A Golden-Haired Stranger

By then, it's soon...summer.

The weather was starting to warm up again when they revived Yuzuriha.

'Yuzuriha, are you alright? Not hurt or anything?!' Taiju fussed over Yuzuriha anxiously.

'I'm alright now, Kagome-san expla-OW!' she yelped at a very sharp, piercing pain that also felt that her foot went spastic on her.

'Yuzuriha?!' Taiju cried as Yuzuriha lifted her right foot...where three of her toes are still rocky.

'...three of my toes are still a rock and it hurts!'

'Senku more fluid!' Kagome cried urgently, seeing the flow of Yuzuriha's ki as chaotic by her toes as in her eyes, ki flows as normal but couldn't go to where it should, blocked and accumulating chaotically. Not only that, her foot is starting to redden. 'Her body is rejecting what doesn't belong already and starting an autoimmune response against her rocky toes!'

'Shiiiit! Be right back! I wasn't expecting thiiis!' Senku was quick to run away in worry to get more supply while she and Taiju helped Yuzuriha down and Taiju was massaging her foot in a bid to make her feel better.

'I guess what's in the bottle wasn't enough.' said Tsukasa in sympathy. 'Try breathing calmly. Quick breaths make blood flow faster thus it hurts more and more.' he advised. 'And hang on until Senku's back.' Yuzuriha nodded while wincing. She did her best but the pain was too much, until Senku was back fifteen minutes later, red-faced and heaving a lot. He wordlessly handed the bottle to Taiju as he was heaving and Tsukasa advised him to control his breathing so he'd recover. He clearly needs exercise, as Taiju poured the fluid on her toes.

By the time Yuzuriha's toes are OK, her foot had already started swelling in pain but since it was only for a few minutes, it wasn't so bad...yet.

'Carry her back to camp, she can't walk with a foot like that.' Taiju was more happy to obey Senku's gasped out instructions. 'I've never run so hard in my life...my chest feels its ready to burst!'

'That's a sign you need more stamina training.' Kagome told him wryly. 'The japanese stereotype of geeks are weak won't help you survive here. Defy that stereotype by exercising when not inventing. Moreover do you even know how to swim?'

'Oi I know how to swim!' Senku's reaction was hilariously indignant at such a question. 'We have swimming classes in school!'

'You can only last a minute before giving up though.' said Taiju, causing a comical arrow to stab Senku.

'I'm not a stamina factory like you!' he cried with a comical bighead.

'Well, you can start training by the beach.' Kagome recommended. 'With your feet ankle-deep into the water and run. It'll build stamina that way, so the boys will take turns being your spotter. Leave camp at around 5 am so you can be at the beach at 6 am. Then run for two hours, before coming back here as again, Sunburn is bad. You'll get breakfast then.'

'Geh...' Senku dreaded the idea but one cannot deny that incase of a chase, he'd be the first to fall and be a deadweight.

Out of the question. He cannot die, not if he wants to bring humanity back to modern age! The knowledge needed, are all in his head!

Seeing his determination, Tsukasa looked at Kagome. 'Kagome, can you fight?'

'I can.' said Kagome. 'I'm a master archer.'

'Be on the lookout while I'm gone.' said Tsukasa. 'I'll handle spotting Senku in the mornings. It helps that I can fish in the sea and smoke at your smokehouse and bring back seaweed.'

'Avoid sunburn and jellyfish, we don't have vinegar for stings! Taiju's lucky so far because he's our seafood forager but all it takes is one bad day.' Kagome reminded him. She can heal without vinegar, but that'd mean revealing...she's not a normal human.

'Mm.'

They'll start tomorrow, so for now, they're preparing their lunch while Yuzuriha recovers from a swollen foot as a result of an auto-immune response no thanks to a rocky toe. She was whimpering and sniffling, trying hard not to bawl because it was THAT bad. But Senku and Taiju knows their friend too well.

Meal for the day, is claypot nabe dish.

Where Kagome's camp was must have been luckily, near a farm. She has a lot of access to Hemp, mushrooms and other fruit such as Amaou Strawberries, Mizuho Loquats, Three types of Pears, sansai they forage around in, usually finding Urui, Wasabina, Shungiku and Udo, vegetables that grew nearby in random finds as due to nature's shift and lots of groceries scattered about and thrived, yup, they're VERY HAPPY and medicinal herbs good for minor ailments but even then, just enough to deal with physical aches and fever.

But Kagome collects all seeds so in the future, they can farm them.

Yuzuriha learns from Taiju how he and Senku had been doing, before reviving Tsukasa and meeting Kagome after a year of experimenting to bring people back and how they began working together for survival as a whole.

'So I'll be working with Kagome-san as a craftsman and farming, I don't mind.' said Yuzuriha. She should work to her strengths, not where she's no good at in.

