A/N - Seems to be I write one massive chapter, decide to split it up in two chapters, post one half, get interested in that second half, turn it in to one massive chapter and the cycle repeats. Not this time. Here is the one massive chapter. Hope it was worth the wait. Thanks, as always, for reading.
A young tanuki or what was better known as a raccoon spirit had been sent on a very important mission. The mission was to journey to a distant island far from his home of Tokyo and find a master shape shifter to bring back to the tanuki's tribe for they had forgotten many of the secrets of the magic.
For two and a half long years, the tanuki named Bunta searched, using the power of his own shape shifting to try and locate the lost master. His luck was poor for it turned out the island was riddled with rabbit holes. Which, as all magical animals know, often lead to other worlds and spirit realms. This made his job infinitely harder as he had to use his raccoon magic on each rabbit hole and see if perhaps it led to another world in which the master might be now living.
"Finally, I found you!" Bunta declared from inside one such rabbit hole. Shoving the rug hard, it came out of the rabbit hole portal with a 'pop!' and landed on the grassy hill beyond. "After years of looking I can return home! We can have a huge party to celebrate and you can teach us all the lost magic of becoming master shape shifters!" Taking another long swig and finishing his last energy drink, Bunta used his power to swell back in to the form of a large male body builder. Bald with thick muscles, a thin mustache and a bright green Speedo, he couldn't have been more out of place in the deep island forest. Bunta didn't care about that though. He was so excited and high off his apparent success at finding the master, he felt invincible.
Grabbing up the rug with ease, he started to head back on the long journey from the island to Tokyo.
Needless to say, every creature in the forest immediately stopped whatever they had been doing to stop and gawk at the absurd tanuki hauling a rolled up carpet through the trees.
"Hey you there, stop!" Called an old, frail voice. A grayed furred taunki shuffled out from the bushes and cut across Bunta's path. The old raccoon had a tail that was going bald in spots and a face that was so wrinkled with age his eyes were hidden under large folds of skin. "Aren't you the raccoon from Tokyo that was asking after Master Kario?"
Bunta nodded – his human form seeming to swell even larger with pride. "I found him too! He was dazed and confused, lost in a human city in a distant world. I've brought him back!"
The other raccoon's eye went so wide with fear the wrinkles almost folded back enough to expose the circles beneath them. "You…brought him back? You fool raccoon! Have you no respect for the dead!"
"Dead!" Gasped Bunta, so shocked he lost his mental concentration and thus, his human form evaporated, sending the rug dropping to the ground. A muffled cry sounded and the rug began wiggling around on the forest floor.
The older raccoon, in an indignant outrage, sniffed in the rug's direction. "You idiot! That's not Master Kario! That's a human!"
"It can't be!" He protested, "She smells like magic and she said she was from Tokyo even though she was in another world and she's just got to be a raccoon in disguise! I know it!"
The old tanuki gave a disgusted, "hmph! You're the reason humans say 'clever as a fox' not 'clever as a raccoon'! She's clearly human! I was coming to tell you Master Kario died years ago. He was shot by a hunter who sold his pelt for a great deal of money! Now go put her back where you found her before other humans coming looking for her!"
"But…" The raccoon seemed to deflate, getting smaller and smaller by the second, the black bands of his tail fading to a dull brown. "The master is dead…?" A sober look crossed his furred face and he looked on the verge of crying. "All those years I searched, wasted and now on top of that you tell me I have to drag her all the way back to the rabbit hole? I'm so tired and I haven't even eaten yet."
Rolling his eyes, the elder smacked the raccoon on the back of his head, sending him sprawling on the ground, "Doesn't have to be the same rabbit hole you ninny – find the closest one that opens in to another world and dump her in it! Do it quickly now. I don't need any trouble in my woods."
Rubbing his sore head, the tiny, defeated raccoon snapped up the edge of the rug with his sharp teeth and started pulling the trapped girl back the way they had come.
"I can't believe it," he whined around the fabric in his mouth, "all that work for nothing." He paused, sniffing the air. Nearby tucked away under an enormous tree root, he picked up the delicate scent of peppermint and rain clouds. Rooting under the trunk with his nose, he found the entrance to the rabbit hole and sighed. "Now I have to waste more magic too. It's going to take me months to get home."
Picking up a leaf from the ground in his five fingered paw, the tanuki placed it atop his head, drawing power from the trees around him. His form melted away growing back in to the man he had been when he had first approached the young girl rolled up in the carpet.
