They watched Elder Ryouga, Elder Ranma, and Chiba eat slowly, as if savoring the taste of their noodles and not knowing when they would next get to eat. Genma watched them pass spices back and forth politely with one another, and then jumped to his feet.

"Boy! You are getting rusty if you let your rival-" here he pointed an accusing finger at a surprised Elder Ryouga "-get the best of you! And is your son as soft as you?" With that, Genma launched what might have been a fierce kick at Elder Ranma.

Without blinking, Elder Ranma's hand came up, snatched the foot, and levered Genma's barreling speed against him. The bald martial artist found his flight stopped unexpectedly by the wall. The building shook upon impact. Elder Ranma snorted with disdain as he went back to his food.

"I do not appreciate people making assumptions upon my skills. I'd rather save my strength and energy fighting against those things that deserve it." He looked thoughtful for a moment and then cast a withering glance over his shoulder at Genma. "One of these days, I'm going to have a genetics test just to prove I'm his son."

Soun choked upon his noodles.

Elder Ryouga shrugged. "Makes sense to me."

Chiba snorted. "I hope I'm not related to that man!"

Elder Ranma sighed dramatically as everyone began to inch away from the three. "Unfortunately, I don't believe I will actually do that. I'm afraid I will be rather disappointed if it turned out I really was his son, and if I wasn't, then whose son would I be?" He frowned thoughtfully. "Wouldn't it be interesting to know that perhaps I was Soun's illegimate son from an affair my mom had with him?"

Soun stared at Elder-Ranma, who looked quite thoughtful and serious. The man burst into tears. Nabiki and Kasumi gave Elder-Ranma disapproving looks as he threw his head back and laughed. A few moments passed as Kasumi rubbed her father's back and tried to sooth him.

Elder-Ranma shoved his bowl away when he finished his meal and pulled his tea cup close. "Pass the sugar," he requested Chiba, pointing at the sugar bowl sitting next to Akane.

Chiba eyed it as if it was going to leap up and kick him in the face.

"Just take it!" Akane shoved the sugar bowl over to Elder-Ranma. He smiled graciously at her before he began to scoop the sugar out of the bowl and dump it into his tea cup.

Cologne cleared her throat. Everyone looked at her expectedly. "Do you three have a place to stay?" she asked.

"Well, there is this hotel room-"

"We got kicked out of that," Chiba reminded him.

"We did? Rats."

Cologne nodded to herself. "You can stay here," she said. Tendo leapt to his feet, his earlier tears forgotten.

"Absolutely not! The boy can stay with us! As it is his solemn obligation to fulfill his destiny of joining the house of Tendo and Saotome together-" here he gave Chiba a look that very nearly made the young man leap up and strangle Tendo were it not for the fact that Elder Ranma grabbed Chiba by his hair "-and therefore it is his right and obligation to stay with us."

Ranma looked up from his bowl of rice. "Which Ranma are we talking about?" he wondered.

Elder Ranma sighed and went back to scooping sugar into his tea. "First of all, it is not my obligation to marry one of your kids, because back in my world, all of your girls died! Second of all, were I to marry one of your daughters, she would have to face up to the fact I will forever hold her against the shadow of my dead wife-who is Shampoo. Third of all, I'm sure she and her 'step-son' who is, might I add, older than any one of your three daughters, would not get along too well. Fourth of all, do not call me a boy or tell me what to do, as I am currently old enough to be YOUR father, Tendo."

Elder Ranma stopped speaking and looked down at his tea cup. He sighed and began to chew on his tea. Soun burst into tears again.

"That's a lot of sugar," Akane began slowly. Her eyes kept flickering back and forth between Elder Ranma, Ranma, and Shampoo. Once, they settled upon Chiba, but when he realized she was watching him, her eyes strayed onward to a different person.

Elder Ranma looked down at the tea cup and then favored her with a wide grin. "So?" He took another bite.

Kasumi watched him with wide yes. "Oh my!" she said. "Do you realize that so much sugar would endanger your health, especially at your age? I don't believe you would actually welcome that during this time."

Elder Ranma gave his tea a sad look. "But I like lots of sugar!" he finally protested. He grinned at Kasumi. "Besides, it has been in my experience that sugar is one of the healthiest aspects in my life." He took another bite. Akane sighed, and spoke up.

"Where will you be staying then, if not with, um, us?"

