Unit 3: Hidden Worlds & Unlikely Partners — Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

• Explore how the body-swap forces Yumi and Painter to become investigators of each other's reality, tracing the accumulation of evidence that leads to the discovery of the machine enslaving spirits.

• Practice the moves of research argument — stating a question, gathering evidence, building a claim, and addressing counterarguments — using Yumi and the Nightmare Painter as a primary source.

• Understand how Sanderson uses the contrast between Yumi's and Painter's worlds to argue that genuine discovery requires collaboration across difference.

• Trace the investigative arc of the novella and explain how Sanderson structures each step as a model of evidence-based reasoning.

• What does Yumi and Painter's body-swap reveal about how stepping into someone else's world changes what we're able to discover?

• How does Sanderson use the nightmares of Kilahito as a metaphor for truths hidden in plain sight — and what does it take to see through a fabricated reality?

This research unit focuses on curiosity, evidence, and discovery through Sanderson's novella Yumi and the Nightmare Painter. On the planet Komashi — where the Shard Virtuosity Splintered herself — two protagonists live in radically different worlds that are secretly connected. Yumi is a yoki-hijo: a spirit summoner who stacks rocks in precise patterns to call spirits into her bright, tradition-bound world. Nikaro (called Painter) contains nightmares with specialized paint in the dark, modern city of Kilahito. When they inexplicably swap bodies, each is forced to inhabit the other's life — and through that forced collaboration, they begin to piece together evidence that Yumi's entire reality is a fabrication maintained by a machine that has enslaved the very spirits she summons. Students examine how Sanderson structures this dual investigation and what it reveals about how curiosity requires seeing beyond the assumptions baked into our own world.