===== 08/07/02 === 11:04:25 p.m. ===== This sentence is a self-referential disclaimer that recognizes that Watsuki Nobuhiro holds the intellectual property rights to Rurouni Kenshin. This sentence is another self- referential disclaimer that does the same for Joss Whedon and Buffy. However, this sentence is not a disclaimer at all. And this sentence no verb. Edodale By wombat Chapter 10 "All right, young lady, that's enough. It's nearly bedtime for you, so go home." Sano tugged on Kaoru's ponytail, away from Kenshin and toward her bicycle. Reluctantly, she broke away from the kiss and waved as she rode away. Hiko and Megumi had already left to drive the still-unconscious Yumi to the hospital, armed with the health-plan card from the wallet in her belt pouch. They hoped Megumi's presence would make the circumstances seem less suspicious, as if Hiko were tidying up the aftermath of a bad date. Afterward, he would drop off Megumi at her house before returning for the boys, who were stuck waiting at the cemetery in the meantime. Once Kaoru disappeared from sight, Kenshin returned to nearly the same position he'd had at sunset, sitting back against the base of the wall with his knees tucked up in front of him. But instead of buried down in his arms, this time his head was tipped up at the night sky. Despite their both being shadowed from the sodium glare of the streetlights, Sano could still make out the bemused smile on Kenshin's face. It pissed him off. "What're you smirking at?" he growled down at him. "It's such a beautiful evening, don't you think?" Hiko had loaded the two swords and Yumi's knife into the trunk of his car and driven off with them, but that still didn't make Sano feel really safe, considering what he'd seen of Battousai earlier tonight. Not very casually at all, Sano took out a metal fishbone and started to sharpen it on the stone gatepost he was leaning against. "What would you do if I put this through your throat?" "Right now, I would die happy." Disgusted, Sano hurled the fishbone point-first into the turf. "Absofreakinglutely unbelievable. Where do you get off being the chick magnet of the damned, anyway?" "Oro?" "You are so lucky I just put my fishbone down." He bent to retrieve it; once he was that close to the ground, he decided to just flop down onto the grass himself, leaning back against the gatepost with his legs out in front of him. "First Kaoru goes all melty for your total wuss-boy mode even though you're shoving her away. Then she sees you get all freaky with Yumi at point-blank range, and suddenly that makes Kaoru and you decide to glom onto each other like soy on sauce?" Still in that nerve-wrackingly dreamy tone, Kenshin said, "I couldn't very well drive her into Battousai's arms with frustration. In any case, Miss Kaoru was right. I can't tell her what to feel. I can't even tell myself. We were both miserable. Now we're not." Sano said a very bad word, triggering a low, drawn-out "Orooooo." He leaned over and stabbed his fishbone into the ground between Kenshin's feet. "Battousai or not, if you hurt her, I'm going to kill you as many ways as I can." "There's only one way that will last, and I'm afraid that's still reserved for her use." Kenshin dropped his gaze from the round golden eye of the harvest moon to the fishbone's silver sheen. "I hope you'll at least give me credit for making her into Battousai's greatest weakness, even to the extent of flirtatiously telling her how to kill him. If all goes well, everything will be over by the end of the year. It seems a small enough request to let us be happy for those last few months. "Mr. Harris, we both have the rest of our lives to court Miss Kaoru. But in that, you have the advantage of me by a considerable length of time." --- "I'm telling you, the brat's drained Yumi dry," Jineh snarled. The burns on his arms and shoulders had already healed, but moonlight still shot through the holes in his hat, streaking his face. "I saw him standing over her body, getting ready to snap up two mortals as dessert. He's recovered his powers, but instead of sharing them with us again, he's treating us as prey. There's no reason we should wait for him any more. We need to hunt him down and take his sword before he can do any more damage. He'll be coming to take Tomoe from you next." The same light made Enishi's hair into a wild pyre of silver flame. The younger man shrugged, turquoise sparks glinting behind his little wire glasses. "All the more reason for me to stay here with her, mate. Just let him try to take her from me, and I'll have him in bits all nicely kabobbed on his own sword. Or if she's even better by then, she can do it herself." Behind him, Tomoe emerged from the crypt into the cemetery glade. She appeared steadier than she'd been for a long time, with her hair bound into a tidy doubled loop at the back of her neck instead of hanging wild, and the crimson silk of her undersash was tucked up into her kimono's overlap instead of trailing away like spilled blood. She leaned her head against Enishi's shoulder. "Yumi's gone away," she said. "Yes, love, Jineh