Author's Note: The alternate title to this chapter was "And Then There Was A Wacky Chase Scene".

#04: This ain't about you anymore

With the gang of Hands hot on their tail, Kanji and his female double pounded around the turn in the hallway, bouncing off the wall like ricocheting pool balls in their haste to get away. "How about this running away thing?" yelled Kanji out of the side of his mouth. "How the hell did I come up with something so smart?"

"What? I thought it was my idea!" the girl pointed out.

Kanji managed to shrug as he sprinted. "You, me, same thing! You look like me, anyway!"

Hearing the patter of the Hands behind them, the girl dashed ahead and punched open a door. "Well so did your Shadow!"

"Well, he didn't think like me, did he?" said Kanji, barreling past her at top speed as she held the door open for him. "He doesn't count!"

"You can't just leave meeeee!" they heard Shadow Kanji screech on cue, with the agony of a thousand tormented souls. "Come baaaack!"

"No frikkin' chance of that, dude!" Kanji hollered. "This ain't—" He wheezed. "This ain't about you anymore!"

"Less talking," the girl panted as she came up beside Kanji, who had gotten a head start of about half a hallway. "More running!"

"You sure you can keep up?" asked Kanji, a little worried by how flushed with exertion the girl seemed. "You don't look so—"

"Pair of Shadows!" the girl interrupted. "Dead ahead!"

"Damnit!" said Kanji. "What do we do now? They're blocking those doors and… that's the only exit left!"

"Just don't stop running!" insisted the girl. "I'll think of something!"

The Shadows were mere meters away. "What, in two seconds?!" protested Kanji. "I can't think that fas—"

"Stop running!" the girl shouted, in much the same tones as before. "I thought of something!"

Kanji glared at her with exasperation. Way to send a mixed message… The formless Shadows had both sprung up, smoky claws at the ready. "Are you kid—"

The girl glanced behind her and then yelled, "Hit the floor, now!"

Kanji only obeyed because he'd actually realized in the pinch what Girl-Kanji was up to. The two of them landed hard against the wooden floor as a wave of energy rushed over their heads, singeing the hairs on the back of Kanji's neck. In front of them, the two Shadows reeled under the onslaught.

"They're both down!" Kanji cheered, caught up in the adrenaline rush. "Now's our chance! Let's crush 'em!"

"Wh-wha-huh?" spluttered the girl.

"Let's crush 'em?" Kanji repeated incredulously. "Come on! Don't be a killjoy!"

"Oh! Right!" The girl bounded to her feet. "Crushing! Count me in on that!"

The two of them rushed at the Shadows, but it immediately it became apparent that neither of them knew just what to do when it came to fighting blobs of liquid darkness. Kanji went for the only part that wasn't liquid darkness, and ended up squashing the mask of one Shadow down into its body with a solid punch and then stamping on the spot as vigorously as he could as the face kept trying to rise out of the doughy mass. The girl, it seemed, was energetically attempting to screw her target's neck around until its head came off.

And then, after one more hard stomp from Kanji and one more sharp twist from the girl, the two Shadows burst into puffs of smoke, which this time assumed no fearsome forms, but simply evaporated without much fuss into the air.

"That was…" The girl heaved for breath. "That was—"

"We've still got those things on our tail!" said Kanji hurriedly. He pointed at the trio of rapidly approaching Hands.

The three Shadows stopped dancing and then, in a kind of chorus, all hopped off the floor and pointed back. Their fingers glowed.

"Well, shit," the girl swore, and then Kanji pushed her through the double doors to safety before she could say anything more.

The Hands seemed to realize that they weren't getting good luck with pointing and zapping. They dropped back to their fingertips and galloped towards Kanji. He shoved the doors open and dove into the room; just in time, too – the door swung shut behind him and smacked into the lead Hand, sending it toppling back into a tangle with its fellows.

"You okay?" Kanji asked the girl as soon as he was through. "The hell are you standing around for? Get running!"

Girl-Kanji was looking around him at the windows. "They're all going…" she said in disbelief. "They're not trying to come in after us."

