InuYasha Fan Fiction / Sailor Moon Fan Fiction ❯ Prismatic ❯ Occurrence ( Chapter 12 )

Kagome wasn't quite certain exactly when she had become such a cynic, but the quiet that followed the cruise ship incident, 'Cruise-ception' as the news stations had so cleverly dubbed it, bothered her. Once they'd gotten back to the shrine, somehow dodging the press long enough to change back and pick up the supplies she'd actually returned for, they were finally able to discuss exactly what had happened.

Mars and Mercury had walked into an enemy trap entirely unawares.

There were worrying implications that neither of them could sense the dark magic or the demon, even if they'd been unable to see through the illusion. Jadeite might have been a master of disguise, but the demons in his ranks -the youma- weren't usually quite so subtle. The demon that he'd had this time had been different. It hadn't been a youma at all. Kagome hadn't thought much about it at the time, too caught up in the chaos of the fight and the following evacuation, but that one had seemed much more like the demons of the feudal era that she had come to know.

Even with middling spiritual power, a trained shrine maiden, a psychic no less, should have sensed something in the air. Hino Rei, of course, had not cared to address that particular detail.

Kagome, already exhausted, had not cared to push the matter. It was inconsequential, at least for the time being, how they had ended up on board. With the events of the scheme and the existence of sailor soldiers so rapidly bursting into the public eye, they had other problems. Seeing the footage of herself and the other soldiers guiding the masses from a burning ship somehow made the entire event much more unnervingly real.

It also made things infinitely more difficult.

Admittedly, it had been bound to happen eventually. With the schemes clearly designed to draw in large numbers to siphon from it had only been a matter of time before the news picked up on the trend. Fighting demons under the watchful eye of the press was not especially convenient. For each headline that only focused on the apparent existence of magic and energy stealing demons, there were at least five more discussing the city's protectors, the sailor soldiers, and theorizing on their identities.

Souta took particular offense to the name that Kagome had hastily claimed for herself.

"You can't have a letter for a name!"

With all the other issues at hand, Kagome really hadn't been able to figure out why it mattered.

"And why not? Sailor V does it!"

"She's a comic book superhero! You just sound like an English beverage!"

When her brother couldn't come up with any of his own suggestions, he finally let it go. As it stood, it didn't really matter now. It was the name that she had given and, with it thoroughly plastered on every screen, newspaper, and half the magazines across the city, it was the one she was stuck with.

If nothing else, at least they'd all been able to agree that laying low would be the best course of action for the time being.

It was probably the first thing their group had unanimously agreed on since Sailor Mars had joined the fray. Though she still wasn't very keen on spending their after school meetings at the Higurashi Shrine, Rei did begin to join them a bit more willingly when they took up a table at the Crown Arcade. When she attempted a peace offering in the form of passing out little Shikon jewel charms to each of them, Rei begrudgingly accepted it, though Kagome wasn't certain if it was only because they were in public. She didn't really partake in much of the conversation or the group study, usually opting to focus on her own work.

She made the mistake of snapping at Usagi to 'pipe down!' once and was swiftly reminded that she had joined their study group. When she'd looked to Ami for support the other girl only avoided her gaze and suggested they get back to studying.

Kagome hadn't paid much attention after that. They had exams coming up before class would break for the summer season, and Rei's superiority complex was not a priority.

Jadeite's disappearance didn't even register until Kagome realized how long the downtime had lasted. When the first week came and went with no sign of any movement from the Dark Kingdom, there seemed to be a collective agreement to simply be thankful for the downtime.

Luckily, the buzz of the media seemed to ebb a bit by the middle of the following week, though they weren't out of the limelight by any stretch of the imagination. Neither her classmates nor Usagi's could stop talking about the new resident superheroes. She certainly felt like a comic book character, no matter what Souta had to say about it.

Deciding to take advantage of the quiet, Kagome made a trip through the well a bit early that Friday, still worried for her more reclusive than normal friend on the other side. Sango and Miroku greeted her welcomingly enough, and she'd been prepared enough to bring a new coloring book for Shippo to busy himself with while she talked to the pair.

