Ranma 1/2 was created by Rumiko Takahashi and its characters belong to her, and her alone. I'm just kinda borrowing them. A few others are mine. The story below is for entertainment purposes only, and not to be used commercially. ...Obviously.
"Learning Curve"
Part XXVIII
by: J. Wagner
"Shinnosuke!!"
The hoarse cry split the air, as tall fingers of fire, as if from some great hand, lapped up through the high branches, obscuring swaths of the sky. Overhead, the sun disappeared behind gouts of black smoke. In the distance, some unknown animal screamed, in fright or pain, the guardian of Ryugenzawa couldn't tell. Wiping sweat drenched hair from his forehead, Shinnosuke focused on the here and now, and on finding some avenue of escape.
Jumping to the left, he narrowly avoided a falling branch, still burning wildly. Behind the flame and the bush, he saw large shadowed creatures moving, trying frantically to escape the conflagration. He heard his grandfather call out for him again, and managed to pinpoint the voice from that rough direction. Gritting his teeth, Shinnosuke raised his hands to his mouth, and released a warbling birdcall. Taking a deep breath, he repeated it, and jumped just as a giant platypus charged through the bushed, trampling the flames nearby.
Leaping up over the animal, he twisted in midair, barely avoiding the panicked creature's tail and scrambling legs. Of all the beasts of Ryugenzawa, Shinnosuke was most wary of the platypi. The males were extremely aggressive, and (he'd been told about, after forgetting) the wounds on his back attested to the poison they could inject from the bone spurs on their hind legs. Avoiding another burning branch as he moved through the air, Shinnosuke landed, and headed towards the only home he'd ever known - a small house in the middle of the forest. All around him, stampeding animals ran and reared, surrounded by the flame.
Only then, when Shinnosuke saw his house, burning and ruined, did he realize that the ancient forest of Ryugenzawa would not survive the night. Breathing heavily, smoke choking his lungs, he ran around to the side of the house and saw his grandfather; the old man was desperately trying to put out the fire with buckets of water from the nearby well. Seeing Shinnosuke approach, he coughed, but kept on his feet, displaying a measure of strength and determination his grandson hadn't seen in years (and certainly couldn't remember).
"Shinnosuke!" he yelled, voice still strong. "Help your grandfather... we have to... we have to..."
"We have to get out of here!" The younger man grabbed his grandfather by the shoulders. It wouldn't be what the older man would want to hear, but it had to be said, none-the-less. It was the simple truth. "Now, Grandfather!"
The other man's soot covered face contorted into a deep scowl. "We will NOT abandon this house! Our home!"
"If we stay here, we are... going... to... die!" Adrenalin pumping through his veins, Shinnosuke slapped the bucket from his grandfather's hands and grabbed his shoulders. "Look around you, Grandfather! In a few hours, there won't be anything left to abandon in this whole forest!"
The old man grimaced and looked away. "We can't leave... you...you need..."
"What?" Shinnosuke was normally a polite and calm boy, but this was an extreme situation that warranted an extreme response. They simply couldn't afford to argue over this. As the younger man hauled his legal guardian away from the blazing wreck of their home, and through an as-yet untouched part of the forest, above them, straddling the tree line, a man lowered his binoculars.
"Do we let them go?" he asked his companion.
"Negative." The other man smiled broadly, face covered by mottled brown and green paint. "They won't get far. Radio Chopper Two. Tell them to rendezvous with us at the pool and converge on the primary target."
Below them, Ryugenzawa burned.
***
Saotome Nodoka was happy.
Perhaps 'happy' was an inaccurate word to describe her feelings. She was actually rather enthusiastic, being so close to finally seeing her husband and her son. She was also looking forward to meeting an old friend of her husband's, Tendo Soun - who she had never met before, but had heard much about in the intervening years between when they'd been engaged and when Genma had left with Ranma. The wait, however, was wracking her nerves with anxiety. How much did Ranma remember of his mother? A little? ... Nothing? Already he was seventeen years old; she had no doubt missed out on much of his young life, and Genma's letters to her had dried up well over a year ago.
For a while, she had feared for his safety.
But no more. The boy escorting her to the Tendo home (Nodoka amended that: Hibiki Ryouga was asking directions, and she was leading him there) was a friend of her son, and knew her husband through association. What he had told her so far cemented her confidence in Genma - that their son had been raised to be a manly man. Unfortunately, the Hibiki boy seemed reluctant to go deeper into things. Nodoka came to the conclusion that he still wasn't totally sure that she was who she claimed to be and would wait before divulging anything too personal or important.
What a good friend his son had!
"Umm... Hibiki-kun, didn't we just pass this way?" Nodoka paused at an intersection.
A sweat drop appeared on the young man's head.
"I usually jump my way to the Tendos, you know. I don't wander around like this anymore," he said, self-consciously. Ryouga looked down, ashamed. "I'm getting you lost, Mrs. Saotome. Maybe you'd be better off without me."
"Nonsense. My son was taking you home, until you saved my life and lost him. Now, it is my responsibility to do so. It is the least I can do for the nice man reuniting me with my family, Hibiki-kun."
"Nice man? Me?" Ryouga's lips tightened. "I'm not really..."
"What did you mean by 'jump' your way?" Nodoka quickly changed the subject. She had quickly learned that the Hibiki boy was easily depressed, and tended to brood while he walked. When he did so, it was obvious that he only got more lost.
"Well. I just jump up onto a roof, or a chimney, or the highest point I can find," he replied, looking up, searching for good targets. "That over there would be prefect." He pointed to a six-story apartment building. "Once I'm at the top, I just ...well, jump around until I see the Tendo property. It works really well in a residential neighborhood like Nerima, because none of the buildings are too tall. In downtown Tokyo, it's more difficult and dangerous, not just because of the heights, but because of the wind and... I'm rambling. Sorry."
Nodoka blinked.
"That doesn't explain how you 'jump' around, Hibiki-kun."
"I jump. You know. Jump. Jump!"
"Up there?" She pointed to the promontory he'd singled out just before.
Ryouga nodded.
"All the way up there?" She asked again. "You can jump up there?"
He nodded again. "Yeah."
She frowned. "That's impossible."
"Well, it's all in the legs." He tilted his head slightly. "And localizing your Ki." He noted that Nodoka still didn't follow. "You've seen Genma do a high jump before, right?"
She shook her head. "My husband can jump quite high, but no one can jump up there..."
"Well, maybe I should just show you." Ryouga pivoted, tensed his legs in a crouch, and jumped. Nodoka blinked fiercely, not quite believing what she was seeing. Ryouga was in midair, arms out for balance, in a total defiance of gravity. She had always prided herself on being the knowledgeable wife of a martial artist, but Genma had never done anything like *that* around her before. She hadn't even imagined that he could. She had known that he was a powerful martial artist, but not that he, or anyone, was really capable of throwing off the shackles of gravity like this boy just did.
Nodoka quickly gasped.
"No! Hibiki-kun! This way!" Ryouga pivoted from where he'd landed. He had turned around, but missed her, and was about to jump in the wrong direction. Her voice caught him before he did, however, and he saw her. With a quick leap, he fell the six stories, to land lightly and without a sound only a few feet in front of her.
"See? Easy." He shrugged the weight of his pack, adjusting it slightly.
"Can... can my son can do that?" Nodoka asked, incredulous.
"Ranma can jump at least five stories without much of a problem. He could definitely make it with a running start, though. Your husband... I'm not as sure." Ryouga shrugged. "Maybe. Probably."
"Incredible. Did you see the Dojo?"
"I think so. It was... it... er..." Ryouga raised one arm and nervously scratched the back of his neck. "I kinda can't say for sure."
"Well, that's all right. We'll find it eventually."
"I hope so," he grumbled, not in any position to refute or argue with her. Nodoka smiled again, trying to cheer him up. Hibiki Ryouga, she had no doubt, was a very nice boy. He was polite, respectful and at least fairly intelligent, despite his little directional handicap. He was also very strong, quite handsome, and manly, but he was also very passive around women, and more than a little sulking, as if something was eating him up deep inside. Nodoka dearly hoped her son was more assertive, more aggressive, than his friend. The whole shy martial artist routine was cute, in a way, but not what she was expecting from Genma's (and her) ideas of a true man among men.
Her husband had always been a true embodiment of masculinity when she'd known him. He hadn't been the most attractive of men, but in his time she thought he'd possessed a sort of rugged roguishness that well suited him. When he wanted something, he pursued it, heedless of caution. He'd been unrepentant when caught leering at her, defiant of authority when it went against his honor code, and he'd been totally dedicated to the Art. It was the height of his training when they'd gotten together, and it was those memories of her fierce and independent husband that sustained her. Sometimes, he would lock himself away for hours, transcribing techniques and skills of his onto paper, before leaving to train. He always returned to her, bold and amorous. Things had changed somewhat when little Ranma had been born, and Genma had transferred his focus from himself to his son.
"Tell me again how Ranma fights, Hibiki-kun," she asked him, as they walked.
"Again?" Ryouga sighed. "Well... he usually dances around a lot. He's very quick and likes to taunt his opponents. He almost always waits until they get angry before he gets serious and takes the offensive. He draws his opponent in, maneuvers and controls the fight, usually. When he fights most people he holds back... when we fight, he really lets loose. His fists are like lightning bolts, so quick they... pour down like rain. But he always knows when to stop. He never goes so far that he would hurt someone without absolutely having to. He values life more than... most people, I think."
He'd just added that last part, the lost boy realized, and shut up.
"I can't wait to meet him," Nodoka repeated.
Ryouga didn't reply.
A small part of him winced just talking to this woman about Ranma. Ryouga looked at her, and saw his own mother, with short dark hair, knowing smile, and warm embrace, telling him that he was loved, and that someone was proud of him. In his mother's presence, troubles faded into the background, replaced by a fleeting moment of caring and kinship. Even when it was his father, a more distant and stern figure, there was the current of warm emotion and... Ryouga quickly snuffed the thoughts before they made him more depressed.
