Occultic;Nine: Volume 1 Read online

  “What do you mean, ‘That’s right?’ Why? Why? WHY? Ryotasu, how could you agree with him?”

  “Poyaya?” Ryotasu crossed her arms below her chest and tilted her head, making a pose like she was thinking. “Poyaya” was probably another one of her meaningless phrases. She had different phrases that she used depending on her situation and mood.

  I would’ve preferred she speak in Japanese, but it was still cute. Everything about Ryotasu was cute. And since she was cute, it was okay.

  Ryotasu sat down next to me, still maintaining her thinking pose. She was looking up at the ceiling— or so I thought, until I felt a toy ray gun poking me in the ribs. The Poyaya Gun, she always called it.

  “Hey, hey, Samurai Gamonosuke!”

  Who the hell was Samurai Gamonosuke? No one had ever called me that in my life.

  And anyway, her face was way too close. She was asking for a kiss! She had to be! Ryotasu was in love with me! —But her face was still way too close!

  “Um... Ryotasu?”

  “Po-ya?”

  “You’re too close.”

  “Poyaya?”

  “Distance-wise.”

  “Poyah.”

  I didn’t know what she was saying, but she seemed to understand me, and backed away a little. The ray gun was still poking into my ribs, though.

  “Hey, hey, when do I get my frozen yogurt?”

  “Well, once I get my affiliate money in, I guess.”

  I decided to look and see when that would be.

  “Today’s view count is... NGGAAH!” Some famous affiliate blogs got hundreds of thousands of hits a day. Compared to that, my numbers made me want to jump off a bridge.

  “Monthly view count is... MGHAH!” That number was just as bad.

  Unless I did something about these numbers, I could probably make a heck of a lot more money working at that frozen yogurt place.

  “I guess the real money’s in porn... But wait. God controls all things. Some day, occult sites shall surpass erotic sites!”

  “God is Ero-him Essaim, after all!” Ryotasu put her hands together in prayer, and wiggled and contorted her body.

  As I watched her shake her body out of the corner of my eye, I slammed my finger down on the F5 key. “Hitting the button sixteen times isn’t really going to change my view numbers, though!”

  The numbers weren’t exactly zero, but some months the deposit fees ate up all my money. I had a long way to go to achieve my goal of being an independent NEET.

  “Our views aren’t going up very fast. We’ve got a long way to go before all-you-can-eat frozen yogurt, Ryotasu.”

  “I see...” Ryotasu looked depressed. “My yogurt...”

  I felt bad, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so I decided to ignore her.

  I checked the blog.

  There were more comments now.

  “Wait, is it him again?”

  “That’s right! His name is... S! A! R! A! I! SARAI!”

  “Yes...”

  Sarai was a regular commenter at Kirikiri Basara, and the smartest one we had.

  To be honest, most of the debunking work on the site was done by him. He was someone I could count on.

  In fact, whenever Sarai showed up and commented, the view count would go up a little as people came to read it. So while I felt grateful as the owner of the site, I did feel a little jealous that I wasn’t the star of my own show.

  Male pride was a complicated thing.

  “Oh, whoops. I’m getting emotional.”

  I read through Sarai’s comment with the usual mixture of dread and anticipation. The page was filled with one of his usual long comments.

  “This photo is a typical example of a simulacrum. I can say, without the slightest doubt, that this is not a spirit photograph, and what’s more, most so-called spirit photographs can be entirely explained via the simulacrum phenomenon, which is also known as the pareidolia effect.”

  “Too long, didn’t read.”

  “Wow, Sarai is always so amazing, huh?”

  Hmm?! Ryotasu’s eyes were wide with amazement as she read Sarai’s debunking.

  I know you have to look over to read the screen, but Ryotasu, your face is really close! And your boobs! They’re touching me! They’re touching me and I can’t focus on what Sarai’s saying!

  If you were to make a pie chart of all the thoughts in my head at that moment, it would have been 3% happiness that my views had gone up, and 6% annoyance that Sarai was stealing my thunder, with the remaining 91% of me going, “Ryotasu! You’re too close to me again!”

  I was so excited I almost forgot about the site!

