DISCLAIMER: I own some J-pop. No, I don't own marketing rights and the like, I own a CD with J-pop on it. Still don't own FY.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: You know, dubs are an interesting thing.
Take FY. There are some moments that are absolutely great in dubbing (i.e. when Chichiri's playing emperor, and is sitting on his head on the throne, and goes in the absolute greatest sing-song tone "This job gets pretty lonely and I'm stir crazy") and moments that are absoluely horrendous (i.e. Miaka's whole "I'll fight them" speech about the Seiryu after Suboshi kills Tamahome's family). On the whole it's all right, even though I definitely prefer the subs with what amounts essentially to a role-call of the Who's-Who Seiyuu from '95 (the year the anime first came out).
Last night they started showing Inu-Yasha on Adult Swim - the dubbed version. Now, I'm an IY manga addict. I'd love to watch the anime, but I'm too poor to get fansubs shipped in and they haven't released it on DVD in the US yet, although with the dub on TV now they're probably going to. I was only able to catch the last five-ten minutes of it, but it was enough to formulate some opinions. Such as: Inu-Yasha's voice scared me at first, but it was all right once I got used to it. But why do they pronounce Kikyo "kee-kee-yo"? There's no extra "i" there. And poor Kagome's dub voice... I can understand being somewhat in dreamy shock, but there was almost no life in her voice. I'm withholding judgement on the dubbing as a whole for a few more episodes, though. And I'm very glad they didn't re-record the ending song in English - it's actually really cool in Japanese! It's by Dream!
~grins~ Okay, musings over. Time to get to what y'all're actually interested in, I think: replies and stuff!
Flying heart, I don't know why you didn't knowwwwwww! Maybe ff.n was being evil again?
~laughs~ Kryssa, the way you describe Hokusai's reaction to Chiri is the best! You're better at these characters than I am! You're right, Hokusai would have to have a lopsided grin and a joyful glint in his eyes (eyes! eyes! ^_^ Not eye for once!) because they're just so him. You are the Chichiri Girl (no offense to Roku-chan's sister!) for me ^_~
Draconsis, glad you liked the cats ^_^ I love cats and I want a lot of them, so I decided to give someone a lot of cats ~firm nod~ If I ever get six cats I'm gonna name them those names - but of course, their coloring would have to match! Except for Sushi, I don't think I'd find a poor cat that was partially green.
Lumi-chan... bad idea. ~snatches the Pocky and stashes it in a Safe Place~ Pocky is god!
CLAMPraven, there's nothing wrong with being a fangirl! ^_~ But I'll keep that in mind.
~grins at Keimei~ Yeah, the way the Gesshin thing is going so far, it's not gonna be a happy night for anything relatively small and flammable... Gesshin's nearly killed Tasuki twice, anyway. Ahh, the fun ^_^
Evil Hunter, how much sugar do you eat a day?
Elwing, you're back! I wondered what happened to you! BAD interent for dying on Elwing! Bad! I'm so glad you've caught up with everything and that you like what's going on! Hope you'll continue liking it!
"What is this place again?"
"It's a used bookstore." Reijirou and Nuriko stood outside a small shop about a mile from Seinan in a distinctly "discount" area, decidedly shabby-looking but nonetheless giving off a comfortable feel. A faded sign in red paint above the door proclaimed the name to be "The Stacks". Hopefully they had what he was looking for.
"Why are we here again?"
Reijirou rolled his eyes. Nuriko was catching on to things more and more quickly, but he still didn't seem to understand the concept of classes and homework. Work-work he was fine with, but school… maybe never. At least he'd learned not to try and talk to him while he was sitting in lectures. "I need to find a lot of books for Taka's class, and he said this place usually had most of them. So we're going in to find out."
"Oh! I get it now," Nuriko replied with a cheerful grin. Somehow Reijirou doubted he did, but he let it go and pushed open the door, making a little bell tinkle.
The inside was as comfortably shabby as the outside: dim, but with plenty of light to read by, free-standing shelves in the middle of the floor as well as pushed up against the walls. Every so often he could see a dust mote in the air in front of him. The carpet was worn in places but some color remained, and the walls and been painted an off-white that helped promote the light. No one was at the counter, but as he looked around he didn't mind: the shelves were divided into sections and genres and neatly labeled with things like "Biological Science," "Mystery," or "Manga." He resisted the temptation to stop at that set of shelves and continued past into the area that contained the non-fiction paperbacks, checking the list he held in his hand.