He had not seen his parents in years.
Deep inside, Ryouga could feel a seething resentment slowly building up. Given time, it would become a fortress inside his mind, and another reason to dislike and be jealous of Ranma. He could not risk that. He could not risk more anger and hate and resentment and jealousy and depression surging up into his thoughts and influencing his actions. He was dangerous enough as he was. More of those terrible thoughts and feelings would only erode the shell of his humanity. With sheer force of will, he crushed the thoughts underfoot and buried the feelings where they would never surface. Never survive.
"Would you like to see some pictures of him?" Nodoka asked, a bit hesitantly.
Ryouga's mind screamed 'no!!!!' but his body just nodded pleasantly. "Why not?"
He spent the next few minutes being bombarded by small pictures of his formerly hated rival. A few drew laughter, the one of Ranma crying after he wet his bed (a common occurrence in his youth, apparently) was something he'd have to remind his rival of next time they argued, but most of the rest... pictures of a young Ranma held tenderly by his mother, the picture with him in his father's arms, with Nodoka just to the side smiling happily, these scenes of joy, of a content family, tore at his heart and self-control. He wanted to rip them to pieces. He wanted others to suffer as he did.
A small voice, like a whisper, wanted the whole world to suffer as he had.
Every man, woman and child.
Luckily, they found the Tendo dojo more quickly than Ryouga had anticipated, sparing any further mental extrapolation on that line of thought. Approaching the door, slightly ahead of Mrs. Saotome, he thought back over the training trip he was now concluding. In some respects, it had been a success, and he was ... happy with the way things had turned out.
He had improved his Ki control by a fair margin, which was certainly one of the primary goals he'd set for himself beforehand. He'd learned to better focus and maintain the equilibrium between his internalized and externalized Ki, reigning in his battle aura. A massive flare of aura was, at this point, as much a liability as a boon. With the Hiryu Shoten Ha, Ranma had a very effective counterattack to powerful auras, so Ryouga had made it a special priority to find a way to utilize the 'crushing' power of his anger-depression battle aura (a necessary counter to the Umisenken) without exposing undue amounts of energy to the Ascending Dragon technique.
He'd improved his danger sense as well, which had stagnated over the last few weeks, as well as some done new experiments on further modifying his Iron Cloth techniques. Ranma had been instrumental in this pursuit, just as Ryouga had assisted his rival in perfecting his adaptations of the Amaguriken and Hiryu Shoten Ha. Looking into the future, the lost boy had some interesting ideas for creating his own class of special techniques, either based off the Iron Cloth, the Bakusai Tenketsu, or both. He'd already developed and used the Yubisaki Ishimi Miketsukan (Finger Touch Imprisonment), Tekimen Kongou Gishu (Instant Diamond Hand) and Tekimen Kongou Toushin (Instant Diamond Blade), so maybe the next step from Iron Cloth would be Diamond Cloth. How old had Genma been when he developed the Umisenken? Surely no more than twenty four. Ryouga was already seventeen, soon to be eighteen; it was time to start thinking about his future.
Of course, outside martial arts what kind of a future did he have, anyway?
Shaking his head at the depressing Ki building within him, Ryouga suppressed it with a small shudder. While his training trip had helped him in all the ways it traditionally would (improving in the Art) he had failed to gain any sense of inner peace, which was what he had truly hoped for. Worse, it wasn't even Ranma's fault. The pigtailed boy had been aggravating at times, but also... sometimes, he was fun to be with. Fun to talk to. Then again, after years of loneliness, Ryouga wasn't too picky when it came to finding friendship. He'd just as quickly found an affinity for Shampoo, Ukyou, and Mousse. He even considered Kuno an acquaintance of sorts.
This left the lost boy with a rival, but no one to hate.
Except himself. Then again, Ryouga knew he didn't truly hate himself - even after killing Taro - That was the shameful part, the secret he could let no one know. He had reveled in it. He would do it again, if he could: leave that poor bastard buried under a literal landslide of rock and rubble. The feeling he felt for himself was more complicated than that, and difficult to put into words. Regardless, that aspect of things had not been improved by his little month long walkabout.
Standing in front of the door now, Ryouga knocked gently. He was home... of sorts. Mr. Tendo was a nice man, though prone to rashness and fits, but Ryouga couldn't quite ever think of him as a fill-in father. Despite the older man's surviving skill in the Art, he was not as imposing or strict a figure as Ryouga's actual biological father, and in the Hibiki household, his father had always been the disciplinarian. It was from him that Ryouga was handed the family curse, and it had fallen on him to teach his son on the ways of survival on one's own. Tendo Soun was more of a peer, almost.
Of Saotome Genma, Ryouga had no strong feels any way. He was the lost boy's elder, but Genma had lost much of the respect due to him from age and experience with displays of cowardice, greed, thievery and general dishonesty. What he had done to Ukyou, in particular, was unforgivable in Ryouga's eyes, and the near cooking (though Genma hadn't known that pig had once been human and never tried to eat him afterwards) had never been forgotten.
Kasumi was great - she was a gentle soul if ever there was one. She was a little oblivious of things, but really, was he one to point out that fault in anybody? He'd been called clueless himself enough times. Kasumi was a caregiver in every definition of the word, and the heart of the Tendo family. Ryouga found he got along well with Kasumi, who had taken liberty of his being around, letting him help around the house and feel useful. All without him even having to ask!
Ironically, it was Akane that he had the most trouble relating to. Despite having a rather intense infatuation with her for a few weeks, what seemed like a lifetime ago, the barrier that the P-chan debacle had created remained between them. Akane had forgiven him (or said she had, a couple times), but he still hadn't forgiven himself, and found that being around her still made him nervous and secretly ashamed of what he had done. It wasn't like he had avoided her or anything. He spent time helping her train in the Dojo, they watched television together occasionally, and unlike the other Tendo girls, she and he shared a background in the Art.
But her anger and intensity intimidated him. Scared him, even. Now, Shampoo had a pretty mean streak to her, and a certain dangerous edge to her behavior and personality. Yet, perhaps because she had been raised in a certain way, Shampoo dealt with her anger fairly well. She would lash out physically quite rarely, and tended to switch from sad to happy very quickly. Ukyou also had a bad temper, but it took a lot to really rile her up, though she would rarely hesitate to bop someone on the head playfully.
Akane, though, got angry extremely quickly, and often (Ryouga now saw) without due provocation. She was a lot like himself in that regard, he had to admit, the difference being that while Ryouga let his anger smolder and generally reigned in any sort of immediate physical response (unless he felt extremely slighted), Akane just let loose... If he were like that, without inhibition, he'd have probably left a trail of bodies behind him, from Shanghai to Osaka.
Then there was Nabiki, who confused him more than anyone he knew. She had convinced him to go to Furinkan, and to study for the entrance exams, and to stay with the Tendos, and... and she was his anchor, here. Without her, he'd have almost certainly have left after the last great fight he'd had with Ranma. With her, he had something approaching a normal relationship (he thought). They had gone out on dates, like regular human beings and she had 'let' him pay like a gentleman should, and there hadn't been any fighting or malleting or uppercuts-into-the-roof. They studied together, and sometimes she'd let him in on her schemes, which while often dishonest, she found amusing, so he usually went along with it for her sake. With her, around her, he had found some happiness... a bulwark to cling to when things seemed like they were falling apart.
So why had he ran from her?
'Because I'm not used to it.' He had decided, after hours of thinking the situation over. He wasn't used to anything approaching a normal life, so how could anyone expect him to instantly adapt to one? Nabiki would understand, when he described it to her later. Hell, she probably already knew, but it was best to share this insight with her anyway. He owed it to her. It would take some time to find the right compromise, because he would and could never be truly normal, not even for her, but he would try. Wasn't that what mattered?
Who else was there? Oh yes: Natsume and Kurumi. The two lost Tendo girls. Though it was his fault they'd shown up at the dojo in the first place, he really didn't know them too well. Kurumi seemed to like him as a source of new foodstuffs, and a sort of older brother. Natsume was more complicated. That girl was as cold as Nabiki, and didn't speak a whole lot; though it was obvious her main concern was keeping the two of them in their new home and winning over their estranged father. And then there was one: the old man. Happosai was a pervert and a dirty lecher. On that topic, he turned to face Nodoka. "Saotome-san. Does the name 'Happosai' right a bell?"
"Oh, yes." She nodded curtly. "My husband trained under Happo-sensei when he was around your age, up to and until Ranma was born."
"Do you know of his... ahem, 'habits?'" Ryouga asked, slowly.
"He likes to peep at girls when they change, and usually tries to grope them as well. He steals women's underwear, he often barges in and eats other peoples' meals, and he's very fond of sake to the point of redefining overindulgence..."
He sweat-dropped. "Oh. Well. He's here. Just, um... so you know."
"Oh, don't worry about me, Ryouga-kun! Genma will defend my honor if his *former* Master tries anything."
"He will?"
Was this the same Saotome Genma they were thinking about?
"Of course he will." Nodoka sounded very confident, and Ryouga let the matter drop. She'd been fairly warned.
"Hello? Who is..." An attractive young woman with long brown hair and a summer dress opened the door and smiled at seeing who it was. "Ryouga-kun! You made it... but where is Ranma-kun?" Her eyes moved to Nodoka. "And who is this?"
"You're not going to believe..." He started to say.
"Saotome Nodoka." Nodoka bowed politely. "You must be Tendo Kasumi. Ryouga has told me much about you."
Ryouga clarified. "She's Ranma's *mother* ..."
"Oh my." Kasumi opened the door fully and gave a small bow. "This is a surprise. Please, come in and make yourself comfortable. Traveling with Ryouga-kun, I imagine you've been on the road for some time. Would you like some tea?"
Nodoka stepped inside. "That would be wonderful, thank you."
Ryouga followed a few feet behind. He watched Kasumi and Nodoka exchange pleasantries, and then looked around for Nabiki. Slowly, he made his way to the living room. Fortunately, he'd spent enough time in the Tendo home to prevent getting lost too easily, and could usually navigate the premises confidently when in his human form.
