This ain't no self-insert fic.

This ain't no slash fic neither.

This is Top Dog.

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Prince Herb of the Musk was not in the nicest frame of mind.

He was a tall, slender, athletic-looking and devastatingly handsome young man, and he didn't really look like his age; most people would have mistaken him for a youthful twenty-five, rather than a fifteen-year-old. Being well over six foot tall and one of those people who very visibly work out tends to massage upwards the age people take you for.

Herb was quite unaware of this; his self-esteem was a mess, mainly courtesy of his sincerely screwed-up childhood. At age fifteen, he had never met anyone of the female persuasion since before he could remember. And now the Council of Nobles were insisting that he was too old to remain unmarried, thus his current stinking mood.

Married? How the hell was he going to achieve that when he didn't even know what a woman looked like?

He'd heard about a billion stories about women, each one weirder than the last – apparently they made absolutely no sense, and could only be counted on to do something no sane man could ever expect or understand.

Of course, the more extreme stories claimed they were ferocious wild animals that would eat any man alive and had to be strictly dominated and kept securely chained to make them safe to be anywhere near, but considering that he'd heard that one from his father, Herb didn't pay it much of any account; the late unlamented Musk emperor had been categorically wrong about everything Herb could remember the man talking about, so why would his opinion of women be anything but what it seemed; inarticulate gibberish ranted in a cloud of spittle by a blithering idiot?

The mildest stories Herb had heard painted women as mysterious and unpredictable beings no man could ever truly understand or control, and apparently they could be a lot of fun for some reason Herb wasn't sure of; a lot of winking and elbow-nudging seemed to be involved, as were the words 'if you know what I mean' repeated ad infinitum. He figured that the truth lay somewhere between the two extremes.

And so it came to be that Prince Herb of the Musk began an attempt to formulate a plan that, if successful, would see him gain a basic understanding of those bizarre creatures called women. And this was what brought him to come walking down out of the Bayanakalas, with a very specific destination in mind and a very specific objective:

Herb was going to Jusenkyo.

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Disclaimer: This is my disclaimer. I put words on it and it is funny.

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Top Dog: Biker Half 2.0

Book 1: Birth of a Modern Legend.

A Doghead13 / United Galaxies fanfic

Written & produced by Calum J 'Doghead13' Wallace

Preread by KuroNeko

Brought to you by Hairy Scottish Git Productions, GMBH

This is not a drill.

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Chapter 9: Calm Before the Storm.

(In which our heroes have a quiet day while a lot of other people have anything but)

Wu Chii, age sixteen, was a bag of nerves, and she knew she wasn't alone in that, though she was admittedly unaware that she was in the emotional company of such a luminary as Prince Herb.

There were twenty Amazons onboard the Lazy Jane; fourteen warriors, three slaves, and three males. One of the males, Wu Chii's eighteen-year-old cousin Mu Tze, was a master of the Hidden Weapons style, which was usually only permitted for female use; however, he was the only surviving member of the family to whom the style belonged, so he had (after a long and valiant struggle) been granted permission to keep his mother's inheritance alive to be passed down to his daughters. This led to the highly unconventional situation that Mu Tze, a male Amazon, happened to be a martial arts master; he actually had three female students. For the first time in Amazon history, warriors, honest-to-Hecate warriors, were being taught by a man. All three of Mu Tze's students were aboard the battered old tramp freighter; all three were quite taken with the forthright but half-blind young man, and they refused to ever leave him alone, primarily because some of the more extreme conservative types would love the opportunity to put a bullet or two in Mu Tze's brain while nobody was looking.

Some of the real hardcases (the names Kou Loun and Lo Shin rang a few bells) liked to publicly decry the situation; they claimed that the travesty of allowing a worthless male to teach the fighting arts would lead to the destruction of the Amazon people. Wu Chii privately thought that those mad old bags were a lot more likely to do the job themselves. Your average woman was obviously smarter and tougher than your average man, any idiot could tell you that, but anyone who said there were no men who could play the women's game and have a fighting chance for success was a complete idiot.

Just look at Cousin Mu Tze.

