Caught in the Whirlpool
Part VIII
The zorua bristled as she was carried back into the small room by the scruff of her neck by her stupid blond human captor.
Stupid bell! she thought venomously. If it hadn't given me away, I might've been able to escape!
"Don't you do that again!" the stupid boy warned her with a glare. However, her attention was on the compartment door as it was securely shut behind the oldest human in the group. "You almost got us thrown off the train!" her captor complained.
She was unconcerned by his grievances. The instant he set her on the floor, she tried to shove the soothe bell off her neck with her front and then her back paws. But the black ribbon was thin and slick and it fitted closely to her neck so she couldn't get a good grip on it. This failure only made her more irritable about her unsuccessful escape attempt.
After successfully sparking the chaos needed to get the door open, she'd darted out into a narrow hall with doors on both walls and a door at each end of the hallway. All the other doors were shut tight and she was pursued, but she'd tried to make it work for her. The narrow hall made it impossible for more than one human to pass through at a time and made it difficult to turn around quickly, so she'd doubled back several times to dart between legs. She had hoped that the noise would encourage some other human to open one of the other doors, allowing her to escape or hide with her illusion powers, but she'd gotten caught before that could happen.
:Stupid, stupid bell!: she growled, vigorously shaking herself in the vain hope that the offending accessory would magically fly off.
:Play!: the stupid baby eevee cried happily and jumped onto her back. :Friend!:
:Hey!: the zorua squawked. :Get off of me right now! I don't want to play with you; I'm not your friend!:
She bucked the little eevee off and was immediately confronted by the male pikachu.
:He's just a baby,: the yellow mouse squeaked angrily. :You shouldn't be so mean to him!:
:Keep him away from me, then,: the zorua sniffed.
:Consider yourself fortunate that you're a dark type,: the espeon hissed. :Otherwise I'd inflict a migraine upon you. How dare you humiliate my Sakura and cause such trouble!:
The zorua sneered at the psychic eevee before she went back to futilely trying to remove the bell from around her neck.
"Well, that critter certainly is clever," the oldest, largest human remarked. "It knew exactly what to do to stir up trouble."
Of course I did, the zorua thought smugly. That was one of my uncles' first lessons to me. To whip up chaos, pick a target and become to opposite gender—use a face familiar to the target if possible—then invade the target's personal space and cuddle. That leads to embarrassment, shock, jealousy, and conflict…
"How annoying," the angry dark-haired boy muttered.
"You'd better teach that thing some manners," the pink-haired girl demanded, cheeks red with embarrassment. "I don't want that fox impersonating me and making me look like an idiot!"
"I'll work on that," the blond boy promised.
The zorua rolled her eyes. She had no interest in developing manners or behaving herself. She wouldn't stop causing her captor and the humans around him trouble until she was free.
At first, when the houndoom had told her how far from her home that she supposedly was, she'd been very upset. But after calming down, it had occurred to her that the demon dog could have been lying to her. He was a human slave and would do whatever he thought would earn him praise from his master, including lie to her so that she might give up her dreams of freedom.
:Why did you try to run?: the adult male eevee without a scar asked.
:I'm going to go home,: the zorua snapped. :And I need to lose these stupid humans before I make it back to my tribe or they'll cast me out.:
:Why not stay?: the eevee said with a frown. :You could become stronger.:
:I like the easy food,: the eevee with the scar remarked. :I won't miss spending hours looking for berries and tasty plants and worrying about some other pokémon stealing my meal.:
The zorua curled her lip in disdain at their weakness. She'd never had trouble getting food. When she was with her tribe the adults provided all the food that she and her siblings and cousins could eat. And in the park it had been child's play to rob the human's buildings of whatever she'd desired. With her powers of illusion they'd never found a trace of her or come remotely close to tracking her down.
And humans weren't necessary to become stronger. Her tribe taught her about her powers and gave her tasks and challenges that would increase her strength. One day, if she completed all the challenges and practiced against her family, she would become a zoroark like her mother.
