Author's Notes: Merry Xmas from the land down under! Sorry for not getting this chapter up on Xmas Day, but real life has... not been cooperative. The next five chapters are planned out, so hopefully updates will come a little quicker, but my computer is dying and my finances are... bad.

Chapter 11: Heroism Calls! Set Sail for Warship Island!

Surrounded by warm, welcoming faces, Apis felt herself relax for the first time in what felt like a week, suddenly and intimately aware of just how tired she was. Exhaustion wasn't the only thing to come roaring back now that she wasn't all tensed up. What Auntie Jacqueline called her 'second thoughts' had decided now would be a great time to start nagging her. Sometimes they helped... other times, they just made her feel stupid.

'What the heck are you doing, Apis!? You were supposed to look for help to save your home from pirates, not bring more of them to loot the place!'

'I don't have a choice! We don't pay the Heavenly Tribute, so the Marines won't help us! Besides, they saved me, they promised to help, and look - they're like, all women, apart from that one guy! They can't possibly be that bad!'

'...Just because they're women? Like that really makes a difference? Remember Terios?'

Apis shuddered as the unmistakable visage of Warship Isle's resident prepubescent female hellion flashed before her mind's eye. Terios was ready, willing and able to prove that she could out-curse, out-do and out-fight anyone, especially any "dumb boys". She was a notorious bully, and she particularly enjoyed going after the other girls on the island. Apis had received more than her fair share of noogies, wet willies, depantsings and other inventive torments.

"I hate to put a damper on your little party, but there's something we need to discuss first," came an unfamiliar voice.

Apis blinked and instinctively looked up, then let out a wordless bellow of shock and scrambled backwards on her hands as a...a... thing floated over to her.

"What the heck are you?!" she demanded, staring in horrified fascination into three glowing eyes in an otherwise invisible face.

The impossible thing sucked audibly on a dirty-looking cigar, its end glowing red before the creature exhaled a plume of purple smoke and dryly responded with, "I'm a parrot."

Apis just stared flatly at it. "...No. No, you are not."

"Well, you're smarter than the first locals we met," the bizarre creature - like a floating kid, almost, but not quite - declared.

"Stop picking on her, Umok," the red-haired captain chided it - him?

"I'm doing no such thing!" the now-named 'Umok' retorted, sounding genuinely offended at the notion.

Truth be told, Apis felt a surge of indignation at the idea herself; she wasn't a baby! She didn't have long to stew in that feeling, however, before Umok turned that three-eyed gaze back towards her, the triangular arrangement of eyes burning into her soul.

"How desperate is your situation? What is this 'El Dorago' doing to your people? Is he hurting them?"

"Um... no? I mean, he's set himself up as king of the island, but he wasn't hurting people just for fun when I left," Apis admitted, brow furrowed in thought.

"And how close is your island?" Umok continued.

"Ah... hm... maybe a week? Depending on the weather," Apis replied, after a moment to wrack her brains.

Umok turned to Ranma. "Then I suggest, captain, that we beach this ship at the nearest island and do some maintenance."

"You heartless little imp! How could you be so cold to poor Apis here?!" cried one of the crew - a woman with black hair in a ponytail.

Apis was very pleased with the support... not so pleased when her supporter suddenly hugged her as if her life depended on it, wrapping deceptively strong arms around her and squeezing like a snake with a rabbit.

"Gak! Lemme go!" Apis protested, struggling in vain to free herself from the weirdly powerful grip, a smell like roses with a hint of decay invading her nose.

'...Is that perfume? I don't see the appeal,' a tiny part of her mind noted. The rest of it was focused on trying to wriggle out of the python-like grip literally squashing her with love.

"In case you've forgotten, this ship wasn't in the best shape when we claimed it, and in the last 48 hours, we've sailed up and down Reverse Mountain, then ran the Gauntlet of Paradise. We're not going to be much help to this poor young woman if we have to swim to her island," Umok dryly pointed out in response.

"...He has a point," the sole man aboard the ship grudgingly conceded, looking over at Ranma.

The red-haired young woman visibly grappled with the idea, eyes screwed shut and brow furrowed as she thought it over. Finally, she nodded slightly and opened her eyes with a sigh. "Kodachi? Let go of the kid and set course for the nearest island. We'll beach there, check for leaks, catch up on scraping the hull, and then we'll start out for Apis' home."

