(T/N: Yoo guys, how you've all been?
I'm finally back!!)
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Chapter 90: Body Swap Roleplay.
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"Kyah!!"
Thud.
"Ow—!"
The shriek hit the morning air like a thrown brick. Outside Moriya Shrine, Marisa — currently on her broomstick at low altitude — nearly lost her grip on the handle.
Kihara removed a soft pair of feet from his face, opened one eye, and addressed the room with the economy of someone who had not yet fully committed to consciousness. "Akane. What are you doing."
The girl who was not Akane froze.
Akane?
Sanae — who had woken up approximately thirty seconds ago, screamed, fallen off the bed, and was now sitting on the floor in a body that was definitely not hers — caught her reflection in the small mirror on the wall.
Lavender hair. Round, doll-like face.
Unfamiliar features carrying an expression of pure bewilderment.
This is Akane Shinjo. One of Kihara's girlfriends. But why am I in her body?
She ran through last night methodically. Nothing suspicious consumed. Dinner had been the fresh vegetables Kanako-sama had brought in — apparently a gift from Kihara, and genuinely delicious.
Surely not the vegetables.
She had been a shrine maiden for years. She had never once heard of anyone changing bodies from eating vegetables.
"I just had a bad dream," she said, making the split-second decision not to explain that she was not, in fact, Akane. The situation was too absurd. He wouldn't believe her.
"Sorry for waking you."
"Ah... do you want to go back to sleep?"
He didn't wait for an answer. He pulled the blanket back, settled in, and gathered her into his arms with the easy familiarity of someone doing something they did regularly.
Something pressed against her abdomen.
Something firm.
Oh.
Sanae was not an ignorant shrine maiden. She understood biology perfectly well. She understood, specifically, that her current physical situation was what you might call precarious, and that she should prepare for the possibility of outcomes she had not emotionally budgeted for this morning.
This body is Akane's. If he... it wouldn't technically be... would it...?
She went rigid. Every muscle she currently possessed locked into a state of complete paralysis. She stopped breathing through her nose on the grounds that any accidental signal might be interpreted as a couples code she didn't have the translation for, resulting in her being consumed in a sense she wasn't prepared for.
It would be too sad. A first time in someone else's body. That's a genuinely unique form of tragedy.
"I want to go to Moriya Shrine today!" she announced, at a volume slightly above what the situation required.
"I'll take you."
"...Are you hungry? Should we eat first?"
Kihara opened one eye again, with the expression of someone noticing something that didn't quite fit. Then he pressed a brief, affectionate kiss to her cheek. "Akane wanting to eat breakfast before laying in bed for another hour — did last night take more out of you than usual?"
Sanae processed this comment.
Then she became aware — with the specific, crystalline awareness of someone receiving information they cannot un-receive — of certain physical evidence suggesting that last night had, in fact, already occurred.
That she had slept through it.
That she had woken up on the other side of it, in someone else's body, to a reality that was already complete.
She had previously thought the saddest possible outcome was a first experience in a borrowed body. She now understood the actual saddest outcome was waking up to discover that the experience in question had already happened, leaving only the aftermath and some interior rearrangement to indicate it had occurred at all.
"Let's get breakfast," Kihara said, already sitting up.
"...Mm."
Moriya Shrine, at approximately the same time.
Akane Shinjo was dragged out of sleep by the very specific sensation of being watched with intense purpose.
She opened her eyes to a hat with frog eyes on it.
She pushed it away from her face. "Weird hat. Where's my guy?"
"That tone. That gesture." Suwako Moriya tilted her head. "You're definitely not little Sanae."
"Sanae? Who's — " Akane stopped. Something familiar prickled at the edge of her awareness — the particular warmth that people with certain perceptions recognized as divine presence. Her expression brightened immediately. "Oh! You're gods, aren't you!"
Kanako Yasaka, arms folded, studied the person wearing Sanae's face and Sanae's pajamas with the focused curiosity of a deity who had seen a great many things and was deciding how to categorize this one. "Who are you, then? A new god arrived in Gensokyo?"