:I don't need a human's help,: the zorua snorted and hopped up onto the window ledge to stare out at the moving scenery in hopes of seeing something familiar. :I'll achieve my dreams by myself.:
I've really been gone for a long time, she thought. Mommy must be looking for me by now. I need to make sure that I escape from the stupid human before she finds me…
As soon as it became clear that Ken-Ichi wouldn't be catching up with them, Katsuro saw no point in dragging his feet and decided to fly home. So he rode upon Menace, his salamence, and loaned Char the charizard to Hayato. His fierce and mighty dragon had no trouble bearing Katsuro's hefty body through the air, and Hayato was so light that Char sometimes forgot that he had a passenger and would try to do some aerobatics to break the boredom of the long flight.
So far they'd done one long flight over the continent and spent the night at the first Pokémon Center they came to as the sun started setting. Right after breakfast they took off again and flew as far as they could until lunch. And now they were over the trackless ocean, heading for the islands of Uzu no Kuni and home.
"Are we almost there?" Hayato shouted over the rushing wind.
"We'll get there before dark!" Katsuro yelled back.
"I hate flying over water!" Hayato complained.
"Wimp," Katsuro muttered, letting the turbulent air swallow it up. His name has something to do with a bird of prey and he hates flying…go figure.
Katsuro loved flying. That was why he'd chosen a charmander as his first pokémon despite the fact that fire-type pokémon were extremely unpopular in his damp, water-filled homeland. And that was one of the reasons why he'd stuck with Menace, even when he'd gotten frustrated with how long it was taking the dragon to evolve.
His family bred and raised dragons since nearly the dawn of time. When the Kurohi had first come to the Land of Whirlpools there had been a wild clan of salamence that had lived in the caves of Mount Spiral at the heart of Central Uzu Island. The mighty dragons had raided the countryside almost at will, and it had been his family—not the high-and-mighty Uzumaki, the snobby Hoshitama, or any other of the so-called Great Families—that had captured and trained all the wild salamence and made them productive beasts that would defend the land instead of plunder it.
"Great Families", he sneered as Menace smoothly stroked through the air on his blade-shaped red wings. They're all a big joke! Especially those Uzumaki.
There were ten families in the Land of Whirlpools that could trace their histories back to the founding of the national government many centuries ago. Each had their own preferences for types and species of pokémon, and each thought that they were the best. The Hoshitama worshipped steel-types, the Retsukai raised ice types, the Biyokuchi trained fighting pokémon, the Myoubikou attracted ghosts, the Kinomoto grew grass pokémon, the Kurokawa gathered dark creatures, his own family mastered dragons, and the Akisame, Furukawa, and Uzumaki all favored water-types and specialized in different species of sea beasts.
The Uzumaki were the ones that got on Katsuro's nerves the most. Partly it was because his family and their family had a long and unhappy history, but it was also because of their pokémon-of-choice. All their men trained gyarados and thought that they were the greatest because gyarados were dangerous and destructive in the wild, and gyarados were strong enough swimmers to cut through strong currents and had the power to temporarily neutralize whirlpools.
There's nothing special about getting past whirlpools, Kasturo sniffed. Just fly over them! Real dragons are so much better than those dragon-wannabe water-worms that the Uzumaki love.
Shaking his head, Katsuro leaned into the wind and strained his eyes for the first faint signs of home…
Minato stood near the bow of the ferry and leaned against the railing as the ocean breeze messed with his hair. Genma loitered nearby, keeping an eye out in case any reporters happened to be on the same boat so that he could try and intercept them if they wanted to bother his employer. The air was growing chilly despite it still being summer and there were no other passengers outside wandering the ferry decks on their part of the boat.
We're almost there, Minato thought as he gazed out to where the light blue of the sky and the deep blue of the sea met at the horizon. We'll spend the night in a hotel on West Uzu Island, and then catch one more ferry in the morning. And then we'll reach Uzu Town by tomorrow afternoon…
He both looked forward to arriving there, and dreaded it. Kushina had relatives in Uzu Town, but he wasn't sure what kind of relatives they were. They could be distant cousins, they could be close cousins, or they could be members of her immediate family. The man that he was to fight, Kenjiro Uzumaki, might well turn out to be her father.
