Crossing the Streams
by P.H. Wise
A Sailor Moon, Ranma 1/2, Doctor Who crossover
Chapter 02: The Black Moon Invasion
Disclaimer: I don't own Ranma. I don't own Sailor Moon. The BBC owns Doctor Who. Please don't sue me.
--
Morning dawned at the Tendo home, and for once, it was accompanied by no splashes, no sounds of combat, nothing to disturb the peace of the morning. The dawn-light poured out across the yard like a love song in the spring: a simple, clear, bright, strangely moving thing. Light rippled across the bottom of the koi pond in queer, undulating patterns, for once undisturbed by the morning ritual of the Saotome men.
6:00 AM passed, and in the guest room, Ranma snored loudly. A narrow band of the morning light appeared on the far wall. 7:00 AM passed, and Ranma didn't wake. No bucket of cold water flew into his face, and no pandas were on hand to fling him out the window. The band of morning light, brighter now, lit up a large patch of the wall. 8:00 AM passed, and the light advanced, and Ranma slept. 9:00 AM passed, and the light advanced, and Ranma slept. Finally, at 10:00 AM, the light fell upon the sleeping boy's face, and the sudden warmth made him flinch. He awoke, and sat up, and blinked confusedly at the clock. Ten o'clock? Nobody had woken him? He'd slept in? What was this? That... was this restfulness? What a strange feeling. Feeling totally rested and relaxed, Ranma got out of bed and got ready for his day.
Some time later, washed and dressed, and having changed gender twice in the process, Ranma walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. The table was clear, and the dishes were done. Breakfast had come and gone. Ranma opened the refrigerator.
No luck. There weren't any leftovers. Frowning an annoyed sort of frown, he made himself a cup of instant noodles. The television was on in the living room, so once the noodles were done, he walked out to investigate. Akane, Nabiki and Kasumi were there, sitting on the couch, watching the television.
"Ohayo," Ranma called.
No response.
"... cause of the crash is still unclear, but one thing is certain: we are not alone in the universe. This is a momentous day for humanity, and for the Japanese people..." the sound of a talking head came out from the TV as a sort of background radiation – present but (to Ranma, at least) imperceptible.
"Hey," Ranma said.
The girls ignored him, and stared away at the television. Commentators were all weighing in, making speeches, and arguing about the importance of the event in the history of the world, but all Ranma heard was, 'Blah blah blah, something something huge significant event, Americans baffled, some Prime Minister of Britain or Germany or something named Harriet Jones claims the whole thing is a hoax, blah blah blah.'
"I can't believe it," Akane whispered, staring at the TV in shock. "Nabiki, aliens crash-landed on our school!"
Nabiki nodded mutely.
"Bah," Ranma said irritatedly, "Those aliens were lame. Just a bunch of stupid, fat, gassy, green-skinned things with claws."
The girls ignored him.
Ranma grew even more irritated. He downed the rest of his noodles in one long slurp, put the box down on a small desk, and glared at Akane's back. After a moment, he redirected his attention to the television, and was very quickly bored to tears. Gah, how could they watch that? A bunch of talking heads yappin' on about how significant it was that some lame alien had crashed his ship into the school? That was the most idiotic thing he'd ever heard of.
Finally, thoughtlessly, and only because he was so bored that he just wanted something to happen, even if it was negative, he opened his big mouth one more time: "Geez, Akane, are you going to sit there all day? You'll never get a husband if you're a couch potato." As soon as he'd said it, he regretted it, but no one had ever accused Ranma of being the most thoughtful person in the world.
The whole temperature of the room dropped. Akane whirled around, glared at Ranma, and promptly booted him through the far wall with a cry of, "RANMA NO BAKA!"
On the plus side, she booted him through an exit hole that had already been made (and not yet repaired) the previous day. On the minus side, she put a serious amount of power behind that hit, and Ranma went flying clear into the street. Immediately, he was attacked by Ryouga, who just happened to be passing by at that moment, and overheard Ranma's careless words.
"Ranma! How dare you say such a thing to Akane! You must not have any heart at all!" Ryouga began to glow with a terrible green light.
Ranma landed easily in the street and dropped into a fighting stance. "Ah, shuddup pigboy. What do you know?"
Both of them burst into action simultaneously, Ranma leaping up into the air and angling his descent to come down in a flying kick aimed right for Ryouga's head, and Ryouga bringing up his hands and crying, "SHI SHI HOKODAN!" and sending an intense blast of green-tinged energy flying directly into Ranma's face.
The blast was angled upwards, and the impact of it (and subsequent detonation) was more than enough to fling the pig-tailed boy several hundred feet up into the air. Ranma snorted irritatedly.
It was then that he landed on the shoulders of a strange, green-haired girl in a tiger-striped bikini.
"What in the...?" Her eyes focused on Ranma, and she glared. "LET ME GO!" she yelled. "Only Darling allowed to touch me like that!" She immediately soared upwards, intent on forcing Ranma to let go by pure wind-shear. To make matters worse, her inflection was the most annoyingly saccharine Ranma had ever heard: she referred to herself as 'uchi,' and ended her sentence with 'datcha.'
For his part, Ranma wasn't quite ready to drop from such a height, and he held on to the girl as best he could. "HEY! Look, I ain't tryin' ta grope ya or nothin', I just don't wanna..." The girl wasn't listening, and to be fair, Ranma was squashing her breasts with his left forearm (his right arm was wrapped around the girl's neck octopus-like).
Electricity began to crackle around the girl's body, and Ranma grew nervous. A moment later, the girl flung her arms apart violently. Ranma lost his grip for a split second, but that was all the girl needed – she promptly punted him skyward, and off he went. A distant cry of "DIVINE RETRIBUTION!" sounded, and there was a crackle of electricity, but Ranma was already gone – out of range.