'For now we'll just be by ourselves, at least until we have enough supply of Nital again.' said Senku. 'Nital is a precious resource that Kagome's family aside, we have to be picky in who we bring back. The problem is, how to sort out good guys from bad? No criminal record and has skills we don't have, but need.'

'We need a celebrity who can identify fellow celebrities.' said Tsukasa. 'Who have what we want. We have an inventor, hunter, forager and craftswomen, so there's a carpenter who can help us build a proper residence that can withstand typhoons and additional fighters who can protect our producers.'

'Alright.' Senku agreed. 'For now we need to wait for enough for a bowl to fill up to avoid a case like Yuzuriha's. We got plenty of brandy thanks to grapes, nitric acid is too slow to fill it's a 10 billion percent pain in the ass.' he sighed glumly. 'I guess for now we do workout.'

'Two hours in the morning and two hours before dinner OK~' Kagome chirped. 'Senku should get the most of training for four hours a day.'

'Don't you mean six hours? The trip back home is an hour long uphill trek.' Senku sweatdropped.

Kagome's smile is...beatific but they see it as sadistic.

Days went by...to a month.

It took four days for Yuzuriha to get better, by eating soup bowls with a good helping of Hemp Oil to reduce swelling, and Taiju massaging her foot with the oil. A two-pronged approach.

When 'that time' came by?

'You even have this...' Yuzuriha was GLAD they have a tampon... It was a hemp sack stuffed with fiber.

'I got fifty of the suckers, so after you used one, we er, dispose of it safely through our toilet holes and quickly cover it with soil to keep lions away.' Kagome grinned. 'Its not as comfortable as store-bought ones, but pickiness is out of the question now. I always make 50 a month for precaution.'

'Yeah, there's that...I'll have to replenish our supply so how do you make the stuffing...?'

xxx

It's now summer that dangers of Sunburn are...high.

They now have to wear cone hats with veils going out, and you need to be fully-clothed in swimming.

Kagome soon brought back killed birds and older deer as it's Tsukasa who brings back fish.

'Wow, it'll be a lot of meat!' Yuzuriha looked happy. 'But is deer meat any good?'

'If prepared right, yeah.' said Senku. 'We get rid of the gamey taste by removing the fat, connective tissue, silver skin, bone and hair and wash the meat well in the river. The taste is then a bit nutty and earthy because of what the deer eats. Kagome, it instantly died, right?'

'Yeah. It's KO-ed.'

'Goody, cuz' it'll suck by 10 billion percent if they have a slow death...kindness to prey aside, stress chemicals in a dying deer make their meat taste bad no matter how you process it. Its like they're spiting us that way.'

'Yeah, I know that.'

'Time to fatten up because being skinny in winter will 10 billion percent suck.' said Senku, looking at his new clothes. With Yuzuriha and Kagome together, clothing production is very quick, he now wore an uwagi with trousers and zori sandals. 'Even with hemp clothes.'

'We also need to make preserved food for winter.' said Kagome. 'Let's hunt mushrooms and vegetables other than harvesting off my farm and dry it in the sun by the river on mats. We'll go out in two groups. We hunt vegetables first, then we hunt meat and fish for preserving for winter, and make enough charcoal while we're at it. At winter wood is too wet for use.'

'Each group will have one fighter.' said Tsukasa. 'Senku with me, then with Kagome will be Taiju and Yuzuriha.'

Foraging far from home is also, quite the exercise anyway.

Vegetables are dried in the sun, as is small pieces of meat and fish flesh lathered with hemp oil to keep bacteria away, and gathered into jars. Seaweed is also collected for umami. They also hacked wood like crazy for drying for winter use. Yuzuriha, Senku and Kagome collected branches as additional material for charcoal-making, Taiju and Tsukasa logged down trees quite literally with their axes, stripped bark off and dried the wood.

Hunt. Forage. Dry.

During hunting, Tsukasa and Senku met a blonde girl carrying a large jar of water...

Stunned at seeing different people other than what they know, it became a Q&A Session...

...and brought her to their camp.

Because there's civilization where the girl is from, however small!

'So your village is like, 40 people only? How come?' Kagome asked Kohaku with a frown. She's clearly a foreigner in tanned clothes, with twisted vines as that rope thingy she has on. And her name reminded her of the Kohaku she knew of.

'Well, when I was born there's a lot more people.' said Kohaku. 'But famine came when there's not much to hunt, so a lot of us died. So everyone has a one-child rule made since then so food won't run out so quick. We fish and we hunt.'

'Er, what about farming? Thanks to Kagome-chan's farming skills, we survived with a full stomach to supplement our meat and fish.' Yuzuriha croaked out and Kohaku gave them a clueless look. That said it all for the modern teens. 'No wonder. You guys...didn't farm.'

'...what's farming?' Kohaku inquired. The idea intrigued her. These guys survived with this technique with full stomachs with just five of them, something even she can only dream about?!

