Author's Notes: I cannot apologize enough. This chapter just took FOREVER to get written. Real life didn't help, of course, but there was just so many writer's blocks I really struggled with this. But take heart; though this is only part 1, the entire chapter was actually just shy of completion before my editor suggested I break it in two, for spacing if nothing else. Since you guys have been so patient, I decided to go with it; I promise, I'll try to have the second half of this chapter out as soon as I possibly can!
In more positive news, I wanna thank you all for the number of suggestions I got on how to give our heroes proper epithets; there were a lot of suggestions and some really well-argued reasons, choosing between them was not easy in the slightest...
Chapter 33: Scarred Lion vs. Young Tiger! Part 1!
The sun shone most days at 10,000 meters above sea level, piercing blue above playing off the seething, swirling expanse of the White-White Sea in a scene that would have been the envy of any mangaka attempting to paint a scene of implicit adventure and excitement. Even the Stormbringer wasn't immune to the positive vibes, and as its steam-powered propellers began the process of descending back down towards the Grand Line surface so far below, its crew were in high spirits.
"C'mon, Umok, sing us a song! We can't go sailing down 10,000 meters without a bit of a shanty! Woohoo!" Lilith cried insistently from where she was dancing in a relatively out-of-the-way corner of the deck, her gyrations quite hypnotic given the abundance of flesh that jiggled and swirled with each twirling motion.
"Is she still drunk? We left Hestavar nearly six hours ago!" Ukyo asked in total disbelief, equal parts impressed and appalled.
"Since when do Umok sing?" Shampoo asked, looking in confusion at the imp that was hiding amidst the makeshift undercanopy of ropes that dangled around the Stormbringer's air balloon.
"I blame you for this," Umok hissed at Ryoga, who looked sheepish and rubbed the back of his neck, unable to meet Umok in any of his three eyes in response.
"Oh, come on; if anybody's got a reason to be celebrating, it's her. What's the worst that could happen?" Ranma interjected, smiling warmly and spreading his hands apart in an attempt at a conciliatory gesture.
Three eyes burned like coals in the shadows of the swaying balloon, before Umok sullenly sucked in a breath and belted out in that impossibly deep, thrumming voice of his, "Neath tides of bleak and briny, in that bed where fortunes sleep!"
"Secrets lie beneath for finding, weaving dread and silt for sheets - c'mon, girls, join in!" Lilith added, spinning around before kicking up high with one long, supple leg.
"In the lambent lamps of phantoms, flotsam all are we in time!" Kodachi added brightly from her usual place at the wheel.
"Can you fathom what the fathoms' blackened chasms have to hide deep in the brine?" Sang Miriam, bending to ensure a bundle of barrels were firmly tied to the deck.
"Does nobody else think that song is ridiculously creepy for a sea shanty? Don't you know anything a little more cheerful?" Ryoga demanded in exasperation, throwing up his hands in an emotional outburst.
Umok rolled all three eyes, but promptly launched into a new song, this one with a far more upbeat tempo that the Kamikaze Pirates immediately joined in on.
So it was the sound of happy voices could be heard blasting from the deck of the Stormbringer as the hull slowly sank into the shimmering surface of the White-White sea, beginning its slow descent down towards the Grand Line so far, far below...
Now, there was a way to descend to the Grand Line at much greater speed. It was called "falling out of the sky and rapidly reaching terminal velocity". Not being at quite the level of insanity to think that was a viable option, the Kamikaze Pirates had instead settled for the slower and safer descent. Of course, the downside of that method was that it gave them plenty of time to kill as they made the trip...
"So, Dyna, are you worried about your sisters?" Ranma politely asked his mechanical crewmate, who had chosen not to partake in the sing-along that had swept up almost everybody else in the crew at this point. Even Ranma was absently nodding his head along with the beat.
The gynoid shook her head slowly. "It is illogical to be concerned. The transmigration of the island was a complete success. Production of new war-shells to enlarge the pool of defenders was already underway as we left. Combat protocols have been successfully updated and disseminated. My sisters will be perfectly fine."
"Logic be damned; how do you feel?" Ranma insisted patiently, looking Dyna square in her glowing blue eyes.
The light behind her optics flickered briefly, the gynoid's doll-like features finally expressing an all-too-human vulnerability. "I... I am conflicted, captain Saotome. It is illogical... all logic dictates that my sisters will be fine. They are safe, and, if I may be so bold, you will probably not live excessively long lives. A century or so is an eyeblink to my kind. And yet, I miss my sisters, now that I am here. Even though this was my choice, though I want to continue to travel with you and the rest of the crew... I still miss them..."