just came to tell us." "Gone away," she repeated softly. "Pretty Yumi, all purple and green like pansies, that's for thoughts. I'd give you some violets, but they withered all when Akira died. Or irises with their long leaves, like her naginata. All gone now, blown away like butterflies." She shrank away as Jineh cursed her. Enishi stepped in front of her protectively. "You've no one to blame for it but yourself, Jineh. It was you what killed him in the first place. He probably would've never tried to drain one of us if you hadn't done him in to start with. Anyway, I don't see how he could've dusted her without the sakabatou. All you have to do is go out and fetch her, then wait a bit until she feels more chipper. Or even if he has managed it somehow, just wait for her to pull herself together and come back to us." "If she's there, you'd better come with me to bring her back." "And leave my little dove here all alone? Get off." Jineh spat. "Bring her with us, then. You say she's getting better, so a little walk will do her good." --- "I don't believe you're letting them do this," Sano groused a few days later. It was after- school study hour in the library, and there was no sign of Kenshin there. Instead, Hiko was calmly sitting behind his desk as if he owned it, regarding him with one of his blankly helpful librarian expressions. "You know. Those two. His room. Crazed weasels. Did you even give them the talk that when a demon loves a girl very much, they share a special kind of hug, but not until they're married?" "I rather doubt they would require instructions to indulge in that sort of behavior, even if they were doing so. They are collaborating on a history project, similar to the one you are not working on." "C'mon, gimme a break. I bet the research they're doing right now has a lot more to do with anatomy than history." Megumi appeared behind Sano's elbow and smacked it. "You could at least give them a little bit of credit here. If Kenshin isn't a responsible adult yet after one hundred fifty years, there isn't much hope for the male species, is there?" "Well said," Hiko murmured, before developing a rather odd expression. "What?" "The alternative hadn't previously occurred to me. But I must say that if I were condemned to be fifteen for one hundred fifty years, I'd also be desperate to be put out of my misery." The phone rang, interrupting their conversation. While Hiko answered it, Megumi tugged Sano into the mini-dojo behind the desk. Tucking loose coppery hair behind one ear, she glanced at him sideways. "Can't you leave them alone already? It's none of our business." "So it's our business when we're deployed as Kaoru's support troops, but not when she's fraternizing with the enemy?" "But Kenshin isn't our enemy. It's Battousai that's the problem." "Don't even start on the excuses about Battousai. You girls make like Battousai is this completely different person who just happens to walk around in his skin, but I don't buy it. I think he's just what happens when Kenshin stops being polite and starts being real. Okay, real freaky and psycho, but it's probably pent-up frustration from acting so wussy the rest of the time." "Oh, stop it. Just stop. Kaoru can take care of herself. I'm almost more worried about Kenshin, considering that she's killed him at least once that we know of, and she has to do it again. For all we know, they're just practicing." "Practicing. Combat. In his room instead of here. Right, and I have a tower in Tokyo I'd like to sell you." "Well," Hiko said, hanging up the phone on his desk and swiveling around, "the hospital has called us after all. Not surprisingly, they have no other contact information for Miss Komagata." Megumi shook her head at Sano's initial blank look. "You know. Yumi." She sighed at his faintly crazed grin of reminiscence. "Did it take her this long to wake up? I really thought she looked okay." "Electrolyte imbalance and dehydratiion, they said. Apparently she's still somewhat disoriented, and they're hoping we know someone who'll be familiar to her. I told them we'd bring him right away." "Hah," Sano said, and raced down the hall ahead of the other two. --- Even without pressing his ear to the door, he could hear Kaoru's indignant voice. "Hey! I told you not to put that there!" "Isn't that where it belongs?" "Absolutely not. Now take it out right now!" Sano grinned vindictively and shouldered the door open, snapping the latch and taking Kenshin and Kaoru by surprise. The sleeping bag was rolled up and tucked underneath the workbench they were sitting at opposite ends of, fully clothed and poking at their history project with duelling colored pens. "Sano, I already gave you the list of references," Kaoru sighed, before pointing back at the offending page. "Look, if you put that paragraph there, it messes up the entire flow. It has to be at the end to lead into the next section, and besides, we need room to fit the whole footnote under there." Kenshin drooped. "Oro," he reluctantly agreed, before looking back up at Sano himself. "Mr. Harris, to what do I owe the pleasure