http://clampfix.fanworks.net/guests/holy-g1.txt </head><body><pre> Holy Ghost An X-Files/Yuu*Yuu*Hakusho crossover by Sionna Klassen Disclaimer: The X-Files, Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, and all related characters are owned by Chris Carter and Ten Thirteen Productions. The characters of Yuu*Yuu*Hakusho are owned by Studio Pierrot, Fuji Television, and Yoshihiro Togashi. No infringement of any of the rights of the creators or distributors is intended. I'm not worth suing, really. I have no money. And now that I'm past the legalese, a warning of what you're getting yourself into if you read this. I have been told that mixing live-action and anime is impossible, not to mention mixing a show as nebulous about the supernatural as the X-Files and one that takes it for granted like Yuu Yuu Hakusho. To both arguments, I say: Deal with it, Sparky. The X-Files is actually very upfront about supernatural phenomena; as in it happens all the time, it's just officially denied. And YYH is more secretive about it than people think. Outside the circle of youkai and main characters, the world is quite similar to the one in the X-Files, which means essentially unaware. Or in denial. As for mixing live-action and anime, I cannot personally imagine YYH as live-action, but it's not too difficult for me to imagine Mulder and Scully as anime. Do that if you like, if it makes it easier; I just integrate them without bothering to change either. Chapter 1 Washington, D.C., USA Thursday, September 14, 1995 9:32 A.M. "Hey, Scully," Mulder said as she carefully entered the office. Carefully, because the clutter was always piled in such a manner as to make her afraid of an avalanche. She didn't relish the idea of literally drowning in paperwork. She paid little attention to the greeting, but Mulder's next question threw her. "How's your Japanese?" "What?" Scully asked, frowning. Mulder looked up at her innocently. "I know you took it. I read your file, remember?" "And my thesis, yes, I remember." Scully sat down in her chair, which seemed to be miraculously free of objects at the moment. "I'm pretty rusty. Why?" Mulder waved a file at her. "It appears we're being appointed as representatives of our country. Which means either that they trust us more than I thought, or they're trying to get us out of their hair." "Representatives to where? Japan?" Scully said. That certainly sounded like what Mulder had been saying, or rather implying. He nodded. "I took some Japanese too, but I'm probably even worse at it than you are. Languages were never my strong point." "Why Japan?" Scully asked. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the FBI supposed to be an organization concerned with *domestic* affairs?" "Apparently, this is a very special exception." Mulder shrugged. "The Japanese government has had a problem with a rash of disappearances lately. They were going to deal with it themselves, but then American tourists started going missing too. To avoid diplomatic incidents, the Japanese government asked for the assistance of our government in order to track down the kidnappers." "How polite of them," Scully said dryly. Mulder looked back up at her with a grin. "I've heard they're a polite people. They've even assigned us a guide to make sure we don't get into trouble." Scully raised an eyebrow. "Is this one of those things where we've said yes before we got the assignment?" "Looks like it. Our plane leaves on Tuesday." "At least they gave us a few days' notice," Scully observed. "But I still don't understand why they picked us." Mulder shrugged again. "Probably for at least a dozen reasons, none of them simple. I don't think there's much we can do about it..." "So why not enjoy it?" Scully finished. "Well, as long as Skinner's paying the bills..." Mulder grinned again. "Besides, travel broadens the mind." She glared at him, then yelped as a precariously-balanced stack of papers and books overbalanced and fell into her lap. Sitting amidst the carnage, she sighed. "This must be Thursday," she muttered. "I never could get the hang of Thursdays." Despite the fact that Scully was absolutely positive there had been a mistake in the paperwork that would be corrected before they left - shoving the job onto someone else - their plane departed on Tuesday, as promised, with Mulder and Scully aboard it. She settled into her seat for the long ride, realizing as she did so that her shoulders were tight with tension. She was almost expecting something to go wrong, and she wouldn't feel exactly safe again until they got back on the ground. She remembered her first case with Mulder, how the plane had seemed to spiral completely out of control for dizzying moments, as everything on board went haywire. And how Mulder had been completely calm the entire time, with an expression that most closely approximated distant interest on his face. Since then, she had attempted to drive to her destinations whenever possible. Of course, when the destination was Japan it became slightly more difficult. And on another case she'd discovered that boats weren't necessarily any safer than planes. <I'm getting paranoid,> she thought, annoyed with herself. <Quit it, Dana. That's Mulder's job.