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1 - Nattō-Kozu
Okay, something in her room smelled really bad.
She must have accidentally lost something under the bed — ever since she'd gotten a western-style bed, Kana kept accidentally leaving this and that underneath it. Stray wrappers, crumbs, sometimes her homework — and once, of course, an entire muffin that she'd brought to her room to eat, but ended up forgetting about for about two weeks. That had been really gross, but this smelt even worse — if she didn't know any better, she'd say it was nattō, but Kana hated nattō and wouldn't have let it within 100km of her room without a fierce battle.
Maybe a rat had dragged something in and left it? Urgh. Kana really didn't want to get any closer to whatever was causing the smell, but opening her windows wouldn't really help with something this bad, so she laid down on her belly and peered under the wooden bed frame with the help of her phone screen as a light.
"Yeek!"
"Woah!"
Scrambling back, Kana almost tripped over her carpet in her haste to put some distance between her and the — well, yōkai, it couldn't be anything else — that had been crawling out from under her bed. It was small and humanoid, but with an odd-shaped head and a perfectly disgusting odor. It certainly didn't seem to be about to attack her, appearing somewhat startled itself, and a niggling part of her memory was saying it was familiar.
"Are… are you part of Rikuo's family?"
The little yōkai, which had been busy dusting itself — himself? it looked like a 'he' — off, jumped to attention and nodded proudly. "Yes! I, Nattō Kozu, am a member of the Main House of the Nura Clan! I have been following the first head for many centuries, and am—"
"Why are you here, then?"
Not that she was angry, per se — he seemed to be benign, despite his aroma — but Kana found herself quite confused as to why a member of Rikuo's clan was here, hiding under her bed like some monster in a western fairy-tale. Surely, there were many other places a yōkai would want to be, places that would be much more appealing than Kana's well-lit, comfortable and western-style bedroom.
Nattō Kozu seemed to shrink a bit, and if she could understand his expressions she would have said he looked sheepish. "Well, there was a festival night yesterday, and I may have gotten a bit— lost? And as I knew you, Ienaga Kana, were a friend of the young master, I knew your home would be a safe place to spend the day! Night? But, as I am quite recovered, I will be on my way!" And with that, he bounded across the room and out her window, leaving Kana wondering just why her house had been chosen as the ideal destination for small, drunk yōkai.
Well, at least her room didn't smell quite so badly now.
2 - Karasu-Tengu
“Ack!”
Upon coming home late from a meeting with the Kiyojūji Paranormal Patrol, the last thing Kana expected to see when she entered her bedroom was a small, crow-like creature dressed in what looked like old traditional clothes shooting out from under her bed to hover in the air before her with its— his— arms crossed. Carefully lifting her schoolbag from where she’d dropped it in her surprise, Kana made her way warily around the creature to her desk and began taking out books and notebooks to study for the night. She wouldn’t go so far as to say he didn’t unnerve her at least a bit, but he certainly wasn’t all that frightening after some of the things she’d seen this past year. (Especially as tonight’s meeting had involved meeting up with Rikuo — in his night form — and joining him on a short patrol around Ukiyoe, thus leaving her rather desensitized to her usual fears).
Of course, this creature couldn’t just leave her alone like the last yōkai she’d found in her bedroom. He cleared his throat once, and then again as she tried to ignore him and start doing her homework, and when she staunchly refused to respond to that too — perhaps he would go away if she didn’t listen — he spoke up in a startlingly deep voice for his size. “Ienaga Kana. I am Karasu-Tengu, and I would like to have a word with you. Now.”
Oh. Well, his tone sounded pretty foreboding, so Kana sighed and turned in her chair to nervously face the yōkai — Karasu-Tengu — once more. “W-what is it?”
“Do you know where the Young Master is?”
“Huh?”
She peered a little closer at him and it clicked. “Oh! Oh, you’re one of Rikuo’s — um — his, you know!” She tried to help her point across with a few creative arm gestures, but it seemed he got the idea regardless, as he sighed and nodded.
“Yes, I am of the Nura Clan. Do you know where Lord Rikuo is?”
