Country of the Blind

Chapter Three: Not Our Job

Disclaimer: Due to much good fortune which I had absolutely nothing to do with, Yu Yu Hakusho does not belong to me. If I did I would barter it for the Starship Enterprise—any of them. But that's just me. Enjoy.

ON WITH THE SHOW!

Some things are universal. These things include, but are not limited to, death, taxes, conspiracy theories, bad breath, and equally bad cell phone connections.

Yusuke shook the little annoyingly pink device in frustration for the third time and resisted throwing it over the edge of the school building to watch it shatter into a million pieces and laugh triumphantly. He wasn't going to do that, of course. Not only would he get yelled at—again—for breaking the communications device, he'd look stupid, because gloating over a victory over a handheld collection of wires and screws and plastic isn't too heroic.

So instead he tapped it on the railing a few times, snapped it open and shut and tried to get a connection to the Spirit World—again. This was becoming damn familiar.

"You know what's really weird?" he asked rhetorically. "If you stand in the right place you can get coverage from human networks, in the demon world, with your average cheap cell phone. But if you try to call your bosses with a phone they gave you with a guarantee it'll work, you can't get shit."

"Still no luck?"

Yusuke managed to refrain from throwing the communicator at Kurama, who was sitting on the inactive AC unit looking aloof and bored. He wasn't sure whether the question was sarcastic, but he was willing to bet that it was. "Whaddya think?"

When he received no answer, he snorted in disgust and annoyance and turned back to his impromptu course on Thing Repair 101. Not for the first time, he wondered why Koenma hated him. He had to, to give him a team that got on his nerves so much.

Moments later, he took that back. Koenma picked on him because he annoyed the godling. On purpose, of course. The immature demigod hadn't given him a team so much as a pair of bodyguards and added someone who didn't really know the meaning of 'none of your business' because it was easier than trying to get Botan to talk her way out of blabbing her head off. And that his team couldn't walk up a staircase without getting into a fight (with each other) was actually one of their strengths. Just because they didn't agree with each other didn't mean that they couldn't cooperate when it was actually important. The constant infighting and petty quarrels kept them on their toes and staved off boredom.

A burst of slightly different-sounding static pulled his attention away from his internal thoughts and to the communicator, which sounded like it was finally getting through. It buzzed and hissed for about thirty seconds before clearing up partway into a picture of a young woman with curly blue hair, peering at the screen curiously. Her hair kept whipping into her face, and as she used her free hand to push it back, she tilted back and forth haphazardly. This, along with the motion in the background, played havoc with the picture.

"Yusuke?" Botan greeted him, as if she wasn't sure. "What's up?" For someone who was the equivalent of the Angel of Death, she sure did sound like a high school girl sometimes. She squinted at the screen through flyaway hair. "Have you turned fuzzy?"

"No," he snapped at the little screen. "This thing isn't working."

"Hold on a second," Botan responded briskly, looking away from the camera's pickup. "I'm thirty thousand feet up, let me land."

"Well, no wonder I couldn't get through," Yusuke complained to no one in particular.

By now the conversation had caught the attention of the two demons and Kuwabara, two of which abandoned being sarcastically bored and impatient in favor of peering over Yusuke's shoulders. Hiei stayed back, refusing to take part in the conversation as ever.

After a minute or so of static interspersed with clouds and sky, Botan's face reappeared in front of a penthouse apartment balcony or skyscraper roof view of an urban center that could have been anywhere in thirty or forty different countries.

"Hi, guys," she greeted the three that the communicator could pick up. "This is unusual. I mean, for you to call me instead of the other way round. Usually it's me hunting you all down."

"Yeah, well, we found something weird," Yusuke told her, resigned to another round of really-you're-sure. "And we think it might turn into a problem. Can you get over here and see if we're jumping at shadows?"

Botan's face went through a few interesting contortions, finishing in the one that reminded Yusuke uncomfortably of a pampered cat with a helpless bird or mouse or other small animal. "You are asking for help?" she whooped. "You?"

