Authors Notes: Merry Xmas from the land down under! I hope this chapter will suffice as my Xmas present to you readers, without whose enjoyment this fanfic would never have taken form.

Fans of Dragon Nabiki, disappointed as you may have been to lose the poll, take heart; there are now artworks for her! You'll have to check out my DA or Kofi accounts to see one of them, sadly, as it was judged too potentially NSFW for Spacebattles. I made the decision to go with a linnorm/lindwurm style "Naga Dragon" for these commissions, in homage to Nabiki's tentative Dragon Zoan being the "Fafnir Zoan". But if folks are interested in more "conventional" Dragon Nabiki arts, well, Kofi or donations would go a long way... plus, I have another fic, called Love Opens Many Doors, which I both want to get artwork for and I have a canonical dragon-girl Nabiki in it. Not to mention another new project I hope to launch within some time of Xmas Day...

Sadly, Death of Snipers, I've never heard of that band. My inspiration was the cartoon spin-off to The Neverending Story in the mid-90s, where a "Lord Pomplemuse" was an antagonist in a story revolving around the Sea of Mists and its Yskalmerie sailors.

OnTheTidesOfEvermore, this story takes place after the anime, so roughly after Nodoka's debut story for the manga comparison. And in One Piece timeline, our heroes arrived a couple of weeks/months before the events of One Piece proper began - the Luffy cameo was basically on Luffy's last stop before we meet him in that barrel in the first chapter. Ranma thought of Luffy as a kid because... well, Luffy, especially at the start of canon, is short and immature (as opposed to post-time skip, where he's taller and immature), so Ranma thought he was younger than he really is.

Chapter 31: Rats in the Hold

Nabiki stared solemnly across the deck at Shampoo. Both zoans were in their hybrid forms, claws glinting in the waning light of the fast-approaching dusk as their fingers flexed. Shampoo tilted her head from side to side, neck popping before she rolled her arms, limbering up her shoulders in a similar manner. Their crewmates surrounded them on both sides of the deck, an irregular circle with their collective attention fixed squarely on the two combatants. Unflinching in the face of their scrutiny, Nabiki gave her opponent a flawlessly executed formal bow, reminding all and sundry that whatever else she may be, she was the daughter of a licensed dojo owner and martial arts sensei.

Ranma chopped through the air with his right hand, voice booming out with an uncharacteristically imperious tone, "Fight!"

Shampoo exploded forward, attacking with a volley of hyper-fast punches easily comparable to Ranma's Parley du Foi Gras technique. But whereas the Nabiki of old wouldn't have been able to even see such moves coming, the new Nabiki dodged and parried every blow with aplomb, as Devil Fruit-enhanced muscles married themselves to the skills torturously won over months of grueling training at the hands of her Nerimite peers.

With meticulous patience, Nabiki waited for her opportunity, and the moment she spotted an opening in Shampoo's defenses, she pounced! She spun on her heel in a manner she was pretty sure might have cracked her spine back in Nerima, bringing her leg whistling around with enough force to pulverize concrete into powder.

Shampoo backflipped away nimbly from the attack, curling into a ball and spinning through a series of high-speed reverse somersaults. Nabiki's claws flushed deep crimson as she drew upon her powers and forced blood out through her nailbeds, using their keratinous shape as a guide to launch a spray of inch-long, razor-sharp shards of solidified gore at her opponent. But Shampoo countered by contorting her body through a series of shifts and mid-air dodges that made even Nabiki wince, before she kicked off of the thin air as if it were solid and propelled herself at the Mythic Zoan like a living bullet.

Nabiki ducked at the last moment, somersaulting forward with perfect timing to avoid catching the cabbit-zoan's double mule-kick in the back. The instant her feet touched the deck again, she spun to face her opponent, only to duck a literal tiger claw swipe that would have torn her face off if it hadconnected.

"Getting a little carried away there, China doll?" She dryly observed, even as she jabbed at Shampoo's midriff in a series of spear-hand thrusts.

"Oh, please, no as if would kill Nabiki - besides, better tough train here than cruel die out there," The Chinese Amazon scoffed, even as she deflected Nabiki's hands with deft parries of her own.

The two zoans clashed in a flurry of punches, swipes, thrusts and kicks, a swift, brutal melee fought entirely at close quarters, devoid of the earlier acrobatics and repositioning. It was the kind of fight where only instinct could guide a combatant, and in seconds, it had reached its climax.

Nabiki froze as she felt the tiniest pinpricks of pain in her throat from where Shampoo's claws were just piercing her skin, which rippled around the intrusions in a futile effort to knit itself whole.

"Shampoo win!" Grinned her foe, her smile full of teeth, purring with a hunter's delight.

"I think you'll find it's a draw," Nabiki sweetly corrected her, innocent as an angel, sweet as poisoned honey.

Shampoo blinked in confusion, then hissed as she finally felt the eerily cold stinging sensation of the sword's blade pressing against her chin, shaped from a streamer of blood that wound out of Nabiki's skin.

"Oh, you getting good!" The Chinese Amazon observed.

Nabiki blinked in surprise. 'Wow... I'd almost think she sounds genuinely impressed!'

"That's enough!" Ranma barked, and the two girls immediately withdrew their respective hands and took two steps away. Nabiki bowed to Shampoo again, and she bowed back, before they reverted to their respective human (or demihuman, for Shampoo) forms.

With the duel officially over, the rest of the crew surged forward like a tidal wave, enveloping the two girls in circles of camaraderie.

"Nice going there, Nabiki - ya'll almost had her!" Ukyo chuckled warmly, her excitement momentarily thickening her accent.

"Bah, Akane could have gotten just as good if Ranma had taken her as remotely serious as he has Nabiki," scoffed Ryoga, folding his arms across.

"Oh, please; Akane let her ego and her temper rule her, an' ya'll know it, pig-boy! She'd never have been able ta suck it up and concentrate on her trainin'!" Ukyo shot right back, glowering at him.

"Of course you'd say that!" Came the answering bark of contention.

'...I am so conflicted right now,' Nabiki conceded to herself, watching as the two continued to bicker.

"Congratulations, Miss Tendo; it was a truly inspiring battle. I've never done so well against Miss Shampoo..."

Nabiki snapped back to reality, before she turned a sincere smile at the crew's crossdressing swordsman. "Trust me, you're getting better too. Ranma and Shampoo are just... very high bars to measure yourself against, that's all."

Miriam chuckled warmly, reaching down to run her sausage-like fingers affectionately through Harumi's long, flowing hair. "Listen to her, dollboy. She knows what she's talking about."

Across the deck, Ranma gently rubbed a hand against Shampoo's back, the Chinese cabbit smiling blissfully and even purring softly at the soothing touch. "You really ran her through the wringer, huh, Shamps?"

"Is only way she learning... lucky Nabiki is quick study... Also, Shampoo tell you, no call her Shamps!" She chided her boyfriend, pinching his earlobe in playful reprimand.

"I must say, she's come quite a long way," Kodachi observed placidly.

"Yeah, but so have all of you girls - we wouldn't be here if you hadn't all driven yourselves so hard," Ranma asserted, smiling proudly at them, a hint of mischief in his eyes as he saw Kodachi and Shampoo both blush slightly at the praise.

"Island ahead!"

Umok's sudden cry echoed over the Stormbringer's deck, snapping the collective pirates (or lunatics, depending on who you asked) back to the world beyond their ship. They swarmed the gunwale to lay eyes on their latest destination, here in the ethereal expanses of the White-White Sea.

This island-cloud was black as the deepest storm-cloud, a many-angled thing of steep, jagged peaks that pierced the darkening sky like hungry fangs, cracked and riven with holes and rifts like great cavities. A low, brooding shore was washed sullenly by the sea-clouds, whose own milky waves seemed to darken as they brushed up against the beach, its texture more reminiscent of crumbling shale and time-weathered pebbles than the usual soft, fluffy cloud. Gnarled, warped trees clawed at the heavens with twisted branches, clinging stubbornly to whatever patches of 'vearth' were available, and a strange sprawling creeper seemed to proliferate everywhere they looked, as if the island had been shrouded by a millionfold spiders weaving webs as black as sin.

The island's singular city was no less unwelcoming in its visage. The housing style seemed to emulate its neighboring steep peaks, with tall, twisting towers and spiral roofs that brooded possessively over whatever flat ground could be claimed. Streets wound serpentine paths through the perpetual twilight, dimly lit by lamp dials that even now were struggling to light themselves, serving only to deepen the shadows of the city's tangled network of veins.

The wind picked up as the Stormbringer glided into the harbor, cold and damp as the grave, eliciting a shudder from all save the steel-hided Dyna and Miriam, bred for the utter cold of the ocean's depths.

"Well, this place is certainly cheery," Nabiki sarcastically observed as the crew almost instinctively fell into their usual routine for making landfall.

"Oh, I think it has a certain Gothic charm to it," Kodachi giggled as she cut the engine before beckoning to Miriam to drop the anchor.

"You would," Ryoga snarkily declared, stoically enduring the belaying pin that ricocheted off the back of his head as he pulled on some of the rigging.

Shampoo grimaced, her long ears twitching. "Shampoo no can hear... anything. Is nobody here..."

The whole crew immediately tensed, shifting from casual to battle-ready in a heartbeat as Shampoo's words reached them. If the Grand Line had taught them anything, it was that even the slightest hint of something unusual could be a potential danger, just waiting to strike.

Ranma looked out over the dark, brooding expanse of the harbor, taking in the unnatural silence. Whilst the sun was setting fast now, that should have meant the docks were buzzing with activity - crews frantic to load and unload the last of their goods mixed with those who were finally free from their labors seeking places to eat, drink and make merry, intermingling with those looking to take advantage of the situation.

