Marisa had to be honest with herself: she was in love with Reimu Hakurei.

They'd known each other practically since they were old enough to walk, so it was hard to say when it had happened. There'd never been any big moment of revelation. Reimu had crept into her heart piece by piece, without her even realizing.

It had been the little things that had helped her figure it out. The way she kept finding herself spending her scarce disposable income on knickknacks that she knew Reimu would like. The longing hours she'd spent sitting on the shrine's front step while Reimu was imprisoned on the moon. The guilt she'd felt one time that Reimu had overheard her play-flirting with Patchouli. So now, it was time for one big thing to announce her devotion.

Marisa had never been subtle in her life, and this definitely wasn't going to be an exception. She had it all planned out. She usually put on a fireworks show for Bon anyway, and this year she'd make the biggest, most extravagant and beautiful fireworks that Gensokyo had ever seen. She'd take Reimu's hand, ask her out, and once she'd said yes, kiss her as gleaming pyrotechnic rainbows shined down from the heavens.

It was the perfect plan.

The only problem was one mistake while she was making the fireworks. One stray spark from a mix of powdered metals that she burnt to test for color. A little bad luck, a few too many explosives and oxidizers kept a little too close to her desk...

The next thing Marisa knew, she was sitting on the ground outside her cottage. Dazed and not quite able to remember what she'd been doing, she sat in confusion for a moment... and hadn't yet gotten her bearings back yet when her front door cartwheeled past. The same shockwave that was propelling it rushed over her, a brief hell of heat and pressure. Coughing, she waved the dust from her face, then pushed herself up to standing to take a look back at her cottage.

Her place had seen better days. The explosion had blown out all of the windows, and most of the side wall had collapsed. Past the heap of splintered wood and the black smoke, she could spot guttering flames in the interior. Lacking the support of one wall, the roof was sagging dangerously, while the cottage's frame groaned in a way that suggested that it might not hold out long.

It was far from the first time that Marisa had accidentally blown something up, but it was easily the worst. She could only watch, stunned, as the roof slowly drooped down. The frame shuddered in protest, then pushed outward with the splintered squeals of twisting wood. With a few cracks, the last of the supports snapped, and the front half of the cottage collapsed on itself, leaving broken beams jutting out into the air. With a few final groans, the twisted structure came to rest. The sight of her cottage—and with it, practically everything she'd owned—crashing to the ground felt... unreal. She knew that she should be terrified or angry, but it just felt too faraway.

In the aftermath of the collapse, things suddenly felt eerily quiet. She could still hear the gentle crackling of a fire somewhere deep in the mess that used to be her house, but other than that, there was no sound. No birds chirping, no distant fairies playing in the trees, nothing. It was like the entire Forest of Magic had paused to have a moment of silence for her poor house. It didn't help make the scene feel any less surreal, but Marisa was slowly forcing her jumbled thoughts to flow again.

There wasn't much she was going to be able to do about this alone. The mini-Hakkero was buried somewhere in that mess, and even if she'd had it, heat magic wasn't going to make this situation any better. If she was going to salvage anything out of this, she was going to need help.

"Alice! Alice! Yo! Are ya in there!"

The run to Alice's cottage had strangely not left Marisa breathless, and she wasted no time in beating on the magician's door upon arrival. It wasn't looking good, though... the windows were dark, and she couldn't hear anything moving inside. She sneaked around the side to peek in a window, and... nothing. Shelves of lifeless dolls staring blankly into space. Damn. Pulling away from the window, she weighed her options. If she hurried, she might be able to reach the Scarlet Devil Mansion and, assuming Patchouli believed her, get her back to her cottage within an hour or so. Patchouli could do water magic, which would be kind of useful if the fire spread, but wasn't going to be much use at digging through the wreckage. Then again, once the fire was out, that could wait...

"What are you doing?"

Marisa whirled around to find herself face-to-face with Alice, who did not look amused at finding a known thief looking in the windows of her unoccupied cottage. "A-ah, hey, Alice! I was just lookin' for you!"