"I'm asking for information, Botan," Yusuke snapped. "Because I don't want to have to bother with this if it's not important, and if it is, I want to stomp on it before it gets big enough to kill me or something equally nasty!"

His manager looked suitably impressed, if still a bit skeptical. "Wow, this must be pretty big if it's got the victor of the Dark Tournament scared," she admitted reluctantly, and then smiled mischievously at his expression. "Or you're just overreacting," she added over his annoyed protest that he was 'not scared, damn it!'

"All right, all right," she waved him off when she recovered from a bout of the giggles. "I'm coming. Where are you?"

"Hanging out on the roof of my school. Where are you?"

"London, actually. Don't look at me like that! I'll duck into the Reikai and cut travel time that way. Don't go anywhere for five minutes or so, ok?"

"Five minu—damn." The connection had been cut from the other end. "That's a damn useful way to travel."

Botan was being optimistic, as per usual. It was actually more towards a quarter of an hour before she tumbled out of the gathering stormy-looking clouds to somewhat less than a ten-point landing on the flat rooftop, by which time two separate squabbles over trivial concerns had broken out, a full-scale fight had been averted, and a shouting match over the railing between Yusuke, Kuwabara, and some other high school students had ended in a draw that both sides loudly claimed to be their victory.

Making a noise halfway between a whimper and an offended snort, she accepted Kuwabara's hand up and dusted herself off, straightening her hair and kimono fussily. "Thanks," she said finally. "I blinked in a little too soon and a bit too high. That's going to be a heck of a storm once it breaks."

"What's 'blinked in'?" Kuwabara asked.

She giggled and slapped him on the back of the head. "You didn't think I flew halfway around the world, did you? I can transport directly back to the Underworld Palace from anywhere in the human world, else how would I get my job done in any sort of time? And from there I can 'port back out to anywhere. It's not that easy in the demon world though," she added. "Hi, everyone."

"So if you can turn up anywhere," Yusuke pointed out, "why the hell did you blink back in so high? Especially if you knew there was a storm up there."

"I didn't know there was a storm up there, idiot!" she scolded. "And besides, it's easiest not to change altitude. You've all seen how high the palace is, I have to go way too far up to get decent air space. Thirty thousand feet there means I'm thirty thousand feet up here. Otherwise I get disoriented."

"Oh. Still seems damn inconvenient though."

Botan waved her arms dismissively. "Never mind how I get around, what have you found that's so important?"

Yusuke glanced around at his friends for support. They stared back. With no help forthcoming, the Spirit Detective shrugged and said briefly, "Humans have discovered demon remains, guessed about the other worlds, and plastered it all over the news." He was exaggerating, of course. A handful of newspaper articles and Internet sites were hardly 'plastering'.

From the look on Botan's face, she was about thirty seconds away from saying 'so what?' Instead, what she said was, "Um, Yusuke, they've been doing that for years; it gets lost, ignored, or laughed at. And, in case you've forgotten, human involvement supports the Dark Tournament."

"I know that! I'm not likely to forget them, either." Yusuke still wasn't sure whether his real enemy in that deadly game had been the fighters or their sponsors. The sponsors had certainly put about as much effort into screwing them up. "But I—we think this is different. Those bastards kept it to themselves so they could exploit it. And the newspaper didn't present it like a Loch Ness Monster sighting, they sounded serious."

"There are six different scientific journals presenting the three-world theory as a viable model, and four that mentioned the artifacts found in the southwest US," Kurama chipped in. "Three had both in close proximity."

"You mean you guys hadn't heard about this?" Kuwabara asked.

Botan shook her head and seemed to be considering it.

"Pay up, Urameshi." Kuwabara stuck his hand out.

Yusuke flipped him off without even looking at him. "Drop dead."

"I'm not refereeing that," Kurama promptly informed Botan, who was ignoring the both of them.

Botan threw up her arms, barely missing braining Yusuke with her oar on purpose. "All right! All right! Let's go. You can talk to Koenma about it, should he have time. Maybe he heard something and didn't tell me."

