CHAPTER 20

Souta stirred softly in his sleep. He was having the most wonderful, beautiful dream. Unfortunately, he awoke to find his fantasies of getting a perfect score on his geometry exam were just that – fantasies.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd been in school, but according to his planner – if he was keeping track correctly, which he was afraid he wasn't due to the number of times he'd been too busy, afraid, or angry to remember of mark off that a day had passed – there was an important practice exam coming up. As much as he hated math, he hated having to make up assignments even more.

So the next morning, he tried explaining all he wanted was to go home to take the exam.

Isha did not like this. "You're going back already?! I thought you were gonna stay here!"

"It's just three days! What's the problem?! It's a really important test! And it's not like I wanna go anway…"

"Is it really worth that much trouble?" Kannon asked, wading in the river they were sitting near.

"You should just stay here forever!" Shippo piped up.

"And after all that crap you gave me about leaving!" Isha said huffily.

"That's different, I – " Souta was cut off Kanon's amazed outburst of "Ohhh, heads!"

There was a large number of heads, just heads, floating down the river towards the group.

"Cooool," Souta said with the same mix of disgust and fascination Kanon's voice had been filled with.

"That is, probably there was a battle somewhere upstream," Kannon said, trying to behave like an adult nun, such as she was. "We should give them all a proper… hang on," she narrowed her eyes as she picked up one of the heads, turning it around in her hands. "There are no cuts or marks or anything. Not even any sort of, well, neck hole. These are no ordinary heads."

"Maybe they're some kind of fakes?" Souta said, examining another head.

"Definitely not. They all smell human," Isha, the only one of the group who wasn't finding a macabre fascination in the heads, said.

Souta immediately dropped the head he had been holding, and it rolled off the bank into the river. As he wiped his hands on his pants, he said, "Well, that settles it. I can't possibly think about studying with this mystery going on. So let's go investigate!"

"Yes!" Kannon exclaimed, following Souta, who was once again traveling blindly on a path to somewhere. "Who knows, there might be shikon shards involved!"

The two had already made good time in the few seconds they had been traveling, with Shippo hopping after them. Inuyasha barely had time to notice they'd left before they were almost out of sight. "Hey! Aren't you forgetting someone?!" she called after them.

"Well what're you just standing around back there for? Come on!" Souta called back impatiently.

They journeyed uphill quite a ways, following the river. The fog thickened the higher they went up, and after not too long, it was completely silent. The river was hardly even making noise.

And then… voices. Faint, mournful voices, crying out from somewhere. "Hear us! Please! Please." All the companions could see around them was the river, a cliff, and a huge tree. As they approached the tree, they learned where the voices were coming from: heads. Dozens, maybe even hundreds of heads, like the ones they'd seen earlier, were all hanging from the tree like fruit, all calling out, asking for someone to listen to them.

"Okay, now, this is just creepy," Souta shivered.

Isha was unperturbed, but also found it a bit funny that out of everything they'd been through, this was the first thing that seriously disturbed Souta?

Concern and sympathy swept over Kannon's face, and she approached the tree. "Yes, we will hear you. What has happened?"

The lowest-hanging head replied wearily, "We were devoured by the mountain man."

"A man? Not a demon?" Souta found this hard to believe.

The head continued, "We were all people who desired to leave this weary world. We heard there was a mountain paradise tended by an ancient master. We all traveled here in the hopes of living a better life; instead, we only became food for a monster known as the Peach Man."

"'Peach Man'?" Souta said in disbelief.

"Sounds like this is all your fault for being so gullible!" Isha huffed.

"Where they heck did you even hear these stories if everyone ended up getting eaten, anyway?"

"Well there's no need to be so callous! Haven't they suffered enough?!" Kannon whacked the two in the back of the head with her staff.

"I'm sorry," Souta bowed his head in apology. "Is there any way we can help you?"

"No, it is too late for us," the head sighed. "However, there may still be others who have not yet been devoured. You may still be able to save them, at least."

Immediately after the head had finished talking, a pile of bones fell from the cliff above them. The roots of the trees rose up and curled around the bones, absorbing them. The tree branches above then began sprouting more heads.

The head who had been talking before explained, "This new head is the owners of those bones. The head of an enchanted fruit is the heart of the Peach Man's elixir of youth and longevity."

Before Souta could get out his confused "What?", Isha snorted derisively and started leaping up the cliff face. "Sure sounds like a demon to me!"

"Hey! You can't just leave us down here!" Souta yelled after her.

"Yes, it would be wiser if we all went together!" Kannon added.

"By the time I lugged each one of you heavy lumps up the hill one by one, the sun will have set! So just stay down there and wait, I'll take care of everything myself!"

"…Did she just call us all fat?" Souta asked flatly, staring after her.

"Why does it matter if the sun has set by the time we all get up there? What did she mean?" Kanon turned to Souta.

"Oh, I don't…" Souta was about to give some generic handwave of an answer, until he realized. "Oh no. Ohhhhno. It's the night of the new moon! Right?"

"…And what does that mean?"

Souta explained, "On the night of the new moon, Isha loses all her demon powers, and becomes like a totally normal human. With no powers, or sense of smell, or claws, or… or anything."

"Oh, but surely she could still… ah… punch hard?"

"We have to hurry and get up there to help her," Souta said, staring miserably up the cliff.

