprained her ankle during a soccer game – that her school won, thanks to her – she had figured she’d be back in business in a day or two. That had come and gone, and now, on Sunday, she was sitting at home in her apartment. She had one foot in a tub of warm water, one hand on the TV remote, and a parfait on the table in front of her. She was wearing the same bright red housecoat she’d put on in the morning, and had done her hair up properly just to look good in the mirror.

It wasn’t like she couldn’t walk at all, but making it to the McDonald’s down the street through the crowds would take effort, and being seen missing a step around her classmates would be embarrassing. Her grandpa had taken the car out of town, and he drove even more slowly than most people his age, so it’d be dark before he was back. In other words, she couldn’t hang out outside. She couldn’t practice for their next game. She couldn’t do anything useful!

“This sucks!” she exclaimed, drowning out the TV.

“As you’ve said,” Veil, her Griffon, responded from the far arm of the couch. She turned her head to look at Mirai but otherwise didn’t budge an inch from her comfortable, paws-tucked position.

“And you!” Mirai pointed at Veil with her free hand. “You can at least exercise! We’re partners, aren’t we? So you should be exercising twice as hard for both of us!”

“Sure, because that totally exercises my wings.” Veil broke her pose for just a moment to stretch, fanning her wings out for emphasis, before tucking her paws back under her belly. “I can just fly around the apartment if I want exercise. Why do I need that?”

Mirai made sure not to pause for too long. “Because you need to exercise your legs, too. How are you supposed to protect me if you just sit on your paws all the time?”

“With wind magic, of course.” Veil looked slightly up and away, as if trying to scoff with a beak. “It was a nice thought, Mirai, but humans had it all wrong with that… hamster wheel. First of all, I’m not a hamster!”

“And it’s not a hamster wheel! Those are wider and smaller!”

“It’s the same idea! You’re trying to trick me into moving nowhere, just like humans do to themselves with treadmills!”

“That’s not a trick! It has a purpose!”

“Yes, the purpose of tricking others!”

Mirai reached around behind her and grabbed one of the pillows she was resting on. By the time she swung it, Veil had already flown off of the couch and into the air, so the pillow hit the arm of the couch limply.

“Do you call that a trick? Because I just got you moving!”

Veil beat her wings and hovered for a moment, then spoke again. “Hmm… Wait, Mirai! You actually have a great point!”

“I do?” Mirai furrowed her brow. “Well, of course!”

Veil circled around Mirai’s other side, avoiding the pillow, and landed atop the couch cushion behind her. “Incentive!”

Mirai turned to look at Veil, then raised a finger. “Ohhh, you mean like how I only get to buy parfaits if I meet my target numbers. Otherwise, grandpa finds my wallet and seals all of my yen away in the shrine!”

“Exactly.” Veil’s feathery collar puffed up proudly, as if she had been the one to make the point herself. “I don’t care about running in circles for its own sake. But I don’t want to get hit by a sick girl’s pillow! If your trick wheel did something, that’d be different!”

“So I have to…” Mirai paused to think, but didn’t take too long. “...starve you until you start running on the wheel?”

Veil jumped up onto all fours, back arched and fur raised. “No, not like that! Besides, that’s immoral! Us demons are still people too, you know!”

“But you don’t need to eat, right?” Mirai jabbed a finger at Veil. “You just like to!”

“Not as much as you do, but we need to eat sometimes!” Veil protested. Then she leapt from the couch, flapping over to the coffee table and precariously close to Mirai’s parfait. “Besides, you eat allllll the time when you don’t need to!”

“Well, this isn’t about me, this is about you!”

“Of course it’s about you! If you get sloppy, the Kais, or some demon is going to get the better of you!”

“That’s right, I’m your partner and guardian! And as your partner, I think YOU should start running on that wheel!”

“Seriously!? You’re crazy!”

They stopped, with Mirai’s finger still in the air and Veil almost brushing up against the parfait glass. Both of them were silent for a moment.

Crunch, crunch.

Mirai grabbed the pillow that had missed Veil, leapt off of the couch, and ran into the hall and then the kitchen with Veil following. As soon as she turned the corner and her feet hit the kitchen tile, she threw the pillow forward and followed its path.

“Zett!!!”