"Saotome-san!" He heard Kasumi yell, her volume just enough to be heard yet not seem un-ladylike. "Saotome-san, you have a guest!"
A voice responded from upstairs: "Be right there, Kasumi!"
"Oi! Kasumi!" Ryouga called out, turning slightly to see her. Taking off his backpack, he carefully put it down on the floor leaning against a nearby wall. Opening the top, he asked, "Where's Nabiki? Is she around?"
"She went out with Natsume-chan a few hours ago." Kasumi's eyes lighted up when Ryouga handed her a small box and book. "Are these for me, Ryouga-kun?"
"Yep." He nodded. "I got ya' some tea cakes, and the book is by some American woman. It was on the best seller list."
"That was very thoughtful." She took the gifts and bowed curtly. "Thank you very much, Ryouga-kun."
Ryouga waved it off. "Don't sweat it. I got stuff for everybody."
"Did'ya get anything for me, boy?" Genma asked, walking in from behind.
The lost boy smirked. "You could say I did..."
"Genma?" Nodoka yipped, seeing her husband in the flesh after over a decade. "Genma!"
"N.n.n..n... Nodoka!?" The elder Saotome 's eyes widened threefold.
"Oh Genma! It's been so long!" Crystal tears trailing down her cheeks, Nodoka jumped into his arms and embraced him.
"N... now... Nodoka... Ah I... aa..."
"I missed you so much, husband!"
Finally, Genma seemed to compose himself, principally after realizing that Ryouga and Nodoka hadn't shown up with his good-for-nothing son. Slowly, he let himself wrap his arms around his wife. It did feel infinitely good to have her in his arms again - now, all he had to do was keep her away from her son until they could cure his little aqua-transsexual problem. Not easy, but not impossible. Much as he loved her, Saotome Nodoka had never been the sharpest knife in the drawer.
"And I you, wife!" Genma hugged her back, eyes closed. "It is... so good to see you again!"
"Our son... has he...?"
"Ranma is, indeed, a man among men..."
"Isn't this touching, Ryouga-kun? Won't Ranma be happy when he gets home?"
"Maybe." Ryouga 'hmffed' and crossed his arms. "I didn't do this for Ranma... I did it because..."
He didn't finish his sentence, and instead headed for the dojo.
***
Tokyo
Futara Arms Apartments
"So: we have full authorization to move ahead?"
"Yes." Pearl Adams sighed, leaning back and into the apartment's only couch. "We do. I double-checked the coded message in case there was a mistake. It was all legit."
"And? What did it say?"
"The Society wants the primary and secondary targets taken out of circulation."
"Ah. Ok, then!" Kenji paced, as he was want to do whenever anticipation got the better of him. "Well, we all knew it was just a matter of time before the order was given."
At the far side of the room, seated by his monitoring and surveillance equipment, Yosho added, his tone neutral, "The timing works for us, too. Both of the primary targets should be present by tomorrow."
"What do you have prepped and ready, Kenji?" Adams asked, after a few moments' hesitation.
"Well..." The Japanese-American thumbed his thin goatee. "I was thinking of using a home made Claymore, kind of pointing up and out, with a nice wide cone." He made a little tent shape with his fingers, his tone excited. "The .2 kg piece I rigged together might be enough... but I've just about finished putting together a much larger .5 kg block of C-4 that should be more than enough to take out any of the targets within... oh, I'd say, two rooms. The walls aren't so thick, so even if someone's in the floor above the explosion, there's a good chance of taking them out. Still, optimally, you'd want it in the den, as close to the primaries as possible."
"Collateral damage is...?" Pearl protested half-heartedly.
"Unavoidable, boss. You know that." Kenji paused in his pacing and faced the other man. "Better safe than sorry... besides, the Tendo house itself is far enough from the street that it's highly unlikely any bystanders will be caught in the kill zone."
"Yosho? What do you think?"
"Make a surprise visit ... in two days. Kenji, how small a package are you putting together?"
"The usual. I can make it look like a box of chocolates or somethin'."
"Good." Yosho rubbed his hands together. "We make the delivery, a mail courier could work, or the boss could drop it off himself. Either is good. A Radio trigger would be optimal."
"Of course." Kenji agreed.
"Then we just set it off." Yosho' hands flew apart. "Boom."
"Plus," Kenji added in. "If we're being given permission to move with this, that means Command already has everything in place to cover for us. Hey, is it true that Tomiko's Team hit their Beta site already?"
"It'll be all over the news tonight, no doubt." Adams spoke up, answering to the affirmative. "The whole thing came off without a hitch. She called me up to brag personally. Says all we have to do is cleanup."
"Oh, please." Yosho groaned, rolling his eyes. "Tomiko's talking out of her ass. All she had to do was shoot a bunch of big dumb animals. Plus, she got an additional team AND helicopters to get the job done. We're the ones out risking our necks trying to take out a gang of punks who can crater concrete with their fists. Cleanup... that's bullshit!"
"No kidding." Kenji nodded and sat on the edge of the couch. "So we make the hit in two days?"
Pearl Adams slowly stood and straightened out his shirt. "I've got a different plan."
"Oh?" Yosho's eyebrows rose suspiciously.
Adams walked around Kenji, to a desk on the far side of the apartment's living room, to the flickering light of the muted television. Next to it, he pulled out a black suitcase and gently put it down on top of the minibar. With a sharp click, he opened the case and reached in, taking out a single small white egg.
"Yeah." Pearl held the egg up to the light. "These came in a few days ago. I say we try 'em out."
Kenji and Yosho looked at each other, then back at Pearl and smiled. Their leader carefully put the surikomi egg back in its padded case. "And I know just how."
***
It was late afternoon when Ranma returned to the Tendo Dojo. Ryouga had been on the roof, ostensibly meditating, when he felt the sense of familiarity approach. The only secular (for lack of a better word) way to describe it was like a faint warm breeze, not offensive or overpowering, but simply an addition to the otherwise maudlin events of the world around him. Not needing, or feeling, like rousing himself, Ryouga instead stayed and listened as some sort of scuffle occurred downstairs.
From the heart of Tokyo, a chill wind blew in, rustling the lost boy's hair. Nonetheless, he felt more at peace than he had in weeks, focusing not on the present state of affairs, but on simply being. He was content to be here. He was comfortable staying in one place, and it filled him with a great sense of satisfaction that he had come to terms with the concept of simply being anywhere. It was a step... a step in the right direction. While not particularly religious in any formal sense, the Hibiki family was traditionally Buddhist, and Ryouga's own lack of peace had always troubled him.
He drew in a sharp breath, feeling that warm caress of Ki again, but from a different direction. His young Ki senses had been wrong, it seemed. It wasn't Ranma that he had felt approaching. Opening his eyes, Ryouga inclined his head to be sure, and stood up.
"Nabiki?"
The middle Tendo daughter carefully kept her footing on the roof tiles and took a few steps towards him. "Ryouga."
No Nabi-chan.
No Ryo-chan.
'Looks like we're back to square one with each other,' he thought, bitterly. Looking at her afresh, he felt a sharp pang from deep inside his soul. She was wearing one of her kimonos, a rare occurrence, since she typically only put them on for special occasions. He'd only seen her a few times in one, and it had never failed to take his breath away. Radiant in a pattern of crystal blue on white, carps and waves, he had to force himself to look away, for even a moment. They had to make a choice, each of them, then and there.
And her appearance would only make him stutter and lose resolve. Her beauty had nothing to do with his feelings. He reached into his pants pocket, and picked out what he'd gotten for her, encircling it in his palm. Resolving himself, standing firm against another gust of cold wind, he walked towards her. The next words almost never made it from his mouth, but at this point, he was wholly committed.
"Nabi-chan." He said it experimentally, and made bolder by her anxious silence, continued. "I missed you."
She looked at him firmly. "I know. You sent flowers. And chocolates."
In that moment, he wanted to give her his present. He wanted to bribe her heart. She would like what he got her: of this he was sure. But still the lost boy stayed his hand. Gulping, he stopped in front of her, and looked away slightly, silently ashamed of still being so shy and indecisive. She took the initiative he'd missed.
"Why did you leave, Ryo-kun?"
He perked up at hearing his name spoken with affinity. It gave him heart, but in a way, also made him sad. She didn't say it, but she was asking, more accurately: 'Why did you leave me?'
And he couldn't say, 'It wasn't you, it was me' because that was a lie. It was she as well as he. It was this place. It was the happiness he still, deep in his heart of hearts, didn't feel he had earned or deserved. Though he felt content here, now, it was destined to not always be so. His recent experiences had taught him that his restraint couldn't be yet be trusted, and that something dark flowed through his veins. Nabiki knew of his darker impulses, she had seen it first hand, but Ryouga knew she didn't fully comprehend them.
Murderer.
'Why do you have to make me feel happy?' Ryouga's mind blamed her.
'Why is this feeling so alien? This warmth in my breast?' And, more than anything, he blamed himself.
Murderer!
'I'll do it again,' he thought with absolute, horrible certainty. 'Some things, a man like me, are incapable of change. I can grow, and I can adapt, but I can never really change.'
Nabiki must have seen the expression on his face, because she took a step forward and asked again. "Ryo-kun..."
That one word said more than before, more concisely than ever. Then, amazingly, she smirked and looked away, at the sky, its daytime light slowly fading. "You know... for a while I thought you had a thing for Shampoo. Or Ukyou. I mean, they're fighters like my sister... except a lot better. They see and knew a side of you I can only imagine, a side you've tried explaining, but I have no reference for. I knew I couldn't compete with that, not outright. I wasn't even sure if it was worth risking losing over. But I tried."
"I know you have problems. I know because I see it on your face every day, in your eyes." She still didn't look at him. "I see it in the way you move. And... and... and I wanted to help. I wanted to help you, because I was willing to bet that you were a good guy who had gotten dealt a bad hand."
