The out-of-control doll

Huo Lin often did this: she became so absorbed in what she was doing that she forgot to rest.

Now that she had finally finished it all in one go, she had become completely lazy and listless.

If anyone else asked what she had finished, she couldn't tell them. Magic was a secret, after all. But if Hayate asked, there was no need to keep it from her.

"Absolute Defense? What's that? Can I learn it?"

Hayate was indeed a magical girl and had magical power, but this was aiming far too high.

"Have you learned factorization yet?"

"..." Hayate glared at her, her cheeks puffed out. "You're mean."

Still, work was underway on a Device made exclusively for Hayate.

A standard Device could generally have more than ten spells permanently inscribed into it.

Besides a designated outfit-changing spell, these included attack, defense, flight, and so on. Depending on its owner's abilities and role, a particular Device could also have options such as wide-area searches or healing support.

Huo Lin couldn't make a Device like that yet. For now, she could only try making ones with a single function.

The materials that "relative" had sent were enough to make five or six Devices with simple functions like these.

The outfit-changing spell had worked last time. This time, Huo Lin was trying to make a flight spell.

The first term of fifth grade passed at this unhurried pace, but Huo Lin had her worries too.

"You took leave from PE this week. What about next week? Will you keep taking leave?" Hayate asked.

Now that they were in fifth grade, their summer PE classes finally included swimming. There was no way Huo Lin could attend class bare-chested in boys' swim trunks.

Ten-year-olds might not have developed much yet, but there were already differences.

Even in a one-piece swimsuit, anyone who wasn't blind would be able to tell whether she was a boy or a girl.

"I'll worry about next week when it comes."

If worse came to worst, she could hypnotize the PE teacher into temporarily forgetting that she was in the class.

"Hmm." Hayate felt that wasn't a very good idea, but she didn't know how to argue against it. Still, that wasn't what she had really wanted to discuss today. "Have you heard? About Michiko in our class running into a ghost?"

"No. I'm not part of your little group."

The girls in their class always had their little groups. Hayate, for example, often hung out with Chiyo and Michiko. Huo Lin naturally couldn't mingle with the girls. After all, she was still a boy as far as the school knew.

"That's true. But it sounds like there really might be something to the ghost Michiko saw. Could you go and take a look, Huo Lin?"

"What could I do? I'm not an exorcist. If it were something magical, that would be one thing, but a ghost..."

Huo Lin paused as she said that. It was hard to say whether ghosts existed in this world, but magic certainly did. Which meant that this supposed ghost was probably something from the magical side of things.

"What exactly happened?"

Seeing that Huo Lin was finally interested, Hayate began explaining in earnest.

Michiko wasn't actually sure it was a ghost. It was really just a stuffed toy.

Last night, Michiko had suddenly woken with a start. At first, she hadn't noticed anything unusual, until she looked up at a corner of her room.

Something was bouncing around on the ceiling. It was her own stuffed toy!

"A stuffed toy in her bedroom moved on its own at night, and even flew into the air?"

Huo Lin thought for a moment, then picked up a stuffed lion from the sofa. When she let go, it slowly rose into the air.

"Like this?"

"Yes, exactly! How did you do that?"

It was simple enough. Making something as light as a stuffed toy float didn't require any specific spell. Simple telekinesis would do.

In fact, Hayate could already do it too. She had magical power; she simply wasn't aware of it.

"This doesn't really count as a spell. Anyone with magical power can do it. But who would be bored enough to use magic like this on a stuffed toy just to scare an elementary school girl? Though it's also possible that the person involved has magical power without realizing it, causing a spontaneous telekinetic disturbance."

"You mean Michiko is a magical girl too?"

"Well, I'm just saying it's a possibility."

It was unlikely. Magical girls weren't that common. Over the past few months, apart from those two from the so-called Time-Space Administration Bureau, Huo Lin hadn't encountered anyone else from the magical world.

"Could we go to her house later and take a look? Michiko's a little scared."

Michiko had seemed out of sorts at school all day. She had been distracted and dazed, probably frightened badly.

"Sure."

They were classmates, after all, and she had run into something beyond ordinary understanding that happened to fall within Huo Lin's field.

Michiko's surname was Suga. The Suga residence wasn't far from the Yagami House, just two streets away, roughly seven or eight hundred meters.

When Hayate brought Huo Lin over, the two didn't knock and disturb anyone. Huo Lin walked around the outside of the main house.

It was a two-story home with a garden. Michiko's room was on the second floor.

"Well?"

"There doesn't seem to be... any trace of magical power."

Or rather, even if there was, it was too faint. Earth wasn't a magic-free zone, after all. Magical elements existed here naturally, and whether they were a little denser or thinner, it was difficult to detect any traces unless a large-scale spell had been used.

But although they hadn't knocked, Michiko opened her upstairs window herself.

"Hayate, Huo Lin, what are you doing here?"

Michiko had been looking out the window and happened to spot the two of them below.

Five minutes later, Hayate and Huo Lin were in Michiko's room.

Huo Lin was a boy as far as everyone else knew, but elementary school children didn't care much about that sort of thing. There was no real notion of a girl's private chamber.

"Did you come to see my stuffed toy? Unfortunately, it's gone."

"Gone? What do you mean?"

"A big hole got broken in the window during the day. Dad just had someone replace the glass. Then I noticed that the stuffed toy in my room was missing."

"Could it have been a thief?"

"I don't know. The broken glass fell outside."

It had fallen outside, which meant that someone hadn't smashed the window from outside. Something had broken out through it from inside.

Could it have been that stuffed toy?

Huo Lin couldn't make sense of it either. If a mage really was involved, there was no need to go to all that trouble to open a window. And why steal a stuffed toy?

"What did it look like?"

"It was a stuffed panda. I bought it last week from that new shop down the street."

It had been bought new from a shop, which meant there shouldn't have been anything wrong with the toy itself. Nor was it something important that belonged to someone else.

Not necessarily.

Huo Lin recalled a few things from the past-from her previous life.

People often hid things that couldn't legally be traded inside stuffed toys, musical instruments, and the like, then let unsuspecting customers buy them. Since the hiding places were concealed compartments no one would normally touch, the buyers had no way of discovering them.

Once the heat died down and the police relaxed, they would steal them back.

Things like this often appeared in the Beika Daily. But the cases that made the paper generally involved criminals double-crossing each other and someone ending up dead. (Simple theft and robbery didn't qualify for coverage. The Beika Daily didn't have that much space.)

Could Michiko have run into the same sort of thing? Was that why someone had gone so far as to smash the window and break in just to steal the stuffed toy?

If that was the case, there was probably something wrong with that toy shop.

Huo Lin, Tokyo's great detective-or rather, a victim in one of its detective stories-was temporarily on the case.