"Sorry about this but you shouldn't go around smelling like magic." He said. "It's only going to give you problems." Having given her his departing words of wisdom, Bunta hoisted the rug up. The rabbit hole enlarged several times over with a series of cracks, opening up in to a frame of earth that showed a starry night sky over a vast mountain range.
He dropped the rug without further ceremony and watched it drop away.
"Well that's that. Now to return home and tell them I've failed." Sighing he let the forest energy go and shrank back down to his raccoon form. "Maybe they'll throw me a sympathy party. Huh?" He looked to the woods with concern. Something was running towards him from the woods and running fast, breaking branches and snapping trees as it went so whatever it was, it didn't care if it was heard. Which meant a predator. Bunta started to shift his shape, thinking a rock would be a fine choice right now.
Before he could finish his magic and to his utter shock, it was a human who broke through the trees. Cold green eyes regarded Bunta and for the first time in his short life, the raccoon felt real dread. Too scared to shift his shape, he couldn't move, couldn't run away. He could only watch what was assuredly his death run closer and closer.
The man in the white took a heartbeat to look from the raccoon to the rabbit hole and back again. His expression was angry. He charged towards Bunta his hand drawn back ready to strike. The raccoon braced himself, hoping his end would be quick. He had never seen human rage before and now he finally understood the reason the elders in his village had sent him to find the master in the first place. They couldn't possibly stand up to the humans without magic. They feared them.
And now he knew why.
Bunta closed his eyes as the man came down on him, too afraid to face his doom head on.
His nose lit up with pain and it took him a second to realize the man had flicked him squarely on its tip. Hard.
Opening his watering eyes just a crack he caught a final glimpse of the man vanishing down the very same rabbit hole he had dropped the girl in to.
"Bad raccoon!" Called the man and with that, the hole snapped shut and the man in white was gone.
~.~
Inside her nearly suffocating prison, Haru was doing her best to breathe. When she first found herself trapped, she had made the mistake of trying to open her mouth to scream.
Now, she was desperately trying to close her mouth and rid herself of the taste of dirty carpet.
With every jostle of the rug, Haru swore at herself. She had been asking for trouble, counting her blessings as she had. It was inviting disaster to think that she and Gikk were in the clear. It was almost like she had never read a manga or seen a movie. The hero should never say how well things were going. It always ended up with being rolled up in a rug and kidnapped by a freaky guy.
Well, at least for her it had. If she got out of this – when – she got out of the rug, she amended; she was going to make sure she kept her optimism to herself. The universe wasn't going to get any more chances to be ironic, not on her watch.
The second thing she was going to do was to use her semi-impressive yelling skills and break this jerks eardrums. She was angry enough now to be a threat – Hiromi was going to be proud of pounding she gave this guy.
Then the ground gave way and she was falling.
All thoughts of revenge and anger were washed away by a rush of life preserving adrenaline and Haru panicked. Torn between struggling to get free of the rug or trying to somehow tuck herself in further to use it as protection from the inevitable landing, she froze up.
I'm going to die! I am so going to die! And then I'm going to kill that creep!
There was a pulling sensation all around her and the world shifted, like riding in a car that was going down a steep, curvy mountain round. She sure she was still falling but it was slower now and more controlled. Pressure rose in her ears, stronger and stronger, blocking out all sound until her heartbeat was all she could hear.
At the same time the rug, seeming to remember it had started its life as a shopping bag, decided it wasn't going to take it any longer. The magic that had warped it's shape started to unwind. Literally.
Haru noticed quite suddenly how free and wonderful her legs felt, how airy and unrestricted. Followed by her midsection and processing upwards. Light flooded in and in a flash, the entire rug was gone, leaving Haru alone in a free fall. She had a brief second to notice the liberated shopping bag wafting away in the wind before she drew in a breath and started screaming.
Falling, falling against a backdrop of stars and a moon so full it looked orange and otherworldly, Haru couldn't believe something like this could happen to her – to anyone twice. A dark form flew through the air before her. Arms wrapped around her mid section and she found herself tucked against a chest, held tight. "Gikk, is that you?" She yelled, trying to draw her head back and look. The arms tightened their grip and she stilled, burying her face against the fabric and trying to protect her eyes from the unrelenting wind.
Gradually, the wind died down, the falling slowed and unbelievably, her feet came to a rest on solid ground.
She was released from the embrace to find it was indeed Gikk who had saved her and was now looking her over with a concerned glance under the bright moonlight.
