Disclaimer: I do not own the Yu Yu Hakusho characters.
Thanks to everyone who reviewed chapter 4! SakuraAngel04- it's always great to hear from anyone who can figure out how to make their emails colorful and use picture/icons –I'm jealous! YavieAelinel – you'll be finding out more about the mysterious Wind Slasher in later chapters, I promise! My newest reviewer, Radiskull222 – Er, Chapter Black Saga? Is that the one that Cartoon Network never bothered to put on the air? They kind of left us hanging at the end of the Dark Tournament! So just think of this story as a bit of a time warp between the two. Caitlin, I'd love to email you again but your email box was completely full and not accepting any new emails the last time I tried!
CHAPTER FIVE: STRATEGY MEETING
"What a dump!" Botan kicked at the animal bones and bits of trash littering the floor of the cave deep in the forest of the spirit realm. "How can anyone, even a team of demon fighters, live like this?"
"He's not here." Hiei planted himself in the middle of the cave and glared around at the rocky walls.
"Well no," Botan admitted apologetically and waded through the garbage on the floor to get to him. "I never said it would be easy, but Hammer Hands was here once upon a time. According to all my sources, this cave is what the Mist Master Team called home when they weren't out fighting, so it's logical that he'd come back here sometime or other."
She glanced around at the filthy bedrolls lining the walls and the charred bits of wood and other unidentifiable matter in the fire ring and sighed. "There must be something here that will tell us where Hammer Hands went. I guess I'll just start looking for clues." She walked over to a rock that was piled with what looked like magazines, and picked one up. A page unfolded from the center and Botan gasped as she caught sight of it, and dropped the magazine hurriedly.
"That was NOT a clue!" She exclaimed in shock, turning pink.
"Humph."
Botan and Hiei searched the cave from top to bottom, but found nothing to indicate where Hammer Hands had ended up.
"Well, that's that." The ferry girl picked up the pile of magazines and dropped them resolutely into the fire ring. "We may not have found Hammer Hands, but at least I managed to put something in its place." She kneeled, drew a match from her kimono pocket, struck it and set it to the edge of the magazines.
"Arrgh! My pretty pictures!" A howl of rage from the cave entrance distracted her. Botan had just enough time to look up from where she knelt by the fire ring when a massive demon launched itself at her. She fell backwards, landing on her rear, pushing her feet into the sandy cave floor, trying to gain purchase to propel herself further away. It wasn't working.
Smack! The huge demon fell face forward into the sand, mere inches away from the soles of her feet.
"Hiei?" Botan queried shakily. The black garbed swordsman marched nonchalantly over the prone demon as if it were a hill, and stood on its back, surveying the red mark on the back of Hammer Hand's neck where he'd slammed the hilt end of his sword. If Botan hadn't known better, she'd have said the expression on her savior's face was decidedly smug.
That afternoon, at Yusuke's apartment, Kuwabara began rummaging one- handedly through the kitchen cabinets, his splinted left arm in a sling.
"Hey Yusuke, Got anything to eat around here?"
"That depends on if my mom remembered to go shopping." Answered Yusuke, sitting on the floor watching T.V. The apartment was, as usual, a mess. Atsuko Urameshi was not known for her housekeeping skills.
Kuwabara grumbled and ducked into a lower cabinet, emerging triumphantly with a dusty package. "Hey! Ramen noodles!" Kuwabara found a saucepan and began filling it with water.
At that moment the doorbell rang.
"S'open." Shouted Yusuke, refusing to get up.
"We're here for the meeting." Trilled out Keiko as she entered, Botan and Hiei close on her heels.
Botan strode into the apartment confidently. "Hello everyone! And thank you for coming to this meeting. I..." she looked around. "Where's Kurama?"
Yusuke yawned and switched off the T.V. "He called and said he had to check on something after school and to start without him if it was a big deal."
Keiko, eyeing Kuwabara watching the water in his pot come to a boil, walked into the kitchen.
"Hey, Keiko." The tall red headed schoolboy greeted her, and tore open the package of Ramen noodles with his teeth, setting it on the counter.