The reason for Wu Chii's concern had nothing to do with that. She was secretly quite proud of her cousin and delighted that he had managed to get his way; it was about bloody time. It had taken the half-blind young man six years to win the Council's permission to study his mother's school, and once he'd mastered it in an alarmingly short six months, it had taken him another two years to get permission to take students. Wu Chii knew for a fact that his master's license had only been granted in an attempt to get Elder Mi Soon (one of the very few forwards-looking elders) to shut up for a while.

No, the reason for Wu Chii's worry was her knowledge of how the Matriarch would react if said old bag ever discovered where the twenty missing Amazons had gone, what they'd taken with them, and what they had planned. At least this was a sort-of-official mission; Mi Soon had been adamant that the Reform required assistance from the Saotome family. Wu Chii wasn't sure why; she had no idea how a bunch of outsider saddle tramps could possibly help win over the Council of Elders, even if one of them was an Amazon's groom, but she was sure that Matriarch Kou Loun would go ballistic if she ever found out exactly what was going on. If Mi Soon's big plan (whatever it was) paid off, by that time the Reform would be a reality instead of a pipe dream and Kou Loun could go whistle for a wind. If not…

But then, for some of them it was damned if you do, damned if you don't. As her elder sister had once said, better to die like a tiger than live like a rat, which especially applied to Lin-Lin; talk about having nothing left to lose. Wu Chii wasn't sure what Lin-Lin had done that got the Matriarch so pissed off, but the seventeen-year-old warrior's execution was scheduled to take place as the highlight of the Summer Games in three months time. Mi Soon and another of the scant number of Reformist elders (Po Da) had sprung the condemned girl, who was by far the most desperate of the twenty; if the Conservatives ever caught her, she'd be glad when they finally allowed her to die.

Lin-Lin's identical twin sister Lan-Lan was also along for the ride. Although they had once been visually indistinguishable (a missing eye and lurid facial scars made Lin-Lin visibly different; they and the scars all over her body were mementos of the interrogation prior to her sentencing) in personality they were almost opposite; Lin-Lin rarely talked while Lan-Lan rarely shut up. Wu Chii could see Lan-Lan having an animated conversation at a silent and taciturn Tiger while Lin-Lin quietly cleaned her Dragunov.

Tiger; now there was one hell of a surprise. Tiger was a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative Amazon, and apart from one thing she was unshakable in her belief in the traditional Amazon ways. That one thing happened to be her little half-sister; Wu Chii. Tiger had caught Wu Chii plotting with Cougar, and told them that either they could take her with them or she'd turn the lot of them in. Wu Chii was glad to have Tiger along; at seven foot two she was the biggest and most physically powerful of all the Joketsuzoku, to the point that she had the honour of ownership of one of the village's tiny number of DShK heavy machine guns, which she used the way most would use a Zastava; she was strong enough to accurately fire the monstrous Russian weapon with one hand. She was even bigger than Dowel, and significantly more experienced in battle; out of the whole group, she was the only warrior older than twenty. Besides, although her mind belonged to the Matriarch, her heart was the private property of her sister and everyone knew it.

Then there were Fox and Cougar, age fifteen. They didn't in look it, but they were twin sisters. Fox was the smallest Amazon, even tinier than Shi; she was very slender and stood only three foot ten tall at full stretch, whereas Cougar was six foot seven and built like, as Xian Pu would put it, 'a fookin' tank'. Fox was a delicate slip of a girl, and Cougar frequently got mistaken for a large and fairly impressive man, aided along by her flat chest and the fact she shaved her head, whereas her tiny twin was busty and had hair longer than her legs. They were almost polar opposites, even down to dress sense; Fox tended not to wear much more than an extremely skimpy bikini, while Cougar never went anywhere without battledress and a dog-eared leather jacket, but once you got past the blatant differences they shared a startling familial resemblance.

Shi. A pint-sized and terminally hyperactive girl, Shi was about four feet tall and talked so fast it was difficult to separate one word from another. She was a slave, officially property of the Matriarch, having been caught stealing a Kalashnikov AK47 from the Matriarch's personal arsenal; she'd been a slave ever since Wu Chii could remember. Oddly, she didn't seem to have aged (or matured) a minute in that time, which was approximately twelve years; she was still the same pint-sized blue-haired lunatic she'd always been. Wu Chii occasionally wondered how old Shi actually was; nobody seemed to know. The AK47 she'd been caught stealing had been successfully stolen this time, and was currently slung across the tiny woman's back as she darted here and there across the Lazy Jane's decks and jabbered on at a mile a minute. If they got caught, she'd be lucky if she was just burned at the stake.

