Omoide no Mori
Forest of Memories
chapter five:
*Osaka-ben Anyone? A Stranger in the Forest!*
"It's nearby, I can feel it."
Kagome slid down from Inuyasha's shoulders as they entered a small clearing in the far Western corner of the forest.
Inuyasha's sensitive nose tingled.
Torinishi... God, it stank!
He curled his lip up in disgust.
The crow was surely nearby...they all gathered here, it seemed. The Western quadrant of his forest had truly gone to the birds, he hated to say. As long as he could recall, there had been an excess of fowl youkai (if you'd pardon the pun) in that area... Crows, ravens, vultures, any type of winged demon one might be able to imagine...they all seemed to gather here. Perhaps he'd just take care of the lot of them all at once... A little cleaning up would do this sector of the forest some good.
He chortled.
Two birds with one stone?
Feh...perhaps even more.
"It's very close," Kagome told him, adjusting the quiver of arrows strapped to her back.
Inuyasha balked momentarily as his eyes fell upon her, and he grinned sardonically at the sight of the bow and quiver.
Kagome may have been the reincarnation of Kikyou's soul...but she surely hadn't inherited the miko's archery skills. She had gotten a lot better, that was for certain...but, no matter how hard she may have tried, no matter how much practice she got...and no matter how much she may have looked like Kikyou...she would certainly never match the miko with a bow...
Granted, he had to admit, she had really saved their butts a few times...but she still had a ways to go with the yumi.
Kagome hadn't even noticed the eyes of the hanyou upon her, she was busy trying to hone in on the Shikon shard.
It was such a peculiar feeling she got whenever she neared the Shikon...as though there were a thousand tiny threads tied to all the nerves of her brain and the fibers of her soul...tugging at her...pulling her toward the stone.
Though she wondered if this talent was so good for her health...
It seemed that whenever she followed the direction of those "threads", she wound up in some sort of trouble...
But, well...that was okay with her...really...for she knew that Inuyasha would always be there for her...would always come to her rescue.
Hai, hai, perhaps he would be acting as though there were no greater nuisance on earth, but he came nevertheless.
She smiled inwardly.
"Where is it?" he asked, flattening his ears against his head, sniffing the air.
There were too many scents for him to pick out their particular crow...there were simply too many bird youkai in the area.
"Kagome...kakera wa...doko da...?"
She shook her head.
"I'm...not sure," she admitted. "It's close...very close...but I can't seem to tell quite where..."
He frowned.
"Nande?"
She twitched her mouth.
"It's...muffled."
"Muffled?"
"Un, like..."
She paused, momentarily lost for direct explanation. Then she wrung her hands as he scrunched up one side of his face in perplexion.
"It's almost like it's being masked or something," she told him. "I can feel the shard's presence, but I can't tell just where it's coming from...it's like it's everywhere around here."
"Could there be more than one?" he suggested.
"I don't think so...it's not like the feeling of multiple shards...it's more like..."--she ran her tongue over the backs of her teeth--"like trying to see a light source within a fog... The light just sort of...bounces off the fog and it looks like it's everywhere, you can't tell just where the light comes from..." She scowled. "Gomen ne, Inuyasha, I can't pinpoint it."
He opened his mouth to ask what good she was then, but stopped abruptly, his body tensing.
"Kagome," he said sharply, and she looked at him.
"Hn?"
He froze.
He was sure of it now...something was nearby...and it surely was no crow. This smelled very different... His nose tingled, his ears twitched...but he couldn't quite tell what it was, or where it was coming from.
He didn't like this at all.
She was right.
Kagome had been right.
Everything seemed...muffled...even his sense of smell. It was all masked in a sort of smog. He could tell something was there, but he could not pinpoint what or where. He grimaced as a sudden feeling of inept helplessness washed over him.
What would he do...?
"Kagome--"
He started to tell her to come closer to him, so that he might be able to protect her should anything happen, but--wait!!
There--! It was--!
"Kagome--abunee!"
Inuyasha whirled with lightning speed and leapt at Kagome, who barely had time to look startled as he shoved her to the ground and she tumbled out of the way. She glanced up in time to see a wave of golden light sear through the air and strike Inuyasha full in the chest.