Where were the merchants, looking to double-check their goods before they were loaded or to take final inventory? Where were the peddlers of food and drink from small carts and trays slung around their necks? Where were the prostitutes, pickpockets, and drug dealers, ready to meet the late-evening surge of vice from sailors either blowing off steam or indulging themselves before another long voyage? The air should have been filled with shouting voices and tromping feet, creaking boarding ramps and the late-evening hustle-bustle.

But there was nothing to be heard, save the lapping of the sea-clouds and the soft moaning of the wind, intermingling with the creaking of the Stormbringer's rigging, and nobody to be seen. Ranma nodded slowly to himself, before turning grimly to his crew.

"Alright... I'm gonna go and check it out."

"We come with you!" Shampoo immediately interjected.

Ranma shook his head. "It ain't safe-"

"It's certainly not safe for you to go alone!" Ukyo cut him off indignantly.

"That's right, Ranma darling. I understand your desire to be cautious, but going in by yourself is just as risky. Some of us will come with you, and the others will stay behind to defend the ship," Kodachi added, and despite the lightness of her tone, one look in her eye made it clear that her convictions were ironclad.

'...I still ain't got no way to argue with girls, do I?' Ranma mused, half irked and half fondly. Externally, he sighed softly and nodded his head.

"Alright, that makes sense..."

"If I may, Captain Saotome, I wish to stay here - this place is giving me a bad feeling," Umok suddenly interjected, poking his head out from amongst a tangle of rigging where he had been sitting and observing.

Lilith nodded her head, frowning as she added, "Yeah, I agree with Umok; this place gives me the creeps and, no offense cutie, you really ain't paying me enough to go poking around there."

"I wasn't thinkin' of asking either of you to come," Ranma absently replied.

"And since when were we paying you in the first place?" Ryoga mumbled to himself with genuine bemusement.

Ignoring him, Ranma turned to Ukyo. "Ucchan... I know ya don't want to hear this, but I want ya to stay here."

"Ranchan?!" Ukyo stared at him, naked hurt in her eyes.

"You're safer here, where you've got full access ta yer stores! The more ingredients you can pull out, the deadlier your style is, we all know that!" Ranma protested, though he couldn't stop his traitorous heart from feeling like cruel fingers were squeezing it at the look on his childhood friend and would-be wife's face.

Then she sighed and reluctantly nodded. "Alright, Ranchan, makes sense..."

Ranma tried not to let his relief show. "Okay, Shampoo, Nabiki; between bunny legs and bat wings, you two are the fastest girls on the crew, so you're both coming with me."

Shampoo actually saluted Ranma, grinning proudly. "Shampoo follow Ranma anywhere! Even into too-too creepy city!"

"Well, at least your reasoning makes sense," Nabiki drawled, briefly shifting into her 'werebat' form and experimentally flapping one wing, before shifting back out of it again.

"Um... Captain Ranma? Is it okay if Harumi and I stay behind? I'm not exactly the most subtle on the crew," Miriam asked politely, her tail swishing nervously behind her as she spoke.

"Sure, go ahead. But if they do sneak aboard, I better not hear they literally caught you two with yer pants down!" Ranma told her firmly, pointing a finger at her in emphasis.

Harumi's pale face went brilliant red, the blush almost burning in the gloom. Miriam went only slightly less scarlet, spluttering in protest. "That's not! We're not! We wouldn't!"

Ranma bit his cheek to keep from sniggering at the wotan's embarrassment.

"Capitan Saotome? I wish to be coming with you," Penelope asked.

"This unit will also accompany you," Dyna interjected dryly, the mechanisms of her mounted gatling gun clicking as she double-checked her bullet feed.

"As will I!" Kodachi asserted.

At that, Ranma shook his head. "Dyna, Penelope, you girls can come if you want, but Kodachi, you need to stay here - you're the helmsman! If we need to make a getaway, you being here is essential."

Kodachi scowled viciously, but she reluctantly nodded - well, inclined her head in just the barest degree necessary to convey acquiescence to the idea. "If that is your wish, Captain darling..."

"It is... Now, Ryoga? Take care of them. I'm trusting you to look after the ship while we're gone."

"Tch! Where else would you put your strongest fighter?" Ryoga asked, trying not to look like he was preening at the implicit compliment Ranma was paying.

'Where else would I put you to make sure you don't wander off and get lost behind enemy lines?' Ranma bit back the unnecessarily cruel ego-bursting comment that immediately sprang to mind; any other time, it would have been fun to brawl - that familiar anarchic relationship that was at once shifting as sand in a desert and solid as a mountain. But now was not the time for such fun and games.

"Alright then; let's go, and stick together!"

Minutes later...

The city was no less unappealing for being seen up close. Only the quasi-automated lamp dials mounted on their intricately wrought, highly ornamental stands provided any sort of illumination in the tangled streets, where the buildings hunkered like predatory beasts and their shadows drowned out what little light remained from the darkening sky. Though most of the exploratory party could move as silently as ghosts, there was sadly nothing Dyna could really do, and though the cloud-based substance of the roads largely muffled her steps, the sounds that escaped echoed through the empty environs.

This unnatural silence and total absence of any people would have been eerie enough, but there were also other, even more ominous signs. Makeshift barricades could be seen scattered through various chokepoints; some intact, others that seemed to have been abandoned... or torn down. And everywhere they looked, they could see attempts to fasten doors or windows shut, a desperate effort to seal homes against potential threats.

"...You take us to such lovely places, Ranma; I'm so happy to be your girlfriend," Nabiki snarked, elfin ears twitching as she blatantly glanced in every direction.

"Can always drop out and leave him to Shampoo," the Chinese Amazon muttered, even as she mirrored her fellow zoan's body language.

"When Ryoga learns to fly without one of us giving him a helping kick in the rump," came the immediate rejoinder.

"...Mes dieux, do you ever stop?" Penelope asked, in mostly feigned exasperation.

Ranma chuckled before answering in a voice equal parts dark and affectionate, "You have no idea..."

The group continued deeper into the urban sprawl, until they were standing in what might have been some kind of central square. Broken barricades, split doors and broken windows told the tale of a desperate defense that had been tried - and subsequently failed. Dark openings surrounded them to all sides, the sun having finally disappeared below the horizon and leaving only the flickering light of the street lamps to provide some attempt at illumination.

"Perfect site for an ambush," Ranma muttered, voicing what they were all thinking.

"We hear... flessshhhh..."

Penelope's clothes rippled as her fur instinctively fluffed itself in alarm, a more visually striking example of the same reaction her human companions were experiencing.

"Called it," Ranma sighed, even as the Kamikaze Pirates clustered together into a defensive formation.

They didn't have long to wait. From out of the darkness lurched and staggered figures; men and women of all ages, from wizen elders to small children toddling along on bare, bruised feet. Judging by their clothes, they came from all walks of life, though most outfits were beginning to rip and tear after ceaseless wear. The only thing universal about them was their horrible physical condition; skin sallow and clinging tightly to gaunt bodies, eyes staring blindly from where they were beginning to sink into their sockets. Many were injured, covered in cuts, gashes, scrapes or bruises, but none paid them any mind, their focus locked entirely on the teenagers (and one robot) in their midst.

"Hurry... run..."

"We are...we are... we are... we are..."

"...Help us... Heeeellllppp..."

"The many sings to us..."

"Got to... get away..."

"What happened to me?"

"Come to us... Come to US..."

"One cannot flee our Many..."

A discordant chorus of moans and babbling spilled from dozens of slack lips as they slouched roughly forward, a tidal wave of humanity advancing on them with single-minded purpose. Some carried makeshift weapons - little better than improvised clubs - but most were armed with only their bare hands, but this failed to stop them from shuffling determinedly towards the Kamikaze Pirates.

"Well, girls? Do we stay and fight? Or do we run?" Ranma asked, his body seeming to almost quiver with the repressed urge to do violence.

Dyna's single eye pulsed as she leveled her gatling gun at the crowd. "Retreat is a suboptimal procedural when advancing is desired."

Her many barrels slowly clicked as she began to cycle her weapon, a blatant warning that she was prepared to fire. But the people lurching towards her showed no fear at the obvious threat. Instead, one of them actually smiled, a single brief flicker of horrible relief before his features reverted to their prior sickening slackness.

"Yesss... kill me... kill me...!" He moaned plaintively.

"Query?! Query?!" Dyna blurted, her companions likewise starting in alarm at the statement.

"There shall be no death today!"

Suddenly, bottles fell from the sky; the sharp eyes of the martial artists made out their shapes - fluted, wide-bottomed, and made of clear, faceted glass - before they hit the street and shattered. Where they broke apart, pillars of eerie blue fire suddenly erupted into life, and the advancing horde recoiled as one, hissing and wailing as the spectral radiance suddenly washed across their features.

From a rooftop fell a figure cloaked all in black; an ankle-length overcoat, thick gloves, rugged boots, and a brim hat. A bandolier holstering a dozen vials of the type that he - or was it she? - had thrown was strapped across the figure's chest, sloshing softly as they spun to face the group. A many-pouched belt was anchored firmly around his waist, securing a holster for something that looked like a bulb-tipped sword handle and a finely made pistol. But far more striking was his face... or lack thereof, for his features were hidden behind a mask that resembled a stylized raven, with thick, shaded glass lenses covering his eyes and a beak-like protrusion jutting forth from his otherwise blank features.

"I won't let you hurt them!" The strange figure barked, filling his hands with the strange handle, from which surged a roiling whip of iron-cloud, and his pistol.