"Yeah, because you'd tell the worlds," Yusuke taunted.

"Shut up, you, or I'll leave you behind," she retorted half-heartedly.

"Wait, how can you transport all of us?" Kuwabara asked. "Can you?"

Botan stopped short. "Yes…I think so…"

"I don't like the sound of that," Kurama muttered.

She grinned at him, changing theory in mid-stride. "Of course I can! We just won't fly."

Hurriedly, she directed them to gather in a rough circle—or failing that, at least in a loose group—around her, which they did, after persuading Hiei that yes, he was coming, and no, he couldn't do anything about it.

"Ready, everyone?" Botan asked, glancing around. "Okay, here we go…"

Yusuke could never aptly describe the transition from the human world to the spirit world. One moment he was standing on the roof of his school, familiar if hated place, and the by the next heartbeat he was in a totally different dimension, where city skyscrapers and urban sound, air, and smell were replaced by the unnervingly different atmosphere of the Reikai Palace and surrounds.

But the instants between urban Japan and mythical castle he never knew how to describe. What on one occasion seemed to be a sensation similar to being immersed in quick-moving water felt at other times like a feeling of static electricity coursing through his body and soul, which went on forever but was over by the time he rematerialized in the Spirit World. Sometimes he saw only darkness, so deep that it blinded him and so still that it seemed to move; otherwise a flash of white light, or blue, or rich gold, burned into his eyes even through closed eyelids so that the first thing he always did upon regaining his awareness of surroundings was rub his hands into his eyes forcefully to clear them.

Once his eyes had cleared, the next thing to assault his senses was the smell. Used as he was to big-city smog and industrial products, filled with the overwhelming general smell of many, many people in a comparatively small space, the unusual cleanness of the air around the Palace never failed to surprise him. Either the denizens of this realm had developed the best air-filtration system ever known, or they did not use energy sources that produced waste products.

Yusuke had never asked, not being overly curious about such things, but he suspected that the Palace ran mostly on the peculiar brand of magic that provided the power of its denizens. He did wonder how the big-screen TV in Koenma's office, used, he suspected, more for spying on people than anything else, had been connected, and whether they'd been forced to bow to the necessities of electricity. He could have sworn he'd seen a distinctly human company's mark on it last time he'd been in there, despite the ornate decoration that had been plastered all over it, which he considered in quite bad taste, as little as he cared about such things.

But no matter.

They'd materialized not in the grand entrance hall of the Palace, a space the size of a pair of football fields combined, but in a back room open along one wall to the air. No balcony or picture window this; the wall simply wasn't there. Below, should anyone care to lean over, a distance that seemed, due either to an optical illusion or differing natural laws, to be immeasurable gaped. Small figures could sometimes be seen below; if the wind was right or forces within didn't distort the aura of reiki that surrounded everyone and everything.

As far as he was concerned, Yusuke would never be able to find his way through the palace on his own; he ended up at a different starting point almost every time and had failed to establish landmarks. It was if the interior of the palace shifted constantly, standing as it did on the edge of the lands beyond and the barrier separating it from the human and demon worlds.

Perhaps in response to this tentative position, the internal geography seemed to be in constant motion. Doors and passages appeared where he was fairly sure none had been before. Corridors projected a vision of infinity and then ended up as dead ends two meters past the threshold. The file rooms he'd gotten glimpses of occasionally were the only consistent part of the gargantuan citadel; they were always, without fail, in a state of chaos.

So he no longer bothered to count the doors or junctions between the room they'd landed in this time and Koenma's main office, which seemed to move despite being always roughly the same inside. It was a relief to leave the shifting hallways and come face to face with his boss.

As the little cavalcade entered, Koenma was to be seen behind his desk, stamping papers and finding time between muttering sullenly and grumbling furiously to actually read some of them. There was a complicated system of stacks developing across the desk, which seemed to have grown larger to include them all. Quite a number of sheets had been tossed in a wastepaper basket now quietly overflowing.