"Uh, Kuwabara?" Keiko leaned over the countertop inquiringly.
"Yeah?"
"I think those noodles have bugs in them."
"What?"
"Some of them are definitely moving."
Kuwabara bent to peer down at the larva wiggling among the dried noodles. "Ew! Gross! Yusuke, what are you trying to do to me?" He stepped back from the counter top, an expression of disgust clouding his face.
Keiko shook the remaining noodles and bugs out of the package and inspected it. "The expiration date reads two years ago."
Kuwabara switched off the stove. "I got an idea!" Ignoring Hiei's huff of disbelief, Kuwabara continued. "Let's have the meeting at my place. My sister's home. She can make us all something to eat." He offered the suggestion with a little brother's blithe certainty that his older sister lived to serve him.
"We can't, lame brain. If we leave, Kurama won't know where to go for the meeting." Yusuke reminded him.
"We could leave a note, you know." Kuwabara suggested.
A speculative look crossed Botan's face, "No," she said. "A note might fall off the door. I'll go get him and bring him to Kuwabara's house. Hiei, you can fill them in on what we found out in the spirit realm."
"Koenma sent us to find Hammer Hands. We did. He talked, but didn't help much." Hiei gave his account as succinctly as possible, and stopped.
Almost out the door, Botan paused. "Now that's not entirely true!" She chided him. "He did tell us that a human hired them to enter the contest and win the opal. A human who spoke English too!" She sighed. "I just wish we'd been able to get a name from him before you rendered him incapable of continuing."
"He annoyed me." Unaffected by Botan's chiding, Hiei lifted his chin and stared her down.
Botan unaccountably blushed, so Keiko hopped in with a question. "Well, why not go back and ask him again?"
Grateful for the question, the silver haired girl answered. "Sorry, Keiko, I meant he rendered him PERMANENTLY incapable of talking anymore."
"What'd you do?" Asked Yusuke, showing interest for the first time.
"Knocked his teeth down his throat. With my sword."
Hiei's statement was met with a silence that Kuwabara broke. "Way to go, shrimp!"
Hiei began to glower, so Botan put her hand on the door and said, "Well, this has been fun, but we can't officially start the meeting without Kurama, so I'll just go get him and bring him to Kuwabara's place." She exited quickly as Yusuke, grumbling, went to get his jacket.
Kuwabara left Keiko to clean up the mess in the kitchen, and walked up to Hiei awkwardly. Hiei regarded him, eyes narrowed with suspicion.
"Uh, Hiei. I'd just like to say...Thanks for killing Hammer Hands. He worked me over pretty good at the tournament, so thanks for getting him back."
"I didn't do it for you."
Kuwabara scratched his head. "Then why...?"
"He attacked Botan. Why would I care what he did to you?"
"Why you little..."
Meanwhile at his apartment, Kurama returned home to find the place dusted, vacuumed, and shiny clean. With a quick mental check of the houseplants he learned that the Wind Slasher had even dusted and watered them too. For a demon fight team member, she was surprisingly domestic. Following the faint noises coming from his bedroom, he opened the door to find her sitting on the floor squinting in incomprehension at program on the small T.V. his mother had given him last birthday.
As soon as she heard him, she jumped to her feet and stood, head down, waiting.
"Have you eaten?" He asked her in demonish.
"No."
He'd just led her to the kitchen and was getting out ingredients when the doorbell rang. It was Botan.
"Hello Kurama! Aren't you going to ask me in?" She asked when he didn't immediately move out of the doorway. She made as if to push past him, so he leaned an arm negligently across the opening.
Undaunted, Botan peered over his shoulder. "Well, who do we have here?"
Kurama sighed as the ferry girl caught sight of the Wind Slasher standing in the doorway of the kitchen, and ducked under his arm, making her way toward the girl.
The girl bowed her head and took several steps backward as Botan bounced closer, until her back was literally up against the kitchen wall. Botan stopped about a foot from her, cocked her head to the side like an inquisitive sparrow, and began to pace in front of the girl, looking her over.