Ranma smiled and patted her on the shoulder. "Hey, they're your family. Of course you're gonna miss them; it's part of being human."
"I am not human," Dyna declared, pouting as she did so.
Ranma just scoffed at the notion. "I don't care what you're made out of, you're as human as the next person on this crew!"
"Damnit, Lilith, spit that out! Zoan or not, you can't just go eating the whole roast hog!"
"GULP!"
"You greedy bitch! That was supposed to be part of the morning snack for us all!"
Dyna looked flatly at Ranma, who simply shrugged in response and cheerfully defended himself with, "So I got a looser definition of human than some!"
About an hour later...
"White-Sea approaching! Stand by for sea-cloud breach!"
Umok's warning boomed across the deck, but there was little panic to his words. The early-morning energy had been bled out over the long descent from the White-White Sea, three thousand meters above. And whilst the Devil Fruit-endowed members of the crew did need to secure themselves in, they had plenty of time, and all of the preparation had been done earlier.
So it was that even as Ranma hooked himself into a cozy nook amidst some barrels and double-checked his thermos was to hand, he wasn't surprised to see a happy Shampoo heading towards him. He ruthlessly squashed the part of himself that immediately wanted to describe her approach as 'bouncing' - it wasn't fair to the poor bunnygirl!
"Nihao, airen! Ranma keep Shampoo safe in sea-clouds, yes?" Chirped the cabbit zoan even as she sat herself down next to Ranma and thrust herself brazenly up against his side, nuzzling into the side of his neck with a soft, adoring sigh.
"Of course, Shamps, you know I wouldn't let anythin' happen to you," Ranma chuckled, unable to resist the opportunity to gently rub one of her long ears whilst she was so close.
"Shampoo keep tell you; no call Shamps!" Pouted the Chinese Amazon, but she made no attempt to pull away from Ranma's gentle, affectionate touch.
Ranma just smirked at her complaint, only to start as another voice rang out from behind him.
"What about me, Ranma? Don't tell me you'd be so cruel as to let me fend for myself - what if the wind picks up while the sea-clouds have me helpless? I'd be blown clean off the deck!"
Despite the chiding choice of words, the tone was teasing and affectionate. Ranma nearly gave himself whiplash twisting to see Nabiki, who had settled right up next to him in a perfect mirror image of Shampoo. She smiled seductively, and Ranma realized she had taken her own hybrid vampire form, her teeth glinting in the corners of her mouth.
Ranma's tongue twisted and tangled in his mouth as he tried desperately to get the words to come out, but Nabiki didn't even notice, instead lazily laying her head on his shoulder.
"But of course, my big, strong, handsome fiance will take care of his defenseless little Nabiki, no?" She cooed in the same playfully joking manner.
"Nabiki as defenseless as hungry viper," Shampoo dryly declared.
"Girls, behave," Ranma scolded them both, even as he reached up and laid his arms across their shoulders. Taking that as an apparent invitation, both zoans snuggled in as close to Ranma as they could possibly get.
The teenage martial artist turned pirate captain blushed at the distinct feeling of two rather generous bosoms crushed up against his chest. But he didn't try to push them away either, even as he watched the first streamers of sea-cloud come slithering over the deck as the Stormbringer sank deeper and deeper into the thick expanse of buoyant cloud-stuff. The milky white neo-fluid moved with deceptive sluggishness; first it rendered the deck invisible, and then it was rising up the collective legs of the crew.
Ranma felt the distinctive tingle as his body rearranged itself, the girls to either side of him subtly towering over him as Ranma shrank down to his smaller, feminine form. Despite this alteration to their respective heights, Shampoo and Nabiki both clung tighter to Ranma in an instinctual search for comfort as the sea-cloud reached their collective waists. For a brief moment, they squeezed Ranma so tight it was almost painful... and then they went eerily still as the pseudo-water stole the motive power from their limbs and left them as limp as dolls.
Now it was Ranma's turn to hug them tighter, the boy-turned-girl wrapping himself around them with ferocious possessiveness (whilst trying his damndest to not end up burying his face in either or both sets of cleavage) even as the sea-cloud swiftly climbed up to his neck. Ranma took a deep breath, and then the sea-clouds closed over his face.
This was, without a doubt, the eeriest part of the journey, and the fact they'd already gone through it before when they'd sunk down through the White-White Sea three thousand meters above didn't really help as much as it ought to. The sounds of the ship were muffled, the liquid-like cloud-stuff enveloping them; it was like sinking into an ocean of milk, adding all the sensations of drowning to the mix. Just thick, cold, white, unbreathable haze in all directions, rippling against Ranma's skin and soaking through the boy-turned-girl's clothing.
