Master Series Episode 8: "Aruku"

Note: I'm not the authour of this story. I've translated it from the original Japanese into English. Please do NOT copy and paste it somewhere else on the web without my permission. Thank you for your cooperation.


I knew one senpai*1 who was going out with a very eccentric girl.
This senpai was my Master in the Way of Occult, and according to his own words the girl possessed "greater power than him."
I will name her "Aruku-san*2" here, for convinience. I remember her field of study was some sort of Literature but I forgot what she exactly specialized in.

Soon after I entered the university I had a chance to be alone with Aruku-san in the club room.
She was a beautiful girl for sure, but her forever expressionless face made it difficult to read her thoughts and for that reason I wasn't particularly fond of her.

She was typing something in on her laptop when she suddenly looked up and said some weird stuff.
"The words - they keep coming into my mouth."
Eh?
'"Sometimes at night, when I am typing, the words I have just written start floating up in the air and then they all start coming into my mouth."
"Um.....OK..."
What the hell?
"Do you understand? And they don't stop. They grow in number and become a lot more than I have originally written. They keep coming in and in and I can't shut my mouth while they are doing it; that is what I find most frightening."
She was dead serious.
At the time the word "denpa" *3 was yet to become popular but she was a true denpa alright.
Yet, to be fair, she wasn't just your ordinary crazy person.
She was unbelievably smart. More than once I saw her defeat my master in debates.

Aruku-san was also someone who possessed an uncanny intuition.
She could tell when buses were late*4 , and also when one time we were watching TV she suddenly told me to change the channel and the moment I did so we got to see a famous baseball player hit a homerun. These kinds of strange coincidences often happened around her.

Once I lightly asked Master, "What is Aruku-san, really?"
"You know Edgar Cayce*5?" He said.
"Of course I know him. The guy who has prophetic dreams and gives readings while in a trance, right?"
"She's probably the same, that Aruku."

"What do you mean?"
"I wish I could let you see her while she's sleeping. It's terrifying."
I didn't understand what he meant by "terrifying" but he dodged my question.
"Edgar Cayce isn't my area of study but I think she didn't aquire it like him. She was born with it."
"What? Does she have prohetic dreams?"
"I don't know what it is. I don't know whether she is sleeping or awake when she does it. But she sometimes gets it right, and other times gets it wrong. Maybe her state is close to what you are like when you are having that virtual experience during sleep paralysis."

I often had this experience during the sleep paralysis, where I thought I had got up when in fact I was still in bed. Sometimes this went on for a long time, and at its worst I would spend one whole day in this state and then wake up to find all my time getting rewound to the beginning of the day.  During high school years I recorded my experiences on a notebook and was making a study out of it.
My master somehow got really interested in this notebook and had often pestered me to hand it over to him; so in the end I relented and gave it to him as he wished.
When I think about it now, he probably wanted my notebook as a material to use for his study on Aruku-san's powers.

"I see. You just want to keep Aruku-san all to yourself, don't you, senpai?"
He grinned, took out a floppy disk out of his pocket, and waved it in the air.
That was too timely and I think that floppy disk was just a bluff, but there is no doubt he was keeping some sort of files on Aruku-san.

But the creepiest thing was just after I graduated she warned me, "Beware of  flood."
I had forgotten about her warning until now, but at the moment I'm back in my hometown after I've failed to find a job in the city, and our house is situated in a place where if a big earthquake hit might sink underwater. The next earthquake's victims in my area has recently been estimated as 30,000 people at most.  What am I gonna do? I'm so scared. How many years will it be before the earthquake hit us? *sobs*


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*1 Senpai :(先輩) an honorific term applied to a senior student by a junior student (for more info see wikipedia)
*2 Aruku-san: literally translated as "Miss Walk," where "san" is a common honorific denoting "Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss," and "Aruku （歩く）" is a verb meaning "to walk".  I have no idea why the narrator chose such a word for a psuedonym.
*3 denpa :(電波) literally "radio wave", it is a slung denoting a crazy person. A term is derived from the fact that delusional people often talk about dangerous radio waves invading their lives.
*4 Fortunately, Japanese buses are in general very punctual and late buses are rare occurences. 
*5 Edgar Cayce: an American  psychic who allegedly had the ability to give answers to questions on subjects such as healing, wars, and even had visions of the world's end (wikipedia)