She sighed. "I'm going to be graduating soon. What friends do I have? What memories? What do people think of me; on the rare occasion they see past my sisters? You were different, and around you, I was different. I was happier." She closed her eyes, shutting in tears. "Don't tell me you weren't."
"I was happier. We were." Ryouga reached out, his free hand to her shoulder, so gently his hand shook to keep steady. She turned, and her eyes opened, looking right into his. "But I'll hurt you, Nabi-chan. I won't want to... I'd never want to... but I don't trust myself. You make me... you make me feel..."
He searched for the word, his vocabulary falling to pieces. "You make me feel like I've never felt before. It confuses me. It... it scares me. Because I want to hold you, but I can't." He shook his head. "I can't hold anyone, because I know they'll break."
"Is that what you're worried about?" She smiled, wanly. "Hurting me? You're the gentlest person I know."
Ryouga shook his head. "You have to be kidding."
"I'm not," she stressed, speaking seriously. "And the only one who doesn't have faith in you..." A slender hand reached out and rested on the chest, right over his heart. "Is you, Ryo-kun."
He looked deep into her eyes, and with the hand that still held his gift to her, silently slipped it into her palm. He had seen, in those brown depths, no hint of malice or faithlessness from the middle Tendo girl. She did believe in him, a hundred fold more than he believed in himself. Why? How? He didn't know, but she did.
"This..." He gently closed her hand over the gift. "Is for you."
"Thank you," she said, without even looking at it. Leaning in close, she kissed him on the cheek, and he blushed crimson. Only then did Nabiki open her hand and see what he had gotten her. In the light of the late day, a beautiful gold and silver money clip glinted, in the shape of the symbol representing yen. Her eyes lighted up, and she gasped.
By her estimates, it must've cost at *least* fifteen thousand yen!
"OH, RYO-CHAN!!"
She pounced on him, and he fell back, arms and legs akimbo. "Na-bi-ki!!! You'll get your kimono dirty!"
Apparently, he quickly realized, she didn't care.
***
"...Ever since Ranma left, my heart had grieved. But when my noble husband made it clear to me that, for Ranma's training to succeed, he must be removed from maternal influences, I knew I had to sacrifice for my child. For my dear son."
As Nodoka spoke, Ranma shifted nervously from where he sat. Genma was next to him, and for that, Ranma was grateful. So: This was his mother? She seemed like a nice enough lady, though he really had no idea how to relate to her. He certainly couldn't treat her like he treated his old man, the pigtailed martial artist knew that much at least, but what exactly he was supposed to do with her, he didn't quite fathom.
From what she'd described of herself, and some of her life, she wasn't a martial artist. She came from a one time rival of the Saotome family, the Tanaka's (Ranma had never heard of ANY of this before, but had kept silent), who had arranged the marriage between herself and Genma. Soun had taken that moment to point out how arranged marriages had a lower divorce rate than normal ones, even during 'trying times.' Ranma had let it pass, because he knew Akane would express enough discontent for the both of them.
And she had.
Still, Ranma was bothered. He didn't have anything in common with this woman. At least nothing he could think of at the moment. So, for one of the few times in his life, Ranma sat down and listened intently, having no idea what to do. Or even what to say. 'Hi mom! It's been a while! Is dinner ready?'
Uh... no.
"You must trust Saotome-san a great deal to leave Ranma in his care for so long," Kasumi said, smiling politely as always.
"I do trust my husband. Explicitly. Additionally, I recorded Genma's vow as a contract." Nodoka took out a piece of paper, for all the Tendo family present (sans Nabiki) to see. The room was already rather crowded, even with two people not present. Natsume and Kurumi were already standing instead of sitting.
"I swear to make Ranma the greatest martial artist of his generation." Genma repeated the vow, eyes closed, face stern. "My son Ranma shall be a man among men."
Ranma's eyebrows fell, and he gave his father a sidelong glance. "You didn't mention the *seppuku* part, oyaji."
"..." Genma's stern mask faded a bit.
Nodoka wiped away a tear, remembering that day. "I kept this contract, and on that day, swore I would defend the honor of our family. I vowed I would hold them to their promise, and if necessary, do my duty as their kaikhaku. As the wife of a great martial artist, I could do no less."
Genma big sweated.
"You're serious?!" Akane asked, incredulous.
Nodoka picked up the parcel she had kept by her side, reached in, and firmly grasped the hilt of a katana to draw it out. "Of course I am... woops!"
Thunk!
Ranma gulped, hard. Tentatively, he pulled out the sword that had imbedded its razor sharp tip in the hardwood floor just inches from his crotch. After a moment's hesitation, he carefully handed it back to her.
"Thank you, Ranma dear." She took the sword, and after two tries, got it back into the sheath. "I'm afraid I'm still not very adept with it."
"Um..." Ranma adjusted the collar of his best Chinese styled shirt. Genma had insisted he wear his finest for this occasion, and the Tendo girls had all put on kimonos for this great reunion. Hearing something, Ranma looked over his shoulder, as Ryouga and Nabiki entered the living room. It looked like she'd fallen down while getting the lost boy off the roof for the gathering they were having. Then there was the goofy look on Ryouga's face...
Ranma rolled his eyes.
"However, seeing my son, and hearing so much of him from his friend," Nodoka inclined her head in Ryouga's direction. "I can see that my fears were totally unfounded. My son, my strong, handsome, wonderful son, is a man among men!"
Ranma nodded slowly. He couldn't argue with logic like that.
"And now he can come home again!"
Ranma kept nodding. Home didn't sound too bad.
"Ahem." Genma coughed, getting everyone's attention. "I don't think so."
Nodoka raised her hand to her mouth prettily. "But husband..."
"Ranma's training is not complete. While he may be a man among men, he is not yet the premier martial artist of his generation. I would be remiss to allow him to end his training on such a note... no," Genma said, voice full of authority and fatherly wisdom. "While he may be able to come home soon, that time is not now."
"Are you absolutely sure, husband?" Nodoka asked, voice sorrowful.
"You must endure, wife!" Genma stood up, fist clenched and striking a noble pose. "Endure just a little longer! Until my vow is fulfilled, I cannot bring Ranma home."
"Oh... oh Genma..." Nodoka looked down, her features pained. "Can I at least stay here for a few days? Please, Tendo-san?"
Soun looked up at Genma. Finally, Genma nodded, and Soun did the same. "Please. Make yourself at home."
"Oh dear." Kasumi added. "Our house is getting very crowded."
"No kidding." Nabiki quipped. "How are we doing to work out sleeping arrangements? Natsume and Kurumi have already moved into the guest room, and the boys were supposed to be in the Dojo. Daddy's on the first floor, and the Happosai takes up the Drawing Room. That's pretty much a full house."
"Oh." Nodoka sighed, sadly. "I hadn't thought of that."
"Did someone mention me?" Happosai jumped out of nowhere and onto the table.
Nodoka gasped. "Happo-sensei?"
"No-chan! How sweet to see you again!" He leapt at her bosom. "Let's remember old times!"
A second later, the old man was stomped into submission and kicked out via the porch. ... By Genma. Ranma was frozen where he stood. He hadn't even needed to get up. His father had actually handled the freak by himself. He slowly sat back down, stunned silent.
Soun patted his old friend on the back. "Well done, Saotome!"
"It had to be done, Tendo." Genma crossed his arms. "Ranma. Your mother and I will take the evil Master's former room. You and Ryouga can have the Dojo."
"Sounds good. I've got no problem with the Dojo," Ryouga said from where he stood, next to Nabiki, leaning against the doorframe. Standing up again, Ranma looked around the room. He'd forgotten just how many girls were living in the Tendo place while he was on the road: there'd be six of 'em, including his mother. Six and a half was more along Ryouga's line of thinking on that same subject.
"Yeah, I know how ya feel. This house is like a Sorority or somethin'." Ranma dusted himself off, feeling more comfortable with the situation now. All he had to do was avoid getting wet for a few days, Nodoka would leave, and he'd go home after finding a cure for is Jyusenkyou curse. Facing Ryouga, he joked, "Still, one more lady in the house means one less chance of Akane cooking..."
"RANMA!!"
The aqua transsexual missed being punted into the koi pond by less than a foot.
"Oh my." Kasumi put into words what everyone thought.
***
"That him?"
"Yep. Pull over."
The periphery of Tokyo was a dark place at night, the only illumination being the soft glow of the moon, distant neon lights, and the flicker of overhead lamps near the street. A young man walked the outer edges of those streets, in the half-light, a duffel bag over his right shoulder. Black boots had carried him far in his quest for revenge, and fulfillment of family honor, and they had finally brought him here: to the capitol.
To Tokyo.
The Saotome's were here.
Cracking his knuckles, the youth smiled in grim anticipation. Once he'd found them and fulfilled the vow he'd made to his dying father, then Kumon Ryu would know peace. The additional knowledge of the Umisenken, and the resulting money and power he'd get from uniting the two techniques, was also a big bonus. Living poor had taught him the value of money, but once he'd perfected the forbidden techniques of Saotome Genma, and rebuilt the Kumon Dojo, he'd be able to learn just how much fun living RICH would be.
He suspected that a direct comparison would favor the latter.
"Oh ho? What's this?" The martial artist in question jumped away and backwards, as a white van sped up and over the curb, screeching to a halt. The side door slid open, and a man stepped out. He was unassuming - wearing brown khakis and a blue shirt. White blonde hair topped the foreigner's head, and he waved pleasantly.
"Hey," the new man said, in English. "Howsit goin?"
"What?" Ryu didn't catch that last part.
"Catch." Adams threw something small and white in a leisurely arc. Ryu easily caught it in his right hand.
'And egg?' He looked down at it, and back at the foreigner. 'What's wrong with this guy?'
"Crush it. Go on!" Adams said, still smiling, and again using English. To demonstrate, he stomped his foot dramatically. "And if it works, you won't know what hit you."
Perplexed, Kumon Ryu shrugged. Why not? Putting the chicken egg on the ground, he crushed it under one black boot. A second later, he saw only darkness and oblivion. Just a few feet away, Mayor Pearl Adams gave his comrades in the white van a knowing look. "Let's get this thing in the van. Quickly. We've got work to do."