Yusuke kicked aside a paper airplane made of thick parchment that had made it all the way across the room and closed the door. Only at the sound it made did the demigod look up.

"What are you…all…doing here?" he asked in confusion. In a hiss evidently not supposed to be heard, he added, "Botan, those two aren't supposed to be in here without supervision!"

Hiei and Kurama sighed more or less in unison, an effect rather spoiled by the smirks, not to mention Kuwabara's outright laugh.

Koenma quickly tried to cover his mistake. "If you're bored, Yusuke, I can find a smuggling ring for you to deal with…somewhere." He put down his stamp, which oozed gold ink all over the desk, and began to shuffle in a pile of paper. "At least, I think so," he added.

"Not interested," Yusuke dismissed him. "I found something bigger."

Koenma contrived to look surprised and skeptical, which was remarkably effective despite the perpetual pacifier. "Oh, really?"

"Yeah, the Spirit World and the Demon World ended up in the paper."

"And the Internet," Kurama added.

"And lots of magazines," contributed Kuwabara.

Koenma's reaction was, more or less, the same as Botan's, along the lines of "Guys, this is nothing new."

Yusuke scowled. "Yeah, yeah, I've seen the tabloid articles. But this is different! Don't ask me how I know, I just know. You better tell me that the barrier's up all the way."

Koenma glared over the Spirit Detective's shoulder at the two demons. "Kurama, put that down! Obviously not," he continued, over the fox's half-hearted excuse, "or they couldn't have gotten through, even with Botan escorting you all, without setting off a dozen and more alarms. But there haven't been any major breaches, or I would have sent you all off to investigate. Even that rat was a minor incident."

"The problem isn't here," Kuwabara told him. "What about border crossings in North America?"

"North America?" Koenma said as if he didn't know where it was or what it was. "I haven't gotten a report from there in years."

"Yes, you have, sir," Botan corrected him patiently. "I believe that's the most recent one over there." She pointed to the parchment airplane, now slightly smudged with a sneaker print.

"Really?" Koenma looked genuinely clueless. "I thought it was junk mail."

The ferry-girl rolled her eyes. "Toss me that, someone," she sighed, covering her eyes with one hand and extending the other, a pose that looked very good on a classical statue but completely failed to lend itself to catching airborne paper airplanes.

By now, realizing that they were in for a discussion, Yusuke's little posse had spread itself out across the room, settling in for however long they ended up staying. Kuwabara had commandeered two of the chairs that migrated in and out of the room from time to time, spreading his full lanky length across one and overflowing his feet to another, while Kurama had seated himself against the wall where he couldn't be accused of stealing anything. Being closest to the parchment missile's impromptu landing pad, the fox was the one who tossed it in the general direction of the rest of the room.

Yusuke himself had cleared off a corner of his boss's desk, and annexed it for himself, so he was the one who caught the airplane. Unfolding it with difficulty (it was a very complex style), he scanned the first page. "You know, I can't read a word of this," he told the room at large.

Koenma climbed onto his desk, generating a veritable snowstorm of paper, to wrest it away from the human. "That's because it's in English, idiot," he snapped, rolling it into a quick cylinder and taking a swing at Yusuke's head. He missed. Clambering back to his chair, he rifled through drawers before finding what looked like an old-fashioned monocle. "Ah ha!"

"What's that?" asked Kurama curiously.

"Mine; and I would notice if it went missing."

"I was just asking…"

"More seriously, it's a…" Yusuke trailed off.

Koenma held it to his right eye and squinted with the other one. "A translator for written words. Very useful. Hold on a second."

Yusuke gave him two before jumping on him again. "How can you not know what's going on? I thought…" He paused. He hadn't.

"I mean, doesn't the Spirit World apply everywhere? Botan was just in London, right?"