  “Oh! Gamotan’s got a naughty look on his face!” Ryotasu suddenly said.

  “Huh?! What do you mean, ‘a naughty look’?! I do not!”

  “Naughty Gamotans get I-shi-shu!” Ryotasu pointed the ray gun in her hand at me and pulled the trigger.

  I felt a sharp pain, and numbness run through my whole body.

  “Ow! Ow, ow, ow!” When you were hit with the PYG— at least, that’s what I called her Poyaya Gun— you felt a stinging sensation like an electrostim treatment.

  It didn’t shoot rays, but I was sure it shot some kind of electromagnetic pulse.

  “Wait! Stop! PYG! No!”

  “I-SHI-SHU!”

  I had no idea what that meant, but Ryotasu sure was excited.

  She still kept shooting even after I fell out of my chair and started writhing on the ground. Maybe she was actually a huge sadist?

  “Ow! Ow! Ow! That hurts! Fine, I’ll stop imagining naughty things!”

  Satisfied, Ryotasu finally put away her gun.

  “Gahh... hahh... hahh... Whew...”

  Wh-What jackass gave a girl like Ryotasu a (semi-)deadly weapon?

  It was her fault for always getting right up in my face, anyway. What gave her the right to shoot me just because I looked like I enjoyed it? Not that I wanted her to stop.

  “Aw, it’s good to see you two kids flirting like that.” The owner had a creepy grin on his face as he teased me.

  But it didn’t bother me. I bet any other guy would kill to get a chance to play with Ryotasu like this. I sat back in my chair, feeling like a winner.

  Sarai’s comment was still displayed on the screen. I glanced through the rest of it.

  “The simulacrum phenomenon is one of the brain and eye’s most basic functions. When the eye sees dots or lines arranged in a triangular shape, the brain interprets them as a face. This is an animal instinct that every person is born with. Since there are several such dots and lines in the photograph, it’s even easier for the brain to interpret them as faces. However, if you look at each portion individually, you’ll see that they’re all tricks of the light or part of the background.”

  “I’m convinced. But I hate to admit it. But I’m convinced. I’m convinced, but I hate to admit it.”

  I looked away from the monitor and rubbed my eyes again. Sarai’s comments were so complicated that I always felt tired reading them.

  “You can tell from the way he writes that he thinks he’s smarter than everyone, you know? I bet he thinks that everybody in the world but him is stupid. If he’s this smart, and he’s got a girlfriend and she’s really hot, I’ll never forgive him. Ever.”

  Ryotasu suddenly looked off into the distance when she heard my “profiling.”

  “I feel bad for poor Sarai.”

  “Y-You feel bad for him?!”

  What did that mean?

  My heart almost stopped for a second there.

  “Ryotasu, you know Sarai?”

  “Sure do! I always read his comments on Kirikiri Basara. Not all the way through, though. Ehehe...”

  “No, I mean, do you know him in real life?”

  “I don’t know him in real life! ♪”

  “Oh, okay...”

  So it was just her imagination, then?

  Still, “poor Sarai,” huh? I had no idea where she was getting that fro
m his comments.

  I didn’t see any comments from Sarai yet on the newer articles. There was always a big lag between when I’d post a new article and when he’d comment on it. He was probably spending a lot of time doing research, like your typical nerd.

  I’d put up three new articles on Kirikiri Basara today: “Man Livestreams One-Man Hide And Seek, Never Comes Back,” “The Curse of Kokkuri-san Is Seriously Terrifying,” and “Is It True That a Girl Once Lived with a Mummy?” I’d uploaded all of them since I’d come to the café this morning. Since all three of them had supposedly occurred in Kichijoji, I’d taken to calling them the Kichijoji Trilogy.

  They’d been up for hours, but Sarai would probably wait until tomorrow to comment. Aside from Sarai, how many other people had commented by now? I decided to take a look.

  “Man Livestreams One-Man Hide And Seek, Never Comes Back!”

  From J-Cast News

  There’s a certain video on Niconico that’s attracting a lot of attention.

  It’s a livestream of a man performing a ritual called “One-Man Hide And Seek,” as described in urban legends.

  Get this: there’s a rumor that after the broadcast, the streamer vanished!

