Voyages of the Wild Sea Horse

by rewind gone nuts

Becoming a pirate captain in a fantastical world was never in Ranma's life plans. But when magic strands him in the Grand Blue, he has no choice. With an impish wizard as a guide, Ryoga as his navigator, and a crew made of unwanted fiancees (plus Nabiki), Ranma sets out to find the One Piece and return to Nerima!

15. Chapter 15

Author's Notes: Not going to lie, I'm a little disappointed with the review outcome from the previous chapter, but I will admit that maybe I had hyped it up a bit in my head. Still, I hope folks are enjoying this. Let's see if this gets a better reaction... as always, we have a TVtropes page that needs some loving, so if you're a troper, check it out!

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Chapter 15: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat!

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It was a calm, sunny day on the Grand Line, with the sun shining brightly above a gentle, almost lazy-seeming ocean. Nabiki didn't trust it for one moment, and kept a constant vigil, peering out across the distance and trying to keep as much visible at all times as she possibly could.

"Sheesh, Nabiki, don't you think you're being paranoid? Shay-Lot isn't supposed to be that far," Ranma asked her.

"Well excuse me for thinking ahead! How are we supposed to get a new ship built if we lose what we salvaged?" Nabiki demanded in response, gesturing at the piles of gold and pearls that were stuffed into every available cranny and crevice of the fishing boat that Bokuden had so graciously loaned them.

"She's got you there, Ranchan," Ukyo declared.

"Well, I for one am simply glad to be away from Warship Island. There are many things I have been glad to learn in my life... the sounds and smells of a hundreds-strong draconic orgy are not amongst them," Kodachi quipped.

Every single teenager aboard the boat shivered, as did the boat's adult owner, who had come along to sail it back to Warship Island once the Kamikaze Pirates were finished with it.

"Shampoo about to go mad from lack of sleep," the cabbit zoan muttered.

"You think you had it bad? Imagine being poor Apis!" Ryoga countered, eliciting another wave of shudders and grimaces in response.

"Yeah... at least we got out of there before we had to explain the hard truth about her adopted grandpa," Ranma opined. He then resumed staring back out at the sea, more out of boredom than out of nervous caution like Nabiki. As his eyes lazily swept over the calm waters, a shadow in the water caught his attention, and at once he snapped from languid to anticipatory.

"Hey, mister! You got spears on this tub?" Ranma called out.

"We carry a couple of gaffs and harpoons to haul larger fish into the boat, why?" the sole adult aboard responded.

"Because, unless I'm mistaken, that's a damn big shark out there, and I'd rather discourage it from gettin' any closer," Ranma replied, almost conversational despite the fact his gaze remained deadlocked on the signature dorsal fin cutting above the water.

The man he was addressing went pale as it was possible to go after a life-long sea-tanning, and scrambled to obey. Even for all the Grand Line's many terrors, the word 'shark' still carried a particular dread, almost up there with 'sea king'. He grabbed a harpoon and slapped it into Ranma's outstretched hand, then got out of the way as Ranma eyed his target, drew back his arm, and then launched the spear.

However, rather than the expected fountain of blood and frenzied thrashing as the harpoon slammed into the shark's brain, a massive arm suddenly erupted from the water and caught the spear in mid-flight! It hovered in mid-clutch for barely a moment, then disappeared below the surface.

"What the hell?! Since when do sharks have arms?!" Ranma demanded, looking at the sweating fisherman, who just moaned and shook his head.

Before Ranma could do anything else, there was a liquid explosion behind him as something rushed up out of the water, and the genderbending pirate captain launched himself instinctively across the width of the boat to avoid being splashed. The distinct tunk sound of sharpened steel impaling thick timber carried even through the pattering of downfalling water, before a quiet, sullen voice rang out.

"Is this yours?"

Ranma turned to apologize for his behavior, as well as to scold them for wearing a fake fin in the ocean, but found his words spilling silently down his shirt as he stared dumbfounded at the biggest woman he had ever seen.

Even back in Nerima, Ranma had faced giants of men in the form of the nameless dojo destroyer whose arrival had spoiled his plans to win a packet of Instant Nanniichuan from Shampoo, and in the form of Wu and Woton, the hulking but brainless guards of Nekonron and Togenkyo respectively. Eldrago had easily equaled those monsters in stature, if not dwarfed them. But the woman now casually leaning on the side of the fishing boat, one hand still wrapped around the harpoon's shaft as if it were an oddly-bladed knife, had to be around twice Eldrago's size.

Weirdly, despite her size, there was something in the curves of her face that suggested youth... for some reason, Ranma was sure that she was around his age, give or take a year or two.

Further adding to the intimidating appearance, she was clearly not human. Seafoam-green hair had been crudely hacked short into a semblance of a pageboy haircut, and out of the corner of his eye Ranma could see Shampoo and Ukyo both wincing at the display of wanton cruelty to one's locks. Amber-hued eyes glittered with intelligence, pupils flicking between the gathered pirates as she clearly studied them, waiting to see their reaction. The shortness of her hair meant that the faint hint of gill slits could be made out on the sides of her neck, and her elongated, diagonally angled ears were plainly visible. When she opened her mouth to run a tongue over her lips, serrated, triangular fangs flashed in the sudden exposure to light before she closed them again.

Combined with the fins jutting out from behind her wrists and the webbing between her hands, it was enough to jumpstart Ranma's memories of two individuals with broadly similar traits that he'd seen only days ago.

"Y-you're a fishman! I mean a fishgirl!" he blurted out, unable to keep from making the verbal amendment as she shifted with the boat and the rather obvious signs of her gender practically screamed for attention.

'Amaterasu preserve me, I think they're bigger than my head... how does a bikini hold that much?! Oh, crap, please don't let the girls catch me looking!'

Fortunately, Ranma's prayers went answered, as the stranger from the sea spoke up in response to Ranma's witless comment.

"You're clearly the brains of the outfit..."

The sudden surge of embarrassment at least helped Ranma to at least stop staring at the stranger's breasts, and he chuckled, blushed and nervously scratched the back of his head.

"Um.. yeah... I'm really sorry about trying to spear you - I didn't realize you weren't actually a shark..."

"So you wouldn't have tried to spear me if you'd known?" she flatly asked in reply.

"Of course not! What kind of jerk would just randomly spear people out having a swim?!" Ranma indignantly spluttered.

A look of genuine surprise briefly flashed across the self-admitted shark-girl's face, but she schooled her features back into their original blankness so quickly that Ranma would have missed it had he blinked. "Oh. Well. It's nice to know there are some people with manners out there. Don't be so quick with the spears in the future, 'kay?"

She let go of the harpoon and was about to release the boat when Ranma suddenly spoke up. "Wait, don't go! We're looking for an island called Shay-Lot; do you know how far it is from here?"

"Shay-Lot? Why do you little people want to go to Shay-Lot?" the surprised shark-girl asked, staring intensely at Ranma - who was used to girls looking at him sharply, but not girls who looked like they could literally bite his head off if he answered wrong.

"I'm a captain, and I need a new ship. I heard Shay-Lot is a great place to get one made. So, can you help me?" Ranma replied simply, not seeing any reason to dither or deflect.

"...As a matter of fact, you're not that far off. I was about to head home there myself. Follow me, if you want, but I wouldn't get your hopes up," the shark-girl replied after a moment's delay.

"Why's that?" Ranma asked, but he was ignored; the shark-girl flopped onto her back and lazily began to backstroke away, moving with deceptive speed.

"What a strange girl," Kodachi observed casually, her companions casually holding back the instinctive commentary about pots and kettles.

"Very healthy one, though... make Shampoo reconsider merits of seafood diet," the Chinese Amazon muttered to herself, which made Ukyo giggle in schadenfreude.

"If you lot are quite finished, let's get going - oh, for the love of... somebody slap Ryoga awake! I swear, he's a bigger pervert than Kuno..."

"Excuse me?!"

"I meant your brother, not you, Kodachi."

"Ah. Apology accepted, Ranma darling..."

---

About half an hour later...

---

True to the oversized fishwoman's word, Shay-Lot wasn't far off. In fact, it was quite obvious to the martial artists watching her that she could have effortlessly outswum them, but for whatever reasons, she had chosen to laze about and drift along at the same pace as the hopeful pirate crew. But as the island came into clear view, they found their attention switched firmly to their approaching destination from their strange guide.

"Man, now that's an island!" Ranma quipped.

Shay-Lot was an impressive sight indeed. Similarly to Warship Island, it was clearly an undersea mountain that had breached the surface, but whereas Warship Island was largely a flat disk - which only made sense, given its true nature - Shay-Lot was far more vertically orientated. Only a single bay was at all approachable for ships, with the rest of the island's coastal faces being steep, crumbling rock escarpments. The towering spires of the peaks were largely covered with thick forests, home to trees of massive size, with a thin belt of cleared land that had clearly been put aside for farming. It was towards the sole bay, and the village that had been clustered into its expanse, that they were sailing.

'Something funny about that village... can't put my finger on it...' Ranma mused.

Almost as if she'd read Ranma's mind, Kodachi suddenly spoke up. "Sir? How many inhabit Shay-Lot?"

"It's either a large village or a small town, all told. About six thousand souls, maybe less?" the fisherman replied, shrugging his shoulders absently at the question.

"But... that makes no sense. If the population is so small, then why have they constructed on such a cyclopean scale?" the confused heiress asked.

'Cy-whatsit?!' Ranma wondered, blinking in confusion. Then he took a closer look at the approaching structures and understanding dawned. 'Whoa... okay, so, "cyclopean" means "freaking huge". Good to know...'

The houses of the village were not especially special in their style. Kodachi would later describe the style as a mixture of British Colonial and American Frontier, and given her education, the rest of the Kamikaze Pirates were happy to defer to her judgment on topics of architecture. To the rest of them, it just looked like a mixture of square and rectangular buildings, made either from slabs of stone that had been stacked together like bricks, or cleaned, cut logs, or even a mixture of both elements. What made them stand out was the sheer size of them. Even as far away as the teens were, the structures towered over them, the smallest of them the size of small fortresses.

"You'll see why they build so big in a few minutes," the fisherman declared, and since he obviously had no intention to be forthcoming, the Kamikaze Pirates promptly began ignoring him and focusing on pulling up to the dock... which itself was similarly enormous, looking like it was designed to hold great warships and massive merchant vessels.

As the Kamikaze Pirates docked, their impromptu guide slid into the shallower water alongside the dock and went from swimming to wading ashore, allowing the martial artists to finally get a better look at her.

