I can't believe I already have 9 chapters on this thing. Holy fucking shit. See, THIS is why this thing is rated M I swear too much :P lol must be hereditary hahaa. Anyway here it is, chapter 9.

A note from me is this: It is stated as such that "The Shinigami have a language; each Shinigami has his or her own written language, with some opting for letters and some opting for pictures. Takeshi Obata, arist of the series, said that he assumes that all Shinigami can understand the languages of one another" I find this fascinating and I think I'm gonna incorporate it somehow, but It may or may not happen. Also,

"Shinigami may be male or female. Shinigami cannot and are not permitted to have sexual relations with humans; they cannot have sexual intercourse with each other, nor can they reproduce. In addition, humans cannot easily tell which Shinigami are male and which Shinigami are female. Death Note: How to Read 13 adds that Shinigami may have emotions "relating to the opposite sex." For instance Ryuk feels shy and embarrassed when Misa hugs him. "

I thought the words "cannot and are not permitted to" interesting. It doesn't say "are not physically able to" does it? I mean, technically, there are undead since they have no natural lifespan of their own and must rely on humans to stay alive, which makes it logical that if they do have any "bits" they don't work, but still. What ELSE makes the difference between male and female? Even if it's just a voice, the different levels of estrogen and testosterone would need to be present, which makes it logical that they must have some sort of organs down there, but anyway, I digress. I thought I'd exploit this little loophole somehow, someway later on in the story.

Anyway, not until later. On with the story!

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Gray felt the eyes of everyone on her back and smiled a little. Inside she was dancing wit joy. Finally, she was in the shinigami realm! Finally, she was getting some answers!

Unfortunately, she had more questions, and she had a feeling it would be no easy task to get them answered.

She kicked at the dirt beneath her feet once she was an adequate distance away from the others and bent down to poke at it. It was fine grained and very powdery and even here there were bone fragments littering the ground. Above her, storm clouds started to gather. Even in the realm of death, there was weather. She found that very interesting.

Unfortunately, her clothes were still damp from her flight into the nether regions of the human sky and if it was going to rain, she was going to get even wetter. She was already chilled to the bone. Maybe she should have brought change of clothes? With all the other things she had brought, she would not have had room in her bag.

She picked up what looked like a very small, sharp tooth and dusted the sand away from it. It looked like a small fang from a cat or a dog. She liked collecting teeth. She had all her baby teeth in a little pouch back home. Her baby teeth were pointed like fangs.

She pocketed it in her skirt and glanced up in time for the first rain drop to hit her in the face.

She shivered violently and again hugged herself with her wings. The fluffed up feathers helped keep her warm and once it began to rain, the water would run right off.

She looked around herself once again and noticed she was in a very sandy, desert-like part of the shinigami realm. The shinigami king had been right; it really was all the same no matter where you went.

She sat down in the dirt in the shadow of a small cavern made of bones and shivered again, her feathers fluffing out even ore as she did so. How was she going to get past an all-seeing dragon whose fire could kill on contact? She was only 17! How was she supposed to get it done any better than someone here?

"Thinking?" said a voice from behind her.

She spun around and saw the small, stitched together shinigami Rem had introduced as Gelus. Up this close, he was positively cute, despite the one eye. Clumsily put together, just a little pathetic and awkward. She felt right away that he could be trusted.

"Oh, hi. Gelus, right?" she said.

Gelus nodded and took out his death note. There was a strange sort of picture writing on the front and Gray peered closer at it, trying to make out what it said.

"It's my name," he said, without her asking. He looked frustrated about something. His voice was surprisingly soft spoken for a shinigami and for some reason, she felt a gentle sort of aura around him.

She crawled on her hands and knees to sit beside him and see what he was frustrating him. He was having trouble gripping the pen he held. His fingers were so small and very ill formed for holding the pen he had.

She reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out the pen she had been using to write in her journal earlier. It was smaller, made for human hands and not as clumsy as the pens or pencils shinigami used.

"Try this," she said, offering it to him.

Gelus seemed to study her for a moment and then dropped his pen and took hers. To his surprise, it was small enough so that he could hold it normally instead of in a fist like usual. It was much easier to write like this!

"Hey, thanks. It's a lot easier to hold," he said, finishing the name of a human with a flourish. It wrote smoothly in black ink.

"Don't mention it," she said distractedly, peering off into the distance. It had started to rain hard outside, and inside the cave of bones, only a few drips got through. She was still cold.

"Where do shinigami get all their clothes from? She asked finally.

