Disclaimer: Niether of these animes belong to me. But I can dream can't I?
Chapter 2: The Next Step...
The two young men traversed the increasingly thick foliage of the valley as they followed the trail left by Genma's ki signature.
"Man," Ranma sighed, "If I'd known it'd be so hard to retreive him, I never would've hit him that hard."
"Hey, what do you suppose he's been doing all this time, to have stayed in the same location?" Goku asked, turning to his companion.
It still surprised Ranma how advanced Goku's ki senses were. They were far above anything Ranma was capable of. There was definitely more to Goku then he had initially suspected. Goku had been fully aware of Genma's distinct aura fluctuations even across the vast distance that they had already travelled. He could even sense when his father was awake or sleeping. Only now was Ranma starting to pick up the faint traces of his father's ki, forcing him to abandon any doubts about his new cousins' ability. They had decided recently to pose as cousins, due to the fact that Genma might not accept Goku as such a direct relative.
"Probably found himself a nice village to stalk or something," Ranma said, only half joking. He noticed that Goku was deep in thought over his last remark. "Hey, what's up? It was only a joke. He's probably just found an easy meal or two and has yet to leave." Although, he wouldn't put it past his father to do something like that.
"I don't know," Goku started seriously, "I can't shake the feeling that he's somehow in danger wherever he is. And as far as I can tell, he's still in panda form."
"Really? What for?"
"Not sure yet, but it's definitely irregular to stay in cursed form for so long."
"Damn," Ranma said, growing impatient, "I wish we could see where we're headed..."
"We're almost out of this, don't worry," Goku reassured.
Ranma mentally scolded himself for showing weakness, but quickly shook it off. "Me? Worried? Yeah right, that'll be the day," he laughed it off.
The two continued on through the brush for another hour before reaching a clearing and stopping at the edge of the trees. Goku put his arm in front of Ranma signaling for him to stop. He looked around cautiously for a minute or so while Ranma stayed silent. Goku's expression was that of complete focus and concentration as he turned the volume up on his senses. Then, without warning, Goku grabbed the front of Ranma's shirt and pulled him as they dove into a bush, barely avoiding two arrows that had appeared out of nowhere.
Ranma peeked out of the bush and stared in shock at the two flaming arrows that were stuck in the tree they had previously stood in front of.
"Get back in here!" Goku whispered loudly as he yanked Ranma back by his pigtail. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?"
"What the hell was that just now?" Ranma whispered in kind as he adjusted his pigtail.
"We found him. Your father's here. If you'd calm down for a second, you'd feel his aura along with a load of other peoples', mostly women," Goku whispered. "It feels like a whole village is just up ahead!"
Ranma did as he was told and expanded his senses. Goku had been right. There was indeed a village up ahead; and it contained several ridiculously strong auras. "How did we not sense this earlier?" he asked as he continued to feel out the villiage.
"Ordinarily we would've," Goku said, feeling the village as well, "However, they must have been expecting someone to come after the panda and masked their presence. This is no average village, I sense it's populated by many formidable fighters. We've gotta retreat for now and rethink our approach."
Trusting Goku's opinion, Ranma agreed. Within a matter of seconds, they stealthily turned tail and ran away from the border of the village as fast as they could. They ran at top speed until they were satisfied that they hadn't been pursued. They caught their breath in a small cave near a river as they re-analyzed the situation.
"Alright..." Goku panted, "I...have an idea..."
"Oh...yeah?" Ranma responded, sounding considerably more winded than Goku. "...let me...hear it..."
After a minute or so of heavy breathing, Goku continued. "When you were passed out in the guide's hut, he told us about our curses and the springs, among other things. But I also distinctly remember him saying something about an amazon village which has guarded this region for many generations. He said that they were extremely dangerous and hostile towards outsiders, especially men."
Ranma recognized where he was headed with this idea. "So you're saying, that we should switch into our curses as a disguise and try to slip by the enemy undetected."
"Well, not completely undetected," Goku admitted. "We'll still be considered as outsiders and treated as such, just not as badly. I hope..." he trailed off. "Anyway, we'll have the advantage of deception on our side, and it could possibly give us the time we need to grab your father and get out unscathed."
"Hm..." Ranma rubbed his chin in thought. He doubted it would be that easy. They'd also have to take into account that the trouble his father may have caused while there would work against them. For all they knew, he could have cracked under interrogation and given away their identities. Then he remebered what Goku had said about his father staying a panda the whole time. 'Well, if he was a panda, he couldn't possibly have spilled any information.'