"Oh, I don't know." Elder-Ranma shielded his eyes and looked around. "Let me see . . . How about . . . Here?" He turned to Cologne with a cheesy grin. She blankly stared at him.

"That may be a good idea, son-in-law. There are many things I would like to talk to you about."

"No!" Heads turned to see Genma weakly lifting himself off the floor. "No! Boy, you are obliged to the Saotome family! For that, you are to marry one of Tendo's girls for the sake of the schools and join them together!" He finished standing up and squared his shoulders back. "I would have expected better from you. All those years I spent training you, all the things I did for you, and you repaid me by marrying a Chinese huss-"

Genma found himself silenced by a knife being buried unexpectedly beside his head in the wall. Elder Ranma took deep breaths as his arm, still in a throwing position, continued to point almost accusingly at the man he had once called his father. He turned to Cologne.

"Many years ago, I learned three very important things. The first was if I did not somehow change and become more flexible with the situation of constant death and killing, I would go mad. The second thing I learned was I had to gain two important abilities in order to achieve this. The first was patience. Without patience, I could lose more than just my temper, but also my life. Anger clouds judgement, and without judgement, one's fighting abilities are-excuse my language, delicate blossoms of ladies-worth shit."

Akane felt herself slowly sinking downward on her cushion as her face flushed with shame. Each word seemed to be aimed at her, though she knew she should not feel like that. And why was P-chan blushing a bright red?

"The second ability was an easygoing, laidback temperament. I cannot be patient if I am a rigid, constantly tense person. That is a bomb just waiting to explode."

Akane sank even further down. Chiba watched her with a blank expression, though his eyes spoke multitudes of what he already thought of her. P-chan's face grew a little redder.

"The third important thing I learned was I needed to get rid of certain values in which to live. The more I fought, the easier it became to kill, to become emotionless and careless with human life. I constantly had to remind myself that each life was as important as the last. For every demon I killed, that was one last demon that would hurt someone else. But it did not seem to help, because many of the demons that we had to kill possessed humans. There is a blade-the Eos Blade-that draws the Orca from a person, but they were always so rare that we would only use them unless we absolutely had to with an extremely important person. We only did realize we had them until about twelve years into the fighting." He lifted his shirt and pointed at a thin scar in his side between his ribs. "I was one of the few to have it used on. I was too important as an Orca hunter for anyone to argue. But it hurt to know that, because an Eos Blade can only be used once. We had lost the knowledge of creating more, and for each person that I killed, I wished there was an Eos Blade I could have saved them with. And through that thought, I began to cherish human life once more."

Ranma's hand crept to the bandaging around his side. The scar in Elder Ranma's side was in the exact same position as his own fresh wound that Chiba had administered to him.

Elder Ranma stood up slowly and turned to look at Genma. "Which is why I have to say this: Do not tempt me to break every single bone in your body twice over. I'm rather afraid I may relish the moment."

"I am your father-"

"MY father is DEAD! I killed him once and I will kill him again if I have to!"

A collective gasp went up around the table and Genma turned a deadly white. "You killed . . ."

"Why do you think I never mentioned your fate in the story, eh, old man?" Elder Ranma's eyes glittered, their dark blue depths drawing up unfathomable emotions. He sighed, and threw a smile over his shoulder at Ranma. "For a brief moment, I wondered which Ranma he was speaking to earlier, and then I also remembered what it was like, to be constantly under his thumb with no choice of my own. Makes you wonder why he is always so fixed upon joining the schools. Well," he looked at Genma, "since you want to join the two houses so much, why don't you adopt one of the Tendo girls, eh?

"Of course, it may assure you, Genma, that you were possessed at the time I killed you. It wasn't long enough for you to be broken and dead while the Orca continued living in your body. But looking at you at this moment . . . It makes me glad I did. Because right now I want to break your neck, and I keep recalling what happened to my old man in my world."

He loomed over Genma, becoming the very figure that allowed him to survive in a world that had killed millions of others before their time. His eyes glittered angrily and his body, slightly stockier than the other Ranma's because of all the extra muscle, was tensed and ready to spring into killing action at the blink of an eye.

Nabiki raised her hand as if she were in class asking a question. "I have a question," she began. Elder Ranma turned toward her, his eyebrows raised in question. Nabiki folded her arms over the table. "What of your curse?"

Ranma himself leaned closer.

Elder Ranma burst out laughing. "Curse? What curse?"