> She turned to her partner and said lightly, "So which will it be this time, Mulder - alien invaders, or Godzilla?" A ghost of a smile crossed Mulder's face, as he leaned back into his seat and closed his eyes. "Oh, hadn't you heard? After munching on Tokyo a couple of times, Godzilla reformed and became a good guy. Helped protect Japan from evil monsters." "Excuse me for not being an expert." She paused. "What could it be - in the realm of the logical and ordinary, that is?" Mulder shrugged. "From the file I was given, none of the kidnapped victims have turned up, either dead or alive. No ransom notes, which seems to indicate they were killed - but what happened to the bodies?" "How many people are we talking about here?" Scully asked. "Here." Mulder passed her a thick folder. "A lot of it's in Japanese, I'm afraid. But I'm pretty sure there's been about twenty-six disappearances that can be attributed to this string." "That's an awful lot of people for anyone working on their own," Scully said. "Mm-hmm." Mulder nodded absently, his eyes closed again. For once, he didn't seem too interested in pressing a theory of his own on her. But then, this wasn't an X-File, so there wouldn't be anything that smacked of the paranormal about it. Thinking that, Scully felt slightly relieved. She hated blundering around in the dark, and on investigations of X-Files she ended up doing exactly that - in both a literal and metaphorical sense - far too often for her liking. <It's about time I get an ordinary case. No jabberwockies or poltergeists on this one.> She relaxed into her chair as the plane began to taxi down the runway. She glanced at Mulder and saw him staring out the window. "What?" she asked. He looked back at her. "Just checking for monsters on the wing." "What?" she asked, then smiled. "You've been watching Twilight Zone reruns again, haven't you?" Mulder shrugged noncommittally, a slightly self-deprecating smile on his face. Scully returned her attention to the folder, trying to puzzle her way through the Japanese reports with the help of the scanty notes scribbled in the margins. Somebody had obviously attempted to translate the folder before it was given to them. Scully wondered if it was so urgent they hadn't bothered to get a real translator to finish the job, or if the English copy of the reports simply hadn't been passed on with the rest. <They don't want to make it easy for us, do they?> she sighed internally. The Tokyo airport was huge, crowded, and confusing. "Damn," Mulder muttered, looking around. "I *knew* I'd get lost in five seconds. Wasn't our guide supposed to meet us here?" "How can you be lost?" Scully asked. "We haven't even left the gate yet. And who are we looking for?" Mulder consulted a piece of paper. "Would you believe a high school student?" "What?" "Shuichi Minami. Sixteen years old, top of his class. Started being a tourist guide as a part-time job." "The government's involved in this. Why give us a high school student as a guide?" Scully shook her head. "It doesn't make sense." "An innocent-looking spy?" Mulder hazarded. "If he looks harmless, they might be hoping we'll let things slip around him." "Could be," Scully murmured, frowning. She looked around, trying to see through the milling crowds of people. Then her attention was caught by a flash of red, and her eyes flickered in the direction of the bright splash of color. "Over there," she said, and she and her partner slipped through the crowd, walking toward the figure holding a card with their names neatly printed on it. Their guide turned out to be a tall, slim young man with large green eyes and red hair that hung to his waist. He looked almost like a girl, on first glance. Even his voice was more like a soft alto than a tenor. He smiled at them pleasantly, and offered his hand. "I'm Shuichi Minami," he said. "I'm Fox Mulder, this is Dana Scully." Mulder shook the offered hand, and Scully copied the gesture. "Fox?" the young man asked, seeming amused. Mulder looked at him, slightly nonplussed. Shuichi continued instantly, pronouncing the unfamiliar names carefully. The pause had been so slight that Mulder couldn't be sure that he'd even seen the amusement in Shuichi's eyes. For someone only sixteen years old, Shuichi certainly had a lot of poise and self-control. Mulder found him hard to read. Mulder wondered absently how a Japanese kid could have red hair, but then dismissed the question in the face of more important concerns. He glanced at a clock, and sighed. It was already 11:25 here, even though the plane had left Washington early in the morning. He didn't feel tired, and he suspected Scully was going to have a hard time getting to sleep. With him, that was taken for granted, whether he had jetlag or not. "I guess we'd better get our luggage and find a place to stay..." Shuichi cleared his throat slightly. "Ah...that's been taken care of," he said, as Mulder gave him an inquiring look. Mulder raised an eyebrow. "Are you going to be leading us around by the hand?" Shuichi had the grace to look embarrassed. "I'm just doing my job," he said. "I was told you weren't exactly...experienced with Japanese culture. And besides - it's the people you're going to be working with who arranged where you'll stay." He frowned. "Did I say that right?" "Sounded fine to me," Scully said with a shrug. She gave Mulder a look which he couldn't quite decipher, then turned back to Shuichi. "All right, let's go to the baggage claim first. I don't suppose you know where that is?" "Yes," Shuichi said softly. "It's this way." He turned away, allowing them to follow him, although he kept glancing back to make sure they were close by. Mulder frowned slightly to himself, thinking. Shuichi's command of English was far better than he would have expected for someone so young. Clearly he was an exceptional student if he was at the top of his class, but somehow he struck Mulder as - not exactly off, but definitely more than he seemed to be. He definitely seemed a lot older than sixteen, even though in some ways he *looked* younger than he was. A human paradox. Mulder smiled as he thought of what Scully would have said to that. <Must be an X-File...