The snow had closed in around us to such a degree that I’d had to close my eyes momentarily lest the flakes slice into them and blind me. When I opened them again, Hannu and I were standing on a flat, level plain that was bare as far as the eye could see, and without a hint of the town we’d been walking through just before. What was going on now?
“Yikes! Ummmmmmmm, oopsie!?”
The speaker was a rather abashed looking juvenile fox, which didn’t surprise me nearly as much as the fact of a talking animal should have; I suppose it had just been that sort of day (or night, as it were).
“Oh. Oh, no.” The puppy-fox looked even more horrified as it looked us over. Then it put a paw over its eyes. “Of course it’s you two. Of course.”
“Since you know us, it follows that we have encountered you before this. Since we do not remember the encounter or encounters, it follows that either you did not reveal yourself to us then or that you erased our memories of the encounter or encounters somehow. Which is it, if I may ask without offending?”
Hannu’s voice was perfectly calm as he asked the question; by all appearances, he was the only one present who had completely kept his composure. More surprisingly, both to me and to the puppy-fox, he was actually minding his manners. It seemed the puppy-fox knew Hannu well enough to know how out of the ordinary this was for him, which to my mind argued for the second possibility Hannu had raised.
After giving Hannu a very calculating look for a few seconds, the puppy-fox walked over to him and asked, “May I sniff your hand?” When Hannu rather tentatively held the appendage out, the puppy-fox sniffed at it quite comprehensively before announcing, “Well, this is both better and worse than I’d thought, which is weird. So; explanation time!
“The answer to your question is: neither. You see, I met a sliiiiiiiightly different Hannu and Ville from a sliiiiiiiightly different world than yours. There’s a whole bunch of those, where something’s just a little biddy bit different from all the others, like Hannu being named Ville and Ville Hannu in one and stuff like that.
“Anyway, I can tell you aren’t the ones I met because you smell of a different world than theirs, not that you silly humans could tell.”
Hannu’s face hardened just slightly. “So, if we aren’t the Hannu and Ville that you met, why did you bring us here?”
“I didn’t do it on purpose!” The puppy-fox looked indignant again. “I was just trying out my new dream catcher—that Kokko gave me”—this last shouted at the heavens—“and… well… it looks like it caught you two by mistake.”
“Very well.” Hannu’s voice was as cool as ever. “A mistake happened, and Ville and I were caught by it. Now, is there a way to un-catch us?”
A sly look came over the red-tail’s face as it answered, “Well, there just might be…”
I was not eager to hear what the unspoken but was in the red-tail’s statement…