I wish I got around to weaseling names of her family members out of her, he thought glumly. I know one of her brothers is named Arashi, two of her brothers are twins, and an aunt of hers ended up living in her house… But that's it. If she said anything else about her family, it was so long ago that I don't remember it. He sighed deeply. Why does she have to be so tight-lipped about her past?
"Something wrong?" Genma asked as he moved alongside Minato and spat a well-chewed wooden toothpick into the sea.
"Just trying to get my head together for the fight," Minato shrugged.
"You're worried about a battle out in a backwater like the Land of Whirlpools?" Genma snorted.
"It's never wise to underestimate the difficulty of a battle not yet fought, especially because of where the battle will be held," Minato retorted. "Just because most people in the Land of Fire have never heard of Uzu Town doesn't mean that the trainers that live there will be pushovers."
"Eh, true," Genma nodded and put a fresh toothpick between his teeth. "It's just not like you to get anxious when the fight is more than a day away."
"I wish I knew a bit more background on this Kenjiro Uzumaki, that's all," Minato shrugged.
"There'll be time to do a little snooping if you really want to when we get there," Genma half-smiled. "So relax and enjoy the nice boat ride, okay?"
Minato grinned weakly and looked back out over the water.
I know that I shouldn't worry about it…but I can't quite stop.
Inaho clutched the ferry railing and stared down into the white boiling wake of the wide slow ship as it chugged along. She was white as a sheet and covered in a thin film of cold sweat. Perched on the railing beside her was her kecleon, Ziggy, holding on tight with his prehensile tail and eying her with concern.
I should never have chased after this pokémon battle. The ferry slowly rose and fell with the gentle ocean swells and she swallowed convulsively. What sort of backwards country doesn't have an airport?
If she bothered to write the travel piece she'd contemplated earlier in the week, she'd bash Uzu no Kuni ten ways from Sunday. The dinky island nation had no airports or airfields of any kind. The only way to come and go from the place was by boat, and Inaho did not like boats.
She carefully pried loose one hand from the railing and tucked some loose brown hair behind her ear to make sure it stayed out of the way and went back to squeezing the metal rail immediately.
Stupid motion-sickness pills aren't working… She clenched her teeth and did her best to breathe shallowly. Stupid, stupid, stupid long boat ride!
At least Minato Namikaze isn't back here… That would be so embarrassing!
And then her lunch escaped.
Kushina settled herself down on an open stool at a tiny eatery that reminded her of Konoha Town's Ichiraku Ramen and ordered a bowl of shrimp soup. Cleaning Kyuumaru up had taken longer than she'd expected and she'd lost track of time while she had relaxed up by the shrine. So now she was behind on doing her work for Professor Utatane.
I'll strike out after lunch…or is it late enough to qualify as an early dinner?
She propped her forearms on the counter and did her best to wait patiently for her order to be cooked and delivered.
Hungry, hungry, hungry…
"Are you sure?" a vaguely familiar masculine voice said somewhere behind her.
"Positive," a more familiar man's voice replied. "Shun's not nearly as nasty as most Kurohi, and why would he lie? He never knew her."
Kushina frowned. Isn't that Arata?
"Huh…so, have you seen her with your own eyes?" the first man asked.
"No, not yet," the second man sighed. "I stopped by her house a few hours ago but she'd already left for…somewhere. By the way, you got here fast. I just left a message with your sister before I swung by the house."
"I happened to be on Central Uzu today and she forwarded your message right over to me," the first man explained. "It was all so interesting that I came right over."
Okay, now I'm curious.
Kushina spun around on her stool and carefully parted the half-curtains that gave the illusion of privacy to the eatery's patrons. A man with dirty blond hair and a long, thin, black rectangle tattoo across his cheeks and over the bridge of his nose was leaning up against a lamp post with a half-eaten carton of dango. And the man standing next to him had fair skin with a scar on his left cheek, short black hair and a neatly-trimmed goatee, dark brown eyes, and…
Holy crap, is that Daichi? Kushina blinked, startled. Where'd that scar come from?