It seemed to drag on for an eternity... and then it began to lift, the indescribable event of the 'water' seeming to drain away in reverse of gravity as the pirate ship turned makeshift zeppelin finally dropped beneath the bottom of the White-Sea. Bubbles seeped from Ranma's lips as the sea-cloud finally lifted above his head, and he immediately gasped for air, the sound echoed by Shampoo and Nabiki as the two zoans finally sprang back to life.
"Ech-ach, ptooie! Euuurrggh, if I never have to go through that again, it'll be too soon," Nabiki grumbled, spitting sea-cloud over to the side.
"Shampoo agree. No like feel so... so helpless..." Snarled the Chinese Amazon, her long hair still dripping with sea-cloud.
"Well, you can relax, girls, because it's all over now; you're safe here, and I'm gonna keep you that way," Ranma promised them, smiling brightly at the two and earning warm, affectionate smiles in response.
And that was when the Stormbringer shook as a cannonball slammed into the hull from beneath and detonated, the whole ship swaying from the impact and sending the two-and-a-half girls tumbling painfully to the deck in an awkward tangle of limbs.
"What the fuck was that?!" Ranma shouted at the top of her lungs.
"We're under attack!" Ryoga roared back, a second explosion - this one just off the side of the Stormbringer, mercifully - punctuating the second Nyaniichuan victim's words.
"How?! Who?! What?!" Ranma spat incoherently, wriggling free of Shampoo and Nabiki's arms and springing to her feet, the zoans clawing their way upright behind her.
"There are islands out there! Real ones! Floating!" Lilith babbled, serpentine bulk sprawled across the deck as she went for the best combination of strength and weight she had.
The blood seemed to freeze in Ranma's veins as she looked out over the gunwale and saw the truth of Lilith's words. Unthinking profanity began to pour in profusion from the cursed boy's lips, putting a whole new and rather literal spin on the saying "swearing like a sailor". It was only when another explosion shook the ship that Ranma finally snatched sanity back from the face of apocalyptic fury.
"-Merveille?! How? Doesn't matter! Action stations! Get us outta here, before they hit the-!"
Ranma's clarity came too late, however. Whether by design or cruel fluke, a cannonball struck right into the precious bag of pressurized hot air that carried the Stormbringer through the skies, tearing it open and then exploding to ensure the biggest possible rift was opened in the hardened leather.
With the ship's sole source of support destroyed, gravity reasserted its merciless grip over the Stormbringer at once. The ship fell from the sky like a stone, prow almost instinctively angling downwards, the wind plucking cruelly at everything aboard the deck.
This time, Ranma reacted quickly and decisively. "Abandon ship! Everybody, get outta here!"
"What?! But the ship!" Protested Miriam.
"We can Moonwalk safely from here to the islands, that gives us a fighting chance! We hit the surface of the sea with this thing, the impact'll kill us all! This is an order - ugh!"
As the shredded balloon deflated, once-taut ropes were allowed to whip about with vicious force, one large knot slamming Ranma right in the face as she was distracted. Fortunately, this was Ranma, so the knot failed to smash her face into a gory ruin of pulped meat and broken bones. But it was still hard enough that Ranma was launched flying from the deck and out into the open void, tumbling semi-conscious towards her doom...
At that moment...
"Jihahahaha! Jiiihahahahahahaha! Excellent shot, crewman!" Shiki bellowed with laughter, slapping the gunner on the shoulder.
"Th-thank you captain - ah! But the crew is bailing out, look!" The gunner wailed, desperately trying to get his cannon loaded and reorientated.
Shiki looked back up, chewing on his cigar and frowning slightly, plumes of smoke wreathing his craggy features as he watched myriad tiny shapes break away from the plummeting ship, rocketing towards the islands in their twos and threes, nimbly weaving between the barrage of cannonballs splitting the sky all around them. Absently, he flicked his fingers, shifting one of the islands so that the enemy vessel was now falling for the lake at its center instead of the open ocean so far below Merveille.
"It's no matter. The beasts will take them... and if not, well, it will give my new crew something to do on the way to the Sea of Schemes... after all, the so-called Kamikaze Pirates left here with their tails between their legs all those weeks ago; how much stronger could they have gotten since then?
Team Alpha - Ranma/Shampoo/Nabiki
The first thing Ranma was aware of was a strange yet disappointingly familiar swimming sensation, and a peculiar ringing noise in his ears.
'Ah. A concussion,' He thought absently to himself. Having become rather inured to such traumas over the peculiar life he'd led, Ranma kept his eyes closed, focused his willpower, and allowed himself to ride out the pain and distraction as his brain painstakingly rebooted itself in the face of recent intense force.