"Ne, Reijirou, come here." Nuriko sounded surprised, but not shocked, and Reijirou casually looked up. The seishi was waving him over to look at something on the wall, something he'd passed right by but Nuriko had stopped to look at.
"What is it?" He wandered back over, checking the shelves for the History section, and paused next to Nuriko. The seishi pointed at the wall, and interested expression on his face.
There was a fairly large frame hanging there. A Polaroid photo was set in a dark green matte, and above it were the computer-printed words "Our First Customer" and below it a date. It looked pretty cheesy, but when he glanced at the photo his jaw nearly dropped. Keisuke and Tetsuya stood there, one on each side of a grinning college-age woman (who also looked kind of embarrassed) who was displaying some book with a red jacket and tiny type on the cover. He glanced upward briefly at the date; it was more than five years before.
"So that's why Taka said to come here…" He suddenly grinned. "Those three must be doing pretty good business: Taka tells his students to come here to buy books for his class, and they probably sell them back when they're done with them. All the while he gets to help out his brother-in-law and their best friend."
Nuriko giggled. "Scandalous."
"May I help you?"
Reijirou whirled to see a boy, or young man (perhaps a year or so younger than himself), push his way out of the curtained-off doorway behind the counter that he assumed led to the back room, and broke into a grin: the boy was fully two inches shorter than him. It made him feel unnecessarily pleased. "Maybe… Do you have any of these?" He walked up to the counter and laid the list on the desk, positioned so the clerk could read it. "I need them for a class."
He took one quick look at the paper and his face broke into a grin. "You're in Professor Sukunami's class, aren't you?"
"I didn't think it was stamped on my forehead." Reijirou grinned also. "I guess you get a lot of us in here, then."
"More than you'd believe. But so far this year you're the first. Which means you're lucky, I think we have almost all of these in now." He quickly knelt and began scanning something under the counter.
Reijirou leaned forward until he was almost lying on his stomach on the counter in order to see the clerk. "You keep them back there? Damn, you must get us in here a lot…"
"Yeah, I found it saved time." A book flew up to land with a thunk on the countertop. "Somehow his students-" Thunk. "-keep coming to us and-" Thunk. "-asking for the same books." Thunk thunk thunk thunk. "This just made it easier." He stood up straight again, fully ten more books balanced in his arms. He blew his short-cut brown hair out of his eyes and let them drop on the table. "How many is that? Seventeen?"
"Yeah… I think so. I'll have to find the others other places, then?"
He nodded, hair bobbing up and down with the motion. "Gomen, we just don't have all of them. Most, yes, but we're not magicians."
"No, no, this is fine. I didn't even expect this many." Reijirou began to make a stack of the books, looking for price stickers. "But I have one more thing I've gotta ask you to do."
"What?"
Reijirou grinned again. "Can you double this? I told one of my classmates I'd get her a set too, as long as I was gonna be here anyway."
The clerk stared at him, wide-eyed. "Are you sure you can carry that many?"
"Don't worry about it."
"SUZAKU!!!" THUD THUD THUDTHUDTHUD CRAAAASSSHH.
The floor shook beneath his feet and he dreaded turning around, a sinking suspicion as to what caused the commotion floating through his head. In front of him the clerk's mouth had dropped open in astonishment and he was staring off to Reijirou's left. Slowly, Reijirou turned around to see what had happened.
As he suspected: the dust was slowly settling to land on a pure mess of books and shelves. Five of the free standing shelves had been knocked over in a domino effect, the first falling into the second and the second into the third and so on. The fifth couldn't reach far enough to hit the wall, and so landed flat on the floor. Books were everywhere, like a new carpet had been laid. The boy scrambled around the counter and rushed to the chaos, gaping like a fish out of water and stuttering about how could it have happened. Reijirou just kept his gaze (when the boy's back was turned) on the guilty-looking seishi standing barely a foot from where the first shelf had originally stood.
"I didn't do it!" he cried.
Reijirou rolled his eyes again and brushed past him, grasping the top of the first shelf and hauling slowly back on it, pulling it back to its standing position. The clerk got the idea and knocked the stray books out of where it was supposed to stand, and Reijirou could put it up again unhindered.