The ground vanished beneath the pigtailed boy as he soared, up, up, up and through the cloud layer. The clouds were sparse, but Ranma managed to pass through one of them regardless, and its moisture quickly soaked into his skin. The familiar tingle of the transformation flowed over him as his features shifted visibly into her features. For one brief, glorious moment, the lovely dark-haired girl that Ranma had become stood at the apex of the world, her feet planted upon the clouds themselves, with all the glorious, impossibly clear blue sky stretched out like a canvas above her. In that moment, she felt a wild, desperate thrill of absolute freedom, and it nearly overwhelmed her. Then it was gone. Down, down, back through the clouds, back towards the city far below...
On the plus side, at least she wasn't bored anymore.
--
Meanwhile, some three blocks away from the still burning Furinkan high school, the TARDIS began its materialization process, the old police box fading into view with a high pitched, pulsing sort of whine. The firefighters, still working to contain the blaze, paid the new arrival little mind. Why? Well, frankly, this was Nerima, and they'd seen weirder. A moment later, a handsome man in a dark brown pin-striped suit with a light brown overcoat stepped out of the police box, followed by an attractive young woman with dusky skin in black slacks, a turquoise sort of blouse, and a red leather jacket that zipped up the middle.
Martha and the Doctor had arrived.
Martha glanced about, quickly surveying the neighborhood. "So this is Japan, is it?" she asked.
The Doctor grinned a boyish sort of grin. "That it is. Land of the Rising Sun and all that. And the time is..." he checked his watch, "Two years before we left. Bet you never thought you'd see 2005 again."
Martha couldn't help it. She grinned too. "Can't say as I did, what with the year having gone by and all."
"I once visited the same year a hundred and eighty seven times," The Doctor said absently. "Except each day was totally out of order. Drove me half mad, trying to remember which events had happened, which ones hadn't. I'm never doing that again, let me tell you." He looked thoughtful. "Of course, if I hadn't, I'd have missed out on seeing a young man slow down time on the Tokyo subway.
Martha looked at the Doctor incredulously. "You're joking."
The Doctor looked at her with a dreadfully serious look.
"OK. Not joking." She assimilated the data. Someone in Japan can slow down the flow of time. "Why'd he want to make time go more slowly?"
"I don't know. Didn't ask. Still, he was so excited about it, I didn't have the heart to tell him not to do it again. I think he was in New York last time I looked."
Martha filed that away under 'weird knowledge gained while listening to the Doctor's babbling.'
"Excuse me," a male voice said in heavily accented English – an effect of the TARDIS. All languages heard by those who traveled in the TARDIS were automatically translated into the native tongue of the hearer, and all languages spoken by the travelers were translated into the native tongues of those who heard them speak. They heard English, but the man was speaking Japanese. The man heard British-accented Japanese, but they were really speaking English.
Martha looked up. There, standing some ten feet away, was a member of the Tokyo police force. He was a clean-shaven, respectable looking middle-aged Japanese man, his face slightly weathered by his long years of service, and his countenance a noble one.
"Hello!" the Doctor said cheerfully.
"Ah, hello," the police officer said. "My name is Officer Yamada. May I see your permit?"
"Our permit?" Martha asked. She glanced at the Doctor. "What's he talking about?"
The Doctor shrugged. "I don't know." He looked at the officer. "Permit?"
Officer Yamada nodded. "You need a permit to park a Class V interplanetary vessel on a street in the Nerima ward."
"You get a lot of our sort in this ward?" the Doctor asked. Anyone else would be totally nonplused, but the Doctor reacted as if it were just another day of the week.
"We get our fair share, sir," Yamada said. "It's pretty rare anywhere else. Well, except Minato. I hear they've been having all sorts of trouble with alien ships flitting about lately, causing trouble, all sorts of nasty pranks."
Martha gave the police officer an incredulous look. "And this is normal here? The rest of the world doesn't find out about this?"
Officer Yamada smiled sedately. "This is Nerima, miss," he said, as if that explained everything."
"Right," said the Doctor, "Permit." He began searching through his pockets. "Let me see here. Ah, here it is." He pulled out his psychic paper badge and held it up for the officer. "See? Right there. General use starship parking permit for the ward of Nerima."
The officer studied the blank badge for a moment, his mind filling in the details on the psychic paper that he expected to see. Then he nodded. "Right then. Everything seems to be in order. Good day to you both, and enjoy your stay in Japan." He tipped his hat, turned smoothly, and walked back to the emergency crew that was still at work on the fire.
"OK," Martha said. "That was weird."
"What, that?" The Doctor asked. "Nah. That barely surpasses moderately normal." He rubbed his eyes and looked about, taking in the burning building, the other buildings close to it, the nearby canal. Something really was strange here, whatever he might say. An odd sort of sense behind his eyes. Something familiar.
At that moment, a dark-haired girl in a red silk shirt and black pants fell from the sky and smashed heavily into the sidewalk not five feet from where the Doctor was standing. The pavement cracked visibly beneath the impact.
The Doctor met Martha's gaze. "That, on the other hand, is weird."
--
It's funny how fate works. Sometimes, our every step seems filled with purpose. Sometimes, you might actually buy the whole idea of predestination. You walk the path set before you, and step by step you get where you were meant to go. It's enough to make a man change his whole eschatology, or even buy the idea of eschatology in the first place. Of course, sometimes Fortune doesn't quite work that way. Sometimes, instead of walking step by step up a mountain, you get booted out into the street, blasted into the sky, and then punted into the stratosphere by an angry alien. And sometimes, you just plain crater right into the place where you're supposed to be. So it was with Ranma.
It was all dark. Darkness here, darkness there, darkness everywhere. There was darkness in a box, there was darkness with a fox. No green eggs and ham, though. Anyways, there was lots of dark. Then there was pain. Pain in the head. 'Hey, wait, I have a head?' Ranma thought. With the thought, her awareness and her sense of self reasserted themselves. It was still dark, but that was because her eyes were closed. Her head hurt, but that was because it was currently embedded in the pavement. Wait, scratch that. It was on some kind of cushion. Weird.