Once he finally regained consciousness, he realized two things. Firstly, he was in his female body. Secondly, he was currently being carried bridal-style, his (alright, her, if you had to be semantic about it!) head resting against something very soft and squishy.
"What happened? Where are we?" Ranma asked as she slowly opened her eyes... Well, she tried to ask that question, but what came out was an incoherent and rather pained mumbling sound.
Shampoo's ears pricked up and the Chinese cabbit beamed in delight, hugging Ranma tight and blithely smooshing Ranma's face deep into her cleavage. "Airen, you okay!"
"Not if you keep smothering him like that," Nabiki dryly interjected from where she was all but hidden in the enveloping leaves of a dense bush.
"Like Nabiki one to talk," Shampoo scoffed in return, but she still gently lowered Ranma to her feet, keeping one steadying hand on her shoulders.
Ranma experimentally flexed her jaw, waited for the stabbing pain to die down to a more bearable level before she croaked out, "What happened?"
"Rope clobber airen good one in face, send you flying. Shampoo and Nabiki catch, then fly for nearest island. Others fly in different directions - Shampoo no could see too good," She shrugged apologetically as she explained this.
"It's alright; they're tough, they can fend for themselves... but, Merveille?! How in all the Chinese hells did we end up dropping down through the White-Sea smack-bang into Shiki's back yard?!" An exasperated Ranma complained, gesturing wildly as she did so.
"Those would be long odds even if Ryoga were steering," Nabiki idly noted, even as she opened a thermos and poured the still-hot water over Ranma's head.
Her captain (and boyfriend) sighed in absent-minded relief as he regained his true form, smiling gratefully at her for her foresight. Then he shook his head and was all business once again.
"Well, we're here now. And obviously Shiki won't let us go without a fight. So let's give him what he wants..."
"Make sense to Shampoo. Easiest way we get chance to fix ship and leave is if we punch Shiki in balls first," The Chinese Amazon nodded sagely.
"You do remember Shiki is a powerful veteran pirate, right?" Nabiki pointed firmly.
"So is we, now," Shampoo immediately shot back.
"And what about the rest of the crew?" Nabiki continued.
"Well, we can hope they get the same idea, but do we really have a choice? It's not like we know where they went or set up a place to head for so we can reunite," Ranma pointed out.
"So, we can either stumble blindly around this floating archipelago hoping to run into them, all the while setting us up to be ambushed by Shiki and his men, who know this place far better than us," Nabiki sighed as she conceded the point.
"Plus, faster we go for Shiki's palace, faster we in less danger," Shampoo added, causing both Ranma and Nabiki to turn confused looks in her direction.
"How do you figure that?" Ranma asked her.
Shampoo was saved the need to elaborate as the sudden sound of wood shattering and trees crashing to the earth split the air. The two martial artists (and one mythic zoan) immediately assumed a defensive formation as the woods to their south were shattered, crushed beneath the bulk of the creature that burst forth into the glade with them in a single titanic, earth-shaking hop.
At one point, perhaps, it might have been a regular toad. Now it was an elephantine mass of luridly colored, slimy flesh in the vague semblance of a toadish shape - a great tumorous malformed hump of meat and blubber crawling along on four toadish legs. Easily a dozen slavering maws at least opened and shut sporadically across its tumorous-looking form, each maw surmounted by a pair of staring, bulging eyes.
"Oh. Right. Merveille is full of escapees from old monster movies," Ranma flatly observed.
The toad-thing opened its many mouths and let out... well, it was technically a single great ribbit, but each mouth was just that little bit out of synch with the others, creating a howling chorus of the froggy damned. Then tongues shot from three gaping, fang-lined, slime-drooling orifice, reaching with hungry intent for the three humans before it.
As one, the three teens broke formation and sprang to find their own angles of attack; Ranma kicking off of thin air, Nabiki spreading her leathery wings, and Shampoo bouncing around like a pinball on a methamphetamine cocktail that would probably have made most hardened junkies go "Damn, you crazy!"
Unfortunately, the toad-thing's many mouths were more than just decoration. Tongues burst into the air in all directions, sending the trio diving, weaving and dodging. Worse still, the creature clearly had some form of intelligence, as primitive and twisted as it must be, as it didn't simply launch all of its tongues simultaneously, but staggered its "fire" to prevent the trio from getting closer as it withdrew extended tongues back into its mouth.
And it drastically proved it was smarter than it looked when Shampoo got too overconfident; she dodged a stabbing tongue by the barest margin, cleanly unscathed... and then the tongue curled around her as it snapped back into its native mouth, hooking the startled Chinese Amazon around the waist and yanking her straight into the gaping maw! She disappeared behind rows of jagged, gnarled teeth, the whole hulking shape visibly rippling as it swallowed hugely.