Koenma continued to read, but he tried to explain, breaking off at odd moments to mutter to himself. "It does. The worlds lie parallel, but that's a lot of area for one organization to cover, even if it is supervised by marvelous me. Several thousand years ago, the Spirit World was broken up into divisions to cover each general district of the human world. The spheres of authority are determined by culture beliefs and physical landforms. So we've got a North American district, which has a history of keeping their noses out of things. That's why I never read their reports, Botan." He glared over the monocle at her. "It's a waste of time. They all say 'Nothing to report, sitting on hands', et cetera."

"Does that one?" she asked curiously.

"No," he muttered, and buried himself in the parchment again. Continuing, he went on, "The South Americas got broken up into several districts that I can't remember right now."

"Some supervisor."

"Shut up, Kuwabara, I'm talking. Anyway, Africa's in bits too, as is India. The denizens are mostly all adapted to their local parallel areas. You'd see all sorts of creative guises in India, lots of cold-resistant spirits in the Russian area. I wanted to stay in Japan, so I got to. I do have the last word, but no one asks for it."

"Got it." Yusuke scratched at his hair. "Wait a second, who deals with the demons?"

"No one." Koenma snorted. "Ask those two"—a wave of a hand in the general direction of Kurama and Hiei, the latter watching from the top of a file cabinet—"to tell you the story some time. The Demon World is a bad place for gods."

Yusuke turned to his friends, curious. "Well?"

"It's the oldest story there is, Yusuke. We killed them."

"Your gods?"

"Back at the beginning of time."

"You're kidding! How come?"

Kurama grinned nostalgically. "Long story, and complicated, but basically…they tried to boss us around."

A long pause while Yusuke and Kuwabara chewed this over. "Well, yeah," Kuwabara said finally. "That's what gods do."

"They didn't deserve to give orders," Hiei explained.

Yusuke folded his arms. "Who or what decided that?"

Both demons gave him patronizing stares. "We killed them, didn't we?"

There had to be a flaw in that logic, but for the life of him Yusuke couldn't figure out what it was. From a demon's point of view, only the strongest could give orders—and expect to be obeyed instead of killed. If gods could be killed, that made them weak; thereby justifying the killing. It was a quintessentially demonic story, even in short.

"Right…" Kuwabara said finally. "No wonder no one bothers."

"Who said that no one bothers? We just don't have the gods we began with. Or had a hundred years ago, come to that. In human terms, it's a high-risk job."

The sound of papers being stacked interrupted. "See how much I can get done while you don't try to argue with me?" Koenma asked rhetorically.

"Whatever. What's the verdict?"

"The verdict, Yusuke, is potentially not good. Other than that, I'm not sure. These guys" —punctuated by a scowl at the parchment— "don't want to get up and investigate."

"You ordered them to lie low three hundred years ago."

"Not now, Botan—what?"

Botan rolled her eyes. "You sent the American Department a very angry note ordering them to keep out of all human world affairs, and not to interfere with anything, no matter what. You may also have tentatively authorized going after rogue spirits, but I wouldn't bet on it."

Koenma looked very confused. "Why would I do that?"

"I don't remember!" she shouted. "Who cares? They listened!"

"For three hundred years?" everyone said.

"Any-way…" the demigod drawled, trying to regain his lost attention. "The local monitoring department reports a possible discovery of the other worlds. Their recommendation is, and I quote, 'wait for them to blow themselves up', that having been their suggestion for everything bigger than a bar fight for as long as I can remember. I must have put a cynic in charge over there."

"Don't look at me. I can't remember all that."

Koenma threw up his hands. Papers flew. "All right! All right! We may possibly have a problem on our hands. But I need more information before I decide what to do."

The Spirit Detectives looked at each other a little uneasily. "Uh, Koenma, we're not exactly a spy team," Yusuke pointed out.

"We hit things," added Kuwabara.

"I know. I know better than that." Koenma shuffled through the drawers of the desk again. "Where did it go?"

Botan shook her head despairingly. "Those drawers are bottomless pits," she said in a stage whisper. "No one can ever find anything. I'm surprised he found the monocle. Those things eat people."

"Botan! That was an accident!"

She rolled her eyes again. "Fine. We got him back after a couple of days," she added, sotto voce—for Botan.