"Learning Curve"
Part XXVIII
by: J. Wagner
"Shinnosuke!!"
The hoarse cry split the air, as tall fingers of fire, as if from some great hand, lapped up through the high branches, obscuring swaths of the sky. Overhead, the sun disappeared behind gouts of black smoke. In the distance, some unknown animal screamed, in fright or pain, the guardian of Ryugenzawa couldn't tell. Wiping sweat drenched hair from his forehead, Shinnosuke focused on the here and now, and on finding some avenue of escape.
Jumping to the left, he narrowly avoided a falling branch, still burning wildly. Behind the flame and the bush, he saw large shadowed creatures moving, trying frantically to escape the conflagration. He heard his grandfather call out for him again, and managed to pinpoint the voice from that rough direction. Gritting his teeth, Shinnosuke raised his hands to his mouth, and released a warbling birdcall. Taking a deep breath, he repeated it, and jumped just as a giant platypus charged through the bushed, trampling the flames nearby.
Leaping up over the animal, he twisted in midair, barely avoiding the panicked creature's tail and scrambling legs. Of all the beasts of Ryugenzawa, Shinnosuke was most wary of the platypi. The males were extremely aggressive, and (he'd been told about, after forgetting) the wounds on his back attested to the poison they could inject from the bone spurs on their hind legs. Avoiding another burning branch as he moved through the air, Shinnosuke landed, and headed towards the only home he'd ever known - a small house in the middle of the forest. All around him, stampeding animals ran and reared, surrounded by the flame.
Only then, when Shinnosuke saw his house, burning and ruined, did he realize that the ancient forest of Ryugenzawa would not survive the night. Breathing heavily, smoke choking his lungs, he ran around to the side of the house and saw his grandfather; the old man was desperately trying to put out the fire with buckets of water from the nearby well. Seeing Shinnosuke approach, he coughed, but kept on his feet, displaying a measure of strength and determination his grandson hadn't seen in years (and certainly couldn't remember).
"Shinnosuke!" he yelled, voice still strong. "Help your grandfather... we have to... we have to..."
"We have to get out of here!" The younger man grabbed his grandfather by the shoulders. It wouldn't be what the older man would want to hear, but it had to be said, none-the-less. It was the simple truth. "Now, Grandfather!"
The other man's soot covered face contorted into a deep scowl. "We will NOT abandon this house! Our home!"
"If we stay here, we are... going... to... die!" Adrenalin pumping through his veins, Shinnosuke slapped the bucket from his grandfather's hands and grabbed his shoulders. "Look around you, Grandfather! In a few hours, there won't be anything left to abandon in this whole forest!"
The old man grimaced and looked away. "We can't leave... you...you need..."
"What?" Shinnosuke was normally a polite and calm boy, but this was an extreme situation that warranted an extreme response. They simply couldn't afford to argue over this. As the younger man hauled his legal guardian away from the blazing wreck of their home, and through an as-yet untouched part of the forest, above them, straddling the tree line, a man lowered his binoculars.
"Do we let them go?" he asked his companion.
"Negative." The other man smiled broadly, face covered by mottled brown and green paint. "They won't get far. Radio Chopper Two. Tell them to rendezvous with us at the pool and converge on the primary target."
Below them, Ryugenzawa burned.
***
Saotome Nodoka was happy.
Perhaps 'happy' was an inaccurate word to describe her feelings. She was actually rather enthusiastic, being so close to finally seeing her husband and her son. She was also looking forward to meeting an old friend of her husband's, Tendo Soun - who she had never met before, but had heard much about in the intervening years between when they'd been engaged and when Genma had left with Ranma. The wait, however, was wracking her nerves with anxiety. How much did Ranma remember of his mother? A little? ... Nothing? Already he was seventeen years old; she had no doubt missed out on much of his young life, and Genma's letters to her had dried up well over a year ago.
For a while, she had feared for his safety.
But no more. The boy escorting her to the Tendo home (Nodoka amended that: Hibiki Ryouga was asking directions, and she was leading him there) was a friend of her son, and knew her husband through association. What he had told her so far cemented her confidence in Genma - that their son had been raised to be a manly man. Unfortunately, the Hibiki boy seemed reluctant to go deeper into things. Nodoka came to the conclusion that he still wasn't totally sure that she was who she claimed to be and would wait before divulging anything too personal or important.
What a good friend his son had!
"Umm... Hibiki-kun, didn't we just pass this way?" Nodoka paused at an intersection.
A sweat drop appeared on the young man's head.
"I usually jump my way to the Tendos, you know. I don't wander around like this anymore," he said, self-consciously. Ryouga looked down, ashamed. "I'm getting you lost, Mrs. Saotome. Maybe you'd be better off without me."
"Nonsense. My son was taking you home, until you saved my life and lost him. Now, it is my responsibility to do so. It is the least I can do for the nice man reuniting me with my family, Hibiki-kun."
"Nice man? Me?" Ryouga's lips tightened. "I'm not really..."
"What did you mean by 'jump' your way?" Nodoka quickly changed the subject. She had quickly learned that the Hibiki boy was easily depressed, and tended to brood while he walked. When he did so, it was obvious that he only got more lost.
"Well. I just jump up onto a roof, or a chimney, or the highest point I can find," he replied, looking up, searching for good targets. "That over there would be prefect." He pointed to a six-story apartment building. "Once I'm at the top, I just ...well, jump around until I see the Tendo property. It works really well in a residential neighborhood like Nerima, because none of the buildings are too tall. In downtown Tokyo, it's more difficult and dangerous, not just because of the heights, but because of the wind and... I'm rambling. Sorry."
Nodoka blinked.
"That doesn't explain how you 'jump' around, Hibiki-kun."
"I jump. You know. Jump. Jump!"
"Up there?" She pointed to the promontory he'd singled out just before.
Ryouga nodded.
"All the way up there?" She asked again. "You can jump up there?"
He nodded again. "Yeah."
She frowned. "That's impossible."
"Well, it's all in the legs." He tilted his head slightly. "And localizing your Ki." He noted that Nodoka still didn't follow. "You've seen Genma do a high jump before, right?"
She shook her head. "My husband can jump quite high, but no one can jump up there..."
"Well, maybe I should just show you." Ryouga pivoted, tensed his legs in a crouch, and jumped. Nodoka blinked fiercely, not quite believing what she was seeing. Ryouga was in midair, arms out for balance, in a total defiance of gravity. She had always prided herself on being the knowledgeable wife of a martial artist, but Genma had never done anything like *that* around her before. She hadn't even imagined that he could. She had known that he was a powerful martial artist, but not that he, or anyone, was really capable of throwing off the shackles of gravity like this boy just did.
Nodoka quickly gasped.
"No! Hibiki-kun! This way!" Ryouga pivoted from where he'd landed. He had turned around, but missed her, and was about to jump in the wrong direction. Her voice caught him before he did, however, and he saw her. With a quick leap, he fell the six stories, to land lightly and without a sound only a few feet in front of her.
"See? Easy." He shrugged the weight of his pack, adjusting it slightly.
"Can... can my son can do that?" Nodoka asked, incredulous.
"Ranma can jump at least five stories without much of a problem. He could definitely make it with a running start, though. Your husband... I'm not as sure." Ryouga shrugged. "Maybe. Probably."
"Incredible. Did you see the Dojo?"
"I think so. It was... it... er..." Ryouga raised one arm and nervously scratched the back of his neck. "I kinda can't say for sure."
"Well, that's all right. We'll find it eventually."
"I hope so," he grumbled, not in any position to refute or argue with her. Nodoka smiled again, trying to cheer him up. Hibiki Ryouga, she had no doubt, was a very nice boy. He was polite, respectful and at least fairly intelligent, despite his little directional handicap. He was also very strong, quite handsome, and manly, but he was also very passive around women, and more than a little sulking, as if something was eating him up deep inside. Nodoka dearly hoped her son was more assertive, more aggressive, than his friend. The whole shy martial artist routine was cute, in a way, but not what she was expecting from Genma's (and her) ideas of a true man among men.
Her husband had always been a true embodiment of masculinity when she'd known him. He hadn't been the most attractive of men, but in his time she thought he'd possessed a sort of rugged roguishness that well suited him. When he wanted something, he pursued it, heedless of caution. He'd been unrepentant when caught leering at her, defiant of authority when it went against his honor code, and he'd been totally dedicated to the Art. It was the height of his training when they'd gotten together, and it was those memories of her fierce and independent husband that sustained her. Sometimes, he would lock himself away for hours, transcribing techniques and skills of his onto paper, before leaving to train. He always returned to her, bold and amorous. Things had changed somewhat when little Ranma had been born, and Genma had transferred his focus from himself to his son.
"Tell me again how Ranma fights, Hibiki-kun," she asked him, as they walked.
"Again?" Ryouga sighed. "Well... he usually dances around a lot. He's very quick and likes to taunt his opponents. He almost always waits until they get angry before he gets serious and takes the offensive. He draws his opponent in, maneuvers and controls the fight, usually. When he fights most people he holds back... when we fight, he really lets loose. His fists are like lightning bolts, so quick they... pour down like rain. But he always knows when to stop. He never goes so far that he would hurt someone without absolutely having to. He values life more than... most people, I think."
He'd just added that last part, the lost boy realized, and shut up.
"I can't wait to meet him," Nodoka repeated.
Ryouga didn't reply.
A small part of him winced just talking to this woman about Ranma. Ryouga looked at her, and saw his own mother, with short dark hair, knowing smile, and warm embrace, telling him that he was loved, and that someone was proud of him. In his mother's presence, troubles faded into the background, replaced by a fleeting moment of caring and kinship. Even when it was his father, a more distant and stern figure, there was the current of warm emotion and... Ryouga quickly snuffed the thoughts before they made him more depressed.
He had not seen his parents in years.