As her first impression had suggested, she towered over even the likes of Eldrago; she had to be the better part of fourteen feet tall, heavy-bosomed, full-hipped, round of buttocks, with muscular limbs and a soft, paunchy middle contrasting the more conventionally attractive parts of her body. She wore little more than a kind of bikini woven out of thick, corded ropes of what looked like some kind of seaweed, exposing her body to the air and water alike with equal indifference. Most of her skin was a dark sea blue-color, save for a grayish-white oval that started at her lips and then ran down the length of her torso, and an abundance of tiger-like black stripes on her limbs and torso. In addition to the distinctly shark-like fins on her spin, wrists and calves, a shark-like tail idly slashed at the water as she strode through the shallows, the vertical fluke at its tip cutting through the waves.

'Huh, that makes two shark-featured fishfolk with tails we've run into. What're the odds?' Ranma idly noted. He didn't have more than a moment for that stray thought before things took a turn for the surreal.

"You should not have come here."

The words boomed from above, echoing like thunder and rolling through the air like the voice of a great kami, reverberating in Ranma's very bones. He immediately snapped into a fighting stance, noting his motley crew positioning themselves accordingly behind him, and started looking around for the source of the voice.

The shark-girl, in comparison, didn't seem bothered by the mysterious threat. Instead, she looked up and shaped her hand into an insulting gesture, middle finger held upright from anotherwise curled fist. "Fuck you, Gogmagog, I still live here."

"For now..." came the voice, strangely mournful despite its massiveness.

Ranma looked up... and up... and up... and his jaw dropped as he finally realized who - or perhaps more accurately what - was speaking.

He'd used the term "giant" to describe people before. The Dojo Destroyer. Kin'nee. Wu. Wonton. Eldrago. Even the currently nameless shark-girl now standing beside him on the dock. But he realized he'd been wrong to do so. They weren't giants. THIS was a giant!

It had the general proportions and appearance of an older man; not necessarily unhandsome, but grizzled and scarred, visibly battered by time and a hard-knock life, with a nose that had been broken and imperfectly reset at least twice and an earlobe that had been bitten off. But it towered over Ranma and his crew like a colossus. It - he - was easily five times the size of the shark-girl standing next to them, twenty meters if he was an inch. He went almost naked from the waist up, legs clad in pants that could have been the sails for three Navy battleships and feet clad in massive boots of leather and thick, heavy iron plate. A salt-and-pepper beard spilled down his chest like a waterfall, his face reduced to little more than swimming hole-sized eyes of deep leafy green peering out from the shadows of a tricorne hat the size of a small caravel. In one hand he clutched a length of polished smooth wood the size of a mainmast, capped in what looked like a great cathedral bell made of wrought iron.

He wasn't the biggest living creature that Ranma had seen since coming to this strange world - that title still went easily to Laboon. But this 'Gogmagog' was truly the very definition of a giant!

"Until the Ting says otherwise, I still live here, so get out of my way," the shark-girl spat bitterly.

"I would not dream of impeding you, Miriam," the giant replied with what they realized was probably supposed to be softness.

The shark-girl - Miriam, if the giant was to be believed - simply snorted and stalked off. Gogmagog sighed, the exhalation ruffling the Kamikaze Pirates' clothing like a gale-force blast of wind, before he suddenly shifted his head and looked straight at them.

Ranma's blood went to ice in his veins and his knees trembled, but stubbornness, pride and courage stiffened his back and kept him from fleeing. "Wh-what?!"

"I am sorry, little ones, my behavior was rude. I am Gogmagog, and I welcome you to Shay-Lot... sadly, I wish I could do so under better circumstances."

"W-We don't want any trouble, we just want to buy a new ship!" Ranma shouted at the top of his lungs.

Thunder roared again, and Ranma flinched, only to realize that the giant was laughing.

"No need to shout, little man, I'm not deaf! All customers are normally welcome here on Shay-Lot... but things are not normal here in Shay-Lot. You are free to go to the Rathaus and speak about a commission, but I cannot guarantee that you will be heard in any prompt fashion."

"The...Rathaus?" Ranma asked hesitantly.

"Down the main street, you'll see it soon enough," Gogmagog answered calmly, pointing with one hand in the indicated direction.

"Thank you, Mr. Gogmagog," Ranma replied, stirred to a rare level of politeness in the face of somebody who could literally squash him like a bug.

Another thunderous chuckle echoed from above. "I'm no Mister, little one. I wish you luck..."

And with that he raised his head and resumed staring out to sea. Self evidently dismissed, the Kamikaze Pirates took a moment to steel their nerves before marching forth into the streets of Shay-Lot.

The town of giants was an odd experience indeed. It wasn't that none of them had never experienced being dwarfed by buildings before; they had lived in Tokyo before Umok had accidentally drawn them to this world, after all. But the scaling of their surroundings, which emphasized that these were the same simplistic buildings they had been seeing ever since they came to this world, just on a massive scale, made for a uniquely oppressive atmosphere.

"And now I understand what Gulliver must have felt like as he traveled amidst the Brobdingnagians..." Kodachi murmured in an awed tone.

Ranma surreptitiously slipped a glance at Nabiki and Ukyo, but both girls just gave him a puzzled look and shrugged their shoulders, evidently not recognizing the reference any more than he did.

Further adding to the oddness was that the town was far quieter than any of them had expected. They saw giants, certainly - and it was less comfort than one might think to discover that the average giant was typically between half to two-thirds Gogmagog's size. But relatively few and far between. The enormous humanoids seemed almost to be slinking through the streets of the village despite their titanic statures, moving as furtive individuals or small, wary bands. A feeling of misery and fear was almost palpable in the air, and slowly whetted Ranma and company's paranoia to a razor's edge.

Finally, they reached the Rathaus; a simple rectangular building, capped with a triangular roof, the very peak of the triangle being a giant-scale Western-style bell roost. A single door flanked by two huge windows was the only feature, save for an enormous plaque of bronze with the word "Rathaus" etched into it.

As they got closer, they realized that there was a small band of giants gathered near the Rathaus - dozens strong, the single largest group they had seen thus far. They were clustered around an average-sized giant, maybe twelve meters tall, with a stereotypical pirate eyepatch over his right eye, gnarled scar tissue protruding in a half-star shape over the right side of his skull painting a grisly picture about what might have happened to it. He wore a conical helmet adorned with three vertical tusks that were easily three meters long, as well as a cape around his shoulders and a high brace of fur and leather wrapped around his waist. Despite his scarred arms and missing eye, the giant was surprisingly youthful looking, even handsome in a baby-faced sort of way... or he would have been, were his features not twisted up in an expression of hate as he ranted and raved to his audience, who watched him with grim expressions.

"The smallfolk are behind these atrocities! Search your hearts, you know it to be true! They envy us, they resent our power and our might! They claim to rule these seas in their entirety, when they know that the waves belong to we giants! They are cowards, and they seek to undermine us with their cowardly ways! Look at how they have poisoned the minds of good, right-thinking giants into taking up arms under their foul flag! I say to you that these murders could only have been the works of smallfolk agents! Who else would be so vile and cowardly as to resort to ambush? Who would be so weak that they would turn the sea itself into their weapon to slay our brothers and sisters? I say that they have gone too far! We must act! We must rise up against the little tyrants, and show them their true place - not at the top of the mountain, but under our boots!"

"That one sound like trouble," Shampoo muttered.

"You ain't kidding, sugar-bun," Ukyo observed, nodding sagely.

"Let's just get into the Rathaus and arrange for a new ship! We don't want to be in sight if that crowd gets ugly," Nabiki declared.

"You know what? That's a good idea - double-time it, guys!" Ranma ordered.

Nabiki let out a sharp squeak of shock as Ranma suddenly materialized in front of her, then scooped her up into a bridal carry. Before she could even open her mouth to question his sanity, Ranma suddenly rocketed forward, springing towards the Rathaus in mighty leaping strides, the rest of the martial artists hot on his heels. In a heartbeat, the Kamikaze Pirates had reached the doors of the Rathaus and shot through them, as they had been left open to form what to giants would have been a slight crack, but to the humans was easily wide enough to pass through.

Once they had all passed aside, Nabiki pouted. "I could have walked, you know."

"Yeah, but you wouldn't have kept up," Ranma replied flippantly, gently lowering her to the floor. Then he turned and took in their surroundings.

"Huh... not what I expected..."

The Rathaus' interior was a single vast hall, dominated by an enormous table at which sat the biggest giantess that they had seen since arriving; a woman who easily would have matched Gogmagog in stature. She shuffled scrolls the size of merchant ship sails, most of her body hidden behind a thick wooden staircase that had been erected to link the far edge of her table to the floor. Despite the hall's size, it clearly wasn't big enough to take up the whole building, and peering into the distance, they could make out human-sized doors on the far walls, leading to who-knew-were.

Staring up at the titaness, Nabiki felt a sinking feeling in her stomach.

"...We're going to have to climb that to talk to her, aren't we?" she sulkily observed.

"Looks like it," Ranma flippantly replied.

Nabiki promptly pressed herself against Ranma's arm and put on her softest, most pleading expression when her startled captain and one-time fiance snapped around to look at her in shock.

"Carry me?" she pleaded hopefully.

"Oh, so now you want to be carried," Ukyo scoffed sarcastically from behind her.

"As if you would refrain from such a strategy if it were available to you," Kodachi needled her back.

"Me an' Ranchan are engaged! She's nothing to him!" Ukyo spat in reply.

'...I may have erred...' Nabiki permitted herself to think, only to then yelp as she felt herself picked up once again - but not by Ranma, who looked almost as surprised as she did.

"Shampoo?!" Ranma blurted, and Nabiki's blood ran cold as she realized that, yes, she was now being bridal-carried by the ship's resident Chinese Amazon.

"Shampoo carry her for you, airen! This extra baggage no stop Shampoo!" the zoan cheerfully announced.

"Who are you calling extra baggage?" Nabiki complained. Then she had to bite back a scream as Shampoo suddenly took off - if Ranma was like a motorcycle, then the rabbit-plus zoan was like a jet engine, covering half the distance between the door and the giant secretary's table in a single bound.

"I-I'm not hitting on Ranma!" she yelped desperately.

"Shampoo know. You just lazy. Still not like you rub-rub itty-bitties on Ranma; that Shampoo's job," the Chinese Amazon cheerfully announced.

'Oh, seriously, you had to go there?! You never mocked Akane's figure like this! ...Then again, Ranma tended to do it for you, didn't he? ...Poor Akane... I wonder how she's do-ING!?'

Nabiki's train of thought was sharply derailed as Shampoo suddenly launched herself once more, this time in response to Ranma and the rest of the martial artists springing past her.