Now that she had more of an idea of what was going on, he didn’t seem quite so foreboding — rather tired, in fact. “Well, we were just with him on a patrol, and I think— um, I think he said he was going to visit a friend? One who’s, um, a doctor? Or makes medicine? He walked me home first, though, so I thought it wasn’t going to be very far…”
“Oh, for—“ The small tengu rested his face in one even smaller hand. “He’s gone to the Zen sect. Why he couldn’t wait until we paid a formal visit… well, I suppose that’s that. I shall send one of my sons to keep an eye on him. Thank you for your assistance, Ienaga Kana.” He shook his head and flew out the window, looking like a very weary parent to Kana’s eyes.
Well, that was certainly odd. And Zen — that was the name of Rikuo’s friend, wasn’t it? Was he also a leader of a clan, then?
It didn’t matter now. Kana had homework to do.
3 - Mezumaru
By now, Kana felt she was really getting the hang of handling odd visitors. Granted, this was the first one actually a normal size (yet still somehow squeezed under her bed frame with apparent ease), and looked pretty human aside from what appeared to be a skull on their head (how that had fit under her bed, she would never understand). Still, they were clearly a yōkai and probably one of Rikuo’s group, so this time she didn’t hesitate to clear her throat and ask, “Excuse me?”
A yelp of surprise was her first response, and the skull-covered head poked out to look at her in urgency. “Shh! Don’t tell anyone I’m down here!”
Well, that was new. “How come? And who are you?”
He — it seemed to be a he, and were there really that few lady yōkai? — glanced around, seeming to listen for something, before responding. “I’m Mezumaru, from the Gyūki Clan! We’re playing hide-and-seek, and right now Gozu’s the seeker, and all the others took all the really good hiding spots, so pleeeeeease don’t tell anyone I’m here! I promise I won’t bother you or look at any of your things, really!”
The Gyūki clan? That’s right, he was one of the ones who attacked Yura and the others in the hot springs the first time the Kiyojūji Paranormal Patrol visited Mt. Nejireme, which would make Gozu the other one — the one that went after she and Rikuo and Tsurara.
Kana sighed. Let bygones be bygones, and all that. “Alright, fine. But go home when I have to go to bed.”
“Gotcha!”
He vanished back under the bed, and she stared at the spot where his head had been for a few more moments before huffing under her breath and searching her shelves for the book she’d just started reading. It couldn’t hurt to stay up a little late tonight, after all.
(She wondered who else ‘the others’ were, but found her question swiftly answered when the entire group of them turned up at her window about three hours later, asking if she’d seen Mezumaru as he was the last one to be found. Rikuo seemed somewhat amused, Tsurara and Yura both greeted her with relative cheer, Rikuo’s two friends — the tall one and the sick-looking one — looked around her room curiously, and the one who must have been Gozu yelled at Mezu when he finally crawled out from under the bed, intimidated but beaming with pride. It was certainly far from the worst evening she’d had.)
4 - Kubinashi('s head)
It had been a very normal day. They’d had PE (which Kana didn’t like), and Music (which she did), and the Kiyojūji Paranormal Patrol (they really needed to come up with a shorthand for that, it was an awfully long title) ate lunch together on the roof while exchanging stories and skyping Shima, who was in Spain for a football tournament.
She had stopped by the store to pick up some groceries, bought herself a packet of pocky as a snack, and was just about ready to settle in and browse through some magazines that had come in with the mail, when—
“Oh!”
Well, of all the yōkai she’d found under her bed so far, a disembodied head was probably the oddest.
Recognizing him was easy enough — when you see a guy with no neck and a floating head, you do tend to remember him — and she knelt down to talk to him as he seemed to either roll or hover out from his hiding place. “Mister— um, Kubinashi, right? What are you doing here? And, um— where’s your body?”
He groaned and tilted his face into the floor, looking as though he dearly wished to hide it in his hands but would settle for the next best thing. “Oh, please don’t tell anyone I’m here. Ki— Kejōrō’s going to kill me. If I go back now, she’s really going to kill me.” After Kana waited for a few patient seconds, he sighed and added, “My body’s hiding somewhere nearby — I think I’m in a tree? And, er— do you mind if I stay here a bit longer?”
“Uh, sure.” Kana blinked a few times before standing up and stretching. “What did you do to make her that mad?”