"What do you think?" Goku asked, trying to read Ranma's expression.
"I don't really like the idea of going as a girl, but as a martial artist I can't ignore the tremendous advantage it would provide in a situation like this."
A quick dip in the river, and a few minutes later, the two girls were on their way back to the amazon village. This time they planned to approach the village from the opposite side and took the long way around.
"Alright," Goku whispered to Ranma, who was behind her, as they came near the border. "They sense us coming, but they don't know that we're the same ones from earlier. This is going to work, just play along."
Ranma nodded as her cousin led them out into the open. She sweatdropped as Goku immediately raised her hands in surrender. 'Some plan...' she thought as she followed Goku's example.
They didn't have to wait long at all as several dozen amazon warriors converged on their position. Both stood completely still and tried to look as unthreatening as possible while the amazons formed a ring around them. They started sweating bullets as the amazons brought spear tips up to their necks and shouted at them in Chinese.
"Hey," Ranma whispered to Goku over her shoulder, "You wouldn't happen to speak Chinese by any chance would you?"
"No," Goku replied. "I thought you could do all the translating."
"You mean, you just assumed that I understood Chinese."
"You've been in China far longer than I have, so it seemed logical..."
"I thought you had everything figured out! But no, you had to go and make stupid assumptions and now we have no way to communicate! Just great!" Ranma said in slighty more than a whisper, causing one of the amazons to press the spear tip against her flesh.
"Hey," Goku replied, defending herself, "give me a break, I'm still a kid. There's no way I could possibly know everything!"
They were both shut up by a sharp pain as poison tipped darts were shot into their necks. All of a sudden, the world became blurry and started to vibrate rapidly. They leaned their backs against each other for support as the amazons warriors removed the spears from their necks and backed up a few steps. The two girls strained their bodies to move into defensive battle poses as the poison rapidly spread throughout their bodies.
Goku was the first to collapse as she succumbed to the poison in her veins. She had been complaining for the last few days about feeling weaker in her female form, but Ranma had dismissed it as her imagination. It seemed she was mistaken.
Ranma, on the other hand, felt considerably stronger as a woman, but wouldn't admit it. It hadn't affected her too drastically, but she did notice an increase in power and stamina. As a result, she was able to fight harder against the poison. She breathed heavily and managed to kneel down and feel for the pulse of her cousin. She was still alive. 'Good,' she thought. The poison seemed to be nothing more than a paralyzing agent. She felt her strength and control over her muscles deteriorate even further as she tried to get back onto both feet. 'Damn, that's it...I can't move anymore...'
The amazons moved back in and struck the two motionless girls over the head to ensure unconsciousness and proceeded to drag the two toward their village.
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'Why do I keep waking up in strange places?' Ranma thought as she came to, a dull pain on the back of her skull reminding her of their mission to retrieve Genma. 'When I get my hands on that idiot I'm gonna give him a warm welcome,' she grinned evily as she cracked her knuckles.
It was dark, possibly late evening or night already. She couldn't see any light through the gaps in between the bamboo and straw of which the hut she was in was constructed. She directed her eyes to the opposite corner of the approximately eight by eight foot hut and saw Goku sleeping soundly on the dirt floor. 'She seems to be fine.'
Ranma decided not to wake her until she had a better sense of exactly where they were in relation to her fathers location. She sat in a lotus position with her back against the wall and closed her eyes. As she stretched out with her senses, she immediately became aware of two guards directly outside of the door. She moved out beyond them and picked up a trace of the panda's aura. He was not far from here. She guessed that the amazons kept all their prisoners in one common area. She concentrated harder to pinpoint the exact direction. There seemed to be an unusually large amount of children in his direction. 'Children? In the prisoners camp?'
Ranma sweatdropped when she sensed several other animals around the same area. It felt like a petting zoo. 'Baka...' she cursed. 'Here we are, going out of our way to rescue you, and you have the nerve to be kicking back in a zoo? Is that why you didn't come back?' A vision of her father rolling around on his back while playing with a tire suddenly played across her mind. She considered abandoning him for a second, but then decided that even he deserved a little bit of her pity. Besides, she had yet to learn all of the Saotome School Of Anything Goes Martial Arts from her pop's scrolls. And the only way to access them was through the panda's stuffspace. 'Bastard,' she added as an after thought.
Leaving her state of meditation, she crawled over to Goku and gently shook her awake while trying to keep the noise down. There was no need to alert the guards of their consciousness until it suited them.
