"S..stop right there!" the shaky guard demanded as the stone statue lumbered toward him.
The gun the man carried was already empty of bullets, small pieces of metal that had merely bounced off the approaching bronze statuette. However, he was still wielding the weapon and pointing at the creature, pulling the trigger repetitively.
Three other security guards lay sprawled around the shattered glass door that the statue had walked through.
Now, it was slowly working its way to the last guard.
The man finally turned, meaning to break into a run for the back door, and found himself tripping over his legs into a painful fall.
The loud clanky steps came closer and closer.
The man closed his eyes as the statue's hands started to reach downward for him.
A loud metallic crashing sound came to his ears and suddenly the awful presence of the monster was no longer standing right over her.
The man cracked open his eyes to see a long, swishing purple tail waving over him for a brief moment before the owner of the tail dashed away and slammed into the statue as it tried to rise to a standing position.
Knocked off balance again, the monster fell backwards. The cat-girl atop of him smashed her foot down into the statue's knee, bending the bronze leg back as if it were taffy.
The loss of a limb structurally capable of holding its weight left the bronze statue as open as a public park to the purple-furred cat-girl. As the guard watched her systematically take it apart, he stood up and backed himself against a wall.
Then the battle was over and the girl was walking with an clipped stride that radiated annoyance. As she walked, the fur and cat features faded away. She made one casual glance toward the guard before picking up a delivery box and mounting a bicycle to ride away.
Unnoticed to either, a fluttering strip of paper smacked into the head of the statue and then fluttered on past as the evil light in the animated bronze's eyes snuffed out.
****
The bicycle skidded over the rooftops with a less than cheerful amazon atop it as she returned from another fruitless night of searching for where Ranma had left with Nabiki.
She knew she wouldn't find them with these little trips of hers and often wondered why she didn't take off for a longer journey.
Shampoo thought back to the last time she had seen Ranma and felt a shiver.
The sort of body control he'd displayed in that instant was…ridiculous.
It was like she was a child in her first training session against a master. Even when Mousse joined the fight, the balance of power had not changed perceptibly. She'd tried to convince herself that Ryouga's arrival and the sudden triggering of their Jusenkyo curses were a sign that Ranma had felt challenged, but she couldn't do that.
He'd merely been in a hurry.
The most intimidating thing of all, however.
Her curse.
He'd changed her curse.
No, he'd added to her curse.
And he hadn't cast a spell…he'd just…done it.
Great-Grandmother had said that they needed to talk about the curse, but Shampoo had been avoiding that talk. So far, Grandmother had been letting her get away from.
She didn't want to know the extent of what Ranma had done to her.
She didn't want to know what he was capable of.
The bike came to a skidding stop as she came to a realization.
Great-Grandmother should have never taught Ranma the Hiryu Shoten Ha.
The martial artist couldn't see it himself given his poor education, but Ranma had an amazing instinct for understanding the interplay of action and reaction. Until the Hiryu Shoten Ha and the Soul of Ice, Ranma had only had his own chi and body to use for resources.
Living beings, even the strongest, were tiny spark of living chi against the background of the whole pattern of life.
Shampoo had seen the battle of Jusendo.
Ranma had taken his tiny spark and very deliberately became the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings.
Only Ranma's hurricane happened immediately and around him.
Only Gods and Demons understood how to interact with the world so directly. Most Mortals that reached such such a connection with the world at large became unstable and dangerous and eventually destroyed themselves.
The possibilities destroyed their minds.
That much power.
Ranma had found the power and then put it away as if it were a training sword.
That much power and he saw it as just a tool.
Shampoo knew what Ranma was capable of.
She should have let Grandmother tell her.
She could have ignored being told.
Shampoo looked back over her shoulder.
She knew why she didn't seriously seek out Ranma.
****
Ranma finished out the kata smoothly and watched with a smile as Midori clumsily imitated the motion.
After standing up from a previous fall. At a three year old body, she didn't quite have the right body to really try some of his katas.
It was hard to believe she was only a year old sometimes.
Midori hadn't had another quick growth spurt for a while now, maybe she was going to start aging more normally now. In any case, she didn't have much more physical development to reach before he could really start teaching her the Art.
Before that, he wanted to get some real lessons in how to teach a student.
He most certainly did not want a daughter who was as much of a basketcase as he was at times.
As for his own ability, he'd improved a lot over the last year. That fight with Shampoo and Mousse had been applications of his experience at the time directed by newly accurate senses.
If he'd used his established techniques, he could have had Shampoo unconscious in the first moments and been gone before Mousse arrived. But he hadn't wanted to do that, and the discovery of his new senses had been a very heavy distraction.
The bit with triggering the jusenkyo curses, he still wasn't sure how he'd done that.
Probably something to do with his domain.
Over the last year, he'd been establishing some basic understandings of his new senses and correcting the imperfections he consequently found in his martial forms.
Of course, his first priority was to reach what he'd consider battle-ready.
That had taken three weeks.
Then had come the task of making sure he went over all the basics, anticipating having to teach in the near future.
"This is fun!" Midori called out.
Ranma interrupted himself and reached down to ruffle his daughter's violet hair with a smile.
"Yeah, squirt," he said, vaguely remembering when the Art was just fun to him.
So, how to keep it fun, and make sure she understands the responsibility at the same time.
And how to avoid keeping neither.
Though Ranma had a lot of experience with what not to do in watching his father.
****
Nabiki watched as the next customer came into line and she scanned over the young-man. A smirk played at her mouth as she realized that she had just characterized the student as young when he was probably two to three years older than she was.
