Forcibly United

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Chapter 6

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"Well, that could have gone better," Ryouga noted as he and Ranma pulled themselves into the communal showers. Both boys were covered in red paint and bruises, thanks to the hundreds of rounds of paint fired from the MP5s held by Chang's men. When they stopped dodging after getting tagged, sometimes stray fire would thump into them as their partner dodged around.

Those were only minor irritations. The main injuries both boys laboured under were mostly self-inflicted, thanks to being dragged around by their partners. Hitting the side of a shipping container at high speeds was never good for one's internal structure.

"Oh man! If it weren't for these stupid bracer things, we'd be fine! Even you're fast enough, and those guys weren't even half as accurate as that tomboy the other night!" Ranma growled, peeling off the formerly white t-shirt and throwing it into a nearby laundry hamper.

"Well, we do have to learn to fight like this, Ranma. There's no point in complaining like a girl!" Ryouga snapped, turning on the water for his shower.

"Who's a girl?" Ranma snarled in response, crossing his arms and glaring. Ryouga put his hand to the shower head, diverting one of the streams of water at Ranma. The pigtailed girl learned, then and there, that Ryouga had been taking advantage of the lock on his curse to shower in cold water. "Hey!"

"Quit it, Ranma. I'm pretty sure Chang'd get angry if we wrecked his place," Ryouga growled, turning his attention back to his shower. The pigtailed girl stomped over to a stall of her own, turning on the hot water and reverting to her natural form.

"So how long do you figure it's going to take us to get used to all of this crap?" Ranma wondered, scrubbing himself. He discovered that the paint was rather stubborn, some of it having had hours to cake on.

"We should get used to fighting alongside one another soon. We already know one another's moves, so..." The Lost Boy trailed off, finally shifting the deliciously cold water over to hot to help loosen the coloring on his skin. He rubbed for a moment before muttering, "What the hell do they put in this paint, anyway?"

"We probably don't wanna know," his blue-eyed partner said with a grin, working the rough cloth over his face. After a moment, he chucked the red thing into the hamper. "Screw it. Ryouga, we're going to have to get some paint thinner if we want to get this crap off."

"Paint thinner? That stuff will leave us reeking of chemicals for days!" Ryouga protested, barely having time to shut the water off before Ranma reached the door, wrapping a towel around his midsection.

"Don't forget it's gonna sting when we rub the paint off the places where we've got cuts. Or the eyes: I know I'm going to be swearing like crazy when I try to get this crap off of my forehead," Ranma commiserated, then grinned and slapped Ryouga on the shoulder. "Truly the life of a martial artist is fraught with peril."

"Ranma, you don't need to act like an idiot because your father's not here," the brown-eyed boy grunted, shrugging off the other youth's arm.

"Idiot!? Hey, take that back!"

oOo

"Okay, seriously. We need to figure this out," Benny said sternly, eyeing his co-workers and doing his best to instill a sense of urgency.

Of course, the fact that the only thing in the office which fit was the horrible shirt Revy bought for Rock nearly a year ago didn't help. Nor did the fact that he had a strangely-shaped bulge around his waist where the excess fabric of his pants was now bunched up thanks to his belt. The eight inches of leather flopping around lent him no air of superiority.

Benny realized, on second thought, that the fact it was only Revy laughing was probably about the best he could hope for.

"So seriously. Rock, we've figured out it can't be your recipe. You've made it before for yourself a dozen times since coming to Roanapur, right?" Benny asked, getting a confirming nod from Rock. At least he wasn't smiling. Much. "Alright then... Revy, you said you got the mushrooms from Tong's market, right?"

"Yeah," the woman gasped, then froze. "Oh shit!"

"What?" Rock asked, ghost of a smile fading.

"Eda and Sis might have been hit with this shit, too!" Revy snapped, eyes meeting Rock's.

"I'll call Hotel Moscow," Rock replied, already moving towards the phone. While Revy was certainly on good terms with Balalaika, the same couldn't be said about Balalaika's soldiers. The Japanese man, on the other hand, was well known to them and any warnings he gave would immediately be considered.

"I guess I should call the bitch and the old hag," Revy muttered, straightening. She walked over to Benny's old shirt, fishing out his cell-phone.

"Oh man, this is crazy," The blond American teen muttered to himself, walking back over to his computer to switch it on. A large shadow fell across the screen, causing the young man to turn his head. "Can you believe this, Dutch?"

"It's probably one of the more messed up things I've seen," the black man admitted neutrally. He went over to the fridge, grabbing two cans out of it and returning. Cracking open a Heireken, Benny looked at his boss curiously as Dutch handed him a can of cream soda.

"What's this for?" Benny wondered. Sure, he liked cream soda, but...

"Now now, a kid like you probably shouldn't be drinking," Dutch said, managing to keep his face completely straight.

"Dutch, the legal drinking age in Roanapur is 'whenever you don't need a sippy-cup to drink beer'," the blond muttered. The man behind him just raised an eyebrow and flashed the ghost of a grin. Benny popped the tab on the can of soda. "Whatever."

The American opened his email program, preparing to type a message to his girlfriend. He'd typed seven words when he stopped, turning in his chair to face his boss.

"I can't really tell Jane about this problem, can I?" Benny muttered, deadpan.

"Not if you want to keep your girlfriend," Dutch remarked, crushing the empty can of beer and tossing it into a wastebasket.

"Wonderful. She's going to get a little curious if I suddenly stop sending her pictures and videos, you know," the teenager said with a grimace, turning and clicking on a random email.

"Shouldn't you be more concerned with the fact that she's supposed to come visit in five days?" Dutch wondered, reading the email the young man had clicked. At the horrified look on his communications tech's face, he patted him on the back. "On second thought, you probably could use a beer, huh?"