Deep inside, Ryouga could feel a seething resentment slowly building up. Given time, it would become a fortress inside his mind, and another reason to dislike and be jealous of Ranma. He could not risk that. He could not risk more anger and hate and resentment and jealousy and depression surging up into his thoughts and influencing his actions. He was dangerous enough as he was. More of those terrible thoughts and feelings would only erode the shell of his humanity. With sheer force of will, he crushed the thoughts underfoot and buried the feelings where they would never surface. Never survive.
"Would you like to see some pictures of him?" Nodoka asked, a bit hesitantly.
Ryouga's mind screamed 'no!!!!' but his body just nodded pleasantly. "Why not?"
He spent the next few minutes being bombarded by small pictures of his formerly hated rival. A few drew laughter, the one of Ranma crying after he wet his bed (a common occurrence in his youth, apparently) was something he'd have to remind his rival of next time they argued, but most of the rest... pictures of a young Ranma held tenderly by his mother, the picture with him in his father's arms, with Nodoka just to the side smiling happily, these scenes of joy, of a content family, tore at his heart and self-control. He wanted to rip them to pieces. He wanted others to suffer as he did.
A small voice, like a whisper, wanted the whole world to suffer as he had.
Every man, woman and child.
Luckily, they found the Tendo dojo more quickly than Ryouga had anticipated, sparing any further mental extrapolation on that line of thought. Approaching the door, slightly ahead of Mrs. Saotome, he thought back over the training trip he was now concluding. In some respects, it had been a success, and he was ... happy with the way things had turned out.
He had improved his Ki control by a fair margin, which was certainly one of the primary goals he'd set for himself beforehand. He'd learned to better focus and maintain the equilibrium between his internalized and externalized Ki, reigning in his battle aura. A massive flare of aura was, at this point, as much a liability as a boon. With the Hiryu Shoten Ha, Ranma had a very effective counterattack to powerful auras, so Ryouga had made it a special priority to find a way to utilize the 'crushing' power of his anger-depression battle aura (a necessary counter to the Umisenken) without exposing undue amounts of energy to the Ascending Dragon technique.
He'd improved his danger sense as well, which had stagnated over the last few weeks, as well as some done new experiments on further modifying his Iron Cloth techniques. Ranma had been instrumental in this pursuit, just as Ryouga had assisted his rival in perfecting his adaptations of the Amaguriken and Hiryu Shoten Ha. Looking into the future, the lost boy had some interesting ideas for creating his own class of special techniques, either based off the Iron Cloth, the Bakusai Tenketsu, or both. He'd already developed and used the Yubisaki Ishimi Miketsukan (Finger Touch Imprisonment), Tekimen Kongou Gishu (Instant Diamond Hand) and Tekimen Kongou Toushin (Instant Diamond Blade), so maybe the next step from Iron Cloth would be Diamond Cloth. How old had Genma been when he developed the Umisenken? Surely no more than twenty four. Ryouga was already seventeen, soon to be eighteen; it was time to start thinking about his future.
Of course, outside martial arts what kind of a future did he have, anyway?
Shaking his head at the depressing Ki building within him, Ryouga suppressed it with a small shudder. While his training trip had helped him in all the ways it traditionally would (improving in the Art) he had failed to gain any sense of inner peace, which was what he had truly hoped for. Worse, it wasn't even Ranma's fault. The pigtailed boy had been aggravating at times, but also... sometimes, he was fun to be with. Fun to talk to. Then again, after years of loneliness, Ryouga wasn't too picky when it came to finding friendship. He'd just as quickly found an affinity for Shampoo, Ukyou, and Mousse. He even considered Kuno an acquaintance of sorts.
This left the lost boy with a rival, but no one to hate.
Except himself. Then again, Ryouga knew he didn't truly hate himself - even after killing Taro - That was the shameful part, the secret he could let no one know. He had reveled in it. He would do it again, if he could: leave that poor bastard buried under a literal landslide of rock and rubble. The feeling he felt for himself was more complicated than that, and difficult to put into words. Regardless, that aspect of things had not been improved by his little month long walkabout.
Standing in front of the door now, Ryouga knocked gently. He was home... of sorts. Mr. Tendo was a nice man, though prone to rashness and fits, but Ryouga couldn't quite ever think of him as a fill-in father. Despite the older man's surviving skill in the Art, he was not as imposing or strict a figure as Ryouga's actual biological father, and in the Hibiki household, his father had always been the disciplinarian. It was from him that Ryouga was handed the family curse, and it had fallen on him to teach his son on the ways of survival on one's own. Tendo Soun was more of a peer, almost.
Of Saotome Genma, Ryouga had no strong feels any way. He was the lost boy's elder, but Genma had lost much of the respect due to him from age and experience with displays of cowardice, greed, thievery and general dishonesty. What he had done to Ukyou, in particular, was unforgivable in Ryouga's eyes, and the near cooking (though Genma hadn't known that pig had once been human and never tried to eat him afterwards) had never been forgotten.
Kasumi was great - she was a gentle soul if ever there was one. She was a little oblivious of things, but really, was he one to point out that fault in anybody? He'd been called clueless himself enough times. Kasumi was a caregiver in every definition of the word, and the heart of the Tendo family. Ryouga found he got along well with Kasumi, who had taken liberty of his being around, letting him help around the house and feel useful. All without him even having to ask!
Ironically, it was Akane that he had the most trouble relating to. Despite having a rather intense infatuation with her for a few weeks, what seemed like a lifetime ago, the barrier that the P-chan debacle had created remained between them. Akane had forgiven him (or said she had, a couple times), but he still hadn't forgiven himself, and found that being around her still made him nervous and secretly ashamed of what he had done. It wasn't like he had avoided her or anything. He spent time helping her train in the Dojo, they watched television together occasionally, and unlike the other Tendo girls, she and he shared a background in the Art.
But her anger and intensity intimidated him. Scared him, even. Now, Shampoo had a pretty mean streak to her, and a certain dangerous edge to her behavior and personality. Yet, perhaps because she had been raised in a certain way, Shampoo dealt with her anger fairly well. She would lash out physically quite rarely, and tended to switch from sad to happy very quickly. Ukyou also had a bad temper, but it took a lot to really rile her up, though she would rarely hesitate to bop someone on the head playfully.
Akane, though, got angry extremely quickly, and often (Ryouga now saw) without due provocation. She was a lot like himself in that regard, he had to admit, the difference being that while Ryouga let his anger smolder and generally reigned in any sort of immediate physical response (unless he felt extremely slighted), Akane just let loose... If he were like that, without inhibition, he'd have probably left a trail of bodies behind him, from Shanghai to Osaka.
Then there was Nabiki, who confused him more than anyone he knew. She had convinced him to go to Furinkan, and to study for the entrance exams, and to stay with the Tendos, and... and she was his anchor, here. Without her, he'd have almost certainly have left after the last great fight he'd had with Ranma. With her, he had something approaching a normal relationship (he thought). They had gone out on dates, like regular human beings and she had 'let' him pay like a gentleman should, and there hadn't been any fighting or malleting or uppercuts-into-the-roof. They studied together, and sometimes she'd let him in on her schemes, which while often dishonest, she found amusing, so he usually went along with it for her sake. With her, around her, he had found some happiness... a bulwark to cling to when things seemed like they were falling apart.
So why had he ran from her?
'Because I'm not used to it.' He had decided, after hours of thinking the situation over. He wasn't used to anything approaching a normal life, so how could anyone expect him to instantly adapt to one? Nabiki would understand, when he described it to her later. Hell, she probably already knew, but it was best to share this insight with her anyway. He owed it to her. It would take some time to find the right compromise, because he would and could never be truly normal, not even for her, but he would try. Wasn't that what mattered?
Who else was there? Oh yes: Natsume and Kurumi. The two lost Tendo girls. Though it was his fault they'd shown up at the dojo in the first place, he really didn't know them too well. Kurumi seemed to like him as a source of new foodstuffs, and a sort of older brother. Natsume was more complicated. That girl was as cold as Nabiki, and didn't speak a whole lot; though it was obvious her main concern was keeping the two of them in their new home and winning over their estranged father. And then there was one: the old man. Happosai was a pervert and a dirty lecher. On that topic, he turned to face Nodoka. "Saotome-san. Does the name 'Happosai' right a bell?"
"Oh, yes." She nodded curtly. "My husband trained under Happo-sensei when he was around your age, up to and until Ranma was born."
"Do you know of his... ahem, 'habits?'" Ryouga asked, slowly.
"He likes to peep at girls when they change, and usually tries to grope them as well. He steals women's underwear, he often barges in and eats other peoples' meals, and he's very fond of sake to the point of redefining overindulgence..."
He sweat-dropped. "Oh. Well. He's here. Just, um... so you know."
"Oh, don't worry about me, Ryouga-kun! Genma will defend my honor if his *former* Master tries anything."
"He will?"
Was this the same Saotome Genma they were thinking about?
"Of course he will." Nodoka sounded very confident, and Ryouga let the matter drop. She'd been fairly warned.
"Hello? Who is..." An attractive young woman with long brown hair and a summer dress opened the door and smiled at seeing who it was. "Ryouga-kun! You made it... but where is Ranma-kun?" Her eyes moved to Nodoka. "And who is this?"
"You're not going to believe..." He started to say.
"Saotome Nodoka." Nodoka bowed politely. "You must be Tendo Kasumi. Ryouga has told me much about you."
Ryouga clarified. "She's Ranma's *mother* ..."
"Oh my." Kasumi opened the door fully and gave a small bow. "This is a surprise. Please, come in and make yourself comfortable. Traveling with Ryouga-kun, I imagine you've been on the road for some time. Would you like some tea?"
Nodoka stepped inside. "That would be wonderful, thank you."
Ryouga followed a few feet behind. He watched Kasumi and Nodoka exchange pleasantries, and then looked around for Nabiki. Slowly, he made his way to the living room. Fortunately, he'd spent enough time in the Tendo home to prevent getting lost too easily, and could usually navigate the premises confidently when in his human form.
