"Well, I guess that's a—Wait, did you just call me shady again?" Ren asked, taking a double take at the electric girl's declaration to bring him along with her. While he could understand bringing the oni and the okami along (given their fame in Japanese mythos), the young man felt wholly out of place here. At this point, though, he found it better to simply not argue against the flow of the conversation, else that girl's friend might end up stuck in the city of mirrors forever...
Or worse. He shuddered at the thought of what could happen, but instead of backing away from the challenge this time, Ren walked over and grabbed a set of charms, pills, and the description of the only possible girl that could be Ayumi's friend before walking up to the group that had assembled and handing the first two out accordingly. There were another two listings left on the board, but one of them seemed to disappear as if being burnt to ashes before anyone else touched it. Izawa took note of that scene and sighed, but no more.

"Worst comes to worst, I can try to be a pack mule for you guys or something, right?" he half-joked before glancing at the portal again, having not noticed the disappearing description on the board beforehand.

This was really happening, huh?

"Okay. Let's go."

With a deep breath, Ren shook his head and slapped his face to clear his thoughts before walking through the portal.

[hr]
There was a moment of disorientation as Ren crossed the boundary again, but nothing like that moment of unconsciousness like he had encountered on his first arrival. The skull of the gashadokuro form the night before was still where it had been, which... He couldn't quite say it was neither good nor bad, to be frank, but it was...  There. The path down the steps to the shrine was wide open, and seemed to be undamaged regardless of the raging youkai that had scaled them the night prior, but...

"Well, from here on out we're entering unknown territory. We should probably memorize the layout of the place as we go... Unless it ends up being one of those wonky labyrinth-style locations, in which case we're gonna need a [i]lot[/i] of thread."

A more sarcastic joke this time around, but given how nothing had changed as of yet, the latter comment seemed incredibly unlikely to be true. Now it was simply a matter of trying to hunt down the missing girl before anything bad could happen to her...