A green-haired, dark-skinned boy was standing in Mirai’s kitchen, eating Mirai’s food. The pillow hit his cheek, dropped from the air, and took the nearly-empty bag of chips he was holding with it. Zett Takajou, now empty-handed, looked at Mirai with a placid, appeasing smile.

“Oh hey, Mirai. What’s up? I was wondering when you two would notice me.”

Mirai marched over to Takajou, stood between him and the fallen bag of chips, and glared at him. “Listening in on my conversations is one thing, but you can’t just eat my food without asking!”

“Sorry, sorry,” said Zett, not sounding particularly sorry or even serious. “I don’t have any money to buy a new bag. Why don’t I tell you something good instead?”

Veil looked up at Mirai as she trotted into the room. Mirai looked down at her. The two of them shared a sense of vague unease at the same time as they shared that glance. Zett was the sort of boy who never offered you advice unless it was about to go somewhere very strange, very quickly. Like a ghost walking the corridors in a horror movie, he was rarely ever directly harmful, but you couldn’t help but feel like he needed a musical sting whenever you spotted him. Or like you might die seven days after seeing him.

But if Mirai didn’t have at least a passing interest in unnecessary danger, she would have just given her mom or grandpa her Devil Riser.

“I guess… What’s it about?”

“Makai, the lands from which all demons hail. Some angels, too. I bet you’re interested in taking a peek yourself, aren’t you?”

Veil trotted in front of Mirai, collar fur puffed out, although she was hardly big enough to really get between her and Zett. “Be careful, Mirai! He might have a plan he wants to use us for!”

“Taking a peek… at Makai?” Mirai asked. She looked down at Veil, who was glancing back at her with clear trepidation. But then she continued: “I’m interested… but what are you getting out of this?”

“Not much!” Zett spoke plainly, with a catlike smile on his face. If he was lying, he could have done a better job of it. “The truth is, this is less about a plan and more about an opportunity. You’ve brought a route to Makai straight to your own apartment, and your guardians are away. Who could let an opportunity like this slip away? Least of all a Devil Child?”

“Or you,” Veil countered.

Mirai snorted. “He already got what he wanted, Veil. My chips. Zett’s not the kind of guy to have big dreams.”

“That’s what he wants you to think!”

Zett held up his hands and waved them as if trying to do something between surrender and appease them. “Girls! You don’t have to fight over what I might be thinking. Isn’t it easier to just consider the offer on the table? It’s like thinking about how tasty those potato chips were, instead of the calories.”

Both Mirai and Veil turned their gazes on him after he said that. Perhaps it wasn’t the right metaphor to use with them. But if Zett had that thought, he didn’t show it. He just kept talking.

“The truth is, that loop-shaped track that Mirai bought for Veil… is actually the perfect size, shape and composition to be turned into a portal to Makai! It would be a tight squeeze for most demons though. Or even adult humans.”

Mirai’s eyebrows grew angry. “There’s no way that’s true! I bought it from a reputable pet store, and I didn’t have any demons try to attack me on my way home!”

“Oh?” Zett’s smile grew, spreading to his chubby cheeks, as he gave her a quirksome glance. “A reputable pet store? Would it happen to be the ZOO near Gotonda?”

That gave Mirai a bit of pause, and her expression softened. “How… how did you know that?”

“There must have been demon activity there recently!” Veil suggested, sounding fully confident.

“That’s right,” said Zett. “Ever since the typhoon a couple weeks ago, a lot of weak demons have been interested in that place. Because so many spiritual entities have congregated in that one place, it might have warped the material the hamster wheel was made out of.”

“You mean hamster ball.” Veil pointed out. “Those are almost spherical surfaces. What Mirai got me is more like a circular treadmill.”

“Veil, is he telling the truth?”

“Oh, right. What do you mean, ‘might’?” Veil asked. “This seems like information you might be leaving out on purpose.”

“Not at all! Actually, you might be able to find out who corrupted the hamster-thingy and how. That’d help all of us, too, come to think of it. We don’t want just anyone figuring out how to go to Makai, right?”

Veil sat back, curling her tail around her front paws. “I guess not… I still don’t think you’re telling the entire truth, though. We should be careful with him, Mirai!”

Mirai put a curled finger to her lips, half-pretending to look contemplative. Then she strode across the kitchen to stand in front of Zett. “Fine. I DO want to see what Makai is like… and if I cause trouble there, no one here’ll know about it.”