"Thank you," the boy muttered, trying to gather books into piles and get them out of the way. "How in the hell could that happen? Those things are sturdy as rock!"
Reijirou wisely chose not to answer that rhetorical question. "Don't mention it. Ne, can you move those?" He pointed to the random paperbacks that had landed where the second shelf was supposed to stand.
"What? Oh! Sure." Together they made fast work of setting the store back to rights: Reijirou moved the shelves as the other pulled books out of the way. In just a couple minutes all five were upright and the books were knocked (or thrown) into general piles. The boy sat cross-legged on the floor to sort them back into their categories and started to protest when Reijirou also sat and began looking at titles, but Reijirou simply shut him up with a look and kept working. It would take the boy a long time to do it on his own, and he really didn't have anything better to do anyway.
He waited until the boy was absorbed in his work to glare at Nuriko and make suitable gestures that meant "go outside", or at the very least "get away from the shelves". Nuriko tried to protest, but Reijirou kept glaring pointedly at him and he finally floated, pouting, out the door.
As they worked a silence fell, one of light-hearted and resigned study as they focused on sorting for awhile. Reijirou was the slower of the two; he didn't work with the books, so he had no idea where some of the more confusing titles meant until he'd read the little jacket flap or back cover. The boy sorted with the speed of a professional librarian, as if he'd been doing it a long time.
"Ne, what's you name?" Reijirou inquired as he puzzled over The Theory of Music - did that go in Arts or Psychology?
"It's Tani Daisuke," he replied, grabbing the book and professionally flipping it at the Arts pile. "What about you?"
"Enomoto Reijirou." A surprised and interested look crossed Daisuke's face. "What?"
"Nothing much… just, do you know Yuki-san and Kajiwara-san?"
Reijirou raised an eyebrow enquiringly. "Yeah, why?"
Daisuke shook his head. "No, it's really nothing, they just mentioned your name a couple days ago. I didn't know you'd be walking in the store soon after."
Reijirou grinned. "Must've been a shock."
Daisuke gave a tentative grin of his own. "Not really, just unexpected. And wow, you must be strong. Those bookshelves aren't just sturdy as rock, they're heavy as rock also. That's how Yuki-san and Kajiwara-san got 'em so cheap, no one else was willing to move them, even though they look good."
Reijirou glanced back in mild surprise at the shelves. "Those weren't all that heavy… More than I normally lift, yeah, but not that much of a strain."
Daisuke whistled appreciatively. "You must be strong then."
"Anyway," Reijirou broke in, getting uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation, "what grade are you in?"
"I'm a senior in high school, going to college next year. Are you a college freshman?" He threw a new book in the direction of the Sports section. Reijirou nodded and also chucked one that way. "So… this'll sound odd, but maybe you could tell me what it took to get in?"
Reijirou put down the book he was inspecting and gave Daisuke a strange look. He sure didn't seem like an idiot, but only an idiot wouldn't know what it took to get into college, since they bombard a student with the information from their first day of school in their entire lives. "I would've thought you knew already."
Daisuke waved a hand in a dismissive way. "I know what they tell everyone, and of course studying and good grades are important, but is there anything else? Some sort of secret ability the ones they accept have and the ones they reject don't have?"
"You… You don't happen to believe in all that supernatural shit, do you?"
"No, but their selection process perplexes me."
Light bulb. Perplexes. Any normal person would've used confused, but not him. Which meant… "You're really smart, aren't you?"
Daisuke grinned sheepishly. "Top of my class… in Jonan."
"JONAN?! God, you'll have no problem going to Harvard in America if you want! My god…" He shook his head slowly, bewildered that the guy who could arguably be the smartest high school senior in the area would worry about getting into college. "With a full scholarship to boot." He shook his head again. "Look, you have nothing to worry about, I wasn't even in the top fourth of my class and they took me. You won't have any problems at all. Shit… Jonan…"
"Calm down, it's not like it's anything big." Daisuke shifted uncomfortably.
"Nothing big? Oh lord… All right, I'll shut up," he mumbled, catching the look Daisuke threw him.
The silence this time was not nearly so comfortable.
When they'd finished sorting the fallen books, Daisuke rang up his total and Reijirou forked over the money. He briefly wondered why Daisuke was bothering to work in a small, out of the way used bookstore, but money didn't grow on Sakura trees after all. It was also a very tactless question.
