Kiki: What do you mean?
KNY: very slowly They got transported into the YYH world, and now we have to go rescue them.
Kiki: Oh.
SGS: How will we follow them?
KNY: Well since my closet is broken, SGS and Kiki look sheepish we'll have to use this! Holds up remote-control type thing
Kiki: A TV remote?
KNY: Buwhahahahaha! No, foolish mortal! It is my patented, handy-dandy transportable-gateway-to-an-alternate-dimension-via-the-Andromeda-galaxy-and-hanging-a-left-at-the-universal-gas-station-device! Insert cheesy commercial music
SGS: A what?
KNY: repeats
Kiki: We need an easier name than that.
SGS: I know! We can call it the "Portable Portal"!
Kiki: I like that! Portable Portal, it is.
KNY: mutters I liked my name better…
SGS: Sooooooooooooo… how does this Portable Portal work?
KNY: You just push the big button-
Kiki: You mean this one? Pushes big button
A bright flash of light fills the room and the girls vanish
SGS: Did it work?
Kiki: Judging by the fact that the sky is a weird greenish-purple and there are flying purple pigs in it, I don't think so.
KNY: Wrong button, Kiki…
Kiki: Oops! Sheepish smile
SGS: Uh, guys? Could we please leave? Shoos away small house with wings The house flies are just horrid here!
Kiki: Okay! What is the right button, KNY?
KNY: You want to push the big blue button, not the big red button.
Kiki: Ooooooooooh… pushes correct button
Three girls vanish again
Kiki: Yay! It works! Looks around at YYH world
KNY: Told ya it would.
SGS: Uh, KNY?
KNY: Yes?
SGS: I know we were transported into the YYH world, but were we supposed to materialize in the air?
KNY: Uh, no.
Girls look at each other, then cling together and fall out of the sky screaming
Kuwabara and Yusuke: fighting again
Kurama: watching boredly
Hiei: silently hoping the baka will finally die
Kurama: Five bucks on Yusuke.
Hiei: Hn.
KNY, Kiki, SGS: Ahhhhhhhhhhhh! Fall on Kuwabara and Yusuke knocking them all out
Kurama and Hiei: staring at the assorted pile of humans and a cat demon
Kurama: And here we go again. Sighs and picks up the girls placing them underneath a tree. Sits next to KNY waiting for them to wake up
Hiei: Hn. Vanishes and then reappears a moment later holding a bucket. Smirks and empties bucket on the unconscious Spirit Detective and his baboon sidekick.
The two jump up, ice cold water dripping from their bodies.
Kuwabara: Ahhhh! It burns! I mean- It freezes!
Yusuke: Brrr-freakin'-err! What did ya do that for Hiei!
Hiei: curtly To annoy you.
Yusuke: Grrrrrrrrrrrrr…
Kiki: Is woken up because of her two favorite YYH bishies arguing. Sits up and looks around. Sees Yusuke and Hiei. YUSUKE AND HIEI! I HAVE DIED AND GONE TO HEAVEN! Glomps the two confused bishies
Yusuke: Ack! Where'd you come from!
Hiei: Onna… Eyebrow twitches Let go.
Kiki: Is too deliriously happy to hear them
SGS: Sits up momentarily SHUT UP! Throws shoe and lays back down
Hiei: Gets hit in head with shoe and get knocked out
Yusuke: How did a shoe do that?
Kiki: It was an authoress's shoe. We have special author powers over the story we are in.
Yusuke: Is completely lost Oh. Okay!
Kiki: Is having difficulty deciding what to do with the unconscious Hiei. Smiles and settles for simply snuggling with the bishie knowing to take advantage of his current state as he would never let her do this if he was awake.
KNY: Wakes up to Kurama's pretty eyes staring at her. K-Kurama?
Kurama: How do you know us?
KNY: Blushes and draws little circles on the ground Umm… that is to say…
Kiki: Aw, spit it out, ya baka neko!
KNY: Shut up!
Kiki: Awwwwwwwwwww… does someone have a ittle crush?
KNY: bright red I do not!
Kiki: Then why are you all red?
KNY: Interdemensional travel will do that to you!
Kiki: Suuuuuuuuuuuuuure, KNY. If that's what you say…
KNY: Glares at Kiki and then turns back to Kurama, looking at the ground as she explains everything
Kurama: Oh. So you're three authoresses and are trying to find some boys from another world and you say they got transported here?
KNY: Yep! So have you seen 'em?
Kurama: What do they look like?
KNY: Well, one is very short and his hair looks like a koosh ball with gel. There is a boy who looks similar to him, only taller, narrower eyes, different bangs, and a deeper voice. One is very tall with blonde hair normally seen with a clueless expression. He has a Brooklyn accent. Another one is also very tall, icy blue eyes, brown hair, fetish for trench coats. Two other boys that look like twins, they both have white hair, but one looks a lot meaner than the other. And one last set of look-alikes, these are pale blonde with tan skin and lavender eyes. The mean one has bad DBZ hair.
