Author's Note: I keep forgetting to put this but they took off Tae and Anji's name off the list and other characters! The problem with doing that is that it's harder to find fics of the less popular characters and if the names aren't there it doesn't encourage people to write about them. So then we have a whole bunch of Kaoru and Kenshin fics featuring them in high school, each one of them doing practically the same thing as all the other fics before them. We need variety people! Variety and originality!

Dsclaimer: Nothing belongs to me.

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Chapter Three

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"Hello? Daddy?" she asked holding with both hands the phone pressed against her ear while her eyes looked sideways.

"Tae!" Sekihara Koiji yelled into the phone so loud she had to pull it away from her ear.

"Where are you?" he demanded in the same accent as his daughter only much heavier.

"I'm in Aizu." she said after bringing the phone close to her ear again.

"Aizu?"

"Yes, Aizu. You see," she then explained everything that happened to her.

"I see," he said thoughtfully.

"Daddy, please don't make me come back just yet." she said seriously, not pleading or demanding, but in the way one states a fact.

"What?" he asked a little surprised.

"Let me stay here for a little while longer. I bought the tickets and everything's paid for except food which we can afford." she said still using the same tone of voice. There was silence on the other end for about a second or two.

"Sure Pumpkin. If this is what you want, then I consent."

Tae looked a little surprised then smiled a teary smile.

"Thank you Daddy."

"Just be careful Tae, and watch out for men. They're not to be trusted." he said warningly.

"But Daddy, you're one." she smiled with a big sweat drop.

"Exactly, so I know how they think." he said sounding incredibly paranoid. Tae just laughed, said good bye and hung up.

"Oh, Daddy, you're just too funny." she said walking towards her room.

'No wonder I'm such a nut. Look at my parentage. Flirting with a monk. Apparently I want to burn in hell for all eternity. But talking to him was... refreshing. I'm glad I bought those tickets and left so suddenly. I never would have been able to get away otherwise. Something would have come up. Something always comes up.' Tae thought contentedly as she walked out of the hotels phone room.

To Be Continued...

The whole, 'burn in hell for all eternity' bit doesn't really count for monks. That's more of a western thing for when you flirt with the local priest(which isn't true as long as you're sorry about it before you die, but it's still not a nice thing to do! So don't do it!). I don't think Buddhist believe in hell anyways because they have re-encarnation. Hell would be all your bad kharma from your past life still with you in your present life making horrible things happen to you. I just had to stick that in there though. I just couldn't help myself. )P

Phone room. Now isn't that an interesting term. Well, if you've heard of these so called 'phone rooms' it's a complete coincidence because it's something I fabricated out of the need to have Tae having a conversation with her father. Phones were anything but common back then and I even suspect they were looked upon by some exactly (maybe even worse) the way Sano looks upon a camara. Why not a telegram you ask? Because it hadn't occured to me at the time and when it did I already had alot of the chapter already written down and it just wouldn't be the same. Reading is not the same thing as hearing. Though I must admit that if used correctly, the telegram could be quite a powerful way of getting laughs coughreviewscough. I'm still playing with the idea though. It is for now in storage for future use.

I couldn't find anything about Tae's family except that she had a twin sister called Sae who owns the Shirobeko in Kyoto. So I created her dad, Sekihara Koiji, the main reason she and her sister are who they are. You see, in his eyes no man is good enough for his little girls so he never tried getting them engaged and instead taught them how to manage a business (which was very rare back then, and that's putting it lightly) so they could take care of themselves and not depend on any man when he was long gone. He's based on my great aunt's father who was a minister. She told me that when her boyfriend came to ask her father for her hand in marriage he looked him straight in the eye and said, "No." without even thinking it. Like it was the most natural thing in the world. If it hadn't been for her mother who took control of the situation she probably wouldn't have gotten married at all.