~ Bad Magic ~
The twins run ahead of their parents, heedless of their mother's pleas for them to slow down and be careful.
Keiji and Kairo Hizuri are normal six-year-old boys, carefree and playful in a way that their father never was as a child.
"Hey, I remember this place!" Kairo shouts, startling his brother.
Keiji trips over a tree root and falls flat on his face, only to spring up a moment later crying "I'm OK! I'm OK!" in spite of his skinned knee.
The rest of the family has almost caught up to the twins when the boys glance at each other with identical mischievous expressions, but before they can take off running again, they are stopped by the scolding of their little sister.
"Kaiju! Kaeru! Stop being bad in the magic place or fairies will play a trick on you!"
Mariko glares down at them from where she is perched on their father's shoulders. The four-year-old girl is the only one of the three kids who inherited Dad's piercing violet gaze, and she is a little tyrant who has her brothers well under her thumb.
Sulking, the boys walk on either side of their mother, each holding one of her hands as they approach the mystical place at the riverbank.
A flash of blue in the water immediately catches Mariko's attention.
"Dad, what's that?"
Cain sets his daughter down and tells her, "It's a fairy stone that belonged to my mother."
"Why don't you go and get it?" Mom suggests, smiling gently.
Mariko gingerly fishes the blue stone out of the water, nearly dropping it when her fingers first make contact. She runs back to where her family waits and hands the stone over to her father.
Cain feels faint ghosts of emotion from 'Corn' but most of the stone's embedded memories seem to have been washed away by the thirty years it's spent in the river.
"It needs a little more time before we bring it home to your grandma, I think," he says. "Who wants to put it back?"
He can see that his daughter is hesitant to touch the stone again, and he can't blame her for that, even if her psychometry is not nearly as strong as his was at her age. He is surprised that the twins also hesitate to volunteer, as they fought for the honor when he brought them here before.
"I will."
Nina Hizuri smirks as she plucks the stone from her husband's hand and returns it to its resting place in the river.
~oOo~
A/N: tee hee, were you surprised by the flash-forward?
For those who don't know: "Kaiju" is a giant monster (Godzilla, Mothra, etc.) "Kaeru" is Japanese for "frog".