Author's Notes: Still don't own Inuyasha. Sorry. It's the truth. I also don't own The Tenth Kingdom, or any of its characters. If you haven't seen The Tenth Kingdom, I definitely recommend it. It is a very long moved (three VHS tapes long), so rent it when you have a Saturday with nothing else you want to do. :) And now, for your reading pleasure, the requested, much anticipated grin continuation of my story...

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It was dark in the cave, so Kagome wasn't aware that two youkai, a hanyou, and two humans were staring at her, waiting for her to continue what she had been saying. In Kagome's mind she was no longer in a cold, dark cave in feudal Japan, but had just jumped through a travelling mirror in New York City to end up in a land of fantasy and fairy tales come to life.

"Um, Kagome?" Shippou asked from his position on her lap.

Broken out of her imaginations, Kagome looked down at the little kitsune. "Hmm? What is it, Shippou?"

Inuyasha wasn't as polite as the little kitsune. "Hey, bitch, I asked you a question!" he exclaimed.

Kagome bristled at his coarse speech, but knowing that reacting would be counter-productive, she settled on glaring in his general direction. "What did you ask, Inuyasha?" she asked the hanyou.

"Stupid bitch," Inuyasha complained. "You are probably the most educated person in this cave, and you can't even remember a stupid question for thirty seconds." Inuyasha turned to look behind him, trying to figure out what it was Kagome was glaring at, but there was nothing of note behind him. She was impossible to figure out, so he just shrugged and turned back to face the girl. "I asked you if there was a dog in this tenth kingdom story."

Kagome blushed, remembering the question and the reason she had hesitated to answer it. "Umm, yeah, there is a dog in that story, but he is sort of split personality."

"Not nearly as noble as the wolf, is he, Kagome?" Kouga asked to taunt Inuyasha. Inuyasha growled, but Kagome had to agree with Kouga.

"In the story of 'The Tenth Kingdom,' the wolf is noble, but the dog is sort of a prince." Inuyasha stopped growling and grinned foolishly, but then Kagome continued. "And he is a common dog, too. The prince was human, and was cast into the dog's body by a witch. The dog's personality and mind get transferred to the human prince's body in its place, so it is sort of hard to tell which is really the dog in the story." Kagome paused, remembering something. "Actually, now that I think about it, the wolf was really only a half wolf."

Kouga snorted. "A worthless hanyou?" he asked.

"What are you complaining about?" Inuyasha grumbled. "You keep calling Kagome your woman, which she isn't, by the way, but if she were your mate, which she isn't, wouldn't all of your pups be hanyou?"

Kouga didn't have a response ready for this. In fact, that had never occurred to him. He was nothing if he wasn't stubborn, though. "Kagome is still my woman," he answered, ignoring the growl Inuyasha gave in response to that.

"But there are no foxes?" Shippou asked, changing the conversation.

Kagome gave the little kitsune an smile that was both apologetic and appreciative. "Nope, no foxes. Do you want to hear the story anyway, Shippou?" she asked.

Shippou curled up deeper on her lap. "Yeah, go ahead and tell it, but I might fall asleep if there isn't a fox in it," he warned.

Kagome smiled, petting his head. "If you're sleepy, I won't be offended," she said.

"Will you tell the story now, Kagome-sama?" Miroku asked. He couldn't see her, so he didn't realize she was petting the little kitsune.

"Sure, I'll give it a shot, but it's a long story. I'll have to summarize it a lot."

"Just tell it, bitch," Inuyasha complained, turning around once again to try to figure out what Kagome kept glaring at behind him.

Kagome sighed and began her tale. "The story starts in New York City in my time."

"What is a new york city?" Shippou asked.

"New York City is the name of a big city in America. A girl named Virginia lived there with her dad, whose name was Tony. I said Virginia was a girl, but she was all grown up and out of school, although she still lived with her dad."

"She was still unmarried, wasn't she?" Sango asked.

"Yeah, she was single," Kagome answered.

"Then why is it surprising that she had not left her father's household?" Sango wanted to know.

Kagome sighed. The difficulties were already beginning. "In my time, children usually move out of their parents' home once they finish school. Usually they are not married yet when they move out to live on their own."

"Unmarried women living without their fathers' protection?" Miroku marveled with a sigh. His yelp indicated that Sango had probably hit him again.

"Do females in your realm really leave the den unmated?" Kouga wanted to know.

"That is just foolish," Inuyasha complained. "Who protects them?" He turned to glare at Kagome, his eyes sparkling with barely-contained rage. "You will not do such a thing," he told her.

Kagome rolled her eyes.

"No, I'm being serious, bitch. You will not live on your own, as you put it, when you are finished with school," Inuyasha stated.

"Of course she won't," Kouga replied. "She will join me and my brother wolves in our den. She has no need to live on her own. She is my woman."

When the two started communicating in incomprehensible barking and snarling, Kagome tried to change the subject. "I thought you wanted to hear my story," she said, letting her annoyance color her tone. The barking tapered off, although a low rumbling growl continued. Kagome decided to ignore it and speak over it.

"Virginia worked as a waitress, which means she served food at a restaurant, which is like an inn except that nobody sleeps there." She foresaw the next line of questioning and answered it before it could be asked. "In my time, people often eat out even when they are near their homes, just for the convenience. If you are travelling, you stay at a hotel. And, no, Virginia was not a prostitute."

She sighed, then continued. "One night when she was working, she found a handsome golden retriever -- that is a kind of dog. She ended up taking it home with her later that night."

"So she ends up with the dog!" Inuyasha said happily.

