Sato Nabiki was close and she knew it, every journalistic bone in her body telling her she was nearer than she had ever been before to that most elusive of creatures, the one she had been chasing since long before she ever set foot on the tarmac of Osaka Airport.
That had been the better part of a month ago on a chill spring morning made all the more so by the fact that a mere few hours before she had been in the sunshine of South America's late summer.
But that was also the shape of Nabiki's life these days, the way her own character drove her. Ever since the day she had left school there had been little else for her other than the next scoop, the next story and the next place to find it.
This was also the first time she had come back to Japan in nearly four years, the appartment she had long ago rented to call home long since given up to sub letting and anything she couldn't carry in her simple luggage long since given up to storage.
And this was a homecoming in more ways than one, not only a return to the land that had given her birth but also a return to elements of the same story that had taken her from school all those many years ago.
Back then the trail had gone dead, the leads dried up in a way that a seventeen year old, even oe with her life skills, had been unable to pursue. Which is when the little investigative team had finally admitted it was time to part ways. Nabiki had gone west to follow a long shot and her friend had gone north for another.
Nabiki's long shot had been a mixed blessing, while it had yielded none of the secrets she was actually after it had led to some startling revelations, revelations that when she put them into print had made her name almost world famous overnight and brought down a whole political party.
From there Nabiki's career had taken off, her name becoming in a few short years almost synonymous with in depth exposes, with telling the harsh truth that others would rather were not told. It had also made her a rather wealthy woman, wealth that had achieved what the lost Saotome contract had failed to do, namely revive her family school.
That too had been a long shot, not least of which because Nabiki had been forced to co-ordinate it from Los Angels where she had been in deep cover within a 'renovation program' that had in fact been little more than a front for a Mobster.
It had also required her to almost completely remove her younger sister from the equation, to get certain accreditations bought for the temperamental woman that said sister had become.
So now Akane lived in America too, a place where her level of skill WAS remarkable and a place where they were used to dealing with high maintenance women like Hurricane Akane and instead professional instructors were passing on the school to thousands of youngsters every year.
Even with her new career Nabiki had lost none of her business acumen and the idea had taken off more than the simple family Dojo had been able to contain, it had expanded and expanded again with branches across the country and beyond.
Which is what had led her back here after all these years; one of her more gifted employees had spotted something that had raised those investigative hackles in an instant, a woman using a variant of the same style he taught without being the version that he taught and containing certain distinctly Chinese elements.
The woman had had lavender hair.
That was far from all the story though because Osaka was not Tokyo and it was certainly not LA. Instead Osaka was something else entirely, a city unique on the face of the planet for the way it had chosen to deal with the encroachment of modern life.
Even as a child Nabiki had known some of the story, how beneath the veneer of modernism Osaka still beat with an ancient heart; how the businesses that called the city their home still carried the Mon of their house nobility, how the city was still effectively run from the tea houses and mansions of those same nobles and how tradition was as much a law here as anything handed down from parliament.
Indeed when Nerima had finally gotten too hot for the Kuno's this is where they had run to, and apparently fitted in so neatly that they were barely observed as extraordinary. Nabiki still got the occasional bit of information from within that deep dark house, her own former agent Mariko still very much on the inside even if Tatewaki was still not going to make their 'arrangement' official.
That is not to say that Osaka was some paradise of principles, the old ways were after all not just about honour and nobility, they were also about repression of the non-titled and exploitation of the less well born, about Eta and owned women. Osaka was not just home to the palaces of bygone ages it was also home to the evils those ages had bred; slavery, exploitation and marginalisation had become everyday realities in the dark unspoken edges of a city where the police chief was merely another laurel to the titles of one of the silent magnates.
But that had been then, and this was now, the life of the streets was changing, the powers of the powers that were being eroded, attacked, or outright ended in a silent war that everyone knew was occurring even if they refused to acknowledge it. This year alone had seen the deaths of thirteen of the most infamous figures of those dark brotherhoods, had seen the deaths of two of the Emperor's own 'cousins' and the ending of a line that stretched right back to the second shogun, Ite.
To Nabiki, investigator and muckraker, such had been begging for attention throughout the long years, only her own inherent reluctance to touch the taboo subjects having ensured that it slipped further and further down her priority list. Then had come the story of that Wu Shu woman with the lavender hair.
"I'm looking for a woman" Nabiki offered, along with a reconstructed, extrapolated photo, across the dark table, "Her name is Xian" she said, watching the priest's eyes for any glimmer of recognition.
This man was the latest end of her latest trail, a man whose name had cost a small fortune to get hold of and a man that she suspected was up to his eyeballs in the darker side of the city, buddist robes or not.