"Hey, buddy, they attacked us! We didn't start this fight!" Ranma protested indignantly.

"You certainly seemed willing to cut them down in cold blood," The stranger observed coldly, though he made no move to strike.

"We wouldn't have killed anybody! Just beaten them senseless and moved on," Ranma assured him.

"That really isn't as reassuring as you think it is, Ranma," Nabiki dryly explained to him.

"This place one of constant battle. Worse than Nerima. Beat each other stupid be like how people say hello here," Shampoo interjected.

"We are doing no such thing in Frauce!" Came the sullen protest from Penelope.

"You is being in East Blue; you is not counting," was Shampoo's immediate response.

"..You're all mad," The stranger declared, his tone one of sincere revelation, indifferent to the hostility his declaration elicited. "And yet, tis said that in times of madness, look to the mad for salvation... Very well! Come with me, strangers; my barrier will not last long, and there is much we must discuss!"

Ranma's hackles bristled, and he was about to tell the stranger where to shove his 'generous offer'... before he glanced again at the moaning, pale hordes beyond the flames, and the eerie hunger burning in their dead eyes.

"...Alright. Deal. C'mon, girls!"

And soon afterwards...

Dyna's spidery legs made a dull 'thunk' as she landed on the other side of the barricade, the sound seeming to echo off the facade of the shabby, timeworn manor in whose front courtyard she and her crewmates had been led. She and the other Kamikaze Pirates now formed a semi-circle around the bizarrely costumed individual who had led them here, and Ranma inevitably took charge of the situation.

"Okay, we're here now; who are ya, an' what the hell is going on here?!" Ranma spat darkly, thrusting an accusatory figure at their quote-unquote savior.

The masked figure sighed, and even despite his heavily obscuring garments, they could see the exhaustion rolling off of him. "Forgive me... these are dark and trying times. You are not seeing poor Wisborg Island at its best... My name is Dr. Simon van Richten, one of the last people left uninfected on the island..."

"Those people we saw before," Ranma realized, rubbing his chin instinctively.

"That no look like any disease Shampoo heard of," the Chinese Amazon declared.

Dr. van Richten shook his masked head. "Nor does it match anything I have ever seen, nor heard of in my studies... it all began one fateful week ago. A strange ship drifted in on the sky-tides - an ancient wreck, of a style foreign to even our most learned denizens. Though most wanted to ignore it and wait for it to drift away again, a few of our boldest youths were determined to investigate, their heads filled with foolish dreams of treasure... That was how it started."

"They start attacking other peoples?"

"Not in the way that you might think. Though all of the infected bear a bacterial infection in their blood, there have been no reported cases of secondary infection. Instead, the infected seem to work as a cooperative to subdue healthy victims and then drag them back to the ship to be infected. It's as if the disease is not only controlling them, but is being controlled by somebody else..."

"A Devil Fruit! It has to be!" Ranma interjected, smacking his fist into his palm to emphasize the realization.

The assembled Kamikaze Pirates collectively nodded in assent, easily following Ranma's logic... which made it all the more surprising when their temporary host folded his arms across his chest and scoffed loudly.

"Devil Fruits? Those are just a fairy tale from the Blue Sea world!"

The Kamikaze Pirates simply stared at him silently, letting the sheer absurdity of his words seep in for a few moments before turning back to each other.

"We going to help, right, airen?"

"Of course! But..." Ranma trailed off, mind racing as he analyzed the facts, falling into the 'zone' where combat made his thoughts sizzle through his brain like lightning through a stormcloud.

"Okay, Shampoo, you go back to the ship and warn the others; yo, doc, it okay if the rest of my crew hole up here? They'll keep the place safe for ya."

The doctor tilted his masked head, the gesture making him look all the more bird-like. "I... That is a perfectly rational request, so of course. But what will you be doing?"

"We'll be trackin' down whoever is behind all this nonsense and kicking their ass until they stop it!" Ranma declared, flashing a thumb's up and his cockiest grin in response.

"Airen! Why Shampoo go back to ship?! Why not Nabiki go?" The Chinese Amazon demanded, stamping her foot angrily and absently leaving foot-long cracks radiating out in all directions from the impact.

"The doc said this thing was blood-based, didn't he? Well, Nabiki's powers are all about manipulatin' blood; if anyone should be immune to it, maybe even able to cure it by suckin' it outta others, it's her," Came the confident response from their captain.

Shampoo grimaced, visibly displeased with the response, but clearly unable to argue. "Okay... Shampoo go - but bat-girl keep Ranma safe!"

"I think we both know he'll be keeping me safe," Nabiki quipped insouciantly, stepping nimbly over and pressing herself against Ranma's side in a classic damsel cum femme fatale pose, smirking at the unamused glare that Shampoo shot her in response.

Ranma paid them no attention, instead looking at Dr. van Richten and asking, "So, where's this ship, anyway?"

"It's on the northeastern shore - over in that direction," the doctor replied, pointing for emphasis.

"Then that's where we're going!" Ranma announced proudly, making a dramatic gesture in the same direction.

"Un instant, capitaine!" Penelope interjected, causing Ranma to nearly trip and fall in his shock. Ignoring the pout he threw her way, the Kamikaze's archaeologist walked over to the masked doctor.

"Excusez-moi, but can you be telling us anything about ze ship that you believe to be causing all of this trouble?"

Dr. van Richten shook his head, looking like a very mournful crow as he answered. "I'm afraid not. I'm a doctor of medicine, not archaeology. All I can say is that it looked ancient, but it was also made out of a material I've never seen before..."

"You mean wood?" Ranma asked, unable to stop himself and blushing at the cool look that the older man turned on him, which was so strong it could be felt even through the smoked glasses of his eye lenses.

"Whilst wood is a rare commodity in the White-White Sea, it's far from unheard of! No, this was like nothing I've ever seen... almost like seashell, but not..." van Richten mused, cupping where his chin probably was beneath his mask and staring off into the distance.

At that moment, a gust of wind suddenly kicked up with unexpected force, causing everybody except for the masked doctor to instinctively clutch at their faces as it whipped through their hair and made their eyes water. Penelope got the worst of it, with the unexpectedly strong breeze roughly snatching away her veil.

"Merde!" Cursed the skunk-featured mink, grabbing at her stolen property, but missing, causing the wind to carry it away, which she watched forlornly. "That was being one of my best veils..."

A sudden sharp intake of breath, almost like a scream in reverse, drew her attention to Dr. van Richten, who had recoiled from her like an arachnophobe confronted with a spider. His whole body was so rigid it practically vibrated, a finger stabbing in Penelope's direction.

The Fraucen archaeologist blushed, the crimson flush evident even through the fur on her cheeks, and gently scratched the back of her head. "Ah-heh... there is being an explanation for this?"

"Rat!" Shrieked the doctor.

Penelope blinked in confusion. "Non... I am being ze skunk. We are not even looking that much alike!"

The doctor stopped reaching for his pistol holster - and unintentionally saved himself from a swift knuckle sandwich courtesy of Ranma in the process. He tilted his head to the side in a very bird-like manner, gingerly edging closer, before slowly nodding.

"My apologies, madam... the resemblance is uncanny. You see, in the earliest days, when the infected were still relatively few in number, there were reports of monstrous rodents that walked in a bipedal fashion skulking through the streets in the dark of night, breaking into homes and snatching up children to carry them back to whatever unholy abomination is behind all this..." Dr. van Richten explained, wiping at his mask's eye-lenses in an instinctive attempt to make them a bit easier to see through.

Penelope's eyes grew wide with fascination. "Other Minks?! Could it possibly be...?"

"Well, we won't know until we go and take a look, now will we?" Ranma pointed out, eliciting determined nods from the three girls who were to be traveling with him.

"One last thing before you go; I advise sticking to the rooftops, since you are evidently capable of traveling that way. The streets in that area are crawling with the infected, who will swarm over you like ants on spilled sugar! Here, take some of these; it's a formula I developed in my labs. Not a proper antigen, alas, but the flame it creates when mixed with oxygen seems to repel the infected. If you are surrounded, it may come in useful..."

So...

"Why am I the one carrying the giant steam-powered robot?!" Nabiki demanded as passionately as she could, given she was panting for breath as she flapped desperately along, grasping paws clinging desperately to any convenient outcroppings of Dyna's barrel-like body that she could.

"Because you can fly, and Dyna only has so much steam to spare for those jet-jumps of hers," Ranma answered casually, even as he sprang across the tangle of roofs with the agility of a mountain goat and the speed of a cheetah on methamphetamine.

He somersaulted onto a weathercock, let his momentum spin him around it several times, then released his grip to launch himself forward, planting a foot squarely on the forehead of a gurning gargoyle and leaping forward.

Over his shoulder, he called back, "You're doing fine, Penelope! You've really come quite a ways with yer roof-hopping lessons!"

"O-Oui, capitaine! I must admit, I had never been thinking my savate lessons would prepare me for... this," Penelope giggled nervously, only to yelp as she nearly lost her footing, turning what could have been a nasty tumble forward into momentum to sprint along a relatively flat stretch of rooftop.

The motley quartet flew, literally or metaphorically, over the tangled roofs, which in many places were so close together that Nabiki probably could have jumped between them even before her hellish training regime under Ranma. The dark streets below, lit only by the eternally-active light dials, revealed shuffling mobs of pale-skinned, ragged figures, whose dead eyes continually swept back and forth in search of uninfected victims. But never upwards...

So, in no time worth telling, the four Kamikaze Pirates had reached the northern docks, where their destination lay. And there was no question as to which one it was...