Koenma swore. "It's not here. Whatever." Instead of whatever he'd been looking for, he pulled out a megaphone. Those drawers evidently were not your typically three-dimensional drawers.

The team got a second's warning—Botan clapped her hands over her ears. They did the same just in time.

"HEY, EVERYONE!" Koenma bellowed. "STAY OUT. SERIOUSLY! I'M BUSY!"

He lowered the megaphone. Everyone flinched.

"Oh, stop that," he said defensively. "The P.A. system went down Thursday."

"Are you thinking of sending a ghost?" Botan asked.

Koenma grinned at her. "That's right." After pausing for a second, thinking, he added, "Jesse, I think. Hush, everyone." He glared around the room, rather pointlessly as no one was talking.

With rather a dramatic flourish, he held out two hands. A few seconds passed, wherein he looked merely rather silly. But then he focused intently on the space between his hands, and they began to glow faintly blue. The glow intensified and then seemed to draw back in on itself, collecting in his palms.

Eventually, a rather shapeless object appeared in his hands. He held it up triumphantly. "Got it!"

"What is it?" Kuwabara asked from his chairs, beating everyone else to the punch.

"It's a focus, and they're difficult to summon like that, so I don't know why nobody's applauding," Koenma sulked.

"Because nobody cares, toddler."

Koenma briefly looked like he was considering throwing the 'focus' at Hiei, but refrained, because he would probably never get it back.

"Hiei, stop it. Is it really?" Kurama got up and leaned over the desk, reaching for the lump of melted metal. The demigod snatched it away. "I'm not…" He broke off with a sigh and a shrug.

"Botan, fill me in," Yusuke pleaded. "What's it for?"

Botan clapped her hands together. "A focus, Yusuke, holds essential traces of a given spirit. With one, the spirit can be summoned from Limbo and sent on errands in the mortal planes. Without a focus, one would actually have to go down into Death and not only find the spirit, but force or persuade it to come back, and that's near-impossible. It's hard enough to snatch one in the first place."

Comprehension dawned. "So you're going to send a ghost to investigate?"

"Yep!"

"Botan, please don't say 'yep'."

"Sorry, sir. Anyway, we use ghosts for minor errands quite often, because they can transport within as well as between the worlds—following?"

"Yeah."

"Most can read minds, and carry things. Not only that, mortals can't see them. Even those with second sight, like you, Kuwabara, see them only as a flicker, because their essence is back here." She gestured at the lump of metal. "Metal's good; it holds energy. Even better if the metal was something really important to them."

"It just looks like a hunk of metal," Kuwabara pointed out.

"It used to be a model he was building, I think, mixed with the steel of the bullet that killed him."

Yusuke pulled a face.

"That would work," Hiei said. "It doesn't get much more personal than that."

"Damn right," Koenma said cheerfully. "One of my better ones. Now, if you'd all come over here? A circle would be good."

The group assembled around the desk in what was definitely not a circle. The demigod boosted himself onto the top of the desk and sat on it, holding the amalgam of steel.

"Think about what you know about the problem," Koenma instructed them. "Just about that, please…let's see." He looked down at the focus, and managed to whistle around the pacifier.

The whistle echoed oddly, lone note continuing long after he'd stopped. As the echoes died, a shape formed at the edge of the group.

It might have been a normal boy, once. Now it was a hunched and frightened creature with shaggy, unkempt black hair, which mostly concealed blue eyes turned into strobe lights by violent blinking. He was clad in a brown jacket and pants that looked weather-whipped and worn. The ghost could have been anywhere from twelve to twenty-two when he died.

Koenma snapped his fingers at it. "Jesse D'arkos, obey. Seek, see, listen, and find."

The shade of Jesse D'arkos straightened up, trying to get his mane out of his eyes. Holding it back with one hand, he reached out with the other one, brushing it across the room in front of him as if scooping the whole chamber into his grasp.