"No, she doesn't," Kagome answered. "That same night she also met Wolf."

"What was the wolf's name, Kagome?" Shippou asked.

"Wolf," she replied.

"Huh?" Kouga asked.

"The wolf's name was Wolf. I don't know why. It just is. Virginia didn't know that Wolf was a half-wolf, though; she thought he was just a person. He came to the restaurant's outdoor patio and started sniffing around. He was looking for the dog, but he got distracted by the food the people were eating."

"Isn't that just like a wolf," Inuyasha said, "letting something stupid like that distract him from a hunt!"

Kouga growled, but was otherwise silent.

"Why did the wolf want to find a dog?" Shippou asked.

"Well, it just so happens that the dog was really Prince Wendell, who had been trapped in the body of the dog by an evil witch, who was also the queen and his step-mother. He escaped the queen by jumping through a travelling mirror, sort of like I jump through the well to get to my time, but the mirror took him from his realm, a place of magic, to New York City in my realm, where people don't believe in magic."

"People in your realm don't believe in magic?" Kouga asked, confused. "But I thought you were a miko!"

Kagome sighed. "I am, I think, but I was never trained as a miko in my realm, and I grew up at a temple! Most people just don't believe anymore. Back to the story, though:

"Poor Prince Wendell couldn't talk, so he couldn't tell Virginia what had happened to him. She hid the dog in a storage closet, but when she went back to check on the dog it had knocked over a bag of flour and written something on the floor with his paw, so she knew this dog was special."

"What did he write?" Shippou wanted to know.

Kagome blushed. "I don't know."

"You don't know?" Sango wondered.

"Well, I learned this story by watching a movie -- moving pictures, a concept I will not discuss now -- and the movie is American, where they speak English. My English isn't very good, and I couldn't read whatever it was he was writing!"

Inuyasha laughed. "Stupid bitch. I thought you were studying English, and you can't read better than a common dog?"

Kagome glared at something behind him again before continuing. "Well, Wolf had been sent by the queen to find Prince Wendell, and he tracked him to the restaurant, but when he was there he saw Virginia."

"So Wolf was working for the queen? Was he tricked to do it, like I was tricked to working for Naraku?" Sango asked.

"Not really," Kagome admitted, "but he falls in love with Virginia and helps her instead of the queen." Kagome paused, trying to remember if it was the trolls or Wolf that gave Virginia's father the wishing beans that made him able to understand Prince Wendell, and why exactly Virginia had gone to her grandmother's house that evening. "This story is really too long to tell, guys. Can I give you the really short version?" she begged.

"Sure, Kagome," Shippou said with a yawn, patting her hand reassuringly with his paw.

She patted the little kitsune back before speaking again. "It ended up that Tony -- Virginia's father -- could understand Prince Wendell telepathically because of an accidental wish, and Virginia, Prince Wendell, and Tony went back through the magic travelling mirror to go to the realm of nine kingdoms. You see, the people in the nine kingdoms didn't believe that there was a tenth kingdom, but the tenth kingdom was the world Virginia was from. Wolf followed them and ended up helping them on a journey to Prince Wendell's castle, where he was soon going to be crowned a king.

"They had lots of hardships along the way, and Wolf and Virginia ended up falling in love. They found out that the wicked queen, Prince Wendell's step-mother, was really Virginia's own mother, who had disappeared from New York City years before and was taught black magic by the old wicked queen. They also found out that a man that wrote down a lot of fairy tales in my realm had actually been to the nine kingdoms, and that that was where he got all of his ideas for his stories. That didn't really happen, by the way; it was just a part of this story.

"The dog that inhabited Prince Wendell's human body was crowned king, and Wolf was supposed to poison the kings and queens and rulers that had come to the coronation, but instead he gave them a sleeping potion so the queen would only think they were dead. Virginia ended up killing her mother, although it was in self-defense, meaning she had to do it to protect herself because the queen was trying to kill her. Then all the royal people woke up, and the dog and Prince Wendell's bodies touched, making their spirits and minds go back into the proper bodies. Tony stayed with Wendell, who was now a king, since he didn't like the life he had in New York City, and Wolf told Virginia that he could smell that she was pregnant with his pup. The end."

There was silence as the party tried to assimilate that very-quickly told story. Inuyasha was the first to speak. "Virginia ended up mated to the wolf?" he asked incredulously.

Kouga sniffed. "Of course she did. You thought maybe she was going to end up with the dog? You see, women from Kagome's realm would rather be with a half-breed wolf than a full-blooded dog prince!"

Kagome sighed and leaned back against the wall of the cave, petting the softly snoring kitsune and trying to tune out the barks and snarls that were being passed back and forth over her head. "I am tired," she said, "and I am cold and my clothes are still wet. I am not in the mood for egotistical, territorial, testosterone-driven yapping. Please stop."

While Miroku was impressed with the big words Kagome had just used, and Sango was surprised that Kagome would refer to two canine-youkai displaying over her as yapping, the two canine-youkai seemed to ignore her completely. It was unfortunate that none in the party bothered to remember that Inuyasha's sword, the one that kept his youkai and human blood in balance, was currently holding up the barrier over their shelter and was therefore not in contact with him.



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Author's Notes again: Now that I've put in that last line, I guess this story will be getting longer, since I can't really end it here. I'll bet I can get another story in before Inuyasha goes all red-eyed. I've had a request for "The Princess and the Pea." Any other requests?

Oh, and I highly recommend you watch "The Tenth Kingdom" if you can. There is a lot more to it than Kagome's summary look at me, giving Kagome credit for a summary I wrote so it is still worth watching.