of your buying me a new latch?" --- Yumi looked pale and tired, but she still blossomed into a smile when Kenshin slipped into her room. Hiko had received only the same tense, bewildered flicker of disinterest that she gave the ward nurse, but she recognized him. "Bats? I did see you before and I wasn't dreaming, was I?" Deftly, Hiko edged the nurse out into the hallway to discuss Yumi's condition, leaving the two alone together. Kenshin sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand, keeping it loosely clasped in his after giving it his usual formal kiss. "My name's Kenshin now," he said gently. "How are you feeling?" "Wicked strange. My naginata's gone. I didn't think that could happen, but nothing makes sense right now. Feels almost like I'm turning into Tomoe." Her fingers tightened. "I didn't dream it, did I? We met up at night and we both changed back for a little while. Did it wear off? One last fling that burned us out?" "I suppose you could view it that way," he said at first. He smoothed a loose strand of hair away from her forehead. With her hair down and her face scrubbed clean, she looked both younger and more mature somehow, no longer the vicious gamine overdressed to kill. "No, I owe you the truth. I meant to do this: destroy your naginata and turn you human again, or as near to that as we can still become. Perhaps it's not quite accurate to say that I'm sorry, but I apologize for having betrayed your trust." "Oh." She mulled this over briefly. "Well, I guess that's it then." "You're not angry with me?" Her shrug had a hint of the old luscious insouciance. "What good would that do? I said I didn't want to live halfway. Okay, this isn't what I had in mind, but at least this way I don't have the naginata in my face all the time without being able to use it. And I'll never have to go home to those guys again. I always told Jineh the only good thing about his stupid hat is it helps hide his face, and Tomoe--" She shivered a bit. "Don't know how Enishi could take it. Every few months, she'd start carrying on as if she'd been thrown off a cliff, or hit by a train, or weighted down with bricks and drowned. Not so much lately, but it still creeped me out." "I see," Kenshin said. He considered his various suicides over the past few years. Had Tomoe been linked to him all this time without his knowing it? Before Battousai changed her, she had trained with her mother in the old shrine traditions of channeling kami or seeing other times and places. Perhaps she had been thrown into a long trance by the shock of using his sword, or being killed by the sakabatou. "I am sorry to hear she hasn't been herself. You know I've always been very fond of you both." "Fond?" she repeated pensively. "I guess so. I'll never forget the times we had together, anyway." "They certainly still haunt me." "Doesn't sound like you mean that in a good way." Her tone had shifted subtly: wistfulness? resentment? "Yeah, we killed a lot of people, but beating yourself up about it won't bring them back." A soft tap heralded Kaoru's arrival. Her cheeks were still flushed from chasing Hiko's car on her bicycle, and the ribbon around her ponytail was coming loose. "Um. Hi," she said. Fondly, Kenshin thought that the expression on her face was similar to the one Sano had worn when breaking down his door, only prettier. His attention thus distracted, he completely missed Yumi's violet eyes flickering from him to Kaoru and back again. For a moment, if either of the others had been looking at her instead of each other, they would have seen Yumi look even younger than before, a lost child set adrift. But she quickly recovered, because she had to. Now there was nothing left for her to cling to except herself. --- Tomoe sat quietly beneath a tree in the afternoon shade. Inside the crypt, Jineh and Enishi were arguing again, though not quite to the extent of open combat. There wasn't much point to duelling as matters stood; without their former powers, the only difference between their black swords and ordinary weapons was the color of their blades. Still, sometimes they fought anyway, giving and taking strange wounds that neither blazed not bled, merely gaping open until bound closed to seal back together. Although she was paying as little attention to their raised voices as possible, her name kept coming up in argument. "You're not taking Tomoe from me," Enishi snarled. "With your katana all buggered, you can't drain her anyway. Even if you could, you wouldn't get near much from her as from me, but you're too much the coward for a fair fight. Stabbed Battousai in the back, didn't you?" "What makes you think I can't do the same to you? And you know that's not what I'm after. Tomoe never lets you. With Yumi gone, you should at least share her with me." "Yumi wouldn't touch you except with the blade of a ten-foot pole. It's not as if I'd been banging her either, because that would've left Tomoe alone for you to get at her." With an effort, she shut out the noise from the outside of her head so she could listen to the inside of it. She folded her hands over her sash, and the small hard stone she'd concealed in the crimson silk beneath it. That night in the gully, she'd found Yumi's emerald easily enough, stumbling as if by accident to pick it up from the mud. Though the men never saw it at all, the jewel had shone out to her as if it were a spring leaf with the sun full behind it. Even now, to her inner sight, it glowed as brightly as the golden flecks that had become star-strewn through her dark eyes that night, which Enishi had been still too busy defending her from Jineh to notice yet. She listened to the emerald now. It echoed with the voice of the Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu student whom she'd known in Okusufodo. She'd kissed him when she gave him her hairpin, before he walked out into the winter snow. His voice had already become harder and colder when he returned, eventually fighting her fiance so viciously that Akira had died of his wounds after Kenshin fled the village to become Battousai. When she sank deeper into the jewel's light, she could see Kenshin's face, and then its focus changed to a girl whose eyes were so blue that their color shone through the green veil that suffused everything. --- As Kenshin smiled in welcome at Kaoru, they were both startled by Yumi's sudden ripple of laughter behind him. "Oh, that must be your little bluebird. What's her name?" "Oro?" Kaoru swatted his topknot as she walked up to shake Yumi's hand. "My name is Kaoru, not Oro. Yumi? I thought you were out cold when I was fighting Battousai. How did you know about the 'little bluebird' thing?" Yumi grinned. "You fought Battousai? And won, I guess, or neither of you'd be here visiting. But nah, I knew from before that." She poked Kenshin's arm, a sparkle of mischief lighting her face. "Maybe you'd better tell Kaoru before I do." Kenshin's blue-violet eyes were faintly glazed. "I'm afraid I can't quite recall. It must have been one of those Battousai moments." "Now, it's just mean of you to make me tell her. Lean down here and I'll remind you." Kaoru watched his ears turn pink as Yumi's lips shaped words into one of them. "Oro," he said, and sat back. "I'll be certain to tell her later. In the meantime, Mr. Hiko-- the man who was with me earlier-- said your health plan will only cover a few more days here. Do you need a place to stay? We can find lodgings for you, perhaps a new job if you'd like to try something different from what you've been doing." "Still getting my feet under me right now, but as soon as I know what's what, I'll give you guys a call. Probably could use crash space somewhere for a while. I'm guessing it won't be with you." While addressing these words to Kenshin, she grinned again at Kaoru, who thought that despite Yumi's bravado, the older girl was much more shaken than she wanted to admit. "Very well," Kenshin said, standing up and giving her hand one last squeeze. "The nurse has Mr. Hiko's phone number. He can reach us if need be, though he can also be very helpful in his own way. I'll come back tomorrow, if you'd like." "Wicked cool. See ya then." Out in the hallway, Hiko was still speaking with the nurse. Kaoru was entertained to see that he'd casually set a little raku figurine on the reception desk. "I'll wait with you until he can drive you back to school," she offered to Kenshin. "After this, I should go home anyway. It's my night to cook again." He looked vaguely apprehensive. "No, I am not going to bring you leftovers tomorrow," she told him, and he looked even more vaguely relieved. She let it slide. They sat together in the waiting area for a bit. "Well?" Kaoru eventually said. "Aren't you going to tell me how she knew I was Battousai's little bluebird?" Nervously, he stroked the end of her hair ribbon. "This nice deep blue matches your eyes," he evaded. "It must have been a good clue." She narrowed her eyes into nice deep blue daggers of death. "That doesn't explain how she knew about it in the first place." "Oro..." "I knew you were going to say that." He gulped. "Apparently during some point in the proceedings that night, Battousai started calling her that. Not the part with the knife. After that." "You mean when...? I mean, during...?" She looked at him trying very hard not to look at her. "Are you trying to pull your head inside yourself like a turtle? You're about to say 'oro' again, aren't you?" Guiltily, he clamped his mouth shut. It seemed to tremble very slightly from internal pressure. Apparently unable to clear the backlog, he sat there wordlessly next to her, neither of them saying anything for a few minutes. After a while, she said, "Actually, that's rather sweet." He peeked up at her through the side of his loose bangs, twitching at the added weight of another unspoken oro. The hapless charm of Okusufodo men, she thought, and leaned her head against his, tipping his face toward hers so he could murmur it against her lips as many times as he needed to. --- Hiko hadn't done much with the old locker rooms in the Kamiya dojo, so it was fairly easy to convert them to a small but liveable space that Yumi could sublet from him. In exchange, however, he insisted on having a respectable tenant, which boiled down to her retiring from the scantily-clad stage to keep his raku gallery open on weekdays. Hiko had also provided classic librarian fashion sense to help assemble a much more demure wardrobe for Yumi, but Sano developed a sudden obsession with rakuware anyhow, rather to Megumi's dismay. "She's an older woman," Megumi said mournfully over a stack of ofuda. She was sitting in the corner of the mini-dojo while Hiko and Kaoru were sparring; on the other side of the closed library door, Kenshin was wading through trigonometry at Hiko's desk. Sano had disappeared off to the gallery again. "Much, much older. Like old enough to be his grandmother's babysitter's playschool teacher." "Kenshin said-- oof!-- that technically she's only eighteen or so." Kaoru dodged under Hiko's bokken. "She just acts older because she had to, after-- ow!-- her family sold her off." "I thought he said she was a samurai's daughter. Though you wouldn't know it from the way she acts." "She was, but-- hey, that's not fair, I'm trying to talk here!" Hiko looked thoroughly bored as he waited for her to get back up. "Perhaps we ought to handicap in the other direction then. Ready?" Above the noise of his bokken thwacking against Kaoru's, and occasionally against Kaoru herself, he said, "If I understand correctly, the tribute collectors came here when Miss Komagata was your age. Her family had only two choices to raise the tribute they needed to pay: they could sell her father's swords and armor, which would be a disgrace to any samurai, or they could sell her to a brothel. Miss Kamiya-Summers, you really must learn to jump higher. After some years, Miss Komagata escaped and returned home. They took her back in, but she could never resume her previous status, not only to avoid being found by the brothel's agents, but also to avert her personal disgrace from her house." "That doesn't make sense if they sold her in the first place." "You almost sound sorry for her now. Hey, that hurt! I bet Kenshin wouldn't thrash me around like this." "Of course not, but Battousai would. For that reason, we cannot allow either of them to become familiar with your fighting style. Such as it is." Kaoru growled and made a lunge that actually made Hiko step back quickly enough to make his glasses crooked. He straightened them, looking pleased. "Excellent. In any case, I doubt very much that Mr. Harris' attentions are likely to have much effect on her." "You think so?" Megumi said hopefully. "From casual observation, he does not quite seem the sort that would appeal to her. For example, she may have been devoted to Battousai, but Kenshin seems to simply bewilder her." Kaoru growled again. "Good," she said, and made another lunge that actually sideswiped Hiko's sleeve. "The Dark Side has made you powerful," Megumi suggested. "Oh hush, Megumi. Ow!" --- After showering in the school gym's locker room, Kaoru returned to the library to find Hiko gone. "He went to check on the gallery," Megumi said, sitting on the corner of his desk. "He promised to swat Sano with a rolled-up newspaper if there was any funny business going on that might cause pottery breakage." Kenshin blinked at the last page of his trig problem set, put his pen down, and gently bonked his forehead against it. "Orooo. I have done terrible things in the past, but I never compelled anyone to graph complex numbers in a polar coordinate system." "Don't do that, you'll make your face all inky," Kaoru said, and then leaned closer to his notebook in disbelief. "Where did you get ink the color of your old shirt?" Megumi tugged at the back of Kaoru's collar. "Hey, careful, don't drip your hair onto his homework. Kenshin, I keep telling you there are certain disadvantages to using fountain pens, mostly the whole water-soluble ink thing. What are you going to do if your notebook gets rained on?" Kenshin shrugged blissfully, closing his eyes and leaning his cheek against the paper as Kaoru started to scritch the back of his neck. "Now you're going to have polar coordinates on your face," she warned him. His only response was to reach up and pull her hand down to be nibbled on, but he quickly stopped when she made a soft hiss of pain. "Oh dear. Blisters again?" "And he kept thwacking my hand to see if he could make me drop my bokken. How many years of this did you put up with? Or is he just giving us the fast-forward version?" He had sat back up to trace the bruises with his fingertips, though Megumi had leaned forward for a quick look and dismissed them as ugly, but not serious. "I can't speak for the way he's training you. But as I recall, the treatment he was giving me last month would have raised suspicions of favoritism or bribery in the old days. No live steel, no rocky streambeds, no ice-water over the head." Kaoru shivered. "Okay, maybe he really is taking it easy on us. He hasn't given me any bloody noses yet, anyway." "Speaking of nosebleeds," Megumi slyly said, "don't the two of you have to go finish up your history project? I'll watch the