Okazaki Yumemi was missing… until she, suddenly and decidedly, wasn’t.
Ryu was effectively moved to full-time professor, complete with more hours and more pay. Of course, it wasn’t by choice. Okazaki Yumemi had extreme bouts of disappearing, so Ryu had no alternative but to fill her shoes. How she had managed tenure, he’d never know.
It was an idle day in his apartment when Yumemi appeared. And it was exactly that: She had
appeared. From his peripheral vision, the girl, as if she had always been there,
was.
Yumemi, who smelled faintly of ashen fire, shook off the sleeves of her crimson jacket and flung it down to the ground, exposing a black camisole underneath. Beads of sweat dripped down her cheek and to the floor.
Frankly, to the man who was previously considering what to make for lunch, it was all too much. But before Ryu could open his mouth to question her, she spoke first.
“Time, no—another world,” she said, nodding, as if she were continuing a conversation she had with him. As if she had never disappeared for weeks on end. “I’ve found it, Ryu.”
“What?”
“Do you believe in magic?” she said.
His mind slowed. “Not… really?”
“I didn’t either. But then I traversed. To other worlds. Or maybe another time, or another dimension, who knows? One where science alone does not dictate the elements. Say it is insane. Absurd, even. I could have been hallucinating for all I know. But I believe I may have been to where no mortal of our realm has been before.”
“Insane is… certainly the word for it.” But Ryu took a look into Yumemi’s eyes, and, within those ruby pools, there was clarity—an alarming amount of it. The nervous fiddling of her hands, her clear eyes gazing level into his own, her mouth which spoke words faster than her mind could process: Ryu could not make sense of it.
“Then call me ill,” she said, feverishly laughing all the while. It was a rare set of laughs that threatened to expose her age. “And embrace me. I’m giddy,” she ad
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