A sigh followed her as the head moved to hover — so he could do that, after all — next to her as she sat down to open up her pocky and start reading. “I don’t remember? We had a lot to drink last night, what with the anniversary and Zen bringing some really nice sake to celebrate, and—“
“And you can’t hold your alcohol. Rikuo told me.”
Kubinashi groaned and smacked his forehead against the surface of her desk. “I have no idea what I did, but I woke up around noon and she just— well, everyone says here’s a good place to hide, so I thought I could just wait it out and go back once she’s cooled off.”
Breaking off a piece of pocky with her teeth and crunching it slowly, savoring the strawberry coating, Kana made a face. “Why don’t you just ask her?”
Bright blue eyes turned to look at her slowly, like a strange movie scene. “… Oh.”
Kana sighed.
“Go find your body and talk to your friend. You can come back here if she’s still mad.”
5 - Tsurara
“Are you looking for something?”
Kana huffed and pressed her face into her hands as two socked feet wriggled backwards out from under her bed, becoming two legs and a skirt and eventually an entire body. Bright blue eyes — the Yuki Onna was still in her human disguise, as they’d just arrived back from school — blinked up at her as Tsurara rolled onto her back and then sat up with a few strands of her normally tidy hair sticking out at charmingly odd angles. For a few moments they looked at each other, before Tsurara giggled and shrugged. “That Onmyōji girl said she looked around your room the first time she was here, so…”
A short pause. “But this isn’t the first time you’ve been to my house.”
“Yeah, but those were different! Those were on business!”
There were definitely a number of times Tsurara had ended up in Kana’s bedroom that she wouldn’t consider business in any way, but they were here for a reason and she might as well get to the point. So, instead of pointing out that a game of hide-and-seek (of which there had now been several, all of them ending up with someone hidden under Kana’s bed) hardly counted as business, she set the tray of snacks and tea on her desk and sat down beside her guest. “So, what is it you wanted to talk about?”
The Yuki Onna’s lips curled into a sly grin. “Weeeeeell… haven’t you noticed anything off about Lord Rikuo recently?”
“About Rikuo?” Kana searched her memories, sifting through ordinary stuff and changes that were easily explained (he was less nervous around them, better at asserting himself and at beating the lunchtime bun rush), before realizing that Tsurara might be onto something. “He’s been kind of— I’m not sure how to describe it, but distracted? Or kind of out of it? Like, I guess maybe he’s just been thinking about something really hard.”
Tsurara nodded emphatically and clapped her hands together. “Exactly! And I think I know why!”
“What? Why?”
She leaned forward conspiratorially, lowering her voice to a stage whisper that Kana could still hear just fine, but which seemed to make the moment more suspenseful. “I think Lord Rikuo has a crush!” When Kana leaned back instinctively, surprised, the Yuki Onna laughed. “I know, right? But I can’t figure out who it is, so I thought maybe we could do some digging—“
“Woah, woah, wait.” Kana shook her head for a moment to center herself. “I mean, are you sure it’s not one of us?” It sounded more self-centered than she would have liked, and she winced, but— well, she and the Yuki Onna were the two young women closest to Rikuo, so it seemed like a fair question to ask.
A snort was her first response. “I’d have noticed if it was you. And as lovely as it would be to have captured the Young Master’s affections, I’m pretty sure we’re about as close as we’re going to be.” Following that, Tsurara sighed and patted her cheeks, brushing away the brief expression of dismay that had blossomed there to instead wink at Kana. “So, do you want to find out?”
“I—“ Kana sighed. What could it hurt? It couldn’t be more than just asking questions, after all. “Sure.”
“Great! Okay, so here’s what we’ll do…”
+1 - Rikuo
Well, that was the last time she was letting Tsurara plan things. Ever.
Kana did her best to stifle the sneeze tickling at her nose, mentally berating her friend for never. Cleaning. Under. His. Bed. Beside her, Tsurara seemed superbly unbothered by the copious amounts of dust that had collected underneath Rikuo’s bed frame (lower to the ground than hers, so it was rather a tight fit). The Yuki Onna was back in her yōkai form, ringed golden eyes fixed on the floor in front of them with her chin rested lightly on her hands. Exhaling through her nostrils forcefully to get any lingering dust away, Kana shifted position and tried to copy her. “How long do we need to wait here?”