"It's too bad that Hachiro's busy and Ando moved all the way to Jungle Country," the dirty blond, Arata Kurokawa, sighed sadly. "It would be cool to put the band back together."
"Arata, we never had a band," the black-haired man, Daichi Myoubikou, snorted. "And if we had, it would've been really lame. Hachiro knows how to play the guitar, but Ando only ever played little bongo drums, I've can only play the harmonica, and what would've been your instrument? The tambourine? The kazoo?"
"We would've been an awesome band!" Arata grinned. "And our darling 'Shina would've been our lead singer!"
"What planet are you on?" Kushina grumbled and briefly abandoned her stool to kick Arata in the shin. "And how many times do I have to tell you to never call me that?"
"Ow!" Arata yelped, immediately taking his weight off the kicked appendage. "Hey! What was that for?"
"It's 'Kushina' or 'Uzumaki', never ''Shina'," she growled. Only Minato could get away with that… And then she realized that she'd given herself away when she could've stayed hidden. Aw, crud.
At first, neither man looked at her with any flicker of recognition. And then she saw realization of her identity in their eyes. Daichi caught on first, being the smartest of her childhood friends, and then Arata caught on, too.
"…Kushina?" Arata blinked, looking her up and down and up again. "Shun said that you had long hair, but I don't think that I really believed him."
"Look at you," Daichi murmured, giving her his own visual examination.
"Quit it," she muttered and then gave Arata a hard look. "And punch Shun for me the next time that you see him."
"Shun's a nice guy…you know, for a Kurohi," Arata protested weakly.
"A nice Kurohi?" Daichi quirked an eyebrow. "Isn't that an oxymoron?"
"Whatever," Kushina growled and returned to her seat at the counter to wait for her soup.
"Ditching us so soon?" Daichi asked, ducking under the short curtain and claiming the stool next to her.
"Yeah, we missed you!" Arata agreed, sliding in on her other side. "Seriously, where have you been?"
"Everywhere but here," she sighed.
"Where is 'everywhere'?" Arata asked with a goofy expression. "And what's this about you possibly being engaged?"
"Engaged?" Daichi folded his arms over his chest. "Are you really?"
"Yes," Kushina nearly groaned. "You're not going to give me trouble about it, are you?"
"You're our friend and you're suddenly going to marry some stranger and we're not allowed to worry about you?" Daichi said with a slight frown.
"Yeah," Arata nodded vigorously. "What he said."
Kushina pressed her knuckle into her forehead as the beginning of a headache started to build. Her soup arrived then and she eagerly snapped apart her disposable chopsticks and dug in. Daichi and Arata placed orders for drinks and waited until the server had delivered their beverages and left before bothering her some more.
Arata poked her elbow. "So?"
"So what?" she growled between bits of noodly, shrimpy soup. "I've known him for a really long time and worry all you like; you're not going to change my mind about what I'm doing."
"So stubborn," Daichi sighed. "I guess some things will never change."
"Well you were friends with me," Kushina shrugged.
"True enough," Daichi nodded and sipped at his cup of green tea. "We missed you after you left."
Kushina fiddled with a bit of shrimp with her chopsticks. "You could've followed me out into the wider world if you'd wanted to. And Ando's seen me a couple of times."
"A couple of times?" Arata cocked his head. "I know he said that he saw you one time years ago…when else did he see you?"
"In Jungle Country a couple a little over a month ago," she told him.
"I hadn't heard about that yet!" Arata pouted. "Ando needs to send more postcards!"
"You could always go visit him yourself if you really wanted," Kushina suggested.
Arata hunched over his bottle of beer. "I think about that sometimes…"
"Why not do it, then?" she asked.
Arata shrugged.
"…Well, what finally brought you back?" Daichi asked after an uncomfortable silence.