Sound intruded into Ranma's experience next. A woman was speaking in accented Japanese: "She's alive! That's amazing! One in a million, her surviving a fall like that!" There was pressure on her wrist for a moment. "Pulse seems normal."
Whoever it was, she was British. Ranma opened her eyes and sat up. Or rather, she tried to. Opening her eyes worked well enough, but the blinding light and indistinct shapes combined with the intense vertigo that flooded through her body when she moved discouraged her from the whole 'sitting up' bit.
"Easy, easy, you've had a nasty fall," the woman's voice said. "I'm Martha. This is the Doctor. I'm going to help you. You have a concussion, miss. Don't try to move. Doctor, can you call for the paramedics?"
After a moment, the light and shapes resolved into two recognizable figures: a beautiful dark skinned young woman with compassionate brown eyes knelt down over him, and the sun shone behind her. She had a very sharp, intelligent look to her. The other figure was a young man in a brown coat and a pin-striped suit. That's strange. He looked vaguely familiar. And he was staring at her, his face almost totally white.
"...Susan?" he asked, staring at her as if she were a ghost.
That name tugged at Ranma's memory, but she didn't know any Susans as far as she could recall. "Ow," she said. "Anyone get the number of that... Oni girl?"
Martha looked confusedly at the Doctor. "Do you know this girl?" she asked.
"Maybe," the Doctor said, not looking away from Ranma. His eyes narrowed.
"Uh, do I know you?" Ranma asked. She once again tried to sit up, and this time she succeeded: the nausea had faded significantly, and her head didn't hurt anywhere near so much.
"Hey!" Martha said sharply. "You shouldn't be trying to move yet, Miss..." she looked at Ranma expectantly.
"Ranma," Ranma said, and she didn't notice the Doctor mouthing the name, a vaguely puzzled look on his face.
"Ranma. You've taken a bad fall, you've definitely got a concussion, and we don't yet know if you've got any bones broken..."
"I'm fine," Ranma said, rolling her eyes good naturedly. It was always this way when someone hadn't seen her rapid healing rate before. "See? Look, no concussion."
Martha looked closely into Ranma's eyes, and then blinked in surprise. "Her pupils, Doctor," she said. "A moment ago, they were each a different size. Now..."
"They're back to normal, yes. That's weird." The Doctor produced a strange rod-like device with a light on the end of it, pointed it at Ranma, and activated it. It whined irritatingly for a moment.
"See?" Ranma said. "I'm fine. Thanks for the help, uh, Martha, but I'm all better now."
The Doctor looked at Ranma crossways. "So," he said, "Ranma," when he spoke the name, he looked as if he had just eaten something sour, "Did you know that you're leaking a considerable amount of energy?"
Ranma blinked. Leaking energy? What was this about? Could the Doctor be sensing her ki? "Uh, no?"
The Doctor nodded. "Yes, great big gouts of it, saturating your cells, leaking out into the air. You're lucky this area has lots of odd energy sources, or people might have noticed much earlier. Bad sorts of people."
Ranma raised an eyebrow. That sounded vaguely like a challenge, but it wasn't quite there. Still, it definitely riled her pride a bit. "Oh yeah?" she asked, rising to her feet, now fully healed. "What kind of people?"
The Doctor pointed upwards. "That kind, I should think."
Both Martha and Ranma followed the line of his finger, and their eyes widened in collective surprise. There, floating above them, maybe a thousand feet above the street, was a vast crystalline starship.
"Doctor?" Martha asked. "Who are they?"
"Them?" The Doctor asked, looking up at the ship. "They're someone who shouldn't be here. Just like our friend Ranma here. Now, maybe it's just that they're here to recover the wreck of the other ships that crashed here. Or maybe they've detected all that energy Ranma is putting out." He grinned. "Personally, I can't wait to find out which."
Ranma stared up at the ship. "No way," she said. Sure, Nerima was weird, but this was... ok, not that odd, if you substitute the flying ship for, say, a flying chariot with a Chinese prince inside looking for a bride. Still, now wasn't exactly a good time for an alien starship to show up.
And show up it did. The vast crystal ship dropped a good five hundred feet in the space of a second or two until it was hovering directly overhead, the wash of its unseen engines pouring down onto the streets below. On board the ship, Rubeus of the Black Moon clan stood at the helm as his scans narrowed in on the strange energy source he had detected.
"Source identified," the computer's voice said. The view screen zoomed in on the city below, and a young girl appeared on the screen. She didn't look like anything special. Dark hair, blue eyes, beautiful, very fit. Certainly none of these readings corresponded to anything from Crystal Tokyo, but still... the energy she was leaking appeared to have some of the same properties as the Time Vortex, and that was something unprecedented. He'd have to bring her aboard for analysis.
A flip of a switch activated the ship's transporter system. A crystal in the center of the command deck began to glow brightly.
"EXCUSE ME," called an amplified voice.
Rubeus blinked, and the view screen quickly zoomed in on a Japanese man in a police uniform speaking through a loudspeaker.
"EXCUSE ME, YOU IN THE SHIP, DO YOU HAVE A PERMIT TO BE FLYING AN INTERSTELLAR CRAFT IN NERIMAN AIRSPACE?"
Rubeus sweatdropped. A permit? What the hell was this? "Uh... what?" he asked, the ship's communications system broadcasting his voice down to the man.
"YOU MUST HAVE A PERMIT TO FLY AN INTERSTELLAR CRAFT THROUGH NERIMAN AIRSPACE, SIR. IF YOU DON'T HAVE ONE, I'M AFRAID I'LL HAVE TO WRITE YOU A CITATION."
Rubeus promptly blasted the policeman with a bolt of plasma from the ship's main gun.
"That was a bit unnecessary, wasn't it?" a voice asked from behind him.