"Ah-ha! I knew it! This is the girl from the tournament. I knew you couldn't kill her, and after I asked all the other ferry girls if they'd seen a soul like hers recently and they all said no, well, it was obvious, wasn't it?"
Kurama resignedly shut the front door and followed Botan to the kitchen area. "As you say, obvious."
"There's not much to you, is there?" Botan addressed the uncomprehending girl. "You're such a skinny little thing!" She reached forward and placed her forefinger under the girl's chin, gently lifting it until their eyes were level. "What's your name?"
"She doesn't speak Japanese, or any other human language that I've been able to determine."
Botan removed her finger and stared at Kurama in surprise. "Then how do you communicate?"
"I can speak some of the dialect of demonish she knows, though not terribly well."
"Well of course not, in your human form you couldn't, now could you? But whatever did you tell your mother?"
"That she was a foreign exchange student named Wendy, from Germany."
Botan stared, then burst into peals of laughter. "Kurama, you're priceless."
"I'm glad you approve." Kurama lifted an eyebrow.
"This is wonderful." Botan clapped her hands together and danced around the kitchen. "Koenma wants to know why someone hired her team to win the opal, and Hiei just killed Hammer Hands, so the only one left to ask is her. We have to take her to the meeting!"
"Aren't you forgetting something?" Botan in the throes of a good idea was a difficult thing to quash, but Kurama had to try.
"What?" Eyes wide with innocent enthusiasm regarded him.
"She can barely speak demonish, and Hiei just killed her only remaining team member. She may not want to help us."
"Whyever not?" Botan was irrepressible. "Besides," she grabbed the girl's arm and pulled her gently out of the kitchen. "I've got a really good feeling about her, and I'm an excellent judge of character." Botan continued on her way to the front door, not letting go of the girl, who shot a questioning gaze over her shoulder at Kurama, as she stumbled along behind Botan. He smiled reassuringly and allowed the bubbly Botan to take her out.
Quickly jotting down a note to his mother about taking "Wendy" to a fictitious exchange student meeting, he locked the door and followed them out to where Botan was waiting expectantly by his car, girl in tow.
TO BE CONTINUED
Thanks to everyone who reviewed chapter 4! SakuraAngel04- it's always great to hear from anyone who can figure out how to make their emails colorful and use picture/icons –I'm jealous! YavieAelinel – you'll be finding out more about the mysterious Wind Slasher in later chapters, I promise! My newest reviewer, Radiskull222 – Er, Chapter Black Saga? Is that the one that Cartoon Network never bothered to put on the air? They kind of left us hanging at the end of the Dark Tournament! So just think of this story as a bit of a time warp between the two. Caitlin, I'd love to email you again but your email box was completely full and not accepting any new emails the last time I tried!
CHAPTER FIVE: STRATEGY MEETING
"What a dump!" Botan kicked at the animal bones and bits of trash littering the floor of the cave deep in the forest of the spirit realm. "How can anyone, even a team of demon fighters, live like this?"
"He's not here." Hiei planted himself in the middle of the cave and glared around at the rocky walls.
"Well no," Botan admitted apologetically and waded through the garbage on the floor to get to him. "I never said it would be easy, but Hammer Hands was here once upon a time. According to all my sources, this cave is what the Mist Master Team called home when they weren't out fighting, so it's logical that he'd come back here sometime or other."
She glanced around at the filthy bedrolls lining the walls and the charred bits of wood and other unidentifiable matter in the fire ring and sighed. "There must be something here that will tell us where Hammer Hands went. I guess I'll just start looking for clues." She walked over to a rock that was piled with what looked like magazines, and picked one up. A page unfolded from the center and Botan gasped as she caught sight of it, and dropped the magazine hurriedly.
"That was NOT a clue!" She exclaimed in shock, turning pink.
"Humph."
Botan and Hiei searched the cave from top to bottom, but found nothing to indicate where Hammer Hands had ended up.
"Well, that's that." The ferry girl picked up the pile of magazines and dropped them resolutely into the fire ring. "We may not have found Hammer Hands, but at least I managed to put something in its place." She kneeled, drew a match from her kimono pocket, struck it and set it to the edge of the magazines.
