Cinnamon and sugar and batter, fried to a crisp outside and a delightfully fluffy inside. There was nothing that screamed "festival" like a fresh, tongue-searingly hot, sweet funnel cake, out of the oil and onto the plate and carried to a table. Unfortunately, there was also nothing else that quite brought out the nostalgia of past festivals, and Chizuru felt lonely for a moment, even surrounded by the locals and in the company of a girl she really liked, munching on one of the most divine desserts in existance and getting powdered sugar on her nose.

It just wasn't the same as back home. The heavy beat of Paixaoan music wasn't the same as the tunes she'd grown up to, the blonde people all around weren't the same as the dark-haired, dark-eyed people she knew best, and Alice... nice as she was to be with... wasn't the same as Orihime. Couldn't be the same as Orihime, despite the air of being distant from reality, despite being friendly and sociable. Maybe she was a little more like Tatsuki, she thought, recalling the plethora of weapons Alice carried around and the deadly efficiency she'd shown in that one fight, but that comparison failed as well because Alice was a lady, and Tatsuki was just a reckless tomboy.

Chizuru tried again, unsuccessfully, to bury the homesickness. They'd tried to leave Paixao already, they'd gotten chased by those monsters and the men in the black coats. And even after that, the Mayor and whomever was in charge of him had probably placed even more guards by the gates to keep anybody from trying to duplicate the experiment.

But if everybody in Paixao was at the Festival today, who was manning the gates?

"I've talked enough about the kind of place I come from," she said aloud, keeping her thoughts and feelings to herself as high-school girls often did, "how about you, Alice?"