"What? They're not?" asked Kanji, wheeling around. "Why aren't they?" He tried to open the doors by the handle. "The heck…? Looks like these things grew a lock or something just now! They're not budging." He let out a long, relieved breath. "Lucky break for us, right?"

"Could be bad, though… we might be trapped too…" The corners of the girl's mouth started to creep up. "But hey, I mean… that was… that was… What was that?"

"That was frikkin' amazing, is what!" Kanji enthused, finding the sense of triumph to be quite infectious. "We showed 'em! I guess even when I back down, I still kick ass."

Girl-Kanji cricked her neck back. "I'd say probably the manliest escape in the history of ever," she grinned.

"Hells yeah!" agreed Kanji. "And hey.. wow… You too… You were like a freaking tank out there, and you ain't even a guy… nice work on that Shadow!"

At this, the girl looked a bit peeved. "Hey… What are you tryin' to say? Girls can't be manly?"

"No, I didn't—! Well, I mean…" It should have been a contradiction, but was it? Best not to push the topic. "I don't know about that, but… That's not what I—" Kanji winced. "Forget it. All I'm saying is… you're one hell of a fighter."

"Th-thanks," stuttered Girl-Kanji. "I mean… Yeah, 's cool. Uh. You too."

The two of them both took a second to lean against the wall and recover. They'd stumbled upon a room that was far larger than all the ones Kanji had encountered previously. The bath in the center was still raised off the ground, but for a bath it was pretty vast, going on pool-sized. The ceiling was held up by thick and massive wooden beams. Kanji could see it clearly now; there was hardly a shred of fog left.

"So you figure the Hands can't get at us in here?" The girl bent over and braced her hands on her knees, still trying to catch her breath.

Kanji shook his head a little reluctantly. "Nah. I mean, you'd expect things that come out of walls could go through walls, too, but… maybe they can't get through now that they're hands? I dunno. Are they stuck as hands or can they turn back into those goo monsters whenever they like?"

"Huh. I didn't think of that," the girl said. "Props to you, I guess." She considered the idea. "We can't really fight these things if we don't know anything about 'em."

"But you thought of ducking the shot so it would hit the other Shadows," Kanji countered. "You saved our butts with that."

The girl nodded. "These Shadows fall for that one a lot. I used it on another one back in the… the place I was in before I fell into this bathhouse. And…" She studied her shoes glumly. "I gotta use moves like that in most of my fights. 'Cause when they're bigger'n you, you use their strength against them, knock 'em into each other. But I wish I could just punch 'em straight up every time. No dodging around, no fancy dancing." After a long look at Kanji, she muttered, "Bet you never had that problem."

"You get into fights a lot?" Kanji asked, confused.

"Well, do you?" the girl responded simply. "'Cause if you do, I probably do too."

Kanji's forehead wrinkled a bit. "You really think you're some alternate reality version of me?" he finally asked. "Who's a girl?"

"Well, I guess I really think you're some alternate reality version of me who's a boy," the girl said. "And that's kinda the same thing, huh?"

"But why the hell should you be getting into all these fights if you're a—"

Girl-Kanji scowled. "I got reasons!" She crossed her arms. "I don't even go looking for fights most of the time! It's just that…" But she didn't really know what it just was, or she didn't want to say. Her sentence trailed off uncomfortably.

"So, uh…" Kanji knew he wasn't very good at talking to girls. But this wasn't 'talking to girls' in the usual sense – she was him, wasn't she? She was Girl-Kanji. She probably knew half the shit that Kanji tried to hide just because it applied to her as well. But only half, he thought to himself. The other half was kind of related to the one area in which she and Kanji differed, after all. "So, uh, what's your name? 'Cause I really gotta stop calling you 'Girl-Me' in my head."

The girl chuckled. "I probably would have been calling you 'Boy-Me', too, except that Shadow guy already said your name was Kanji… I'm Kajiko Tatsumi."

Kanji awkwardly clasped the proffered hand. "Kajiko. Neat. Nice to meet you." He folded his arms, unintentionally mimicking her. "So, uh… where you from?"