"Arrgh! My pretty pictures!" A howl of rage from the cave entrance distracted her. Botan had just enough time to look up from where she knelt by the fire ring when a massive demon launched itself at her. She fell backwards, landing on her rear, pushing her feet into the sandy cave floor, trying to gain purchase to propel herself further away. It wasn't working.
Smack! The huge demon fell face forward into the sand, mere inches away from the soles of her feet.
"Hiei?" Botan queried shakily. The black garbed swordsman marched nonchalantly over the prone demon as if it were a hill, and stood on its back, surveying the red mark on the back of Hammer Hand's neck where he'd slammed the hilt end of his sword. If Botan hadn't known better, she'd have said the expression on her savior's face was decidedly smug.
That afternoon, at Yusuke's apartment, Kuwabara began rummaging one- handedly through the kitchen cabinets, his splinted left arm in a sling.
"Hey Yusuke, Got anything to eat around here?"
"That depends on if my mom remembered to go shopping." Answered Yusuke, sitting on the floor watching T.V. The apartment was, as usual, a mess. Atsuko Urameshi was not known for her housekeeping skills.
Kuwabara grumbled and ducked into a lower cabinet, emerging triumphantly with a dusty package. "Hey! Ramen noodles!" Kuwabara found a saucepan and began filling it with water.
At that moment the doorbell rang.
"S'open." Shouted Yusuke, refusing to get up.
"We're here for the meeting." Trilled out Keiko as she entered, Botan and Hiei close on her heels.
Botan strode into the apartment confidently. "Hello everyone! And thank you for coming to this meeting. I..." she looked around. "Where's Kurama?"
Yusuke yawned and switched off the T.V. "He called and said he had to check on something after school and to start without him if it was a big deal."
Keiko, eyeing Kuwabara watching the water in his pot come to a boil, walked into the kitchen.
"Hey, Keiko." The tall red headed schoolboy greeted her, and tore open the package of Ramen noodles with his teeth, setting it on the counter.
"Uh, Kuwabara?" Keiko leaned over the countertop inquiringly.
"Yeah?"
"I think those noodles have bugs in them."
"What?"
"Some of them are definitely moving."
Kuwabara bent to peer down at the larva wiggling among the dried noodles. "Ew! Gross! Yusuke, what are you trying to do to me?" He stepped back from the counter top, an expression of disgust clouding his face.
Keiko shook the remaining noodles and bugs out of the package and inspected it. "The expiration date reads two years ago."
Kuwabara switched off the stove. "I got an idea!" Ignoring Hiei's huff of disbelief, Kuwabara continued. "Let's have the meeting at my place. My sister's home. She can make us all something to eat." He offered the suggestion with a little brother's blithe certainty that his older sister lived to serve him.
"We can't, lame brain. If we leave, Kurama won't know where to go for the meeting." Yusuke reminded him.
"We could leave a note, you know." Kuwabara suggested.
A speculative look crossed Botan's face, "No," she said. "A note might fall off the door. I'll go get him and bring him to Kuwabara's house. Hiei, you can fill them in on what we found out in the spirit realm."
"Koenma sent us to find Hammer Hands. We did. He talked, but didn't help much." Hiei gave his account as succinctly as possible, and stopped.
Almost out the door, Botan paused. "Now that's not entirely true!" She chided him. "He did tell us that a human hired them to enter the contest and win the opal. A human who spoke English too!" She sighed. "I just wish we'd been able to get a name from him before you rendered him incapable of continuing."
"He annoyed me." Unaffected by Botan's chiding, Hiei lifted his chin and stared her down.
Botan unaccountably blushed, so Keiko hopped in with a question. "Well, why not go back and ask him again?"
Grateful for the question, the silver haired girl answered. "Sorry, Keiko, I meant he rendered him PERMANENTLY incapable of talking anymore."
"What'd you do?" Asked Yusuke, showing interest for the first time.
"Knocked his teeth down his throat. With my sword."
Hiei's statement was met with a silence that Kuwabara broke. "Way to go, shrimp!"
