A/N: Chapter twelve is here! Right on time! Sort of. This chapter was actually finished on Thursday but I couldn't get to the internet until today. Sorry. But the good news is that the next chapter after this one is finished and the last chapter is almost done. We're getting close, readers! But for now we need to worry about finding the demon douche that turned Hiei into a doll and making him pay for his hilarious, yet heinous crime. If not but for Hiei's sake. Poor Hiei. Why must we torment him so? Anyway, read and review please!


Chapter Twelve: Hunting

"It's about time you got here." Koenma said when the Tentei arrived. Kurama stood leaning against the wall nearest the doors, Hiei still on his shoulder, and Kuwabara and Yusuke stood in the center of the room. Botan walked up and stood beside the young godling. "I was starting to wonder if you were going to go hunting the demon first before coming here."

"Well, we would have except we don't know anything about this demon." Yusuke answered. "Plus, we need to change Hiei back first. Then we can work on finding this guy."

Koenma nodded. "A wise decision. However, I'm not entirely sure I can change him back." He said thoughtfully. "We don't even know who this demon is, so we have no idea how he turned Hiei into a doll in the first place and therefore have no way of knowing if it will actually work or if there even is a way to turn him back."

"There's no way to turn him back?!" Yusuke exclaimed, only hearing the last thing Koenma said. "You mean he's stuck like this forever?"

"That was not what I said." Koenma replied. "I said there's a chance that he can't be changed back only because we don't know who this demon is. Before we try anything, why don't you all tell me what you've found out about this demon. Then maybe we'll have a better chance of figuring out who he is and then find out how to change him back. There's no point in taking unnecessary actions."

"I agree." Kurama nodded. "There's no point in risking it. Hiei is here, even though he's like this, and he's alive. At the moment, that's most important. So, I think we have a bit of time to think this through carefully before declaring any rash actions."

"So," Koenma said, turning to glance at Hiei expectantly. "Why don't you start with what happened after you left my office in a fit of rage because of Kuwabara and whatever other thing that usually gets you moody?"

Hiei glared at Koenma before beginning his explanation, starting with the feeling he got in the woods and ending with waking up in the morning and realizing that he was able to move and speak again. "And now I'm here explaining everything to you, who should already know about this, and delaying any further actions to fix me." He finished.

"Hm." Koenma murmured, staring at Hiei thoughtfully. "Ogre." He said suddenly.

A tall light blue ogre wearing a loincloth stepped up beside him. "Yes, sir?"

"Bring me that book we were looking at earlier. The one with the weird clock on the first page." Koenma ordered.

"Yes, Koenma, sir." The ogre said as he hurried out the large double doors. They waited in silence until he returned, carrying a large, dark red leather bound book with a gold trim. The book was old, with the leather peeling and the brittle, fragile pages coming loose. "Here you are, sir."

Koenma placed the book on the desk in front of him and started leafing through the pages, absently catching any pages that started to fall out and replacing them. Finally he stopped at a page near the middle of the book. "Ah, here we are." He picked up the book and turned it to the room at large. "Is this the one that attacked you?"

"That's him!" Shouted both Hiei and Kuwabara in unison when they saw the picture. A demon dressed in a red suite with purple hair and orange skin stood in the center of the page, a long black cane in his hand and a sinister sneer stretched on his snake-like face.

"Who the hell is he?" Hiei snapped, glaring at Kuwabara out of the corner of his eye. He hadn't quite forgiven him for not getting him out of the doll house before the girl had taken him home.

"His name is unknown but he calls himself Mannequin. I'm sure you can guess why." Koenma turned the book back toward himself. "According to this, changing people into dolls wasn't his original power. He actually had several different powers, such as being able to shrink people as well as being able to make them immobile and silenced. He can also create small force fields. They're not that strong, but putting them on a dollhouse is more than strong enough to keep anything in or out."

"So, he created a way to combine the different powers on one single thing that could become extremely useful once completed." Kurama confirmed. "Interesting." Hiei glared at him and yanked on one of the strands of hair that hung over Kurama's shoulder. "Ow. I mean, that's terrible."