  The video is approximately three hours in length, and consists of nothing but footage of a doll sitting in the streamer’s room. Nothing special seems to happen. But after the upload, the streamer, who had regularly been posting over 100 tweets a day to his Twitter account, ceased to update the account altogether. And a woman believed to be the man’s sister wrote on her own blog that her brother had suddenly vanished.

  Upon noticing this, one of the streamer’s followers contacted the Musashino area police, who confirmed that a missing person report had been filed for him.

  ■NEET God

  The whole thing sounds like a setup to me, lol.

  And what’s more, J-Cast just ripped this whole thing off of 2ch.

  And what’s with all these livestreams of One-Man Hide And Seek, anyway?

  There’s like a billion of the things.

  What’s that? “Explain One-Man Hide And Seek”?

  Lmgtfy, jackass.

  Okay, Basariters, rip it apart.

  1: Anonymous FOUND YOU

  FIRST POST, BITCHES!

  2: Anonymous FOUND YOU

  Snake, what’s wrong? Snake? SNAAKKKKEEEE!

  4: Anonymous FOUND YOU

  We don’t even know for sure that the guy on the missing person report is the same guy as the streamer.

  Where do people get this shit? Lol

  7: Anonymous FOUND YOU

  >4

  2ch figured out that guy lived in Kichijoji, which is in Musashino. After that they saw a missing person report in the newspaper for a guy in Musashino, and then it hit the news sites.

  18: Anonymous FOUND YOU

  You guys don’t honestly think this is real, right? Dude’s probably just trying to run from some bad debts or something.

  32: Anonymous FOUND YOU

  NEET God, stop putting up these crappy articles all the time.

  37: Anonymous FOUND YOU

  >18

  But from the photos I saw, he’d put some real effort into setting it up. It’s obvious he was pretty serious about doing the livestream.

  41: Anonymous FOUND YOU

  Affiliate – Affiliate – Affiliate – Affiliate – Affiliate – Affiliate – Affiliate – Affiliate – Affiliate – Affiliate – Affiliate – Affiliate – Affiliate – Affiliate – Affiliate – Affiliate – Affiliate – Affiliate

  43: Anonymous FOUND YOU

  Man this stuff was old news ages ago. Who gives a crap about Solo Hide-and-Seek these days NEET God, get with the times, damn it.

  47: Anonymous FOUND YOU

  It’s okay to trip.

  It’s okay to fall.

  It’s okay to play hide-and-seek.

  That’s what it means to be human.

  By Mitsuwo

  53: Anonymous FOUND YOU

  If the guy who went missing in Musashino really is the guy from the Solo Hide-and-Seek video, wouldn’t this be bigger news?

  59: Anonymous FOUND YOU

  No way is the news gonna talk about this stuff. Since when does the mainstream media cover anything occult?

  72: Anonymous FOUND YOU

  I laughed when I found out that there are as many variants for the rules of One-Man Hide And Seek as there are for rules of poker.

  “The Curse of Kokkuri-san Is Seriously Terrifying!”

  From Twitter

  @shimizuBBA

  I heard from someone in my club that four girls from the third-year class were playing Kokkuri-san, and one of them took her finger off the board. She ended up going crazy and they had to take her to the hospital. There was an ambulance at school sometime during the fall. So that’s what that was? Scary!

  ■NEET God

  The source is Twitter, home of the stupidest people on the internet.

  Okay, Basariters, rip it apart.

  9: Anonymous is Seriously Scary

  Kokkuri-san is like a Japanese ouija board. It scares the hell out of me.

  12: Anonymous is Seriously Scary

  Obvious BS, lol. But I like this stuff about a Kichijoji high school girl, so feel free to keep going.

  13: Anonymous is Seriously Scary

  Kokkuri-san = Ko (Fox), Ku (Dog) Ri (Raccoon).

  20: Anonymous is Seriously Scary

  My grandma caught me playing Kokkuri-san once and started screaming at me. She told me to never, ever play it. She’s dead now, though.

  21: Anonymous is Seriously Scary

  Why are all these articles from Kichijoji, lol. Is that place cursed or something? This place is turning into a local newspaper.