"You have a truly fine tuned gift for finding mischief." He said, a little breathless. "I'm not at all surprised that out of all the girls in the village, I find you kidnapped, falling through an alien sky, wrapped in a rug that changes in to a plastic bag with comedic timing." He ended the sentence with a half smile and admiration in his eyes, like he was the luckiest guy in the worlds.
Haru smiled back and motioned with her finger, "Just one second."
She took a deep breath, replaced her frazzled ponytail and straightened her sweater dress over her leggings.
Absolutely sure that this incident and all the ones that had followed and were to come, were somehow tied to the man before her, and not sure if she was excited or horrified by that but knowing either way he was going to get a good yelling at for – for whatever, because she needed a good yelling right now, she closed the distance between them.
"Now you listen here-"
His hand shot out and gently covered her mouth, "Do you hear that?"
Haru stopped midsentence, her train of thought skidding to a halt and she started to answer, speaking around his hand, "Hear what-"
"No shhh." He said quietly, eyes searching around the forest.
"I don't hear anything." She whispered back to him, after a minute of trying to detect anything out of the ordinary.
"Exactly." He confirmed. "This forest is utterly quiet. No forest is this quiet. It's like it is listening and watching, waiting."
Swallowing hard, all anger and especially the need to yell gone, Haru reached up and moved his hand away from her face, her eyes never stopping in their scanning of the surrounding trees. Quite aware of what she was doing and not caring, she kept a hold of his hand. "Ok my official vote is leave." She whispered softly, though even that seemed so loud in the eerie silence.
Gikk nodded, giving her hand a reassuring squeeze. "I saw how the raccoon that kidnapped you opened a portal. I might be able to recreate one on my own, but not here. We need to get out of the open. Now."
Haru mentally tucked away her question and shock at the revelation she had been kidnapped by a raccoon for later. The here and now was much more pressing and she nodded, moving slowly towards the edge of the clearing they had landed in.
There was a sharp pinch on her shoulder, followed by the sound of something landing on the ground beside her. That was followed by another and another – her whole body lighting up with pinches of pain as tiny rocks? rained down around her.
"Ow!" She cried, freeing her hand from Gikk's and trying to shield herself from the onslaught.
From the trees, the rainfall of stones ceased and there was movement, eyes catching and reflecting the moonlight. Not close enough to the pair to make out what the dark shapes could be yet their voices carrying through the silence like rolling thunder, lighting up the night in sound.
"You go. Leave nameless one." Came a halting, baritone voice.
A chorus of agreement rang out.
"Leave nameless one." All the deep voices demanded. "Nameless one stay, use magic to fight."
"Fight!" Cheered the trees all around them from the dark shapes hiding away in the thick foliage of the branches.
"We will use magic, destroy the humans!" Continued the first speaker, his voice louder and deeper than all the rest. "Nameless one use power, humans die. We take back forest."
"Nameless one?" Haru asked softly, rubbing a sore spot on her exposed forearm. "There is no 'nameless' one here!" She yelled. "Leave us alone! We want nothing more than to leave your forest in peace."
The answer was more stones, falling down from the trees. Gikk was fast to react this time and draw Haru to him, most of the pebbles bouncing harmlessly off of his jacketed back.
"You're starting to make me angry!" He called as a particularly sharp stick lodged itself in his hair. "Stop this right now!" He demanded.
Immediately, the barrage ceased. In the silence that followed, Gikk hesitantly loosened his grip on Haru but did not completely move away. A tense few minutes dragged on but no further assault or demands followed.
"Huh, I really didn't expect that to work." He said, looking rather confused and slightly, deep down, pleased. "Which means they have either realized we're a bigger threat than we look or –"
Haru tensed in his arms and gave a startled scream of "RUN!"
Nodding as if the world made sense again, Gikk grabbed her hand and started running. "Or they got reinforcements!" He finished.
The pair ran through the trees, dodging the thick trunks and jumping over logs and winding around huge boulders that had freed themselves from the nearby mountains.
Behind them, the forest came alive.
Only once did Haru make the mistake of looking back. Huge apes swung from tree to tree above them, eyes glowing in the moonlight. On the forest floor, a swarm of smaller apes ran on all fours, hooting and screaming with rage and the excitement of the hunt.
She didn't turn around again after that.
"I have a horrible idea!" Gikk called to Haru as they ran.
"Can't be much worse than this!" She called back, raising a hand to protect her face from a branch.
"I think I could open a portal! But I've no idea where it would come out. Could ended awful!"