"Ah" was all he replied, but Nabiki wasn't even hearing the words, the man hadn't looked at the photo either, he hadn't needed to, he had expected the question, and known the name.
Nabiki didn't consider herself a foolhardy woman, indeed she went to great lengths to be anything but. However one thing that investigation had taught her was that sometimes you had to step into the tiger's cage if you wanted to count his stripes. Being caught by her quarry had revealed more than all the safe questioning she had ever done.
To this day the weight of her name, her agile mind and fast tongue had always been enough with the preparations she had made to allow her to walk free at the end, but she knew deep down that it might not always be so.
And suddenly she was very afraid this might be the day, the priest hadn't only known that she would come he had also apparently known why and if ever there needed to be an object lesson as to why Nabiki should have been afraid the fate she had presumed had overtaken Xian Pu should have been more than enough.
"She disappeared" Nabiki said, even though she knew that this man would know the story as well as she could tell it, and quite probably better, "travelling between here and Tokyo" she said, "My friends and I came looking" she said, completely understating the case as near enough the whole of the wrecking crew had descended on the city to tear it apart after their lost companion.
They hadn't found her, but they had found Mousse. He had been with the cursed girl when she had disappeared, or rather had been as 'with' her as she had allowed considering she had been in the middle of another scheme to snare her 'arien.' They had found his body a few minutes after the police, deader than the dumpster he had been dropped in and mutilated in ways that still brought on a shiver even after all these years.
"We thought she was dead" Nabiki admitted, once more exaggerating significantly, at the end of the day most of them had given up, their best hopes forced to finally admit that if Cologne couldn't track her great granddaughter then they had little hope themselves. Most of them had reluctantly accepted the bitter truth that they didn't need a body to guess her fate.
Everyone had given up, everyone except her and Ranma. The pigtailed martial artist hadn't just been obstinate, he had been unmovable in a way that made even Ryoga seem rational and for some reason Nabiki had allowed him to coax her into it too, even as much as her ehad and heart had been telling her he was wrong.
These days she knew why, and could forgive herself that little fallacy, she could even admit how much she had been in love with the dumb lump, how much she had needed to be near him, how much she had loved the version of her that she had seen in his eyes and needed to be that strong, smart and capable woman that he had always seen her as.
But as the search had gone on her heart had finally admitted it's own failure, Ranma wasn't the sort that she could afford to be near that way, his complete disregard for his own personal safety or welfare having finally broken the ties her heart had made. It had been that or follow him to the grave.
She had mourned him before the letter ever arrived, had known that the day would come long before whatever agency that made it a reality did, and had known there was nothing she could have done about it.
By that point she had been in Europe, as far away as she could get from the young man who still owned that silent piece of her soul. She had also been recently engaged to a wonderful man whose own connections to Osaka were far from secret, who had been a few weeks before the quarry rather than the intended.
Sato Toshi was a man whose history was dark enough to understand a young woman whose house had literally been bought on the proceeds of blackmail, who had walked the dark path and, like Nabiki herself, found a way out.
Their romance had been so very very right that to this day Nabiki wouldn't have changed it, even with how it ended. They had laughed and lived enough for a dozen lifetimes and had been both joy and foundation for each other for as long as they had been together.
She might not be able to forgive him for the decision that had taken his life from her but she steadfastly refused to let that colour the rest of the memory.
"I will take you to her" the priest offered, his voice without a hint of threat or menace. But then Vlad the Imapler, the new version that Nabiki had won the Pulitzer exposing in Georgia, hadn't been any different. And he had murdered hundreds of men women and children before they finally ran him to ground.
Still Nabiki could do little but follow him as he rose and even if her nerve had failed her now she couldn't have really run, not when there was a chance she might finally uncover the answer to this decade old riddle.
Together they walked through the small shrine and out into the small graveyard behind. On the wind a hundred cherry blossoms were falling but Nabiki hardly saw them, and even the priest soon faded from her awareness as her world contracted down to the sight that sat in pride of place.
'In memory of a heart that knew no bounds,
Of a love that knew no denial
Of a woman
I loved too little.
Xian Pu, Amazon.'
The words were silver on the rose cut stone, stark as they reached through the years to speak of a woman whose life had so briefly shone into Nabiki's. But even they were gone a moment later as Nabiki recognised the kettle sat offertory in front of the stone.
Ranma's kettle, the one he had quested twice for, the one he had fought a dragon for and the one that she knew had been the key to a dozen curses.
"When?" she asked, turning back towards the priest, a hundred questions on her lips, a thousand thoughts suddenly rushing her mind, but that was not to be, and one more time she found her words lost altogether. The priest was gone
And there stood Ranma.