Rubeus turned and immediately frowned. The girl had been brought aboard, but it seemed that two others had also been snagged in the transportation beam. Rubeus shrugged. No loss. He opened his hand and blasted both the Doctor and Martha with low-intensity energy bolts, sending them both flying a good three feet with the concussive force generated.
"HEY! You can't do that to them! They're just ordinary people!" Ranma yelled even as she turned to see if the two had survived.
"Yes, and thus are useless for my purposes. You, on the other hand..." Rubeus grinned, and twisted a dial on the control panel.
Immediately, a terrific invisible force crushed Ranma to the floor. "What the..." was all she had time to get out before being smashed flat. It felt as though her limbs were made of lead. "I... I can't move?"
The Doctor sat up and took stock of the situation. This didn't look good. Whoever their captor was, he had access to powerful technology. Nothing that couldn't be overcome, given time, but time didn't look like it was something they had a whole lot of just now. Still, he'd figure something out. "You coward," he snapped.
... or maybe he'd just enrage the hostile alien. Yes, that seemed like the thing to do. ... ok, so maybe he wasn't thinking as clearly as he should have been just then. You can hardly blame him. Ranma had confused him deeply.
Rubeus glanced the Doctor's way. "Coward?" he asked, looking vaguely insulted.
"Oh, sure," the Doctor said, "Big advanced alien picking on a little girl with your scary advanced technology. Must make you feel really powerful. But you and I, we know better, don't we? You're not much better than a school yard bully, are you?" As he spoke, he fiddled with the sonic screwdriver, using it to scan Rubeus's energy pattern.
"You're in no position to be insulting me, fool," Rubeus snapped. He clenched his fist, and an aura of power gathered around him.
The Doctor grinned.
--
Martha grimaced as she came to. She wasn't sure how much time had passed since the red-haired man with the black crescent moon on his forehead had blasted her and the Doctor with that raygun or whatever it had been, but... blasted with a raygun? "Doctor?" she asked worriedly, and sat up.
Her surroundings were much the same as they had been a moment earlier: the ship was crystal both inside and out, and she appeared to be on what served as the ship's bridge or control center. The red-haired man was currently pacing back and forth in front of... oh, right. In front of Ranma, who looked like she was trying (unsuccessfully) to move, with some invisible force holding her in place. Nearby – well, there was a thing she hadn't noticed earlier, though in her defense she hadn't really been afforded much time in which to notice – four teenaged girls in weird, semi-fetishistic versions of the female Japanese school uniform were bound to, their hands and feet merged into the structure of, crystalline crosses. And as for Martha herself: she stood within a small force bubble in front of the four crosses, with the Doctor lying unconscious not far away. He had injuries on him that he hadn't had before she'd lost consciousness - burns, mostly.
"Doctor!" Martha called insistently, and shook him.
The Doctor stirred faintly. "Now what does the radiation read, Susan?" he mumbled.
"Doctor?" Martha asked again.
He didn't speak again. He was still breathing, though, so Martha let him be for the moment. A voice was speaking somewhere nearby – Martha didn't recognize it.
"... very interesting readings, Rubeus. I can already see a number of ways in which this could be utilized. Whatever this energy is, it's closely tied to the Time Vortex."
Another voice replied: the voice of their captor, this 'Rubeus:' "I've already begun the extraction process, Safir." A pause. "Do you really think the energy contained in this girl could allow us to travel freely back and forth through time?"
A laugh. "Maybe. Maybe. My design is working well, I take it?"
"Well, it's working," Rubeus replied somewhat irritably. "But at this rate, it will take weeks to extract this power from the girl's cells."
"We can afford the wait. Better to have reliable means of travel in a few weeks than to continue to gamble on being able to evade Sailor Pluto each time we pass through the time/space tunnel. We lost several ships on our last trip."
Martha began to study the floor beneath her, looking for some way to disengage the energy shield. The floor was the same crystal structure as the rest of the ship, but there were conduits of energy flowing visibly through it, forming a circle that matched the energy barrier fairly closely. Then a glint of metal out of the corner of her eye brought Martha's attention to something lying just inside the energy field: the Doctor's sonic screwdriver. She'd seen the Doctor use it plenty of times. He'd even showed her how it worked not long ago. Not that she was an expert, but still, she knew enough that a plan began to form in her mind. Martha smiled. "Just you wait, Doctor," she said quietly. "You've saved me lots of times. Now it's my turn."
Brandishing the Doctor's sonic screwdriver for all it was worth, Martha went to work.
"Hey, you. Are you ok?"
Martha looked up. It was one of the girls on the crosses – this one had long, dark hair and a red skirt. "Hello," Martha said, and waved. "Just fine, thank you."
The girl blinked. "You're taking this pretty well."
Martha nodded, and continued fiddling with the sonic screwdriver around the base of the force field. If she could just find the correct frequency... the shield vanished.
The girl in the red skirt blinked in surprise. "How did you...?"
Martha felt a thrill of excitement. She had done it! She quickly rose to her feet and pulled the still unconscious Doctor out of the field. Once that was accomplished, she listened very carefully to see if Rubeus had heard the activity.
Nope. He was still talking with whoever that was. She walked over to the first of the crystalline crosses. All of the girls were watching her now, each of them silent, each of them looking at her with a thoroughly disbelieving look on their faces. "Now," Martha said, "Let's see if we can't figure out how these work."
There was a panel on the side of the cross with readouts, dials, and switches. Martha took a moment to study it.
"I hope you aren't just planning to fool around with the settings until something happens," the red-skirted girl whispered, a little alarmed. "Who knows what could happen?"
Martha raised a delicate eyebrow. "Would you prefer to stay stuck to that thing, then?"
The red-skirted girl looked pensive, then shook her head. "I guess it can't be any worse than what Rubeus has planned for us if we don't get away."