The last she had seen them all had been almost right after the cruise ship fiasco. She had been tired, jittery, and ready to drop all in one that day, driven only by the motivation of getting medical supplies back to their side as she'd intended.

When they questioned if something had happened for her to return so soon, Kagome felt oddly ungrateful to admit that her concern was that it hadn't.

"No, it's been really quiet." Kagome frowned and crossed her arms over her chest with a huff as she glared back at the well. "I don't like it."

Miroku looked thoughtful as he followed her gaze. "It has been a few weeks now, hasn't it?"

"Well," Kagome sighed, "only about two but…"

Sango looked up at that, pausing in her work on Hiraikotsu just next to them to furrow her brows. "It does seem unusual given how active you say they were before."

Miroku hummed, tapping his staff against the ground thoughtfully. "I must say, the tactic isn't unlike Naraku's usual methods. I would wonder what they have disappeared to work on."

"Yeah," Kagome grimaced, crinkling her nose as she thought on that particular issue. "There haven't been any shard rumors for a while either, right?"

"No." Miroku's gaze grew distant, and Kagome did not miss the way he absently rubbed at his right hand. "Another bit of quiet that is worrisome."

"It's probably for the best right now. Inuyasha's still…" Kagome trailed off as she turned to look in the direction of the Goshinboku.

It had been Inuyasha's safe haven since the events with his demon blood, and it had been all she could do to get him to at least come down to eat somewhat regularly. As aloof as he tried to be about the entire affair, Kagome knew better. That he hadn't pressed them to get back to the shard hunt was telling enough. She hadn't wanted to press him either, but secluding himself in the Goshinboku away from the rest of them was clearly offering little benefit.

Kagome thinned her lips. "I'm going to try and get him to come back with me for a bit."

At the very least a change of scenery might do him some good.

---

Kagome always had the strangest of ideas.

Inuyasha had been surprised to see her so early in the week since her return. After her last visit, he was surprised that she returned at all. She should have been frightened. But he supposed she was too stubborn for that.

She had always been too stubborn for her own good, the damn wench.

Bullying him into allowing that 'first aid' of hers was one thing. He was used to that particular whim of hers. Ordering him to come eat was another quirk of hers that he had -at some point he couldn't quite recall- gotten used to. Insisting he come back with her to her own world though, he wasn't exactly prepared for. Her assertion that he clearly needed some relaxation, preferably away from demons, wasn't as strange as her insistence on the matter.

They weren't exactly drowning in leads and he could never really refuse her. He had grown weak to her whims in the time he'd known her. It was odd to think that it had only been a few lunar cycles since they'd met. It felt as if he'd known her or, at least, as if she had known him for much longer.

He took her bag from her wordlessly as they exited the well-house and pretended not to notice the way she smiled at him in turn. The wind shifted and he sniffed quietly as she shut the door behind them. When she opened the front door of the house to kick off her shoes, he was not surprised to see those friends of hers and their talking cat parked in the sitting room.

"Oh…Usagi! Luna! Ami-chan!" Kagome brightened at the sight of the trio and waved a hand over her head as she jogged over. "Have you guys been waiting long?"

"They arrived this morning, actually." Kagome's mother wandered out from the kitchen, an apron around her waist and a rag tossed over her shoulder that smelled a bit of grease and herbs.

Souta ran upstairs talking animatedly with the cat, and Inuyasha watched from the doorway as Kagome chattered with Usagi about something, probably those tests she was always running off to contend with. He still wasn't quite sure why she wouldn't let him defeat them for her.

"I do hope you all intend to stay for supper." Kunloon's voice broke his reverie and Inuyasha turned to glance at her. As if she'd sensed his gaze, the woman turned a smile on him in turn. "You too, Inuyasha. I've made plenty."

Luckily, she turned to look at Kagome before she could see the heat that touched his cheeks, still not sure what to make of the motherly attention after so many years without it.

"Kagome, come give me a hand please?"

"Oh," Kagome perked up and turned to follow with a smile, "yes, Mama."