  24: Anonymous is Seriously Scary

  She’s currently locked in a psych ward and they’re not letting her receive visitors.

  Source: A friend who goes to the same school.

  34: Anonymous is Seriously Scary.

  >24

  You’re obviously NEET God using an alt. You’re fooling nobody. You don’t need to make crap up to try and make this more exciting, lol

  39: Anonymous is Seriously Scary

  Don’t you use a 5-yen piece to play Kokkuri-san? In the age of digital currency I bet the ghosts are bored off their asses (@_@)

  42: Anonymous is Seriously Scary

  Just use your Suica card that you use for the trains.

  46: Anonymous is Seriously Scary

  >42

  I bet it makes that “ding” noise when it stops over a certain letter.

  48: Anonymous is Seriously Scary

  Stop it, you’ll open the automatic turnstile to the spirit world! Lol

  51: Anonymous is Seriously Scary

  More like COCK-kuri-san iykwimaityd

  53: Anonymous is Seriously Scary

  I looked up how the hell stuff like Kokkuri-san and ouija boards actually work and it’s a kind of group hypnosis. Maybe it really is that scary. Post-hypnotic suggestions and mind control are real, after all.

  57: Anonymous is Seriously Scary

  I don’t believe in hypnosis and mind control, anyway. I’m sure it wouldn’t work on me lol

  “Is It True That a Girl Once Lived with a Mummy?”

  From the Tokyo Urban Legends Blog

  Did you know that there’s a huge mansion that’s been unoccupied for years in a corner of a Kichijoji residential district?

  Several years ago, a mummified corpse was found there. The TV shows were all over it.

  It seems the body belonged to a resident of the mansion who died from an illness.

  But there’s actually a terrifying rumor surrounding the incident.

  There was another person who was living with the mummy in the mansion: a girl who was only 14 or 15 years old!

  ■NEET God:

  A loli who lives with a mummy lol.

  It sounds like an H-game.

  When’s the movie version comi
ng?

  Okay, Basariters, rip it apart.

  1: Anonymous lives 24/7 in his mom’s basement

  FROST PRIST

  3: Anonymous lives 24/7 in his mom’s basement

  http://www.love*lovedeaiknews.com/archive13/

  5: Anonymous lives 24/7 in his mom’s basement

  So the mummy was banging the girl, right?

  6: Anonymous lives 24/7 in his mom’s basement

  For the first time in my life, I want to be a mummy

  7: Anonymous lives 24/7 in his mom’s basement

  Let’s go to the sea, Brother. You love the sea, right?

  10: Anonymous lives 24/7 in his mom’s basement

  >7

  That’s right. You put the dried mummy in the sea and it puffs up, and goes back to being a person. Wait, that’s dried seaweed!

  12: Anonymous lives 24/7 in his mom’s basement

  Guys you’re missing the most important part. They found a mummy in some family’s house! And this girl was hiding it from the cops! And the body had gone missing from a hospital after the guy had died there! That’s a crime!

  16: Anonymous lives 24/7 in his mom’s basement

  You’ve got me there. I bet the hospital was trying to keep it... under wraps!

  21: Anonymous lives 24/7 in his mom’s basement

  “Mummy” is a bad way to put it. “Mummified body” is better.

  24: Anonymous lives 24/7 in his mom’s basement

  I bet he was just lonely, and wanted his MUMMY. haha. Get it?

  27: Anonymous lives 24/7 in his mom’s basement

  If you’ve got a thing for bandaged chicks, you’ll loved mummies.

  31: Anonymous lives 24/7 in his mom’s basement

  I thought mummies only had bandages in anime.

  35: Anonymous lives 24/7 in his mom’s basement

  I’m pretty sure that some Egyptian mummies have bandages and some don’t. (^^)

  42: Anonymous lives 24/7 in his mom’s basement

  So who took the body from the hospital to the house, and why? Is there a source somewhere?

  “Gah... I hate to say it, but without that nerd Sarai, the rest of them are all morons.”

  I softly closed the lid of my laptop, and let out a long, long sigh.

  “I’m feeling extremely tired all of a sudden. Let’s get some food. I’ve been working all day, and I’m starving.”

  “Working? You?”

  “That’s right. I’m the site admin.”