Author's Notes: Don't you just get sick of reading these things? How many of you have just completely skipped what I just said because you have to know if Miroku really kissed Sango? Well not to worry, I won't be offended if you did. Chiba Usagi and I want to thank you for your patience, computers can be so difficult sometimes. I have to go to my local library just to upload these. Gotta love the family computer and all the junk on it that keeps it from working properly.
Anyway, down to business. We do not own Inu-Yasha; we cannot claim rights to Miroku, Sango, Kagome, Kirara, Shippou, or Inu-Yasha. Nor do we own the Shikon no Tama. It and some of the other great wonders of the world all come from the mind and pen of one person: Rumiko Takahashi. Feel free to sue me, but keep in mind that when you do, you will most likely be acquiring my last two pennies that I rub together to start the fire that I use to cook my food and warm my cardboard box.
Oh right! Thanks Usagi, for reminding me. I have to post a WARNING to all readers. The subject matter at the end of this chapter involves a bit of violence and adult situations and may not be suitable for younger readers, but it's still nothing to go R over.
~ Second Interlude ~
Miroku was lost deep in thought, dazedly playing with Sango's hair until she gave out a slight whimper in her sleep. Having just regained conscious awareness of the world around him, he froze for a second to be sure that's what he really heard. When she whimpered again and made a kicking motion with her right leg, his heart sank. Was he too late? Just what had Sango gone through in the few days she was lost to him—er—them?
Miroku dwelled on these dark thoughts—his mind concocting all sorts of scenarios—until Sango awoke. She winced in her sleep and a hand flew to her right knee. She slowly, partially opened her eyes, raised her head to look at her knee and then turned to take in what she had been using as a pillow. A sort of sleepy smile came to her face as she scooted up closer to Miroku—now placing her head and her hand on his chest—and whispered, "thank you," before falling asleep again. So as not to disturb her, Miroku mouthed the words, 'you're welcome,' and panged slightly when his jaw grazed the top of her head. Sango was already too asleep to notice, not like he hadn't been playing with her hair nonstop for the past hour.
Miroku—now inches from her locks—pulled bits of straw from her hair and began to slowly take his fingers through it trying to comb it out for her. He distinctly thought, 'if only I had a comb then I would do this right.' Close enough to smell her hair he rested his chin on the top of her head wishing that it wouldn't be too awkward if he kissed her crown. Instead, Miroku settled for bringing his free hand up to hers. Too close to hold her hand he brushed his thumb across her forearm. So there they were: one sleeping; the other combing her hair, perverse thoughts farthest from his mind.
~ Chapter 3: The Mask ~
Miroku shot up wide-awake, grabbed on to his staff, and pulled himself to his feet. When Kagome woke moments later, she saw him standing at the window.
"What's wrong?"
Miroku shook his head, "I could have sworn I just heard Sango scream."
"Maybe you did. After all, we are right next to the mysterious alley," Inu-Yasha butted in and then headed outside.
"Ignore him." Kagome sighed turning her attention back to Miroku, "I'm sure it was just a dream."
**~**
"Calm down, girl. It was just a dream. You don't have to scream about it."
"Just a dream? That was… that was…" the other girl stuttered.
"What was it? A premonition or a glimpse into your heart?"
"What?" She shook her head, "Neither…. I hope." A shudder passed through her. She finally opened her eyes enough to take in her surroundings. She was still in a cave, but now she was on a straw bed in a well-lit chamber. "Where am I?"
"Despite what he says, you aren't the first to follow him in here. As far as I know, I was the first. Most girls who end up here dream of one of two things, either premonitions of future events or scenes of their hearts' deepest desires. This is the void—as we've termed it—a mystical realm between two worlds. My name is Mikomi."
"I'm Sango. So how do I get out of here?"
"Oh, I'm afraid you can't. At least not on your own."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Well in the past only two other girls have made it out of here. One died and then returned to her world—that was quite a mess—and the other left here as legend predicted."
"Legend?"
"Ah, yes, the legend. It's a sad depressing tale that we do not speak about."
"Why not?"
"Because it's nearly impossible for the circumstances to happen to a girl when she's out in the light, free world, let alone stuck here in the dark separated from all of humanity." Then Mikomi kind of smiled to herself as if she'd just said something funny. "Well except for the rest of us that is."
"The rest? Where are they?"
"Oh they live in these caves," she said offhandedly as if it was totally obvious.
"Okay who are they? How did they get here?"
"Well most of them are young women like us who followed him here. Then there are the men who came to rescue them and got stuck as well. They're not the happiest people in the world."
"Why?" Sango cut her off before she could answer more.
"Because, dear they're stuck here."
"But how did they get in here?"
Mikomi thought a moment, "I'm not really sure."