Wolf was another wild card in the group. She was very unusual in that she wasn't a native Amazon; she'd been found as a child by one of the Council of Elders while off on some secret mission somewhere not listed, and said Elder (Mi Soon) had brought the ice-cold blonde girl back to Joketsuzo and adopted her. Nobody knew her exact age, but it was somewhere in the region of eighteen. She was an unnervingly accurate shot with a sniping rifle, to the point that Mi Soon had somehow acquired a Heckler and Koch PSG-1 for her; the day she was given it was the only time Wu Chii had ever seen Wolf smile. She seemed to share some kind of connection with Lin-Lin; the two quiet snipers were usually to be seen together. Currently, she was sat on a packing crate next to Lin-Lin, likewise maintaining her gun. Wolf happened to be number one on the People's Government top hundred Most Wanted list; two years ago she'd shot a People's Army general in the groin from half a mile away, then managed to get to the corpse and scalp it despite the fact that twenty armed soldiers were guarding the body. She'd been seen and shot her way out, putting paid to thirty-five soldiers in the process; a feat that made her a living legend among the young Amazons. She still wore the general's scalp on her drab grey bomber jacket.

As for Ru Ki, she was sitting on top of the tarpaulin-shrouded shapes that were the current centre of Wu Chii's worry. The nineteen-year-old was casually reading a cheap romance novel; it was unnerving how calm she was, considering how Lo Shin (one of Kou Loun's cronies) was liable to be extremely annoyed about the abrupt departure of her favourite punch-bag.

The third slave was of course Si Ren, age fourteen. She was the only member of the group who was certain not to be in deep shit if the Conservatives caught them; she belonged to Xian Pu O'Conner as of the Youth Tournament three years before, at which she had been a central component of first prize. Xian Pu had left without leaving her slave any instructions, and in that situation it was a slave's obligation to follow her mistress. Unfortunately, things were liable to get a bit hairy, and Wu Chii knew for a fact Xian Pu would go ballistic if Si Ren got hurt; the Champion seemed to regard the young slave as a daughter.

Then there was Mao Xing O'Conner. He was Xian Pu's elder brother by six years, and shared a very visible familial resemblance to her; he was short, stocky, pale-skinned and brawny, but unlike his sister (Who was an albino of sorts) he had jet black hair and was a truck mechanic rather than a fighter. They had very similar body language, and shared their father's County Down accent, quick intelligence, and sarcastic Irish sense of humour; his propensity for barbed comments had got him in trouble with the Council of Elders a time or two, but he had a remarkable ability to worm his way out of it, which was probably the only reason he hadn't been gelded and, come to think of it, was still breathing. This time, if Kou Loun caught up with him he'd be a dead man; he'd left the village without written permission from at least three female relatives, in fact he'd taken off without the permission of anyone. Wu Chii was downright terrified he'd get hurt; if anyone harmed a hair on her brother's head ballistic wouldn't even start to describe how thoroughly Xian Pu would fly off the handle. Besides, he was cute in a cynical wisecracking Irish sort of a way; Wu Chii had been trying to get his attention for a couple of years now.

There were others in the group, of course, but those were the ones Wu Chii was worried about for whatever reason; the rest of them either had an excuse the Council might accept or could take care of themselves, or both.

Wu Chii glanced back at the tarpaulin-shrouded shapes of the thing that would definitely cause the Matriarch to go ballistic; a pair of fully-equipped gun trucks. If Mi Soon's plan didn't work and the runaway Amazons found themselves before the Council for sentencing, the death penalty would be the least of their worries; Joketsuzo had twenty-three armed and armoured three-axle trucks which they used to patrol for People's Army ambushes on the many roads around the Valley of Three Tribes. Heavy weapons like the Goryunov machine guns were in chronically short supply, and the loss of those two trucks would set the village's combat schedule back by nearly six months; stealing them was the most frightening thing Wu Chii and Lin-Lin had ever done. If they got caught, they could truthfully claim that they were using the trucks to transport Xian Pu O'Conner's sizeable collection of weaponry to where it belonged, but it probably wouldn't fly and they'd still be screwed.