Goku slowly opened her eyes and was greeted by the sight of a beautiful red haired girl leaning over her. She drooled for a second before she remembered who it was. 'Yuck!' she inwardly gagged. She mentally beat herself over the head for allowing her eyes to betray her. "What's going on?" she mouthed to Ranma silently.
Ranma leaned in to whisper in her ear and began relating her discoveries.
Goku nodded as she absorbed the information and turned it over in her head. She laughed at the part with Genma being in a zoo.
They proceeded to whisper back and forth in each other's ears as they formulated an exit strategy with a high probability of success. It didn't take them long to agree upon a plan as neither of them enjoyed the idea of spending more time than necessary in the prison hut. They felt energized as they had decided to dispose of the stealth idea in favor of a direct attack and fast get away; something they both felt immensly more comfortable in doing as it relied on their battle skills rather than their ability to stay hidden.
Both stood up to their full height within the cramped hut, which currently wasn't much due to the fact that they were both girls. "One...two...three!" they said out loud as they ignited their auras and tore the hut to shreds. Before the guards had registered what had happened, they were flat on their backs in a daze.
A split second later, Ranma and Goku were gone from that spot and on a path headed straight toward the panda.
"The shortest distance between two points is a straight line," Ranma said as she ran ahead of Goku and punched a hole in the stone wall perimeter of the prison camp big enough for them to jump through. 'Yes! We're making good time! At this rate, by the time they mobilize that amazon squad of theirs, we'll be long gone!'
As soon as they were past the wall, the petting zoo became visible. Luckily for them, most of the children had already left as the zoo was about to close for the night. They covered the last bit of the distance in one huge leap, landing in the middle of the grassy clearing where all of the animals were kept.
"Aww man..." Goku whined, "I think I just stepped in a pile of crap. Nasty..."
Goku's remark caused all of the remaining patrons to turn their attention toward the two escaped intruders. Before the two could even blink, every man, woman, and child remaining in the zoo was brandishing some type of deadly weapon.
"Better make this quick," Goku said to Ranma. "You take care of these guys and I'll get the panda. I hate fighting in this body..." she trailed off.
"No problem," Ranma said in full confidence of her abilities.
Goku leapt over the small crowd and over to the panda, who was balancing a ball on it's head and juggling. "Hey, Mr. Saotome!" Goku greeted as she landed right behind the panda.
"Ahh!" panda Genma signed, dropping his toys. "What are you doing here?"
"Getting you outta here, now stand up and get ready to run."
"No way!" Genma signed. "If I stay here, I can retire early!"
Goku knocked him upside the head. "Are you insane? How long do you really think you can keep up the charade? They're gonna find out sooner or later and you remember what the guide said about how they treat outsider men! I can't believe you! You'd abandon your own son for nothing more than a guaranteed meal? You make me sick!" Goku shouted in disgust.
Genma felt ashamed at himself for once in his life and watched as his son-turned-daughter fought off the people from the zoo with ease. 'Oh well,' he thought, 'I can still retire once the schools are united...' "Alright, I'm ready to go!" Genma signed, standing up to his full panda height.
Ranma glanced at Goku and got the thumbs up. Now that the panda was on board, she could end it. She had been systematically knocking everyone out with a gentle attack to the base of the skull and there was only one left. However, this purple haired girl proved to be more stubborn than the rest. The gentle knock out hadn't worked on her and Ranma was forced to take off the kid gloves.
The purple haired amazon threw her bonborri at Ranma who was in mid jump over her head.
Ranma simply spun her body around to avoid the attack before she landed both feet on the amazon girls head and used it as a rebound. She winced in pain for the poor amazon girl after she had landed a short distance away from Goku and the panda. Nobody was usually able to stay conscious after one of her rebounds. Ranma turned around to confirm that the girl was down and was surprised to see the amazon staggering toward her slowly. She was unsure of what to do as the purple haired girl stumbled into her arms. "Uh...sorry?" Ranma said, not sure if the girl even understood what she had said.
The purple haired warrior girl cupped Ranma's face with both of her hands and placed a kiss on her cheek before passing out.
Ranma stood frozen in shock and let the girl slide out of her arms as blood trickled from her nose. The sound of Goku yelling brought her back into reality.
"Lookout!" Goku shouted at Ranma.
Ranma narrowly dodged the flaming arrows as she back flipped toward Goku and her father. "Looks like that's our cue to leave!" she said before taking off in the lead with Goku and the panda directly behind her.