Sango rolled her eyes—I'm not going to get anything useful out of her—and brushed her hands against her head.
"I took the liberty of bandaging your head. You really should be more careful when walking the pointy maze."
"H-hai," Sango nodded at the girl as if she were a complete idiot. Brushing a strand of her hair out of her face, she remembered her dream and wondered if her hair was really that disheveled. Then thinking about her dream, her hands came to her lips, which she thought felt unusually warm. Sango allowed herself a brief inward smile before she shook her head to clear those thoughts and all like them from her consciousness. 'How am I ever going to get out of here?' she thought sinking back against a stone.
"Are you thinking about him?" Mikomi smiled.
"Who?" Sango sat up looking at her as confused as ever.
"The man of your dreams, of course."
"The who of my what?" Sango blinked. She let out a little laugh, "You don't seem to understand. I am not some little, prissy girl who needs to dream about the ideal man. I've done just fine on my own up 'til now and I'd like to keep it that way. And nothing you say is going to make the least bit of difference in that department." Sango got to her feet and began to walk away.
"Oh, if that's so, then why dream about him?" Mikomi said in a know-all manner as Sango walked away.
"I guess I hit my head harder than I thought," and with those words Sango left the room completely.
"Hm," Mikomi said with a sour look on her face, rose to her feet and headed into another room, where the tall, dark man Sango had followed stood awaiting her report. "She's obstinate and unbelieving. She's searching for something. I couldn't tell what, but I don't think it was the man she followed in here." Mikomi stressed these last words by running a finger along the man's chest.
The man had a pensive look etched into his face. "I wonder…" he said his golden eyes twinkling in the darkness.
**~**
"That old woman knew something. I'm going to search until I find her."
"You may be out here for hours."
"If we're lucky he'll be out here forever."
Kagome glared at Inu-Yasha. "You're not helping?"
"Am I supposed to be?"
"Inu-Yasha," Kagome groaned, "we're not leaving this village until we find Sango."
"Feh." Inu-Yasha stormed off. He stopped for a second turned back and said, "The baa-baa said that you have to find this one guy, and something about waking a sleeping dragon?" He said the last part off handedly as if he didn't understand its purpose.
"A sleeping dragon?" Kagome questioned him.
"Or… troll perhaps."
"Inu-Yasha, what did the woman say exactly?" Miroku asked looking rather peeved.
"Uh…it's important to know that you must wake this sleeping creature with a kiss."
Miroku looked at him puzzled.
"Yeah, that's what I thought too," Inu-Yasha shrugged.
They both turned to look at Kagome.
"Could the word have been beauty? As in a sleeping beauty," Kagome asked.
Inu-Yasha paused a moment, his ears twitched a little, and then he said, "Yeah."
"A sleeping what?" Shippou asked hopping onto Kagome's shoulder.
"It's a fairy tale everyone knows in my time about a beautiful princess locked away, and she remained in a timeless sleep for a hundred years until a prince came and woke her with love's first kiss."
Miroku and Inu-Yasha looked at each other and then Shippou expressed the very thoughts that were going through their heads. "Why would the baa-baa tell us something like that? We're not looking for a princess."
Kagome sighed, "I don't think she meant the sleeping beauty. I think she was referring to Sango."
"Feh. Why would Sango be sleeping?" Inu-Yasha asked.
Miroku looked thunderstruck, "Is she trying to get me killed? Couldn't I just shake the sleeping princess awake, or dump water on her, or something that would result in only a severe beating?"
Kagome laughed, "I guess that all depends on the situation when we get there. If she's even sleeping and then she'd have to be under a pretty strong magical curse for that to be the only way to wake her."
But no matter how hard Kagome tried, everything she said just made the three males with her more and more confused.
**~**
'It has to be around here somewhere,' Sango thought as she slowly made her way through the cave system. As she walked along, she would hit pockets of darkness one minute and bright campfires set off to the side the next. At one of these campfires, she met a group of people.
"Kon'nichi wa!" a girl screamed. Sango thought she couldn't be more than thirteen.
"Oh, hello," Sango replied sheepishly turning to greet everyone.
"New here?" a tall man asked.
"Hai," Sango nodded.
"Yeah, we stumbled upon this place about…oh what was it," he said looking at the scrawny woman next to him, "six years ago, and we haven't been able to find a way out since." The woman nodded and hugged him tightly around the waist as he continued. "So how did you come by this place?"
Sango looked at them a little bewildered, "I followed a man with a mask. What do you mean you stumbled upon it? How do you know how long you've been here?"
The woman began to speak in a small voice, "Time may not pass here as it does in the other world but we are always aware of how much time has passed without us. We don't really know how; we just do." The woman smiled gingerly, "as for how we stumbled upon this place. We were spelunkers in our other life. We spent much of our free time in caves, and on one of our trips we passed through a one-sided waterfall and couldn't return."
