Chapter 7

Answer: it will keep me up the rest of the night.

Why?

Well, after Kuro-tan stopped chasing me, after we had been summoned by a patient messenger (who had waited 4 laps for us to notice his waving) to come receive our uniforms, after the sun, massive and fiery, had set and we had returned to our tent, we had to talk. Yes, talk.

Or, to be more precise, draw.

Perhaps this was the reason Kuro-tan had stayed so close. He wanted to share the information he had gathered since we'd arrived (one) and more so, to ensure our stories collaborated should any suspicions rise (two). I suppose we could have worked out a pantomime for everything, or come up with a sign-language. I suppose I could have used magic and that would have solved the language barrier right there, but I did not. So, instead, we found two sturdy sticks and by the light of the fire we had lit in front of our tent, drew pictograms that, more-or-less, communicated what we wanted to say.

Or more than what Kuro-puu had in mind, I think.

For, of course, for "Fai" and "Kuro-puu" and "Sakura", "Shaoran" and "Mokona", I used the caricatures I had created in Oto. Kuro-rin tried to stamp those out at first, but patient as patience itself, I carefully redrew my little masterpieces until he let them be with a grumbling acquiescence. And when he finally realized that using these as shorthand was far more comprehendible than his scrawling stick-figures and started to begrudgingly use them himself, I used every trick and grace I possessed to keep my expression free of the gut bursting laughter that came every time he used "Big Puppy" to mean himself… Oh, I was very proud of myself then…

For Yasha-ou, I used a snow-flake and Kuro-tan, once he realized it was indeed the king's symbol, looked at me, waiting for explanation. I gave none. We moved on.

We "spoke" of quite a bit, our system working itself out fairly quickly. It seemed we were both wondering about the children, Mokona, and when I suggested they might be in the enemy camp, Kuro-tan stared at the pictogram for such a long time, that I began to erase it, to try again, but Kuro-sama stopped my arm, stared at me and wrote the equivalent of:"Big Cat + Arrow + Good + ?"

I raised an eye brow, shrugged, but his hand was still on my arm and he was staring at me with his black eyes in a way that got under my skin. My grin wilted, just a little, and I tried to pull back with a laugh, but his grip tighten and he shook me, pointed at the unanswered question.

In reply, I didn't bother writing, I stared at him, studying him, and confused, shook my head.

For this, I was given a quick series of images: the Oto oni with a cat jumping between them. Kuro-rin pointed at this, then to me before drawing a picture of the outcome of one of my battles with the oni. I had had no weapons, the darts turned out to be powerless against them, and so I had had tried to dodge my way around them. If Kuro-puu hadn't been there, I might have died. Puzzled, I watched Kuro-tan point to the picture of a cat with a hurt leg, then to me and shake his head.

Then one more time, he turned to his drawings, and when he was done, I blinked at it, then him. His black eyes watched me and I wished I knew what was going on behind them as he always seemed to know what was in my head. The images said: "Fight, or die".

Fight? But we had only arrived and there didn't seem to be any preparations for a march and from what I had seen the enemy was not near-by. Perhaps, Kuro-tan was a little more paranoid than I had thought... I pointed at the character "fight" and shook my head. Lips curling back from his sharp teeth, Kuro-tan looked away into the distance of the camp, then up and I followed his line of sight.

Above us was the moon I had seen the night we had arrived. It was huge, and too close, and it was nestled in the blackness and the stars.

And it was almost full.

To Be Continued…