'...Sheesh, that thing's nearly as big as one of the smaller American battleships I saw when dad and I were scrounging around Sasebo! An' I can see why the doctor reckoned it looked weird...'

The vessel loomed over the cloud-stuff piers to which it had been tethered, with a dark hull that seemed to glisten in the moon's pale light. Picked out on its side was a weathered namecard, bearing a simple title; "Demeter".

'...Looks kind of like an insect shell, and a lot more like something out of an old sci-fi anime... Focus, Saotome! First thing we gotta do is get inside, then we'll find whatever sicko is putting the mind-whammy on the people here, then we'll beat 'em up and fix things!'

Ranma hunkered down, readying himself to make the final leap onto the ship's deck, only to catch himself, glancing over at the visibly intimidated skunk, who was now going bare-faced and with her tail free for greater ease of movement.

"Hey, Penelope; c'mere, I'll give you a lift down," He called quietly to her, extending a hand to beacon her closer.

She blushed, but nodded and gingerly stepped forward, allowing Ranma to sweep her off of her feet into a bridal carry. "I am being sorry about this, capitaine..."

"Hey, no sweat; you're new to this! I'd probably have been doing this for Nabiki if, y'know, she hadn't gone and sprouted wings..."

"Gee, you really know how to make a girl feel special," Nabiki dryly observed from where she was perched on Dyna's head, having taken advantage of a sufficiently flat rooftop to rest her aching wings. She rolled her neck, which audibly cracked, flexed out her wings, and lifted off, following Ranma as he leapt the distance to land on the ancient ship's hull.

Dyna's feet (well, for lack of a better word) hit the deck's surface with an almost metallic clanking. Nabiki dropped next to her in a flutter of leathery wings, whilst Ranma descended without even so much as a whisper, gently lowering Penelope to the deck. Even as they did so, the two teens from Tokyo - by all the kami and the bodhisattvas, what a distant memory that felt like! - frowned in confusion at what their feet were telling them. Ranma even went so far as to bend over and touch the deck with his fingertips.

"Plastic...?" He wondered aloud.

Nabiki's long ears twitched as the word registered. She shifted to her hybrid form, for its combination of superior senses and still-functioning fingers, and emulated Ranma's behavior.

"You're right... it is plastic! Covered in all kinds of mold and who-knows-what from floating around here for so long, but still, that's definitely plastic..."

"Pardonne moi, but what is... plass-tick?" Penelope asked, looking quizzically from Ranma to Nabiki and back again.

"It's... something from our homeland. Something we've never seen used elsewhere in the Blue Seas," Ranma explained, scratching the back of his head.

"And even there, we've never seen an entire ship on this scale built out of it," Nabiki added.

"Ah well, questions for later... c'mon, girls," Ranma declared, already sweeping towards the dark hollow of a main doorway that yawned like the mouth of a hungry beast before them.

They'd only gone five steps before they realized that Dyna wasn't following them, turning to face her with mutually confused expressions.

"Yo, Dyna, what's wrong?"

The gynoid's single eye was flickering like a candle buffeted by a stiff breeze. Her whole body seemed to be jittering, her primary claw's triple talons jerkily opening and closing partially, her manipulators twitching like the legs of some giant dying insect. Only her spidery legs remained firmly planted on the deck. Her usually implacable, doll-like features were wrought in an expression of agony, and she let out a sound that was half tormented moan and half grinding of misaligned gears, a plume of steam gushing from her vents.

"Hey-Hey! C'mon Dyna, what's wrong with ya?" Ranma demanded, skipping across the deck to stand before the stricken girl-machine, snapping his fingers in front of her unseeing eye.

The attention seemed to drag Dyna back to reality, for she moaned softly and slowly shook her head, insofar as she was capable of that range of motion. "Apologies, Captain... My memory banks were attempting data retrieval, but the files were all too corrupted to use..."

"You poor thing," Penelope murmured, reaching out to place a hand on Dyna's barrel-shaped torso in an instinctive gesture of comfort.

"Wait, you recognize this place?" Nabiki demanded, having latched onto the obvious inference.

"Data unavailable... I..." Dyna's whole body shivered violently, various bits and bobs clattering from the motion.

"We get it, we get it! This place has some connection, but you can't remember what - don't break yourself trying to make the memories come back!" Ranma scolded her, thumping her "chest" with a balled fist to shake her back to the real world.

"Apologies, Captain..."

"Hey, don't sweat it; we'll sort this mess out first, and then we'll take this whole ship apart if we need to in order to find out how it connects to you!" Ranma assured her.

Dyna's lips - rose pink against porcelain white - curled into the softest of grateful smiles. Then the wind changed and it was gone, and she bobbed her torso in her version of a nod.

"Thank you, Captain..."

And so, they turned once again to the doorway, and soon they had disappeared inside; Ranma at the front, Dyna at the rear, Penelope and Nabiki in the middle.

The interior matched the exterior in its weirdly fluid shape, as if it had been poured or sculpted like clay. But whilst it was dark, the sparsity of lamp dials compensated for by Dyna's own concealed lanterns, it was also remarkably clean. No moss or lichen fed by untold years of puddling rainwater, no ancient garbage, not even the expected stink of rats and their noisome idea of personal hygiene. The interior of the Demeter was simply... empty. Just dark halls stretching into a labyrinth, Dyna's metallic footfalls creating a confusing chorus of ringing echoes that bounced off into eternity.

"...So much for being stealthy," Ranma grumbled, before he sighed, "Well, it's not like we were going to get too far by just sneaking around, anyway."

"How exactly are we to be finding this Devil Fruit user, capitaine? This ship is being very big, and we are being but four," Penelope pointed out.

"We'll just have to keep looking... but, if I were this asshole, I'd be either in the captain's quarters... or hiding down in the cargo hold. We'll start with the captain's quarters, and then work our way down to the cargo hold," Ranma declared confidently.

"Look at you, being all captain-like. You've really grown into this, haven't you?" Nabiki giggled in sincere amusement.

"You know me; die or fly, that's always been my family motto," Ranma chuckled.

"I thought it was 'if you can eat, eat, and then eat some more because you might not get a second chance'? I seem to recall your dad passing that life lesson on to you at some point..." Nabiki playfully mused.

Ranma pulled down his bottom eyelid and stuck his tongue out at her, before the two teens from Nerima laughed at this reminder of their life before the Grand Line. Dyna and Penelope looked between the two, both visibly confused, before the quartet set off in pursuit of the captain's quarters.

Ten minutes later...

As solid as Ranma's logic was... there were some issues when it came to the practical implementation. Namely, this was a big ship, and they didn't really know where the captain's quarters were. So though they had a goal, the reality was that they were still largely stumbling around blindly in hopes of eventually finding their way to their destination.

"You'd think whoever is running this place would have some kind of map up," Ranma grumbled as they headed down yet another stairwell which led to another long corridor lined with doors.

"There was probably being one, but it most likely decayed into uselessness over the decades, perhaps even the centuries - it is so hard to judge with this material! It is being like nothing I have ever seen," Penelope marveled, reaching out to stroke the wall.

"Don't make it any less annoying that we're stuck bumbling around like a bunch of idiots," Ranma complained, even as he reached out to try the latch on a nearby door.

Nabiki's ears twitched, the bat zoan trying to concentrate through the natural racket produced by Dyna's footfalls and the eternal bubbling and hissing of her steam engine. Despite the cacophony, she thought she heard... Something tingled down the back of her neck, and she shouted, "Ranma, stop!"

But it was too late; Ranma was already swinging the door open, leaving them face to face with at least a dozen man-sized rats!

They were small, by human standards, though that still made them enormous by rat ones - around the height of Ranma's female form. Aside from the obvious species difference, they were strongly reminiscent of Penelope, with the same bipedal posture and faces that were at once human and animal. Unlike the skunk mink, though, they were practically naked; loincloths, chest wraps, belts and bandoliers were all they wore, their furry pelts coming in a surprising array of patterns wrought in brown, black, gray and white.

The humanoid rodents stared at the human, apparently shocked stupid by the sight of him, before they broke out into a chorus of high-pitched squeals that made the non-robotic Kamikaze Pirates' ears ring. They surged towards Ranma, who punched the first one to reach him in the face, using the breathing room its flying body caused as it hit its brethren and knocked them flying to slam the door shut.

"Wrong door!" He yelped instinctively.

The air began to ring with shrieks and squeals; the squeaking of rats wasn't normally intimidating, unless you were severely phobic, but the sheer volume of rodent battlecries that were echoing from all around them was doing a pretty convincing job. Especially when it was paired with the thunder of many, many feet rapidly skittering through the dark halls.

"Enemies inbound! Query: Defend or retreat?" Dyna demanded, her gun sweeping around as she attempted to discern the best firing line.

"I don't fancy our chances if we stay here, where there's no room!" Nabiki cautioned, fingers curled into talons fit to shred through flesh.

"Yeah - run for it, girls! We gotta get down to the hold, where there's room to really cut loose!" Ranma ordered.

As one, the four ragtag pirates fled down the corridor, sprinting along as fast as they could go, all semblance of stealth forgotten. Doors flew open all along the corridor as rat-people began to pour into the corridor by the dozens. Hundreds of man-rats surged after them like a living tide of fur, gleaming eyes and glistening teeth; some on two legs, others on all four, moving in a way that made them more akin to an onrushing wave of death than mere flesh and blood. Chittering, squeaking, and spitting the occasional bit of recognizable human language - mostly synonyms for "Run!" - they surged after the fleeing pirates with the relentless drive of a hunting shark.

