The doppelganger in the garrison had taken the shape of the father Miroku remembered – a man who'd had children young because he didn't know how long he had to live, and hadn't been out of his twenties when the void finally collapsed and took him with it. Miroku had been expecting this strange place's version of his father to look similar, but the man who arrived to pick him up turned out to be older and greyer, with a different haircut and a short, carefully trimmed beard, but still recognizable. So this, Miroku thought, was what his father would look like now if he'd lived to see his son grow up.

"I don't think I've heard you mention a 'Kagome' before," said Professor Houshi as he started up the car. His tone was conversational, but with a slightly wary note. "How long have you known her?"

"A few months," replied Miroku, figuring that honesty was probably the best policy unless he absolutely had to lie. Telling the truth meant not having to remember what he'd lied about.

Professor Houshi – that was how he'd answered the telephone – nodded. "Did you have fun this evening?"

"I suppose," said Miroku. Feeling a further description was expected of him, he added, "we had pizza, and we watched a movie." His tongue stumbled over the unfamiliar words."

"What movie?" Professor Houshi was curious.

"Them!," said Miroku. Why so many questions?

"The old giant ant movie? Or is there a remake?"

"The old one." Souta had described it as such.

"I've never seen that." Professor Houshi sounded interested. "How was it?"

"Interesting," said Miroku. He really hadn't understood much of it beyond that there were very large ants attacking people.

Professor Houshi glanced at Miroku in the little mirror mounted on the inside of the car's front window. "Are you all right, Miroku? You're awfully quiet. All you did was forget to phone, you know. You aren't in that much trouble."

"I'm fine," said Miroku, making a mental note – he was apparently expected to be more talkative.

It didn't seem to be a very long trip home. After a few minutes, the car turned a corner and approached a complex of two-story buildings, divided into sections with a door and windows in each, and pulled to a stop in front of number sixteen. Professor Houshi turned off the engine and opened the door.

"I'm probably going to be in the den most of the night," he said, getting out of the car. "I've got a lot of work to finish up before my colloquium."

"Right," said Miroku.

Beyond the door marked '16' was a suite of small, dingy rooms, of which a kitchen and a sitting room of some kind were visible from the front door... and both were a mess. The dwelling was stuffed to the gills with all manner of Buddhist paraphernalia, ranging from small statues to dishes of prayer beads to posters of temples to a few items Miroku couldn't begin to identify. All of this was thrown together in a way that suggested a disinterested collector far more than someone with any actual respect for the stuff, and looking at it gave Miroku a powerful urge to start cleaning up immediately. Such things should not be sitting in haphazard heaps like that!

But he resisted, because the small part of him that wasn't horrified told him that he had no idea how his actions might be interpreted. For all he knew, this could be some kind of trap, to trick him into revealing that he didn't belong here.

One thing was certain, though – his real father would never have treated these items like that... or tolerated half such a mess; the rooms were full to bursting with furniture and clutter. The motel room, with its oversized furniture and decorated walls and floors, had seemed stuffy and claustrophobic to Miroku, but this was a hundred times worse.

"Miroku?" Professor Houshi asked.

Miroku blinked, and realized she was standing in his father's way. He quickly stepped aside. Professor Houshi passed him, then paused in the act of pulling off his jacket to look back.

"Are you sure you're all right, Miroku?" he asked.

"Yes," said Miroku. "I'm just fine."

"If you say so," Professor Houshi said warily.

While his father settled down to work, Miroku explored the house a bit. His own room wasn't hard to identify – it had a license plate on the door, with his name on it. Looking inside, he was relieved to find that the room was considerably cleaner than the rest of the house, and what clutter it had was rather less sacrilegious. The walls were decorated with a mix of images – landscapes and portraits both, the latter divided about evenly between pictures of tall men holding orange balls like the one that had given Miroku his nosebleed, and pale-haired women in not much clothing.

Well, there were much worse things he could have had to look at. Even if the women's somewhat predatory expressions were a bit, they were all very pretty, and Miroku was the last person to have anything against a bit of cleavage. He sat down on the bed...

