You turn to Altria. "Do you know first aid?"
She blinks. "I have basic training, yes."
"Good." You grab her nearest hand and half-lead, half-drag her to the group huddled on the floor around Tatsuki, who is out like a light. Evidently being told that one of her parents was involved in creating the seal on her was too much for her to handle. "You can help Miss Masaki make sure that Tatsuki's okay. I'll do a ki-scan, to see if that turns up anything a normal examination might miss."
"What about me?" Ichigo asks.
"Handle the twins, dear," Masaki says, very business-like as she loosens Tatsuki's gi. "We shouldn't be crowding Tatsuki like this; it'll just alarm her if she wakes up."
Ichigo encounters some resistance on the part of his sisters, but manages to do as requested.
You're not sure what, exactly, can be accomplished using mundane first aid - and for that matter, you're not entirely convinced it's necessary. As far as you can tell from looking at Tatsuki's aura, all that happened just now was that she fainted after suffering a major emotional shock. So long as she didn't hit her head or land on some other bone the wrong way in the process, she should be physically fine. Still, you see no harm in being thorough; one of your friends is in pain, and you just plain do not like that.
Gained Protective F+++
Isshin, meanwhile, has been glaring at Ambrose.
"The Arisawas aren't sorcerers," he says firmly. "And they definitely don't have any involvement with Hell. I'd have been warned years ago if either of those were the case, let alone both."
Ambrose snorts. "I'm sure."
"They live at a shrine, damn it! I've been there! The wards are intact, functional - Hell's agents couldn't even cross under the torii without burning the whole place down first!" For a moment, Isshin looked like he was going to say more, but then he abruptly stopped, frowning darkly.
"You have the look of a man who's just thought of something," Ambrose says. "Care to share?"
"He's probably just remembered the story about the oni and the fire," Ichigo says.
Everybody stops and stares at the boy.
"What?" he asks defensively, blushing slightly. "There's a memorial for the fire right out in the open, and Tatsuki's mom told me the story about the oni the first time I went over. I always thought it was just a story, but now, well..." He trails off, looking at his unconscious friend.
"What did Akkiko tell you, Ichigo?" Masaki asks, looking at her son. "I'm familiar with the story, but I never heard it directly from a member of the family."
"Oh, well... um..." He frowns, thinking back. "Okay, so the shrine is really old - like, Warring States Era old - and the story goes that back then, Karakura was home to an oni, which did all the things that oni do. Picking fights, taking food, wine, and treasure, kidnapping good-looking people and eating them, throwing lightning at people because it was funny, starting earthquakes if it got ticked off - that kind of thing. Anyway, the local people got fed up and sent for a monk, and eventually one showed up who was powerful enough to defeat the oni."
"Fairly standard fairy tale material so far," Ambrose notes. "I take it the story doesn't end there, though?"
"No. See, the monk was kind of a greedy jerk. When he saw how strong the oni was and all the powers it had, he decided not to kill it or banish it back to the Underworld, but kept it as his servant. He had the oni build the shrine, and then got rich by making it fight youkai and ghosts, and charging people for the service. The monk taught his son how to control the oni, and the son used it the same way - and then his son did the same, and his son after that, and so on. The problem was that the more they relied on the oni, the less the monks were using their own power, and the weaker they all kept getting, the seal with them. After a while, they were making the oni do all the spiritual stuff, because none of them had any power - and then someone figured, it's our servant already, so why not make it do all of the regular servants' work, too? So they did that, and the oni was told that it had to obey the other members of the family like it did the monks." Ichigo shakes his head. "In late fall that same year, the whole extended family got together at the shrine for a celebration. A girl complained of the cold, and told the oni to start a fire. It did, and the whole shrine burned to the ground. The only one to survive was the girl, who the oni saved because she was basically the one who set it free."
"Also not unusual for a fairy tale," Ambrose says. "What happened to the oni and the girl after that?"
"The oni had its revenge, and it didn't want anything more to do with Karakura, so it left," Ichigo says. "As for the girl, she inherited just about everything her family owned, including a lot of property in town. She could have lived pretty well off of it, but she sold most of it to get the money she needed to rebuild the shrine, after which she moved in and lived there for the rest of her life to atone for her mistake and her family's behavior. The shrine's been in the keeping of the women of the family ever since. If the story's true, the girl who released the oni was Tatsuki's great-great-great-great-grandmother, on her mother's side."
You look down at Tatsuki, and the still-visible black chains. "If the story's true," you add, "it still doesn't explain where this seal came from."
"Actually," Masaki says, "with an oni involved, it kind of does. Let's just say that you never leave an oni alone with a girl, and leave it at that."
You look at Ichigo and Altria to see if either of them have any idea what Masaki is hinting at, but they're both showing blank expressions. Isshin, Ambrose, and the cat all seem to get it.
Well, the last puzzling bit aside, that was a fairly enlightening tale - and from Ichigo, too. You have to admit, you hadn't expected that.