Martha nodded, and then went back to studying the panel. Damn. This was going to be difficult. There was no indication of how to deactivate the thing and release a person who was merged with the device. "If only there were a manual of some sort!" Martha hissed, quite frustrated. If only there were instructions!
The red-skirted girl shook her head. "Who would be stupid enough to leave a manual of operations next to a device like this?"
On the floor, the Doctor stirred once more.
Martha blinked. "Hold on a minute," she said. There was something resting in a little nook in a corner not far away from where she was standing: a book. She walked over to it and picked it up. There, printed right on the cover were the words: Crystal Cross Operator's Manual. 'Crystal Crosses and You: A how to guide for the storage, transport, and containment of mana positive threats.' She held it up, and the red-skirted Senshi looked somewhere between mortified and ready to laugh out loud. After taking a moment to make sure that Rubeus was still otherwise occupied, Martha opened the operator's manual and began to read.
--
Pain. Ranma's whole world had become this singular fact. Pain. Pain and constant pain. Her nerves were on fire, and she could only suppose that she was dying. Lying there on the floor in the area of drastically increased gravity, with a strange device placed above her firing some kind of energy beam into her chest, she felt every kind of pain she could think of: shooting pain, sharp stabbing pain, dull throbbing pain, horrible crushing pain, awful tearing pain, searing pain, blistering pain, aching pain, and of course, 'little bones in your ears that you hear about in anatomy class and never think about again having been broken' pain. That last one really was a peculiar and novel kind of pain, and Ranma had never experienced it before, but she had now, and she had Rubeus to thank for it. Naturally, she wished to express her gratitude to him for allowing her to experience such heretofore unknown forms of pain in a number of different but equally creative ways. Oh, wait, there was also lancing pain and creeping pain. She'd never felt those ones, either. She added several new ways to express her gratitude to her rapidly growing list.
The worst thing about it wasn't the pain, though: it was the helplessness. Ranma had never been helpless before - unless you count the ultimate weakness moxibustion point, but Ranma had often said of that particular incident that it 'didn't count,' so we won't - so this too was a novel experience, and not the sort of novel experience that she liked. What she needed to do was to somehow nullify or counteract the gravity field that was keeping her pinned. Initially Ranma had managed to get to her feet, but then the gravity field had been increased significantly, and once again she was rendered immobile. Since then, she'd been trying with little success to find a way to counteract this gravity field.
Suddenly, a new sensation intruded on her world of pain: the sound of an unkind voice. "I trust you are comfortable?" Rubeus – her captor – asked.
"Fine," Ranma managed to grind out as insolently as she could.
"Good to hear," Rubeus replied, and increased the gravity.
Ranma ground her teeth. OK, this was getting ridiculous. She needed to get out of here, and now. Maybe she could concentrate all her ki into strengthening her body to over... ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow what was she just thinking about? Pain on this level had a way of making coherent thought a difficult thing to have. Desperately, she embraced the soul of ice technique. Soul of ice. Soul of ice. Soul of OW, I mean ice. Ice. Ice. Ice. Ice. Ok, now she was in pain AND she felt cold. Still, she cared about the pain less now with her emotions dampened, so that was something. It let her think a little more clearly, at least. Let's see. What did she know? Well, she knew that strengthening her body with ki wouldn't work. That had been the first thing she'd tried, and she just couldn't make herself strong enough to resist the effect of this high gravity area. And what was gravity, anyways? Well, she knew that gravity was a way of describing the way that space and time bends around massive objects. With that in mind, how could she use her ki to counteract the effe... wait a minute, space and time bending around massive objects? Where had that come from? Still, it rang true to her, though she couldn't say why. So... maybe she could use her ki to create a kind of barrier around herself that would... resist bending? Kind of like light ki against heavy ki?
Movement. There it was, in her peripheral vision: that dark skinned foreigner, Martha, was free, and was... reading a book? Uh, right.
Rubeus was talking again. Or had he been talking all this time? There was another voice. Someone was talking to Rubeus. Ranma grimaced. This would be so much easier if she weren't in a state of agony, even one muted by the effects of the soul of ice technique.
'Oh shit,' she thought. 'He's turning around. He's turning around. He's going to see that chick!'
"Ya look pretty satisfied, Rubewhatever," Ranma sneered as insultingly as she could, "But I'm gonna wipe that smirk off your face!"
Rubeus turned his attention back to Ranma. "Although your body is unusually resistant to the increased gravitational field," he said, "Don't think that you're safe, girl. If I want to, I can crush every bone in your body. I may not be able to kill you and still extract this energy, but I can make your life even more miserable for the short time you have left."
"Pretty confident, ain'tcha," Ranma said.
Rubeus smirked. "You don't fool me. That field is amplifying the force of gravity around you. You're helpless as a kitten." Ranma flinched at the 'kitten' reference, but Rubeus didn't connect that with cats. "Do you really want me to make you suffer?"
Martha put the book down and fiddled with the controls on the side of the first crystal cross, and instantly, the first of those sailor suited girls was free! Ranma's hopes began to rise. Rubeus began to turn around again, but Ranma quickly spoke once more:
"Maybe I like pain," she said.
Rubeus raised an eyebrow, once again turning his attention back to the pig-tailed girl. "What a coincidence," he said. "I like pain, too. Inflicting it, that is." He grinned wickedly, and turned up the gravity again.
Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain! PAIN! God it hurt, crushing her to the floor, unable to move. Any more than this, and she'd be squished. Fortunately, the second of the four girls was now free, and Martha was already working at the third girl's cross, with the Doctor finally conscious and working at the fourth one himself.
Rubeus's grin widened. "Not so cocky now, are you?" he asked, lowering his hand from the gravity control module.