The truth was, Mirai had the Kais in mind when she said that. She was pretty sure Zett knew what she was getting at, too. Just recently, Nagahisa had started a fight that shocked even Mirai, and it’d led to all sorts of consequences for him.

She didn’t know the details, but Mirai felt bad for him. She hadn’t really thought about whether Nagahisa’s situation was right or fair; she just knew she didn’t want any of that for herself.

Zett smiled.

“Of course they won ‘t! I can keep a secret.” Zett crouched down to indicate Veil. “After all, that’s your partner’s concern, isn’t it?”

Zett reached a hand forward to try to pet Veil’s head. Veil snapped her beak inches from his fingers and then reared back, ears flattened. Zett just chuckled.

“So,” Mirai began to tap her foot, “how do we do this?”

The three of them had assembled around the so-called hamster wheel. Zett had produced a mirror with a crystalline core, which Veil immediately identified as magical. After that, they went through a series of steps: walking circles together around the wheel, chanting phrases in a language Mirai didn’t know, and even putting packets of hot sauce at each of its corners.

Just when Mirai was about to lose her temper, something appeared in the air at the centre of the wheel.

It was a single pulsating white dot, growing larger and then smaller at the turn of the seconds.

“Is that supposed to be the portal?” Mirai didn’t sound very impressed.

“It’s the beginnings of a portal!” Zett said cheerfully.

“It’s really tiny.” Mirai crossed her arms.

“That’s because it needs the will of a Devil Child to truly form!” Veil walked in front of Mirai, looking up at her with determined eyes. Zett’s mouth hung open, his exposition stolen from him, as Veil continued speaking. “Make your will known by speaking aloud, and we can reach Makai!”

Mirai closed her eyes, brow furrowed, and stepped towards the cat exercise wheel.

“O portal to health and harm! Light the way within you!”

A cold gust whipped through the room, and Mirai’s eyes jolted open.

The mote at the center of the wheel blossomed like a flower in a time lapse, filled it from side to side, and became a pure, white, shimmering mist, through which Mirai thought she could see vague shapes. Its colour reminded her of continued snowfall in the dead of winter.

“This is…” Mirai found herself muttering, more shell-shocked than she expected to be.

“Familiar, isn’t it?” Zett asked, insincerely, making it clear he already knew the answer. “Yep, this portal will take you straight to Ice Land. Though you’ll be pretty far from the castle, so don’t expect to be familiar with your surroundings.”

“Mirai blinked. “Far from the castle… like the diner?” This was an opportunity to restock the fridge. The parfaits would even keep cold, if Ice Land was as ear-burningly freezing as she remembered.

“I said you wouldn’t be familiar with your surroundings, didn’t I?” Zett fired a question back at her, but his meaning was clear. Veil even stopped glaring at him to look up at Mirai judgmentally.

“Well, I figured there’d be more than one diner in Ice Land!” Mirai threw her hands up – and slightly toward Zett, in an unnecessary bit of aggression. “Fine! Whatever! So my job is to go to Ice Land, and… stop the weak demons you mentioned? This should be easy!”

“Of course it’ll be easy for you, Mirai,” Zett agreed, hands on his hips and eyes locked to hers. “But still be careful. Your spirit remembers things your body doesn’t, so don’t try fancy maneuvers or ask Veil to cast spells she can’t.”

Veil flapped her wings and flared out her feathers. “I can cast plenty of spells, thank you very much!”"

“Maybe… but I’m not helpless.” Mirai folded her arms, glaring at Zett. “Mom insisted on teaching me a few things about fighting. She doesn’t want me to do this, but she wants me to be tough enough to hold my own and escape from a demon. I’ll do better than escape!”

Zett chuckled, ambled over, and put a hand on Mirai’s shoulder as she continued to stare at him. “That’s the spirit, Mirai!” He told her. “I bet you remember your greatest victories even better than I do. I’m just saying not to let them go to your head. You might need to do some grinding first.”

Mirai grabbed Zett’s hand and paused momentarily. He wasn’t particularly warm or soft, but the entire gesture still felt odd. She pushed it away, as planned, and scoffed. “I beat Dragon Quest IX at a lower level than any of the Kais. I can handle this, Zett.”