Gelus shrugged his tiny shoulders in a "who knows" gesture.

She shivered again and watched the rain.

"Been thinking about how to get past that dragon?" he asked suddenly.

"Yeah. I honestly don't know why he thinks I should be able to succeed when others have failed," she said. She knew Gelus would assume her use of the word "he" would mean the shinigami king.

Gelus was silent for a moment.

"I'm sure there's a way, somehow. I wasn't allowed to keep tabs on you before, so I don't know. I guess he wants you to figure it out," he said finally.

Gray sighed. She got the impression that Gelus was one of the less intelligent shinigami, if the most gentle-hearted.

"What's worse is I only have a week to figure it out," she complained, drawing her knees to her chest and resting her arms on them.

"Time flows differently here. A week in the human world is about a month here," said Gelus quietly. He had stopped writing and his notebook lay at his side. Now he sat and watched the rain as well.

"Are you cold?" he asked her.

She shivered again and nodded.

She heard the little Gelus scramble away and looked over her shoulder in time to see him shambling back dragging what looked like a large black rag through the dirt. He handed it to her.

She stood up, towering at least a foot and a half over the smaller shinigami and shook the dirt out of the thing he had been carrying, which turned out to be a long black trench coat, shredded and ragged. But the point was, it had long sleeves and holes cut in for wings.

"Hey, thanks," she said, slightly impressed. She pulled it on and found it was a lot too big for her. It dragged on the ground behind her and the sleeves went way past her fingertips.

But she was finally warm!

She snuggled deep into it and smiled gratefully. Gelus smiled back as best as he could with his lopsided, ill-stitched face, glad he had been able to help. It could get quite cold sometimes.

Outside, the rain stopped, leaving the sandy ground nothing but mud. She didn't care to walk through that, so she brought out her wings and, stepping outside, began to hover, flapping only to remain airborne. Gelus followed her. The wings that sprouted from his back were significantly smaller than her own, but just as stitched as the rest of him was. They were leathery, blue and batlike. He hovered like her.

"Want a tour?" he asked. He had his death note tucked under one arm and handed her pen back to her. She shook her head and put it back into his hand.

"Keep it, I have lots more with me," she said. Gelus looked surprised. He wasn't used to receiving gifts, nor was he used to having friends in the shinigami realm. They teased him for not acting like a proper death god.

"Sure. Does the whole place look like this?" she asked. Gelus nodded.

"Follow me," said the little rag-doll shinigami and he flew off into the sky. She followed suit, stirring the mud with the wind from her wings and they flew through the sky like that, she following her newest friend as he showed her around. He showed her the cliffs where nothing-ness existed, where all humans went when they died. To her it appeared to be a blank void of black where the sky and the ground should have been, but she could hear voices unintelligibly.

"Don't go over these cliffs. If you fall in, you join the void and cease to exist," Gelus warned her. She shied away.

He then showed her the different regions of the realm of death. The bowls of plains formed by cragged mountains and the mountains of bones that were main hangouts of the shinigami and the desert regions with the viewing pools where shinigami went when they wanted to kill humans alone. He showed her vast plains of bones, nothing but bones, it was like a bone graveyard.

Next he showed her the path to the newly erected black tower, and with it, the dragon she was to face. He made her hide behind a clump of dead bushes. She felt like she was a kid again, hiding with a friend where she wasn't supposed to be.

The dragon was ENORMOUS. Even from this distance, she could clearly see it had bulging yellow eyes and a long, pointed snout. It was enormous.

"Come on, that thing always made me nervous," said Gelus and he led her away again.

He was flying back towards the place where the others had congregated before and retracted his wings before he even touched the ground, floating gently to the earth. She tried the same thing and fell heavily, landing with a thud that knocked the wind out of her.

Unfortunately, there were still a few shinigami hanging around, Ryuk, Guuku and Deridovely among them and they all saw it and laughed.

She stood up and brushed herself off, the sleeves of her newest addition flapping as she did and she glowered, feeling her face flame red with what flowing blood she had. Her heart did beat, but nonetheless, she had o pulse. The majority of her blood was already congealed. How she lived was a mystery to science.

"You may have a lot of shinigami in you, but you're still solid no matter how you look at it," said Deridovely, still cackling.

"You mean I probably couldn't go al transparent like you guys can?" she asked.

"Most likely, not," said Ryuk, smiling evilly.

"Fuck," she said dully.

Guuku grinned.

She had met the king of death, had met her contributing parents and even made a new friend.

So passed her first day in the land of the dead.

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