That was when Ranma acted: she concentrated as hard as she was able and forced her ki into a pattern she'd never attempted before, never even heard of before, but something she somehow knew corresponded to the energy pattern given off by an anti-gravity generator. How she knew, well, she didn't have the faintest idea, and that bothered her to no end, but she'd take it. It burned almost all of her ki reserves to do it, but she had to keep Rubeus distracted for a few more seconds, and she didn't see that there was any other choice: she sprang out of the field (and out of the beam of energy) and tackled the red-haired man.
Rubeus's eyes widened. "Impossible!" he yelled even as she knocked him to the ground.
Unfortunately, that was all the energy Ranma had, and she had a horrible, sinking sort of feeling that she might have actually damaged herself by forcing her ki into such an unnatural pattern. She didn't so much land on Rubeus as she collapsed on him.
The red-haired man rose to his feet, his face a picture of fury made visible. "You BITCH!" he hissed. "I don't know how you managed to resist the gravity generator, but it won't happen again. I'm going to break every bone in your body before we start again!" He opened his left hand, and a glowing ball of red energy formed upon his palm. "Now..."
Whatever he had been about to say was cut off, because at that moment, four battle-cries resounded through the ship:
"BURNING MANDALA!"
"SPARKLING WIDE PRESSURE!"
"SHINE AQUA ILLUSION!"
"VENUS LOVE-ME CHAIN!"
Rubeus's eyes widened in shock, and his shield flickered into being at the last possible second: the attacks blasted into the barrier full force, and as it had not yet stabilized, only about half of each blast was deflected. The rest went right into his body, and while he was very, very tough, he wasn't THAT tough: he went flying into the control console, which exploded in a shower of sparks.
A moment later, Martha, the Doctor, Mars, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter were at Ranma's side.
"Ranma, can you walk?" the Doctor asked.
Ranma nodded. "Yeah, gimme a sec," she rose to her feet and immediately fell to her knees, the actions so close together that they seemed the same movement. Damn. She really had used all her energy. "Uh..."
One of the sailor suited girls – the one in green – spoke up. "I'll get her." She scooped Ranma up into her arms.
"Hey!" Ranma protested weakly. "I can walk on my..." she fainted in Jupiter's arms.
"Right then," The Doctor said, occasionally giving Ranma a strange, worried sort of look. "If you'd all just make your way to the teleportation pad, we'll get off of this ship."
They did. Light sprang up around them and they vanished, reappearing a moment later on the ground below.
A few seconds later, Rubeus clambered out of the wreck of the ship's primary control console thoroughly singed, blasted, electrocuted, half frozen, and very pissed off. "They will pay for this," he hissed.
--
Sailor Pluto has a hard job. You know, Gates of Time and all that. Not even hers, really. She guards them, of course, and does what she can to keep the timeline intact, which is a surprisingly difficult job, let me tell you. See, all things being equal, there wouldn't be any need for her intervention at all. Time flows from one point to another, everyone's choices feed into the Time Stream, and off it goes into the future. Right now in 2005, the Black Moon Clan was just gearing up to kidnap Chibi-Usa, which would bring about their defeat, both right now in 2005 and right now in the thirtieth century, little more than a footnote in the history of the First Great and Bountiful Human Empire.
Still, problems did come up when people started gallivanting all about through time. You know, like Egon says, 'Don't cross the streams.' It's bad. Really, really bad. On the plus side, time has several natural defenses against that sort of thing. Against paradoxes, that is. The first is just the fact that it's bloody hard to change the past. Most of the time, you go back in time because you were meant to, and whatever you do is just what already occurred. Changing things is hard, but it is possible, which brings us to the second defense: the infinite temporal flux. But how to explain the mechanics of the infinite temporal flux? Right. Here I'll just take my cue from the Doctor himself: it's like Back to the Future. When Marty prevents his own parents from meeting, time just sort of absorbs the paradox. Instead of Marty not having ever been able to go back to prevent their meeting in the first place, the future that Marty came from just sort of fades away, though slow enough for him to do something about it. That's one of Sailor Pluto's big jobs – making sure that people don't cross the time streams, and when they do, seeing to it that Crystal Tokyo doesn't just fade away in the aftermath. And it's a hard job, keeping a kingdom up and running in the face of that sort of fading. But the thing about the Infinite Temporal Flux is it's not a very large infinity. It can absorb paradox to an extent, but there's a threshold you can get to where it can't take any more. A paradox of sufficient size will create a kind of wound in time. That's when Time's own sort of immune system kicks in. Reapers. They're much harder to deal with. They tend to flood in and sterilize the wound, destroying both the source of the paradox and everything else in the vicinity. Once the cause of the paradox has been removed, things generally go back to normal. Back when the Time Lords were still around, it was pretty easy to keep things in order, since they were actively out there helping to repair paradox and keeping the universe running. Now, well, it's a bit more difficult.
As I was saying, right now in 2005, Rubeus was supposed to be gearing up to do a grand old battle with Sailor Moon. He'd already captured Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury in his ship, had already given his ultimatum to Sailor Moon (you know, give me the Ginzuishou and the Rabbit or your friends die in two hours). Sailor Moon was going to go onboard the ship with Chibi-Usa, they'd fight Rubeus, and they win. It's all very dramatic, underlining the power of love and justice and the triumph of idealism and various warm and happy feelings over hatred and anger and what not.
What certainly was not supposed to happen was the Doctor, Martha, and Ranma getting brought on board, rescuing the captured Senshi by themselves, smashing Rubeus's ship, and instigating an all out attack by the Black Moon fleet on the ward of Nerima.
Buildings were going up like tinderboxes as nearly a dozen Black Moon ships bombarded the Neriman cityscape from about a thousand feet up. The smell of ozone was thick in the air, mixed with the smell of burning buildings. People ran screaming in the streets: aliens was one thing, but being bombed by an alien fleet was quite another.