"Saotome-san!" He heard Kasumi yell, her volume just enough to be heard yet not seem un-ladylike. "Saotome-san, you have a guest!"
A voice responded from upstairs: "Be right there, Kasumi!"
"Oi! Kasumi!" Ryouga called out, turning slightly to see her. Taking off his backpack, he carefully put it down on the floor leaning against a nearby wall. Opening the top, he asked, "Where's Nabiki? Is she around?"
"She went out with Natsume-chan a few hours ago." Kasumi's eyes lighted up when Ryouga handed her a small box and book. "Are these for me, Ryouga-kun?"
"Yep." He nodded. "I got ya' some tea cakes, and the book is by some American woman. It was on the best seller list."
"That was very thoughtful." She took the gifts and bowed curtly. "Thank you very much, Ryouga-kun."
Ryouga waved it off. "Don't sweat it. I got stuff for everybody."
"Did'ya get anything for me, boy?" Genma asked, walking in from behind.
The lost boy smirked. "You could say I did..."
"Genma?" Nodoka yipped, seeing her husband in the flesh after over a decade. "Genma!"
"N.n.n..n... Nodoka!?" The elder Saotome 's eyes widened threefold.
"Oh Genma! It's been so long!" Crystal tears trailing down her cheeks, Nodoka jumped into his arms and embraced him.
"N... now... Nodoka... Ah I... aa..."
"I missed you so much, husband!"
Finally, Genma seemed to compose himself, principally after realizing that Ryouga and Nodoka hadn't shown up with his good-for-nothing son. Slowly, he let himself wrap his arms around his wife. It did feel infinitely good to have her in his arms again - now, all he had to do was keep her away from her son until they could cure his little aqua-transsexual problem. Not easy, but not impossible. Much as he loved her, Saotome Nodoka had never been the sharpest knife in the drawer.
"And I you, wife!" Genma hugged her back, eyes closed. "It is... so good to see you again!"
"Our son... has he...?"
"Ranma is, indeed, a man among men..."
"Isn't this touching, Ryouga-kun? Won't Ranma be happy when he gets home?"
"Maybe." Ryouga 'hmffed' and crossed his arms. "I didn't do this for Ranma... I did it because..."
He didn't finish his sentence, and instead headed for the dojo.
***
Tokyo
Futara Arms Apartments
"So: we have full authorization to move ahead?"
"Yes." Pearl Adams sighed, leaning back and into the apartment's only couch. "We do. I double-checked the coded message in case there was a mistake. It was all legit."
"And? What did it say?"
"The Society wants the primary and secondary targets taken out of circulation."
"Ah. Ok, then!" Kenji paced, as he was want to do whenever anticipation got the better of him. "Well, we all knew it was just a matter of time before the order was given."
At the far side of the room, seated by his monitoring and surveillance equipment, Yosho added, his tone neutral, "The timing works for us, too. Both of the primary targets should be present by tomorrow."
"What do you have prepped and ready, Kenji?" Adams asked, after a few moments' hesitation.
"Well..." The Japanese-American thumbed his thin goatee. "I was thinking of using a home made Claymore, kind of pointing up and out, with a nice wide cone." He made a little tent shape with his fingers, his tone excited. "The .2 kg piece I rigged together might be enough... but I've just about finished putting together a much larger .5 kg block of C-4 that should be more than enough to take out any of the targets within... oh, I'd say, two rooms. The walls aren't so thick, so even if someone's in the floor above the explosion, there's a good chance of taking them out. Still, optimally, you'd want it in the den, as close to the primaries as possible."
"Collateral damage is...?" Pearl protested half-heartedly.
"Unavoidable, boss. You know that." Kenji paused in his pacing and faced the other man. "Better safe than sorry... besides, the Tendo house itself is far enough from the street that it's highly unlikely any bystanders will be caught in the kill zone."
"Yosho? What do you think?"
"Make a surprise visit ... in two days. Kenji, how small a package are you putting together?"
"The usual. I can make it look like a box of chocolates or somethin'."
"Good." Yosho rubbed his hands together. "We make the delivery, a mail courier could work, or the boss could drop it off himself. Either is good. A Radio trigger would be optimal."
"Of course." Kenji agreed.
"Then we just set it off." Yosho' hands flew apart. "Boom."
"Plus," Kenji added in. "If we're being given permission to move with this, that means Command already has everything in place to cover for us. Hey, is it true that Tomiko's Team hit their Beta site already?"
"It'll be all over the news tonight, no doubt." Adams spoke up, answering to the affirmative. "The whole thing came off without a hitch. She called me up to brag personally. Says all we have to do is cleanup."
"Oh, please." Yosho groaned, rolling his eyes. "Tomiko's talking out of her ass. All she had to do was shoot a bunch of big dumb animals. Plus, she got an additional team AND helicopters to get the job done. We're the ones out risking our necks trying to take out a gang of punks who can crater concrete with their fists. Cleanup... that's bullshit!"
"No kidding." Kenji nodded and sat on the edge of the couch. "So we make the hit in two days?"
Pearl Adams slowly stood and straightened out his shirt. "I've got a different plan."
"Oh?" Yosho's eyebrows rose suspiciously.
Adams walked around Kenji, to a desk on the far side of the apartment's living room, to the flickering light of the muted television. Next to it, he pulled out a black suitcase and gently put it down on top of the minibar. With a sharp click, he opened the case and reached in, taking out a single small white egg.
"Yeah." Pearl held the egg up to the light. "These came in a few days ago. I say we try 'em out."
Kenji and Yosho looked at each other, then back at Pearl and smiled. Their leader carefully put the surikomi egg back in its padded case. "And I know just how."
***
It was late afternoon when Ranma returned to the Tendo Dojo. Ryouga had been on the roof, ostensibly meditating, when he felt the sense of familiarity approach. The only secular (for lack of a better word) way to describe it was like a faint warm breeze, not offensive or overpowering, but simply an addition to the otherwise maudlin events of the world around him. Not needing, or feeling, like rousing himself, Ryouga instead stayed and listened as some sort of scuffle occurred downstairs.
From the heart of Tokyo, a chill wind blew in, rustling the lost boy's hair. Nonetheless, he felt more at peace than he had in weeks, focusing not on the present state of affairs, but on simply being. He was content to be here. He was comfortable staying in one place, and it filled him with a great sense of satisfaction that he had come to terms with the concept of simply being anywhere. It was a step... a step in the right direction. While not particularly religious in any formal sense, the Hibiki family was traditionally Buddhist, and Ryouga's own lack of peace had always troubled him.
He drew in a sharp breath, feeling that warm caress of Ki again, but from a different direction. His young Ki senses had been wrong, it seemed. It wasn't Ranma that he had felt approaching. Opening his eyes, Ryouga inclined his head to be sure, and stood up.
"Nabiki?"
The middle Tendo daughter carefully kept her footing on the roof tiles and took a few steps towards him. "Ryouga."
No Nabi-chan.
No Ryo-chan.
'Looks like we're back to square one with each other,' he thought, bitterly. Looking at her afresh, he felt a sharp pang from deep inside his soul. She was wearing one of her kimonos, a rare occurrence, since she typically only put them on for special occasions. He'd only seen her a few times in one, and it had never failed to take his breath away. Radiant in a pattern of crystal blue on white, carps and waves, he had to force himself to look away, for even a moment. They had to make a choice, each of them, then and there.
And her appearance would only make him stutter and lose resolve. Her beauty had nothing to do with his feelings. He reached into his pants pocket, and picked out what he'd gotten for her, encircling it in his palm. Resolving himself, standing firm against another gust of cold wind, he walked towards her. The next words almost never made it from his mouth, but at this point, he was wholly committed.
"Nabi-chan." He said it experimentally, and made bolder by her anxious silence, continued. "I missed you."
She looked at him firmly. "I know. You sent flowers. And chocolates."
In that moment, he wanted to give her his present. He wanted to bribe her heart. She would like what he got her: of this he was sure. But still the lost boy stayed his hand. Gulping, he stopped in front of her, and looked away slightly, silently ashamed of still being so shy and indecisive. She took the initiative he'd missed.
"Why did you leave, Ryo-kun?"
He perked up at hearing his name spoken with affinity. It gave him heart, but in a way, also made him sad. She didn't say it, but she was asking, more accurately: 'Why did you leave me?'
And he couldn't say, 'It wasn't you, it was me' because that was a lie. It was she as well as he. It was this place. It was the happiness he still, deep in his heart of hearts, didn't feel he had earned or deserved. Though he felt content here, now, it was destined to not always be so. His recent experiences had taught him that his restraint couldn't be yet be trusted, and that something dark flowed through his veins. Nabiki knew of his darker impulses, she had seen it first hand, but Ryouga knew she didn't fully comprehend them.
Murderer.
'Why do you have to make me feel happy?' Ryouga's mind blamed her.
'Why is this feeling so alien? This warmth in my breast?' And, more than anything, he blamed himself.
Murderer!
'I'll do it again,' he thought with absolute, horrible certainty. 'Some things, a man like me, are incapable of change. I can grow, and I can adapt, but I can never really change.'
Nabiki must have seen the expression on his face, because she took a step forward and asked again. "Ryo-kun..."
That one word said more than before, more concisely than ever. Then, amazingly, she smirked and looked away, at the sky, its daytime light slowly fading. "You know... for a while I thought you had a thing for Shampoo. Or Ukyou. I mean, they're fighters like my sister... except a lot better. They see and knew a side of you I can only imagine, a side you've tried explaining, but I have no reference for. I knew I couldn't compete with that, not outright. I wasn't even sure if it was worth risking losing over. But I tried."
"I know you have problems. I know because I see it on your face every day, in your eyes." She still didn't look at him. "I see it in the way you move. And... and... and I wanted to help. I wanted to help you, because I was willing to bet that you were a good guy who had gotten dealt a bad hand."
She sighed. "I'm going to be graduating soon. What friends do I have? What memories? What do people think of me; on the rare occasion they see past my sisters? You were different, and around you, I was different. I was happier." She closed her eyes, shutting in tears. "Don't tell me you weren't."