Kurama: Thinks for a moment. I think I saw some matching your description walk by here a little while ago. A medium-tall once wanted to play a game with me while a tall blonde tried to arm-wrestle Yusuke and two rather sadistic looking boys were engaged in a conversation with Hiei about how to maim, disfigure, and kill those you hate.
KNY: Nods Yep. That would be them. Realizes something Shit! Pulls out laptop
Kurama: Um, KNY-san? What are you doing?
KNY: I have to start the fic!
Kurama: Fic?
KNY: SGS will explain! Must write!
Kurama: Sighs, giving up. Turns and attempts to wake SGS so she can explain KNY's meaning.
Disclaimer:
KNY: picking petals off a daisy. I own 'em. I own 'em not. I own 'em. I own 'em… NOT! Stupid flower! Stomps daisy into oblivion
Earthbound Goddess
Chapter Six
Fluff, Coconuts, and Cheesy Special Effects
The two travelers rode towards the swiftly setting moon, the only sound their mounts' hooves searching for a foothold in the sand.
"Where exactly are we going?" Yami asked, breaking the silence.
His companion hesitated a moment before answering, "To a very special place. Kind of like… well, what's the name you call the land you summon your monsters from?"
Yami blinked, startled she knew of it. "The Shadow Realm. Why?"
Cat-eyes nodded. "The Shadow Realm is but a small part of a larger place. An entire dimension of ever-changing worlds existing alongside this one, yet only accessible by very special individuals."
"Like who?" Yami asked, curious.
"Like yourself, for example. Shadow sorcerers, mediums, even your average fortune teller can access the other world to some extent. Although the farthest any human has managed to go has been the Shadow Realm."
"So we're going to the Shadow Realm?" he didn't seem at all perturbed. That would change soon enough.
"Not exactly," Cat-eyes corrected. "We will probably pass through it, but it is not our final destination."
"Then how do we get there? I mean, if the farthest any human has gone has been the Shadow Realm then…"
She then stopped her horse and slowly turned to look at the adolescent pharaoh. Her pupils slitted and her irises glowed in the moonlight. Yami felt as though he was seeing a power as old as the stars and twice as mysterious.
"Let me handle that, pharaoh," she answered, voice like a velvet-covered dagger. A secretive half-smile tugged at her lips, and her eyes sparked once more with moonfire as she turned back to the desert.
That smile… it seemed oddly familiar. Yami could have sworn that he had seen that look somewhere before, but couldn't quite place where.
He shrugged to himself and hurried to catch up with Cat-eyes's retreating back.
The riders continued all through the next day, eating in the saddle and only pausing to water the horses.
Finally, just as the sun was beginning to set, they came across the oasis on the map.
"We can rest here for the night," Cat-eyes said, surveying the area before them.
"Thank you!" Yami cried as he dismounted, wincing in pain from his saddle sores. Oh was he going to be stiff in the morning!
"Get some firewood, pharaoh," Cat-eyes ordered. "I will tend to the horses and prepare dinner."
Yami opened his mouth to protest that she couldn't possibly do all that on her own, but then saw the futility of it and turned to a tall palm tree. He concentrated and formed a small ball of black lightning at its base. He would have to go slowly, lest he accidentally set it on fire.
Yet, just because nothing else in his life could go smoothly, as he cut, a small coconut fell out of the tree and landed-yep, you guessed it- right on our dear pharaoh's head.
"By Anubis's teeth!" the teen cursed as he rubbed his smarting head. Then he heard a small creak. His violet eyes widened as the tree began to sway dangerously in the air. His gaze flickered briefly towards Cat-eyes as she bent over their packs, digging for rations while the horses grazed peacefully several feet away. If the tree fell, it would surely severely injure her, if not kill her!
The world seemed to move in a cheesy slow motion segment like in a bad suspense movie as the tree began to lean down, obeying the call of gravity, just as the coconut had. Yami yelled to warn her and ran towards the dancing girl, but the slow-mo sequence snapped and the world sped up once more.
He shoved the startled girl out of harm's way, just as the great palm fronds came crashing down.
He watched the branches approach, wondering what in Ra's name was he doing, sacrificing himself for some girl he hardly knew who was too stupid to know when to move! Was this how the great pharaoh was going to die? Not in some heroic battle or sorcerous duel on which the fate of the kingdom rested, but crushed by a bloody palm tree.