"Aye-aye, captain darling!" Apis' captor, the newly named Kodachi, gleefully replied. She gave Apis one last squeeze - and Apis had never felt more sorry for her old teddy-bear than she did at that moment - before skipping over to man the ship's wheel.

"Shampoo, Ryoga, tack the sails!" Kodachi ordered, and Apis watched as the ship's sole man and… a half woman, half rabbit? The hell? Hurried to obey her commands. Then her stomach decided that now was a good time to announce its displeasure at the fact she hadn't eaten since she'd finished off the last of the bread yesterday morning and it growled loudly, causing her to blush and wrap her arms around her midriff.

"Hey now, you hungry, sugar?" asked an unfamiliar voice, and Apis looked up. Yet another woman had made her way over to Apis, staring down at her with a warm smile and an affectionate light in her eyes.

"Um... no, not really," she insisted, only to blush again as her stomach growled even louder, as if actively refuting her prideful lie.

The longhaired pirate woman didn't say anything about being lied to; if anything, her smile grew deeper. "Yeah, I thought I recognized that sound. C'mon, sugar; let's get you some food... nothing we can do out here anyway."

She reached down and took Apis by the wrist, gently but firmly tugging the young girl to her feet before leading her into the ship's galley, Ranma drifting along on their heels. Apis took a seat on one of the small stools in the single-room space that doubled as kitchen, dining hall and sleeping quarters, and watched as her benefactor stepped over to the stove.

"Um... thank you, miss...?" She politely probed, the manners her grandfather had instilled in her rising to the fore.

"My name's Ukyo. You've already met Ranchan," the brunette replied, nodding towards the redhead for emphasis. Ranma grunted absently in acknowledgement, more focused on the kettle she was putting on a spare part of the stove.

Apis nodded her gratitude, and watched as the two women busied themselves at the stove. Soon, a delicious smell of something frying began to reach her nose, and her stomach growled in anticipation. The only thing underwhelming the scent of incoming deliciousness was the faint odor of boiling saltwater, which made Apis wrinkle her nose in distaste.

'What the heck is she doing?'

She got her answer a few minutes later, when Captain Saotome took the now-steaming kettle and tipped the contents over her head - changing into a black-haired boy in the process! Apis fell off of her stool in shock, shrieking in surprise at the sudden impossibility.

"Wh-what the hell?! You're a boy now? But you were a girl!" She stammered, staring wide-eyed at her mysterious rescuer.

"Would you believe... Devil Fruit?" Ranma asked in a hopeful tone.

"No, because you swam out and saved me, and everybody knows those who eat Devil Fruits can't swim!" Apis barked in response.

At that, the strange sex-shifter actually grinned. "Wow, you really are a smart one, aren't you? Alright... it's called a Jusenkyo curse. It's kind of like a Devil Fruit, except I didn't get superpowers, I just turn into a girl when I get splashed with cold water. Also, I can still swim."

"...Lame," Apis bluntly assessed.

The cursed captain's lip curled into a bitter smirk. "How do you think I feel? I have to live with it."

Any further conversation was cut off when a plate covered in a grilled… something, it looked kind of like a pancake covered in sauce, meat and cabbage, was placed in front of Apis.

"Come on now; eat up, sugar. You've had a hard time, you need your strength," the woman exhorted, still smiling affably at Apis.

"Oh! Um, thank you, miss," Apis politely replied, before turning her attention to the strange pancake thing. It wasn't like anything she'd ever seen before... but it did smell pretty good.

Captain Ranma chuckled warmly. "Go on, eat up, kid; Ukyo makes the best okonomiyaki you'll eat in your life. There's a reason she's the ship's cook."

Encouraged, Apis took her first forkful. Her eyes went wide in shock as the flavors assaulted her tongue. Crisp, fluffy batter, crunchy cabbage, rich sauce and deliciously salty meat and eggs all rolled over her tastebuds and made her stomach growl in anticipation. She barely took the time to chew before she swallowed it down and ravenously attacked the rest of her meal.

"Easy, easy! You'll choke!" Ukyo laughed, beaming with pride at Apis' response before turning back to the stove; it was obvious to her that another serving would be required...

Meanwhile...