The hallways conducted the cacophony, leaving Ranma, Nabiki and Penelope's ears ringing, but the three pirates powered onward - Dyna, as a robot, was more or less immune. One hatch opened just ahead of the party, and a hulking rat-man with a missing eye stitched shut with fish-hooks and scars all over its bare chest sprang out like a panther, a murine battle-cry on its lips as it lunged for Ranma.

The captain of the Kamikaze Pirates backhanded it out of his way without even looking nor breaking stride, the beastman bouncing off the wall to lay stunned on the floor, before it desperately curled into a ball to avoid being trampled by its stampeding brethren.

"This procedure is sub-optimal!" Dyna declared, reversing her claw and using it to smash rat-folk that had gotten too close into the floor.

"More enemies, coming from ahead!" Penelope cried, pointing ahead of them, where doors were flying open to allow more and more of the rodent-featured beastmen (and beastwomen) to come shrieking into the room.

"Right, emergency exit it is! Hang on ta yer stomachs!"

Ranma skidded to a halt, raising one leg high and then slamming his heel into the floor with all his might. It spoke wonders to the durability of this strange plastic that it didn't shatter at once, although a spider-web of cracks rippled outwards from the blow. A second strike deepened the cracks, fist-sized chunks falling like hailstones as they lost their grip. The third strike was the last, and the floor beneath the Kamikaze Pirates gave up the ghost, sending them plunging downward.

...A pity that directly under the floor that Ranma had broken through was a stairwell. One that didn't take kindly to three teenagers, a steam-powered gynoid spider-tank, and a bunch of debris slamming into it like a fist from an angry deity. The stairs broke apart into so much flying slivers, sending the quartet plunging down into the next level beyond that.

Lesser pirates would have ended up painfully crashing into a heap on the bottommost floor of the ship. The Kamikaze Pirates were of a different breed. Dyna flared her jump-jets at the last second, her spidery legs and massive main claw clanging against the steel-hard plastic as she bled off the last of her momentum through them. Ranma grabbed Penelope in mid-fall, instinctively hugging the mink close before cushioning their fall with his own powerful legs. And Nabiki simply snapped open her wings in a rush of displaced air before gliding down as daintily as a ballerina to make an en pointe landing.

"So, tell me, Ranma; did your father inculcate that dramatic streak in you, or do you come by it naturally?" The vampire zoan quipped, snapping back to her hybrid form.

"Hey, it worked, didn't it?" Ranma shot back, the words devoid of heat and instead purely playful as he smiled that cocky smirk that Nabiki would never, ever tell him had always stirred funny feelings in her heart.

"Thank you, mon capitaine," Penelope politely told Ranma as he gently lowered her to her feet.

"This unit recommends we proceed before our assailants catch up to us," Dyna observed, lights illuminating the utter darkness of the dank, musty-smelling room.

"Agreed - c'mon!" Ranma gestured to a doorway revealed by Dyna's lights, already starting towards it.

And so the four of them moved on into the darkness, striving to keep their senses as alert for the presence of danger as was possible when Dyna was clanking along beside them.

Five minutes later...

"...That's a lot of mushrooms," Ranma observed, absently stating what the whole group was thinking.

Their meanderings had brought them into one of the larger sub-compartments of the hold; one that had apparently been set up as some kind of garden. Great masses of dark, decay-rich... soil, that was probably the most polite way to describe it, had been spread out to form long banks of makeshift earth in accordance with some alien logic. From these emerged countless mushrooms in a dizzying array of shapes, sizes and colors, from tiny flat disks that would have fit delicately into Nabiki's palm, to towering cones whose blunt tips stretched higher than Ranma's head.

"This must be being 'ow ze rat-folk are feeding their people... there are probably being more gardens like this throughout this level of the ship, perhaps even hydroponics bays for more variety," Penelope marveled, picking her way through the fungus and looking around with sincere fascination at the unearthly site.

"Captain, look!" Dyna gestured with her claw, her lights focusing on what her unblinking electronic eye had seen.

The tracking lights revealed a small figure squatting in the gloom, seeming to be poking at a puffball. A human girl, no more than six or seven years of age, clad in the ragged remnants of what might have once been a woman's shoulderless nightgown, the overly long cloth trailing off in filthy tatters around her knees. Her skin was so pale it was almost bloodless, easily as white as Dyna's porcelain-like features, contrasting hair as black as sin that fell in tangled locks down to her ankles. She hummed softly to herself, bare feet squelching through the mud as she stood up and shuffled around... which put her in the perfect position to see the four Kamikaze Pirates. She gasped in shock, stumbling backwards and falling over a particularly hard and knotty clump of rugose mushrooms.

"You girls hang back, we don't wanna scare her," Ranma told Penelope and Dyna, before he began moving towards the fallen girl, trying to make himself seem as small and nonthreatening as possible.

"Hey there, little girl; what are you doing down here? Where are your parents?" Ranma asked her, in his softest, friendliest tone.

"You really have no idea how to handle kids, do you?" Nabiki opined, even as she shifted back into her human form to make herself less intimidating.

Ranma shot her an annoyed look, before turning back to the girl, who was cowering before him, a hand held up in a feeble attempt at warding him off.

"Wh-who are you? What do you want?" Sobbed the strange child, tears rolling down her pallid cheeks and glistening in the light from Dyna's lanterns.

"My name's Ranma - I'm just here to help, sweetie, I promise," Ranma assured her, gingerly edging closer.

It actually seemed to work, as the girl sniffled, but stopped trying to squirm away from him. Instead, she simply sat there and let Ranma gently reach down and lift her out of the mud, brushing a stray mushroom out of her hair.

"Help us? You want to help us?" She asked, nestling into Ranma's arms as he tucked her in close to his body.

"That's right - wait, us? Where are the others?" Ranma asked, instinctively looking for any other sign of human life amongst the fungus and gloom.

"Around," she replied simply. "Please, help us..."

"Of course, of course! Do you have a name, sweetheart?" Ranma asked, still trying to be as patient and coaxing as he could.

"...Nosferatu," came the soft, simple statement.

Nabiki blinked in the gloom, looking with uncertain eyes at their foundling. 'Why does that name sound familiar...?'

Nabiki's Flashback!

"You sure know a lot about this vampire stuff, Kodachi," Nabiki observed from where she was carefully luxuriating in her end of the pool-like bathtub that the female Kamikaze Pirates were sharing, staying close to Miriam in case of her new water weakness kicking in.

"I owe it to my English and Foreign Languages teacher, Mrs. Mayberry! She was a huge fan of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and used it extensively in our lessons. Fascinating book, really... did you know that Mr. Stoker invented the word 'Nosferatu'? In the story, it's claimed to be the Romanian word for 'vampire', but the reality is that there's no such word! It's been theorized he may have been inspired by a real Romanian word; 'Necuratu', which means 'unclean spirit', or perhaps even by the Grecian 'Nosophoros', or 'bringer of plague'," Kodachi proudly lectured, which was more impressive than you might think given she was also busily massaging herbal shampoo into her scalp.

She paused to scrape some excess suds away from her forehead before turning an approving look on Shampoo... the Chinese Amazon cum Zoan, not the hair cleanser... cheerily declaring that, "This latest batch might be your best yet!"

Back to reality!

'Oh crap!'

"Ranma! Get away from her! She's the Devil Fruit user!" Nabiki screamed at the top of her lungs - but it was too late!.

With a feral hiss, the girl suddenly lunged for Ranma's throat and bit him viciously in the crook of his shoulder. Ranma bellowed in a mixture of shock and pain, grabbing the girl and ripping her away in a spray of crimson.

"Ranma, are you okay?!" Nabiki blurted unthinkingly, rushing over to take a look at the damage.

"I - nngn! - I think so," He hissed in pain, gingerly easing his hand away from his neck, revealing two small punctures. They weren't bleeding heavily, just a slight trickle seeping from each wound, but Nabiki quickly did her best to bandage it with a makeshift tourniquet made from a handkerchief, gritting her teeth at the way her stomach softly rumbled from the smell of blood.

"Eeeheeeheheheheee!"

The hairs on Ranma and Nabiki's necks stood up in instinctive aversion to the shrill, demented noise coming from the mashed mushrooms and toppled toadstools. Behind them, Penelope nearly doubled in size as her entire fur coat bristled with nerves. Their gazes snapped back to Ranma's assailant - Nosferatu - as she rose from the mud, grinning a maniac's grin that was so wide her cheeks threatened to split, her eyes gleaming in the gloom with pupils that had shrunk to the size of pinpricks, the faintest gleam of red all there was to be seen of her irises.

"Too late too late too late!" She chanted with wicked glee, and the organic pirates present immediately found their minds snapping back to particularly obnoxious childhood bullies. "Stupid warm-meats let Nosferatu close! Now you belong to Nosferatu!"

"What the hell's your problem?! Why are you attacking the people of this island?!" Ranma demanded angrily.

"And what is being your connection to the humanoid rats of this vessel?" Penelope interjected, almost as fiercely.

The girl tittered shrilly, never once losing that insane grin, which regarded Ranma, Nabiki and Penelope with the fervor of a starving Genma confronted with genuine roast lobster - she barely seemed aware of Dyna's presence.

"Nosferatu was born here... Nosferatu thinks? Nosferatu does not remember the time before..." The girl-child shrugged, her shoulderblades somehow moving out of synch with each other.

"How can you not know? Make sense, damnit!" Ranma spat.

"In the bilges, Nosferatu grew. Sometimes in the warm wet of the red, the sweet juice of meat-things... but mostly in the cold brine of the bilges. Nosferatu hunted. Nosferatu ate. But always, always, Nosferatu hungered..."