It felt like a freezing cold, barb-bladed dagger had driven itself deep into Ranma's heart and then twisted mercilessly.
"Shampoo!" He howled his grief, a feminine wail of shock echoing him as Nabiki too cried out in dismay.
In what initially seemed like mockery, the squamous horror squatting before them opened its many mouths and bellowed at them. Then blood came geysering out of first one mouth, and then another, and another, and they realized what they were hearing was a chorus of batrachian agony. Its already malformed body quivered and quaked, distending unevenly before it suddenly burst like an over-inflated balloon, shedding cascades of blood and shredded viscera over the grotto.
From amidst the organic wreckage a spitting, hissing, fur-fluffed, ears-back, claws-out spiraling unstoppable mass of purest fury and destruction emerged, painted head to toe in toad-guts and clearly not happy about that fact.
And then, with a final high-speed whirling gyration, it leapt clear of the mangled carcass and became Shampoo. She grimaced in disgust and flicked the last of the lingering gore from her talons, shaking in a very feline manner in an effort to ruffle off the worst of the blood slicking her body.
...And that was when she found herself tackled by a flying Ranma and crashing to the forest floor in a tangle of limbs as he hugged her for dear life.
'...So this is what it is like to be on the receiving end of a glomp...' Was the thought that rushed madly through Shampoo's mind, before Ranma's words filtered through into her shocked consciousness.
"-don't you EVER scare me like that again, ya hear?!"
"Was no Shampoo's intent. Shampoo be more careful, Shampoo promise," She assured Ranma, reaching up to brush her palm tenderly across his cheek, her eyes full of joy as she drank up the palpable proof that finally - finally - she could be certain that Ranma cared for her.
When Ranma actually leaned downwards, her heart skipped a beat in anticipation. Thus her joy was undercut with no small amount of disappointment when Ranma simply buried his face in the crook of her neck and squeezed her tight, reassuring himself that she was still alive. That disappointment... well, it didn't so much grow as linger, but Shampoo chose to focus on the bliss of bathing in that display of affection as Ranma smoothly released her and jumped back to his feet.
"C'mon, then! Shiki's ass needs kicking, and all that blood'll draw every predator for miles..."
He strode off into the wilderness as Shampoo nimbly flipped back onto her feet behind him, casting a pensive look at his retreating form.
"So close... what Shampoo need to do to get a kiss?" She sighed, in mostly feigned lament.
"Well don't ask me, you couldn't afford me," Nabiki quipped playfully, the wind of her passage ruffling Shampoo's hair as she flapped past deliberately overhead in a strangely affectionate manner.
"Shampoo could say same to you!" The Chinese Amazon snapped back, even as she loped after her counterparts.
Team Gamma - Kodachi/Ukyo
On sandy shores framing sparkling blue water... which simply gave way to empty air after a dozen meters or so, in complete defiance of gravity... two women stared sullenly out into the void, watching in silent dismay as the ship that had carried them so faithfully for all these... gods, was it really months now? The ship that had been their home plummeted through the void and disappeared.
"My kitchen..." Ukyo mournfully sobbed.
"My garden..." Kodachi softly wailed.
Then, in perfect unity, they snarled, battle auras bursting into life and fusing the sand beneath their feet into vitrified glass, "Shiki is going to die for this!"
A sudden piercing wail, eerily like that of a human infant, burst both their auras like a balloon embraced by an amorous porcupine. They looked around in shock, instinctively taking up defensive stances, as something burst from the jungle, hit the sands of the beach, then turned and ran straight towards them.
"...What in tarnation?" A dumbfounded Ukyo blurted.
Racing towards them, kicking up dust in its wake, was perhaps the single oddest creature either of them had ever seen, even including Umok.
It looked, at first glance, like a large weasel with bluish-white fur - bright blue at the tip of the tail, the head and the paws, fading to white as it approached the body. This would have been unremarkable on the Grand Line; what set it apart was the fact it had six legs, and a head like that of a small anteater, save for the nubbish horns adorning its scalp.
The creature let out another of those horrific baby-like screams of alarm - and little wonder why! About half a dozen luridly patterned semi-humanoid lizards, each as tall as Ranma in his female form and wielding a long, sharpened stick, were chasing intently after the anteater-weasel-thing. Frog-like croaks and rolling clicks echoed from pulsing throat-sacs as they brandished their makeshift weapons, clearly intent on skewering the little beast like a pig on a roasting spit.
The meter-long weasel thing sprinted right past Ukyo, who sneezed as a puff of dust caught her right in her face and tickled her nose, before it leapt into a startled Kodachi's arms. The former heiress turned pirate instinctively wrapped her arms around it in a protective embrace, cradling it close as it whimpered pathetically.