"Inaba, of course," she said immediately. "Lived there all my life."

"Oh… that's right…" Kanji still couldn't quite wrap his head around the idea. "But you're from… another Inaba?"

Kajiko nodded very hesitantly. "Another… 'dimension' is what that Shadow kid was saying. I guess this place…" She waved her hand in the air. "I mean this place is pretty damn supernatural and all, so maybe my world and your world are separate in real life but in here things work differently and the two worlds could just…" She gestured with vague concentration, pressing her palms against each other and lacing her fingers. "Just sort of… weave together? Like warp and weft." Then she flushed. "Uh, sorry, that was cloth-speak. My family owns a textile shop and I pick this stuff up. Warp and weft are the two directions that the threads—"

"Yeah, I know what it is, okay?" Kanji interrupted. He frowned, tried to make it sound like this knowledge had just casually seeped into his mind without his permission. "My folks own a textile shop too. It figures, since we're, like, alternate copies, right?"

Kajiko sucked in a hiss of breath through her teeth. "Hush up a sec! Was that…?"

All other thoughts vanished from Kanji's head. "What? You heard somethin'?"

Both of them hurried closer to the center of the room, instinctively assuming their back-to-back battle formation. "Like little feet running about," Kajiko said. "And there's no way in hell this place's got mice, right? It's gotta be…" She snorted. "Well, whatever it is, I'm ready to kick its sorry ass!"

"Right there with you on that!" Kanji cracked his knuckles. "So don't drop your guard or nothin'. We don't know where it's coming from." He could hear it too, now. It did seem to be, as far as he could tell, the pattering of bare footsteps.

"Oh, no," he heard Kajiko growl after a moment. "Oh, shit no."

Kanji turned, squinted past the girl's shoulder, and then rubbed his eyes. "What the hell is that?" he said. "Why do all these Shadows have to look so frikkin' creepy?"

Wobbling out of the corner of the room on three dark legs was what appeared to be, for all accounts and purposes, a table, the kind you'd fold out in a hurry when you wanted to sell trinkets or pass out flyers in a fair. It had a simply patterned overhanging cover that bore the familiar expressionless mask, and it was swiftly juggling a handful of items in the space above it.

"Argh! How did it find me?" Kajiko raged. She took a swipe in the air with her first. "Get lost or I'll… I'll reupholster your face! Scram!"

That was an oddly specific reaction to what, at least from Kanji's perspective, was just another monster. He stepped around Kajiko and took a few strides closer to the table. "You sayin' you've met this thing before?"

"Yeah, and last time it tried to shove its knife into me so I'd want to stay the hell back!" Kajiko said warningly. "It throws that thing wicked fast."

"Knife?" asked Kanji. "What are you blabbering about? It hasn't got a knife." He tried to focus on the spinning objects one at a time. "There's a hammer'n a round thing'n a cup and I don't know what the hell that last one—"

"Is that a leg?" interrupted Kajiko, with disturbed fascination. "It's carrying around its own leg? How'd it think of that?" Addressing the Shadow again, she yelled, "Back off, I'm warning ya! You're outnumbered, and we can so kill things like you, right, Kanji?"

"R-right!" Kanji blustered. "Tch… 'course we can! It's easy! So why's it carrying a… that looks more like a hand to me, actually, but—"

"That's its missing leg," the girl explained. "What, did you think it was supposed to have three? I chopped that off last time with its own knife." She puffed her chest up like a peacock. "I gotta say, it was pretty badass." The she frowned. "I guess it can only hold four things up in the air at a time but… if it's so smart, why the heck didn't it drop that stupid cup or something, and keep the weapon?"

Kanji threw his arms out, sending his jacket-cape billowing, and leaned towards the table, in the primal technique of trying to appear bigger for the purpose of intimidation. "Scram!" he yelled. "You heard me! Get lost!"

The table jumped, and as it tried to scuttle away, its back two legs buckled and folded underneath its board. In this new position, with the tail of its cloth spread out behind it, the Shadow looked like a very ugly three-legged dog sitting on its haunches.