And that was of course why they weren't going to Japan by Chinese trawler. The Lazy Jane was a highly disreputable tramp freighter, her rust-coated steel hull dating back to the Second World War, and she flew the Union Jack; that said, her voyages were usually completely outside the law. The ports she docked at didn't appear on any chart; Wu Chii knew perfectly well that the packing cases Lan-Lan and Wolf were sat on happened to be full of handguns and ammunition destined for one of Japan's most notorious Yakuza families, and the aft hold contained a cargo of two hundred slavegirls who had been bought in Egypt and were to be sold to some kind of less-than-legal organisation in Japan. It seemed said organisation was not a Yakuza family, which had Wu Chii absently wondering whenever she wasn't busy worrying. She hated being aboard such a dodgy vessel, but they hadn't had a whole lot of choice; it was that or a route the Matriarch's people could easily trace.

They'd already had to break a few wrists; most of the scummy seamen who populated the run-down wreck of a ship didn't want to understand that when a girl says 'shove off' she means exactly that. Two hours out of port, it had got so bad that Dowel was now holding a machine gun to the captain's head in shift with Tiger and Cougar; it seemed the sleazy thug had been planning to bash the varied Amazons over the head and add them to his hold-full of slaves once his scumbag crew had got done raping them.

All in all, this was going to be one of the very few times in living history that someone was given money at gunpoint. Breaking the law is just breaking the law; there are occasions that obeying the law would be the wrong thing to do. For example, it's illegal to shoot someone in the face for a fairly obvious reason, but if you're holding a gun and you find someone raping some poor chick, and they don't back off when you point your shooter at them and tell them to get the Hell away from the girl, if you centred the gunsights on the sick bastard's nose and pulled the trigger, you'd be doing the right thing. The cops would likely bust you anyway (the police tend to take a dim view if you blow someone's brains out) but at least at the end of the day you'd be able to say you did what any decent person would do given that situation.

Losing your honour, on the other hand, is a whole different kettle of fish. Honour is the entire reason behind the Joketsuzoku's war against the People's Government of China; without honour, life would not be worth living, and acting like a common bandit would be seriously dishonourable.

And sometimes, if you're going to get out with your honour intact, you can't obey the law; after all, laws are only as honourable as the people who make and enforce them.

As all this was running through her head, Wu Chii was quite unaware of three sets of eyes carefully watching her. These eyes belonged to a trio of nine-year-old girls named Sam, Puma, and Su Li. They were hiding under the tarp that was slung over the ammo crates in the back of one of the gun trucks; they had been hiding there since Sam overheard Wu Chii and Mi Soon planning the theft of the vehicles. Sam had been adamant that it was essential she accompany the mission, and her two bosom buddies had been equally adamant that they were going with her. If Wu Chii had realised that the so-called Terrible Three were there, she'd have gone ballistic, and if she then discovered that Shi had noticed the three girls an hour out of Joketsuzo and decided not to say anything because she thought it was a good thing that the three were getting out of there, she'd probably have wrung Shi's neck.

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Arriving in the ballistics lab, Jitsuyama had a glance around. The weaponry he and Matsubara had liberated from the bombed-out restaurant was stacked in neat lines on tables around the lab; Okuno was critically examining a series of deformed slugs in varying calibres.

"Got anything?" Jitsuyama asked. "Miyuke said you were looking for me."

"Looks like we've ID'ed who killed that Kobayashi guy." Okuno said, looking up from his bullets. "Looks like someone decided to return the compliment."

"How's that?" Jitsuyama asked.

"Two of the Thompson M1A1's you got from that restaurant were the ones used in the drive-by." Okuno said. "We got matches for those slugs you dug out the wall; seventh and eighth out of one, fifth out the other. Do you reckon this was a response to Kobayashi getting whacked?"

Jitsuyama slowly shook his head.

"I have no idea. I hope not. If it is, we're looking at a gang war unlike anything we've ever seen, at least since roadkill week – and at least the renegade truckers weren't using automatic weaponry and incendiary grenades."

Okuno grimaced. "Whoever hit that place wasn't mucking around. The slugs were scored and drilled in the tips."

"Any anomalous organic material?" Jitsuyama asked, a horrible feeling sneaking up on him.

"Yeah, aconite sap again."

"Shit." Jitsuyama muttered. Okuno looked faintly puzzled, handed over a preliminary report, and went back to examining his bullets as Jitsuyama headed back to the office.

Halfway up, he met Matsubara coming the other way.

"Ah, there you are." Matsubara said. "The guy who called us in for that mess at the restaurant is ready to make a statement, and I think you'd better be along for it."

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Ranma was working on his bike again.

Over the last few days, Akane had noticed that the young biker spent more time with his machine in pieces than he did riding it; it always seemed to need some sort of work done, probably because of how far he was pushing it's performance with the modifications he'd done to the engine and drivetrain. It had holed a piston on the way back from the park, and now he had the heads and block off the engine, and was carefully constructing new pistons from the titanium he had left over from making the gearbox.

While he was doing that, Akane was working right beside him, carefully paring down a sliver of metal that was destined to become a firing pin. It had originally been a bent knitting needle, and its new job would be igniting the primer in her next Frankengun.

Getting to examine the workings of three mass-produced guns – an H&K P7, an MG3, and Xian Pu's Zastava – had been a real treat; it was the first time Akane had been able to properly look at the workings of guns she hadn't made, and it had given her several valuable ideas. Just the way Genma's old machine gun's feed system was laid out had allowed Akane to make a paradigm shift in the way she approached the design of firearms, and investigating the internal workings of a Kalashnikov-style rifle and a Heckler and Koch pistol provided the icing on that particular cake; all three were classic firearms designs with a bunch of excellent ideas inside the frame. Akane had a load of Kalshnokov AK47 technical drawings, but she'd never handled a real Kalasher before, and never mind stripped it down and examined what made it tick. The net result was she'd spent most of the evening after their return from the park drawing up plans, and now Frankengun 11 was officially obsolete.

Most of the rest of the family were sprawled around the living room and patio; Genma wasn't present, he was out at the building site, but apart from him everyone was about. Kasumi was pouring over a Haynes manual and mumbling something about penguins to herself. Nabiki was lounging on a sofa with her laptop on her knees. Soun was reading the financial pages of the daily newspaper and making notes in his little red book. Xian Pu was noodling around with her guitar, repeatedly playing slightly different versions of a somewhat rockabilly riff she claimed to be trying to get right. Micheru was snoozing on the other end of the sofa from Nabiki.

As for Rei, she was sitting in her usual chair out on the patio and staring off into the eighth dimension or some-such. Akane idly mused to herself that it was odd how fast the combined families had established an equilibrium. It had been less than a week since the Saotomes rolled up at the Tendo dojo, and it already felt like half a lifetime.

"I've got a feelin' somethin's gonna happen." Ranma remarked.

Kasumi got to her feet and wandered out towards the garage, muttering something about luck nuts and sprunge plates, then stopped dead in her tracks with a startled noise as soon as she was outside.

"Come have a look at this!"

Everyone caught the barely-suppressed excitement in Kasumi's voice, which was unusual to say the least, so they followed her out to the patio; Micheru woke up with her usual gargle and went to see what the fuss was about.

Horse was sat in Rei's lap, purring like a kitten, and she was stroking him. For the first time since they'd known her, she was actually reacting to something in the world around her.

"What'd yeh know it?" Xian Pu whispered.

Nabiki smiled, unearthed her camera, and took a photograph.

"I knew getting this cat was a good idea." Kasumi said with evident satisfaction, and proceeded to the garage whereupon she started doing something noisy and probably oily to her car.

"I still got a feelin' somethin's gonna happen." Ranma muttered. "And that weren't it."

"I guess she had one of those again." Akane said.

"Huh?" Ranma grunted, going back to his pistons.

"You know how Kasumi's a medium, right?" Akane checked; Ranma nodded.

"Well," Akane continued, "Occasionally she gets a sort of flash or something, or just gets possessed by a ghost that isn't the usual ones, I'm not sure which, and does something totally random that turns out to have a really good reason – the last time she did that, well, apparently the school would have exploded if she hadn't thrown a nail bar onto the distribution board and blacked out the whole of Nerima. There was a gas leak in the abandoned bunkers, and it would have reached some damaged wiring in the ruins of the old high-energy physics classroom that was sparking until the power went down, though I've gotta say I'm kinda concerned about the radiation dose the martial arts electricians must have picked up getting that close to what's left of the tokomak reactor."

"Pity the containment systems went down and those blasted biology experiments escaped yet again." Nabiki groused. "It's a good thing Moreau-sensei installed the automated countermeasures after the time they nearly ate Frankenstein-sensei, or it might have been time for Kuno to load up the trebuchet again. Ow." This last was said in response to Akane hitting her. "Oh well, at least only three people got eaten that time, and at least I'd had the sense to jump out the window when the power went down. Sprained ankles are better than citrus detoxification any day. Quit hitting me already, Akane."

Ranma, Xian Pu, and Micheru all shared a round of highly doubtful looks.

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"Tell me in your own words what you saw." Matsubara said.

"I was walking south on 12th, I was about twenty yards from the restaurant when they opened up." The English man replied. He was a pretty impressive specimen – tall, with a powerful build, and that air of cool predatory competence you only get from highly trained fighting men, and he was oh so very English. He probably attended the Church of England, enjoyed a game of cricket, liked to take pot-shots at deer and grouse, drove a Range-Rover, chased foxes with dogs while on a horse, drank sherry, wore green wellies and tweed, and enjoyed a nice cup of tea with the vicar on the weekend. "The first thing I saw was a silver four wheel drive stationary at a red light; I believe it was a Toyota Land Cruiser, though I can't say for certain. I didn't think anything of it until the fellow in the front passenger seat leant out with a FAL and underslung, and fired his underslung into that café window. From the smell it was a white phosphorous incendiary, and I have reasons to believe it hit someone; I haven't smelt that terrible stench in quite some years. Fortunately I glanced over when I heard him launch, so I can tell you for certain the one in the rear left passenger seat was a woman, her frame was all wrong for a man you see. She was armed with an MP5, and the chap in the rear right passenger seat had a matching weapon; both of them had sizeable drum magazines that change the weapon's profile in quite a distinctive fashion. I positioned myself and Kathy in cover at once; I placed a parked car between us and the gunmen and got myself right down onto the tarmac with Kathy beneath me – if one is exceptionally fortunate a human body will slow a bullet down enough that it won't kill the person behind you, especially if one combines oneself with a Mercedes, and you can be quite certain I'm fully prepared to exchange my life for my daughter's at any time."

"I'm sorry you had to see that, sir." Jitsuyama said.

"Oh, it's the way things go sometimes." Colonel Alexander Joachim Bryce said with a gloomy nod. "Especially when there are well-equipped and trained terrorists around; ah well, stiff upper lip and all that, eh? At any rate, those blighters fired several magazines; the chap with the MP5 reloaded thrice, the young lady reloaded once and the chap with the rifle reloaded twice. The rifle had to be a FAL and not an SLR since he had it on cyclic; the good old L1A1 is semi-automatic only and the parts don't match the metric FAL so it's a right blighter of a job to convert the SLR to selective, even if you've got the necessary FAL components. That's fair bit of firepower with the sizeable drum magazines they were using, and from the terrible mess the bullets left when they hit I'd be willing to swear they were scored. I saw one of the chaps coming out the door produce a Skorpion, it's a Czech sub-machine gun approximately the size of a large pistol, nasty little blighter, but the poor fellow went down before he could open fire. Those blighters certainly knew their stuff; if you give a civilian a sub-machine gun or an automatic rifle he'll usually fire the entire magazine off as soon as he opens up, and they were firing short controlled bursts – pop off three or four shots, reacquire the target, another little squeeze – and they were hitting with every bullet they fired. It's not as if they were working at long range, but when a chap puts every bullet in the clip into the target you know he's not playing silly buggers, especially with such large magazines. I evacuated myself and Kathy as soon as the terrorists pulled away, and then I called you chaps. I believe you know the rest."

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"Well, that was a stroke of luck." Matsubara remarked, handing Jitsuyama a cup of coffee. "The chances of a soldier of his calibre being nearby must have been pretty slim, but let's not question it."

Jitsuyama blinked. "What do you mean?"

"I checked Bryce's background." Matsubara said. "I had to call in a few favours with a pal in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to find this; he's the commanding officer of the British Army's Twenty-Two Special Air Service. That guy holds the Victoria Cross, that's the Brits highest decoration for valour in combat. He used to work with Rainbow Six before he was moved up to overall command of the SAS; he's one of the top ten most experienced soldiers on the planet."

"That's one hell of a witness." Jitsuyama murmured.

"I don't think he's here on official business seeing as how he's got his wife and kid with him, but we can't be too certain about that." Matsubara said with a nod. "The M.O.F.A's being justifiably cagey about the whole mess."

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Kodachi set the slim dossier down and turned to gaze out the window over Nerima and towards the heart of Tokyo, her eyes habitually looking towards where she knew the Forbidden Palace was hidden by high-rise buildings.

It seemed that the Saotome and Tendo families were the leaders of a pair of ancient secret societies of largely similar nature. Secret societies that made the Yakuza look like an old wives gossip society. Their forefathers had cut a bloody swathe across the history of Japan and the larger world; any family that crossed them was exterminated to the last child. They were a bit like what you'd get if you took the worst features of the Yakuza, the Freemasons, the Hell's Angels, a ninja clan, and a horde of rabid dogs, and fused them into one hellish whole.

No wonder Akane could openly carry a handgun – if Sasuke's findings were correct, Nerima was effectively an independent nation within Japan, and Soun Tendo was the absolute overlord of that nation. Japanese law was only enforced within Nerima on Soun Tendo's sufferance; at any time, he could turn around and throw Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department out of the prefecture, and the government would do nothing about it because they were scared of Soun Tendo. His power was apparently unlimited; within Nerima, the law was what Soun Tendo said it was.

And they were all just as dangerous. Ranma alone was known to be a master-level practitioner of at least four schools of martial arts, with a good footing in dozens more, many of them so obscure that Sasuke had been unable to find anything more solid than rumours. Supposedly, Ranma's father had been a major player in what passed for a resistance during the American occupation of Japan. Supposedly, Ranma's mother had once declared a one-trucker war on a prominent Yakuza family – the same family that murdered Kodachi's mother – and almost completely exterminated them with some minor assistance from some other renegade truckers; she was a swordmistress, a crackshot with any firearm, and her rig was more heavily armoured than a JGSDF Type 74 tank. Her personal bodycount was well into four figures.

The statement that the Yakuza who had given the order that led to the death of Kodachi's mother had been dragged to his death along a road by one ankle behind a tractor-truck at speeds of over a hundred and fifty miles per hour gave Kodachi some momentary satisfaction.

But there was one word that was repeated over and over again in the information about the Saotome and Tendo families, a word that led Kodachi to stare out the window with unseeing eyes towards where she knew the Chrysanthemum Throne to be, wondering how much of what she thought she knew was actually wrong – a word that made her wonder whether the statement that, 'It is the Moroboshi's duty to guard the Home Islands from any and all supernatural threats', might actually be deadly serious rather than being based in antiquated beliefs – a word that made her wonder exactly what in God's name was really going on.

And that word was, Werewolf.

--- End Chapter ---

AN -

Well, I had a bastard of a time with this chapter, but it's here now. I'm still not sure about it, but I'm going to post it and get cracking with the next portion of the plot instead of sitting and stewing any longer.

Yup, the truth's beginning to come out, and the first elements of the coming crunch are heading for Nerima. If this chapter seems a bit disjointed, that's because it's almost entirely setting things up for the next section of the fic – after I posted chapter 8, I realised there were a load of things I needed to set up onscreen before I went ahead with the next steps of the plot.

When I described Sasuke's shrug last chapter, 'Gallic' was not a mistake; the shrug in question is that very expansive and equally very French type of shrug. The people who use that sort of mannerisms are typically from the area that used to be ancient Gaul. I've seen it described as things like 'a very Gallic shrug' or 'that peculiarly Gallic shrug' several places. Only Frenchmen usually shrug quite like that; exactly where Sasuke picked that mannerism up from is open to debate.