"Inuyasha!!"
He cried out as he was thrown backward by the force of the energy blast, landing hard on his left side and tumbling end over end before coming to a stop several meters away. He grunted and pushed up to his knees, kneading his left shoulder where it had slammed into the ground.
"What in the seven hells...?" He glanced at Kagome, who was on the ground, but otherwise seemed unharmed. "Are you all right?" he asked.
She nodded.
"Ee, daijoubu," she assured him. "Are you?"
He nodded crisply--what a dumb question!--and got to his feet.
What the hell was that, anyway? he wondered, and straightened his back.
"Oi," he called to their invisible attacker, "you can come out now. You've impressed us with your light show, now let us see your face."
Kagome gasped when a soft giggle lilted through the clearing--a light and airy sound, like the laughter of a ghost.
"Nani...?"
Inuyasha flicked his ears and turned them every which direction to try and determine where the spectral laughter had come from, but, like the presence of the shard, as well as everything else in that clearing so it seemed, the origin of the phantom giggling was utterly undetectable.
The hanyou hurried to Kagome's side and pulled her to her feet, pushing her toward a tree until her back was against it. Then he stood directly in front of her, his hand clamped around the Tetsusaiga's hilt.
"Inu--"
"Shh," he hissed, his eyes narrowed. "Someone is here."
There was a moment of tense silence, so thick Inuyasha was almost certain he could have sliced the very air with his sword, and then the laughter came again, a little louder this time.
"Maa, zannen ya de," came a disembodied female voice, "I had hoped you wouldn't be able to detect my Raijin in time to save the girl..."
Kagome blinked rapidly.
"Osaka...-ben...?" she said softly, confused.
She narrowed one eye.
No...couldn't be...Osaka didn't even exist yet! There was no way that could have been an Osaka accent.
She figured she must have been hearing things.
Inuyasha twitched his ears. The voice was smooth, confident, as unctuous as it was strangely pleasant.
Whoever this girl was...it sounded as though she had the two of them right where she wanted them.
Feh, we'll see, Inuyasha thought.
"Dare da?" he demanded fiercely. "Who's there? Show yourself!"
Kagome felt a shudder run down her spine as another laugh tittered through the air, seeming to cling to the breeze itself, coiling around her senses like a snake hissing in her ears. And then suddenly, a figure appeared before them, parting the auditory mist with a soft whooshing sound as she landed softly on the ground from a higher elevation. Her shaggy black hair shone like obsidian, and a pair of large dark brown ears poked out of the tousled locks, standing atop her head pointed forward, as though to catch every sound of their apprehension. Her skin was dark, her hands and feet even darker, like the markings of a Siamese cat, her face hidden by a large wooden fan with cream-colored fabric detailed with gold and crimson leaves stretched between the boning, garnished with two blue tassels and a small, round blue sphere that hung from the base.
She lowered the fan just enough for them to see the bright blue of her eyes.
Inuyasha seemed startled.
"Onineko..." he whispered.
Kagome blinked.
"Onineko?"
"She's a neko youkai...of sorts," he told her without looking over his shoulder.
"Demo..." Kagome protested, "Kirara ga...?"
Inuyasha shook his head.
"She's not totally cat demon," he explained. "If she was, she'd look like Kirara, I imagine..."
He paused.
"This one...she's part something else... She's also a half-breed."
"Hanyou?"
He shook his head.
"Iya...I smell no human from her..." he said. "She may be a hybrid...but she's all youkai..."
Kagome shuddered again.
This sounded like trouble...
*
"Nee, Sango," Shippou said, yawning, "do you suppose Inuyasha and Kagome have had any luck?"
Sango shook her head.
"I dunno, Shippou," she admitted, and glanced back over her shoulder at Miroku, whose eyes were scanning the trees around them.
He caught her eye, smiled quickly, then returned to watching the forest.
Sango narrowed her large eyes.
"Shippou," she said softly after a moment, "is it just me, or is Houshi-sama acting awfully peculiar today?"
The kogitsune nodded eagerly.
"Aa, he's been spacey and distracted since this morning," he said.