"Me? I'm Kihara's girlfriend. Akane Shinjo!"
"The young Kihara's companion...
interesting. This doesn't feel like soul transfer. More like a consciousness exchange?"
"Consciousness exchange?!"
Akane launched herself out of the bed with the energy of someone who had just been told they were the protagonist of an extremely cool situation. She caught a flash of green hair at the edge of her vision, immediately understood the full implications, and began systematically going through Sanae's room looking for a mirror.
Kanako watched the careful organization of Sanae's living space disintegrate in real time, sighed once in the key of minor resignation, and produced a small hand mirror from somewhere. "Stop ransacking the room. Here."
"Oh, thanks. Nameless god."
Akane studied Sanae's reflection. Tilted her head one way, then the other. Pinched her chin between two fingers and nodded several times with the evaluative air of a professional rendering judgment.
Suwako's curiosity got the better of her. "You think Sanae looks nice?"
"Partly that." Akane's expression settled into something thoughtful and faintly scheming.
"Mostly I'm thinking about whether I should use this body to go find Kihara. Last night was slightly..." she searched for the word, "...incomplete." She extended her tongue and ran it slowly across her lower lip, leaving the thought to land where it would.
The two deities looked at each other.
"That," Kanako said finally, "is the most alluring expression I have ever seen on Sanae's face. It's a genuine shame we don't have a camera. I could have gotten years of use out of it."
"Cameras are easy," Akane said, already thinking ahead. "Once Kihara gets more battery packs sorted, we can put up a signal tower out here. Bring you a few phones while we're at it."
Kanako sat forward slightly. Kanako Yasaka was one of Gensokyo's rare deities with an active interest in the outside world's technology — she'd been tracking it for decades. "A signal tower... one of those external infrastructure constructions? Would that affect the mystery of the youkai here? Interfere with the boundary?"
"Don't worry. There's already one up near the Bamboo Forest of the Lost. And Kihara says as long as the local powers agree, Yukari won't object."
Kanako looked at Suwako. "What do you think?"
"Don't care. Whatever you decide."
"Then it's settled." Kanako nodded at Akane.
"I'll leave the signal tower project to you and Kihara-kun."
"OK!" Akane pumped one fist, pleased with having negotiated a deal on her boyfriend's behalf while also currently being in the wrong body. Then her stomach made a sound with strong opinions about breakfast.
"Speaking of which — do you have anything to eat here? Instant noodles? Anything?"
"Regrettably," Kanako said, "neither Suwako nor I require food, so the shrine's supplies are limited to what Sanae keeps. As for instant noodles — nothing of that kind. The good news is that Kihara-kun is currently on his way here." A serene pause. "With your body."
"How do you know that?"
Kanako straightened, with the particular posture of someone about to say something they had been waiting for an opportunity to say. "As the deity enshrined here — even the act of setting foot on the approach to this shrine registers to me."
"Huh~"
Kihara arrived at the top of the stone steps to find a barefoot girl in sleep clothes running toward him at surprising speed.
Sanae — in Akane's body, lavender hair loose, feet on the cold stone — grabbed the person wearing her body by the wrist and pulled her urgently toward the inner shrine building.
"I've been waiting! Kihara, feel free to look around — we have something very important to discuss, she and I—"
"Ah — sure." He watched the two of them disappear, decided this was probably about tokusatsu merchandise and Sanae's cover being blown, and turned to find Kanako and Suwako waiting in the courtyard.
"Good morning, both of you. How were the vegetables yesterday?"
Inside Sanae's room:
Akane sat cross-legged on the floor. Sanae sat across from her. They looked at each other — Akane in Sanae's face, Sanae in Akane's — for a moment of mutual, slightly stunned acknowledgment.
Then Akane smiled.
"So," she said, brightly and with the tone of someone who had already made a decision and was presenting it as a collaborative suggestion, "until the consciousness swap reverses itself — how about we roleplay as each other?"
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Thank you for reading.