Chapter 1: Panda Skin Rug.

The Tendo residence was strangely silent as Soun, Genma, Ranma and the three Tendo daughters sat around the dining room table, with the hardly noticeable exception of Happosai, who was cursing all of their ancestries from the next room over. "Okay," Ranma said, as he flipped a tiny blue marble from finger to finger, watching as it seemed to gleam back at him. "What's goin on here?"

"Well, um," Soun said, uncertain of how to answer the question. Truthfully, he'd been acting as though the device the boy was now holding, and all it represented, hadn't existed for more than ten years, especially after his wife died. "It's... hard to," he began, only to have Genma interrupt him.

"That device is an heirloom of the Saotome family, boy," the balding man said, gruffly. "I've been waiting for the time to pass it down to you, but you've never been ready for it. Truth be told, I believe you still aren't, but it needed to be used to defeat the Master."

"Negative," the gem in question proclaimed, causing Ranma to almost drop it in shock. He knew that it had talked earlier, but it had been quiet ever since the battle had ended, and the armor it had created around his body had been replaced by his usual clothes.

"Shut up, you," Genma snarled, glaring at the jewel.

"Negative," it replied again, and this time, it seemed to Ranma, a sense of irritation could be heard in the thing's perfectly monotone robotic voice.

"C'mon, ol' man," the boy grumbled. "Why not tell the truth for once?"

"You insolent little brat!" Genma thundered, lunging across the table to grab Ranma by the collar and glare into his eyes. "I've never lied to you in my life!"

Ranma's incredulous look was evident long before the device came out with another "Negative," this one, to the pigtailed boy, almost sounding like it was broken up with snickers.

"Hmm, seems that thing's got a brain," Nabiki drawled, looking speculatively at the little jewel and wondering how much talking rocks went for on the market.

"Nabiki-chan, that's not very nice," Kasumi rebuked. "Of course it has a brain." She tilted her head, considering. "Or some metaphysical equivalent."

"All right," Akane said, looking oddly at her oldest sister for a moment. "Insulting Uncle Genma's fun and all, but can someone explain what's really going on here?"

Genma just sputtered in a state of near total fury, while Soun looked between his three daughters and his younger houseguest. Sighing, he began, "I suppose I should tell you."

"But Tendo, you can't!" Genma objected. "The secrecy regulations! We're already in deep as it is, and the boy likely sent off a distress signal when he changed!"

Soun rolled his eyes. "Saotome, old friend, you and your son turn into other things when splashed with water. I doubt this planet is still under the Magical Secrecy Act."

"This planet?" Nabiki asked, her eyes widening.

"Oh, are you trying to follow the Prime Directive?" Kasumi inquired serenely.

"Not exactly," Soun amended, and then sighed, his eyes beginning to fill with tears as he began to recall the past. Still, he managed to restrain them, helped greatly by being able to stare into the next room, where the bane of his existence was squirming in a set of magical bindings, his arms locked in a very excruciating looking position.

"Happosai was not Genma's and my Martial Arts Master," the eldest Tendo started. "He was actually a criminal we were chasing. Unfortunately, he was far more powerful than we thought, and destroyed most of our gear, stranding us on Earth."

"Wait, stop," Nabiki said, raising her hand and waving it back and forth. "Happosai's a criminal, and he trapped you on this 'planet.'" she made little air quotes around the last word. "What, you're trying to tell me that you and Saotome are space cops or something?"

"Well, Pop is dumb enough to be Mihoshi," Ranma chipped in, having empathized rather a lot with a certain fictional Masaki.

"Hey!" Genma grumbled, not knowing what that meant, but knowing that a name like Mihoshi sounded pretty girly.

"Actually, Interdimensional," Soun contributed, ignoring the byplay between father and son, and addressing his comment to Nabiki. "Most of what we've done over the past twenty years was to find a way to permanently capture Happosai and get a call back to headquarters. We've done the former already," he explained, gesturing to the old freak, "and with Ranma's new Intelligent Device, the latter won't be that hard."