"I'm sure you were."

"No, I mean! I could use your help, and there's not much time, okay? I kinda, uh, accidentally blew my house up."

"You blew your house up," Alice said dryly. Her eyes drifted down over Marisa for a moment, and an annoyed flush rose in her cheeks. The dollmaker had a basket held in her hands, but the Shanghai dolls flanking her were already subtly shifting themselves into a more combat-ready stance. "You look remarkably clean for a pyromaniac. Do you want to tell me why you're actually here, or should we have a spellcard battle to find out?"

"Eh?" Marisa took a glance down at herself, and found that Alice was right. There wasn't a single smudge of soot on her clothes. Even her apron, usually covered in multiple layers of stains, was lily white. It was probably the cleanest she'd looked in weeks. Only now, far removed from the explosion, did she realize what a miracle it was that she'd escaped unharmed. "W-well, I dunno how that happened, but...!" Marisa's mind raced, and she glanced toward the direction of her cottage. There, showing above the treetops, was a pillar of thin smoke. "A-ah! Over there! See? It's burnin', okay?! ... crap, it's burning. We've gotta go. I'll explain on the way!"

Marisa didn't wait for Alice to respond, but she could hear a cry of, "Hey, slow down!" behind her as she dashed into the underbrush. The path between her house and Alice's was a rarely-walked one, narrow enough that briars and sticks scratched at her arms, but she didn't let it slow her down. The sight of that smoke column had instilled new panic into her, and yet... she felt strangely calm, without the sharp edge that she associated with adrenaline rushes. The run left her enough time for her racing thoughts to cover the strange situation. If her place really was burning, Alice wouldn't be much help. Half of her dolls were full of gunpowder and a bit prone to exploding if you squinted at them wrong, to begin with. Even the ones who weren't gunpowder-filled were still made of wood, so sending them into a burning building probably wouldn't accomplish much. She'd have to go get Patchouli, and after another delay at this point, there might not be anything left to save by the time the two reached it, anyway. She could try her hand at a water spell herself, but she'd never really practiced them, and most of her reference materials were somewhere inside the building she was trying to save in the first place...

Cresting a small hill, the cottage came into view again, and she slowed to a stop. It didn't look quite as bad as she'd feared,. A few hot embers still glowed in the mess, letting out plenty of smoke, but it looked like most of the actual fire had been suffocated by the collapsing roof.

With a slight rustling of grass, Alice settled onto the ground next to her, while dolls more slowly floated down to join her. "You were telling the truth..." she said, sounding a bit surprised. "What happened?"

"I dunno. Something with the fireworks I was makin'." Marisa set off down the hill, a bit less hurried now. "Think your dolls can move the rubble? I want to save some of my stuff."

"Should that really be your first concern? You just survived an explosion, after all. We should take you to Eientei for... Er." Alice had been hurrying after Marisa, but now slowed to a stop and inspected her again. "... you actually don't have a scratch on you. How did you manage that?" She trailed off, her eyes drifting over to the door, stabbed into the ground at the end of a long series of splinter-lined gashes.

"I dunno," Marisa said. She approached the cottage cautiously, then squatted down by the edge. With the roof collapsed down at an angle, she could just see into the interior, now mostly free of smoke. What little she could see looked promising: Her shelves had all toppled over in the collapse, but the books looked otherwise unharmed. Maybe a little smoke-damaged, but with any luck, she could salvage most of her stuff, throw up another house in a few weeks of magically-aided work, and be back in the rhythm of things in a month. It was a heartening thought. She rose to her feet, and after eyeing the arrangement of the collapsed structure, grabbed a chunk of wall and started dragging it away. "Guess I was thrown clear. Pretty lucky, huh? C'mon, grab some house and get movin'. Maybe if we're quick, I can get my stuff outta here by dark."

"There aren't still more explosives in there, are there...?" Alice asked, approaching it more cautiously.