Ranma leapt to his feet. "You mean you found a cure?"

Elder Ranma stopped laughing and looked directly at Ranma. "Are you kidding?"

Ranma stared at him in surprise. "But-what about-"

"Ah, that is something I forgot to mention. You see, with all the fighting, there was never enough time to actually look for a cure, and about fifteen years into it, I never even noticed when I changed until someone pointed it out to me. Oh yes, on some level, I realized I still had the problem. However, that didn't seem too important in the light of everything else."

Elder Ranma sat down and put an arm around his son's shoulders. "Chiba was about three years old when he lost his mother. I felt it was an awful thing. Mind you, it was normal for a child to lose one or both parents at an early age, but I still felt it was bad. So, I literally sought to be both his mother and his father! Until he was nine years old, I was constantly in my female form, unless I went out to fight, and then I took my male form. In any case, he winded up with a very well-rounded childhood."

Elder Ranma looked thoughtful for a moment, shot a look of annoyance at Genma who quivered again, and then looked across the table at Cologne. "It is important to the child that both his parents are readily available to him. I strived to be both. You know, I hated my curse up until that moment I chose to be Chiba's mother. And then I found it to be a blessing. So am I cursed? No, I don't believe so."

Mousse, silent up until this time, pushed his glasses across the bridge of his nose. "Two questions. How did you manage to live in a safe place or raise children? I mean, where did you stay? And what do we do about these Orcas?"

Elder Ryouga was the one who spoke first. "We wait. It is no use to go after Orcas at night because you can't see or sense them. They disappear, we don't know where they go."

"When day comes," Elder Ranma began, "Ryouga-er, my Ryouga-and I will go looking for them. In the mean time, Chiba will train the rest of you ways to see them before they attack and what to do when that happens-"

"I'm going to teach you run very fast," Chiba deadpanned as he crossed his arms before his chest. Elder Ranma pinched him arm.

"You be quiet. As of now, we do not have the weapons in which to actually fight these creatures." He looked at Cologne for confirmation. She nodded.

"It will take many weeks to overcome protocol with my tribes and many more weeks in which to ship the weapons out there."

Elder Ryouga made a fist. "Tarou! That's who we need! He carried enough weapons on him to take on an army of Orcas."

Chiba snorted. "He usually did too."

Elder Ranma waved his hands in the air. "Ah, we must remember why he is known as Tarou the White though, which is why he carries so many weapons." He sighed. "I would feel better if he was here with us. Now that is a single-minded man who knows what he wants and goes after it with a purpose to rival any marriage-seeking Amazoness."

Shampoo's eyes grew wide. "Hey!"

"Ah, no offense to you, Shampoo my dear." Elder Ranma turned back to Mousse. Beneath the table, Mousse's hands were tightening to fists. He took several breaths to calm his rising jealousy. Elder Ranma leaned forward, folding his arms over the table. "Yes, we stayed in a safe place. Well, relatively safe place," he amended. "As I said earlier, we did use the magical arts. The Orcas seemed to be relatively weak against it. I never really managed to learn anything, though Chiba and Ryouga are skilled."

"Tarou,"Elder Ryouga said again. "He was much stronger in it than us."

"Yeah." Elder Ranma absently nodded his head, as if trying to gather his thoughts together. "Because they were weak against it, Orcas could not get to any place that was chock full of magic. The Jusenkyo springs is loaded with magic. So, in the very middle of the springs, we gathered together all the people we could find, and plunked them down in a village we created. Of course, this had some unusual side effects."

There was a long pause. Kasumi ventured to speak. "What sort of side effects?"

"Well, people tripping at the most inopportune times," Elder Ranma replied airily. He pointed at Chiba. "Take him, for instance. Chiba nearly fell into the Spring of the Almost-Drowned Akane. But don't worry, a different spring broke his fall."

"What spring was that?" Nabiki asked.

Elder Ranma tipped a cold cup of tea over Chiba.

"Ahhh-pika!"

Nabiki stared down at the sputtering yellow creature. Its fur stood on end in anger and it rounded upon Elder-Ranma with a fierce growl. "It's a pikachu. How is it possible there is a spring of the drowned pikachu?"

Elder-Ranma shrugged and tipped a cup of hot tea over the animal. Chiba appeared, wet and still as spitting angry as he had been earlier. "Ask me how it is possible there is a spring of the drowned octopus?"

No one could answer that.