... then stood up again, as something under the bedclothes crinkled. Curious, Miroku reached under them and pulled out a magazine. When he turned it over, the front cover proved to bear a picture of three women; two blondes and one dark-skinned and dark-haired, each clad only in little cloth triangles tied on to cover the socially unacceptable areas.

Miroku sat down again and opened the magazine. Oh, yes... things were definitely looking up.

Two or three pages later, the telephone on the bedside table started ringing. Miroku looked up from the picture he was studying and wondered whether he ought to answer it. Probably not... it might be Penelope, or one of he boys from the locker room. Those weren't people he wanted to try to have a conversation with.

It rang a couple more times, and then stopped.

"Miroku!" Professor Houshi called from downstairs. "Telephone!"

Miroku hesitated. "Who is it?" he asked.

There was a pause. "It's Kagome."

Oh. That was all right, then. Miroku picked up the receiver and lifted it gingerly to his ear. "Hello?" he asked.

"Miroku?" It was Kagome's voice, though slightly distorted by the telephone. "It's me. I just wanted to check if you were all right. Is your father okay? I mean, is he... normal?"

"He seems to be," Miroku shrugged before remembering that Kagome couldn't see him. What an odd way to communicate; you missed so much of a conversation when you couldn't see the other person's face! "He asks a lot of questions, but he hasn't tried to hurt me or anything, if that's what you mean." He turned a page of the magazine and found a picture of one of the blonde women... facing away from him, but with absolutely nothing on her above the waist. Tease.

"Oh, good," said Kagome. Paper rustled. "I should have thought of this earlier, but I'm going to give you my and Sango's phone numbers. Write them down. We need to all keep in touch with each other. Have you got paper and a pen?"

"Pardon?" Miroku hadn't been quite listening – it took him a moment to remember what Kagome had just said. "Paper and a pen. There has to be..." he looked around. "Give me a moment. I don't know where anything is."

After some searching, he found a tin can full of long, thin objects that looked like some kind of writing implement. Miroku pulled one out and tested it on a corner of his magazine; for a moment, nothing happened, but then blue ink began to flow. Good! He picked up the phone again. "Found one," he said.

"Okay," said Kagome. "There are the numbers."

She read them off, and he dutifully copied them down on the blonde woman's back – then, at her insistence, he read them back to her to make sure he had them right.

"Keep those with you. We need to keep in touch," said Kagome.

"I will," promised Miroku. He pulled the page out of the magazine and folded it up to put in his pocket.

"Don't call me tonight," she added. "I'm still at the motel. But tomorrow we all need to meet at school, and then we're going back to the little store where you and Sango were last night, and we'll wait there for Souta. He's going to help us get some weapons."

"Souta? Your brother?"

"Yeah. He knows where things are around here – we don't," Kagome pointed out. "And by the way... Miroku, can you fight at all? Without your void, I mean?"

Miroku turned the page of his magazine, and there was the same blonde, still topless, but in a slightly different pose that allowed just a bit of breast to show. Very impressive... how did she stand up with those? They looked terribly top-heavy...

"Miroku?" asked Kagome.

"Hmm?" He realized he'd better shut the magazine... it was too distracting. "I used to be able to fight with a bo, a little," he said, "but it's been a long time since I practiced." He paused, thinking for a moment. "Kagome... my void is gone and Inuyasha is human... what about you? Will your arrows work the way they normally do?"

"I don't know," she said. "I wouldn't want to count on it."

"Me, either," Miroku admitted. "I've actually been noticing since I got here that I can't see auras anymore." That was somehow far more disturbing than the loss of the void – possibly because unlike the void, it was an ability he'd come to take for granted.

"Auras. I'll have to look," said Kagome. "Is there anything else you need? Any questions? Anything you need help with?"

"I think I'm all right," said Miroke. "Good night, I suppose."

"I'll see you tomorrow," said Kagome.

Miroku waited until the phone began to beep at him, that seeming to be the best sign that the conversation had ended, then set the receiver back in the cradle and opened his magazine again. Maybe if he kept looking, he'd see some more of the blonde woman's breasts.

"So," he said aloud, turning back to the page where he'd left off. "Where were we?"