CHAPTER 04: "Hassle in the Hallway"
Chasing the gaijin through the dusty and crumbling halls of Onigumo Manor wasn't all that hard, mostly because the halls were… well, dusty. Five sets of footprints (two in heeled shoes, two in tennis shoes, and one with four enormous paws) had carved clear and unmistakable tracks through the dirt and debris coating the rotting floorboards, making it a total cakewalk to follow the fleeing teenagers into the depths of the house.
The fact that the gaijin weren't very smart was helpful, too. They fled in a straightforward path through the house's entry hall, through a bare dining room, and into a long hallway lined with a half dozen doors on each side of its lengthy stretch. That's where Yusuke and his friends came upon them; the gaijin stood in a knot, looking frantically between the many doors in what was obviously really, really pathetic confusion. Just pick a door already, morons.
Yusuke would come regret that sarcastic thought, though.
The gaijin turned as Yusuke and company came into the hall. They jumped, comically in unison, and then they scattered, each bolting for an individual door that they wrenched open and dove inside.
The dog, it should be noted, opened his door with his tail, which curled and twisted like a monkey's tail around the nearest rusty doorknob, opening and shutting it with disconcerting dexterity.
"Yeah," Kuwabara muttered as the door slammed shut behind the mutt. "That ain't no dog."
But the dog's prehensile tail was the least of their worries. No sooner had the door shut behind the dog than did another door swing open—a door on the opposite side of the hall, not to mention further up the hall, and the dog came scrambling out of this door as if the two doors connected on the other side, which was clearly impossible since they were on opposite sides of the fucking hall and whatnot. And at first Yusuke thought maybe this dog-demon had dimension-warping powers or something, but soon the gaijin all came bursting out of doors that it was frankly not possible for them to burst out of, and there went that theory.
"I know I failed physics class," Yusuke said, "but this is ridiculous."
"It's like somethin' from a slapstick cartoon!" Kuwabara looked grey about the face as he staggered backward, gaping in horror at the scene unfolding in the hallway before him. "What the FUCK?!"
Kurama didn't reply. Ever the tactician intent on conducting research (and maybe getting a stomach wound in the process; dude had weird hobbies), he reached for the nearest door. He walked through it. And he popped out of a door on the opposite end of the hall with a positively bewildered look on his face.
"And we thought the House of Four Dimensions was disorienting," Kurama muttered as the girl in the orange sweater somehow followed him out of the door, exclaimed "Jinkies!" and vanished back into it. Exasperated green eyes slid to Yusuke and Kuwabara as the girl reappeared on the hall's opposite side. "A little help wouldn't go amiss, you two."
And so Yusuke and Kuwabara took deep breaths and tried a door for themselves. The sensation of being slapstick-cartoon-teleported was somehow less nauseating than Yusuke expected—but it was infinitely more annoying than he expected as he dove in and tried to catch the stupid gaijin, who were as unperturbed by the odd nature of the doors within Onigumo Manor as they had been when their deformed Great Dane had started to talk with its whack-a-doodle speech impediment.
This case, Yusuke decided, was fucking weird.
NOTES: Did you REALLY think we could have a Scooby Doo fic without a logic-defying hallway chase scene? Those are CLASSIC. Also all the chapter titles so far have been riffs on either Scooby Doo or YYH episode titles (or are just straight-up titles from certain episodes) because I'm an unoriginal and also pun-obsessed bastard.