CHAPTER 7 (omigosh!)
In which the following quests begin:
a quest for love, a quest for brunch, and a quest for dust spray.
"You're hired!" Shigure exclaimed at once. Like Uotani before her, Tohru didn't even bat an eye at the fact that the dog talked. She was, however, very surprised at what he said. She hadn't even gone through an interview, after all.
The orange cat and silver mouse seemed just as taken aback as she was, because at the exact moment Tohru opened her mouth in surprise, so did they.
"What?" the three of them said in stereo.
"And," Shigure continued, dragging out the word so he sounded very much like that guy on that show with the wheel and the fortune aaaaand a brand new car!, "It's been decided that your first task will be cooking brunch!"
---
Elsewhere in a kingdom two or three hours away depending on traffic, there lived a beautiful and lively princess who had been waiting (im)patiently for her beloved knight in shining armor to come and carry her off in a swell of orchestral music, a sunset, and the rising ending credits.
"Kyo… Kyo… wherever art thou, Kyo-Q?" the princess sighed in a manner only lovely damsels in mild-to-moderate distress can perform properly. She was standing by the widow of her room so a light breeze fluttered the gauzy white window curtains around her. Beyond the window, a bird with twittered a melancholic song, and a doe and her fawn hesitantly stepped from the surrounding Relatively Dark Forest into a grassy clearing on the other side of the moat of the castle. A few fluffy bunnies bounced as effortlessly as basketballs in the same grassy clearing.
After watching the idyllic scene through the window, the princess turned away and flung herself dramatically on her unkempt bed. (Even if she was a princess, she didn't like making her bed just like the rest of us.) The inside of her room was equally untidy. There were books strewn across the floor, her cloudy glass slippers and matching earrings placed over thereabouts in the corner, the straw-spun-gold carpet littered with the delicate and detailed furniture of the six-foot tall, four-story dollhouse with working electric lights and swimming pool and Porsche, the latest gaming console, digitally enhanced for the greatest –
"Savvy salamanders, Kyo!" the princess shouted abruptly, interrupting the list of her belongings. "Where are you?!"
Without waiting for an answer (because Kyo wasn't there to answer it, and if he was, there wasn't really a point in asking it, was there?), the princess wrested herself from the bed and stomped back to the window.
"And you! Be quiet! I need to think!" she said in a manner that couldn't really be interpreted as polite to the bird still singing outside. The bird immediately shut its beak and flew off. Well, if that princess couldn't appreciate good music, it was no skin off his teeth.
The princess turned to face the inside of her room again, hands on her hips. Well, if Kyo wasn't going to find her here, she would have to go find him, instead.
---
Because the princess interrupted her list of belongings, the reader was not able to notice that she was also in possession of a mirror. From a distance, the mirror looked quite ordinary, but if you were to stand closer to it… actually, it still looked like an ordinary mirror. But maybe that's why it looked so out of place.
Moreover, it was a mirror that looked very similar to the one in Hatori's office. The princess was, after all, another Sohma. (It's a very large family!)
---
But enough of the princess, at least for the moment. Shigure had escorted Tohru to the kitchen while Yuki attempted to arrange her muddy shoes neatly out of the way in the entrance hall and Kyo unsuccessfully tried to hang her umbrella on the umbrella rack by the door. (Since he'd been living there for a week, Kyo finally found out where they were kept, the umbrellas.) Now standing in the kitchen, Tohru wasn't sure what to say.
"Yes, it is a little messy," Shigure admitted to Tohru's silence. Saying it was a little messy was a bit of an understatement, like saying the Enchanted Mountains were a little tall or being an animal was a little inconvenient for making ramen noodles. The lint screen of a vacuum cleaner was squeaky clean compared to this junkyard.
"Oh no, it's just… it's only… uh…" Tohru began, then smiled bravely and switched to another topic. "I can make something without the stove."
The stove was currently buried under a mountain of pots and pans. Suffice to say, Shigure was in need of a housekeeper before he was transfigured into a dog, and also, he had an absurd amount of pots and pans.
Tohru squeezed between the wall and collection of garbage bags.
"Yeek!" she sqeaked abruptly, leaping away as if burned.
"What?" Shigure barked in alarm.
Tohru slowly pointed a trembling finger at the garbage bag.
"It moved," she whispered urgently. The young woman and dog continued to stare at it for a long, hard minute.
---
Having made her decision, the princess threw open the double doors of the castle and kicked down the drawbridge with a mighty swishfallBOOM! Just as she was about to leave, Kagura noticed one of her ladies-in-waiting had wandered up behind her curiously. Okay, so technically, Ritsu wasn't a lady-in-waiting because he wasn't, strictly speaking, a lady. He was a marquess.
"Oh, hello, Ritsu. I'm going out, okay?" the princess said musically as if she hadn't just thrown open the doors that usually took three or four strapping young men to budge nor kicked down the drawbridge that had effectively kept out the occasional bad-tempered Jabberwocky.
Ritsu smiled nervously, his hands twisted together in front of himself.
"Oh. That sounds nice. Where are you going?"
