Hey kid wanna get stoned? (INV, ND)

Why was it always Toshi? It had taken him a while but finally he had been accepted into Grad school. And once he was there, he seemed to fit right in. These old ass archaeologists seemed almost like they themselves needed to be in a museum or something. But Toshi enjoyed the whole tweed-jacket-with-elbow-patches thing, it seemed funny. And the research was good, he thought. He was undertaking research into ancient civilizations and their paganistic magic worship. It followed on from his dissertation based on those strange ruins he had explored with that shinigami Mana and the others he had met that time. It seemed how now, just like then, he would be the one sent on a mission to a new ruin. He got bad vibes when his supervisor looked at him with a glint in his steely eye. There was a lot of talk about how "young" and "fit" Toshi was and frankly it worried him. And now his worries were confirmed.

And so, Toshi had been shipped off to Bhutan, with the co-ordinates of a recently discovered ruin and enough instruction on how to arrive safely at his destination. What concerned him the most, perhaps, was that his work was in Magiarchaeology. Of course his supervisors thought the level of risk in these places was generally low, since Toshi was such a strong seeming individual to them. But Toshi knew that he was pretty much small-fry when it came to the spiritual world and these places were always spiritual. Always full of ghosts who were trapped in there and spiritual mechanisms designed to kill you.

So arriving at the mouth of the cave, buried deep in the mountains was the easy bit. The guide that had taken him up had refused to enter the valley, citing that he knew the dangers and if the idiot Japanese kid wanted to get himself killed that was none of his business but he wasn't going to mess with that folklore shit. Toshi thanked him and paid him, before setting off. He wore khaki breeches and shirt, much like the archaeologists of old, coupled with a pith helmet. His backpack was made of canvas, and extremely large, with many items hanging off of it.

He stepped towards the ruins. He noticed the suppression of his reiatsu with a sigh. Yup, it would be one of those. There was a door; presumably the entrance to the true treasures of the mountain but most important was working out how to get rid of all this spiritual crap. He stepped through the door, careful to avoid the pressure plate. Rookie error, that. He began quickly and expertly sketching a map as he ventured inwards, writing down the location of anything notable, and any traps he saw.

He stepped right, through a door into some kind of vestibule or other room, maybe it had been used for storing shoes or hats or coats or something. He wrote all of this down in his expedition notebook. It was then that he noticed the reiatsu of the shinigami approaching him. He frowned. Well hey, at least someone who knew what they were doing would be able to help him, if they didn't just send him away like a stupid child.

Or so he though, anyway. He heard the griding of Yorishou stepping onto the pressure plate. He winced in sympathy. Oh god. This would be anything but good. He heard the roar of some huge beast. There was a cataclysmic noise, and he peered out of the room he was in to see a hand reaching down the corridor to grab Yori, sailing straight past Toshi from his cloak-room cubby hole. The shinigami was grabbed and thrown clear out of the ruins by the enormous golem that then threw the roof after him. Huh, this guy was serious, eh. Toshi, at this juncture, decided that it was best to do a runner. He performed two steps, the first to get him into the main entrance hall and the second to get him well clear of the ruins. He couldn't help but weep internally at the destruction of the otherwise pristine ruins.

"You idiot! You stepped on a damn pressure plate you fatass, and now he took the roof off! That roof was probably more valuable than both our lives!" he shouted angrily. He approached the shinigami who was presumably buried halfway under the rubble and shifted some rocks off of him, and offered him a hand up. "Man I thought a Shinigami would know this shit."

Toshi continued shifting, cursing the shinigami's ineptitude until Yorishou leaped fancifully up. How show-y. What the hell was wrong with this guy. He was kind of a "pretty boy". He looked a bit like... A bit like Zac Efron, he considered to himself. "Ooooooh, Zac Efron..." Kanaboshi said in Toshi's head and he did the mental equivalent of rolling his eyes. The hell was wrong with that girl. He heard Kasei snickering in the back of his mind too, while Ianto remained thoroughly undisturbed by the entire exchange. The guy discarded his shihakusho and was wearing a waistcoat and a shirt. He looked like he belonged in the damned theatre or something. What was up with this guy. He was so weird, even for a shinigami. Usually they were all stoic and martial. Not this dude.

"Wh- Wha!? Hey the ruin might not be valuable to you guys since you're so old and shit and you probably live in ruins like this but for normal humans this is priceless you piece of shit!" he said, before Yori pointed out the golem. Was Toshi... Allowed to help him? What the hell was up with this shinigami. All of a sudden, Toshi felt his right hand yanking upwards. Oh god. Oh god no. Where his hand had been was instead a tiny girl. Her waist joined smoothly to his wrist, just below the navel. She wore a little dress and had bright green hair, and large blue eyes. She looked almost like a hand puppet but she was 100% realistic, and made of flesh.