Usagi brightened and practically launched herself from her spot on the floor. "I'll help too!"

There was a long stretch of quiet once the pair vanished into the kitchen and Inuyasha heaved a breath. Then, he was reminded of the one girl -Ami, he thought- when he heard her shuffle behind him. He turned to glance at her and she shrunk in on herself a little, a timid smile tugging at her lips.

"I-it's good to see you again, Inuyasha."

He offered her a noncommittal grunt and looked away. When he snuck a glance at her through the corners of his eyes, she didn't seem terribly bothered.

"Kagome and her family are very welcoming, I must say."

"…yeah. They are." Inuyasha shoved his hands into his sleeves with a scoff. "Kagome's too fuckin' nice if you ask me."

"Oh, that's not really a bad thing, is it?"

Ami smiled at him then and Inuyasha idly thought that she was also far too nice.

"She and Usagi are alike in a way." She turned from him, the look on her face softening fondly as she turned a page in her book. "They were my first friends."

Inuyasha glanced over at that. She seemed a perfectly nice, normal human girl aside from that sailor soldier stuff. Sure, she seemed a bit quiet and timid, but he couldn't fathom why she wouldn't have friends. At least it made sense why people hated him. But she didn't have the same dirty blood. Even her scent was clean, pure in a way he would never be.

He eyed her for a moment more before looking away so she couldn't see the way his expression softened. "Yeah…Kagome was my first real friend too."

They at least had that much in common.

---

It was Monday afternoon when the first reports came in. A number of people had been admitted to the hospital, suddenly and inexplicably falling into comas that had doctors baffled. By Tuesday the numbers had doubled. It was Wednesday afternoon, with Ami and Usagi visiting after their respective schooldays had been cut short, that they finally decided the entire event was strange.

At least, Kagome and Ami decided it was strange. Usagi, fed up with studying, had run off with Souta's soccer ball to play in the courtyard while the two of them sat more dutifully on the bench beneath the Goshinboku.

Kagome did not buy the suspected 'sleeping sickness' outbreak that the news was reporting for one second and she admitted as much.

"This does seem highly unlikely." Ami tapped the end of her pen on her book thoughtfully. "It's very strange with how widespread it has become."

"Keh," Inuyasha, lounging on a branch of the Goshinboku above them, snorted. "What's unusual about it? Humans are weak."

Ami, to her credit, seemed nonplussed by the comment. Kagome almost giggled when she saw the glint in the other girl's eyes, the way she lit up at the chance to talk about her preferred area of study. "Oh, well, it might be a normal illness, but the suddenness and severity of the symptoms seems unusual for it to be natural, even if it were highly contagious."

Inuyasha tilted his head, a brow arched skeptically as he looked down at her. "How do you know that?"

"Well," Ami paused to smile a little, a look of fondness softening her expression. "My mother is a doctor, and I have been studying to enter medical school after high school."

"Doctor, huh?" Inuyasha murmured, looking up at the sky, his gaze far away. "My mother knew lots of remedies too."

"Huh? Oh, everyone's here…" Souta staggered a little as he hefted himself up the stairs, his movements heavy and sluggish and his eyes oddly bloodshot.

"Souta, you look exhausted." Kagome paused to put her book down, frowning as she looked him over. "Was practice that bad?"

"No, I didn't have soccer today." Souta rubbed a hand over his face as he climbed the last few steps leading onto the shrine grounds. Then, as he trudged over to them, his posture straightened, his expression suddenly alert as he stepped out of the shadow of the looming torii gate. "But I feel just fine now."

"What the heck were you up to, kid?" Inuyasha questioned as he leapt down from his perch in the Goshinboku. He eyed Souta for a moment before crinkling his nose in distaste. "You reek of demon magic."

Kagome froze, and Ami sucked in a sharp breath beside her before hastily turning to retrieve the Mercury computer.

"Oh my…you seem to be right." Ami frowned, lips pursed thoughtfully as Souta swatted Kagome's hands away from his face. "But it is fading very rapidly."

Ami stood and Kagome gave up on fussing over Souta to follow. Usagi rushed over to join them by then, her brows knitted in concern as she seemed to have realized something was wrong.