The creepy girl-child's face seemed to wither for a moment, flesh clinging tightly to her skull, cheeks sucking inwards and eyesockets deepening into hollows in which her eyeballs glistened like the last drops of water in a well... And then she was normal again.

"But one day... she came. There was an accident, in the deep dark pits, and she fell into the bilges. She broke. And Nosferatu smelled the red in the muck. Nosferatu /feasted/..."

Saliva, red as blood, flowed between teeth that they realized now looked as sharp as pins, a waterfall of crimson that dripped down her chin and stained her dress.

"But she was more than meat. There was something inside her... something in the red. And when Nosferatu took the red, Nosferatu took it too. Nosferatu became more than what Nosferatu was... Nosferatu became... this..."

The girl reached out her arms... and out... and out...

Her whole skeleton seemed to dissolve like a candle next to a furnace. Flesh ran like molten wax, dissolving into something resembling mucus, but colored in shades of crimson and black. Pseudopods reached out, groping hungrily at the air, forming into semblances of hands and mouths, all whilst her face - still human, hideously normal against her amorphous self - leered at them from atop the quivering bulk. Then, as suddenly as a thought, her seeping foulness coalesced, solidifying itself and resuming its previous human semblance.

Ranma stared at her, his revulsion writ on his features as the realization flashed into his feverish mind.

"By the kami and the bodhisattvas... you're not a person with a disease Devil Fruit... you are a disease!" He shouted in horror.

"Heeeheeeeheeeee! The Human-Human Fruit, Model Type: Child. That's what the Skryre called it. They used it to select someone to sneak onto sky-islands so they could find things to take away, things that they couldn't make themselves. But Nosferatu needs it more, heeeheehee," giggled the faux-child.

"But that makes no sense - how does a Human zoan give you the power to control others?!" Ranma demanded, Nabiki and Penelope unconsciously nodding along with the sentiment.

"When Nosferatu became Nosferatu, Nosferatu awoke. Nosferatu is many, but also one... even when Nosferatu is running in the red, sipping in the sweet, sweet juice, Nosferatu is always many and one. Nosferatu slips inside the meat-things, runs in the red, but Nosferatu is still Nosferatu! The meat-things become part of Nosferatu... until Nosferatu has used them all up. That is why Nosferatu will take this village. Nosferatu must feed. Nosferatu must grow... and now, you will become Nosferatu!"

Suddenly, with a chorus of squeals, the rat-people - the Skryre, Nosferatu had dubbed them - exploded out of the darkness. With the Kamikaze Pirates having been distracted by the humanoid sickness' revelation of her origins, her rodent-featured thralls had been able to creep close without any of them noticing. The element of surprise on their sides, they launched themselves at the four pirates, outnumbering them easily a hundred to one.

But they needed better odds than that to take on the Kamikaze Pirates! Human, zoan, mink and gynoid swatted ratfolk aside with all the ease of a pride of lions battling a regular colony of rats. Mud flew as garden banks were flattened, and toadstools were pulverized in sprays of sticky mush as bodies slammed, bounced, rolled and skidded in all directions. But there were so many of the Skryre - so, so very many...

"Targets multiplying exponentially!" Dyna thundered, bludgeoning with wide sweeps of her chunky arms, the hiss of steam from her joints adding to the cacophony.

"We need to defeat ze Nosferatu! If we take her down, then the Skryre and the people should be free!" Penelope asserted, even as she high-kicked a Skryre in the face so hard his chisel-like incisors snapped off, causing the skunk mink to wince in guilt.

She pirouetted around a second attacker, slapping him across the face with her tail as she spun - an attack that should have been comical at best, yet which somehow slammed him to the ground as if she'd struck him in the head with a steel bar. In the same elegant blur of motion, she drew her machete and launched herself at the grinning child-plague, who seemed to regard the whole spectacle as some sort of game. She was about to strike off Nosferatu's head in the midst of her soaring leap... when something grabbed her tail, painfully arresting her in mid-jump before a tremendous force jerked her backwards, her assailant swinging her by her tail backwards and slamming her into a mushroom bed.

The breath burst from Penelope's lungs at the sheer force of the impact, mud and squashed fungus barely cushioning the blow, which cracked at least one rib. She spat blood, panting for breath, struggling to regain her focus. Then she saw her assailant.

"Capitaine?! Que fais-tu?!" She screamed breathlessly, staring dumbfounded up at Ranma.

He stared back at her, face contorted with guilt, whole body trembling as he slowly reached for her with a hand curled into a claw.

"I-I can't stop! My body won't obey me!" He wailed in dismay.

"Eeeeheheheeee! You are part of us now, meat! You belong to us! You do as we command! And now, so will you!"

In the blink of an eye, the Nosferatu had scuttled through the legs of her verminous vassals and pounced on Penelope. The skunk-mink screamed in fear and tried to fight her off, but when she tried to punch the plague that walked like a girl, it wrapped spindly legs around Penelope's arm and then sank its fangs into the underside of her wrist. The mink wailed and squirmed, but could do nothing to stop the living disease pouring into her veins, stealing away her body as her soul was left to watch.

"Ranma! Penelope!" Nabiki cried out, her usual emotional control cracking at the sight of what she was seeing. But even as the words slipped out unconsciously, her conscious mind was racing.

'Can't hope to take them both on at the same time, and certainly not with all of these other freaks to back them up! Only got one chance...'

She dodged one Skryre's attempt to grab her, kicked a second in the junk before kneeing him in the throat, backhanded a third with a closed fist and finally earned enough breathing room to snatch up one of the precious vials that Dr. Simon van Richten had given her before they had set off for the ship. Snarling hatefully, she smashed it viciously on the floor, causing the infected masses to recoil in a chorus of squeals and moans.

"Dyna! Retreat!" Nabiki shouted, already charging through the paralyzed masses towards the nearest exit. Thunderous metallic footfalls from behind her made it obvious that the gynoid had obeyed.

Minutes later...

"Okay, I think we lost them... oh, kami, I don't know how much of this my heart can take," Nabiki moaned, panting for breath and cradling her head in her hands.

"Unit Nabiki has a plan to free units Ranma and Penelope, correct?" Dyna asked, somehow managing to make her tone even colder than usual.

"We need to get that - that child-thing! If we kill her, that should free everybody she's infected-"

"Logic chain obstructed. Explain," Dyna interjected curtly.

Nabiki sighed softly, her breathing finally under control. "Okay... Remember what the doctor said about how the infected in the town never infected anyone else? They always dragged victims back to the ship? I think it's a side-effect of their new state - this body-snatching thing isn't what their Devil Fruit was supposed to do, it's just something they're loopholing... I think that Nosferatu can't spread from one host to another; maybe it's just a mental block and it'll eventually grow beyond that, but for now, the consciousness controlling the infected is in that one individual, the shapeshifter. So if we can kill that one, then the remaining bacteria will die as well - or at the very least they won't have a mind controlling them any more. It's a basic decapitation strike, just in a very unusual context."

Dyna's eye pulsed, and she rocked her barrel-shaped body back and forth in her semblance of a nod. "Your logic rings true. But how are we to assassinate this Nosferatu creature?"

Nabiki shook her head. "Now that's the hard part... we need to catch it off-guard, or at least in a place where we can stun Ranma and Penelope with the last of the vials the doctor gave me long enough to finish the Nosferatu. Those two are the greatest threats we face now... and it's not like the Nosferatu is just going to come to us, now is it?"

A hatch suddenly exploded as, with an unholy scream, Nosferatu exploded from an air-vent in a flying tackle that slammed into Nabiki and sent her tumbling backwards before she could hope to react.

Nabiki's back hit the floor, only a desperate tension in her neck muscles keeping her skull from bouncing off the weird pseudo-steel of the ship's interior. Her hands locked themselves desperately against the rival zoan's wrists, desperate to keep the magically mutated bacterium at bay. One would have thought that a teenager, even one with Nabiki's historical lack of interest in the martial arts, would be able to handle an angry pre-teen. With that teenager bearing the incredible might of a Mythic tier Zoan Devil Fruit, the contest should have been laughable in its very concept. And yet Nabiki found herself straining herself to her very limit to keep her foe back as she writhed and thrashed wildly atop her.

"Give in to us! You belong to us! You will join us! Let us in! Into the warm wet! Into the red!" Nosferatu shrieked like a fiend from hell. Her mouth gnashed its multitude of jagged teeth, blood-red saliva frothing at the corners of her lips. The smaller mouths that replaced her eyes opened their disturbingly baby-like lips and wailed hungrily, baring long, needle-like fangs. And the leech-like orifices that dotted her hands - five in each palm, three on each finger - pulsed thirstily, sucking and slurping wetly as their circular masses pulsed, the rasping teeth lining each mini-mouth flexing in anticipation of boring through Nabiki's skin and opening up her veins.

"In! In! We want in!"

Nabiki screeched back at her, a chiropteran battle cry of defiance that echoed hellishly around the room. Her nails sprouted into razored claws that punched through Nosferatu's flesh and caused bilious black blood to flow, and her own teeth stretched into fangs for rending and piercing as the vampire zoan took her hybrid form. Her heartbeat seemed to beat a wardrum's tattoo, its rapid-fire pulsations thundering in her brain. A cold inferno of fury roared to life in her guts, human rage married to bestial instincts that gripped her in its own inescapable talons.

"You want in, you twisted little brat?! Then fine!"

Nabiki suddenly yanked forward, dragging her assailant closer whilst keeping a firm grip on her wrists. Disorientated by the sudden change in motion, the user of the Child Model Human-Human Fruit was unable to stop the vampire from savagely sinking her fangs into her neck, opening up her arteries in a spray of ichor - black as sin, and thick as clotted cream.