'THIS IS STUPID!' was his last thought before darkness consumed his conscious thought and his brain went on auto-pilot…
"WATCH OUT!" Cat-eyes turned towards the young pharaoh's cry in time to see the thick palm branches loom above her. Her eyes widened as she tried to move, but her feet seemed rooted to the ground. She glanced down and saw a black and purple mist covering her sandals all the way up her calves.
Her eyes narrowed. So that's how it was, eh? Shadow Magic!
She glance back up only to see that spiky-haired idiot running at her, full-throttle. He roughly shoved her out of the way as the tree came down.
She landed on her butt- hard. When she opened her eyes, all she could see was the pharaoh's upper body sticking out of a mass of limbs.
Cat-eyes quickly went to work. She moved aside the branches and carefully freed his legs. Luckily, he had been smart enough to roll to the side to avoid the full weight of the tree so his legs wouldn't be crushed. She picked him up, cradling him in her arms like a small child, and gently laid him on a nearby sand dune. After she tended to the numerous small scratches covering his skin, she glared at the tree, rolled up her sleeves, and began to make a fire.
When she had a roaring blaze, and numerous scorch marks on her sleeves, (Hey, they didn't teach you wilderness skills in the House, okay!) she sat down next to the still comatose teen.
She exhaled a small puff of air and glanced at him. A little pang of guilt, another human trait she had come to abhor, hit her stomach. He wouldn't be like this if it wasn't for her.
She groaned and gave in to her conscience, gently placing the sleeping pharaoh's head in her lap as the checked him for any signs of further injury.
Satisfied that he was going to be fine, she began to move him back into his sandy nest when she was suddenly struck by how he looked, laying there in the snow-white fabric of her lap. He looked so… so handsome. Her long fingers lightly traced his cheekbone down to his jaw-line, brushing his skin in an almost wistful caress. She gently laid a fingertip on the young pharaoh's lips.
'I wonder…'
She began to bend forward, but immediately snapped up as her charge began to twitch in his sleep. That jerked her out of whatever spell the magic of the night had cast on her senses. That was the only explanation for her strange behavior.
'I mean, really,' she thought, snorting, 'he's human!'
Then, Cat-eyes felt something tighten around her wrist, so she looked down only to see the pharaoh's hand firmly clasping hers. Her eyes narrowed. She needed to discourage this behavior.
Oh yes, she knew what had been going through our favorite spiky-haired teen that evening on the balcony. She had seen that look many a time before. Longing… passion… lust… but it was her duty as a goddess to make sure that it remained a feeling and nothing more.
Her father's words still echoed in her head. "Mortal must not love immortal. That is a key rule as your role as a goddess. You must be as loving as a mother, yet as distant as the moon."
She should make him let go. She really should. Minutes ticked by without any movement.
'SIGH! Stupid conscience…'
Yet as she sat there, staring at their interlocked hands, she couldn't bring herself to do it. She groaned and laid back against the dune, the rapidly cooling sand shifting to accommodate for her body. She spared one last glance at their intertwined hands and one for the pharaoh's face before she closed her eyes and let the sweet oblivion of sleep claim her…
"Now what we have here, your highness, is a well-known piece by the great Senusert and… ah, I fear your highness is not paying attention."
Yami was snapped out of his reverie by the dry voice of his teacher Sheftu, Scholar of Egyptian Literature. "Eh? Oh, sorry Sheftu."
The old scholar rubbed his temples as if seeking to relieve a headache. "If your highness does not pay attention, how does his highness expect to meet his father's expectations?"
Yami mentally groaned. He had heard this speech plenty of times before.
'If his highness would simply pay attention to his studies and spent less time daydreaming, then your education would proceed much quicker and thy father would be pleased,' Yami mentally recited in time to Sheftu's lecture.
"Daydreaming in class again, Atemu?" a smooth deep voice said from the doorway. Yami turned to see his father not so much as standing in the arched doorframe as filling it. The Pharaoh Amenemhat was a giant of a man, sinuous muscles taut under tanned skin. He regarded his son with amused, dark eyes, his cropped black hair showing flashes of ruby in the afternoon light.
It took Yami a moment to realize that his father had asked him a question. "I'm afraid so, father." Yami grinned sheepishly.
The pharaoh did not return his smile, but his dusky eyes laughed in his caramel-colored face. He nodded to Yami's teacher. "I would like to have a word with my son. You may leave."
Sheftu bowed until his wrinkled nose nearly brushed the floor and backed out the door, still bowing.
"Now then," Amenemhat said, turning to his son, "How about we focus back on your reading?"
Yami scooted over on the bench to make room. "But I thought you had business with the ambassadors from the other cities today? When did you find the time to come here?"
His father groaned. "They have been arguing about fishing rights for the past two hours. I told them I had some urgent business to attend to, and that they could find me when they reached an agreement."
"Ah."