"What the…? 'S not even going to attack us?" said Kanji incredulously. He had been planning to run up and kick the thing, but now, with this docile behavior from it, he couldn't find the heart to go through with the plan.

As his side, Kajiko appeared to be battling through a terrible dilemma. "Isn't it… kinda cute?" she murmured.

Kanji could have sworn he saw the table shrink ever so slightly in size. And had it been this bowlegged before? "Cute?" He found himself going crimson from second-hand embarrassment. "Didn't it try'n kill you?"

"Yeah …'s pretty spunky," the girl said. The corners of her blue-gray eyes were just the tiniest bit crinkled with wry affection. "Musta been following me around this whole time. That's one persistent little shit right there."

"Uh…" Kanji really didn't know where to start responding to this, because if he actually said what was on his mind, he'd have to admit that he agreed with her, just a little. "Whatever, man, just… I don't wanna have that thing smacking me with its hammer when my back's turned, all right?"

"You think it could do much with that twig?" Kajiko snorted. She rubbed behind her ear and then deliberated. "I'm not saying it's not dangerous… prob'ly followed me to get back for what I did to it, but, you know, bein' an object of vengeance, that's still kind of flattering. It was either stupid enough or hell-bent enough to jump through a portal after me…"

This rung a clear bell in Kanji's memory. "Wait … so that big hole that opened up in the floor upstairs, that was what dumped you here?"

"Coulda been," Kajiko answered cagily. "Mighta been… Unless there was more than one portal that opened up from that prison place to your weird-ass bathhouse…"

"Hey!" said Kanji, pulling himself up fiercely. "This ain't my weird-ass bathhouse! I got chucked in here, same as you!"

The girl didn't seem to respond well to being contradicted. She scoffed, "Yeah, but I'm not supposed to be here. I'm supposed to be in that other place, getting an earload of shit about what a shocking disgrace to society I am. This place was made for you."

"Made for me?" demanded Kanji, heating up with anger. If his anger hadn't been sparked, he might have wanted to ask just what the girl's own 'place' had been like, but the idea that this building was connected to him brought up a lot of unpleasant ideas. "Just how d'you figure that?"

"I don't know, but it's all trying to mess with your brain, isn't it? So this bathhouse has gotta have something to do with you and not me…"

"Well it doesn't!" Kanji growled. He spat on the floor with vehement scorn. "They screwed up! Whatever knucklehead made this place has got it all wrong about me!"

The table sat and blankly watched the argument develop. The only sign that it could understand came from the way the orbits of the objects over its head nervously contracted every time one of the two adolescents made a gesture of anger.

"What if you made this place yourself?" Kajiko went on, determined to keep prodding at the issue – out of sheer pig-headedness, Kanji thought. "What if it all crawled outta your own mind? That would explain why it suits you so—"

"You tryin' to say I belong here?!" Kanji demanded, beside himself with indignation. "You sayin' this 'Rosy Steam Paradise' shit was my idea?"

"How the hell should I know?" Kajiko threw up her hands. "Maybe it's just a little suspicious how bothered you are by my suggesting that it is!"

Kanji might as well have had smoke coming out of his ears. "I ain't in denial about anything!" he bawled. "And you can take that notion and stuff it up—"

A bolt of dark lightning flashed down in the middle of the floor and rose petals burst from it like sparks out of a case of defective fireworks that, despite missing the cue for the grand finale, have mulishly decided to give it their all as soon as their fuses got working again, no matter how unfashionably late that might be. A euphoric purr of triumph accompanied these theatrics, and a voice dripping with affectation sang out, "Caught you at last…"

With a sense of dread, the boy and the girl both stopped mid-shout and tipped their heads towards the commotion. Out of the whirlwind of shadow, Shadow Kanji exploded into the room, hovering over the waters of the large central bath. "My, MY!" it gasped, heaving in air as if it had been holding its breath. "It took you both long enough to remember me! Well now I'm here, and this time, you're not getting away so easily!"

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