The hand was nowhere near him, but Yusuke still felt it as if the ghost had laid hands on him. Yusuke tried not to flinch from the touch. His fingers were icy cold, and clammy, like flesh left too long in a bath. He tried not to think about the fact that the boy was dead, an effort helped by the fact that Jesse's touch pulled all his memories on the discovery to the front of his mind, leaving no room for other thoughts. His vision blurred for a second as the room was replaced by the newspaper article.

Shaking his head as Jesse pulled his hand away, he watched as the rest of the team reacted to the shade's method of extracting information. Kuwabara shuddered, and Hiei snarled for a split second—he hated to be touched. Kurama took it stoically, although Yusuke could have sworn he saw his hands clench.

Having obeyed his first command, the ghost of Jesse D'arkos vanished, and the group broke up. The entire process between the shade appearing and disappearing had taken no more than five seconds.

"That was damn creepy," Kuwabara complained. "Do they always do that?"

"Only when they need information to start with. Like a tracking dog with a scent."

Yusuke folded his arms around himself, maintaining the illusion of noncommittal confidence while actually trying to warm himself up. The presence of the ghost had chilled him in a way he'd never experienced before. "Now what?" he asked, to cover his discomfort.

Koenma shrugged. "I don't know how long it will take him to return. It's implanted in all the ghosts we use to return after an hour if they've found nothing, but it could be a lot quicker than that."

Kuwabara collapsed back into his chairs. They creaked slightly, as most chairs will do upon being flopped into. "Good thing I didn't have anything to do today." He folded his arms behind his head. "Better than getting rained on. Wake me when it gets back."

Yusuke kicked a chair leg in passing. "Lazy."

"Oh yeah? And you're planning on what?" The taller boy opened one eye lethargically.

As usual, Yusuke didn't have an answer for a question like that. "Who cares?"

Botan giggled, as she was wont to do. "I'm sure he won't mind if you hang out in here," she told them, jerking a thumb toward Koenma, who was ruffling through his desk drawers again. As heads turned, automatically following her gesture, he pulled his hands out with a yelp, shaking them. Green glowing liquid flew off them, spattering the desk. Where the drops fell, the enchanted wood began to steam.

"Don't mind me," Koenma waved his hands. "I'm not doing anything. What? Yes. Yes, you lot stay here. I'm going to find someone disposable to clean out this desk. Yusuke—keep those two away from it, would you?"

"No one trusts us," Kurama lamented as the demigod clambered out from behind his desk and jetted out of the room, Botan in tow. She waved a cheerful farewell as she was dragged by her ponytail toward the door.

"You're surprised?" Hiei asked rhetorically.

In the background, the door slammed, and Botan yelped, "Leggomyhair!" in one breath.

"I like people to trust me."

"Yeah, so they don't suspect you when things go missing."

"That's not very fair, Yusuke." He paused to think. "True, though," he added.

"One point," Yusuke immediately tallied up.

Kuwabara abandoned his feigning of sleep. Yusuke was catching up on his score. "Hey! For what?"

"Catching Kurama in a lie. That should earn me at least one point."

"That wasn't a lie."

"Ha! No points!"

"Why you…"

"No points!" Kuwabara fended off Yusuke's objections with much waving of hands and a gratuitous 'loser' gesture, which almost sent the argument into the next dimension, that of full-out fight. "And no arguing! Now what were you talking about, Kurama? I haven't heard this story before."

Yusuke hadn't heard it either. Granted his experiences with demons were limited mostly to fighting with them, but he was getting the idea that he was missing out on something big here. "Yeah. Tell us."

The fox had sat back down in his earlier seat against the wall. Now he looked up at them both. "Well, like I said, it's the oldest story the youkai have. There are two versions, a song and a story. The song you only usually hear sung by trained actors, or demons who are very drunk. Almost every demon child intelligent enough to listen learns it almost before they can speak."

"Don't let him sing it," Hiei advised. "It is supposed to be sung. But don't let him do the singing."

"I wasn't planning on singing anything, Hiei. You know I can't sing."

"I know that. But I wasn't sure you did."