"Oh, shhh, there-there, it's okay," She cooed, immediately slipping into the almost-forgotten mindset of comforting her beloved pets.
Ukyo, meanwhile, reached inside herself for the power and the passion that she had learned to touch so intimately over the past few weeks... or was it months? Warmth flooded her veins, curling out of her stomach and through her arms, pouring like a tidal wave into her beloved battle spatula and causing its blade to glow red hot as she brandished it at the lizard-people.
"Alright, that's far enough! You stay back, y'hear?!" She spat at the closest of them.
The lizard-thing didn't react to the threat. Instead, it stared wide-eyed at her weapon, seemingly fixated by the glow and the way heat visibly rippled from its surface. It dropped its primitive spear and lunged, long, bulbous-tipped fingers grabbing onto the red-hot metal.
There was a roar of displaced air, and the lizard went up in flames like it had been bathing in distilled petrol! Ukyo was knocked flat on her butt in shock, and she hastily scrambled backwards on her hands across the sand, wide-eyed as she stared in shock at the vision before her.
The lizard-creature was now floating in midair, a solid core of coal-black and blue-white streaks at the center of a phantasmal copy of itself made from raging flames, easily five times the size of its flesh and blood counterpart. A cruel, all-too-human leer split the pyrokinetic lizard's face, and it raised a fist with deliberate purposefulness, causing its fiery exoskeleton to mimic the gesture.
Ukyo backflipped nimbly away at the last second as the enormous flaming fist slammed into the shoreline where she had been standing, molten sand spraying from the impact as it left behind a vitrified crater deep enough that Ukyo could have used it as a bathtub.
"That's a new one!" Ukyo spat as she landed, already brandishing her battle spatula as her mind raced, trying to figure out how to attack a giant made of living fire...
The sharp crack of pistol fire rang out from behind her as Kodachi used her free hand to shoot at the creature. Ukyo expected to see the bullet disappear in a sizzle of melting metal... she was rather surprised, then, when the fire-lizard's head exploded like a honeydew melon in Miriam's jaws, its fiery aura snuffed like a candle in the wind.
The five surviving lizards gawped stupidly - a fatal mistake, as three more shots rang out, each felling its target even as Ukyo sprang forward and brought the sharpened edge of her battle spatula's blade scything through surprisingly soft flesh. Within moments, they were all dead on the ground, leaving the two women the only survivors.
"Okay, how in the hell did ya put that first one down with that little peashooter?" Ukyo demanded, wiping the blood off her spatula's edge with fistfuls of sand even as she turned an interrogative eye on her crewmate.
Kodachi laughed, causing Ukyo to flinch - but not the weasel-thing that looked comfy as a pet cat cradled in Kodachi's arm. "Surely you don't expect me to give away all my secrets, dear? Suffice it to say that I have been putting in some effort with my gunpowder mixtures..."
"Callooh! Callay!" Hooted the furry whatsit, nuzzling happily against Kodachi's cheek.
Ukyo frowned and pointed her now-clean spatula at the little beast. "And don't you think you oughta put that thing down?! Ya don't know what it is!"
"What? Leave this poor, sweet, darling baby all alone in this terrible place? Never! It's coming with me!" Kodachi declared, stowing her pistol in an instant and then hugging the beast tightly, which wagged its tail.
"And that doesn't seem even remotely dangerous to you?" Ukyo drawled, looking at Kodachi through hooded eyes.
"Oh, come on, look at this adorable little face! How can you say no to that?" Kodachi asked, presenting the creature at arm's length with genuine dismay on her face.
Ukyo stared into the creature's bright pink eyes as it wagged its tail gleefully. A shockingly long, slender tongue shot from its elongated, tubular muzzle and licked the chef upside the nose, for all the world like a playful puppy. Behind it, Kodachi smiled with all the innocent joy and love of a little girl just presented with her first pet.
'...Ohh... why do I have to be such a softie at heart?' Ukyo lamented in the privacy of her head, even as she grimaced in reality.
"...Alright, you can keep it. But if it turns inta some kind of chitinous, slime-drooling freakshow an' tries to suck yer brains out, don't come crying to me!" Ukyo warned her, trying to sound as stern as possible as she held up a finger for emphasis.
Kodachi simply beamed brightly and hugged her new pet close again.
"Now, c'mon - we gotta find Ranchan, and I'd bet the next breakfast shift that he'll be heading for Shiki too!"
Team Delta - Miriam/Lilith
"Ohh... my aching... everything..." Miriam moaned, pushing herself up off of the deck and slowly shaking her head, tail flicking once at the other end of her body. She looked around, and smiled proudly to herself.