Four men and one woman stood on the deck of a damaged ship, currently limping through the waves, watching uneasily as the last of their number, a ferocious-looking blonde woman, stormed back and forth across the deck, boots audibly thumping against the decking as she flailed her arms about angrily.

"Damn it all! Those rotten punks! Look what they did to my ship! What are a bunch of gunners like that doing on some no-name pissant crew fresh down Reverse Mountain?!" She screeched, not so much at her underlings as for the sake of hearing herself rant.

"Calm down, Miss Twinkle; these things happen, there's no point getting upset about it," soothed one of the men; a tall, broad-shouldered, black-haired brute of a man, big enough to make two normal sized mene, a kanabo slung over his shoulders. Sleepy eyes stared out from amidst craggy features, making him look constantly on the verge of dozing off.

"That's easy enough for you to say, First Mate Mr. Anchor! You weren't the one humiliated by those little bastards! Bah!" Miss Twinkle, acting captain of this vessel, snarled, and kicked a handy bucket over the gunwale into the water, where it swiftly vanished into the dark depths."How'd that little brat even manage to get out of the hold, anyway?!" she demanded

Another man, small and meek looking, with a visibly receding hairline,, visibly swallowed in his nervousness, knees knocking together as he mustered the will to speak, stammering, "Her- her ropes had been chewed through, Miss Twinkle..."

"And weren't you supposed to be watching her to prevent something like this from happening, Mr. Tiger?!" The blonde snarled at him, making him whimper like a small child.

"Lay off him, Miss Twinkle! How were we supposed to know she could talk the ship's rats into setting her free, hey?" the only other woman on the crew interjected, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, dusky-skinned beauty who looked like she was ready for a day on the beach, sleeveless bikini-shirt top contrasting her long grass skirt.

"By remembering that we were told she had the powers of the Whisper-Whisper Fruit! Don't pretend that our employer El Dorago didn't warn us she could talk to animals, Miss Beach!" Miss Twinkle barked back.

A silvery-haired young man whose hair had been sculpted into the intricate shape of a hammerhead shark's distinctive head sniffed disdainfully. "As if we should care what a man like that says... he's not even part of Baroque Works!"

"No, but he's paying us for our services, so shut your trap, Mr. Peacock! I don't care if you are supposedly moving up to the Billions, right now you're still a Millions like the rest of us, so you shut up and do what you're told, is that clear?!" Miss Twinkle snarled.

"Yes, Miss Twinkle," Mr. Peacock replied, hanging his head obediently.

"None of this changes that we're still out a mast and have big ol' holes in our sides, captain. Your orders?" Mr. Anchor asked patiently.

"Grr... set course for the nearest island, you idiots! We'll make repairs there, and then we'll go after that little brat and her stupid friends, and when we find them..."

She trailed off, clenching her fist in anger and letting her underlings shudder as they used their own familiarity with her wicked temper and barely-repressed streak of cruelty to fill in the blanks for themselves.

Soon thereafter...

"Whoa! Awesome! They're incredible!" Apis cheered excitedly, too amazed by what she was watching to even think of being suspicious. After all, it wasn't every day that you saw two guys hauling what had to be a hundred ton, maybe hundred and fifty ton, caravel onto the sand with all the effort of a fisherman beaching his rowboat.

"Yes, my darling Ranma is quite the paragon of manhood, isn't he?" Kodachi chortled, watching warmly from the deck beside Apis as Ranma and Ryoga used the Milka's anchor chains like boarding lines to pull the ship up onto the beach.

Sand audibly crunched beneath the ship's keel as it was drawn steadily and inexorably through the shallows and up onto the beachline proper. Ranma and Ryoga heaved away relentlessly, and soon the Milka had been firmly beached.

"And now... we have to start hunting for leaks," Kodachi sighed, clearly not looking forward to it.

'Not that I blame her; even just checking the fishing boats is a chore,' Apis noted to herself. Fueled by a sudden impulse, she asked, "Would you like me to help you check the interior for leaks?"

Kodachi blinked in surprise, but then smiled warmly. "Why, thank you, Apis! That would be most appreciated."

The older girl turned and began heading inside, with Apis following in her wake. Ukyo was already in the ship's galley when they entered, holding a couple of spare storm lanterns, and she smirked at the sight of them.