"I was happier. We were." Ryouga reached out, his free hand to her shoulder, so gently his hand shook to keep steady. She turned, and her eyes opened, looking right into his. "But I'll hurt you, Nabi-chan. I won't want to... I'd never want to... but I don't trust myself. You make me... you make me feel..."
He searched for the word, his vocabulary falling to pieces. "You make me feel like I've never felt before. It confuses me. It... it scares me. Because I want to hold you, but I can't." He shook his head. "I can't hold anyone, because I know they'll break."
"Is that what you're worried about?" She smiled, wanly. "Hurting me? You're the gentlest person I know."
Ryouga shook his head. "You have to be kidding."
"I'm not," she stressed, speaking seriously. "And the only one who doesn't have faith in you..." A slender hand reached out and rested on the chest, right over his heart. "Is you, Ryo-kun."
He looked deep into her eyes, and with the hand that still held his gift to her, silently slipped it into her palm. He had seen, in those brown depths, no hint of malice or faithlessness from the middle Tendo girl. She did believe in him, a hundred fold more than he believed in himself. Why? How? He didn't know, but she did.
"This..." He gently closed her hand over the gift. "Is for you."
"Thank you," she said, without even looking at it. Leaning in close, she kissed him on the cheek, and he blushed crimson. Only then did Nabiki open her hand and see what he had gotten her. In the light of the late day, a beautiful gold and silver money clip glinted, in the shape of the symbol representing yen. Her eyes lighted up, and she gasped.
By her estimates, it must've cost at *least* fifteen thousand yen!
"OH, RYO-CHAN!!"
She pounced on him, and he fell back, arms and legs akimbo. "Na-bi-ki!!! You'll get your kimono dirty!"
Apparently, he quickly realized, she didn't care.
***
"...Ever since Ranma left, my heart had grieved. But when my noble husband made it clear to me that, for Ranma's training to succeed, he must be removed from maternal influences, I knew I had to sacrifice for my child. For my dear son."
As Nodoka spoke, Ranma shifted nervously from where he sat. Genma was next to him, and for that, Ranma was grateful. So: This was his mother? She seemed like a nice enough lady, though he really had no idea how to relate to her. He certainly couldn't treat her like he treated his old man, the pigtailed martial artist knew that much at least, but what exactly he was supposed to do with her, he didn't quite fathom.
From what she'd described of herself, and some of her life, she wasn't a martial artist. She came from a one time rival of the Saotome family, the Tanaka's (Ranma had never heard of ANY of this before, but had kept silent), who had arranged the marriage between herself and Genma. Soun had taken that moment to point out how arranged marriages had a lower divorce rate than normal ones, even during 'trying times.' Ranma had let it pass, because he knew Akane would express enough discontent for the both of them.
And she had.
Still, Ranma was bothered. He didn't have anything in common with this woman. At least nothing he could think of at the moment. So, for one of the few times in his life, Ranma sat down and listened intently, having no idea what to do. Or even what to say. 'Hi mom! It's been a while! Is dinner ready?'
Uh... no.
"You must trust Saotome-san a great deal to leave Ranma in his care for so long," Kasumi said, smiling politely as always.
"I do trust my husband. Explicitly. Additionally, I recorded Genma's vow as a contract." Nodoka took out a piece of paper, for all the Tendo family present (sans Nabiki) to see. The room was already rather crowded, even with two people not present. Natsume and Kurumi were already standing instead of sitting.
"I swear to make Ranma the greatest martial artist of his generation." Genma repeated the vow, eyes closed, face stern. "My son Ranma shall be a man among men."
Ranma's eyebrows fell, and he gave his father a sidelong glance. "You didn't mention the *seppuku* part, oyaji."
"..." Genma's stern mask faded a bit.
Nodoka wiped away a tear, remembering that day. "I kept this contract, and on that day, swore I would defend the honor of our family. I vowed I would hold them to their promise, and if necessary, do my duty as their kaikhaku. As the wife of a great martial artist, I could do no less."
Genma big sweated.
"You're serious?!" Akane asked, incredulous.
Nodoka picked up the parcel she had kept by her side, reached in, and firmly grasped the hilt of a katana to draw it out. "Of course I am... woops!"
Thunk!
Ranma gulped, hard. Tentatively, he pulled out the sword that had imbedded its razor sharp tip in the hardwood floor just inches from his crotch. After a moment's hesitation, he carefully handed it back to her.
"Thank you, Ranma dear." She took the sword, and after two tries, got it back into the sheath. "I'm afraid I'm still not very adept with it."
"Um..." Ranma adjusted the collar of his best Chinese styled shirt. Genma had insisted he wear his finest for this occasion, and the Tendo girls had all put on kimonos for this great reunion. Hearing something, Ranma looked over his shoulder, as Ryouga and Nabiki entered the living room. It looked like she'd fallen down while getting the lost boy off the roof for the gathering they were having. Then there was the goofy look on Ryouga's face...
Ranma rolled his eyes.
"However, seeing my son, and hearing so much of him from his friend," Nodoka inclined her head in Ryouga's direction. "I can see that my fears were totally unfounded. My son, my strong, handsome, wonderful son, is a man among men!"
Ranma nodded slowly. He couldn't argue with logic like that.
"And now he can come home again!"
Ranma kept nodding. Home didn't sound too bad.
"Ahem." Genma coughed, getting everyone's attention. "I don't think so."
Nodoka raised her hand to her mouth prettily. "But husband..."
"Ranma's training is not complete. While he may be a man among men, he is not yet the premier martial artist of his generation. I would be remiss to allow him to end his training on such a note... no," Genma said, voice full of authority and fatherly wisdom. "While he may be able to come home soon, that time is not now."
"Are you absolutely sure, husband?" Nodoka asked, voice sorrowful.
"You must endure, wife!" Genma stood up, fist clenched and striking a noble pose. "Endure just a little longer! Until my vow is fulfilled, I cannot bring Ranma home."
"Oh... oh Genma..." Nodoka looked down, her features pained. "Can I at least stay here for a few days? Please, Tendo-san?"
Soun looked up at Genma. Finally, Genma nodded, and Soun did the same. "Please. Make yourself at home."
"Oh dear." Kasumi added. "Our house is getting very crowded."
"No kidding." Nabiki quipped. "How are we doing to work out sleeping arrangements? Natsume and Kurumi have already moved into the guest room, and the boys were supposed to be in the Dojo. Daddy's on the first floor, and the Happosai takes up the Drawing Room. That's pretty much a full house."
"Oh." Nodoka sighed, sadly. "I hadn't thought of that."
"Did someone mention me?" Happosai jumped out of nowhere and onto the table.
Nodoka gasped. "Happo-sensei?"
"No-chan! How sweet to see you again!" He leapt at her bosom. "Let's remember old times!"
A second later, the old man was stomped into submission and kicked out via the porch. ... By Genma. Ranma was frozen where he stood. He hadn't even needed to get up. His father had actually handled the freak by himself. He slowly sat back down, stunned silent.
Soun patted his old friend on the back. "Well done, Saotome!"
"It had to be done, Tendo." Genma crossed his arms. "Ranma. Your mother and I will take the evil Master's former room. You and Ryouga can have the Dojo."
"Sounds good. I've got no problem with the Dojo," Ryouga said from where he stood, next to Nabiki, leaning against the doorframe. Standing up again, Ranma looked around the room. He'd forgotten just how many girls were living in the Tendo place while he was on the road: there'd be six of 'em, including his mother. Six and a half was more along Ryouga's line of thinking on that same subject.
"Yeah, I know how ya feel. This house is like a Sorority or somethin'." Ranma dusted himself off, feeling more comfortable with the situation now. All he had to do was avoid getting wet for a few days, Nodoka would leave, and he'd go home after finding a cure for is Jyusenkyou curse. Facing Ryouga, he joked, "Still, one more lady in the house means one less chance of Akane cooking..."
"RANMA!!"
The aqua transsexual missed being punted into the koi pond by less than a foot.
"Oh my." Kasumi put into words what everyone thought.
***
"That him?"
"Yep. Pull over."
The periphery of Tokyo was a dark place at night, the only illumination being the soft glow of the moon, distant neon lights, and the flicker of overhead lamps near the street. A young man walked the outer edges of those streets, in the half-light, a duffel bag over his right shoulder. Black boots had carried him far in his quest for revenge, and fulfillment of family honor, and they had finally brought him here: to the capitol.
To Tokyo.
The Saotome's were here.
Cracking his knuckles, the youth smiled in grim anticipation. Once he'd found them and fulfilled the vow he'd made to his dying father, then Kumon Ryu would know peace. The additional knowledge of the Umisenken, and the resulting money and power he'd get from uniting the two techniques, was also a big bonus. Living poor had taught him the value of money, but once he'd perfected the forbidden techniques of Saotome Genma, and rebuilt the Kumon Dojo, he'd be able to learn just how much fun living RICH would be.
He suspected that a direct comparison would favor the latter.
"Oh ho? What's this?" The martial artist in question jumped away and backwards, as a white van sped up and over the curb, screeching to a halt. The side door slid open, and a man stepped out. He was unassuming - wearing brown khakis and a blue shirt. White blonde hair topped the foreigner's head, and he waved pleasantly.
"Hey," the new man said, in English. "Howsit goin?"
"What?" Ryu didn't catch that last part.
"Catch." Adams threw something small and white in a leisurely arc. Ryu easily caught it in his right hand.
'And egg?' He looked down at it, and back at the foreigner. 'What's wrong with this guy?'
"Crush it. Go on!" Adams said, still smiling, and again using English. To demonstrate, he stomped his foot dramatically. "And if it works, you won't know what hit you."
Perplexed, Kumon Ryu shrugged. Why not? Putting the chicken egg on the ground, he crushed it under one black boot. A second later, he saw only darkness and oblivion. Just a few feet away, Mayor Pearl Adams gave his comrades in the white van a knowing look. "Let's get this thing in the van. Quickly. We've got work to do."