"He didn't have a cane, though." Hiei said, still glaring at Kurama. He looked at Koenma and gestured to the book. "The picture shows him with a black cane. He didn't have one with him that I saw."

"Hm, that is unusual." Koenma said thoughtfully as he surveyed the picture and text. "It says here that the cane is the source of most of his powers. There is a blood-red jewel at the top of the cane, inside a gold dollhouse, that he made himself; you can see it through the windows and the door. When he turns someone into a doll, that jewel is what keeps them that way. The cane will glow a bright red color, along with whoever was turned into a doll and the dollhouse, which he also makes himself so that he can install the force field. The force field dies once the house is no longer in his possession but in order to change the victims back to their original form, the jewel must be broken."

"But if he didn't have the cane on him, then where was it?" Yusuke asked.

"Hang on." Koenma quickly scanned the page. "It says here that he must keep the jewel close by at all times, otherwise his magic will start to weaken on his victims the further away he is from it. If it's not on his person, then he must have hidden it somewhere close enough to keep his magic strong but safe enough so that no one can find it."

"Does it say how far he can be separated from it?" Kurama asked.

"I can't tell." Koenma replied, squinting closely at the bottom of the page. "The pages are worn and old. The text is extremely faded. But it looks like a five, though it could be a six or an eight. And then it looks like it says 'meters' but I'm not a hundred percent sure. I honestly can't tell. I can, however, say that it is in the single digits. Like I said, wherever he keeps it, it can't be too far from him."

"Hang on." Kurama said thoughtfully. "If he's got to have the jewel so close to himself at all times and he was in the woods when he was with Hiei, and lets say that the page says 5 meters, then that would mean that the jewel was five meters, or about fifteen feet or so, from wherever he was standing. So we should find out where he was when he was with Hiei, and use that to estimate how far the jewel was and hopefully when we find the place it was in, we can use anything we find there to help track him down."

"Huh?" Yusuke asked in confusion.

"My brain hurts." Kuwabara groaned, clutching at the sides of his head.

"Just trust me." Kurama said exasperatedly.

"Sure." Yusuke said. "So what do we do now?"

"Now, we go find this Mannequin demon and find the cane." Kurama said. "Once we find the cane and smash the jewel, we can turn Hiei back to normal."

Koenma nodded. "Right. I would give you this book to take with you for help but it's so old that I'm afraid it will get more damaged than it already is. And my father will be furious if I let it out of the palace in this condition. Though he'd probably be angry anyway at me for letting it get this bad in the first place."

"Don't worry, I think we have all the information we need." Kurama said. He turned and headed towards the door. "We shall return shortly. Would you like us to bring anything back?"

Koenma nodded. "The cane and whatever's left of the jewel if you can. Although, be prepared for some chaos when this is over. If people were turned into dolls and sold, there's going to be a catastrophe when you break the jewel and they all return to normal."

"Right." Yusuke said as he and Kuwabara followed Kurama out the door. "We'll remember that."


The Tentei stumbled through the woods as they followed Hiei's directions toward where he had first felt the odd feeling. "It was just up ahead." Hiei said, pointing a few yards in front of them. A rather large tree could be seen in the distance, apparently in the direction Hiei was herding them in. "I was in that tree over there when I first felt the demon's presence."

They approached the tree and looked around. "Which way did you go?" Kurama asked, sending his energy out in the hopes of sensing something unfamiliar.

Hiei gazed around for a moment before pointing to their left, almost in the same direction they had just come but slightly to the right. "I headed that way. I felt several different feelings, like blood lust and mischief. It was faint but I still felt it. I was still extremely irritated, so I decided to follow it in the hopes of using it as something to take my frustration out on."

They quickly headed in the direction Hiei pointed in, searching for anything out of the ordinary. Suddenly Kurama paused, holding up a finger. "Hang on." He said, growing still and searching with his eyes. The others stopped and listened, tensing in preparation for a fight.

"What is it?" Yusuke whispered, searching rapidly with his eyes, fists poised.

"Do you feel it?" Kurama asked, still unmoving.

"Yes." Hiei replied softly, turning his head up to gaze at the tree tops.