Meanwhile, Isha had reached the top of the cliff, where she found a little house. With no further ado, she kicked the door down and demanded of the first person she found, "So are you the Peach Man? If so, I've come to kill you." The fat, wide-eyed Peach Man stared curiously, not saying a word. "Awfully well-fed, aren't you? I guess it pays to fake being an ancient master to devour all your students, eh?" She drew Tessaiga and lunged for the man's stomach, only to bounce several feet backwards. The Peach Man was completely unharmed.

The Peach Man stood and brandished his leafy staff, still giving that wide-eyed stare. "I do not know who you are or where you come from, demon, but I'll show you that I am no fake." He hit his stomach with his staff, and a cloud of peach blossoms filled the air.

"Oh yeah, producing these cheap tricks is really something!" Inuyasha scoffed.

"Look very closely at those flowers," said the Peach Man, unblinkingly.

Isha was about to make some crack, but she noticed the flowers were indeed strange – they were growing! They were almost as large as her before she even knew it. Not only that, but a gigantic hand reached out passed the flowers to grab her.

Rather than the flowers growing larger, Isha had, in fact, shrunk, as the Peach Man helpfully pointed out to her before tossing her into his mouth and swallowing without giving her a chance to even curse out loud.

OoO

Oops the end for now. By the way I really wish I could get the author's notes to be in subscript, but it seems like you can't do that on this website? Or am I just an idiot?

The peach guy storyline was always one of my faves. I don't know why. Maybe it's because Kagome looks pretty cool in Inuyasha's clothes. Inuyasha's transformation into a human also looks cool in the manga, with the black-on-white splotches in his hair. And storylines with human Inuyasha are always a bit more thrilling. I think maybe I also just find human Inuyasha more physically attractive than regular Inuyasha… _ (the Ranma ½ storyline with the dragon's whisker, where Ranma's hair keeps growing is also one of my faves, partly just because I like to point and laugh and be all "Look, it's Inuyasha!")

This is one of those chapters where I desperately struggled to reword dialogue but I was unsuccessful in many areas. This is mostly a set-up chapter, next chapter should have more of the action and whatever and naked Souta so that's fun.

I mostly like to focus on Souta in these chapters, so if Souta's not part of a scene we won't see it most of the time. This arc I'm putting most of the focus on Isha, though, because otherwise it's mostly just Souta stuck in a table until he wakes up in a bathtub and then Inuyasha shows up all bloody and battered.

One thing I've never noticed before, the previous storyline ends with Kagome sleeping. The next time we see her, she's having a dream. Was this meant to trick us to thinking it was a continuation of the last arc? Maybe it is and Inuyasha just carried her to wherever it was they were going rather than bothering to wake her up? And then when they got to that camp site, Miroku set up the bed for her because I don't know if Inuyasha would think to do something like that… Headcanon accepted.

Also in the manga, there's this weird part where Shippo asks what the sun setting has to do with anything, and then he immediately answers himself with "it's the turning of the cycle." I've read and reread that part and I can't make sense of what's actually going on – Shippo was there the first time we saw the new moon, first of all, so he should know what Inuyasha's worried about so why is he asking about it? Second, why is he answering himself? I feel like he should be talking to the audience, asking us a rhetorical question and then explaining with a flow chart or something. Anyway that's why I have Kanon asking in this story instead of Shippo.

Ah man Sango/Kohaku introduction is coming soon. Ah, geez. Will having another young man in the group change the dynamic of the story? Probably. I gotta wonder, all things considered, if my version of the story was canon, with everyone the opposite gender, and things were allowed to go however they wanted without worrying about getting a Teen rating… Well, you think maybe there'd be more sex going on? My impression of how it is in canon, is Inuyasha's too dumb to think about that stuff, and Miroku is too respectful of the two women in the group to be like "Hey, everyone else is asleep, wanna do it?" Miroku also seems to be the most mature character in the story, aside from, say, Kagome's mom and grandpa. I would therefore say that Kannon is the most mature, and respectful, person in THIS story (even though she barely gets any screentime, sorry), but… Well, I don't know. I'm trying to get across an interesting hypothetical scenario without just writing it myself. Basically, if Kannon, Kohaku, Souta, and Isha were all REAL people, would any of them go off to have sex at some point?

I'm thinking of not really addressing that outside of this author's notes. We'll see how things go. _ I'm also not totally sure if SoutaXIsha is going to progress more quickly than KagomeXInuyasha did. We'll see. As a general rule, I'm totally up for characters "doin' the do" in my AUs and whatnot, but not in ones that I actually write. (And I have HELLA Inuyasha AUs, too. Some of them are terrible, we should all be glad they aren't written down.)

…Now I'm wondering about other, personal matters… Let's just say that probably the characters do some very personal and private things when they're alone or the others are asleep, much the same way that Kannon probably menstruates, but we aren't going to mention it, outside of here, because that would be rude. Rude to the characters.

Oh god I'm suddenly thinking about what the Band of 7 arc is gonna be like if/when we ever get there. Jakotsu won't really be the same as an actual woman… hm… if I left him as a gay man he obviously wouldn't still be in love with Inuyasha, though… *starts planning arc that starts nearly 20 volumes from now*

Anyway, the next chapter may be a while. I'm moving, so it'll probably be a week or two before I get my stuff at the new place, let alone getting it all set up so I can write. I'm hoping once I'm settled in to get out two chapters a month at the very least. I'm excited because I'm rolling around some ideas in my head that will be TOTALLY different from how things went in non-bent canon, so I'm working out the how and when. Plus I'm just enjoying rereading the manga again. I seriously haven't read it since I posted chapter 16. And that was a while ago.