"Well, decided to get your hands dirty, Kodachi? Wonders never cease," Ukyo chuckled.

"Since I am the only one of us with any prior experience of sailing life, it behooves me to lend you my expertise," Kodachi sniffed in response, even as she reached out and took one of the lanterns from Ukyo.

The Milka wasn't the biggest ship, and in all honesty, its hold wasn't really used for much. Which frankly didn't help make it feel much less eerie as the three girls descended into the dark depths, the only light the small spheres of illumination coming from the lanterns at their sides.

"I hate coming down here," Ukyo muttered, raising her lantern and peering about through the gloom.

"Unfortunately, it is a necessary task... I for one would hate to start sinking in the open ocean," Kodachi pointed out, although she seemed no more eager to step forward than her counterpart.

"Where do we even start?" Ukyo wondered.

"Oh, I know! We have to start tapping on the walls below the waterline; we're supposed to find any cracks or loose boards that could let the water start pouring in," Apis cheerfully announced, before scampering over to the wall to do just that.

Whilst the Milka's hold was emptier under Ranma's captaincy than it had been before, that didn't mean it was entirely empty. Barrels and crates full of various non-perishables and essentials were laid along the walls, spare sails were folded up into places where they could theoretically be easily brought up to the deck... all in all, there was actually a surprising amount of bric a brac lying around when you got up close and personal with it. As Kodachi poked at a crate, trying to judge where best to move it to, something small and fuzzy shot out from the crevice between it, squeaking loudly.

Kodachi let out an ear-piercing shriek and leapt up onto a nearby barrel, squealing in dismay. "Eee! Kill it! Kill it!"

Instinctively, Ukyo filled her hand with spatulas, readying them to be launched like kunai; whilst not sharing the traditional girly-girl fear of creepy animals, as a restauranteur, she wasn't very fond of rats on principle.

"No! Don't hurt it!" Apis cried, flinging herself into the line of fire and forcing Ukyo to jerk her wrist, ensuring the spatulas thunked bodily into the wood around the girl rather than burying themselves in her soft, tender flesh.

"Don't you ever do that again!" Ukyo thundered, looming over Apis.

But the girl completely ignored her, instead hunching over the trembling rat that had started everything. "Are you alright? You're not hurt, are you?"

The rat squeaked loudly, and Apis' face lit up in visible relief. "Oh, thank goodness! I'm sorry, I know you didn't mean to scare them..."

She held out her hand and the older girls watched in amazement as the rat ran right up into it. Apis gently cradled it to her chest, petting it tenderly. "It's not your fault they're so mean...you've lived here a lot longer than they have, after all."

"You like rats?!" an incredulous Ukyo blurted.

"I...I have a Devil Fruit. The Whisper-Whisper Fruit. It lets me talk to animals," Apis explained, still petting the rat as she looked up at the long-haired she-pirate. "I don't like people hurting innocent creatures, either."

"It's a rat!" Ukyo responded, dumbfounded.

"You can really talk to it?" Kodachi asked, sounding intrigued, even as she deftly hopped down from her perch.

"I can talk to any animal! I hear them in my head," Apis boasted.

"Fascinating... maybe your little friend can help us?" Kodachi asked, getting as close to Apis as she dared whilst the rat was still sitting in her lap.

"Help us? That thing?" a confused Ukyo asked.

"Well, it lives down here in the hold... surely it would know of any places where the water tends to leak in particularly badly," Kodachi replied with a self-satisfied smile.

Meanwhile...

"Enemy ship sighted!" came the cry from the crow's nest.

"You're sure of that?" Miss Twinkle's bark of an answer came back.

"Skull, whirlwind and fists Jolly Roger! It's them alright!" Cried the crewmate above.

"Good work, Mr. Ketchup! I knew those idiots would have to pass by this island - lucky for us it's a binary island! Ready the longboats - we'll sail over there and hit them whilst they're beached and defenseless!"

"Aye-aye, captain!"

Soon afterwards...