"I don't know. I doubt it! Besides, it looks like the fire's mostly gone. I figure it's pretty safe." Marisa dropped the chunk of rubble she was carrying and wiped her hands on her apron before realizing that no soot had stuck to them in the first place. With that, she took a moment to look over the cottage and make a plan of attack. Getting the roof off would be the hard part, since that had mostly remained in one piece. Maybe if she had an axe or something, she could smash it apart to make it more manageable...

"Where do you plan to store your things even if you do get them out?" After studying the structure a little, herself, Alice signaled her dolls forward with a subtle gesture. A small team of them cooperated to grab a section of the roof and start tugging on it. "... and don't say that you'll store it at my place, because I'm running out of room already. I just got my dollmaking supplies for the next few months."

"Uh-huh. Well, I'll figure it out."

"I'm sure that you will. I—" Mere meters from Alice, the crew of dolls finally managed to dislodge their chunk of roof. With one final tug, they started dragging it backward, and the entire structure groaned as the weight redistributed itself. The roof section slid free and crashed to the ground, and with it came a rather large support beam. It had apparently been propping up most of the rest of the roof, since it creaked momentarily before it finished collapsing into the cottage. In a cloud of dust and the shriek of splintering wood, the roof cracked into pieces, and the surviving walls slanted outward under the additional strain.

"Hey! Good goin'. That'll make it a lot easier to move the rest," Marisa said. She moved in to grab another piece, then paused, as she noticed that Alice was frozen in place and staring into the rubble. "Find somethin'?"

"I..." Alice had to force herself to look away, and just seeing her expression convinced Marisa to start walking around the building. "I think you need to see this, yes."

"Uh... 'kay." Marisa stepped around the corner of the ruined building and leaned in to inspect the ruined interior through a hole in the wall. It took a moment for her to realize that the splintered wood scattered in front of her was the right color to be the remains of her desk. Here at ground zero of the explosion, the damage was bad enough that it took a second for her eyes to start making any sense of it. A smudged piece of white cloth peeking out from the rubble was the first thing to catch her attention. Her eyes traced along the hidden contours of the object, then settled onto the one other part of it that was visible. Under the circumstances, she needed a moment to realize what she was looking at: The blood and dust coating it left it almost featureless, but the thing in front of her was undoubtedly a human hand.

Behind her, Marisa could hear Alice vomiting, but it barely registered. That feeling of surreality was back, at full force this time. Nobody else had been in her house when the explosion happened... so that would mean... Her reluctance to enter the shaky structure was gone instantly. She hefted herself over the jagged edge of a collapsed wall and hurriedly picked her way through the rubble, then started grabbing chunks of it and tossing it aside, not caring what she crushed in the process. The first thing she uncovered was the front of a dress, with rips and burnt holes through it. Pushing aside a fallen shelf revealed a leg, with a familiar shoe at the end...

Marisa carefully stepped over to the other side, then grabbed a larger section of roof and hefted it up. Only now, with her thoughts racing in her head, did she realize that everything had been wrong all along. Even with the sudden exertion of sprinting to Alice's cottage and back, she couldn't feel her pulse. Sifting through the burnt ruins hadn't left a single smudge of ash on her clothes. She still couldn't explain how she'd gotten out of the explosion unharmed...

And as the piece of rubble lifted up, it revealed the last piece of evidence. The hair had gotten seared toward the tips, but plenty of the messy blonde curls were left. The side of her head was plastered in enough blood to hide the wound beneath matted hair. Despite the damage, it was still hard to mistake the sight of her own face staring up lifelessly.

She couldn't stop herself now. She was practically operating on autopilot, her hands moving before she consciously realized what she was doing. Two fingers pressed to the side of the corpse's neck. There was no pulse, not that she was expecting one. The skin was already rapidly cooling to match the evening air.

"Holy shit," Marisa mumbled, as she slumped back to sit in the burnt wreckage of her house. "I'm dead."