'Farming is that a large amount of land is cleared up, removing stones and trees, and evening out the land while plowing it, softening the ground to plant edible plants to eat.' Senku explained. 'People don't just eat meat and pluck anything while foraging you know. That's not good in the long run that it's often best to farm goods for full stomachs.'

'Show me an example?'

'Kagome you're up!' thus Kagome explained to Kohaku how she survived on her own before she met the other four. She even showed Kohaku her farm of fruits, sansai vegetables, actual vegetables and mushrooms. She also has fruits which she planted out of season on purpose, so she has food year-round and wanting for nothing.

'Had we have this, we wouldn't have starved?!' Kohaku was utterly shocked as Kagome gave Kohaku some out-of-season strawberries. But nobody EVER thought of this, at all!

'No.' said Tsukasa. 'Humans realized that hunting just won't cut it. In desperation as well as through trial and error as well as deaths, they sought plants that can be eaten, and know what should not be eaten lest you get sick or die as some plants are poisonous.' he explained. 'People thus began cultivating these edible plants and combining their different tastes through cooking, and eventually have delicious food. We'll show you.'

Kohaku watched as everyone worked together.

Gathering water from the river, then put it on their unusual cooking fire and while they wait for it to boil, with the pot containing a wavy green leaf and a bunch of chopped mushrooms with white stuff, before Kagome and Yuzuriha prepare the vegetable and mushrooms while the boys prepared the meat.

Once the water began boiling, the boys put the meat in...and in select order, certain types of vegetables.

'Er won't it be more efficient to dump everything in at once?' Kohaku asked, baffled.

'No. Otherwise the leafy vegetables would get too soggy and will easily crumble to mush when we get them with spoons.' said Taiju.

'Thus the rule is, put the slow-cooking stuff in first, then put fast-cooking ones in last. Then wait for five minutes and its all done.' said Kagome. 'We don't eat roasted meat over campfire all the time, we eat soups too.' and that's because it's all they can only make, as they lack tools for other cooking techniques as well as lacking in supplies! Hotpots is all they can do.

When Kohaku tried some, she gasped at the difference. Cooking with plants indeed, made food tastier! She practically inhaled her food.

'This water is so delicious!' Kohaku gushed out, liking the nabe. 'It's sweet with a bit of salty and meaty flavor, but delicious! I want neesan to eat this!'

'Your sister?'

'Yeah...she's sick for many. many years.' Kohaku croaked out. 'She gets fevers too easily, coughs a lot with sometimes, green or yellow slimy stuff she pukes out, and she complains of chest pains its sometimes enough to make her fall over. And she breathes like she ran fast when she never ran her whole life. I get clean water from the hot spring in the nearby volcano as it's hot water for cheap and it'll cool down by the time I get home. Using up precious firewood was why most neighbors gave her up as dead as nobody lives for long with that sickness.'

'And clean water keeps her alive...' Senku frowned in deep thought as he browsed his brain for knowledge as he studied everything he can get his hands on that he can easily accomplish himself. '...Pneumonia.'

'That's her sickness?' Kagome asked him. The lone genius nodded.

'Yeah. That's her illness. Kohaku's done well in bringing her clean water, as it's of a great help because indeed, people with Pneumonia don't live long without access to clean drinking water as water from rivers and lakes are dirty despite how clear it looks and it will make her sister sicker. In fact, untreated people live only a month without care and is 10 billion percent stubbornness that made a gal like that live this long.' Kohaku gasped at this. All her years of work was worth something! And Senku clearly knows the illness her people gave up on as they have records by their elder's memories!

'We boil our water every day for safety at night to drink the next day after all to keep us sick-free.' Senku told her, waving an arm towards his group. 'But sulfa medicine is all we have as long as we have resources. And we're conveniently, near a volcano for the main ingredient. The rest is also accessible, I just need tools. But we don't have a tool maker who can help me out with that. I need equipment.'

'I'll talk to Chrome and old man Kaseki!' Kohaku said excitedly. 'And I need permission to let you guys in.'

'Permission?'

'Yes, well, in the past, our village banished criminals.' said Kohaku. 'Doomed to live in the wild with dangerous beasts outside. Its why all of us have to be strong and good fighters.' Kohaku explained. 'Since you don't look anything like us, its impossible for you guys to be their children. I'll come back in a few!' and Kohaku ran off, her face all lit up, excited.

'Well, what is this sulfa-drug?' Tsukasa asked Senku.

'They're the world's first antibiotics made in 1935...before scientists discovered Penicillin.' said Senku. 'Penicillin is far stronger that sulfa-drugs became lost in the shadows of history. However, improper use of it gave birth to Penicillin-resistant bacteria over time...and that's why Sulfa-drugs would have a great shot. In the 3700 years that went by...we can no longer rely on Penicillin unless we had studies that confirms it's effective again.'

'Ohhh.'