The taste was unspeakably foul. Sour and cloying, with overtones of spoilage and rancid grease, the faux-blood clung to Nabiki's tongue like syrup and coated her teeth in its sludgy vileness.

'Oh, gods, this is just like when I ate my Devil Fruit! ...Actually, I think she tastes worse!'

And yet despite the unholy awfulness of what she was consuming, Nabiki sucked on her opponent's throat like a dying wanderer who had stumbled across an oasis in the desert.

A human would have screamed, panicked, flailed and tried to escape. Even a beast would have fought back, trying to wrench itself free of those terrible jaws. This thing that bore a semblance of a child's face squealed in shock. And then she laughed. Her whole form liquified, as if years of decay in a dank, humid cellar were taking place in fractions of a second, dissolving into an amorphous mass of red-streaked black foulness.

Nabiki drank with all the more vigor, gulping nauseating mouthfuls of the bacteria-rich sludge in a desperate bid to inhale the creature before it could slip free of her grasp. But she hardly need have bothered, for Nosferatu didn't try to run. Instead, she forced herself down Nabiki's throat, thrusting herself into the rival zoan's gullet like a slimy great eel worming its way into an inviting crevice.

It was like going from sipping at a straw to being force-fed a garden hose at full blast. Even in her semi-liquid form as a sapient bacterial mat, Nosferatu still had the approximate mass of at least a six-year old. Nabiki gurgled in distress as she felt her stomach literally fill to the brim with slime and filth, and Nosferatu kept on feeding herself into Nabiki. As the muck-girl pushed her way down Nabiki's throat, the teenage vampire's belly began to distend, as if she were a human water balloon. Her shirt stretched, threads creaking in protest as her burgeoning gut strained against the confines of its cotton prison, but Nosferatu kept forcing her way in. The sharp, unmistakable sound of fabric tearing echoed through the halls like a gunshot, drowning out the wet burbling moans from Nabiki as her shirt tore open, the sudden freedom to expand at least alleviating some of the pain as her body was violated in this unnatural manner.

And then, the last of the slimy Zoan disappeared down Nabiki's throat with a sound eerily reminiscent of water burbling down a drain. The teenager gasped desperately for breath, her hands instinctively flying to her swollen midriff, bloated into a mockery of a pregnancy with her inhuman meal. As she cradled the sloshing bulk in her hands, Nosferatu's voice rang out from inside her - slightly muffled, but her crisp, high giggle still echoed with equal parts madness, malice and mirth.

"Stupid-stupid-stupid! Now we are inside! Now we will make you us too! Now we... we..."

Nabiki's stomach visibly swayed and rippled as the amorphous entity inside shifted its fluid bulk.

"Why are you not us?!" Shrieked Nosferatu, all the selfish fury of a toddler in her wail.

Nabiki gagged, swallowed hard, and managed a slightly gurgled mocking laugh in response. "You didn't think this through, did you? You live in blood... but I live on blood! And you just jumped down my throat!"

"So what? What's that mean?!" Demanded the child-zoan. Before Nabiki could even think to answer, a shriek of agony suddenly rang out from inside her guts, which wobbled and quivered like a jelly as Nosferatu suddenly thrashed around. "It hurts us! It HURTS! Stop it stop it stopitstopitstop!"

"It means I eat things like you! All you did was make me need to upsize my wardrobe!" Nabiki shouted over the bacteria-girl's wailing, laughing madly even as she clutched her midriff with all her strength, trying to hold it still.

Despite her taunting, Nabiki's feelings ran more along a different track...

'Oh, gods, this HURTS! Why did I do this?! Oh, gods, make it stop, please, make it stop!"

It was the most surreal sight one could have imagined, a vision that would probably have repeated in an onlooker's nightmares. Nabiki's bloated belly quivered violently, its surface distending in sudden, massive surges of motion, like an unborn child's kicking magnified a hundredfold. The stretched skin tore from the sudden thrust of pressure, but Nabiki's healing factor kicked in and the rifts in her flesh sealed the instant after they were made.

"Aiiiiiyeeee! Kill you hate you rip you eat you!" Shrieked Nosferatu. A shape like a monstrous skull pressed outwards from within Nabiki's swollen stomach, pushing so hard the skin stretched to outline over the malformed face, trying to gnaw its way through the obstructing flesh.

"No, that's what I did! Now hurry up and die! DIE, damn you!" Nabiki screamed defiantly, choking as a sudden gout of blood welled up in her throat, swallowing it down before it could escape past her lips.

'No, no, damn you, NO, I won't let you win! I won't let you beat me!'

The ticking of seconds seemed to last an eternity, the thrashing of her victim making Nabiki's whole body convulse like a ragdoll being thrown around by some enormous, temperamental child. But her swollen stomach began to shrink, growing smaller and smaller with the passage of each second as her Devil Fruit-altered anatomy digested the living bacterial mass with supernatural ferocity, as if spurred on by Nabiki's own determination. And as it dwindled, the creature within grew weaker and weaker. Within a minute, Nabiki looked merely pregnant, as opposed to the unnatural vista she had presented before. Thirty seconds more, and the small bulge was easily cradled within the palms of her hands.

"Whhhhyyyyy...? They belonged to us... to us...!" Came the thin, dying wail from inside Nabiki's guts. Her skin shifted, forming the vista of a baby-sized hand trying to push its clawed fingers out through her midriff... but it was so weak that it didn't even hurt.

"No, they belong to me! Now go to hell!" Nabiki snarled viciously, pressing against her potbelly with her palms.

There was the tiniest little cry, so thin and weak that Nabiki wasn't even sure she had heard it, and then her stomach resumed its former flatness. She waited tensely, drumming her fingers on her abs, and then sighed in relief at the lack of any further strangeness.

"Gods, I do not intend to tell anybody about how I beat that monster," she declared firmly, even as she slowly clambered to her feet, fingering the dangling strips of fabric from her torn shirt and frowning at the sight.

"Damn it all, I liked this shirt!" She grumbled to herself.

"Query; unit Nabiki is functional?"

Nabiki looked over at Dyna, and then nodded slowly. "I think so-!"

She belched thunderously, a billowing cloud erupting from between her distended lips. Gaseous fumes, that's what she thought at first, but then she realized it was actually a cloud of fine, pale green ash that wafted mournfully in the breeze before drifting slowly to coat the ground. She rubbed a smear of the dusty particulates between her fingers, before sighing.

"Okay, now I think I'm okay... just had to get her out of my system. Do you think the others are alright?"

"Data unavailable... are you certain you are functional?" Dyna asked, in what genuinely sounded like concern from the usually apathetic gynoid.

Nabiki blinked at her, noncomprehension apparent on her face. "Why are you repeating yourself?"

And then there was pain.

She screamed in startled agony as her whole body convulsed in torment from the torture that suddenly enveloped her. It was like half of her bloodstream had suddenly turned to liquid nitrogen, and the other half had become oil that somebody had set on fire. She burned and froze and corroded from the inside out, clawing at her skin in a desperate attempt to let the toxins eating her alive free from her veins. This was worse than having the slime-girl trying to rip and gnaw its way out of her stomach! Her guts spasmed and writhed, her eyes flooded with tears and her bones turned to jelly as she fell to the floor.

She opened her mouth so far that her jaws audibly cracked, her shrieks of suffering cut off as she suddenly vomited. Acrid, oily, caustic foulness poured out of her, gagging her with its taste, with its smell, and inciting her to expel more and more. It poured, it gushed, it flooded from her, a profusion of liquid rot that seemed to be ripping her guts out of her for the ride. Dizziness cut through the nausea, and the world faded into darkness...

?

'-biki? Nabiki? Nabiki, are you still alive?"

Nabiki slowly blinked open her eyes, then hissed hatefully as her temples throbbed. She instinctively reached up to cradle her temples in her... wings.

'What?'

Tendo stubbornness, mixed with some of that martial artist "I won't die even if it kills me" attitude that had sadly been rubbing off on her, caused Nabiki to force her way through the anguish to take stock of her situation.

"...Great. I'm a chibi-bat again," she sourly grumbled.

"It is superior to the alternative. Which would be death," Dyna stated bluntly.

Nabiki blinked again, then realized she was being carefully cradled in two of Dyna's small manipulator arms. "What happened to me?"

"You reverted to this state upon purging yourself of your stockpile of blood," Dyna explained, causing Nabiki to look instinctively at the floor.

"...Eww. That came out of me?" She asked in disbelief, wrinkling her nose at the fetid stench emanating from the congealing mess, which had the consistency of mostly-solidified grease and a smell comparable to an open air market's produce dumpster after it had been sitting in the summer sun without cleaning for three days.

"Affirmative."

"...Well, I suppose it was pretty stupid to think I could just eat a goddamned plague," Nabiki sheepishly admitted, hunkering down as best she could in the frankly rather uncomfortable grip of Dyna's manipulators.

"Although that logically had its part to play, I believe the true issue had more to do with this..." Dyna raised a third manipulator into view, revealing that she was also holding a fruit. A strawberry, specifically; so vibrantly pink it looked like something from an anime, adorned with a very familiar pattern of spirals in creamy white.

"...A Devil Fruit?! Where? How?" Nabiki spluttered in disbelief, gaze fixed on the magical edible.

"It coalesced from the fluids you expelled. Evidently, consumption of a Devil Fruit user counts as consumption of the Fruit...And, also evidently, multiple Devil Fruits react negatively to their presence in a single host-organism's system. If not for your unique ability to manipulate your own blood, allowing you to literally purge the second Devil Fruit from your veins, I hypothesize the results would have been fatal," Came the cool, collected assessment from the steam-powered fembot.