When Daisuke once again asked if he could carry all the books, Reijirou smirked. He'd come prepared. He pulled several grocery bags out of his pockets and popped them open; none of the books were really big and he could fit several in each bag without worrying about the plastic breaking. Then he simply strung a couple of bags on each arm, said good bye, and walked out the door.
Nuriko was standing on the sidewalk out front, starting idly at the building across the street. Reijirou waved a hand in front of his face to get his attention, and the seishi blinked at him. "Nani?"
"What happened in there?"
Nuriko shrugged carelessly. "Just got a surprise, that's all." He clearly wasn't going to say anything more on the topic.
Reijirou shook his head. "Anything interesting happen out here?" The bus was going to be a few minutes in coming, they might as well talk while they waited.
"Chichiri dropped by. He seems more sociable than anyone so far. Said he'd already been to Soi and Taka-chan and was going to Tasuki after that. Apparently Hokusai's still thrilled and is determined to find a way to work this into one of his books or whatever."
"Anything else?"
"No- Oh, yeah. I told him we'd found Chiriko."
"WHAT?!?!"
"Funny, that was my reaction," Reijirou commented idly.
Risako stared at the two of them with her mouth open in shock, the bags of books hanging by their handles from limp hands attached to limp arms. A pair of silver wire-framed reading glasses was threatening to fall off her face. Reijirou amusedly put out a hand and pushed them back up to sit on the bridge of her nose. "A-Are you sure? Keisuke and Tetsuya wouldn't be such idiots that they'd ignore a seishi right under their noses!"
"Remember, if they even saw Chiriko in the first place it was as a miniature thirteen-year-old. He's grown up a lot, and looks kind of different that much older." Nuriko grinned. "After all, it took me a few minutes to recognize him, and I spent a lot of time with the kid. They simply didn't realize it."
"Yeah, and when you did, you made chaos explode."
Nuriko glared sarcastically at Reijirou. "Next time let's see how YOU react when that happens. And it was an accident!"
Hoshiko came out of the Daishis' kitchen, drying a plate with a dishtowel. "Keep your voices down, no need to shout. What was an accident?"
"Nuriko knocking over five shelves and a mountain of books in the store," Reijirou replied easily. "He freaked when he recognized Chiriko."
"Chiriko?" Hoshiko's voice became interested and sad all at the same time. "I remember Chiriko… He was a brave boy."
Nuriko nodded. "He was. And now he's here again."
"I think… I'd like to see him when he knows."
"I'm sure you'll be able to. But right now we have to figure out how to 'enlighten' him." Reijirou pushed the still-stunned Risako into a chair and took one himself. "And Suezo. They're the only two Suzaku left. And there's Tomo and Miboshi to find also." He surpressed a shudder that threatened to run down his spine. He privately thought Miboshi was very creepy, based on what was on him in the book, but he deserved a warning like everyone else. "And Yui has to call them and the twins, then we have everyone. And then we've gotta figure out a way to stop the Wolf Man."
"Yeah… man, we only have to find two? Then we're almost done…" Risako trailed off, pushing her glasses back up the bridge of her nose again. "It sure doesn't seem like it should be that simple… after all, we started not even a week ago…"
"Don't argue, dear. Consider it a matter of luck." Hoshiko leaned back through the doorway to deposit the plate and dishtowel on the kitchen counter, then joined them in the living area, taking her usual seat. "Hopefully, with a bit more luck, this will all be over within another week. It took us nearly two months to deal with our problem."
Reijirou watched her closely, but she didn't elaborate further. They still hadn't gotten her to spill about what the reincarnated Byakko went through, or anything about the surrounding circumstances. When they asked, she just pressed her lips together and shook her head, wavy white hair shaking with the movement. Ryobe had been similarly tight-lipped. Speaking of Ryobe… "Ne, Risako, where's your father?"
"Hmm? Oh, he's at the dojo."
Reijirou blinked. "Dojo?"
"Yes, Ryobe owns and runs a small dojo in downtown." Hoshiko smiled. "Remember who he used to be. A professional-quality fighter capable of teaching Tamahome even at a hundred years old. Kind of logical, ne?"
It did make sense when put in that light. "What do you do, then?"
"I help him with the books and things, and keep him in line. I don't have to be up there much to do it though."
"All right," Nuriko broke in, drifting over to sit on the couch, "how are we going to do this?"
Risako blinked in confusion. "Do what?"