"Hah, still in one piece! Score one for Shay-Lot construction!" She boasted, even as she took to her feet.
A sibilant hiss of protest split the air as the monstrous sprawling bulk of Lilith in her hybrid form similarly raised her hooded head, looking right at Miriam in disbelief.
"You... Are. Nuts. Who in their right mind would ride a ship falling out of the sky in hopes of steering it into a lake on an island a thousand meters below?" She asked, the question no less emphatic for its obviously rhetorical nature.
"If you thought it was so crazy, then why did you stay?" Miriam asked, smirking softly before she cracked her spine back into proper alignment and winced.
"Because you needed the help! After you, I have the most weight to throw around on this ship," Lilith quipped back, smirking and as she jauntily slapped her long, powerful tail against the deck.
"You most certainly do," Miriam dryly responded, glancing at the zoan's abundant assets as the vibrations of her tail-slap made them bounce and jiggle.
Their pleasant bantering in the face of having survived the latest crazy stunt was sadly interrupted when the wind changed. Miriam squalled like somebody was twisting her tail, hands flying to cover her nose in disgust. Lilith screamed in disgust, wringing her tongue between her fingers in a desperate attempt to scrape the sensitive organ clean of the olfactory assault clinging to it like rancid oil.
"Daft Green!" They wailed in perfect unison.
Lilith snapped back to her human form, sighing in relief as the diminished sense of smell-taste brought her relief from the abominable stench. Unfortunately, Miriam wasn't so lucky; she toughed the smell out for about five seconds, then went charging off into the kitchen, forcing Lilith to hurry after her. By the time she caught up, Miriam had dug out a keg full of pickled gherkins, cracked it open, and was busily soaking half a tablecloth in the vinegary brine. The wotan wrapped it around her face, still dripping salty liquid, and sighed with palpable relief.
"Ugh, it was bad enough in Shiki's palace, but at least there the Daft Greens were far away and the cold numbed the worst of the smell. This is, like, ten times worse," Miriam moaned, slightly muffled beneath her impromptu veil.
"Which is weird, because we're pretty much at the opposite end of the archipelago on the z-axis - why would there be Daft Greens around a lake?" Lilith wondered.
"Doesn't matter. C'mon, let's get this ship over to shore, so we can assess the damage - then we can figure out where we're going to go from here..."
"...Normally, I'd say that sounds like a plan, because I don't want to be here if this ship starts sinking, but... how are we going to get it to the shore? The sails are all in storage in the hold, and the rigging needs to be reconfigured to hang them back up anyway," Lilith diplomatically pointed out, before snatching up a banana from a bowl of fruit that had somehow miraculously remained intact. A deft squeeze popped the fruit from its skin and sent it arcing down her throat.
"I'll take the anchor and pull us," Miriam stated simply. Pausing only to limber up a few joints, in particular cracking her neck in an attempt to dislodge a stubborn crick, she strode purposefully back out onto the deck, with Lilith casually following along behind.
With a grace that belied her hulking frame, Miriam deftly swung herself out over the gunwale and into the water, disturbing the surface as little as possible. Lilith hastened to unwind the anchor chain, allowing Miriam to fasten it around her waist.
"Hey, that looks like a village over there! Maybe we should head for it first?" Lilith called down to her crewmate, gesturing with one arm in the appropriate direction.
"A village? Shiki never said anything about a village... everybody lived and worked in that castle he hosted us in, he said. Wonder who lives here," Miriam mused aloud, even as she began lazily swimming in that direction, dragging the Stormbringer along with seemingly no effort on her part whatsoever.
The village was a small, quaint collection of single-story structures, their white plastered walls and sloping straw roofs giving them a quaint, rustic feel. As the ship pulled in with barely a sound, the two crewmembers of the Kamikaze Pirates took in their destination.
"Strange... where is everybody? I can feel plenty of fish in this lake, but there's nobody out fishing for them..." Miriam softly murmured, as much to herself as to Lilith.
"Maybe because there's nobody here strong enough to perform such a task? Look at those villagers - old women and small children, every last one of them. Hardly the types to perform such labor," Lilith observed, pointing to the wide-eyed locals watching them arrive.
"Are those feathers on their arms? Could they come from the sky-seas?" Miriam wondered, now wading waist-high through the shallows, allowing her to untie the anchor-chain and simply tug the Stormbringer along like a common rowboat.
"It's possible, but no tribe I ever met," Lilith absently replied, putting on her friendliest smile and waving to a cluster of children who were wading in the shallows, who almost instinctively waved back to her.