The martial artist pirates bounced up the staircase like giant-size fleas, and within moments were assembled atop the plateau-like expanse of the giant's desk. Amidst the surreal landscape of scrolls, books, impossibly massive quivers, inkwells the size of above-ground swimming pools and other oversized prehistoric-looking renditions of office paraphernalia, they were finally able to get a good look at the receptionist.

She was easily the tallest giantess they'd seen so far, and the second biggest since Gogmagog - honestly, she might have been taller than he was. She was young and beautiful looking, even given the strange blue tint to her otherwise pale white skin, with an air of matureness to her that weirdly reminded Ranma of his mother, for some reason. Which was an impression that became even more awkward given that nature had seen fit to bless her with not only a beautiful face, but also a very curvaceous figure. Ryoga gurgled and clutched desperately for his nose as the group did their best not to stare at the sight of an exposed cleavage line you could lose a canoe in. Seafoam-green hair was styled into an intricate tangle of braids that flowed down over her shoulders to brush against the desktop, her brow furrowed in concentration as she spoke - not to the Kamikaze Pirates, but to a gaggle of men in Marine uniforms who had evidently beaten the teens to the desktop.

"I'm sorry, Captain Malibu, but as I've told you before, there are simply no ships or shipwrights available! You will have to wait until the crisis is resolved," the giantess said, and although she wasn't so blunt as to sigh in exasperation, even Ranma and Ryoga could pick up on her desire to do so.

To add to the bizarreness of the situation, she sounded just like Hinako Ninomiya the ki-vampire in her adult form, although the Kamikazes had little time to dwell on that fact.

"That's simply inexcusable! Can't you at least sell us a prepared ship so we can sail to the nearest base?!" one of the marines, evidently Captain Malibu, shouted, stamping his feet. Tall, broad-shouldered, bronzed, blonde and blue-eyed, he would have been a handsome man were it not for the almost childish expression of frustration twisting his features.

"As I've told you before, there are none available to sell! All of them were either sold or destroyed before you arrived, and none of the shipwrights are willing to work! So, unless you are willing to try sailing one of our rafts, you are simply going to have to wait!" The giantess replied.

The Navy captain scowled and stamped his foot in fury. "Useless overgrown oafs! What's the good of a port full of giant shipwrights if they won't even work?!"

"Hey, there's no need to be so rude to the lady!" Ryoga barked, his chivalrous streak choosing that moment to make a rare display of itself for a woman other than Akane Tendo.

Captain Malibu glanced over at them, and his lip curled in disgust. "Well, look what the tide washed in. If you're here for a ship, then don't bother, nobody on this miserable island wants to work."

"Well, that's obviously not normal! What's going on? Why isn't anyone working?" Ranma interjected, asking the question on his whole crew's minds.

"Some little business about a serial murderer stalking the town, frightening everybody into staying away from the water," the Navy captain announced, waving a hand dismissively.

An appalled silence hung over the tabletop, before Ukyo spoke up. "You mean there's a killer on the loose, and you guys ain't even offering to help find them?! I thought you were supposed to be, like, sea cops or whatever!"

"We keep the law and order on islands affiliated with the World Government. As an unaffiliated island, Shay-Lot is out of our jurisdiction," Captain Malibu replied in the same casual tone.

"You would use petty rules as an excuse to put aside your moral duty? Tch! Truly, the Navy consists of nothing but bullies and cowards," Kodachi scoffed, folding her arms over her breast as she imperiously stared down her nose at the Navy officers.

The seamen shuffled hesitantly, clearly uncomfortable with the accusation, but Captain Malibu purpled with rage. "And who are you to say such things?! No... wait, I know you! You're the girl who won the Grand Octopree - you cost me my ship, you miserable pirate!"

"At your service," Kodachi sweetly replied, curtsying before letting out one of her trademark cackles of glee.

"And I agree - any real man would step up to help these poor people, and screw the dumb rulebook!" Ranma spat.

"And who the fuck are you to talk to me like that!?" the Navy captain bellowed.

"I'm Ranma Saotome, Captain of the Kamikaze Pirates, and Kodachi sails under my flag, so I'll talk to you however I like!" Ranma jeered.

Kodachi laughed once more at his words, openly wrapping her hands around the hilts of her whip and her sword in anticipation. Ukyo unslung her battle spatula, and Shampoo adopted a Tiger Style stance, unsheathing her all-too-real claws. Even Ryoga sighed, rolled his neck and cracked his knuckles, whilst Nabiki quickly stepped behind a book that was thicker than she was tall.

The Marines turned red, drawing swords and pistols and pointing them at the pirates.

"There will be no fighting in the Rathaus!" the giantess suddenly declared, combining the tone of a mother putting her foot down with the volume of an angry god, the words making the bones shake in her listeners' bodies.

Both pirates and marines went pale, and quickly slipped out of their fighting stances. An embarrassed silence descended over the tabletop, before Captain Mulligan drew himself up as regally as he could.

"Tch! Fine, we'll arrest you pirate scum later. Come, men!" he barked, before sweeping off down the staircase to the staircase to the floor.

Ranma watched him go and made an insulting gesture. "Jerk."

Then he turned his attention back to the giantess, who was watching patiently. "Sorry, we didn't mean to break any rules..."

"It's quite understandable... did you mean what you said? That you would help us?" she asked.

"Sure did!" Ranma immediately replied, ignoring a startled choking sound from Nabiki at his reply.

"...Why?" the giantess asked, her eyes narrowing as she studied the teenage pirate captain, as if he were an interesting bug whose fate she was still trying to determine.

"It's a martial artist's duty to defeat monsters and villains!" Ranma replied confidently, the phrase springing to mind immediately.

"And yet, as pirates, we are monsters and villains," Nabiki quipped from her hiding spot.

"Details, details," Ranma scoffed, physically waving a hand in dismissal of the topic.

"If that is the case... then you may just be who I need," the giantess declared, nodding slowly.

"Please, Miss Giant, tell us what's going on," Ukyo suggested.

"Call me Agnetha! There has been a swathe of mysterious deaths in our town - townsfolk have been washing up on our shore, savagely beaten before being drowned to death. It has the whole island hiding in fear; nobody is brave enough to get near the water now, and that's why all the shipmaking businesses have ground to a halt," the giantess explained, gesturing as she spoke.

"Who could be strong enough to murder giants?!" an incredulous Ryoga demanded, and the rest of his crew nodded in fellow feeling.

"Obviously, our suspicions have turned to our own people, which has only furthered the paranoia and distrust running rampant in our community. It's honestly hindered our ability to track down who the culprit is," Agnetha replied.

"Surely you must have a suspect already?" Nabiki asserted, and Agnetha looked grim.

"Y-yes, there is someone who the townspeople are starting to blame... but it's the wrong person, I just know it!" the giantess asserted.

"Who is it?" Ranma piped up, and Agnetha looked quite uncomfortable.

"It's... my daughter. Miriam. She's the one that people are starting to talk about."

"...Miriam? Huh, weird, we met a Miriam as we arrived here," Ranma noted.

Agnetha perked up at his words. "Green hair? Amber eyes? Shark's tail?"

"Yes, she was a giant fishgirl - shark-girl? Whatever... how'd you know?" Ranma asked, tilting his head comically.

"That's my daughter! That's my little Miriam!" Agnetha chirped proudly, eyes shut and lips curled into a massive smile, radiating maternal pride like a small sun.

Silence reigned over the tabletop, as the Kamikaze Pirates looked over the absolutely titanic giantess before them, then mentally pictured the big but still comparatively quite tiny fishgirl they had met in the waters off of Shay-Lot's shores.

"...Actually, I can kind of see the resemblance," Ranma weakly professed.

"She takes a lot after her father, I'll admit... poor thing," Agnetha sighed, and the teens hunkered down as the wind of her breath wrapped around them like the teeth of a gale, tugging at their clothes.

"Am I missing something here? Why's a little girl like Miriami - a sentence I can't believe I'm actually using to describe her - being suspected of murdering giants? The smallest giant I've seen here has been, what, three times taller than she is!" Ranma protested, gesturing with his arms in a vain attempt to illustrate the difference in scale.

"One of the things everyone knows about fishmen is that their strength increases tenfold in the water, and that holds true for their halfblood children, too. As a wotan, my Miriam can wrestle all but the biggest giants if she can get them to fight her in the sea, even if they can overpower her on land," Agnetha explained patiently.

"Okay, that makes it more believable... and let me guess; everyone who's died was somebody she used to fight with, right?" Ranma suggested.

"Actually, only a few of them, which is why they haven't arrested my baby yet. But enough of them were to plant the seeds of doubt, and it's only a matter of time before public sentiment grows against her to the point I won't be able to keep her safe," Agnetha sighed mournfully, shaking her head.

"I'm guessing that loudmouth outside isn't exactly helping people think clearly, either?" Ukyo sarcastically observed.

Agnetha's lips tightened as she frowned. "Yes... Ahab Tempos is his name. A visitor from the old country - Elbaf. Came here trying to drum up interest in joining his pirate crew, launching a suicide mission on the World Government to rescue the Red and Blue Ogres. Hasn't worked yet, though - we're a peaceful people, and we know that the World Government is too strong to fight directly."

"Ogres? Those are a thing too?" Ryoga blurted out.

"Sorry - the Red and Blue Ogres are the nicknames of Dorry and Broggy, the co-captains of the Giant Warrior Pirates, an all-giant pirate crew who once terrorized the seas..."

"...I can imagine," Ranma replied weakly, trying to wrap his head around the carnage that a whole boatful of giant pirates could inflict. Then he shook his head. "Anyway, that's not important! The important thing is finding this murderer, and proving your daughter's innocence!"

Ranma and his companions all flinched as Agnetha suddenly bent in closer, her head looming over them like a small moon as hope visibly glittered in her eyes.

"If you can do that, then I promise you, I'll make sure you have the best workers on your new ship!" Agnetha vowed.

"It's a deal! C'mon, guys, let's get out there and catch us a murderer!" Ranma declared, waving his arm before leading the other teens down the stairs from Agnetha's desk and back out the door of the Rathaus.

Fortunately, the ranting giant from earlier, presumably Ahab, had moved on along with his crowd, leaving the Kamikaze Pirates alone in the street. The sun hung high above the giant buildings, casting shadows like small lakes of darkness from the perspective of the comparatively miniscule humans. Against this backdrop, Umok bobbed like a dot as he floated through the air to hover in front of Ranma.

"That was a very pretty speech you gave back there, Captain Saotome. Very noble. But how do you intend to go about finding this murderous miscreant?"

Ranma smiled and raised his hand, forefinger and thumb extended as if about to make a speech, only to trail off without saying a word. Ryoga, the imp and the girls watched him expectantly as he hummed and murmured to himself, before he finally adopted a sheepish expression and scratched the back of his head and confessed, "I... have no idea."