"I got loaned to Professor Utatane until one of her regular assistants comes back," Kushina informed them.
"You didn't just want to come and visit us?" Arata pouted.
"I was going to do that eventually," she shrugged. Probably. Like, after I got married.
Arata snorted. "What were you waiting for?"
"A good time for a trip," Kushina muttered and lifted the bowl to sip at the leftover warm broth. "You guys want to come help me survey the coastline for the professor? You can catch me up on stuff while we work."
"Sure, I'm off work for a few days," Arata grinned and tossed back his beer. "Let's go!"
"I can help for a day or two," Daichi agreed.
"Cool." Kushina finished off her soup and left her money on the counter. "There's still a few hours of good daylight left and I know just the place to search. Follow me!"
"Yes, ma'am!" Arata saluted.
"Lead on," Daichi grinned as he set down enough cash to cover both his and Arata's drinks.
Kushina smirked and headed for the harbor. "So, where's Hachiro?"
"Last I heard, he was living in sin with some dude named Akira and working on a Contest routine with his gyarados and milotic," Arata told her. "He's really into the idea of ugly destruction paired with beautiful serenity…or whatever."
She furrowed her brow. "He's what?"
"He turned out to be gay," Arata said. "You surprised?"
"…Not really," Kushina replied after a moment's thought. "It makes a lot of sense now I that I think about it. Good for him."
"It didn't much surprise us either when he finally admitted to it," Daichi shrugged. "I think the only people that were really surprised were your cousin Akane and her mother."
"That doesn't surprise me, either," Kushina muttered and rolled her eyes. "Well," she said as a gleaming stretch of water appeared up ahead, "on to adventure."
"Adventure!" Arata eagerly agreed.
Daichi just laughed.
The sun had long set when the clouds parted to reveal smudges of faint stars in the black sky. The moon was still covered, leaving the night dark and forbidding. A chill wind stirred the undergrowth and made the stunted trees creak.
Kyuumaru sat just outside of his den—a hollow space formed beneath the densely interwoven branches of evergreen bushes—untouched by the cold night and wondered what phase the moon would be. He'd long lost track of how long he'd been guardian of the shrine, let alone what the exact date was. Now that he was all alone it was like he'd lost his grip on the flow of time and drifted in and out of the past.
With little effort he could visualize Mito-sama sitting before the shrine and contemplating it, or standing just inside the shrine and making sketches of the carvings therein. He could imagine Tenshi and Shikon taunting Ikamaru, while Kin and Ryuuza sunned themselves on the warm flat stones set into spiral patterns around the shrine. It was so hard to remember that they were all dead and gone, even Ryuuza who had seemed to have been still alive only a few days ago, although he knew that the dragonair had been deceased for much longer than that.
Some days, when he hadn't eaten much and hadn't had any real visitors for weeks, he would start to confuse his memories of his mistress and the descendant that bore her name centuries later. He would see the other Mito among his long-dead comrades in the garb of his trainer. Or he would see his Mito in more modern clothes being led astray and away by the foreign man from the mainland that he'd never liked.
And now a fresh confusion preyed upon his mind. A new Uzumaki—a Kushina that reminded him almost of a boyish child from long ago…or had that one been more recent?—that didn't bear his beloved Mito's name, but looked so much like her; like the other Mito. Even though she wore pants, something neither Mito had ever done, she still seemed to take on his Mito's hairstyle or the other Mito's glittering crystal necklace—a gift from that untrustworthy stranger.
Kyuumaru stared up into the heavens and struggled to order his thoughts into something less fuzzy and more chronological. He started with his vulpix-hood on the mainland, as there was none of his kind on this island, or anywhere in Uzu no Kuni. He reviewed his career with the mighty Mito Uzumaki and her fascination with the Sealed Shrine in her later years and her death…
"Promise me that you will protect the shrine from harm…from people forgetting… Guard it…until…"
He briefly closed his ruby eyes and whined softly in remembered pain of the heart.
:Until my dying breath, I will guard this place for you, Mito-sama!: