A Few Needed Adjustments

LET'S GATHER AROUND THE CAMPFIRE AND SING OUR CAMPFIRE SONG

"Ask me 'Are we there yet' one more time and I'll drop you off in the middle of no where."

Keisuke reeled a bit in his seat from his half-sister's biting comment.

"I didn't ask it that, geez."

"You've said that same sentence almost seventy-eight times!" She growled back.

"I'm just curious."

Natsume facepalmed. Don't get Natsume wrong, she loved her brother Keisuke deeply, but at the same time, he was a little brother. He was pushy, annoying, and a bit bratty sometimes. He was definitely was showing all those traits this morning.

She didn't originally plan to bring him to Kyubi's place. She had planned it out the night before by calling Touma. She told him about what she was doing the next few weeks and she needed him to tell her parents that she was at the detective "club", as her dad called it, while she was gone. He agreed to do it and seemed excited for her. She thought. Sometimes with Touma it was hard to tell his emotion as his voice didn't usually rise or fall too much when he talked. Though, it had been cracking recently.

She had to lower and turn up the volume on her phone at some points because it went from his usual low and monotone voice that squeaked a little to a something more baritone in quality.

She was kinda glad she wasn't a guy at some times.

That afternoon after school seemed like it would go flawlessly as she was preparing to depart.

And then Keisuke walked in.

He was so sheepish with everything else when he needed to suck it up, but at the ONE point, the single time he needed to be a little less curious, he was.

And she couldn't lie her way out like every other time because there was too much evidence. She was taking a goddamn book about foxes and kitsune shit with her; of course that raise red flags to even a box of wood, considering the circumstances.

And somehow, he knew how to blackmail. He said he was going to tell Mom and Dad that she was seeing someone.

She made a mental note to kick his ass where Dad, and especially Mom, couldn't see them. Usually, the father was the one to pull out the leather from the little loops in the jeans of dress pants and begin the work, but her mother was the one who did corporal punishment. And she hit hard.

But not on the bus and definitely not at someone elses house. That'd just be rude.

And now here they were, floating around in the void filled with colors, buildings with unconventional shapes like hexagons and trapezoids, and various eyes and mouths on these buildings and yokai doing their daily business.

After a few minutes, they were what could be called into the country area. Natsume surmised this as there was more oddly shaped Flora than oddly shaped buildings.

"If your stop is here, please get off." The humanoid driver rang out as the bus stopped the at where they needed to go.

"C'mon, here's our stop." Natsume shook Keisuke awake as he was half asleep.

They stepped off and watched as the only normal looking thing in this plane, the brown bus, disappeared into the into the pink fuzz of the distance.

"Where the hell are we? It's like we're in a kids cartoon."

"Stop complaining and just follow me."

"Ugh."

"Hey, it wasn't my idea to bring you here. If I had it my way, your but would have still been home, safe."