Ryoga groaned loudly in exasperation. "Some leader! And you were talking so big back there - I shoulda known you couldn't back it up!"

"Hey, it's not my fault! Back home, the bad guys usually came to me!" Ranma protested.

"Well, it looks like I will need to step up to the plate," Nabiki announced, smoothly, confidently, and more than a little smugly.

"You?" an incredulous Kodachi declared, eyebrow raised skeptically, even as Ukyo and Shampoo nodded in fellow feeling.

"Who else? I happen to be the expert on figuring out how people think," Nabiki replied in the same self-assured tone.

"Well, it can't hurt... what do you think we should do, Nabiki?" Ranma asked politely.

"The first thing I think we should do is find Miriam and talk to her," Nabiki declared.

"But we're trying to prove she's innocent! Why would we interrogate her?" Ukyo protested.

"Because she knows this island and we don't. She knows who was killed, where they were found, where they were likely to be killed - all the little details," Nabiki explained.

"Couldn't we have asked that stuff from her mom?" Ryoga pointed out.

"We probably could have... but somebody decided to be a big showoff and lead us out of there before we did," Nabiki teasingly agreed.

"It's the first time I've ever been involved in something like this!" Ranma protested.

"Aw, don't take it so hard, Ranchan, we know you're smart," Ukyo consoled him, gently placing her hand on his shoulder.

"Is probably more good we talk to fishgirl, anyway. Giants not likely want to talk to us, not with stupid Ahab," Shamoo observed.

"Okay, that's all well and good, but where do we even find her?" Ryoga interjected.

Now it was Nabiki's turn to look uncertain.

"I say we look for someplace to eat," Ranma suddenly interjected.

"You can't possibly be hungry already!" Ryoga protested.

"I'm not! But you saw her, right? Kind of chubby around the waist, muscley limbs? That's the kind of body you get when a person likes to eat, and can't quite keep ahead of it with their exercise. Trust me, if she's anywhere, she's probably where there's something to eat," Ranma declared authoritatively.

"That make sense to Shampoo," the Chinese Amazon confessed.

"Yeah, I follow the logic," Ukyo added.

"Then I suggest we defer to the expert here. Alright, Ranma; find us a place to eat," Nabiki ordered him.

Ranma smirked at her, and then glanced around at his surroundings. He even closed his eyes and sniffed the air, before suddenly pointing in one direction. Wordlessly, the crew set off, eager to track down Miriam and start their investigation for real.

It took over an hour before Ranma finally led them to a giant-scale restaurant which bore a sign proclaiming it to be "The Drunken Crab", but that was less due to a failing on his part and more due to the sheer scope of the village. Fashioned from harvested pieces of scuttled ships, the scent of meat and seafood being roasted, fried, grilled and boiled wafted from its doors and windows even in this subdued period, proving there was life inside.

The doors weren't built for humans... but they were so large that even a minute crack for giants made it possible for six teens and an imp to slip through. Inside, candles the size of ship masts and a roaring fire that could have swallowed a city block provided illumination from the gloom. Despite the subdued mood of Shay-Lot, the tavern was still fairly crowded - or at least so it seemed to the humans, who had to weave and scuttle through feet the size of rowboats. The sounds of giants talking, joking, and even laughing or singing in small, defiant clusters melded to form a susurrus that surrounded the Kamikaze Pirates to the point it canceled it out, like the eye of the proverbial storm.

Fortune continued to smile on them as they made their way through the crowds; in an out of the way corner, they stumbled across a table clearly made for a smaller clientele. It was probably normally used by giant children, but this day had been commandeered by Agnetha's daughter for lunch. And, judging by both the small mountain of food still on her table, and the way her previously soft stomach had visibly rounded out like a partially inflated balloon, she was treating lunch like a matter of life and death. As they approached, she stopped slurping up shovel-sized spoonfuls of some soupy substance from what looked like a repurposed bathtub to pick up a roast cow haunch, which she bit into like somebody taking a bite from a chicken drumstick... if that person were inclined to bite clean through meat and bone in one mouthful.

Nabiki winced at the hideous crunching. "Even for a half-giant, that's a bit much, don't you think?"

"She's very clearly a tiger shark!" Kodachi giggled merrily.

"Whatcha mean, Kodachi?" a confused Ranma interjected, looking away from the stunning display of gluttony, only to flinch at the sound of disintegrating bone.

"Tiger sharks are known as the garbage cans of the sea, Ranma darling. Though they have specialized to feed on sea turtles, with teeth designed to saw and crush through shells and bones, they are the most indiscriminate feeders of all sharks! All manner of flotsam and jetsam have been recovered from tiger shark stomachs; tin cans, old boots, license plates, even fur coats!"

At this point, all of the other teens were staring at Kodachi, who, in a rare display of embarrassment, blushed and sheepishly scratched her head. "...My father taught me that when I was younger. I learned much about the creatures native to the waters of Hawaii."

"Huh. Well, ol' Principal Coconuts can actually teach. Who knew?" Ranma remarked.

A particularly grisly crunching noise mingled with the sound of audible swallowing drew attention back to the gorging wotan, who was now swallowing her roast cow's foot - gristle, bone, hoof and all. The teens collectively winced at the sight as she gulped it down whole, clutching their own necks in sympathetic discomfort. As she picked up her shovel-spoon, Ranma shook his head and stepped forward.

"Ahoy there! Can we talk?" he called up to Miriam, who even seated at her table still towered over him.

The shark-woman stopped mid-spoon, looking confused. She instinctively glanced upwards before finally looking down at Ranma, who put on his most winning smile and waved in a friendly manner.

"Hiya! Remember us?"

"I seem to recall you throwing a spear at me, yes," she replied dryly, before grabbing a fistful of deep-fried clams and tossing them idly into her mouth.

Ranma blushed slightly and scratched the back of his head in embarrassment. "Heh, yeah, not my proudest moment... I'm Ranma Saotome, and you're Miriam, right? So, can we talk?"

Surprise visibly washed over Miriam's face, before she restyled her features into a suspicious glower. "...Why do you want to talk to me?"

"You're the only one around here who doesn't have her head in the clouds!" Ranma chirped brightly in response.

A bubble of awkward silence seemed to bloom into being around their little group. Ranma would swear later he could actually hear Nabiki's palm slapping against her forehead in exasperation, whilst all three of the other girls shook their heads and muttered their own variants on "Oh, Ranma..."

Miriam blinked. And then blinked again. Then her bottom lip began to tremble as a guttural noise bubbled up from deep inside of her. Then she burst out laughing. "That's a good one! You're right, they are a stuck up bunch! C'mon, sit down - just hop up on the table, it's big enough to hold you!"

Ranma smirked over his shoulder at the rest of his crew, before springing up onto the table. Miriam blinked in surprise at Ranma making such a leap, moments before the rest of his crew followed his lead.

"Let me introduce us! I'm Ranma Saotome, Captain of the Kamikaze Pirates! This is Ryoga, my First Mate; Kodachi, my Helmsman; Nabiki, my Quartermaster; Shampoo, my Doctor; Ukyo, my Cook; and that's Umok! ...We're not really sure what he does."

With each name, Ranma gestured to the crewmate in question, who acknowledged in their own distinct way.

"Pirates, eh? Well, you're not the first to land here, and you won't be the last," Miriam observed casually.

A stomach growled, causing the Kamikazes to glance at each other, wondering who it was, before Ranma nervously chuckled. "Ah... do you mind...?"

The tiger sharkgirl hesitated for a second, one hand slipping beneath the table to drum fingertips on her stomach, before she shrugged and smiled softly. "Eh, why not? I'm not really that hungry, I was just eating for comfort..."

"Things have been rough lately?" Ranma asked politely, even as he sat down on the tabletop in a position where he could both look Miriam in the face and grab at the food, with the rest of his motley crew simply sitting down and starting to tuck into the enormous bounty spread before them.

"Like you wouldn't believe..." Miriam grumbled.

"Yeah, we noticed that people here aren't exactly in a hurry to make friends... but I guess it was probably never that great a place to live," Ranma confessed.

"It wasn't always like this!" Miriam protested, hometown pride flashing a defiant fin. "I mean, yeah, it's never been easy being the town runt, but this used to be a friendly, happy place. Work hard, play hard, that was our motto..."

"Forgive my intrusion, but may I ask what you do on this island?" Kodachi interjected, before breaking open a boiled lobster and sucking out the tail meat.

"I'm a shipwright!" Miriam declared, with pride. "These big lummoxes may be dab hands at the heavy labor, but putting in all the smaller details? Nobody on this island can handle that without the use of special tools except me, and that means I can do it faster and better than anyone else."

"Sounds like you have a real skill," Ukyo observed, chewing on a smoked sausage.

"It keeps me busy, I guess," Miriam said, although her smile made it clear that she was pleased by Ukyo's apparent appreciation.

"So, why is everybody so on edge, anyway?" Ranma asked, stealing a bowlful of creamy clam chowder from the half-full bathtub.

Five heads turned towards Ranma in confusion at his question; after all, Agnetha had explained everything back at the Rathaus! Nabiki was about to speak up, when she realized Ranma was glancing her way and subtly shaking his head, whereupon she closed her mouth.

'Well, he's not as dumb as I used to think... I guess it can't hurt to wait and see where he's going with this...'

Failing to notice the silent interplay between the teenage pirates, Miriam devoured a grilled fish in two bites before sighing mournfully. "There's been murders..."

"Murders? That's really what's got everyone so spooked? I mean, no offense, but this place is kind of rough..." Ranma pointed out.

Miriam looked around at the tavern as if seeing it for the first time. The arm-wrestling matches, the shouting, the giant putting another giant in a headlock, the three teenage giantesses having a belching contest, the table where two giants were playing a game that seemed to revolve around trying to stab between their fingers as fast as possible without cutting themselves, and all the other raucousness.

"Okay, yes, we giants can be a little rowdy... but that's because we're tougher than humans! In all my life, you know how many deaths I've heard of? Three. One old guy who got sick, a kid who was dragged to their death by a sea king when wading off the beach, and a freak accident where a guy got drunk and fell off the highest peak. But in the last month, we've had six deaths, all by drowning! That's not normal!" The wotan insisted.

Ranma nodded sympathetically. "I see... and that's why they're suspecting you, huh? If giants drowned, it must be the girl who can breathe underwater who did it?"

"Pfft! Idiots. Some of those giants were my friends! I mean, okay, Rumar and I never got on, and I wouldn't give you a deepfried softshell crab sandwich for Binky, and I wouldn't have pissed on Klodivik if he was on fire... alright, yes, they were all jerks! But I didn't kill anybody!" Miriam insisted, slamming her fist into the table and making the Kamikazes all shake as the vibrations washed through them.