"What do you suppose he's thinking about?" she wondered aloud.
Shippou snorted.
"The same thing he's always thinking about?" he suggested, his eyes narrowed devilishly.
Sango twitched her mouth.
"But he hasn't tried anything even mildly perverted today," she said, frowning. "Why, usually by this time, he's tried to grope me three times over--!!"
Shippou launched himself backward as the taijiya let out a strangled yelp and pitched forward onto her hands. She glared back over her shoulder and smacked Miroku's wrist away from her rear end and contemplated clobbering him with his own shakujou.
"If you were waiting for it, Sango, you should have just told me before," the monk said snidely, rubbing the back of his wrist.
She scrunched up her face and sat down firmly between Kirara's shoulders, folding her arms over her chest.
"Shows what I get for worrying about you, Houshi-sama," she growled. "Mou, you're absolutely incorrigible."
Miroku lifted his eyebrows.
"Worrying?" he asked, sounding genuinely surprised.
Sango frowned, and glanced at him.
Why did he seem to be so startled by that? she found herself wondering. He knew she cared about him...
Platonically, of course...he's my friend, she added to herself quickly, as though she herself might have needed the reassurance of that fact.
But still...why was he surprised that she admitted she had been troubled?
"You've been distracted all morning, Houshi-sama," he said, as though he might not have even realized it. "I just wondered what was bothering you..."
He smiled again.
He didn't like to worry Sango...to worry anybody, for that matter...but it always felt kind of good to know that someone had noticed.
He had rather tried to keep it to himself, though he found he had never been very good at that...the others always seemed to be able to tell... He'd never been one to speak openly about his feelings...considering he'd never really had anyone to speak to...but he had never had much luck hiding it when he was distracted.
True, he denied it with abandon...but everybody seemed to know when the priest had something on his mind.
He found it greatly annoying...
And yet...somehow...when it was Sango who questioned him about it, he didn't find it quite so irritating.
When that nondescript hint of concern crept into the taijiya's soft voice, it had a curious effect upon him, one that he'd always been rather at a loss to explain. Being that he'd lived most of his life alone, with no one but Mushin-sama, his well-intentioned if not mildly inebrious mentor and foster father, and Hachi, a good-natured, but perhaps not-too-bright tanuki for company, Miroku had never been much of a scholar in the ways of communicating how he felt to anybody.
He seemed to have a particularly difficult time in that field when it came to females...
Well, perhaps that was why he had turned to lechery when all else failed...
But, either way, from the moment he had met the spirited young taijiya, it had always warmed his heart to know that Sango thought of him...even though the feeling was a little unnerving. Miroku honestly had no idea what to make of the peculiar palpitations in his chest when Sango smiled at him, or what to think of the strange way words seemed to fail him whenever she was near...
He'd honestly never had that problem with anybody else...he'd never felt that way before.
Funny, he thought to himself. Ah, well...
He smiled at her, unsure of whether he wanted to tell her just what it was that was on his mind, for fear she would think him absolutely nuts--'Familiar aura? Houshi-sama, what are you talking about?'--so he simply coughed lightly into his fist in an effort to change the subject.
"It's nothing, Sango," he lied, "my mind has just been wandering a little today."
"Trying to keep up with your hands, perhaps?" Sango muttered, straightening the sash around her waist.
Miroku gave a half-feigned scowl, and then sighed.
"Maa, tokoro de...perhaps we'll have more luck if we head West," he suggested, and Shippou shot him a glance as he pointed. He eyed the kogitsune for a second, then continued, "Kaede-sama said the crow flew in that direction...we might at least find some sort of clue there."
Shippou folded his arms.
"Way to avoid the subject completely, Miroku," he said to himself, and hopped back up onto Sango's shoulder as the taijiya pressed Kirara forward and to the West. He looked at Sango's profile, and noticed she, too, seemed a trifle preoccupied now.
Sango didn't even notice Shippou's speculative look.
Dammit, Houshi-sama, she thought, why do you keep everything inside?
She suddenly caught Shippou eyeing her, one eyebrow cocked in a suspicious manner, and she winked at him, trying to brush it off.