Pluto ground her teeth and went to work on the time tunnel, using a combination of her own power and Silver Millennium technology in a frantic attempt to prevent the paradox waves being generated by the attack on Nerima from creating a Space/Time breech in Crystal Tokyo. "Damnit, damn it, damn it, damn it, DAMN IT!" she hissed, said, yelled, and finally shouted. It wasn't supposed to happen like this! The only way it could have changed is if a time traveler from outside of the Black Moon time/space event had interfered on a huge level. The gates were open now, and they weren't supposed to be. A thousand possible futures flickered across their surface, some good, some bad, but none Crystal Tokyo. Then, for one shining moment, Crystal Tokyo itself was there on the surface of the entrance to the time-tunnel. Then, an old, rickety wooden blue police-box.
Sailor Pluto felt her stomach go cold at the sight of it in a way that an ordinary police box simply wouldn't cause. She ran a quick cross-temporal scan to make sure, and the results were precisely what she'd expected: this was a TARDIS. A TARDIS without a functioning chameleon circuit. "Time-lord!" she hissed. And not just any Time-lord: there was only one of them that she knew of who tended to involve himself in the affairs of Earth, interfering countless times across history, polluting the Time Stream with his touch. Only one whose TARDIS carried the shape of a London police box no matter where it went. Still, she didn't have time to take action against him, and changing the past was forbidden to her. If she was to prevent the time/space breech, it would be a long, long night.
Damn but she wished she were drunk.
Meanwhile, back in Nerima, the attack continued, and now, droids were on the streets in force, blasting everything in sight. The citizens of Nerima were fighting back, and while they could hold their own acainst the droids, it's hard to fight back against being bombarded from above, even if you're a master of Martial Arts tea ceremony, or Martial Arts figure skating, or even the Saotome School of Indiscriminate Grappling.
--
"Bastards," Ranma muttered, staring across the destruction which had been visited on Nerima in the five minutes since their escape to the surface.
Another blast of concentrated plasma struck a building nearby and detonated violently.
"Anyone have any ideas?" one of the sailor suited girls - the one in the fuku with the gold trim - asked, staring up at the distant shapes of the Black Moon fleet.
The other sailor suited girls shook their heads, and the one in blue said, "We can't do much at this distance. Maybe if we had Sailor Moon with us we could try a Sailor Teleport, but..."
"Right then," the Doctor said. "I'm the Doctor." He gestured towards Martha and Ranma in turn. "That's Martha, and this is Ranma."
The sailor suited girls each exchanged looks of surprise, and then introduced themselves as Mars, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter.
A single black moon ship began to descend, approaching their position rapidly, its weapons charging.
The Doctor nodded as if he had expected as much. "Pleased to meet you. Now, unless anyone wants to get blasted by the ship that's about to fire on us, let's run for our lives." Neither he nor Martha missed a beat, but immediately began running for cover, each of them grinning wildly.
Ranma and the Sailor Senshi exchanged startled glances, and then sprinted off after the two.
Two seconds later, the spot they had been standing exploded beneath a volley of plasma impacts.
They ran for about two blocks before a group of droids swarmed into view from around a corner. While they'd been running, the Senshi had called for backup on their communicators, but their allies were a long way from Nerima.
Even as the droids approached, the Senshi let loose with their attacks, sending blasts of magical energy aligned to the elements of electricity, water, fire, and metal into the ranks of the artificial monsters.
Battle was joined. For a solid minute Ranma lost herself in the joy of the fight, ducking over improbable attacks, dodging blows, snapkicking droids into lamp posts, weaving through her opponents like water through rapids.
Martha could only stop and stare. Then she noticed a droid coming towards her and the Doctor. "Doctor!" she said in warning.
He produced his Sonic Screwdriver and pointed it at the thing. There was a high pitched whine, and then...
Nothing happened.
The Droid kept charging.
"Doctor?" Martha said, concern only now entering her voice.
The Doctor frowned and began to fiddle with the sonic screwdriver's controls. "Must not have matched the right power frequency... let's see..." he thought for a moment, "Maybe if I reverse the polarity of the neutron flow..."
The droid was nearly on top of them now, an only vaguely mechanical woman-shaped creature with green hair and mirror-like eyes. "DIE!" it shouted.
"DOCTOR!"
Ranma was there, power crackling around her body in spite of her state of near total ki-depletion, grabbing the droid by the arms and wrenching it backwards, away from the two. "Oh no ya don't," she hissed through clenched teeth.
In ordinary circumstances, she wouldn't have had as much trouble against the thing, but now, near the point of exhaustion and fresh from being tortured and having depleted most of her ki reserves, it was all she could do to keep it from plowing into the Doctor and Martha.
The Doctor visibly brightened. "Of, of course!" he exclaimed, then fiddled with the settings on his device. "I had it set to drive screws of all things," he said in reply to Martha's questioning look. Then he pointed his sonic screwdriver at the droid and activated it.
Instantly, the droid went limp and fell forward onto its face, taking a very surprised Ranma down with it.
By then, the Senshi had cleaned up the other droids in the street, and another plasma blast detonated nearby.
Martha reached down to help Ranma to her feet, but the pigtailed girl stubbornly refused the help, struggling to her feet on her own. "... Nice move, uh, Doc," he said.
"Doctor," the Doctor corrected.
"Uh, right."
The Doctor briefly surveyed the group, and then nodded to himself. "Right then. This way." He gestured theatrically down the road towards what was left of Furinkan High School, still burning in the distance. "Come on. Allonse," he called over his shoulder as he walked off down the street.
The others followed.
Above, the bombardment continued, and Ranma's heart clenched. At this rate, Nerima would be a pile of rubble within the hour.
Ten minutes of walking and another brief fight with a band of droids found the group rounding the street corner at last at the very entrance to Furinkan High School, only to come face to face with... an old style phone booth of some kind?
Mercury raised an eyebrow. She knew enough history to know what this was, even if she didn't know why it would be here. "A London Police Box?" she asked.
The other Senshi gave her a confused look.
"A what?" Jupiter asked.