"Intelligent Device, that's the marble?" Ranma asked, holding up said item.

"Yes, it is," an unfamiliar female voice said from behind him, "And I would ask you to put it down and turn slowly."

"Oh crap," Genma muttered, his face going white, though Soun had a far stranger reaction.

"Oh, thank goodness you're here!" He crowed, jumping up and rocketing past the pigtailed boy, incidentally knocking Akane over in his flight. As both young people recovered, turning to face the voice, which was now protesting feebly, they blinked.

Currently being crushed in a bare hug by Soun, and looking rather uncomfortable, was what looked like a short girl with very dark blue hair styled in a bob similar to Nabiki's. "You're here, and you can get us off of this backwater, and we can see Nodoka again, and the Master will never pester us, Oh, Happy day!" Soun exalted, causing all of his children to back away from him slowly, not used to this rapid attitude change.

"Get off of me," the girl grumbled, squirming to get free. When Soun didn't respond, she asked this more loudly, though nothing happened. Finally, as Akane was about to get up to pull her father gently back, a small green card appeared in the girl's hand, and she announced, "STU, Setup!"

There was a blinding flash of light, and Soun flew back a few feet, smashing into the table, and incidentally overturning a glass of Sake on Genma's legs. When the light cleared, the girl was wearing what looked like a military uniform, and held an intricate, but still serviceable crossbow in her right hand.

"Dad!" Akane yelled, jumping to her feet and taking a defensive position, quickly followed by Ranma, as Kasumi moved over to tend to her father, who was groaning and staring up at the ceiling.

"Okay, who're you?" Ranma asked, suspiciously, wishing that Akane would go over to Kasumi rather than trying to fight next to him, and wondering why there had to be two strange fights in one day. At the moment, he would be much happier if Ryoga had smashed down the wall, rather than some random fourteen year old magical girl teleporting in.

"I can't tell you that right now," the girl explained. "Which of you owns the Intelligent device that you were holding?" She asked, looking levelly at Ranma, though her weapon remained at her side.

"I think it's me," The pigtailed boy said uncertainly, still flicking the thing between his fingers, and not really liking the prospect of losing it, for some reason.

"Great way to hold things close to your chest, Saotome," Nabiki griped from nearby, but was thoroughly ignored by everyone.

"Were you the one who sent the mission completion report?" The girl asked.

"The mission what?" Ranma asked, more confused than, well, than he'd been in at least five days, since that guy with the cheese wiz based martial arts style had shown up.

The girl was about to say something, when a sign from Genma suddenly intruded between Ranma and Akane's standing defence and the newcomer. "The boy sent it!" It read, with several dozen exclamation marks. "And I'm just a cute little Panda!"

"You know something about this, Pop?" Ranma growled, snatching the sign out of the panda's hands and tossing it aside. Unfortunately, the Saotome patriarch wasn't inclined to answer any more questions, having retreated to the back yard and pulled a tire out of nowhere in the short time that Ranma had looked away to toss the sign.

"Figures," the young martial artist grunted.

The newcomer girl looked nonplussed for a moment, before starting again. "Who hear defeated the criminal Happosai?"

"Okay, that one was me," Ranma said, proudly.

"Are you Genma Saotome or Soun Tendo?" The girl asked, giving Ranma an odd look. She'd read a report on her current mission, and from what she'd heard, the people she was looking for were about as old as the man who had glomped her when she'd teleported in, but the boy was holding an Intelligent Device, which meant that he had to be one of the agents.

"Genma's my ol' man, he's over there playing with the tire," Ranma said quickly, wondering what crap his father had gotten him into, and reaching out casually to catch the rapidly scribbled sign that said 'traitor!' on it in big, bold lettering.