> Mulder had heard that rooms in general in Japan were ridiculously small, but when he opened the door to his, he found that it was actually of a fairly decent size. <That means either this place is really old - which I doubt - or it's really expensive,> he thought, and smiled. <Skinner's going to love the bill on this trip. Unless, of course, the Japanese government is paying for it.> He settled down on the bed, fully clothed, and stared up at the ceiling. The last thing he wanted to do was sleep - not when he had so much to think about. <This doesn't make any sense.> He had gotten the feeling, even from his brief experience with the young man who was acting as their guide, that Shuichi knew just as much - or possibly even more - about the situation as they did. He didn't think that was exactly standard procedure. Why would they have told him anything? And then there was something else that was bothering him. Just from reading the initial report - which he hadn't understood all of - Mulder had already found the obvious conclusion to draw from the available information. It was so easy that the officers here *must* have thought of it themselves. It was a cult. It wasn't as if that was a wildly unlikely theory. Just about everybody in the world knew there were cults in Japan by this point, they'd been in the news so much recently. And if a cult was at work here, they were just being extremely careless in picking their victims to have been noticed in the first place. It was so obvious it was pathetic. <So *why* were we called in? It just doesn't make sense...> Unless there *was* something odd and unexplainable about this case, and they'd gotten it because of Mulder's work on the X-Files... <But if that's it, why hasn't anyone said anything?> Then he almost laughed. <Oh, come on. We just got here! If they're trying to keep it a secret from the public - which is pretty much standard procedure - of course they wouldn't have told us. They won't until we actually meet them in person, so nothing will leak.> He sighed. Without more information, there wasn't much he could do. At this point about his only option was to try and sleep. So he turned on the TV instead, and lay on the bed watching late-night Japanese television until sleep finally snatched him while he wasn't paying attention. The young man who had introduced himself to the American agents - almost entirely truthfully - as Shuichi Minami stood in an office, dominated mostly by a huge desk that was covered in neat and not-so-neat piles of forms and official-looking documents. The only other marginally interesting feature of the room was a large television screen on the wall behind Shuichi, or more accurately in front of the wall, since the screen was actually a completely two-dimensional surface that could be moved to anywhere the occupant of this office chose. That occupant was sitting behind the desk, dwarfed both by it and the plush chair he was sitting in. He was, in entirety, probably less than three feet tall, and had the outward appearance of a baby, complete with blue pacifier in his mouth. He was wearing a purple tunic and a large purple hat that had the English symbols for "Jr." on it. The "Jr." was hardly necessary, at least around here, because everyone here knew who he was, and more importantly, who his father was - Enma Daioh, Lord of the Dead. Which would have made Koenma a very powerful spirit indeed except that his father had put him into the role of essentially a glorified paperpusher, keeping souls moving smoothly to their correct places in the afterlife. The paperwork that littered his desk showed that, as usual, he was taking advantage of an opportunity to ignore it in favor of "weightier matters." "So, Kurama?" Koenma asked, remarkably clearly considering that he did not remove the pacifier from his mouth. "Do you think this is going to work?" "I think so," Shuichi replied cautiously, unwilling to commit completely. "I think I can work with the FBI agents, although they don't trust me. I think Mulder is certain I'm spying on them, and Scully is just unhappy about being here in general." Koenma looked slightly unsettled by the news. "Well, you *are* spying on them, sort of - I didn't expect him to figure it out, though." "Yes, but he thinks I'm spying for the government," Shuichi said. "I'm not going to tell him that I'm a detective for the Spirit World. He'd think I was crazy." "Yeah, and I don't think it would matter much that we just want to help solve the case and find where all those disappearing people have got to. I suppose I'll have to start calling you by your human name from now on," he said, changing the subject. Kurama shrugged. "You can call me by my real name if you want to; I'm not going to contact you where anyone can overhear, and the FBI agents in particular are *not* going to learn that I'm not exactly human." "Okay," Koenma said. "Keep me informed. You don't have to come back to the Reikai to report, though." He handed a slip of paper over the desk to Kurama, who bent over to take it. He looked at it and saw that there was a phone number written on it. Koenma said eagerly, "Look at this!" He pulled open a drawer of his desk and revealed