"It doesn't translate well as a song anyway. Even in prose it doesn't sound half as good as in the original. Some things just don't translate."

Yusuke was getting impatient. The demons could argue poetry over prose on their own time. "Well? You gonna tell the story or not?"

Kurama's attention had already shifted. "Not, it seems. Or at least not now. Remind me later. They're coming back."

In truth, the door opened again, and Koenma floated back in, Botan still in tow, though not literally this time.

"The spirit's coming back," Koenma said importantly.

"It hasn't been an hour yet," Kuwabara observed. "Doesn't that mean it's found something?"

Koenma seated himself behind his desk grumpily. "Apparently so." Even as he spoke, dark gray smoke, heavily streaked with black, began to condense in the general center of the room. And as it did so, Yusuke realized what had bothered him about sending a captured ghost.

That could have been me… At least I'm alive to run their errands. At least I have a choice.

The smoke pulled itself together, resolving again as Jesse's ghost, still looking like he'd crawled off a shipwreck. However, there was now a difference. Instead of wearing his beaten brown jacket, that had doubtless seen better days even in life, he was carrying it like a sling between his two hands.

The miniature Lord of the Dead clapped his own two hands together sharply. "Jesse D'arkos, report!"

Jesse looked up at him, as much as he could be said to look at anything through that shock of hair, and dropped the jacket. Out of it spilled pamphlets, letters, computer printouts, a handful of tickets, and a binder or two. Somewhere in the avalanche, the ghost vanished, mission successfully fulfilled.

Yusuke snatched one of the quite substantial tickets, which had fluttered through the air slower than the rest of the mass. Turning it this way and that, he drew on his rudimentary knowledge of Western characters to read slowly, "S…an…Fr…an…s…iss…coh—San Francisco—hey, give that back!"

Koenma had snatched it out of his hands, monocle already in eye. "'San Francisco US Airport, Flight 73, second class'," he read, hovering out of Yusuke's reach. "'Disembarking at Gate Nine at 2:19 PM, April 2nd.' It's a plane ticket."

"I see that! Give it back."

Now that he'd read it, he had no further interest in it, so he dropped it, letting Yusuke scramble for it. "Anything else?"

"Plenty." Kurama had a map spread out on a free floor tile, kept in place with a notebook and a rock. "Looks like your ghost just raided someone's desk. And you accuse me of stealing."

Koenma scowled at him. "They don't do that. They make replicated copies of the essence of whatever they find so people don't wonder where everything went. The real versions of all these are wherever he found it. It's all rather complicated. What's the map of?" He took off again to look at it from a different perspective.

"College campus, from the look of it. There's scribbled notes everywhere. I can't read them."

"Schedule," Hiei added in his usual monosyllabic manner, somehow managing to make the two-syllable word seem like one. He squinted at it, before turning it upside down, which turned out to be right side up anyway. "Rikidyce International Biological Sciences…" Had he been anyone else, he would have added something along the lines of 'shit, can't they abbreviate?' at this point. As he wasn't, he kept on stubbornly, "…Media and Broadcast Annual Convention, San Francisco, California."

"Media and Broadcast." Botan seized on this specifically.

The little fire demon kept flipping through the schedule. Because it was unlikely that they would get an answer, no one thought to ask him where he'd learned to read English. "April twenty-fourth, Kobayashi-maru Sato, hosting in conference room ten…'Beyond the Missing Link: New Worlds of Evolution.'"

"That's him. That's it." Yusuke punched a fist into the air, missing Koenma purely by chance.

Somewhat affronted at the close call, the godling came back down to the ground. "Well, boys…looks like you have your target."

The whole room paused. Then there was a general outcry, mostly objections.

"What? Us?"

"Why us?"

"We don't spy! We hit things!" Kuwabara repeated.

"Koenma, sir, are you sure about this?"

And so on and so forth, most of which would eventually be settled by Koenma screaming at all and sundry until he turned blue, which was enough to shut most of them up anyway.

(To Be Continued)