desk if you want." "It's a very kind offer, Miss Megumi, but it's not a very interesting desk to watch. Perhaps if we gave Mr. Hiko some of those strange executive toys, or perhaps a small fishtank-- oro!" Kenshin discreetly yelped as Kaoru tugged him out of the chair by his topknot and dragged him back to his room. --- "Mmm. Kaoru, please don't do that." "What, that?" He pulled away from her on the workbench, nervously tucking his shirt back in again. Frustrated, Kaoru glared at him. Even now, it was the same point of impasse every time. "Why won't you let me do anything besides kiss you?" she burst out. "It's not like you don't know how. You can't even say you've forgotten after this much time, considering Yumi." "Have you been paying any attention to Mr. Harris?" "What?" She had no idea what he was getting at. "I know he's been acting weird and jealous, even now that he's started to hang around Yumi a lot, but don't tell me you're getting jealous of him." "It's not a matter of jealousy, at least not entirely." Kenshin tucked his legs up onto the bench and leaned back against the wall. "He is concerned for your safety. And so am I. You have done me the kindness of acting as if Battousai is completely separate from the person I am now, and certainly I feel no current affinity for Battousai's actions. But even I do not know how separate we truly are." "You can't think you're going to freak out if I take your shirt off or sit on your lap," she muttered resentfully. "Frankly, I do not know what might happen." His face flushed. "I hope you'll bear with me. I was raised in a very different time, you know. There have been only a few women I've kissed as my own self. My mother was the first, of course, and then there was that last morning I met Tomoe at the shrine. You are the third. Anything beyond that is the province of Battousai, and I have no wish to test whether it would provide another avenue for him to assert himself." "You've spent more than a hundred years wandering around post-Battousai and you haven't gone on any dates until now?" Kaoru was incredulous. "And Megumi was complaining about her social life." The slight motion of Kenshin's mouth barely qualified as a smile. "I have not been terribly eager to press my company upon others. Besides, much of that time was spent either in the wild or as a monastery novice, a kitchen servant, or in some other role that did not involve many... dates, as you call them." "Well," she said, lifting her chin, "if Battousai does try anything, I killed him once and I can do it again. So please won't you let me-- " He caught her wrists and held them away from his shirt buttons, gently but firmly. "There are other possible complications for you, even without the question of Battousai. If I ceded a little ground to you, you would demand more and more, until that risk would become inevitable." "We could stop before then. Couldn't we?" The plaintive desperation of her own voice startled her, and when he opened his hands to free hers, she withdrew them instead of reaching toward him again. "Could we?" he echoed. "If I were to meet with your mother, could I tell her that I have only honorable intentions in courting you? Miss Kaoru, you are fifteen years old. To outward appearances, so am I. We cannot possibly marry as we are now, and it's unlikely we will be able to do so in the future." "I'm not talking about marriage, you know." "Yes, I know." He picked up her fallen hair scarf and absently wrapped the blue silk gauze around his hand. "And that is why I will not let you proceed any further than we already have. I apologize if I will not permit myself to endanger your life, your honor, or your soul." "I don't care about any of that," she insisted. His blue-violet eyes were mournful. "But I do." ----- (The light at the end of the tunnel may be another oncoming boxcar of angst. Bwahah. Since I can't think of much useful stuff to say about this chapter itself, I'm going to get all self-indulgent and address some issues no one has asked about. The Edodale Kenshin has the darker OVA hair/eyes coloring instead of the more vivid tv palette partially because Megumi-as-Willow already has similar hair color to the latter, and also because I have to confess that the original OVA is what really hooked me on RK, even after watching the tv series up through the end of the Kyoto arc. There's practically no Japanese in the dialogue because I don't have any useful knowledge of the language and because imho its casual insertion just doesn't fit into the Whedonesque idiom, to whatever extent that I've been able to manage that. And I suppose I could've used the history project to explore worldbuilding geekery about how Edodale seems to be located in an AU California that was initially colonized by the Japanese instead of by the Spanish, so that even after it was incorporated into the US, it still retained many place/personal/family names, food preferences, and other random things from the first wave of settlers, resulting in a cultural mixture somewhat reminiscent of the way Hawaii is now. But I didn't, so there.)