"Hey mister! I- I can help you defeat it!" Kanaboshi, the spirit on Toshi's hand said. Oh god damn why the hell did he have to say the guy looked like Zac Effron. Zac Effron wasn't even that hot!

"Kasei he's so cute! Like really cute!" Kanaboshi said in Toshi's head. He could feel his other spirit, Kasei, blushing in his head. How the hell did that even work anyway!?

"Aah jeez Kanaboshi. Well whatever. What she said, I'm not going to let you fight that big dumb thing alone, what the hell sorta guy would I be if I let you do that?" he said, determiniedly. He considered activating his "powerup", in order to help him but... Perhaps now was too early in the adventure to do it. So he let it be.

Toshi scratched his head with his free left hand. Kanaboshi looked grumpily at Yorishou, who had effectively completely ignored her. She was only little but Kanaboshi hated being ignored. Toshi simply looked from the shinigami and followed his gaze towards the stone golem thing. Toshi looked at it as well. It certainly looked quite imposing. Kanaboshi let go of her annoyance to examine it also. Toshi wondered if it had any insides. If he could get close enough to pelt it with a few barriers, he could likely send a few of them at it to determine its weak point before sending an explosive one at it, hopefully totally destroying it. But he would need a decoy or a distraction to let him get close enough...

"Hmm... Well not explosives exactly. But I can create an explosion. I have to get close enough to see where it'll be most effective." Toshi explained thoughtfully.

"Zac-Efron-San, if you could distract it, Toshi could get close enough and I could hit it with my Chirasu Hageshiku!" Kanaboshi said from her position on Toshi's wrist, her fists balled and eyes flashing in excitement. That girl loved to explode stuff for sure, Toshi thought to himself.

The shinigami seemed pretty comfortable with just leaping straight into the face of danger. Toshi kinda liked that gumption but he guessed that when you were already dead it wasn't exactly like you had much to lose from that sorta thing. Either way, he prepared a barrier on his right hand, sharpening the edge, not that he would be able to realistically make it sharp enough to dink that thing. Bah. Yorishou leapt onto the giant's arm, and Toshi was about to launch the barrier on a straight vector, hopefully completely severing the thing's head, when he felt his right arm being wrenched away, the barrier flying off into the air.

"Watch out Toshi, you're going to hit Zac-Efron-san!" Kanaboshi cried. He cursed. He'd lost his window with her intervention.

"Do you mind dammit?" he asked the green haired sprite who had taken the place of his right hand. "I'm tryna take this thing out!" he said angrily. In the background, Yorishou performed ever more daring acrobatics, getting the thing to strike its own foot. Toshi and Kanaboshi, however, were completely oblivious to the fight occurring behind them.

"But you were gonna hit him! I had to stop you!"

"Aah I wasn't gonna hit him! Or if I did only a little bit, the golem would have got most of it!"

"Aha! So you admit that you were gonna hit him!" as Toshi responded, Yorishou darted in between its legs, barely dodging the hand that came to reach him.

"Guys." Kasei said in their minds, but neither of them were listening.

"Only a little bit dammit, you always get so het up on semantics!"

"Guys!" Kasei said a little louder now, but to no avail.

"Hitting him just a little is still hitting him, numbskull!" The hand appeared to be about to grab onto Yorishou. Kasei acted quickly on Toshi's behalf. His left hand rose while he was busy talking to his right hand, and from it launched a Kasei Death Beam. Kasei didn't have time to aim, she launched it straight at the golem, who happened to bend down and look up just in time for the full force of the Death Beam to hit it straight in the eye.

Toshi and Kanaboshi both looked up, eyes wide at the beam that had come from Toshi's left hand, where Kasei was now manifested. It looked like he had two incredibly lifelike hand puppets who were on his wrists. She looked at them defiantly, as if daring them to challenge the fact that she had taken action.

"Uuh Kasei, are you okay?" Toshi asked her. Hopefully, Yorishou would not be too offended that Toshi had not asked him if he was okay.

The two guardians on Toshi's hands went quiet as they heard the golem thing scream. It was an unearthly, ungodly sound. That wasn't the sound that some random thing cobbled together with a bit of magic made. That was the sound of a being that was able to feel pain and suffering. Had Toshi done that to it? Rather, had Kasei? She looked up at Toshi, her large brown eyes filled with concern. Through sheer force of will, he dispelled his two hogo-sha from his hands. He didn't want either of them to have to experience this if it was really all that bad. The smoke was clearing gradually and he headed into it, wary of an attack of some description.

"Hello?" he called, into the dust. When he went through he saw the corpse of the giant stone beast lying prone upon the ground. It had been stabbed through the head. Jeez, that was dark. He could just about make out the shinigami walking down the tunnel. What the hell was with this guy!? Toshi used his step to catch up, the roadrunner-type noise echoing through the passageway as he did so. Did this dumb shinigami really intend to just head into the ruin with no light source? Toshi got out his torch from his backpack and clutched his pith helmet to his head as he chased down Yorishou.