"Come off, you little jerk...And...there!" Ranma crowed triumphantly as his knife broke the biological cement anchoring a final crab-barnacle-thing to the hull. It tried to latch onto his thumb with pincers that looked like they could cut through steel bolts, but his own fingers snapped closed in a vice-grip that crunched the shell and smashed it into a nauseating pulp of gooey flesh and crunchy shell fragments. A dismissive flick of the wrist and the biological debris sailed off onto the sand, where small crustaceans and stray seagulls were already picking their fill from the other seafaring parasites that had been scraped off of the hull.

"About time! At least they weren't as bad as the first time we had to scour this tub clean," Ryoga grumbled, crushing something underfoot with a deliberate twist of his heel.

"Yeah, there's something to be said for tackling things early," Ranma observed absently, before he balled his fist and thumped on the Milka's hull, just hard enough to produce a knocking that would be audible inside.

"Hey, how's it going in there?!"

"Everything present and accounted for, Ranma honey!"

Ranma looked up and saw Ukyo standing on the Milka's deck, leaning over the railing to grin and wave at him. Kodachi materialized by her side, similarly enthused if more restrained in expressing it, whilst Apis inquisitively poked her head through the rails to look down at him.

"The ship's seaworthy?" Ranma asked, feeling a little redundant even as the words left his mouth, but he knew that there had to be certainty.

"A few minor leaks here and there, Captain darling, but with Apis' aid, we found them all and patched them up. I have every confidence that the Milka will get us to Apis' home," Kodachi replied proudly.

"That's great news, Kodachi; you girls did good," Ranma told them, unable to keep from smirking at the way that their faces lit up at his words.

However, he didn't get long to enjoy their response as his hard-honed sixth sense for danger suddenly screamed at him. He barely glanced in Ryoga's direction to see from his arch-rival that he was feeling it too, and then instinct took over.

"Get down!" Ranma cried, already diving and rolling. He had no further time to spare for his crew, however, as he felt the bullet whistle past him to embed itself in the Milka's thick hull, followed shortly by the crack of a gunshot.

"Damn the luck! Get in there, you incompetent idiots! Stomp these fools and catch that brat!" an enraged but distinctly feminine voice rang out of the surrounding wilderness. It was followed by a chorus of battle cries as seven figures broke from the trees and charged at the martial artists turned pirates.

Of course, the outraged Kamikaze Pirates immediately rallied and counter-attacked, leaping across the sand in their eagerness to get to grips with their foolish foes... with the exception of Nabiki, who instead scrambled up the anchor chain and over the gunwale, where she grabbed Apis and dragged her out of sight behind some cover.

"Hey!" the little Devil Fruit user protested, instinctively kicking her legs and trying to pull away from Nabiki's grasp.

"Oh, no; this is no place for normal people like us! You let the muscleheads worry about these idiots; we're staying right here," Nabiki insisted, doing her best to call upon her fuzzy memories of wrangling an uncooperative Akane when she was little and Nabiki was sometimes called upon to do the "obedient big sister" thing... which admittedly hadn't been often.

"How can you leave your crew in danger like this?!" Apis demanded angrily.

"In danger? That lot?" Nabiki laughed. "Kid, there's no place those lunkheads are happier than in the middle of a hearty brawl. Trust me, we're the only ones in danger, so it's best we just stay out of the way and watch the fun."

Even as she said this, she was cautiously peeking out from behind cover with the ease of somebody long experienced in the arts of snooping on others. Apis glared at her a moment longer, but then her own curiosity got the better of her and she joined the older girl at the gunwale.

On the sand, Ryoga had instinctively gone after the biggest assailant, a towering brute easily twelve feet tall, bald-headed, long-faced, with shoulders so broad he looked like he could have carried a rowboat slung on his back without effort. The man was wielding an actual kanabo, and he swung it at Ryoga in a two-handed upward-arcing blow as the smaller teen came sprinting towards him.

Ryoga could have dodged the attack, but instead he simply focused his ki into his skin and muscles, willing his flesh to achieve the supernatural hardness that allowed him to headbutt his way through brick walls without even blinking. An all-out frontal assault had always been his style anyway, but ever since the Bakusai Tenketsu training had built upon his natural toughness and affinity for withstanding damage... Well, he'd come to enjoy the demoralizing effect that his ability to literally ignore attacks granted him in fights with people outside of the "Nerima circle", as it were.