Demo...I suppose this makes me no better, then, does it? she thought wryly with a touch of sour sarcasm.
Shippou frowned, then sat down on her shoulder and gazed ahead, hoping things would improve once they found Inuyasha and Kagome.
He hated it when nobody told him what was going on...
* * *
It's all right
To make mistakes
You're only human
Inside
Everybody's hiding something
~Dido
* * *
Author Notes:
Hey gang, this will be the last chapter update for a little while... I'm leaving on October 24th to head out to Arizona to visit a friend, and then I'm taking her to Tokyo for a couple weeks. I'm so excited!! The next chapter update prolly won't be till the last week of November...maybe around Thanksgiving. I hope you're all still with me when I get back! Mata ne!
*Glossary of Terms*
I am assuming we all know the Inuyasha basics, like youkai, hanyou, Shikon no Tama, etcetera, so those will not be translated here. Also, I'm only gonna put translations once, so as the story goes on, the glossary will dwindle. I'm hoping your memories will serve you, because otherwise the glossary will be absolutely enormous! Some chapters probably won't even need one, so I hope you guys can keep track of words already translated. Let me know if it gets too tough.
yumi: the proper term for a Japanese kyudo bow and quiver.
Kakera wa doko da?: "Where is the shard?"
Nande: Another way to say "what?" Literal: "What of?"
Houriki: Buddhist spiritual powers. Go Houshi-sama! ::squeeeeze:: ^_^
"abunee!": I don't think I did this one yet... Properly written Abunai, this means "Look out!"
Ee: Similar to un, a feminine affirmative response. Pronounced "eh".
**"Maa, zannen ya de...": "What a pity." In straight Japanese, this would be written "Zannen desu ne." More on this two definitions down...
Raijin: No translation, really... It's an attack name I came up with. The prefix Rai indicates lightning.
Osaka-ben: Anyone who has seen Magic Knight Rayearth knows that people from Osaka speak with a unique dialect. If you're familiar with Cardcaptor Sakura, Kero-chan speaks with an Osaka dialect as well, and so does Kitsune from Love Hina...it's very interesting to listen to, and has a very casual and fun sound to it.
When a non-Japanese person learns the language, they are usually just learning straight, formal, Tokyo-Japanese--which is totally fine and viable to speak...just don't be surprised when you hear people using words you've never heard before when you head ot other parts of the country... Western Japan is a wonderful mix of several different dialects, all sort of umbrellad under the term Kansai-ben, or Western Dialect. People from Osaka, Kyoto, and other parts of Western Honshu and the sounthern Islands, as well as sub-tropical the Okinawa Islands at the southern tip of the archipelago, are all known to have dialects unique to their area. I loved the running gag the Rayearth girls kept making with the Osaka dialect, and so I decided to give my anti-herione the accent... It has proved somehwat difficult, however, to bring this out in writing, as I myself am by no means fluent in Japanese, and I'm certain even less of my readers are... As the story progresses, you will notice that some characters may have unusual ways of speaking...do not adjust your TV, that's how I intended it to be. Osaka-ben has a fun and fluid sound...very down-to-earth and easy to listen to. It's hard to write it, however, and so that is why you'll see variations in a character's speech. I have translated Osaka-ben into what would be something along the lines of a Cockney English accent...only because it's easier to differentiate, and becasue Cockney was about the closest thing I could think of to the inflectual differences between Tokyo-Japanese and Kansai-ben.
There are a lot of differences between the Japanese dialects, and I've had fun trying to decipher them...but I'm not even close to having mastered any of it...so if anybody out there reading this is familiar with Kansai-ben and notices I've made a mistake somewhere, please let me know. Ookini! ^.^
Dare da?: "Who's there?"
onineko: Another term I made up... The character is not a true neko demon, and so I had to come up with something else to call her. Onineko would translate directly to "ogre cat", which sounds a little crude...but I thought it kind of went well with the ioni itrend Takahashi-sensei seems to have set up...Onigumo...Goshinki the oni... I smell a running gag...
Maa, tokoro de: "Well, anyway..." As Miroku deftly changes the subject...
Seeya in a month!
~~hikari