"Daisuke, Suezo, the twins, and more." Nuriko waved his hand expressively to show the large scale-operation they were dealing with. "Miaka's part seems nearly over, but Yui's is just beginning. And the twins are going to be hard." He flashed Reijirou a quick, worried, "correct me if I'm wrong" look. "If I've figured this out right, in this world the twins are still considered children in a lot of ways. Everyone else so far has been fairly easy to deal with because they're adults and can be by themselves. But we might have to deal with those boys' parents." Reijirou nodded slightly at him, and he sighed quietly with relief. He really was getting good at sorting out the modern world.
There was a pop of air and they all glanced up, not surprised, to see Chichiri standing there. His fox-like mask was smiling, but at the same time also looked excited and overwhelmed. "You two are good at throwing us for a loop no da. Everyone's in a frenzy about Chiriko na no da."
Reijirou settled back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest. "You know, I don't know why we didn't think of this seishi-to-seishi communication before. I could've saved a fortune on phone bills." He smirked mildly in Nuriko's direction. The hospital phone bill had arrived the day before, and it was… too big for his parents to be willing to pay it. There went the funds for a new jacket… "I could've just sent you to Miaka with a message every time we figured something out."
Nuriko gave him a dirty look. "I would've thrown you into the wall if you'd ordered me around."
"Can it you two," Risako ordered. Both reluctantly shut up. "What's everyone saying, Chiri?"
Reijirou could almost see Chichiri's eye roll at the nickname Risako had immediately latched on to, but he chose to ignore the usage this time. "Miaka's gloating because Keisuke and Tetsuya are going crazy about how they had one right there and missed him no da. Tasuki's ecstatic, Taka's smirking, and the Seos are trying to plan what to do next na no da."
"We need to talk to them then, we thought of another problem." Hoshiko stood up and knocked some stray dust off her skirt. "The twins. We need to figure out a way to get them alone to explain all this and call their seishi." She began walking back towards the master bedroom. "Reijirou, I think that will have to be your job," she called back over her shoulder.
"What the...? Why is it always my job?" he grumbled under his breath.
She came back with a pile of clothes in her arms, giving him a sharp look. "I have better hearing than you seem to think. And it's because you happen to be the one their family is familiar with. Meaning they would most likely trust you more than any of the rest of us." Out went Hoshiko with her laundry.
"So what do you expect me to do about it?"
"They're your brother's friends, ne?" Nuriko spoke up suddenly. Reijirou nodded. "So offer to take all three of them somewhere, and have someone else distract your brother long enough for us to do it."
"Explaining it to two of 'em? That'll take a LONG time to explain, I don't think anyone can distract my brother that long." Reijirou sighed. "But it sounds like the best thing we're gonna think of… Short of breaking into their house or kidnapping them on the way to school, I can't think of another way to get 'em alone."
"We sound like a bunch of perverted criminals," Risako muttered. "Getting them 'alone'. It can be taken in really sick ways." Suddenly her head snapped up in Reijirou's direction. "Does your brother like to read?"
"Yeah, why?" he replied cautiously. Intense Risako could be strange.
Thankfully, she grinned brightly. "That's it then!"
"That's what then na no da?" Chichiri asked, also cautiously.
"Take them to the bookstore! Gesshin or I can distract Hajime with a book, and he'll think Katai and Shirai just wandered off to look at other things!"
Nuriko blinked, then slowly began to grin. "That might be just the thing…"
"Definitely!"
After a quick bus ride back to the Enomoto apartment (Chiaki had completely refused to let him have the car for the next couple of days and had hidden the keys just to make her point), praying that Hajime would be there when they got back, Reijirou and Nuriko nearly sprinted up the stairs and exploded through the front door.
"Whoa, son," his father said as the door banged sharply against the wall. "Where's the fire?"
"Dad?" Reijirou was confused. Why was his father home so early? It was only - he glanced quickly at the clock on the wall - about four in the afternoon.
"I got out early today, there wasn't much for me to do. And I'm going to enjoy my free time." Enomoto-san was standing behind the bar-counter that separated the kitchen from the dining area, sandwich makings spread in front of him. "Want a sandwich? Got almost anything you can ask for."
"Uh, no thanks Dad." His dad was generally a cool person, but him being here would make it much less easy for them to corner Hajime. "Is anyone else here?"