"I see..." the girl drawled, slowly, before raising her weapon, and causing every one of the martial artists in the room to tense up. "STU, scan mode," she ordered, and several small white balls of light flew from the weapon's end, slowly circling the room.

"Scan detects three combat mages and three civilians. Two mages register light foreign magical fields," a female voice rang out, its tone similar to that of Ranma's marble.

The girl quirked an eyebrow, but said nothing as she looked dubiously at Genma, before her eyes became somewhat distant, and her mouth began to move as though she were talking to someone. After a few seconds, where she cast her eyes between the collected group in the sitting room where Happosai's tied up form lay, she spoke again. "I'm going to have to ask you to return to my ship along with Happosai and I."

"I don't really like this idea..." Akane said, concerned, as she looked between the newcomer, her fiancé, and her father who was looking slightly less like he'd taken a head long dive into the living room table. "I mean, we don't really know this person's name, or where they come from."

"I don't mind," Ranma responded. "Figure it'll let me know what's goin on here. Plus, your Dad seamed pretty happy about it."

"Yeah, but..." Akane started, before she was interrupted.

"My name's Marle, if that helps," the girl said, looking somewhat sheepish for not introducing herself earlier.

"Akane-chan, we should go, it will be so exciting to see a real space ship!" The eldest Tendo exclaimed, happily.

"I'm afraid," the girl who had now been identified as Marle, started reluctantly, "I can only take the three mages and the prisoner. Even letting normal civilians know I'm here is technically a violation of protocol."

"Oh," Kasumi said, and as she looked down, slightly disappointed, Marle felt like she'd just drop-kicked a basket of kittens out an airlock.

"If it helps, it's not really a spaceship," she hurriedly continued. "We use a special drive to cross dimensional barriers, and..." She abruptly snapped her mouth shut, horrified that she'd revealed so much. "Let's, um, let's go," she said, flustered.

"Ranma's not going without me," Akane objected, irritably. "The idiot could get himself in trouble or something!"

"She just said ya couldn't come, 'kane," Ranma objected, and seeing the blue-black haired girl's face darkening, he continued, "Besides, it's space, or another dimension, or whatever. I'm pretty sure Pop hasn't sold me ta anyone up there... yet."

"Growf!" Genma said angrily, and then wished that he hadn't, as it had drawn attention from everyone in the room. "I'm just a cute panda," he scribbled, hurriedly, and then tried to bolt, before Ranma moved, grabbing him by the fur at the back of his neck and pulling hard. "This is cruelty to animals!" The panda objected, but was quite easily ignored, as Kasumi helped Soun to his feet, and he, Ranma, Genma and Marle gathered around Happosai, who was starting to struggle and curse again.

The three Tendos watched as a column of light surrounded their father and the others, and they vanished leaving not so much as singed tatami.

"Okay, this is weirder than usual," Nabiki noted, while Kasumi whispered something about Norse gods, and Akane looked worried.

HR.

Ranma Saotome was impressed. This didn't happen often, as through his travels he'd seen some of the most beautiful landscapes in Asia, even if he'd then ended up tossed off, at, or through them, but he was. The ship he was on seemed like a giant mass of shiny white corridors, with windows that looked out on a coruscating blue world that was kind of hard to look at for a long period of time.

He hadn't even noticed when his father and Mr. Tendo had been lead off a few minutes ago, apparently to meet the captain, until his guide stopped, tapping a button next to a door and leading him into a small room with two couches and a table, on which was a plate full of food.

The girl sat down on one of the couches, and gestured for him to do the same on the opposite one, before fixing him with a rather strangely intent stare. "Um, you're not engaged to me, are you?" He asked, as though the stare wasn't the same as the one he usually got from his fiancées, it was never a bad idea to check.

Marle very nearly spat the tea she'd just taken a careful sip of. "What?" She asked, deadpan.

"Well, Pop likes engaging me to girls for really stupid reasons, 'n you're a girl, even if you're a bit younger than usual, so I figured it was possible," the pigtailed martial artist quickly explained.

