Mentioned Characters: Nitori

"Even now, deep beneath the water, a world unknown slumbers. The light of human knowledge doesn't reach it, yet the beings that dwell there continue to live." Nitori Kawashiro is THE kappa in Gensokyo. An expert in both commerce and engineering, she's the kappa to see for everything from pencils to rockets. Lemme see your journal. In return, I'll give you this precious cucumber!

We're kappa, and Miss Nitori is basically our leader. We're water-dwelling youkai who love cucumbers. Plenty of humans know about us. But don't worry, we love them. When it comes to business, don't feel bad if we get the better of you―we buy and sell everything with profit in mind! Huh? You wanna know where the kappa came from? Like we'd remember something like that! (I can't believe I forgot...)

Gensokyo Multiverse Theory There isn't one fixed past. Could that really be true? Supposedly, it is. At least, according to a book I flicked through. It means that yesterday's breakfast might have been a cucumber, or it might have been a bitter melon. The law of increasing entropy states that it takes energy to preserve information. If left alone, any information will eventually return to a meaningless, random state. That makes perfect sense... Wait, no it doesn't! Are we kappa descended from Chinese river gods? Are we Jesuits who never made it back to their homeland? Or perhaps we're some kind of mysterious lifeform, unlike anything else in nature? I really don't remember. But... why not?

Business Makes the World Go Round People associate the word "business" with greed. It's been seen that way since ancient times. But don't you think the world rests upon the shoulders of the global economy? Business isn't simply a modern reincarnation of feudalism. Take the Silk Road. Without a desire for global commerce, that trade route would never have been established (at least, I don't think it would've been.) I've seen the ledgers Miss Nitori keeps. What shocked me is that she uses double-entry bookkeeping! (I only know single-entry!) I wonder where she learned it. Maybe there's a book about it at Suzunaan. And that got me thinking about equivalent exchange. The law of conservation of mass, of momentum, of energy... In the end, nothing ever just disappears. Everything happening in the world is some form of exchange. And business is no exception. Anyway, that's enough of my rambling. After all, I'm just a low-ranking kappa who happened to skim through a book or two.

Gensokyo Machine Theory What if this world is actually an enormous machine? And we engineers are merely imitating its mechanisms? Honestly, that idea kind of makes sense to me. Like redirecting a fraction of river water to a tree in front of your house, in the hopes it bears more fruit. Or making farming tools to till the soil with less effort and more precision, knowing that tilled soil leads to a better crop. Both are examples of engineering. But really, the mechanisms that make those things possible were already embedded in the world itself, weren't they? Which means... we're just digging them up and replicating what was already there. No matter how hard you try, you can't force things to work against the laws and properties of the universe. In other words, this world runs on absolute, unambiguous rules. I read in a book once that there are humans who try to explain nature using math. Doesn't that make it obvious? The world is a machine.