Which meant nobody was more surprised than Ryoga when the bruiser's blow to Ryoga's sternum lifted the charging teen off of his feet and sent him flying backwards through the air, bouncing off of the sand several times like a human golfball until he slammed into and through a coconut palm tree. Momentum arrested, Ryoga shook his head, more shocked than actually hurt, and directed a genuinely surprised look at his opponent.

"Wow, you're stronger than you look! Okay, if that's the way you want to play it..."

Ryoga leapt to his feet and spun around to wrap both arms around an intact coconut palm tree. Growling with effort, he bent his knees for better leverage and heaved upwards, ripping the whole tree out of the ground like an overgrown daisy amidst the distinctive creak-groaning of soil sundering and roots tearing. Adjusting the tree for a better grip, he turned back to his opponent with a feral grin.

"Alright, now let's fight fair and square!"

"Y-you call that fair and square?!" the enemy pirate spluttered, before leaping to safety as Ryoga tried to swat him with the tree's top, the leafy mass of wood hitting the ground hard enough to leave a crater as dust erupted in a blinding, choking cloud.

Elsewhere, Kodachi was calling on every trick her brother had taught her to keep at bay the flashing sword of a man with silvery hair shaped into a twin-prowed pompadour that reminded her of a hammerhead shark, silently wishing she'd been just a little more attentive. This man was good, in a whole different league to the Marine riffraff she'd been dealing with over the past few weeks!

"Ahahha! Give it up, girl! You haven't got a chance of beating me!"

"The Black Rose never surrenders!" Kodachi spat back, digging deep into her memories. She let her unwanted dance partner take the lead, studying the way he moved, memorizing the patterns of his strikes... and then, at the opportune moment, she struck! Metal sang as her sword deflected the other, creating an opening for her to launch a powerful kick to the sternum that sent the silvery-blond main rolling backwards over the sandy dunes, struggling to regain his footing even as she pounced on him, and now he was the one being forced to retreat.

Not too far away, Shampoo had found herself cornered by two men at the same time, which in her opinion was hardly a fair fight... she had them outnumbered.

"C'mere, bunnygirl; gonna skin me a rabbit!" sneered a black-haired man wielding a sword in his right hand and a dagger in the left.

"That's really quite vulgar, Mr. Ketchup," his red-haired, axe-wielding counterpart observed in a gently chastising tone.

Before he could reply, Shampoo had launched herself at him in a flying kick that, fittingly enough, sent "Mr. Ketchup" flying when she struck him in the chest, leaving him upside down in a scrubby, thorny bush clear on the other side of the beach.

"And Shampoo heard it all before," the Jusenkyo-cursed zoan calmly observed. Right before she whipped out her sword and swung at the axe-man, who to her surprise actually managed to block the attack, even if he did stagger back a step.

Close enough to watch as this duel went on, Ukyo rolled her eyes and scoffed. "Show off! She was bad before, but she's gotten worse since she ate that stupid Devil Fruit."

Even as she said this, she deflected a bullet from the man aiming two pistols at her with the flat of her battle spatula, and then forced him to quickstep backwards before she hit him in the face with the edge of it.

In the center of the fray, a scowling blonde woman stamped her foot and screamed at the top of her lungs, "You useless idiots! Fight harder!"

"And that answers that question," Ranma declared casually, causing the woman - Miss Twinkle - to spin to face him with an expression of unholy rage on her face.

'I give that one a six. The old ghoul looks way scarier when she's mad...' The flippant part of Ranma mentally noted.

"What question is that?!" Miss Twinkle shrieked.

"What kind of captain you are," Ranma dryly explained.

Screeching like a harpy, Miss Twinkle snatched a pistol from her hip and aimed it at Ranma's heart. "I'll show-!"

And that was when Ranma moved. Faster than the eye could follow, he closed the distance between them, disarming his counterpart with a contemptuous backhand that slapped the pistol from her hand and launched it across the beach. She stumbled back in shock, tripping over a small dune and landing flat on her butt. Pale and sickly, she started up at Ranma, a greasy veil of sweat soaking her features.

Ranma casually cracked his knuckles, and then his neck, his expression darkening despite his attempt to sound conversational. "You 'n' me are gonna have a little chat about picking on kids..."

Miss Twinkle screamed at the top of her lungs, the sudden burst of shrill, piercing noise making Ranma yelp and leap back, giving her an option to scramble to her feet and start running in the opposite direction. "Retreat! Retreat, you idiots! Run!"