His father nodded, spreading mayonnaise on a piece of wheat bread. "Hajime and Chiaki are both studying in their rooms. Your mother went grocery shopping." He gave his son a significant look. "We seem to be going through food pretty fast recently."
Nuriko smothered giggles as Reijirou turned slightly pink. "We are? Well, I'll just have to eat out more often then… I'm gonna go do my reading." He practically dashed down the hall to his room, Nuriko giggling unrepentantly as he followed.
Reijirou threw the bags of books on his bed and quickly closed the door, leaning against it. "Man, how do you explain that your best friend from a former life came over with her daughter and ate it all? And then Tasuki seems to be obsessed with our stuff…" Tasuki, it seemed, didn't use the possessing-capabilities to help Gesshin or to make things easier. He used them to eat basically everything under the sun. And as good food was expensive, the two of them frequently turned up on the Enomotos' doorstep at the oddest times, ready for anything Reijirou was willing to throw them.
"I can see how it might be hard," Nuriko replied with an amused grin.
Reijirou took a deep breath, held it for a couple seconds, then let it out slowly, trying to calm down. Better talk to Hajime now, while he had the chance. "I'll be right back, don't destroy anything while I'm gone." Nuriko saluted military-style, something he'd picked up from modern times, as Reijirou exited his room.
Hajime's door was closed and the little "Do Not Disturb" sign he'd stolen from a hotel somewhere was hanging on the handle, but Reijirou knocked anyway. When Hajime heard what his brother was proposing, he'd forgive him for breaking his concentration.
"Go away Nee-chan, for the last time!"
Reijirou rolled his eyes. "I really hope I'm not a 'Nee-chan.'"
"Oh." After a couple of moments the door swung in, revealing Hajime with two pencils stuck behind his ears and a calculator in his hand. "It's you, Aniki. Gomen, Chiaki keeps trying to talk to me and I wanna get this homework over with."
"I don't blame you. Algebra again?" Hajime nodded sadly. "Well, don't ask me for help, it was never my strong point. Anyway, just one question and I'll let you get back to work."
"What?"
Reijirou grinned internally. Begin countdown… "I was out trying to get some books I need for a class today and I found a used bookstore we've never been to." Hajime's face began to brighten significantly, green eyes getting wider. "I was thinking maybe sometime this week you and I could go check it out. They've got a lot of stuff there I've never seen before."
"Really? COOL!"
Blastoff. He grinned. Now was the tricky part; he had to sound infinitely more casual, but not overdo it at the same time. "You can even bring a couple friends along. Maybe the Aizawa twins would like it."
"I bet they would! Arigato gozaimasu Aniki! I'll call them after dinner, I think we're all free Wednesday afternoon, is that okay with you?"
"Whoa, slow down. Yeah, that's fine." He grinned at the enthusiastic boy and deliberately ruffled his hair. "Just let me know, and make sure their parents give them permission to go."
"I will!" The door closed sharply as Hajime practically danced back to his math homework. Reijirou couldn't help it; he began to laugh right in the middle of the hallway. The kid's single-minded determination was amazing, he'd probably get back to work on the math and do them all wrong without realizing it because he was too excited over finding a new bookstore.
He calmed down sufficiently to walk normally and went back to his room, where he found Nuriko lying on his back on his bed and throwing a small ball up towards the ceiling. The seishi was definitely controlling his strength; the ball never touched the ceiling, and it didn't shoot up and down with an amazing amount of force. Reijirou left him to his activity, picked up the portable phone, and pulled a legal pad out of one of his desk drawers.
The top page was covered with the names and corresponding phone numbers of everybody mixed up in this thing, from him at his apartment to the Seos at their house to the Obinatas at their hotel (where they'd taken an indefinite extended reservation). His number, as a matter of fact, was down twice, for both him and Gesshin. He quickly looked up Keisuke's number and dialed it, putting the phone to his ear and listening to the ringing on the other end of the line. The seishi-to-seishi communication he'd joked about earlier was definitely a good idea and great for spreading news among a large number of people very fast, but some things just required a telephone.
The phone rang four times, and then there was a click. "Keisuke, it's Reijirou, I just got through-"
"You have reached the residence of Yuki Keisuke," the answering machine said in a very tinny-sounding imitation of Keisuke's voice. "At the beep please leave your name, number (especially if you're a good-looking woman), and a passionate message about why you called, and I shall break down in tears before I call you back. Thank you!" Beeeeeeep.
