"Huh. Okay."

"...but if he doesn't..."

"You might want some kind of explanation ready, yeah."

"I mean... if he doesn't accept it. If he wants to stop me. If he gets in my way and I can't get it otherwise. At what point... are more drastic measures... something we should consider?"

"I mean, I think you're justified in trying a few different things rewind-style, if you've gotta. Do you have a way to get unmarked money in the first place, if that's a concern - like, can you buy cashier's checks or something like that -"

"Not... straightforwardly. I could steal. I could counterfeit. If I use a check I can't imagine he wouldn't be able to know about it."

"- counterfeit is a great idea, you can duplicate money, he never has to know."

"It's still, you know. Fraud."

"I wouldn't do counterfeit if we weren't doing heavy duty superheroics, and I wouldn't advise you to do it to hide purchases that are merely embarrassing, but if you have to bribe the weather agency to save Tokyo I think you can counterfeit to do that!"

But Haru considers the mind trick so far beyond the pale it didn't even occur to him that Yutaka could be referring to that. 

"I suppose if any situation called for it..."

"Yeah. You can maybe destroy an equivalent amount afterwards or something if you did really economyfucking amounts."

"Hopefully it won't come to that."

"Hopefully!"

Well, should they go hunt some evil monsters?

They should! In this new territory they were just gifted, even.

In this new territory they were just gifted there's a witch.

It's quiet in this witch. None of them contain diegetic theme music, but most of them there's fake wind rustling the decor, familiars squishing or stepping or skipping around, sound effects from the moving parts. This witch isn't silent, they can hear their own footsteps on the carpet (there's carpets, lush oriental rugs on the ground and the walls and in hundred-deep heaps in place of walls, edged in tassels, eating visual attention like gentle basilisks), they can hear themselves breathe, but nothing else is making a noise. Among the rugs there are moths, big ones with unnecessarily creepy mouthparts, bearing Persian-rug patterns on their wings and deep-pile fluff on their abdomens and plush plumose antennae. They don't attack. Their wingbeats are silent, their crawling up the piles of hundreds of rugs is silent, their creepy mouthparts as they nibble on the tassels - silent.

It's a deep complicated labyrinth, and it gets darker and darker as they get farther and farther in, with the candle lanterns that hang overhead from the distantly textile ceiling coming farther apart, and sometimes proving to be blown out.

"I hate this place," whispers Yutaka from where he's kind of hiding behind Haru holding a flashlight. "I wish something would happen already. Witches should not be like horror movies." The monster could be anywhere, here, and that's just so, so much worse than knowing where it is.

"Hundred percent with you there," Haru murmurs. He shot a moth, early on, but it just fell silently to the ground, the others didn't seem to find it provocative. "I dunno what kind of witch to expect here. Creepy marionette maybe."

He swallows dryly. "Yeah, maybe." Yutaka is five hundred percent sure something is going to sneak up on them or show up unexpected or, or something, and he is going to scream like a little girl and he might wet his pants and that'll be the most embarrassing thing EVER. It's a lot less okay to be a scaredy cat when it's real life. He's trying to brace himself and he knows he's going to fail and that just makes him more anxious.

The floor starts sloping downward. In pitch darkness but for the flashlights - Haru has one too and is holding it in his teeth by this point so he can have his bow at the ready - they descend the slope.

Eventually the beams fall on something new.

It's not a marionette. It is a doll, though, giant and porcelain-faced with painted-on blush and china hands and a fluffy Victorian dress and big long-lashed blue eyes that roll to stay level with the floor as she moves.

She appears to move slowly, but - isn't, something may be fucking with their sense of time or else her tremendous size is making her look ponderous where actually she's nimble or maybe she's skipping frames, teleporting her limbs into place. She points at them, and the moths swarm, the sound that they aren't making a suffocating thunder.

Haru starts shooting them down.

Yutaka does scream, then, and yeah he's shooting them down, too.

"Yutaka give us TIME!" yelps Haru, skewering three moths and batting aside a torrent of more of them with big golden shields.

—right yes time time he stops—

Haru catches his breath. "Oh thank god for a second there I thought maybe it didn't work in this witch for some reason - are you okay, did a moth get you -"

"I'm fine," he says in something that is at least two octaves higher than his usual tone of voice. He clears his throat and tries again. "I'm fine. Freaked out is all." One octave higher? Probably good enough.