InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ El Tanto Tonto ❯ Teaser One: Inheritance. ( Chapter 1 )

Title: El 'Tanto' Tonto!

Rating: high PG-13 to low R. humor warning

Pairing: Inuyasha/Kagome, Miroku/Sango, Midoriko/other.

Summary: When Kagome turns 16, she inherits a Tanto blade from her deceased grandmother. What she doesn't know is that this Tanto causes the world around her to be more than a little... silly. Kagome learns secrets about her family and her family's past that are best left unknown... secrets that can alter reality, could kill her and bring back a dead man, all in one go.

There's a reason "May you live in interesting times" is a Chinese curse.

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01: Sweet Six... oh crap, somebody HELP!

1.00: The Blade with the Crest of the Dancing Dog

She had the hands of an old woman, despite being only forty. They were gnarled and wrinkled and withered: the only withered part of her body. Her hands looked wrong when empty or holding various normal objects... But when her old, withered fingers clutched tightly around a very, very old tanto...

They looked just right.

She placed her thumb just where the hilt sprouted out of the sheath and popped the hilt further out of the sheath. The hilt ornament, a dancing dog with its tongue lolling out of its mouth and its eyes appearing to be rolling backwards, looked a bit too finely wrought.

Someone had been dramatic.

Or perhaps they'd just had a good sense of irony.

Why the smith had made the tanto's hilt ornament in such a manner did not matter. Certainly, it was an interesting topic, but it was nowhere near as important as another one: why did the smith imbue the tanto with such power? Had he led a boring life? Thought that nobody had a sense of humor? He had imbued so much power into the dreadfully tacky thing that he had surely put a heavy amount of thought behind his reasoning.

But he'd left behind no scroll detailing his reasoning behind making the artifact. The closest thing to an explanation of precisely how it worked was a scroll written five hundred years before by a woman named Kaede, explaining what the tanto did. It gave only the briefest explanation as to how to break the spell the sword cast.

The woman carefully penned the last kanji on the scroll, flattened it and tucked it into the tanto's sheath.

"It is time to right the wrong I have done," the woman whispered.

1.1 [Modern Era.]

Kagome smiled happily and blew out the sixteen candles on her birthday cake. Mm, cake. Cake and oden were the best things since... since, well... she didn't know what.

"Kagome, which slice do you want?" Higurashi-san asked.

"The one with my name on it," Kagome replied.

Her mother laughed at the joke Kagome had made at every birthday party they'd held since she could read (there wasn't any writing on the cake), cut a slice and then deposited it on the sixteen-year-old's plate.

Kagome dug in.

Ten minutes later...

"Wow, Kagome," Souta said, looking surprised. "I know you like chocolate, but if you keep inhaling it like that..."

"Shufrep!" Kagome replied.

"Uh... When can we open presents?" Souta asked.

"When can I open presents, you mean," Kagome said, ruffling his hair and smiling to show she that she was just joking around.

Her brother yelped and rubbed the "injured" area, but Kagome could see that he was laughing.

Higurashi Cho smiled at her children's antics and wondered what their relationship would be like once they were adults. Something inside her wondered how she and her own brother would have gotten along, had he lived to see her become an adult.

She forced the grim thoughts away and smiled more, cheerfully turning to face Souta. "We have a present Kagome can open right now. Do you want to see what it is?"

Souta bobbed his head.

"It's from your grandmother, so we aren't really sure what it is," Cho said, handing Kagome a long, slender box.

"Mama? Grandmother's..."

Her mother went perfectly still for an instant, then said harshly, "Don't you think I know that? She left it to you," Cho's voice softened, as though her mind was a thousand miles a way, "like she knew she wouldn't see your sixteenth birthday."

"Oh, Mama," Kagome replied, tugging on her mother's hair.

Grandmother had died in a car crash about sixteen years before.

Kagome unwrapped the box to find a slender black case. The smooth, black varnish was shiny, contrasting with the matte silver engraving of a dancing dog. She opened the case and found a slender blade -- a tanto, judging by the length. The hilt ornament, a dancing dog with its tongue lolling out of its mouth and its eyes appearing to be rolling backwards, looked a bit too finely wrought.

Someone had been dramatic.

A small scroll had been flattened and pressed into the tanto's sheath.

Kagome felt her eyes widen and a breathy "oh," escaped her lips.

"Her will said she wanted you to see it before you read the letter," Cho said quietly.

Kagome closed her fingers around the hilt and traced her finger up along the blade. Her eyes fluttered closed for a moment, but soon opened again.

What she saw couldn't have been possible.

Higurashi Cho had four horizontal scars on her left cheek, with a vertical scar right beside the horizontal ones. Her face was an unnatural white, except for the red that caked itself under her eyebrows and on her eyelids. Her lips had been painted as white as her face, with black lipstick forming a tiny, tiny cupid's bow. She looked strange in a garment made of black straps that, rather than covering her suddenly voluptuous breasts, put them on display. The straps crisscrossed down her body, hooking into a black strip of cloth that started low enough to show a good deal of pubic hair.

Her brother had also been transformed: he was older looking and definitely way cute. In fact, he looked almost exactly like her mother's dead brother- Shou, who had died when he was seventeen.

Souta (or perhaps Shou) might have been a masculine version of Cho, dressed also in a collection of straps, with four horizontal scars on his left cheek, and a vertical scar right next to the column of four horizontal ones. His hair was long and black, his chest hair curly and thick and black. His right hand loosely held a thin black line…

…that led to a collar locked around her mother's neck.

It had to be the funniest thing she'd ever seen. Kagome blinked, the hand that had caressed the blade moved by itself to cover her mouth and she giggled helplessly.

Suddenly the sight before her moved like the ripples of sunlight on water and she realized that her mother wore no make-up and had on a plain blue dress. Her brother's hand wasn't holding a leash but a plastic fork.

Both were staring at her.

The giggles ceased and Kagome found herself apologizing, explaining that she'd lost touch with reality for a moment.