a red phone sitting in it. "I've always wanted one of these," he said confidentially, with a big grin on his face. Kurama smiled, politely hiding his amusement behind his hand. "I'll call you when I find out anything," he promised, and turned and walked out of the office. Even at this late hour (since it was now well after midnight, both in the human world and the spirit realm), the building called the Gates of Judgment was buzzing with activity. It looked, at least on the inside, like an ordinary office complex, with desks covered with paper and computers, a recent addition to try and keep the paperwork under control so that mix-ups didn't happen - at least, not too often. Kurama had a friend who had managed to get himself killed and then held up in the system as a ghost. He'd managed to get Koenma to send him back to life, probably in equal measure because Koenma thought he'd make a good Spirit World Detective and because the paperwork to find him a place in the afterlife would have taken close to forever. And with Yuusuke busily breaking all the ghost rules and generally making trouble, it was probably in Koenma's best interests to get Yuusuke out of his hair as quickly as possible. Kurama smiled as he walked down the corridor, evading harried, multicolored Spirit World employees who were rushing from place to place like upset ants, usually with too-large stacks of papers and files. His own entry into the service of the Spirit World had been a bit more indirect, since he'd been born a fox spirit in the Makai, the Demon World, and had lived there for over four hundred years before his body had been killed. But his spirit hadn't gone to the Reikai, but to the human world to be reborn in his current body, the one that bore the name Shuichi Minami. His life had been fairly ordinary after that, until he'd stolen a magical mirror from the Reikai and Yuusuke, the newest Spirit World detective, had been dispatched to get it back. Unlike Kurama's accomplices, who each had stolen something to further their own aims, Kurama had had no interest whatever in fighting Yuusuke, or even keeping the mirror. He asked Yuusuke to return it for him once he was finished with it - because he wouldn't be able to do it himself. The reason he'd needed the mirror in the first place was that his human mother was dying, and the mirror would save her, but it would take Kurama's life in exchange. What had surprised him was that Yuusuke joined in, offering half of his life force so that neither he nor Kurama would have to die. He was just as surprised that it worked. So now, although Yuusuke would never hear of it, Kurama owed Yuusuke his life. And since Kurama *had* stolen Reikai property, even for noble purposes, Koenma made him a Spirit World detective to make sure that Kurama was on his side from then on, and sent him to work with Yuusuke on the majority of cases that came through. Koenma could be very canny when he chose; Kurama was sure there was some fairly complicated reasoning behind the choice, but he wasn't inclined to try and puzzle it out. Being a Reikai Detective served him perfectly well, and he had no objections to working with Yuusuke. In fact, they'd quickly become friends. He stifled a yawn. It had been a long day for him, and they probably wouldn't be getting shorter anytime soon. It was definitely time to get back to the human world so he could get a few hours' sleep. Tokyo, Japan Wednesday, September 20, 1995 2:37 A.M. The television signal dissolved into white noise. The lights flickered and went out. Mulder twitched in his sleep. Radio transmissions were lost in static. Streetlights guttered and failed, causing the few night motorists to look around uneasily, tightening their grips on steering wheels. Something shrieked in a range past human hearing. Kurama stirred uneasily, dreaming of dripping blood. Newspapers were snatched in a sudden wind that beat them against concrete walls in an enraged frenzy, until suddenly it died and let its battered victims fall into crumpled heaps of old print. One of them bore the week-old headline: Twenty-Third Murder. Mediums and psychics all over the city woke again, as they had for nights on end, trying to stifle the screaming in their minds. The lights came on again, the television signal escaped from the blizzard, the radio went back to playing its regular programming. The streetlights turned back on, making pools of cold fluorescence. The drivers relaxed. They had no idea what had just happened, and no clue that it wasn't over. In a grove of trees just outside the city limits, something stirred. Black on shadow, it was effectively invisible until a cold blue glow appeared and then began to brighten, revealing a vaguely human shape crouching in the branches of the tree. The light illuminated a face dominated by large eyes - two like hard amber, while the third was the source of the blue glow. The creature grumbled to itself about being awakened from its rest, muttering some highly uncomplimentary things about humans in general; then it flickered and vanished into the night, moving so quickly that no one could have seen the movement even in broad daylight. The betraying blue light vanished, and there was no sound to mark the creature's departure, leaving no sign in the grove of trees that anyone had ever been there. </pre><p><a href="./">Back</a></p><p><a href=http://www.dreamhost.com/donate.cgi?id=216><img border=0 alt="Donate towards our web hosting bill!" src=https://secure.newdream.net/donate1.gif></a></p></body></html>