"We suspect there are many passages like it, and for the first three years or so all we did was search for them, isn't that right dad?" the girl said perkily.
"Yep," the man nodded smiling at his daughter. The conversation continued for a while longer and Sango asked them if they'd seen the man or the mask. "A mask you say?"
"Yes, I'm trying to find it."
The family looked at each other and they all shook their heads, "Sorry, my dear, we have been all over these caves and we haven't seen anything like what you described."
"And no one's been this way all week, 'cept for you." The little girl added.
"That's okay. Thank you very much," Sango bowed a little and left.
"Such a nice girl, tragic her being all alone." The man said to his family as Sango disappeared into the darkness.
**~**
Night fell, it had already been two days since Sango disappeared, and the rest of the Shikon-gumi had done everything they could think of to find her. Kirara would leave for hours at a time and return briefly only to paw Miroku's robes and leave again. Shippou and Kagome had asked everyone in the nearby shops if they'd seen anything. Inu-Yasha sat on a few rooftops and kept an eye on the alley while passively looking for Sango or the man that could have taken her, not that anyone knew what he looked like. Inu-Yasha had a feeling he wasn't human, and as long as he only smelled humans and his companions below, he stayed on the roof. Miroku searched for the old woman, with no luck of finding her, and performed cleansing rituals for a few households to get what little information they could tell him. Stories of daughters disappearing and runaway pets were all he ever got from any of them.
When morning came, Miroku could be found sitting on a rock alone at the edge of the woods. He was actually trying to use his monk training to focus his mind on something that might lead him to her. 'Sango where are you?'
**~**
Sango awoke abruptly from another odd dream. Thinking she had heard someone call her, she sat up looking around. No one, not even a rat, could be found around her. Sango sank back into the dark corner she had been sleeping in, recalling her rather happy dream. She had dreamed of the future, not the actual future but still clearly the future. She was grown up and had two young children with her. One of them, a boy, called her mom. Sango remembered that the other was her niece; she was visiting her brother and his wife. Even her father was there. Sango sighed, her father had just told her that her husband was walking up the front walk when something awoke her from her dream. Not that any of it could ever happen; all of her family had been killed shortly before she met her new companions. Sango got lost in these thoughts, only to be shocked awake when a trio of men had rounded her corner with a torch.
"Well, well what do we have here?" the biggest said.
"Looks like a new girl," said the skinny man holding the torch with a sneer.
The man in the middle gave them each a look and then took a step toward Sango, "Hey, you shouldn't be sleeping along this stretch of cave." He smiled reaching out a hand to help her up, "these caves are known for their crime rate. It's sad really, we're all stuck down here awaiting the same fate, and yet some people still feel the need to attack others."
Sango eyed them all cautiously and took the hand up. As the nice man's hand clasped around her wrist, he yanked her towards him. Sango had expected as much and threw her whole body against him knocking him to the ground. She took off running down the corridor; looking back briefly, she saw that there were now five men on her trail. Her dress wasn't making her escape any easier. She could barely run in her kimono. One of the larger men caught up to her and grabbed her from behind. To his surprise, he landed hard against a wall. Looking back he began to realize that this was no ordinary girl, not only could she fling him over her shoulder but she could do it wearing a kimono and wooden sandals.
Sango took to running again before he'd even hit the wall. Her sandal had cracked slightly under the pressure she used to grip the floor when throwing him. So it was no surprise when it broke apart as she turned a corner. Sango skidded into a wall, swearing slightly under her breath she kicked her shoes off and continued running. Looking down she noticed that she had torn the left sleeve of her kimono and her arm was now bleeding. Ignoring the pain, she loosened the bottom of her kimono so she could run faster.
Losing her shoes worked to her advantage; as the men rounded the corner, one of them tripped on her discarded footwear and knocked all but one of them over. The torch went flying and became extinguished in a puddle of water. Sango clamored over a large rock scrapping her right knee in the process; the single man was still hot on her trail.
The man came to a sudden halt as he entered a sparkling cavern. Sango stood frozen just meters a head of him, her jaw slackened and eyes wide as she took in the sight. The entire cavern was covered from ground to ceiling in ornate masks. A soft blue light emitted from some unseen source lit the entire cave and reflected off the jewels on the masks making them sparkle.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AN: I know I'm a mean, horrible person to stop at a place like this. We all want to know what happens, what do all the masks mean, where did the cave come from, will Miroku ever find her and if so will they be able to leave? Bwahahaha… I'm not telling, this is the end of the story….bwahahahahahahaha… just kidding, it's only the end of the third Chapter. Tune in next week for the exciting fourth Chapter and possible real conclusion.
As always review if you like it, for that matter review if you don't. If you think I'm an absolute nut, tell me so.