Crossing the office to the fridge, Revy's quiet conversation suddenly grew loud with the Chinese-American thug's laughter.

"Oh man, you got hit!?" Revy snorted, trying to fight down her laughter enough to actually speak. She wasn't entirely successful. "So let... let me get this *snicker* straight: You, the old bitch and half of your altar boys all got hit? So how's it like to be thirteen again?"

Too quiet for anyone else to hear, the person on the other end of the line spoke.

"No fucking way!" Revy snarled. She gripped the phone and glared at the mouthpiece as if the action would carry through the lines to the other end. "Look Eda, save some of that shit! Benny looks like he's twelve again and I doubt he'd think being four or five years older would be worse!"

She pulled the phone to her head and listened for a little while longer.

"What the fuck do you mean we can buy it if we're lucky!?" Benny winced Revy snarled, opening his bank account and checking the balance. He'd saved up a pretty decent amount, now that he looked at it. "What do mean, bidding starts tomorrow!?"

The dark-haired woman closed the cell-phone with a hiss of annoyance, turning her glare on the blond at his computer.

"I hope you've got a bit of cash hanging around, Benny," Revy huffed, sitting down on the couch, deflated. "Eda and the other bitch figured the mushrooms out, same as us. They figure their stuff turned them around seventeen, which is a lot more marketable than turning someone into a snot-nosed kid, I guess. That cunt Yolanda's been spreading word around town and they're going to be auctioning the rest of their mushrooms off tomorrow morning."

"We'll probably see Balalaika there," Rock piped in, hanging up the phone. He sat down on a chair. "Luckily for Hotel Moscow, Balalaika was the only one affected, really. Unfortunately they assumed it was a poison of some sort in the dish and only saved a tiny sample for testing before torching the rest."

"I bet Balalaika's not happy about hearing that," Dutch noted, sipping another beer. Rock nodded.

"She says she's probably around fifteen, if her memory is correct. She says it's hard to tell though, since her hair wasn't as long then as it is now and she didn't have her scars the first time she was that age," the Japanese man noted. He flashed Benny a slight grin. "On the bright side, Benny, I might be able to talk her into parting with one of the mushrooms if she wins the auction tomorrow."

"Thanks for the thought, Rock, but I'm not exactly sure I want to bet having to wait four years to fit my old clothes again on Balalaika's good will," Benny snorted, turning back to his computer. "I think I'm going to be withdrawing a lot of money from my bank today, just in case."

"I'll take out a bit of money as well. It'll be a problem for the company if our tech support can't reach his computer when he needs to," Dutch informed the group, moving to the door.

"Rock, you're saving the mushrooms, right?" Benny asked worriedly.

"Yep. They're in the fridge. I've even got some I haven't cooked yet," Rock replied.

"Those will probably be the key to fixing this whole mess," the blond noted, grabbing a beer from the fridge.

"Hey, aren't you under-aged?" Revy wondered with an evil grin.

"That joke wasn't funny when Dutch made it, Revy," Benny snorted, popping the tab on the drink and chugging it.

oOo

"This is your brother?" The officer asked, nodding towards the sketch the police artist had drawn according to the young girl's memory. He was an Asian man in his early twenties, with short, mussed brown hair. His eyes were wide and kind, and the medical patient made a point of mentioning that her brother wore a white shirt and tie.

"Are you sure you're related to him?" The officer asked her kindly. Her European features contrasted sharply with the man in the sketch. He could have been any of a thousand Japanese tourists, taking a week off from their salaried positions.

The young girl shook her head once, wincing at the headache which came whenever she tried to remember anything.

"I'm not sure. I remember... I'm... an orphan? Maybe I was adopted..." The girl finally admitted. She shook her head, white blond ponytail whipping into and out of her vision. "I'm sorry I can't remember any more."

"It's alright. This should help. I'll run this past some of my friends in the inter-city relations department. Maybe I'll get a hit," the officer said, nodding once to the sketch artist, who left to scan the image into his computer. "Now, have you had any luck remembering your name?"

"Nope," the girl admitted, shaking her head. The officer chuckled, rumpling her hair.

"Maybe we should call you Gretel. The story gets you smiling whenever I read it," the officer mused, scratching his chin.

"Gretel," the girl tried, frowning. A flash of something jarred her memory. Pain? Something red. Something warm and no longer livi- She slammed a door on the memory. "I'm not sure that name's quite right."

"Then what about Greta?" He grinned at the small smile on the girl's face. "Okay, you like that name. Until we figure out who you really are, you're Greta. Does that sound right?"

"I like Greta," the girl admitted.

Greta didn't bring the bad things to the door in her mind. She didn't want to think of herself as Gretel. The name being associated with her brought a dark chill.

oOo

Author's Notes:

Part of the problem with wanting to write Ranma/Ryouga scenes right now is that all they're going to be doing for the next several days is training with Chang's thugs shooting several different types of weapons their way. There's only so many ways I can make "Ranma and Ryouga get shot with paint bullets" interesting.

The other problem is the requirement for a lot of exposition here, which I only made worse by starting to plant the seeds necessary for the return of Gretel. I mean, I could just have the elements show up a chapter or two before they come back, but I feel that not building things up properly is a poor way of telling a story.

On the bright side, these disjointed chapters are at an end. The characters have been more-or-less introduced and their status in Roanapur (or elsewhere) established for the foreseeable future. Next chapter is going to focus entirely on the auction and after that, the first arc begins!

And no, Heireken is not a typo. That's the brand of beer everyone in Roanapur drinks. :P