With a speed even Ranma could appreciate, she was soon plunging back into the undergrowth. And her panicked departure didn't go unnoticed - combined with the fact that they were being very soundly beaten back by Ranma's crewmates, her followers broke almost immediately and sped off after her.

Shampoo and Ryoga started to give chase, only to skid to a halt when Ranma whistled sharply to the pair of them.

"Forget it, they're not worth the trouble! Let 'em go," he ordered, and to his private relief, they obeyed - admittedly, Shampoo more eagerly than Ryoga, but he'd expected that. Turning back to the Milka, he shouted, "Apis! You okay?"

The young girl poked her head over the gunwale, eyes wide in excitement. "That was awesome! Those bullies knocked the strongest guys in my village around like children, and you took them out without even breaking a sweat!"

"Are those all of El Dorago's forces?" Ranma asked her.

"No, he's got dozens more, and they're all about that strong," Apis replied, shaking her head.

"Huh. Sounds like a piece of cake... actually, I could really go for a piece of cake," Ryoga admitted, before tossing the half-a-tree he was carrying casually over his shoulder.

"I might be able to whip up something," Ukyo noted, polishing her battle spatula.

"Alright then; let's push this tub back out into the sea and get out of here!" Ranma ordered, and his motley crew quickly fell into line to help him with the business of literally pushing the Milka back out into the open sea.

With their collective strength, the ship was soon launched and was sailing back out onto clear blue water once more.

"Log Pose is pointing to the next island, captain darling!" Kodachi called from the wheel.

"Lucky for us that island didn't take long to memorize," Ranma observed.

"Well, it wasn't that big of an island," Ryoga interjected. "Even if there are two of them so close together... heck, maybe that actually weakened the field somehow?"

"Could be," Ranma shrugged nonchalantly, his gaze shifting over to the neighboring island they were passing. Something caught his eye and he focused his gaze, an evil expression blooming on his face.

"Isn't that the ship that belongs to those lousy kidnappers?" He asked, and everybody nearby quickly turned in the direction he indicated.

"Y-Yeah, it is their ship!" Apis replied, swallowing hard at the hated visage of the Goldendust, with its pouch of gold-themed figurehead.

Ranma was sneering at this point. "Shampoo, fetch me a cannon ball..."

The rabbit zoan took off like a shot, bounding across the deck, into the crew's quarters, and then into and out of the hold, returning with a solid sphere of black iron.

Ranma reached out and took it from her, body shifting into a throwing position that a professional baseball player would have admired as he sized up the distance. After a few moments to gauge the shot, he drew back his arm and then snapped it forward, sending the cannonball screaming through the air to strike a thunderous blow into the hull of the Goldendust. The ship visibly rocked as the cannonball smashed into it right on the waterline, tearing clean through in a cacophony of splintering wood and allowing the sea to rush into the ship's hold.

"Direct hit! Nice shot, Ranchan," Ukyo cheered in admiration.

Smirking, Ranma dusted off his hands, and then dramatically posed with one foot on the gunwale. "That'll keep those jerks busy for a while... set sail for-! Uh... where do you live, anyway?"

Apis blinked in surprise, then looked up at Ranma and answered, "I live on Warship Island, Captain Ranma."

Nodding, Ranma resumed his dramatic position, one arm jutting out and pointing towards the horizon as he boomed, "Set sail for Warship Island!"

"Aye-aye, Captain!" came the answering chorus.

As the teen pirates began scrambling to get the ship on course, Apis stared out into the horizon, towards the spot where she was certain that her home lay.

'I can't believe that I found strong people to help me... much less that they're pirates. But they really could save us! Hold on, Granpa Ryu... I'm coming for you!'

Chapter End & Closing Notes

Not my longest chapter, I'll admit, but in the face of everything, I thought it was best to cut it short and get it out sooner. I do have the next five chapters planned, and chapter 16 in particular will be a major event, but I can't promise how quickly they'll arise. My computer is dying, to the point I can confront multiple blue screens of death per day, and my funds are meager at best; I have no idea when I'll be able to replace it.

As always, reviews are the life's blood of my creativity, and don't forget this fic has a tvtropes page just waiting for fans to fill it in!