Monogatari Series - Volume 13 - Chapter 1.11

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At that point, I decided to abandon the five or six other cons I had going. To abandon and abjure them. To act as if they had never existed. After all, they might have been another one of my lies.

Either way, handing Hitagi Senjogahara her plane fare, I sent her on ahead of me then headed to a convenience store inside the airport.

I wanted to buy a pen and notebook─the 8 ½ x 11 variety, but unfortunately they didn’t have any that size, so I ended up with a memo pad, which was a little smaller than I would have liked. A Tokyu Hands or a Loft would have done the trick, but apparently neither chain has outlets in Okinawa.

I jumped right into my preparations while I waited for the flight─I clearly couldn’t stay in that town itself, so I made a reservation at a business hotel in a shopping district more than a half-hour away by train.

One week, to begin with.

I didn’t use a false name because I didn’t think it necessary, but Deishu Kaiki already sounds like a fake name, and since I don’t have a fixed home, I had to lie through my teeth to fill out the address section.

The cost of the stay would pretty much use up the 100,000 yen (strictly speaking, Senjogahara’s plane fare had already taken care of some of it), but travel and hotel expenses are something that I always have to contend with anyway, so in this instance I decided not to include them.

Oh, but Senjogahara.

How reckless, to come to Okinawa without enough money to get home─or maybe it was that unexpected for her that I actually took the job. If I refused, she would still have the entire 100,000 yen available, but perhaps she was simply terrible with money. She was the only daughter of a formerly wealthy family even if they had fallen on hard times.

As I made phone calls, laying the groundwork and getting the ball rolling on gathering info, it came time for my flight to depart─I would arrive there before the end of the day, but only just. It would be quite late at night, so while it was true that I was getting underway today, the real investigation wouldn’t start until tomorrow.

In which case, I wanted to work on my plan in the meantime.

I love planning any con, let alone a huge job like this. Pulling one over on a god? I was like a kid in a candy store.

Unlike the stream-of-unconscious lies that flow out of my mouth, a systematic con is an art form─yikes, that came out sounding like a lie.

How embarrassing.

It’s really just a matter of prudence… But since my student days, I’ve always enjoyed making plans for summer vacation and so on. This is truly true. It might be a lie, but it’s true. A lie that might be true. Whatever, who cares, I’m just putting up a smokescreen.

I used the time waiting for the plane, and the time on the plane, to steadily think things through─opening the notebook, I used a whole spread to draw a map first.

A map.

A map of that town.

A map of the town from which I was temporarily un-banished.

I had only vague memories to rely on for certain areas, but having drawn one a little over six months ago, I didn’t have all that much difficulty.

A map it was, but the scale and relative positions didn’t need to be correct. It was simply an approximation, a tool for visualizing a situation.

Visualization.

Basically my own kind of mental map.

So more like an illustration than a map.

It’s much easier to picture things when you start drawing. At least it is for me.

Kita-Shirahebi Shrine, whose location I knew, secondhand; MS 701, which I believe Nadeko Sengoku attended while she was human; Naoetsu High, where Senjogahara and Araragi go; the Kanbaru residence; the Araragi residence─maybe I didn’t need to draw in Tsuganoki Second Middle, Araragi’s little sisters’ school, since it was a little farther away? No, better include it, just to be on the safe side. I crammed the blank spread with info that might come in handy, info that might not.

I also drew recognizable caricatures of the involved parties whose faces I knew, like Senjogahara and Araragi. Those two, in particular, had names that looked scary if I wrote them out.

In cartoon form, they became cute kids.

Naturally it wasn’t just those two. I fluidly drew all the middle schoolers I had duped back then whose faces I could still bring to mind.

When the spread was full, I turned to a fresh one for a somewhat more specific map. If the previous pages were an overview, this was a detail. The scale was still completely screwy, but if I needed precise distances, I could just use the mapping app on my smart phone.

It might come across as a strange activity to whoever’s sitting next to you on a plane, but that didn’t bother me. This was my own internal visualization aid, and if they peeked, they still wouldn’t get it; for anything I really couldn’t have anyone seeing, I use codes.

Thanks to the cute illustrations, people might even get the mistaken impression that I’m a manga artist.

Speaking of, back in the day, I think in college, I showed one of these visualization aids to Gaen-senpai, who said, “Looks like a walkthrough for a dating sim.” It brought me down, and I gave it up for a while─but no other method took, and I went back to it soon enough.

My drawings and notations almost completely filled the notebook, and it was at that point that we landed.

The snow was piled high, a real winter wonderland─but all I felt was cold. Confirming that I wasn’t moved, that I lacked any such sensibility, I called Senjogahara.

“I’m here.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it.”

“Yup.”

That was all we said to each other.

All we said.