"Keisuke, before I say anything else, you need a girlfriend desperately. What was that, especially if you're a good-looking-"
There was another click. "Well, what do you expect? I get bored making plain old messages," Keisuke grumbled. "And I don't appreciate the comments on my social life, especially from someone more than ten years younger than me."
"Hey, at least I've been on dates."
"With who? The school councilor?"
"Anyway," he said firmly (play-fighting with Keisuke was fun but they had business to discuss), "I just talked to my brother and he's all set. He's going to call the twins and get them to go along also, on Wednesday afternoon."
"Wednesday?" There was some shuffling on the other end of the line, as if he was shifting through papers. "Wednesday… Wednesday… Ah shit," he mumbled.
"What is it now?"
Keisuke sighed. "Daisuke's not working and he'll refuse to come in. Damnit, if we could just take care of the three of them at once it'd be so much easier."
"Yeah, but we'll still take care of two of them. We need to call Yui and make sure she can be there, do you know if she has anything else scheduled?"
"Iya, but Tetsuya would. I'll call him next." There was a minor thud but no cry of pain, so Reijirou resisted the temptation to laugh and tease him. "I still can't believe we've gone more than a year not realizing-"
"Reijirou-chan?" His door swung open suddenly. Nuriko sat up with a look of horror on his face and Reijirou clapped a hand over the bottom of the receiver, desperately hoping Nuriko had remembered to make himself invisible to Chiaki. The ball fell to his bed, straight through Nuriko but thankfully unnoticed by his sister. "I just talked to Hajime, you're taking him to a bookstore on Wednesday?"
Reijirou nodded. "Yeah, and possibly his two friends as well. Couple of my friends might be going also."
Chiaki grinned. "Good! Me and Suezo are going with you."
Thunk. Nuriko and Reijirou's jaws both dropped. "N-Nani?"
"We. Are. Going. With. You. Suezo needs a couple books for his Lit and English classes, and I need to see what they have in the science section so I can begin coming up with this experiment Ibi-sensei wants us to think of ourselves."
Suezo, good. Chiaki, bad. "Are you sure it has to be Wednesday?"
Chiaki looked at him closely. "Reijirou-chan, you're acting pretty strange. And if we don't go with you, how will we know where it is?"
"Reijirou? What's going on?"
"One moment Keisuke." He covered the receiver again. "All right, but I get the car."
Chiaki rolled her eyes. "Yeah yeah sure sure, whatever you want. We'll be here at four, just make sure that everyone else is, too. I'm gonna get back to my formulas." She ducked outside, forgetting to close the door.
In somewhat of a stupor, Reijirou stood and let his hand slide off the phone. "Keisuke?"
"Reijirou? What happened?"
He walked over to the door, Nuriko watching him closely for signs of imminent collapse. He leaned dazedly against the door, which shut slowly beneath his weight. "Better make that three."
AUTHOR'S NOTES II: Mwa ha ha ha ^_^ Yes, I am evil. If you didn't know that already, then make sure you don't forget it next time.
Ara-chan: I think they all knew you were Evil, Kaze-chan.
Kaze-chan: Well, just so they don't forget.
Ara-chan: Dearie, just thinking of you is too much of a reminder.
Kaze-chan: Now now now, be nice - or else.
Ara-chan: Else what? I have Hoofie!
Kaze-chan: And I have the power to make Reijirou completely, totally, absolutely petrified of you (not that he needs much more prodding)! You'll never see him again, mwa ha ha!
Ara-chan: Uuuuuuhm! What I meant to say was, "Kaze-chan is the most wonderful, splendiferous evil person around!"
Kaze-chan: Hmm... Give him to you or Risako... Tough decision...
Ara-chan: *offers burnt offerings and virginal sacrifices*
Kaze-chan: Um, okay, no.
Ara-chan: Dangit. *offers a complete Fushigi set, complete with manga in Japanese and English and CDs. Throws in some Kenshin paraphenalia for good measure*
Kaze-chan: ~wavers~ Welllllllllll...
Risako: Take it! Take it!
Reijirou: Hey, you're supposed to be helping me!
Ara-chan: *aaaaaaannnnnnnnnnd a Tokaki plushie and some Prismacolors?*
Kaze-chan: Okay! ~glomps Pile O' Cool Stuff happily~
Reijirou: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!