Hiei began to glower, so Botan put her hand on the door and said, "Well, this has been fun, but we can't officially start the meeting without Kurama, so I'll just go get him and bring him to Kuwabara's place." She exited quickly as Yusuke, grumbling, went to get his jacket.
Kuwabara left Keiko to clean up the mess in the kitchen, and walked up to Hiei awkwardly. Hiei regarded him, eyes narrowed with suspicion.
"Uh, Hiei. I'd just like to say...Thanks for killing Hammer Hands. He worked me over pretty good at the tournament, so thanks for getting him back."
"I didn't do it for you."
Kuwabara scratched his head. "Then why...?"
"He attacked Botan. Why would I care what he did to you?"
"Why you little..."
Meanwhile at his apartment, Kurama returned home to find the place dusted, vacuumed, and shiny clean. With a quick mental check of the houseplants he learned that the Wind Slasher had even dusted and watered them too. For a demon fight team member, she was surprisingly domestic. Following the faint noises coming from his bedroom, he opened the door to find her sitting on the floor squinting in incomprehension at program on the small T.V. his mother had given him last birthday.
As soon as she heard him, she jumped to her feet and stood, head down, waiting.
"Have you eaten?" He asked her in demonish.
"No."
He'd just led her to the kitchen and was getting out ingredients when the doorbell rang. It was Botan.
"Hello Kurama! Aren't you going to ask me in?" She asked when he didn't immediately move out of the doorway. She made as if to push past him, so he leaned an arm negligently across the opening.
Undaunted, Botan peered over his shoulder. "Well, who do we have here?"
Kurama sighed as the ferry girl caught sight of the Wind Slasher standing in the doorway of the kitchen, and ducked under his arm, making her way toward the girl.
The girl bowed her head and took several steps backward as Botan bounced closer, until her back was literally up against the kitchen wall. Botan stopped about a foot from her, cocked her head to the side like an inquisitive sparrow, and began to pace in front of the girl, looking her over.
"Ah-ha! I knew it! This is the girl from the tournament. I knew you couldn't kill her, and after I asked all the other ferry girls if they'd seen a soul like hers recently and they all said no, well, it was obvious, wasn't it?"
Kurama resignedly shut the front door and followed Botan to the kitchen area. "As you say, obvious."
"There's not much to you, is there?" Botan addressed the uncomprehending girl. "You're such a skinny little thing!" She reached forward and placed her forefinger under the girl's chin, gently lifting it until their eyes were level. "What's your name?"
"She doesn't speak Japanese, or any other human language that I've been able to determine."
Botan removed her finger and stared at Kurama in surprise. "Then how do you communicate?"
"I can speak some of the dialect of demonish she knows, though not terribly well."
"Well of course not, in your human form you couldn't, now could you? But whatever did you tell your mother?"
"That she was a foreign exchange student named Wendy, from Germany."
Botan stared, then burst into peals of laughter. "Kurama, you're priceless."
"I'm glad you approve." Kurama lifted an eyebrow.
"This is wonderful." Botan clapped her hands together and danced around the kitchen. "Koenma wants to know why someone hired her team to win the opal, and Hiei just killed Hammer Hands, so the only one left to ask is her. We have to take her to the meeting!"
"Aren't you forgetting something?" Botan in the throes of a good idea was a difficult thing to quash, but Kurama had to try.
"What?" Eyes wide with innocent enthusiasm regarded him.
"She can barely speak demonish, and Hiei just killed her only remaining team member. She may not want to help us."
"Whyever not?" Botan was irrepressible. "Besides," she grabbed the girl's arm and pulled her gently out of the kitchen. "I've got a really good feeling about her, and I'm an excellent judge of character." Botan continued on her way to the front door, not letting go of the girl, who shot a questioning gaze over her shoulder at Kurama, as she stumbled along behind Botan. He smiled reassuringly and allowed the bubbly Botan to take her out.
Quickly jotting down a note to his mother about taking "Wendy" to a fictitious exchange student meeting, he locked the door and followed them out to where Botan was waiting expectantly by his car, girl in tow.
TO BE CONTINUED