"Whoa! Well, that's what I hoped to hear! As it happens, I can't get anybody to work on my ship whilst everyone's cowering in their homes... so, you interested in finding the asshole who's really behind all this?" Ranma asked, a half-feral grin on his lips.

Miriam grinned savagely, only to then visibly hesitate, eyes narrowing in suspicion as she stared down at the pirate captain sitting in front of her. "...Wait a minute... why would you come to me for help?"

"Besides the fact you're the only person on the island willing to talk to us? If all the victims were drowned, then obviously they died on the beaches. Who would know the coasts and shores of this place better than you?" Ranma replied calmly.

The giant-blooded sharkgirl looked sincerely surprised at Ranma's reasoning, before nodding slowly and uncertainly. "Well... yeah.. that makes sense."

"Of course it does! Now, what can you tell us about the murders? I'm sure you have theories of your own..." Ranma pushed.

"...As a matter of fact, I do! Gimme a sec!"

As the teenaged pirates watched, Miriam pushed aside her clam chowder and began grabbing bits and pieces of food from the pile, which she arranged into a pattern in front of her.

"Let's say that this represents the island... and these are where all the bodies turned up..."

"The killer seems to have a fairly narrow range of killing grounds. You'd think they would have been easy to track," Kodachi observed, craning her neck to take in the makeshift map.

"That's the thing - there were no signs near any of the bodies that were found here," Miriam insisted, tapping a finger on the table.

"Wouldn't the pounding sea erase any footprints, or things like that?" Nabiki asked, inquisitively.

"For a human? Sure. But giants leave a much bigger impact, and two giants wrestling into a death-roll? Trust me, it'd take a full-blow hurricane to sweep the beach clean of that! It's why nobody's been caught; nobody can figure out how they hid all the tracks..."

"But you have a theory," Ukyo deduced.

Miriam beamed proudly. "I don't think they were killed here! I think they were killed elsewhere and then pushed into the sea, before the current washed them back up onto these beaches. That's why there was no evidence."

Murmurs of agreement rippled through her audience, who nodded along, before Nabiki asked what they were all thinking. "Where do you think they were actually killed?"

In response, Miriam leaned forward and tapped one specific point on her map. "Dagon's Colonnade. It's easy enough to get there, but nobody ever bothers. It's a great big patch of storm-polished black basalt; slick, treacherous, and partially submerged at high tide. If I wanted to have a good environment to be able to knock a giant over and drown them, this would be my choice... and the currents from here all flow down to the bays where the bodies were found..."

By this point, Ranma was unconsciously nodding sagely. "Yes, yes, that makes sense! How come you haven't told anyone else about this?"

Miriam wrinkled her nose disdainfully, baring her teeth. "Pah! I tried! They all just brushed me off - they still see me as a stupid little kid, largely because of how small I am. Even my mother just humored me and then ignored what I said..."

"Well, it sounds like a great argument to me. I say we should stake the place out! ...But when?" Ranma mused.

"Every murder victim was found after a specific tidal period, and tonight will be the first time the tides will be right since the last killing. If the pattern holds true, this would be the ideal night to strike," Miriam declared, tapping the table with one fingertip for emphasis as she spoke.

"Sounds like a plan! We'll head there at sundown - you want in?"

Miriam's previously lovely features twisted into a terrifying snarl, the combination of shark teeth and an all-too-human jawline creating a truly nightmarish visage. "This asshole's been hurting my community... I want my pound of flesh..."

"Whoa, whoa, hang on, Ranma! Shouldn't we talk to the authorities, get them involved?" Ryoga suddenly interjected, reaching out to grab his rival and technically captain's shoulder for emphasis.

"Since when do we get other people to solve our problems?" the incredulous Ranma replied, staring suspiciously at his childhood friend turned rival.

"Not to mention that I already told you none of the authorities around here take me seriously," Miriam grumbled.

"Hey, I don't like getting others involved in our stuff - I believe in sorting out our own problems!" Ryoga defensively shot back. "But you realize that on an island of giants, the murderer of giants is probably another giant? What are we supposed to do against a giant?!"

Ranma froze for a moment as Ryoga's words registered. 'Crap... he's gotta point... but I can't back down now, not after talking so big!'

The reluctant pirate captain put on his most convincing smile. "Ryoga, c'mon, man; you know as well as I do that bigger don't mean better! Yeah, these giants are tall, but we're strong, we're fast, we're agile, and we're a team! We can hit 'em hard from any angle, and chisel 'em down to size - plus, Miriam will be there to back us up!"

"You bet I will be!" the wotan declared, puffing out her already impressive chest and beaming proudly.

"Airen right! No matter how big you is, take out joints, hit pressure points, you down for count!" Shampoo chirped cheerfully.

"I for one have every confidence in our captain!" Kodachi added.

"I'm with you all the way, Ranchan!" Ukyo cheered, waving her heavily laden fork like a banner in her enthusiasm and nearly dropping a sausage down her shirt.

Ryoga still looked hesitant at best, but sighed and slowly nodded. "Alright, you do have a history for pulling wins out of nowhere... besides, it's not like this'd be the first giant monster we fought together..."

"Besides, worst comes to the worst, Ranma can just dig out the Ultimate Anything-Goes Technique!" Nabiki chimed in, before cracking open a steamed lobster.

"What, you mean run away and think of a better strategy?" Ryoga scoffed.

"Hey, it worked on you, bacon-breath!" Ranma defensively snapped.

"That's the Saotome School Final Attack. I said the Ultimate Anything-Goes Technique," Nabiki chided them both, before dipping her lobster into a nearby bucket of butter.

The rest of the Kamikazes blinked in unison, before turning as one to their captain with matching inquisitive expressions.

"...I don't know what she's talking about either," Ranma reluctantly confessed.

"Don't play coy," Nabiki playfully teased her captain, waving a finger in feigned disapproval. "The technique that turns you into a giant! Remember? Our daddies and grandfather Happosai all used it during that silly little business with the monsters that came out of those cursed wall scrolls!"

"Oh, /that/ move!" Ranma replied in recognition, mouth moving faster than his brain once again. He paled and tensed up, but his would-be fiancees were staring at him with awe-filled expressions, whilst Ryoga looked stunned but indignant.

"Y-You can really do that?" an incredulous Miriam asked, breaking the silence that had formed.

"Eh... yes?" Ranma hesitantly replied, refusing to look any of them in the eye and nervously poking his index fingers together. Then he grunted as a sudden sharp blow between his shoulderblades drove the wind from his lungs and nearly knocked him face-first into the table. He rolled with the blow and twisted around, only to realize that the beaming Miriam had just given him the equivalent of a friendly slap on the back.

"Then this'll be a piece of crabcake! C'mon, eat up; when we're done here, I'll just swing by home to grab something, and then I'll show you to the Columnade!"

That said, she grabbed the bathtub of clam chowder and lifted it to her mouth, chugging away at the contents with great, satisfied swallows. With the plan self-evidently decided upon, the Kamikazes fell back on the rest of the table's bounty with a vengeance; it'd been quite some time since breakfast, after all.

In fact, Ranma was so engrossed with a grilled fish that he didn't realized Nabiki had snuck closer until she touched his arm gently, almost making him inhale a bone in surprise.

"I have to admit, Saotome, I'm impressed," she murmured to him.

"Well, obviously, I couldn't tell her we were here because of her mom - she'd never open up to us!" he half-whispered back.

---

Dusk...

---

Dagon's Colonnade was a fantastical vision, even given some of the sights that the Kamikazes had seen since arriving in the Grand Line. Huge hexagonal columns of black basalt emerged from the side of the island and stretched out into the sea, dropping below the waves save for isolated rows that flanked the sides of the way like pillars. It really did look like a half-completed ornamental processionway constructed by giants, descending from the island's shore into the deep - even with the tide as low as it currently was, the basalt pillars continued to plunge into the waters beyond the coastline, as if made to let something advance down into the depths of the ocean... or rise up therefrom.

Such a cyclopean vista left plenty of hiding places for human-sized creatures, and so the Kamikazes had easily concealed themselves in what would have been, to giants, minor cracks and crannies.

That just left the one inescapable foe of any who have ever been called to perform the arduous duty of a stakeout... boredom.

"...It never takes this long on Detective Conan," Ukyo muttered, doublechecking the sharpness on her battle spatula with her thumb.

"I didn't know you watched that show," Nabiki observed from where she was hunkering down with her.

"Well, I preferred Gundam," the former crossdresser confessed.

The thunderous noise of gargantuan footfalls on basalt echoing through the dark ended their brief moment of unexpected bonding, and the two girls tensed up in anticipation; Ukyo preparing to attack, Nabiki to stay hidden.

The moon was high and full, and to the heightened senses of the martial artists, the two giants stood out like they were wrapped in bells and neon lights. They recognized one of them as Ahab, the ranting giant from earlier that day; the glow of the moon on his face made his missing eye and the hideous scars surrounding it stand out like a beacon. The other giant was... well, nobody they recognized, for obvious reasons. He seemed to be young, with no visible scars and only a stubble of crimson fuzz on his cheeks. He still stood head and shoulders over his companion, but unlike Ahab, he was visibly nervous, glancing conspiratorially over his shoulders.

"Is it only you?" Ahab asked, his tone conversational, even slightly sorrowful.

"Yeah... only me. Some of the other guys were thinking about coming... but they ain't quite sure of it yet," the second giant replied, scratching the back of his head with treetrunk-sized fingers.

"A pity... you, obviously, heard the wisdom of my words," Ahab stated.

"Well, yeah! They make so much sense... the Giant Warrior Pirates are still legends to this day! Why shouldn't we follow in their footsteps?" the other giant retorted.

"Why, indeed? The problem is that so many giants lack faith... but that can be rectified. Sadly, it will require certain sacrifices..."

With uncanny speed, Ahab suddenly punched his companion squarely in the nearest kidney. Even as the bigger giant folded over, Ahab was moving with ruthless precision. The Kamikazes, being connoisseurs of the arts of grappling, could only marvel at the ease with which Ahab pounded on various joints and nerve clusters, rendering his former companion unable to fight back as the one-eyed giant wrapped them in a headlock and dragged them to the water's edge. There, he forced them to their knees and began shoving their head into the water.

"Thank you for your sacrifice to the cause," Ahab declared, smooth and calm and sincere as he did.

"Get him!" Ranma's voice roared out from his hiding spot.

A ship's anchor suddenly exploded out of the water just shy of where Ahab was attempting to drown his victim, wrapping itself around Ahab's neck and snapping taut. The effect was rather similar to having a fishing line wrapped around a person's neck, the hook digging deep into the skin of the throat; not a deadly blow, but painful and startling to say the least.

Ahab let out a wordless bellow as he was bodily dragged sideways from his victim, forcing him to release the second giant. He clutched at the chain, only for a second anchor to come hurtling out of the deep and wrap around one of his wrists, bodily yanking it away from his neck and leaving him roaring in frustration.

The giant that Ahab had been trying to murder yanked his head from the water, coughing desperately for breath and vomiting brine back into the deep. As quickly as he could, he scrambled away on his hands and knees, stumbling to his feet and racing away up the colonnade as fast as he could, clearly having no stomach to stay and fight.

"Vermin! You'll ruin everything!" Ahab roared, yanking with all his might, dragging his tormentor - Miriam, clearly fighting with all her might to restrain him even in so limited a fashion - to the surface of the sea, where her feet and tail thrashed up a miniature tsunami as she wrestled with the far larger giant.

"Don't forget about us!" Ranma cried, as he led the Kamikazes in their charge from their hidey-holes. He bounded across the basalt expanse and delivered a massive blow to Ahab's ankle, eliciting a roar of pain from the giant.

The rest of the Kamikaze Pirates followed in his footsteps. Ryoga took his iron-bound umbrella in both hands and swung it into Ahab's other ankle with all his might, bone audible cracking from the impact. Kodachi and Ukyo slashed at Ahab's tendons with their blades, whilst Shampoo took on her hybrid form and literally clawed her way up his thigh, slashing and gouging as deeply as she could as she climbed for his knee and the vulnerable joint beneath.

Nabiki, meanwhile, stayed exactly where she had been from the start; she knew she had no place on this battlefield!

Ahab screamed in pain and fury, the sudden cacophony deafening them all. As they tried frantically to regain their scrambled senses, he grabbed at the chain wrapped around his wrist with his free hand, transferring his grip to two hands before yanking with all his might. Caught off-guard by the bigger, stronger giant, Miriam was torn from the waves and pulled bodily into the air, where Ahab spun her around his head like a toy before slamming her into the ground.

Basalt cracked like broken glass, slivers of razor-sharp volcanic rock flying as a crater formed underneath her spine. Droplets of blood flew out of the wotan's mouth, raining down on her cheek as she went limp, her grip slackening on the chains that linked to the anchors wrapped around Ahab's body.

Bellowing in triumph, Ahab stomped and kicked blindly, sending the Kamikazes scrambling to get away.

"Maggots! Worms! Runts! You can't imagine what you've just cost me!" the giant bellowed.

"Not really! What kind of genius plan is it to drown the people who decided to listen to you?" Ranma roared back, leaping away as Ahab tried to step on him.

"A necessary sacrifice! These fools need somebody to light the fires in their hearts, and only blood would do! They were necessary sacrifices to the cause!" Ahab ranted, stooping to try and swat Shampoo as if she were a mosquito, only to yank his hand back with a cry of pain as she raked her claws as deep as she could across the length of his finger.

"How did the giants here fail to realize you were to blame? You're nuts!" Ryoga snarled, smashing his umbrella into Ahab's ankle yet again, desperate to try and break something to bring the giant down.

With a furious bellow, the giant slammed his hands together, the air pressure striking the collected pirates like the shockwave from a bomb and sending them tumbling across the basalt.

"Weeks of work, ruined! I'll have to start all over again! But first I'll take care of you!" Ahab spat, raising a foot purposefully into the air over the still-stunned Ukyo.

Ranma froze, the icy fingers of terror racing up and down his spine... before a roiling wave of pure fury melted them like snowflakes in a furnace. Thought fell away like petals in the wind as pure instinct moved him...

"DON'T YOU HURT MY UCCHAN!"

Ahab stopped in mid-stomp, eyes growing wide as a new giant sprang from thin air in front of him... or, at least, the semblance of a giant. Standing before him was a monstrous phantasm; a spectral mass of greenish-blue hellfire that suggested more the shape of a giant than anything solid, flicking like a bad projection, the faintest hints of its surroundings visible through its quasi-flesh. It was formless, featureless, save for two blank white eyes that burned with hate, and a black abyss of a mouth that gaped like a wound where its face should be.

"D-Draugr!" Ahab hissed in shock, dumbfounded at the sight of an apparent legend sprung to life.

This left him completely defenseless as a fist the size of a bus slammed squarely into his face, crushing his nose flat with its all-too-real weight. Having been caught still standing on one leg, Ahab hadn't a hope of holding his balance, and he toppled clean over backwards, striking the ground with a thunderous crash of slamming meat and shattering basalt.

Thus, only the Kamikazes and the newly conscious Miriam were present to see the phantasmal giant gutter out of existence like a candle flame, leaving only Ranma standing where it had once loomed. Silently, Ranma's eyes rolled up in his head and he fell face-first to the ground.

The tableau was silent for a good minute, the only sounds to be heard were the whistling of the wind and the lapping of the waves.

Unsurprisingly, Ukyo broke the spell first.

"Ra-Ranchan!" the bug-eyed crossdresser screamed, scrambling to her feet and racing across the slick stones to get to her boyfriend. Her actions prompted a full-on charge as the rest of the Kamikazes flocked around their fallen captain, with even Nabiki slithering out from her rocky crevice to check in on him.

Ignored by her allies, Miriam painfully heaved herself out of her crater, retrieved her weaponized anchors, and limped over to see what was going on.

"Is he dead? Please, he can't be dead!" Kodachi sobbed.

"Of course he's alive! Ranma can't die until I kill him!" Ryoga thundered.

"Will you all shut up and let Shampoo work?!" the exasperated zoan screamed at them. Once she had cowed them into silence, she resumed examining Ranma, before sighing in relief. "Airen alive! He just exhaust all his ki..."

"So... is that serious?" Nabiki verbally prodded the Chinese Amazon.

"It just mean Airen tired. Really tired. Sleep for long time, but be fine when wake up," Shampoo assured her, smiling in blatant relief at the thought.

The other teenagers all visibly relaxed at her words, each expressing their relief in their own ways.

"I can't believe you were telling the truth about that technique," an awestruck Miriam interjected, staring down at the fallen pirate captain with a newfound respect.

"I can't believe he managed to pull it off so well on his first try!" Nabiki quipped in response.

"...What?" the dumbfounded wotan replied.

"Ranma's never used that move before, as far as I know. I don't think he was ever trained in it, either; all he's done is seen our fathers and the old pervert use it," Nabiki explained to her shocked audience.

"...Talk about die or fly!" Miriam muttered.

"Speaking personally, I'm glad Ranchan is so amazing!" Ukyo interjected.

The happy mood was suddenly snuffed out as an unholy low note reverberated through the air, making their bones tremble. Whipping around towards the source, they saw that Ahab was slowly sitting back up, his movements sluggish and uncoordinated, moving with the ill-ease of the punch-drunk. He spat, and blood rained down onto the ground beneath him, along with three teeth the size of two-year-olds that tumbled through the air before bouncing almost musically off of the basalt.

"N-No way!" Nabiki whimpered.

"How's that possible?!" Ukyo demanded furiously.

"Giants are tough... your captain got him good, but there was no way he was going to be beaten with one punch!" Miriam declared, clutching her anchors and raising them in anticipation of a strike.

Ryoga glanced from the giant currently lurching to his feet to his long-time rival, and grimaced bitterly.

"Okay; Kodachi, Nabiki, Ukyo, you take Ranma and go hide! Shampoo, Miriam, you're with me - we'll stop that big bastard!"

"No need to tell me twice!" Miriam chuckled grimly, leering toothily at her foe.

"Just try and stop Shampoo!" spat the zoan, extending all of her claws in anticipation.

As the weaker members of the crew ran for shelter, its most powerful fighters held the line as Ahab took a thunderous step towards them, the slow, purposeful, ground-shaking stride clearly as much for intimidation as from a lingering concussion.

"Don't know what kind of filthy Devil Fruit trick that was, but you miserable little bugs are gonna pay... gonna grind yer bones..."

Even as he grit this out, Ahab reached for a particularly narrow spar of basalt, wrenching on it with all his might. With a gritty, glassy screech, it snapped away from its base, allowing him to heft the comparatively small shaft of stone like a club.

"Big tough guy! What, your bare hands not enough for us?" Miriam jeered.

"Treacherous little runt!" Ahab roared, swinging his stone club in an overhead arc at Miriam's head.

The wotan brought up her anchors and caught the basalt-backed blow squarely on their tines, the clash of stone on steel ringing out like a bell in the night. Again and again Ahab hammered at her, but she held her ground, gritting her teeth and blocking each blow.

"You betray your mother's blood siding with these weaklings!" Ahab thundered.

"Big talk coming from a stinking murderer!" Miriam spat back, ducking forward and slashing with her anchors. Unlike normal anchors, the arms and flukes had been painstakingly sharpened, allowing them to be used as something in between a two-sided war-pick and a double-headed axe. Though Ahab was easily three times Miriam's height, that didn't make him invincible, and he hastily blocked the wotan's strike as she attempted to gouge open his thigh.

"It was for the greater good! If the Giant Warrior Pirates are to rise again, we will need an army of giants to free Dorry and Broggy!" Ahab howled, making a two-handed swing at his smaller opponent's head.

"What possible connection could that have to what you've been doing?!" an incredulous Miriam spat back, even as she narrowly dodged the attack.

"Everything! The Giant Warrior Pirates ruled the seas, until the World Government captured them through base treachery! Oimo and Kashi have spent fifty years guarding the gates of Eines Lobby in hopes of winning them their freedom, but you can't trust humans to keep their word! Once the giants of this island had been properly roused to remember their fighting spirit, I would have led them to raid Impel Down and free Dorry and Broggy! Under their leadership, the giant race would have overthrown the World Government, and we would take our rightful place as rulers of this world!" Ahab ranted, waving his club around like a king's scepter.

Miriam just stared at him in disbelief. "...You're even crazier than I thought! I heard the stories of the Giant Warrior Pirates growing up too, and you're far too young to be one of their ranks! Why, if you're more than hundred and ten years old, I'll eat my best bikini!"

Ahab stopped dead, staring at her with wide, mad eyes. His whole body trembled in fury before he threw back his head and screamed in rage.

"It's not my fault! I didn't ask to be too young to travel with them! I would have gone if they'd let me!"

Miriam had only a moment to take in the way Ahab's eyes had gone blood red and foam was dribbling from his jaws before he charged at her with renewed vigor, pounding on her desperately blocking anchors like a crazed bellringer, trying to overwhelm her through sheer brute force and doing a pretty good job of pushing her back.

Ignored by the two giants up until this point, Ryoga and Shampoo watched the fight.

"Great... so, how are we supposed to win this?" Ryoga grumbled.

"Drop Perfect Shishi Hokodan on stupid killer's head?" Shampoo suggested.

"No good, he'd shake me off before I even launched the attack, never mind hitting him with it afterwards," Ryoga sighed, shaking his own head at the thought.

Shampoo pouted, then looked thoughtful, tapping her index finger against her bottom lip for a few moments before brightening up. "Shampoo have idea!"

"What? What is it!?" Ryoga demanded, only to start as Shampoo suddenly shifted into full cabbit form and leapt into his arms. He was so surprised he almost fumbled the catch, then stared incredulously down at the Amazon zoan.

"Get Miriam to throw you over stupid giant's head! High as she can do!" the cabbit zoan ordered him.

"What kind of plan is this?!" Ryoga demanded. He didn't get an answer, though, as Miriam suddenly crashed down onto her back next to him. "Oh, fine, not like we have much of a choice..."

The wotan moaned painfully, reaching up to gingerly touch her lower jaw, which had been partially dislocated by the basalt club she'd just taken to the face. With a nauseating squelch-pop, she snapped it back into place, clicking her teeth experimentally to check it was back in alignment.

"Thank the gods for fishman anatomy," she mumbled to herself.

"Hey, Miriam! We got a plan!" Ryoga shouted at her, drawing her attention to him.

"Well, can't be any worse than what we've had..." she mumbled.

"Throw me over his head! High as you can get!" Ryoga ordered her.

"...What?" the incredulous wotan replied simply.

"No time, just do it!" Ryoga barked.

"Then hold stupid giant still!" Shampoo squeaked up from where Ryoga had tucked her under his arm like a football.

Miriam looked at them both as if they'd lost their minds, but the thunderous footfall of Ahab storming towards her robbed her of any chance to argue. She hurled herself upright and snatched Ryoga off of the ground, before whipping around and flinging him high into the air, sending him shooting bare inches past Ahab's startled face.

The giant looked down at the wotan with naked incredulity, his shock momentarily bypassing his rage. "...You tried to hit me. With a human. Just what the hell was that supposed to achieve?!"

"Hell if I know," Miriam admitted, before slamming both her anchors onto Ahab's foot, the sharpened points of the flukes piercing through the top of his boots and skewering the vulnerable flesh beneath.

Ahab roared in agony, instinctively cradling his injured appendage and hopping up and down in pain, blinded to the outside world.

Meanwhile, high over even Ahab's head, Ryoga turned a sour look to his companion. "Okay, now what?!"

"Throw Shampoo at giant's head! Aim for temple! Shampoo get this idea from when Ranma take down Pantyhose Taro!" the cabbit barked at him. Then she squeaked as Ryoga raised her overhead.

"Here goes nothing!" Ryoga shouted, before launching the cabbit at Ahab's head in a manner that would have seen him snapped up by any rugby coach worth their salt.

Squealing in a mixture of defiance and terror, Shampoo whistled through the air like a ballistic bunny bullet, the wind whipping through her ears and tugging at her cheeks. Still blind to anything other than his maimed foot, Ahab was a sitting duck as Shampoo aimed herself for what she knew to be the thinnest part of the skull. Tumbling over herself, she snapped from beast form to hybrid form, drawing up her legs as tightly as she could. Right as she was about to slam into Ahab's skull, she lashed out, kicking with every ounce of strength her Devil Fruit-augmented Chinese Amazon body could muster.

Her oversized hind paws slammed into Ahab's temple with steel-rending force, the impact generating a visible shockwave. Enough concussive force to cave in a Navy battleship's hull slammed through the weakest point on the giant's skull and bounced around the interior, ricocheting off of Ahab's brain with deep bruising force. Giants were tough... but they weren't indestructible. Ahab's eyes rolled up in his head and he gargled as the concussion slammed on every single mental shut-off switch he had. He toppled over bonelessly to the side, hitting the ground hard enough to make it shake, out cold even before he struck the ground.

Of course, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Shampoo's megaton kick had the inevitable consequence of launching her off of Ahab's skull, forcing her to somersault through the air like a mad monkey to bleed off her excess momentum... and she still botched the landing, taking a humiliating tumble across the basalt. Luckily, she smacked into another faux-pillar hard enough to smash it to pieces, which arrested her roll before she could end up plunging into the sea. Rubble groaned and grit together as she painfully shoved her way back to the surface, groaning gingerly at the battering she'd taken.

"What am I supposed to do?!" Ryoga howled in protest as he plunged back towards the earth... only to find himself hitting not the hard, cruel embrace of the earth, but the much softer and more welcoming embrace of Miriam's arms as the wotan caught the plummeting martial artist before he hit the ground.

"...Um... thanks?" Ryoga meekly replied, his usual shyness around attractive women picking that moment to resurface once he realized he was alive.

"Happy to help! Wow, you two really did it - I can't believe it!" Miriam cheerfully declared.

"Are you sure he's done?" Ryoga declared suspiciously, attention immediately snapping back to Ahab.

In reply, Miriam strolled back over to the prone giant, letting Ryoga get a better view of the way his eyes had rolled up in their sockets and his tongue was hanging limply from his mouth.

"I'm quite sure..." Miriam cheerfully declared, even as she swung Ryoga back down to earth.

"Hope he have grandfather-sized headache when he wake up," Shampoo spat as she limped back over to join them.

"Now we just gotta find the others-" Ryoga began.

"We're right here! You didn't really think we'd leave you to face that monster all alone?" Ukyo cried, interrupting Ryoga before he'd even really begun.

As Ryoga, Shampoo and Miriam turned, Ukyo and Kodachi bustled over to join them, with Nabiki peeking out from behind a surprisingly close bastion of basalt. Upon getting a glimpse of the unconscious giant, Ukyo let out a low whistle.

"Wow, you two really took care of him!"

Kodachi giggled. "Doubtlessly, the blow my darling Ranma delivered him left him vulnerable for their follow-up strike."

"Hey, this guy was a monster - Shampoo and Ryoga did real good to take him down, even if Ranchan helped," Ukyo chided her.

"Shampoo just glad it all over," the zoan sighed.

Suddenly, the earth began to shake underfoot, a thundering cacophony filling the air. The Kamikaze Pirates toppled like dominos, and even Miriam found herself struggling to stay upright.

"Earthquake!" Nabiki shrieked in panic.

Clutching her anchors by their shafts like the world's oddest double-head axes, Miriam suddenly went pale... well, as pale as was physically possible for someone with her complexion.

"No, worse!" she moaned.

"What could be worse than this?!" Ryoga demanded.

"MIRIAM CTHYLLA RANSDOTTIR!"

"...My mother," squeaked the wotan, as a dozen angry giants came storming down the basalt field, led by a very angry-looking Agnetha, waving the biggest battle-axe that any of the Kamikaze Pirates had ever seen...

---

Some time later...

---

A novelist with the penchant for the dramatic would have waxed poetic about how Ranma and pain were old friends, and that waking up to find himself still-tired and aching was nothing new to the wandering martial artist turned reluctant pirate captain. Ranma, on the other hand, was not particularly poetic, so he just rolled with the way he felt like Ryoga and Akane had been tenderizing him in tandem as he groggily opened his eyes and peered all around.

"D-did we get'im?" he croaked.

"Airen!"

Ranma promptly found his view of the outside world replaced with an up close and personal view of the inside of Shampoo's cleavage. Which, all things considered, was not necessarily an unpleasant view, but one had to have certain priorities.

"Yo, Shampoo... mind letting me up?" He mumbled, too tired to be properly panicked.

Thankfully, the exuberant Chinese Amazon deigned to listen to him, and Ranma found himself freed of her glomp. Which made him a sitting target as the rest of his crew poured in, with both Kodachi and Ukyo throwing themselves around him in passionate embraces.

"Ranma-darling! I was so worried!" Kodachi sobbed.

"You scared the hell out of us, Ranchan!" Ukyo blubbered, face buried into Ranma's shoulders.

"What was I supposed to do, let him squash you!?" Ranma protested feebly.

"Always have to be the big flashy hero, don't you, Saotome?" Ryoga chimed in from where he was leaning against the door.

"Hey, sometimes you have to just go with your gut... I mean, what was the worst that could have happened?" Ranma shot back.

"Airen burst like overfed tick," Shampoo coldly assessed.

That little comment killed the mood pretty quickly, with the rest of the Kamikazes all looking at Shampoo with varying degrees of horror. Ranma tried to speak, but found words like "You're joking" or "are you serious" just wouldn't form on his tongue. Instead, he finally replied...

"Okay... putting that in the 'things not to try again without major practice first' box..."

"Do you even know how to practice that move?" Nabiki asked.

Ranma shrugged haplessly in response. "So, anyway, I guess that neatly explains why I still feel like crap..."

"Airen recover much, much faster now. Burn out entirety of ki reserve - like engine with not even fumes left. Now you back to baseline level, it come back quick. Airen lucky it only take better part of week to do so," Shampoo declared.

Ranma gawped at her, prompting Nabiki to giggle.

"Turns out we didn't just declare her the ship's nurse to make her feel better," the middle Tendo declared, making no effort to hide her amusement.

"Is true! Now, airen need eats - Kodachi, Ukyo, bring food! We feed airen, then be off; have much to show! We get much-much done this week!" Shampoo ordered, clapping her hands authoritatively. It said something when Kodachi and Ukyo, rather than arguing, immediately jumped to obey her.

They soon returned bearing a table groaning with a bounty of simple, hearty foods, at which point Ranma's stomach could have been mistaken for a rather cranky grizzly bear. He fell upon the food happily, held back only by his experience with starvation and the knowledge that glutting too fast in his weakened condition would just make him sick. Not that Kodachi, Ukyo or Shampoo were complaining about the chance to feed him, after all!

Once Ranma had eaten all he could hold, he found himself shuffled into a chair and carried from his bedroom - over his protests, mind, as he insisted he was perfectly capable of walking. Neither Ukyo nor Shampoo would be swayed, and so Ranma was forced to sit in his seat and endure it as they carried him out of the Rathaus and into the streets of Shay-Lot.

Such a difference in the community now! The streets were alive with giants merrily bustling back and forth, filling the air with casual conversation. Wherever they spotted Ranma and his entourage, joyous greetings and declarations of gratitude boomed like thunderclaps, news of Ranma's deeds in uncovering the killer who had stalked their streets having spread like wildfire during his convalescence.

"Whatever did happen to that nut, Ahab, anyway?" Ranma asked.

"He's been locked up... evidently, they're still trying to decide what to do with him," Nabiki replied. Glancing ahead, she smiled. "Ah, here we are!"

Ranma looked ahead and realized that his motley crew had brought him to the port. In fact, they'd brought him to a very specific ship, but Ranma didn't have the opportunity to focus on that, as he instead found himself walking into an argument...

"Unacceptable! You giants have really crossed the line this time! You devote the past week to working for this pirate, but refuse to aid a representative of the Navy and the World Government!?" Captain Malibu screamed, shaking his fist in impotent fury.

"That pirate had been on our island no longer than a few hours before he risked his life and the lives of his crew to help us, whereas you had been here for over a week and refused to give us even the slightest aid," Agnetha declared, before bending over to bring her enormous face closer to the Navy captain, looming over him.

"You'll get your ship when it's good and ready. Now get out of my sight," she growled.

The Navy official looked ready to scream his defiance, even in the face of... well, Agnetha, but despite going almost purple with rage, his sanity evidently won out as he turned and stormed off... right in the direction of the Kamikazes.

"You!" he hissed, glaring right into Ranma's eye.

"Me!" Ranma cheerfully quipped back, having been glared at by far scarier people in his day. "Since you're going to go crying back to whoever, I'll tell you this; you idiots used to call us the Dirty Coward Pirates back in the East Blue. That better stop, hear?"

Captain Malibu's upper lip curled in disgust, but he visibly gritted his teeth and stormed off without a further word.

"It's good to see you up, Captain Saotome!" Agnetha's joyous voice boomed like if a thunderstorm could sound happy.

"It's good to be up!" Ranma called back. "Uh, I'm sorry about the Navy..."

"Bah, not even enough to stir our sails! You more than earned our thanks for what you did! ...Speaking of which... what do you think of your new ship?" Agnetha asked, beaming with pride.

"Sh-ship!?" a startled Ranma unthinkingly blurted out,. His gaze shot from the giant to his crew, who were variously beaming with delight or smirking with amusement at his surprise, before moving on to the ship they were standing beside.

Half-again as large as the late Milka had been, this new vessel was sleek and fast-looking, whereas the Milka had been a tub devoted to raw cargo space over everything. Even to Ranma, who still could have fit everything he knew about boats on his palms, it looked well-made and ready for action. At its prow, a figurehead loomed; a rearing stallion with four finned forehooves, the hindquarters of a shark, and sharp deer-like antlers.

Seeing where Ranma was looking, Kodachi coughed in feigned humility. "Just a personal interpretation of Sleipnir as hippocampus..."

"Hippo-whatsit?" was Ranma's oh-so-articulate reply.

"A yokai from Greek mythology, with the forequarters of a horse, and the hindquarters of a fish," Kodachi merrily instructed him. "It was a... compromise after some rather... heated conversations..."

"You guys were busy while I was out cold, huh?" Ranma observed, unable to hold back an amused smile as he did.

"Indeed, your quartermaster and helmsman were most instrumental in directing our attentions," Agnetha chuckled. "But the exterior can only tell you so much! Go on, take a look inside!"

"Sounds good to me... but no more chair!" Ranma snapped this part at his crew.

"Airen should be recovered enough to walk self now," Shampo conceded, whereupon Ranma immediately leapt out of his chair, stubbornly ignored the way his treacherous legs tried to buckle underneath him, and began marching up the gangplank.

Truthfully, there wasn't /that/ much different between this new ship and the old. After all, a ship was largely a ship, regardless of the hull design. But that didn't mean there weren't a few noteworthy additions...

"We have a bathroom now?!" Ranma howled in delight.

"Yep! Even Nabiki was willing to trade the cargo space for the plumbing and boiler. No more scrubbing off with a bucket of saltwater on the deck!" Ukyo cheered in glee.

"It's still not big enough for us all to have our own individual baths," Nabiki pointed out.

"To hell with it; if it means hot water, I don't mind sharing!" Ranma blurted out, too caught up in his joy at never having to undergo another of their former "bathdays" to think about what he was saying.

Kodachi, Ukyo and Shampoo, on the other hand, were not so oblivious, as their mutual dreamy expressions and red cheeks suggested.

After a few moments, Kodachi coughed pointedly. "But there's one more special room we should check out, and it lies deeper in the hold..."

"Well, what are we waiting for?" Ranma flippantly asked, before following Kodachi as she led them out of the bathroom and to the last part of her little tour.

The room she led them to wasn't actually all that impressive. It consisted of an empty space, save for a large central plinth, capped by a horizontally-aligned wheel and an array of gears that fed down into the floor. It was hard to even see that at first, because Miriam was bent over the plinth, murmuring inaudibly to herself as she worked away with strange-looking tools.

"Miriam! What are you doing here?" Ranma called cheerfully.

"My job! Who do you think handled all the little details on this project?" the wotan replied cheerfully, without even looking back at Ranma. She adjusted something with a metallic clink, spun the wheel with one twist of her powerful arms, nodded and then stood upright - which was when Ranma finally realized something that had been bugging him. His new ship had been built with rooms high enough that Miriam could move about with relative ease, not even having to stoop here in the hold.

Miriam turned to face them, a toothy grin on her face. "All done! I still don't understand what this contraption of yours is supposed to do, Miss Kodachi, but it'll work as you ordered."

Kodachi burst out laughing in delight. "Excellent work, Miriam, you've truly exceeded my expectations! It's only a pity that my understanding of steam mechanics is lacking!"

"What are you talking about, Kodachi?" Ranma asked.

"To put it simply, my darling, we stand at the heart of a primitive engine room! By having some of our more physically inclined crew turning that wheel, it will provide motive power to a set of water screws installed near the keel... in short? It's a hand-cranked outboard engine - we no longer need to depend on the wind to sail!" she cackled.

Understanding washed over Ranma, who looked at the plinth with renewed interest. "Wow, Kodachi, how'd you come up with that?"

Kodachi's smile turned brittle and she coughed. "Well... I must confess that some of the...finer details were in fact provided by Umok..."

Blinking, Ranma turned his attention to the ever-present imp. "You?"

"I may not be a gear-smith or mechanist, but I have some passing interest in such topics," the little wizard coyly replied.

"Well, whatever! Who knows when that'll come in handy? You guys did an awesome job getting this ship all figured out - and your people did an even more awesome job in building it, Miriam," Ranma gushed, eliciting beams of pride and joy all around.

"Now all that we need do is address the last issue before we can set sail for our next destination!" Kodachi cheered.

"Last issue? Huh?" Ranma replied, looking in confusion at the Kuno heiress.

"Why, naming our new vessel, of course! As captain, you of course have final say... but, personally... I rather like the name 'Stormbringer'. What title would be more fitting for the conveyance of the Pirates of the Divine Wind?" Kodachi chirped, grinning one of her more manic grins.

"Stormbringer...?" Ranma rolled the syllables around his tongue, tasting how they felt, before glancing at the rest of his crew.

"Meh, I don't care. Be hard to be worse than calling it 'Milka'," Ryoga scoffed.

"Personally, I think it's rather melodramatic, but I suppose that's not a bad quality in a pirate vessel," Nabiki quipped.

"I... actually, I like the name. It's punchy," Ukyo confessed.

"Shampoo agree, Shampoo like that name too."

"Then Stormbringer it shall be!" Ranma declared, grinning. "How long before we can set sail again?"

Miriam feigned a cough. "I'm sorry, but there's one other thing we need to discuss before you leave..."

Ranma stared blankly up at her, before directing an incredulous look at Nabiki and Kodachi. "You seriously forgot to pay her?"

"Ranma darling, how could you think that?!" a wounded Kodachi sobbed, placing a hand over her heart.

"We paid her mother before the work even began!" Nabiki added, somewhat bitterly.

The wotan coughed again, drawing attention back her way. "It's not about the money... I... um... I was wondering..."

"...Yeah?"

Miriam closed her eyes and inhaled through her nose, visibly steeling herself before her eyes snapped open and she passionately proclaimed, "I want to join your crew!"

Ranma stared at her as if dumbstruck. "...What?"

"I-I've been thinking about leaving the island for a couple of years now. I'm not the only kid on the island, but... I just need to leave, okay? I want to explore, I want to see the rest of the world! I don't want to stay here all my life! You're the first pirates I've ever seen who actually seemed to be decent people, so... can I come with you guys?"

Ranma stared up at her like a deer caught in the headlights. "Uh... gimme a sec?" he pleaded. Then, before she could answer, he had drawn his friends (for lack of a better term) from Nerima into a huddle. Oh, and Umok too.

"Okay, I have no idea where this is coming from!" he hissed.

"Sheesh, Ranma, take a chill pill - she just said she's been thinking of doing this for years!" Ryoga shot back.

"Why Ranma so nervous? We is being mighty pirate crew; people will be wanting to join us!" Shampoo pointed out.

"Honestly, I think it's quite flattering. And, to be frank, I think the poor dear would blossom under our care... there's something about her that says she needs more room to grow," Kodachi mused, eliciting a giggle from Ukyo.

"Somebody who can patch the ship up is always going to be useful. And more muscle on our team is always a good thing. Both at once is what I'd call a real bargain," Nabiki interjected.

Ranma nodded, then glanced at Umok. "Okay, imp, what do you say?"

"Me?" Umok incredulously replied, blinking all three eyes.

"Yes, you! You're the one who started us on this journey..."

"...That still explains nothing. But, for my two coppers, we've barely begun to taste the dangers of the Grand Line. Another formidable fighting recruit would always be a good investment in my opinion, and with the One Piece as our ultimate prize, all the more so. If you're really so hesitant, tell her where we're going and see if she has the courage to stand with us."

Ranma nodded before breaking the huddle and turning to face the expectant wotan. "Before I decide, you should know we're not just any old pirate crew! We're sailing for the One Piece, all the way at the end of the Grand Line! Still want to come with us?"

"Are you kidding? That sounds awesome! I told you I wanted to see the world, and that lines up perfectly! Count me in!" Miriam cheered.

"Well... I guess it's official, then. Congratulations, Miriam; you're officially a Kamikaze Pirate!" Ranma declared, clapping his hands together authoritatively.

"And may your gods have mercy upon your soul," muttered Umok.

"Thank you, Captain Saotome! You won't regret this!" Miriam cheered, bouncing gently up and down on her heels in her excitement.

"Call me Ranma; everyone does," Ranma chuckled.

---

Chapter End & Closing Notes

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And thus the Kamikaze Pirates truly begin their future conquest of the Grand Line, with the Stormbringer to carry them and a new crewmate to join them in their quest! What misadventures will happen next? You'll have to wait and see, but expect some more startling shifts in the status quo! As always, if you liked this chapter, leave a review, and we have a TVtropes page that is just begging for love, especially if you thought that there was a particularly awesome, funny or heartwarming moment in this story.