"No," Marle continued, her eyebrow twitching. "I'm not engaged to you. I'm supposed to be debriefing you while the captain questions your father and Mr. Tendo."

"Oh," Ranma said, and then his eyes widened. "So that stuff about them being space police was true?"

"Combat mages, actually," Marle corrected. "You don't know anything about this? You're using an Intelligent device."

"Well, Pop just sorta tossed this thing to me and told me its name was Darkfire or something," Ranma said. "Helped me out against whatever the ol' pervert was using, though."

"So your father gave you a magical artefact with no experience, explanation or training?" The girl asked. At Ranma's nod, she grumbled, "I don't suppose his brain is actually a Panda's along with the rest of him?"

Ranma couldn't help himself, as he snorted in laughter. He'd actually never thought of that particular insult, and quite liked it. "He's pretty dense," he explained.

"All right," Marle said, reaching over onto the table and tapping a button. "Could you please tell me what happened? Then I will have to ask you to turn over the device you're using, since it's Bureau property."

"Um, I guess so," Ranma said, shrugging and beginning to explain what had happened this morning.

HR.

The ferret ran. It actually ran pretty fast for a ferret, as its tiny little legs churned beneath it, almost creating a dust cloud. Behind it, a black cloud of... something... seemed to hump its way along like a slug, leaving burnt grass and snapped branches in its wake.

At the moment, the ferret was more scared than it had been in its entire rather short life, and was calling itself ten different kinds of idiot, including a few that were in languages forever lost to most.

Rapidly changing its course so that it was running down a beaten dirt track, the ferret noticed that there were people walking down the road in front of it. As horrible as the thought was, it could be a good idea to distract the thing with the other people, so that it could get the chance to transform, activate the small bobble around its neck, and seal the damned thing.

It was pretty sure that it could mutter the chant quickly enough that no one would be badly hurt, but not one hundred percent, so as it ran it kept jerking to one side, and then correcting its course as it realized that it was likely going to die.

Just as the small, golden furred animal was closing on the first person, a voice above it called ""Divine Retribution!" As the animal looked back, a lightning bolt came from above, shocking the black blob and causing it to lurch painfully to the side. Seconds later, a figure in what looked like a glorified boys school uniform descended on the blob wielding what looked, basically, like a katana mounted to a pole. As the blob split down the middle, the boy swung his weapon in an arc and commanded, "Sovnya, capture mode."

"Yes, Master." A soft voice came from the weapon, before six dark tendrils shot from a blue jewel mounted where the blade met the pole, binding the shadow together. As the ferret watched on in shock, a blue diamond shaped item shot out of the thing, and the boy raised his weapon to collect it.

'Could this be someone sent by the STAB?' the animal thought, dashing towards the boy's foot, and tugging on his pants' leg. He looked down at it curiously, before bending and scooping it up. "Hmm," He muttered, studying the animal closely. "It's kind of cute, isn't it?" He gently patted it on the head.

""Thank goodness you're here, the jewel seeds have to be found quickly!" The ferret telepathically projected, and the boy jumped.

Narrowing his eyes, the boy noted a small red jewel tied around the thing's neck, and frowned. "Interference," he muttered, sadly, before tugging the jewel free and tossing the ferret against a nearby tree. "Stay out of my way."

Yuuno Scrya coughed loudly as he hit the ground, wondering precisely what had just happened, as the boy walked off into the forest nearby. For just a moment before the pain of the impact made him lose consciousness, he thought that he'd made a terrible mistake.

HR.

"Why are you so damned happy," Genma growled, as he and Soun sat in a holding room, waiting for the captain of this ship to talk to them.

"Don't you get it Saotome? We're finally going back home," the eldest Tendo said. "We won't have to deal with that backwater again."