"I," Kagura said with Great Drama, "am on a quest for Love."
"How noble," Ritsu said, wishing he was brave enough to quest for something like that. He'd been on a quest for Courage, once, but he somehow ended up with a collection of seashells, instead. Oh well. They were nice seashells.
"Do tell mother I shan't make it for tea today," Kagura informed the marquess-in-waiting. Then, because she and Ritsu were good friends, she added, "If I find any Courage on the way, I'll bring some back for you."
---
Young Tohru Honda went to the cupboard to get the poor dog a bone after staring at the garbage bag for some time and deciding it hadn't moved after all. When she was there, the cupboard, that is, she found it was bare, so Shigure had none.
"I could go grocery shopping," Tohru offered helpfully as she climbed around the garbage bag on her way back to Shigure. The bag didn't move… this time.
"Not at all," Shigure said, wagging his head from side to side. "Yuki, Kyo and myself should be able to get something ourselves."
"Oh, no! It wouldn't be any trouble at all!" Tohru insisted.
Shigure shook his head again. "To tell the truth," he replied, "I'd rather you cleaned the kitchen. That way, when we come back, you'll be able to make something right away. Is that all right?
Tohru considered this proposition a moment, her eyebrows flattened into a pair of thoughtful lines over her eyes. She was really quite expressive, like a cartoon character. It only took her a second to make a decision, and her expression switched from thoughtful to determined as fast as a flipbook.
"Yes! Leave it to me!" she agreed.
And so, on that fateful day, Yuki the Sarcastic, Kyo the Complaining, and Shigure the Wordsmith went on a quest for brunch. Once outside, it was Yuki, of course, who posed the problem to the others.
"How exactly did you plan on getting food?" he asked, directing his question to Shigure. "I don't suppose you have any money hidden in your fur, and even if you did, they don't allow dogs in the supermarket."
Yuki was hitching a ride on Shigure's head, because it would have been a slow-moving quest if he did otherwise. It wasn't because Yuki's legs were so itty-bitty. Rather, it was because Kyo was likely to pick another fight with him. In his cat form, however, Kyo was fighting the instinct to flee up the nearest tree from a dog, so Yuki was relatively safe for the moment.
"We do have neighbors," Shigure replied to Yuki's earlier concerns. "And this is an enchanted forest. The other animals living here should be able to give us advice."
"Unless we're on their menu," Yuki pointed out.
"I wouldn't worry about that," Shigure said brightly. "Not many animals would eat a dog."
"That makes me feel so much better," Yuki muttered.
Kyo, who had been lagging behind with a disgruntled expression, stopped suddenly and turned his nose to the west.
"Hey!" he called to his cousins. "There's something cooking over there!"
Back at the house, Tohru stood confronting the sea of decay of the kitchen.
"Where do I even start?" she asked no one in particular. Well, it wasn't like the place would clean itself. Without waiting for an answer, Tohru simply grabbed the topknot of the nearest garbage bag and began dragging it out.
It moved. Again. In the opposite direction Tohru pulled it.
Tohru shrieked (again) and leaped back. The bag began rolling back to its original position.
"I hope those weren't leftovers," Tohru thought to herself. Out loud, she said: "Um… excuse me, Mr. Garbage Bag, but I really need to clean the kitchen. Would you mind very terribly if… ah… you rolled outside to the garbage bin?"
"Yes, I would very much mind," said a gritty voice. We'll assume it belonged to the garbage bag for the moment.
"Oh," Tohru said, visibly deflating. She didn't want to offend the garbage bag, but she wanted to help Shigure and the others, too.
The bag trembled, and from underneath it (as opposed to inside – yuck!) a cloud of blue dust swirled onto the floor. As it shaped itself into a form, Tohru gasped and backed up into the doorway.
"You are… you are…!" she stammered through her fear.
The collection of blue dust cackled. Evilly.
"Yes! A dust bunny, and an evil blue one at that!" it said, pronouncing each word with perfect malevolence. His teachers at the Institute of Evil Bad Persons would have been proud.
Tohru had heard of dust bunnies before, but she had always thought they were only in fairytales.
Oh wait. This was a fairytale. Drat.
"Ah… well… Mr. Blue Dust Bunny…"
"That's Mr. Evil Blue Dust Bunny of Death! Death and Destruction to you, missy!"
"Sorry!" Tohru responded automatically, "Mr. Evil Blue Dust Bunny of Death! Death and Destruction!, sir, I'm really very sorry, but you can't stay here because – "
"Silence! You will do no such thing!" the dust bunny commanded in his most evilly evil voice yet. "From the day Shigure moved here," it continued, "I knew this house would be easily converted into my secret base of evil (but not as evil as me) hordes of dust devil minions. It will only be a few days more until my plan come into fruition, and no upstart housekeeper can get in my way!"
"But, Mr. Evil Blue Dust Bunny of Death! Death and – "
"First, the kitchen. Then, the house. Then, the ENTIRE WORLD!! Attack, my evil dust devil minions! Attack the housekeeper!"
...
Moral of today's story: Cleanliness is next to godliness,
rooms 243 and 244, respectively.