"Readings indicate that it seems to stop just at the edge of the shrine." Balancing the Mercury computer on the crook of her arm, Ami furrowed her brows, seeing something in the images on the screen that Kagome did not. "The dark energy simply vanished…"

Usagi perked up at that, snapping her fingers with a dramatic expression of realization. "Like when the clock stopped working!"

"Yes, Usagi-chan, I think you're-" Ami paused, cut off by the sound of her communicator blaring loudly. She furrowed her brows and exchanged glances with the rest of them before pressing the button to answer. "Mars?"

"Where are you all?!"

Usagi popped her head up over Ami's shoulder to peer down at the communicator. "We're at Kagome-"

Clearly deciding she needed no further information than that, Rei cut the blonde off with a sound of annoyance. Kagome scowled at the communicator, despite knowing that the other girl couldn't see the expression.

"What are you there for? This whole thing-" Rei stopped suddenly, and Kagome could almost see the look of annoyance that the other girl must have been wearing if the sigh that echoed from the device was anything to go by. "Oh, never mind! Turn on the news now!"

Whatever annoyance Kagome might have felt went to the wayside. Rei, for all her faults, at least usually managed to keep the pretense of being calm and collected. The other two looked equally thrown, pausing only to exchange looks of concern before they hurried inside.

The television was already on, her mother and grandfather perched in front of it with expressions of thinly veiled horror. Beside her, Kagome heard Ami's quiet gasp but even as Usagi grabbed her hand, she couldn't look away from the screen.

The streets of their city lay still. What should have been a city center bustling with life and activity only showed pedestrians growing sluggish and slowly dropping, one by one as they watched. A car swerved off the road, halted only by the postbox that it crashed into.

The camera panned out to show the rest of the street in a similar state, vehicles driven onto sidewalks, into telephone poles, some piled up in places with their drivers slumped over the wheel and bodies strewn across the pavement, unmoving. Suddenly the recording jerked and then slowly slid to the side, the live feed fading away to the crackling sound of static.

Usagi gripped her hand a little tighter and Kagome's stomach twisted as she realized the cameraman must have gone down too.

"Now that I have your attention, soldiers," the static halted, and Kagome straightened with a jolt just as the familiar sound of Jadeite's voice filtered through. "If you don't want to see the rest of your precious city suffer the same fate, come face me at Dream Land amusement park."

Her eyes widened as his face appeared on the screen. If she didn't know better, Kagome thought he might have been staring right at her. Her breath quickened slightly.

"Bring me Sailor T if you want the city to live. Otherwise…"

The screen flickered to the sight of a crumbling city, skyscrapers in broken ruins and bodies motionless in the streets. It was lifelessness. Her home was still and silent. Her home was dead. Though she knew it to be an illusion, the sight still made Kagome feel ill.

A husk of death and emptiness was not befitting what should have been the liveliness of Tokyo.

Inuyasha stepped up beside them as Usagi clung to her arm, crossing his arms into his sleeves as he turned to her, brow arched. "Relaxation, huh?"

---

The demon that greeted them wasn't quite what any of them had been expecting. Wearing a pink dress more befitting of a fairytale princess from one of Souta's video games and clutching what looked like an apple, Kagome might have mistaken her for a genuine park mascot if not for the dark magic that seemed to hum within her.

"Hello, soldiers." The demon smiled, an expression far too sweet for Kagome's liking. "Welcome to Dream Land amusement park. I am the Dream Princess, Murido."

"Where's Jadeite!?" Sailor Moon stomped her foot childishly, a gesture that might have been amusing if not for the seriousness of the situation, and waved a fist in the air. "Is he too much of a coward to face us himself?!"

The smile that the demon, Murido, offered in response was unnervingly saccharine.

"Well, you certainly didn't come alone." Murido looked them over pointedly. Her gaze lingered on Inuyasha for a moment before she smiled once more. "It is only fair that my master assures his own support."

