| [Mar. 5th, 2018|04:29 am] |
Pakkun made a face that was essentially a shrug. His wrinkles rippled in fascinating ways. “Numbers aren’t really essential. I can count, obviously, since I just did. But mostly we just need one, a few, and a lot. I mean, how much difference does it make knowing that His Testicle Lordship is fourteen-thousand or old as balls?”
Genma dissolved into a quiet fit of laughter, leaning back against the warm stones. It took him a minute to fight his way back to calm, especially after he muttered His Testicle Lordship and broke up again. Kurenai glanced at him, maintaining her poise, but visibly fighting a smile. Raidou had to press a hand over his own mouth.
Kurenai asked, “Why don’t dogs and tanuki get along, from your point of view?”
Pakkun tilted his head, ears flopping. “Because they’re assholes. Did you like them?”
“They have their moments,” Kurenai admitted. “And their… not-moments.”
“Uh huh,” Pakkun said dryly. “What about you, kidnap-boy? Which part did you like best — the bit where they broke your captain’s ribs, or the bit where they still haven’t given you your chakra back yet?”
Genma’s eyebrow arched. “They deliberately took my chakra? I thought it was an effect of being outside our own dimension.”
“It’s definitely tanuki,” Raidou said. “We all lost our chakra briefly when they stole you, had it in the dog dimension, still had it in this dimension until the tanuki showed back up.”
Genma frowned. “But I asked them what was wrong with my chakra, and they didn’t even know what it was. They described you in terms of your chakra natures — that’s how I figured out they’d seen you — but they acted like it was a foreign concept.”
Pakkun yawned, showing pearly white teeth and the ridged roof of his mouth. “You asked adults or children who’d never been to the human dimension before?”
“I asked the children I was with,” Genma said, far less defensively than Raidou would have responded. He’d been kidnapped by kits. Who else was he supposed to have asked? “If they were actively doing something to my chakra, I couldn’t tell it. I just couldn’t sense mine. But obviously I still have it, or I’d be dead. And I don’t think this is the afterlife.”
“If it is, I have complaints,” Raidou muttered.
“Displeased with the company?” Kurenai asked silkily. Before Raidou could answer, she went back to Pakkun. “The tanuki told us stories about tengu and kappa. Some of those stories took place in our human world, and some of them were set in these alternate dimensions, like your home. How much do you know about the connections between them? Do the worlds all connect to ours, or to each other? Why was your sun orange, but the tanuki sun is yellow — and yet their moon is full when ours was crescent?”
Pakkun was starting to look a little cross-eyed.
Kurenai snatched a breath and added, “How are summoning dimensions created? Do they exist before the summoning contract?”
Raidou had wondered that last one himself. The few families with summoning contracts were notoriously tight-lipped about their origins.
Pakkun extended a back leg and spread his toes. “Rub my pads.”
Delicately, Kurenai complied. She seemed a little surprised, as if the texture wasn’t quite what she’d expected. Pakkun’s eyes went half-lidded and Raidou had cause to reflect, again, on how weird this day had been. Even by his standards.
“Okay, first, I’m not a scholar, historian, or scientist, and before you start complaining, you tell me how much you know about the metaphysics of your dimension.” The little pug shot all three of them a look. Raidou rolled his eyes, but Genma and Kurenai, held hostage by the lure of knowledge, kept their silence. Satisfied, Pakkun carried on. “I have no idea how the dimensions were created. As far as I know, they just exist. But I can tell you that we think all the worlds are folded together, like origami, except they’re sort of folded through each other.”
Kurenai’s head tilted. “You mean, occupying the same space?” |
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