"I don't feel anything." Kuwabara whispered in confusion.

"Exactly." Hiei replied.

"Huh?" Kuwabara asked. "What do you mean?"

"There's nothing here." Hiei clarified. "No animals. It's completely silent. Do you hear any birds or rodents?"

They all listened. "You're right." Yusuke said, his voice sounding eerily loud in the sudden silence. "There's nothing. It's like all of them decided to just leave."

"Either that, or they were forced to leave." Kuwabara said. "Like if they thought it was too dangerous to be here any longer. Maybe the Mannequin guy chased them out."

"Animals can be extremely intelligent when it comes to survival instinct." Kurama agreed. "When there's a fire, they all head in the direction that the smoke is not in. When there's a storm, birds fly in huge masses to get to shelter before the winds blow them out of the sky. They know when danger comes before we do."

"We should get moving." Hiei urged. "Either we're getting close to where the demon is or to where the jewel is. Or where either of them was. And we're getting close to where I fell into that hole."

"Like Alice and the white rabbit." Kurama bemused.

"The what?" Hiei asked.

"Haven't you ever heard of Alice in Wonderland?" Kurama asked in amusement. "It's about a human girl named Alice who follows a white rabbit into a rabbit hole that actually takes her to a place called Wonderland, where she meets all sorts of unusual things. Like a doorknob that talks, and talking flowers, and bottles that say 'drink me' that either make you extremely big or extremely small, and a cat called the Cheshire Cat, who speaks in riddles and is extremely unhelpful. And the Mad Hater and the March Hare and their unbirthday party. And let's not forget the Queen of Hearts. She wanted to kill Alice because Alice painted all of the queens white roses red."

"That's stupid." Hiei commented. "What kind of garbage is that?"

"It's a human fairytale, Hiei." Kurama said. "It's supposed to be very popular to most children."

"It's still stupid." Hiei said. "Stop!" he said suddenly. Everyone paused. "We're here."

They scanned the clearing they had stopped in; it was rather large, as if a giant round pool had been moved recently, leaving behind a large circular, uneven patch of grass where it had been. Trees surrounded the clearing in a tight ring, all of them blowing silently in the wind. Kurama, Yusuke and Kuwabara spread out around the edge of the clearing, examining the grass and the trees and the rocks and anything else that looked different from the rest of the clearing.

"I can't find anything." Yusuke called after several more minutes of searching.

"Maybe because there's nothing to find." Someone called back. "Have you tried the center of the clearing?"

"Why would I go in the clearing when there's a psycho demon on the loose that could have used it as a trap- hey!" Yusuke looked up as a red flash zoomed past him into the clearing. The others stopped and turned to the demon standing in the center of the circular clearing, grinning at them in amusement.

"I was wondering when you'd come." The demon cackled. He turned his grinning head in Hiei's direction, his grin widening, showing all of his sharp white teeth. "Sleeping Beauty returns. What happened? Not the right dollhouse? Perhaps you'd like another."

"Change me back!" Hiei yelled, ignoring the demon's attempt to bait him.

"No, I don't think I will." The demon said, pretending to sound thoughtful. "I rather like you this way."

"Then we'll just have to make you." Yusuke threatened.

"Good luck." The demon said, cackling loudly as he spun around and bounded into the shelter of the trees.


A/N: So, what did you guys think? Getting interesting, no? Looks like a game of cat and mouse. More like three dogs chasing a cat with a mouse on one of the dogs' shoulder. *cough* Hiei *cough* Things are about to get a bit more interesting. Especially when they underestimate the demon and… oh, wait. You haven't read that far, huh? Oops, never mind.

And no, I did not base any of this on Alice in Wonderland, in case you're wondering. I just thought of the comparisons as I was writing that part. Now that I think about it, it does seem to coincide with that story pretty well.

This story is almost over, readers. About two chapters left. Why don't you guys just review for old time's sake, huh? Thanks for reading and sticking with me. Like I said, the next chapter is already written and will be posted as soon as I finish the next chapter of The Worst Case, so you won't have to wait too long. Have fun.