She took in the clothes as he sat down. Well tailored and very well maintained, but beginning to show a bit of wear and tear. The t-shirt was custom-printed and displaying an obvious in-joke to an anime fanfiction she was familiar with. Dark circles under the eyes, and showing a bit of recent weight loss.
The laptop bag he set prominently into view was top-quality with lots of extra pockets and a number of the more impractical options. More telling was the small emblem on the bag, which indicated it had been purchased by someone with employee benefits and wanted to display they had employee benefits.
He was used to having money, but had recently lost some of his resources. Probably his father or mother were laid off from a…no she corrected that analysis as she watched his hands beat out a pattern.
He had been laid off.
Very young to be a returning graduate.
The shirt implied a bit of immaturity. The tailored clothes on top of the t-shirt, and the laptop, indicated that he thought highly of himself. He wanted to show that he worked hard and deserved everything that he gave himself. He wasn't just some kid born with money.
He was exceptional.
He'd worked hard to get out of college early. Took the extra hours, took the summer classes. Took the internships for practical experience through college.
A genius of hard-work, as the anime character on his shirt would have said.
Probably was starting post-graduate classes he'd considered useless before getting out on the playing field. He was looking to beef up his resume and get back into the game.
Probably he hadn't managed the exceptional feats he'd expected of himself.
As he finished settling himself, Nabiki was finishing finding his file based on that profile.
Five, maybe six seconds.
"Hello, how may I help you?" Nabiki asked, turning to look at him politely.
Behind her a manager had noticed her pre-emptive file calling and was moving to make a comment that she shouldn't be starting a file maintenance when she was about to help another student.
"Yes," the young-man said. "Yoshida Sano, I'm an alumni, graduated…a year and a half ago."
The manager was looking at the file as the young man introduced himself and his mouth hung open in shock as the names matched.
He was also blinking as Nabiki, eyes not looking at the screen was maneuvering her trackball to several bookmarked locations, the first thing she had done when setting up her workstation settings, to call a series of open internships and computer programming centric scholarships.
"All right," she said with a smile, not the shark one, but one borrowed from Kasumi and rarely worn. "What can I do for you?"
She wasn't trying to bruise these kids' egos, after all.
Behind her, the manager, not the one that had hired her, felt a small twinge of intimidation.
****
"I'm home," Nabiki said stretching out and feeling far from tired.
From what she could tell, the electronic transactions themselves didn't count as handling money, but the charge cards did. In addition, there were checks and cash transactions carried out as well.
She hadn't even needed a break.
Nabiki Tanaka came through the entrance and found her husband and daughter, hard to think of her as a stepdaughter after all this time, practicing some of the lighter katas in the living room with the furniture pushed aside for the moment for more room.
"How're you doing?" Nabiki asked as she moved to the couch and leaned against it to watch.
"We're doing pretty good," Ranma said, smiling.
"We're having fun!" Midori declared proudly as she struggled through a change over until she tripped over her feet and toppled to the floor with a giggle.
"Looks like it," Nabiki said smiling. "But, Megumi'll be home soon. Sooo."
"Yeah," Ranma said. "Let's put the room back together."
"Awww," Midori said, a bit disappointed.
"Come here kiddo," Nabiki said reaching over the couch to grab at Midori and then bring her back and set her on the couch.
A moment later she was giggling as Ranma pulled the couch back into place and she got a quick ride. The rest of the furniture was put into place as Midori settled into the couch.
Once they finished, Nabiki and Ranma sat down on the couch with Midori in between them. The TV came to life then as someone found a remote and the three set out to watch some Bayside Police reruns.
Ranma's arm comfortably wrapped around Nabiki as she leaned carefully into him over Midori, giving the child a secure nook between the two adults. Slowly, as time went on, the napping feeling crept up on Midori, try as she might, it came over her and she fell asleep between her parents.
Nabiki lifted her head off Ranma's shoulder to look down at Midori for a moment before leaning back against Ranma, enjoying the arm around her as she reached up to play with his hair.
The two were distracted with each other and didn't hear the door opening to the front of the house.
"So," Nabiki said quietly, not wanting to wake up Midori. "When did this happen?"
"I don't know," Ranma said, his fingers wrapping with Nabiki's.
"This makes things so much more complicated," she sighed in apparent resignation.
There was a dichotomy between the tone of the words and the mood ambient about the couple. If a person where to listen through a recording or something similar, the discussion would have sounded like a cold discussion of some inconvenience.
Watching the scene, however, the affection between the two was obvious. There were small smiles on their faces, warm and quiet, but mixed with a little worry.
"Yeah," Ranma agreed with Nabiki. "Should have been more careful."
"Nothing we can do about it," Nabiki sighed, snuggling in a little closer. "What's done is done."
"So how do we handle this?" Ranma asked.
"I think we've already been handling it," Nabiki noted with a twist of her normal sarcasm.
Both flushed at almost identical moments, eyes flicking to the corners of the room.
Both turned towards each other, looking a bit hesitant before bending towards each other. For a brief moment, lips touched and anybody watching the scene, restrained tones and words or not, could not have helped but to feel the heat brimming from the emotions included.
Lips pressed together and then parted, a simple, chaste kiss that still sent both god and goddesses minds and souls whirling with passions that only seemed to display through the most minute of expression changes.
And when the flash washed over them, momentarily blinding their eyes, the feelings didn't dissipate, though their was the addition of a bit of chagrin at having been caught unaware by Megumi.
"This picture will make the best postcard for you guys to send to people you know," she said proudly. "You looked sooo cute."
Meanwhile Midori started to blink awake herself and the routines of life started to settle in.
Of course, that didn't change the things that were.