"Awful?" Haru gasped, starting to get winded.
"Bottom of the ocean, inside a volcano, I dunno – frog kingdom?" He shook his head, "No idea, be a bit of a shot in the dark."
Beside him, Haru was starting to slow down and few apes in the trees were a swing or two away from closing the distance between them. Seeing Haru exhausted and in danger made the choice for him.
Just as it had been when he was in the ice cream shop and a feeling – no a compulsion -of dread moved him towards where she had been taken and gave him the power to follow her, his mind cleared.
He grabbed her in midstride and held her tightly to him.
On the ground beneath them, unseen by either, dark lines of power raced over the forest floor, forming a perfect geometric design. It flared up in eager flickers of light and devoured the two.
There was a flash so bright all their pursuers clutched their eyes in pain, some falling to the forest floor temporarily blinded, and like that, the pair was gone.
~.~
At the top of the highest point of her castle, a woman was leaning on the railing of the balcony to her room. Her long silvery ponytail was trailing about in the wind, free from the hat that was tied loosely to her head with a smart ribbon under her neck.
In the distance, storm clouds were rolling over the open plains, trailing the horizon with sheets of rain that looked like white curtains. The taste of ozone was heavy on her tongue.
"Look!" She called with delight to the bedroom behind her, never taking her eyes off the horizon. "It's raining!"
The huff and puff of the castle beneath her feet changed its rhythmic tempo to a slower one, getting ready to settle in for the night against the oncoming storm.
"So it is!" Answered a deeply masculine voice from behind her, a smile evident in the speaker's tone. "You never cease to surprise me Sophie! I would have thought you were the kind of girl that was all sunshine and here you are, excited for a rain storm."
"I like the rain." She answered back, leaning in to the embrace as his arms wrapped around her from behind. "It makes everything feel new again and clean. It makes the flowers grow and new life bloom."
"And Calcifer complain." Howl added lightly, breathing in the scent of her hair as he pushed her hat away from her hair and rested his chin on her shoulder. "He'll be at me to move the entire castle…again."
Sophie laughed, as she did more often these days, with free abandon and delight. "I should be worried if he didn't complain."
"You're right." He consented. "He loves the attention."
Her laughter died away, her tone losing its playfulness. "Howl, what's that? Over there?" She moved out his arms, leaning over the balcony to get a better view. In the far distance, but getting closer with each lumbering step of the castle, a white blur made a stark contrast against the muted green of the valley. "Are those people?" She continued, "Out here in the middle of the Wastes? What on earth are they thinking! They could be hurt!"
Wasting no time, she turned back inside, rushing down the stairs to grab her coat.
"Sophie! Wait!" Howl called. "They could be wizards! Or witches! Or worse!" But his calls fell on deaf ears. "Hold up just a second! I'll come with you!"
Without waiting for the castle to completely stop and mentally thanking Calcifer that he was already slowing it down to settle in for the night, Sophie pushed open the entry way door and jumped down to the soft ground below.
"What's going on?" Called her young adopted son, Markl after her. His thoughtful brown eyes regarded her with concern.
"Stay inside!" She called to him as she hitched up the hem of her dress as she took off in a run. "I'll be right back!"
Her feet pounded over the rocky face of the field, one hand holding the ribbon at the base of her neck to keep her hat from flying off. Life had certainly taken some interesting turns in the last few years. She never thought she'd be running across the Wastes to offer assistance to lost travelers.
On some days, usually a lazy Tuesday, inside the warmth of her private room or surrounded by her loved ones, Sophie could lose herself for hours working at a mundane task.
These times, often spent stitching new clothing for Markl, who was starting to grow at a near alarming rate, or tending to the house keeping of which there was never a shortage, Sophie would forget that she lived in a moving castle, powered by a demon. Or that she was married to a wonderfully powerful but endearingly naïve wizard.
Of course, on days like today, which happened to be a Sunday – Sophie would be reminded in the most spectacular way that her life wasn't quite so ordinary.
As she closed in on the pair, she affirmed that it was indeed two people she had spotted from her balcony. She wasn't too shocked to find her husband already there –still dressed in his pink house coat, trying to make non threatening motions towards a younger man, dressed in a… was that an ice cream uniform?... with ridiculously orange hair sticking out in every way, riddled with sticks and little stones through out. In his arms was cradled a woman of the same age, wearing the most outlandish dress Sophie had ever seen.
Yes, it was definitely a Sunday.