"Right," the Doctor said. "Martha. Ranma. It's time to go."
Ranma blinked. Her limbs felt like they were made out of water. Really really painful water. It was tiring even to keep walking at this point, but she was still aware enough to be surprised by the Doctor's announcement. She looked the police box up and down, and though there was something naggingly familiar about it, she had other things on her mind. "Whaddya mean, 'time ta go?'" she asked, thoroughly confused.
"Just that. Time to go. You can't stay here."
Martha looked at the Doctor questioningly.
Ranma stared at the Doctor, her confusion obvious on her face. Exhausted or not, in pain or not, she wasn't about to go anywhere. Not that there was an anywhere to go to. "Look, Doctor, or whoever ya are," she snapped, "I ain't about ta leave these girls to fight against those things alone. Those ships are blowin' up the whole damn city!"
The Doctor looked annoyed. "Ranma. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But these ships are attacking because of us. Because of you, because of me, and because of Martha. More to the point, they're going to be able to detect you wherever you go thanks to the energy you're giving off, and they'll track you wherever you go. You're valuable to them, and that's a very dangerous thing to be."
The Senshi kept silent, looking between Ranma, the Doctor, and Martha. Mercury, meanwhile, produced her computer and began to scan to see if she could confirm whether or not Ranma was giving off some form of exotic energy.
Ranma shook her head. None of that made any sense, and besides, she couldn't leave... Akane. "I ain't leavin'," she said stubbornly.
"Listen to the Doctor, Ranma," Martha chided.
"I might not be the smartest guy in the world," Ranma said, and the others blinked in surprise at the use of the word 'guy,' "But I know when I got a thing worth fightin' for. I ain't gonna leave because if I did, then... then... Akane, Ukyou, Shampoo, Kasumi, Nabiki, they'd all be..."
Mercury looked up from her computer in surprise. "... He's right," she announced. "She really is giving off an exotic energy signature, and now that I know what to look for..." She punched in a few variables to isolate the signal, and her eyes widened even further.
"What?" Mars asked. "What is it?"
"... Minna, I think they can track this from anywhere in the world..." she said.
Ranma sank into herself. "But..."
The Doctor smiled gently. "I understand. You've got people you care about. But the best thing you can do for them is leave. If you go, these aliens will follow. We can lead them away from this place."
Ranma grimaced. Could she really leave Akane behind? Could she really leave all her friends and family? Something inside her whispered to trust this man. To believe him. She didn't know what to make of that, but there it was. "If you're wrong..."
"I'm not wrong," the Doctor insisted. He sounded supremely confident.
"Sailor Mercury confirmed it, didn't she?" Venus asked. "If she says so, then..." she trailed off, a look of pity in her eyes as she looked at Ranma.
"Besides," Martha said quietly, pitching her voice so as not to carry beyond herself, the Doctor, and Ranma, "The TARDIS is a time machine. If it doesn't work, we can just come back to the instant after we left. Right, Doctor?"
The Doctor nodded.
Damnit, was she really going to listen to this? This was crazy. This was... normal. Damnit. With the way things worked in Nerima, it sounded about right. Like every other freak who found his or her way to Nerima, these aliens would inevitably end up following Ranma wherever she went. ... she swallowed her pride, and nodded stiffly.
"Right then," the Doctor said, and quickly opened the TARDIS. "Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, always a pleasure."
The four guardian senshi blinked at that.
"We've met before?" Mercury asked.
The Doctor grinned a boyish sort of grin, and ducked inside the TARDIS. Martha and Ranma followed a moment later.
Ranma's eyes widened even as she stepped through the door. The inside was bigger than the outside! She voiced this thought, of course: "The inside is bigger than the outside!"
The Doctor nodded absently, heading over to the center of the room and began fiddling with the controls.
"Takes a while to get used to," Martha said as she shut the doors behind Ranma.
"This is, uh, some kinda ship?" Ranma asked. It seemed familiar, somehow. She couldn't explain it exactly, but something about it... but that was impossible.
A shudder went through the vessel as they lifted off from the surface of the Earth. The Doctor promptly fiddled with a few controls, and the very angry face of Rubeus appeared on the view screen. "Hello!" the Doctor said cheerfully.
"YOU!" Rubeus all but yelled.
"Me," the Doctor said, and then gestured to his companions. "Martha and Ranma, too." He turned to Martha. "In all the universe, there is one taunt that is hated and feared above every other. This one can send a Judoon platoon into a blood rage, boil the blood of a Sebacian, and short-circuit the emotional limiter of a Cyberman." It was hard to tell if he was being serious or not. The Doctor turned to the screen, held up his hands on either side of his face, thumbs against his cheeks and each finger extended and said, "Nya nya nya nya nya nya," in a sing song voice.
Rubeus's face grew red, and before he could speak, the Doctor shut down the view screen. The entire Black Moon fleet then zoomed off in hot pursuit of the TARDIS.
Up, up, up into the sky they went, rapidly passing the point that Ranma had attained under tomboy, P-chan, and flying alien assisted flight. Up, up, higher, higher, out into space, with the Black Moon ships flying close behind, firing wildly at the retreating TARDIS.
"Everyone hold onto something," the Doctor said. "Next stop, the First Great and Bountiful Human Empire!" He slammed a fist down onto a weird plunger-like device, and the a high pitched, pulsing sort of whine of the TARDIS in transit filled the room.
The TARDIS vanished into the time-vortex just before a dozen energy beams crossed the space it had occupied.
On board his ship, Rubeus cursed and pounded the secondary control console with his fist. "They think they can escape so easily?" he asked. Let's see. The readings indicated that the ship had gone to... wait a minute. Crystal Tokyo? It had gone THERE? Why had it gone there? Rubeus grinned. That made things much simpler. He activated his own ship's time circuit, and the whole crystalline starship vanished into thin air.
END CHAPTER 2
--
Author's notes: Revised