"Right," The Saotome snapped. "After we're finished with the court martial for aiding a known criminal, contaminating a Non-Regulated planet, defacing Bureau property, and nineteen and a half years of unpaid rent."

"You don't really think they'll..." Soun started, worriedly.

"Of course they will," Genma muttered. "And you don't actually think they'll let you take your daughters back," the balding man kept right on pushing, deciding that if he had to face reality, so did his former partner.

"No," Soun said, horrified. "They won't take them from me!" suddenly, the man had a demon head filling the room, and Genma was actually kind of intimidated. The demon head was about the last bit of Magic Soun could pull off, or at least the last bit he was motivated to do, ever since he'd become terminally depressed about being stuck on Earth, and then his wife had died eight years later to hammer things home.

"Look, I'll be happy to see No-chan again, and maybe being in a bureau prison will be better than trying to make my way back there," Genma said, trying to get the other to dispel his demon head. "But things aren't exactly rosy, Soun."

The taller man sighed, his demon head shrinking to nothingness. "At least we finally put away the Master," he said, most of his cheer from seeing the Combat mage and now the ship vanishing.

"At least we got him," Genma agreed, and then frowned. "Now, we should probably get our story straight on how we got him, or we're going to be in even more trouble."

Soun nodded.

HR.

In a small, dark room, a terminal beeped and a screen briefly flickered on to reveal a mess of computer print-outs, half-eaten food and rune covered papers. The beeping repeated several times, before the terminal screen flickered, the words "Message system active" taking over the screen, and a crisp, efficient sounding young man's voice echoed from the speakers. "Mrs. Saotome? This is STAB command. We need to speak with you urgently. Your Husband and Son have been found on a planet in the Non-Regulated regions. Please, call back as soon as you can." The voice faded away, and the screen blinked again, showing a list of dozens of unread message logs before shutting off.

HR.

"What do you mean you can't remove it?" Marle asked, as she leaned over Commander Creyton's shoulder, in the Typhon's main medical bay.

"Look here," the young man said, pointing at a diagram that anyone from Earth would say was a child's drawing after an accidental ingestion of hallucinogens. "We can't zero the Linker core to unbind it, since it's not bound to the linker core."

"Then how did he manage to activate it?" The girl asked, confused, throwing a quick glance to Ranma, who was laying on a bed half way across the room, his Intelligent Device hovering over his chest.

The commander shrugged. "It looks like it was somehow bound straight to his life force," he explained. "That sort of research has been outlawed for years, since we have no idea how to reverse it. We can't zero it like a Linker core, since that pretty much means killing someone."

"Great," the dark blue haired girl muttered. "Well, we can't exactly recover it if that means killing him, but we certainly can't let him go back with an artefact like that."

Creyton shrugged. "He already completed one mission," he offered. "Recruit him."

"WHAT?" Marle bellowed. "Are you insane?" Creyton gave her a steady look. "I mean, are you insane, sir?" She rephrased her earlier question.

Ranma turned his head for a moment at the sudden exclamation, but seeing that it was just a girl yelling at a guy, he returned his gaze to the hovering sphere above him.

"Look, it would only be in order to train the boy in the use of the device, so he can keep it controlled. Plus, it's always good to have an expert on local society around when you're looking for missing items on a planet," Creyton said, reasonably.

"Wait, we're looking for things?" Marle asked, confused.

"Oh yeah," Creyton said, snapping his fingers. "Command just got a mission in for us. Apparently some archaeologist kid lost a bunch of artefacts on this planet. His transport fell out of dimensional drive or something. We've been ordered to find the missing items."

"How convenient," Marle muttered, sourly, and then looked over at Ranma. The commander's logic did make at least some sense, and the boy had been reasonably easy to get along with. Also, it was very possible that he'd just flat out say no, and they would give him just enough training to keep from accidentally activating his new found Intelligent Device and then leave him to it. 'Oh well, what's the worst that could happen?' she thought, before moving to the bed to explain the situation.

END.