Nabiki stared at the enchanted strawberry in horror as the realization of how close she came sank in.

"Yeah, I remember reading something like that in the Devil Fruit Encyclopedia...Oooh, boy, I think I might just take Shampoo up on that offer to snuggle Ranma tonight..." She murmured absently. Then she blinked as a thought crossed her mind, frowning as she eagerly focused on the distraction.

"Wait a minute! I've drunk plenty of blood from Shampoo and Lilith, and that never made me sick!" She angrily asserted, annoyed at the logical inconsistency.

"Since you merely took some of their blood, as opposed to swallowing them whole and digesting them, perhaps that didn't count as consuming them for the purpose of the Devil Fruit? ...I would advise against testing if draining a Devil Fruit user to death also counts as eating them, at least without ready medical attention," Dyna added this last part as if she were contemplating the weather.

"I wasn't exactly planning on doing so anyway," Nabiki dryly quipped back, before she shook her head. "Look, can we stop talking about how close I just put myself to death and go see if Ranma is okay?! I'd rather know if he's alive before I worry about tonight's nightmares!"

"Affirmative," Dyna replied, in what Nabiki would swear was almost an amused tone, her spidery legs setting up a rhythmic clanking as she reversed course and began heading back to where they had been forced to abandon their companions.

Nabiki settled into her perch as best she could, staring silently into the gloom as she allowed herself to be carried, wrestling with the full impact of the past... what, five, ten minutes?

'I know they used to call me ruthless back in Nerima, but I never would have thought I had a real killer instinct then! Where the hell did that plan come from!? Was that my devil fruit, acting on its own again, like when I attacked Ranma? Or was that all me...? Have I really changed so much since becoming a pirate?'

She squirmed a little, trying to get more comfortable, which was pretty much in vain given she was being cradled in what amounted to two iron spiders turned upside down.

'Then again... I can't say that I really care that I killed that thing. It was going to kill me after all! Not to mention, it would have killed Ranma, and the rest of the crew, and everybody on the island - and it wouldn't have stopped there! Hell, what I did was heroic! ...Still not gonna tell them that I literally ate it, but still, I did absolutely nothing wrong!'

"Nabiki! Dyna!"

Nabiki blinked owlishly in surprise. 'Woah, that was quick - I must have really been out of it... what the hell am I doing sitting here?!'

"Ranma!" The vampire zoan cried in relief, before spreading her wings and launching herself through the air, fluttering like the bat she resembled until she could wrap herself around Ranma's neck by her thumb-claws, digging her prehensile feet into his shirt.

"Whoa, easy, easy! Feelin' a little lightheaded!" Ranma protested, but he was laughing as he said it.

"I'm just glad you're okay - I knew you were too thickheaded for that stupid jumped-up clump of bacteria to keep you down," Nabiki declared, nuzzling Ranma's cheek with her own in a gesture she normally wouldn't have dreamed of doing... at least, not where anyone could see her.

"I don't know that I would have made it without you... an' looking at you, I'm guessing that Nosferatu thing didn't go down easily," Ranma noted, absently petting Nabiki's hair as he did.

The vampire zoan recoiled with a whole body wince. "How did you-?! Oh! Uh, yeah, she put up a real fight, alright! Ended up burning through my entire blood stockpile to take her down, and - hey, are you okay? You look awful!"

The sight of Ranma - skin stretched taut around his face and now a pale grey hue, his dull eyes and sunken cheeks - had finally registered in Nabiki's forebrain, and as she took in the sight of what even a few minutes of infection had done to her boyfriend, she felt something dark and ugly bubble and roil in her heart.

'Filthy damn bacteria, I'd eat you again if I could!'

"You're one to talk," Ranma dryly quipped back. "But, frankly, I got off easy - the rest of them aren't even able to walk yet."

"Well, that fits - you've always been too stubborn to admit when you were injured. But I suppose we should go and rescue Penelope from those skryre," Nabiki declared, already scrambling around to lay atop Ranma's head.

"More like we'll be rescuing them from her; she was already badgering them to tell her all about their history when I left and came looking for you," Ranma chuckled, somewhat weakly, but his back was straight and his stride full of purpose as he turned back the way he came, Dyna loyally clanking along after him.

A week later...

Although Nabiki's desperate gambit had paid off, with the death of Nosferatu freeing its slaves, that had still left them suffering the effects of having been infected with a hemorrhagic disease. Now, it /had/ gone largely inert with Nosferatu's death, but the damage had already been done. The Kamikaze Pirates had spent the last week helping the beleaguered Dr. Simon van Richten and his fellow surviving medical staff to administer treatment to nurse the Nosferatu's victims back to full health.

They had also, completely by accident, brokered a peace treaty between the sky-islanders of Wisborg and the skryre of the Demeter. The rat-people - evidently an offshoot of the mink-tribe, but one who had split from their common ancestors so long ago that they had little to tell to their 'long lost cousin' Penelope - were a shy and retiring race, who had traditionally used the Human-Human Fruit, Model Type: Child as a way to scout out rubbish heaps and refuse dumps on the islands they had drifted to, pilfering the unwanted leavings of the sky-dwelling races to bolster their own closed world. They had been rather shocked to discover that the people of Wisborg were willing to work with them openly, rather than forcing them to scurry in the shadows like rats.

Between these factors, it should be no surprise what the end result was...

"Three cheers for Captain Saotome and the Kamikaze Pirates! The morning sun has vanquished the horrible night! Hurrah!" Whooped Mayor Drusseldorf, a thin and ragged scarecrow of a man who easily had to be in his 60s, yet had the energy of a man a third of his age.

Ranma fought hard to keep from blushing as the whole town square seemed to shake with the cheering that arose from Wisborgians and skryre alike.

'I know Akane always said I had an ego... ok, maybe she wasn't wrong, but this still feels a bit much!'

The 'this' in question was an enormous party, to which every single resident of Wisborg and the Demeter had invited themselves. Tables groaned under an enormous bounty of food and drink, and already people were stuffing their faces, quaffing booze, singing, playing, dancing and, here and there, fighting or engaging in... other forms of physical interaction, shall we say?

Eager to distract himself, Ranma glanced over at his crewmates. He was unsurprised to see that Ukyo, Harumi and Miriam seemed almost as out of their depths as he did, whereas Kodachi and Shampoo were drinking in the blatant adulation. Ryoga seemed absolutely stunned, Nabiki was simply letting it all wash over her with at most her usual smug self-certainty, and Lilith was... up and dancing on one of the tables. Well, nobody seemed to mind (other than a few plainer-looking mothers, who were trying to usher their kids away), so Ranma paid it no attention.

'Wait, hang on a moment... where's Penelope? Or Dyna, for that matter?'

"Capitaine! Capitaine Saotome!"

People parted in equal parts politeness and self-preservation as Penelope came hurtling through the crowd like a black and white bullet, with Dyna churning stubbornly after her. The skunk-featured mink absently leapt onto the table, dishes scattering as she came face to face with Ranma, eyes wide and gleaming with glee, face split by a huge grin of manic intensity. Her hand shot out and grabbed Ranma's shirt collar as she dragged him forward so they were practically nose to nose.

"Capitaine! C'est incroyable! Nous l'avons fait! Nous l'avons finalement fait!" She shouted, gesturing wildly with her free hand for emphasis.

"Hey, language!" Ranma scolded her instinctively.

Evidently, it worked; the skunk-girl looked confused for a second, shook her head, and then tried again, this time with a slightly less insane level of excitement. "No, no, capitaine, I was saying that we have been doing it! It was in the most ancient archives of the Demeter - where the ship had come from! If it had not been for Dyna, I would never have been able to find it, much less translate it..."

"Find what? What's got you so fired up?!" Ranma demanded.

Before Penelope could speak up, Dyna's claw closed around her midriff and unceremoniously yanked her out of the way.

"The Demeter was built in Hestavar, Captain. It came from my home! And it has an Eternal Pose leading back to Hestavar! I... I can go home!" Dyna's eye burned so brightly that Ranma had to shade his own eyes, but that didn't stop him from recognizing the genuine emotion in her voice, breaching through her usual monotone.

"You - that's awesome!"

"Oh, Dyna, you're finally going to go home!"

"Congratulations!"

"I always knew you'd make it - this lot are far too stubborn to let a little thing like your homeland being lost in the sky stop them."

Ranma watched as his crewmates congratulated their robotic companion, before loudly whistling to draw their attention back to himself.

"Okay, guys; this is big news, but let's not be rude to the nice folks, okay? So eat, drink and make merry, because when we leave Wisborg, we set sail for Dyna's homeland! To Hestavar!"

"To Hestavar!" They shouted back, all of them smiling as they did so.

Chapter End & Closing Notes

At long last, we reach the climax of the Sky-Seas Saga, with the impending arrival at Dyna's long-lost homeland! Bet you thought we were never going to get there, huh? I'll try to get it up soon, as I'm sure you're eager to see it at long last!

You may have noticed a somewhat... creepier... vibe than usual in this chapter. At least, I'm hoping so. As a writer and, frankly, someone with a rather stunted emotional range, I always want to improve my emotional range in my writing. Romance is a major element, of course, but I'm also fascinating with seeing what I can do with horror, too. So, what do you say? Think there's some entries for the Nightmare Fuel page for this fic?

As always, there's a Tvtropes page begging for editing, and I have a Kofi account if you'd like to toss me a few bucks to get some more art to accompany this work!