The lack of a description of the sword was an artefact of the way I assembled that chapter; it's been corrected, as has an extraneous mention of Xian Pu from where I'd intended the sequence with Kodachi to be a touch longer. I'll repeat the description here for anyone who doesn't want to go back and check:

'It looked much like a katana, but a touch on the short side and with a blade as straight as an arrow, finished a gleaming jet black, and with an oddly European-looking crossguard.'

I can't believe I forgot that. Duh.

The pun with the Cadillac being launched down a football field comes from the fact that what we call football here in the UK is what people call soccer over in North America, so what you would call a soccer pitch we would call a football field. As scoring is referred to as 'a goal', I think you can probably now see where the pun came from. Yes, it's a horrible one.

Concerning Herb's thoughts about women, don't tell me you think the Musk would exactly be feminists. They and the Amazons are (in the Biker Half context) supposed to be polar opposites; the Amazons are severely misodranic (sp?) by tradition, the Musk are severely misogynistic by tradition. Which one is worse? That's a matter of perspective.

Gun trucks were invented by the US Army during the Vietnam War. Take a medium-size all-terrain truck, armour it with as much plate metal as you can get your hands on, and arm it with as many machine guns as you can scrounge up, then paint on a name and logo in the vein of WW2 bomber nose art. You have a gun truck. In Nam, these trucks were used to guard convoys along Ambush Alley; as soon as a convoy got ambushed, it was the gun trucks' job to boot it for the ambush point with all guns blazing. They were surprisingly effective by all accounts. Note that the sort of armour involved is popularly known as 'Hillbilly Armour' or 'Farmer Armour', and involves scrap metal and preferably some spacing to stop HESH and HEAP charges. Today, there are gun trucks doing their best to protect convoys in Iraq, though ambushes aren't so much of a problem as in Nam; the main problem these days is roadside bombs (aka Improvised Explosive Devices) and a gun truck can't do much against a home-made landmine.

Just so you know, luck nuts and sprunge plates are not components of a car. They're not much of anything, in fact.

The level of strangeness at Furinkan is inspired by prolonged exposure to the Anime Addventure. Yes, they have Dr Moreau and Dr Frankenstein as biology teachers, and there's a downscaled version of Chernobyl in the basement. The rest of the context of Akane and Nabiki's remarks is still under construction.

For Bryce's accent, I decided that, since he's in 22 SAS and he's in a story primarily centred on Japanese characters, I'd better exaggerate his English-ness, so I turned to James Bigglesworth and Dan Dare for linguistic pointers. Apart from the Eton-educated set, the word 'Chap' and the term 'Poor devils' are actually very unusual in the English language as spoken in England, as is describing something as a 'blighter', the line about stiff upper lips, and the phrase 'Playing silly buggers'. It's always bemused me how about the only examples of the many, many British accents (and types of British person) you tend to see in movies are either Cockneys or upper-class twerps; I'd be surprised if many Americans had any idea what a Scouser or a Liverpudlian sounds like, and I'd be equally surprised if many Americans could accurately identify a Ross-Shire accent further than being Scottish. The British Isles are a pretty small place, but what we lack in elbow room we more than make up for in variety. But then, I'm a fine one to talk; I can't tell one American accent from the other, so I can see where you guys are coming from in relation to the accents of Britain.

Wellies – Wellington boots – gumboots – rubber boots. Just thought I'd translate. Green wellies are the trademark footwear of the hunting-shooting-fishing tweed-wearing Range-Rover driving upper-class Englishman, probably educated at Eton and possessed of a one-digit IQ. Oh, I say, tally ho chaps! Jolly good show, eh what?

I originally had Jitsuyama unfamiliar with scored ammunition, but it seemed a bit unlikely considering the number of messy situations he's dealt with over the years. In case anyone reading this doesn't know, scoring ammunition entails cutting a deep X-shape into the tip of the bullet, which will then mushroom way more when it hits the target. It's far more effective than a normal hollowpoint, and is in fact against the Geneva Convention.

Well, catch you all next time.

Doghead Out.