Murido lifted a hand, unnerving smile ever-present, and waved towards a large chain-linked fence. The gate in its center swung open with a 'bang!' that made them jump and a fleet of buses sped through the opening. They screeched to a stop only feet away from their group, the designation marker of '66' glowing eerily.

The front doors of the bus in front of them slid open, and Murido turned to it with a smile, the expression almost genuine. A woman, tall and stern looking, stepped out to stand beside the self-proclaimed Dream Princess. When a closer look found no human energy to suggest a thrall, Kagome supposed the bus driver uniform was only for show, part of a scheme they had failed to notice.

Kagome's throat felt tight as she strained to swallow a fresh batch of nerves. 'How much have they done that we just haven't found out?'

"Good to see you, Kigan." Murido turned back, her smile eerily wide as she held up the apple in her hand. "Now that we're all here…"

The doors on the remaining buses slid open with a hiss and Kagome felt her skin crawl. When, one by one, glossy-eyed civilians staggered out to surround them, Kagome felt her heart plummet.

Murido only smiled and, with a flash of power from the apple in her hand, the quiet tinkle of carousel music echoed around them. "Let the festivities begin."

Inuyasha snorted and Kagome held out an arm when she saw his hand drift towards Tessaiga. "Stop! They're human!"

He froze and Kagome almost winced when she saw the flicker in his eyes, his hand stilling to grip the hilt of his blade for an entirely different reason.

Their hesitation, as it stood, appeared to be what the enemy had planned for. They were swarmed all at once, forced away from each other as the thralls snatched at them, their innocence leaving them with little recourse as they were separated. Kagome smacked a few away from her with her bow, wincing as their bodies crumpled to the ground.

"We're getting nowhere like this!" Sailor Mars hissed, left to battle only with her psychic power and a waning stock of ofuda. "There's too many of them!"

Kagome was inclined to agree. They couldn't keep fighting like this, but they couldn't thin the enemy ranks by sacrificing civilians. Her gaze drifted towards Murido and Kagome frowned. While that prop of hers seemed to hold some sort of magic, it seemed to be more of a conduit for drawing and controlling the power rather than the source of it. If anything, it seemed to control the workings of the park around them.

'Like that creepy music…' Kagome glared at the speakers she could see lining the fence, the carousel music still echoing around them unnervingly, making the air around them feel heavy and foreboding. When the air around them flickered, her heart skipped a beat. 'That power…the way it moves…I recognize that energy!'

Kagome felt her breath catch as her eyes widened in realization.

"Mercury!" She broke into a sprint, narrowly dodging the reaching hands of the enthralled humans as they grabbed at her, charging her bow and swatting them away to clear a path. For the first time since the chaos had started, she could see a way out.

"Can you sustain Bubble Spray long enough to cover the city?" Kagome leaned against her knees as she skidded to a stop in front of a bewildered Sailor Mercury. Inuyasha landed beside them, and she inclined her head towards him. "If Inuyasha carries you?"

"What do you think you're doing?" Sailor Mars froze another thrall with an ofuda to the victim's forehead, eyes ablaze as she spun on Kagome with a hiss. "We can't be splitting up now!"

"Cover the- oh!" Sailor Mercury's gaze rapidly lit with understanding. Then it hardened to one of determination and she gave a sharp, decisive nod. "Yes! I think so."

Inuyasha, on the other hand, looked none too pleased with the suggestion.

"You don't expect me to just-" He turned to look at her and swallowed the words before he could finish speaking them.

Whatever argument he'd been about to start, Inuyasha wisely decided to abstain from when she squared her shoulders with a look of her own. They didn't have time to be arguing amongst themselves. He held her gaze for a moment longer before looking away with a scoff.

"Keh, fine." Inuyasha stalked over to kneel down for Sailor Mercury, despite his clear displeasure. Despite her blush, Mercury slid into place on his back with only a little squeak of surprise as he took hold of her thighs to hold her in place. He stood and Kagome knew better than to take it to heart when he turned a scowl on her. "But don't you dare go gettin' yourself kidnapped again while we're gone, got it?"

Kagome only offered him a little smile, seeing his irritated front for what it was. "Wouldn't dream of it."