“Until he comes back! Now shush and keep listening!”
A groan escaped against her will as Kana slumped forward and closed her eyes. They’d searched through Rikuo’s bedroom first (she’d been a little uncomfortable, but Tsurara moved with care and didn’t actually seem to be searching through anything intensely private, so she got the feeling this wasn’t a new activity), and when it had yielded nothing except one of the bottles of high-quality sake Zen seemed to bring by from time to time and an earring that Tsurara identified as belonging to Rikuo’s mother, they’d fallen into the backup plan of simply spying.
Of course, the downside to spying was that until you had someone to actually spy on, it became exceptionally boring. The two of them had already gone through several rounds of Twenty Questions, once Kana had taught Tsurara the rules, and even a couple attempts at Truth or Dare. Since they were stuck under a bed, there hadn’t been any option to pick except for Truth, so the idea died rather quickly (but not before Kana learned a few interesting facts about her companion, among them Tsurara’s actual age and the purpose behind her ever-present scarf).
Considering how long they’d been there, Kana was sure she’d have to just sleep over at the Nura house in some way or another — a year ago, the thought would have made her very nervous, but by now she’d become so accustomed to the Nura Clan yōkai popping up in her bedroom that she doubted sleeping over at their house would be much worse.
Footsteps echoing down the hall caught her attention, and in a split second Tsurara had one hand on her shoulder and the other raising a finger to her lips in the universal motion for silence as the door slid open and two — not one, two — pairs of bare feet padded quietly into the room. One pair was Rikuo’s, for sure — the skin tone was right, and Kana was pretty sure she recognized the small scar on his left heel from their early elementary days. The other pair was unfamiliar to her, but her companion seemed to recognize the fabric brushing the floor behind them, if the delighted expression she shot Kana was any indication.
The two — Rikuo and his companion — sat together on the bed, both of them tucking their feet up and out of view. The companion spoke up, and after a few moments Kana finally recognized his voice. “—really don’t need to be worrying over me, idiot.”
“Yes, but I want to.” That was Rikuo, familiar as ever, though his voice held a note of concern she hadn’t heard in a while. “We both know you don’t have all that long left, Zen. I want to at least be able to help, somehow.”
The doctor yōkai, Zen, made an emphatic sound somewhere between a snort and a sigh. “Not really much to be done about it, at this point. My body’s going to keep breaking down, there’s no stopping that. If I don’t do anything interesting for the rest of the life, I might have another ten years in me— but tch, what sort of sorry life would that be?”
Under the bed, Kana could hear them shifting around, as though moving closer together. Beside her, Tsurara seemed equal parts astonished and ecstatic — for what reason, she didn’t know. Rikuo spoke up, sounding distinctly sad now. “And if you do? How long would you have then?”
There was a long pause, in which Kana realized acutely just how much this was something she and Tsurara shouldn’t have been eavesdropping on. Finally, Zen responded. “Probably three or four. Five at best, if the weather doesn’t turn bad too often.” He sounded resigned. “I know this hasn’t been the worst I could’ve gotten — my great-grandfather only lasted twenty-one years, after all, barely lived past my grandmother’s birth — but… man, there are some days when I just look at myself and think—“
“—about all the stuff we could do if you had more time.” Rikuo finished the thought softly, his statement punctuated by a gentle sigh that somehow brought the image of him resting his head against his friend’s shoulder to Kana’s mind. “I know.”
Another sound of rustling fabric and bedsprings shifting, and Kana tuned out of the conversation to look back at her own companion. By now, she thought she had an idea of why Tsurara was making that expression — whatever the two above them had, relationship-wise, it did seem to be what had been bothering Rikuo lately. Tsurara turned to meet her gaze, nodding imperceptibly, and Kana found herself abruptly distracted by the realization that the Yuki Onna’s natural eyes were really, really pretty.
She restrained the urge to sneeze once more, yelled at her friend mentally for the dust under his bed, and resigned herself to the fact that her life seemed bound to just continue becoming more and more interesting.
Especially if she kept finding yōkai under her bed.