Amenemhat glanced at the text Yami was supposed to be memorizing and winced. "He had you reading out of the "Pert Em Hru" (The Book of the Dead)? No wonder you were daydreaming!" He chuckled softly. "Let's try something a little more interesting." And with that, he walked over to the shelf, scanned the dusty scrolls, and with a satisfied nod, pulled out a tattered tome, obviously well-used and much loved. He carefully unrolled it on the sandalwood desk for Yami to read. The title read "Keepers of the Guardian Way: Sekhmet and Bastet".
"I used to love to read this when I was your age," Amenemhat said proudly. He pointed at an article near the middle of the scroll. "Go on. Give it a try."
'Lessee…' Yami thought, reading the hieroglyphics on the old papyrus. 'Squiggle… stick man… wavy line… constipated eagle… squiggle…'
It was a detailed description of what Bastet had done for the kingdom since it was first created. It was mostly due to her power that Egypt was as advanced as it was. Then Yami came across a brief paragraph describing the goddess's physical features.
Cat's eyes in the face of a woman... seem to promise the most unusual and selective delights as deep and seductive they glitter... the cat face is an ensemble of marvelously matched and balanced features and the total result is one to stir the heart. Where the human female is able to approach them, she becomes irresistible…
Then Yami's gaze fell to the accompanying artist's illustration. She was mainly humanoid, with two soft cat ears jutting from her head as well as a slender tail came from the base of her spine. She was clad in the thin, off-the-shoulder top donned by only the highest ranking ladies and a pair of semi-transparent harem pants, leaving her slender waist bare. He could just make out the shape of her calf and hips through the frail material. Then he looked up at her face once more. Her eyes were slit-pupiled and beautiful, just as the author said they were in his passage. And a small, secretive half-smile hovered about her sensuous lips…That smile seemed familiar…
Then the picture before Yami began to swirl like a cartoon flashback as he began to return to the realm of the waking…
Yami opened his sleep-fogged eyes and rubbed at them with his free hand. He began to stretch, when he realized that his fingers were wrapped around something. Someone's fingers.
But at this particular moment in time, he didn't really care. He just wanted to snuggle back down in the warm nest he had been sleeping in. It was just so comfy! Then he noticed just whose fingers were intertwined with his own.
'Cat-eyes!' he thought, a lump lodging itself in his throat as he froze, waiting to see what would happen.
When a few heart-racing moments had passed and she had yet to move, Yami cautiously let out the breath he hadn't been aware he'd been holding. She was sleeping… fortune smiled for once!
Yami glared at her sleeping form. This was all her fault. If she had moved when he told her to, then he never would have been squished by that stupid tree.
Ra, she was annoying! All that day he had found himself glancing at her slender neck or trailing on some elusive curve of her cheek. Even now, as she lay on the silvery sand, she captivated him. Her soft skin gleaming in the moonlight, a stray curl lying across her cheek. His hands itched to brush it back into place, but he firmly clenched his shaking fists together.
What was wrong with him! Why was he feeling such things for a mere harem girl! This girl with the sharp tongue, flashing, angry eyes, half-smiling lips…
His thoughts lingered for another moment on her lips, and before he could stop himself, he was leaning towards her, feeling her soft breathing against his face. He inched towards her… only to be stopped by ten inches of steel sliding in front of his nose.
Yami jerked up to see a large, hairy arm attached to the hand that held the sword. He opened his mouth to demand that he explain himself, when the man smiled humorlessly and smacked him with the flat of the blade.
And for the second time that day, Yami got to visit dreamland…
KNY: Muwhahahahahaha! Cliffy!
Kurama: Reading over KNY's shoulder You do realize that your reviewers are going to kill you, right KNY-san?
KNY: He called me KNY-san… swoons And yes, I know. I'm trying to achieve the title of "Evil Queen of Cliffhangers"!
Kurama: You just may succeed.
KNY: Yay!
Yusuke: Sneaks away from Kiki and the unconscious Hiei. Walks up behind KNY.
KNY: Stiffens. Urameshi, you have ten seconds to remove your hand from my ass. One… Two… Punches Yusuke into nearest wall.
Yusuke: Pries face out of rubble. You said ten seconds!
KNY: I suck at math. So sue me!
Kurama: Shouldn't we locate your missing friends KNY-san?
KNY: Yes, let's round up the others and go.
Replies to Reviews:
Duelchick901- I made another author's favorites list! Does a happy dance. Glad to meet a fellow cat lover! I like dogs too, but there's just such a quiet elegance about cats… Sighs.
KawaiiKoorimeYokai- Thanks, Kiki. Here's your update!
SGS- Good luck rescuing Tama-baby! Yes! Crocodiles! Laughs manically Okay! Pokes male parental unit repeatedly. Finish writing!