And that was when dozens of marines suddenly popped up out of hiding, emerging from behind doors and low walls, brandishing their rifles at the two Kamikaze Pirates in a staccato chorus of clicking primers.
"Pirates! Surrender or die!" Cried one marine in a petty officer's coat, the order somewhat undermined by the copious amount of bandages wrapped around his head, leaving only his eyes and mouth exposed.
Miriam stared flatly at the marines, only the swish of her tail through the water betraying any hint of the emotions she might be feeling. Calmly, she dropped the anchor chain and took a step forward. Every rifle was instantly trained on her, but she took a second step, and then a third that came down on the shore with an audible crash, a faint tremor rumbling through the earth as if Miriam was many times her already considerable mass.
"I... am having a bad day. My ship has been shot at, who knows what damage that little tumble might have done to the keel, the smell of Daft Green is giving me a migraine, I've missed lunch and, most importantly of all, my boyfriend is currently lost in the middle of monster-infested wilderness. So... please... give me a reason to hurt you..." The wotan snarled as she deliberately stared down at them, lips curling back to reveal row after row of razor-sharp fangs, tail slapping at the water as she took another thunderous step forward.
Hesitation visibly rippled across the assembled marines faces, whispering and muttering, looking at each other before they collectively lowered their rifles again.
"Oh, come on! Are you men, or mice?!" The mummified petty officer roared angrily at his cowed subordinates. They flinched, looking from him to Miriam, visibly trying to decide which of them was the more intimidating.
"Wait a moment, I recognize you! Yes, you there! You were the little pervert who tried to cop a feel when I was crushing you back on Hestavar!" Lilith suddenly called out, pointing at one marine.
His fellows nearest to him turned to face him as one, their expressions varying from amusement to amazement to appalled, the subject of the attention blushing in embarrassment.
"Come to think of it... some of you smell familiar..." Miriam added, loudly sniffing for emphasis - the dramatic gesture being undermined when she promptly started gagging on the scent of Daft Green.
Undeterred, she pointed dramatically at the assembled marines once she had her dry heaving under control. "You remember what we did there! You really want to take us on again? I don't see any zoans here to help you out, and they weren't much help then, either!"
That statement seemed to knock the wind out of their collective sails, as the rifles collectively dropped back down to the ground. Miriam scoffed and stepped forward, this time without the dramatic, earth-shaking footfall.
"What are you idiots even doing here? Last we saw you, you were burning foam away from Hestavar with your tails between your legs!" She asked, looking right at the bandage-wrapped petty officer, evidently the highest authority the marines had available to them at the moment.
He stared at her, trying to muster a defiant air, before slumping and sighing hugely. "It's all that wretched Shiki's fault... we were sailing back towards the nearest portway back to the Grand Line, when we nearly ran aground on Merville as it rose up out of the White Sea in front of us. My men did their duty! But..."
"Shiki kicked all your asses. He's a scary bastard," Miriam acknowledged flippantly.
"Scary, nothing - the man used to fight with Gold Roger," spat the petty officer.
Miriam stiffened, icy fingers playing down her spine, her eyes growing wide. "He... He's that strong?!"
Her voice was quiet, muffled with shock; though only a teenager by giant standards, she was still far older than the Great Pirate Age by a considerable stretch. Which meant that she remembered the legendary First King of the Pirates from her childhood. The news that Shiki had been considered a rival to Roger was enough to chill her to the bone.
The petty officer nodded grimly. "Crushed us without even trying. Dragged the Commodore and the Captains off to that palace of his, then dumped us all here. I don't know why he didn't just kill us..."
"He has a plan, that's for certain. Whatever damage that steering wheel did to his brain, he's no fool," Lilith interjected absently. Her attention was fixed on a small cluster of children under the nearby dock, who had decided the grownups were boring and resumed their own private play - which largely consisted of trying to playfully corral some surprisingly large but evidently docile octopuses.
"Hey, Miriam? Is this a saltwater lake?" The skylander called to the wotan, brow furrowed as she stared suspiciously at the children's playmates.
"Uh, no? It's fresh - not a hint of salt," She called, giving Lilith a confused look.
"Really now? I thought those looked familiar, then," Lilith smiled smugly to herself, her voice a purr of contentment as she nodded.
With the casual grace of a dancer, she flung herself over the side and into the water, ignoring the way it lapped around her ankles as she sloshed over to the confused children.
"Hey, kids; wanna see something really cool...?"
Team Beta - Ryoga/Dyna/Umok
"Your Moonwalk skills are still inadequate."
Ryoga sat up from the crater-like end of the trail he'd gouged through the grassy plain with his face, spat out a heaping mouthful of mud, and grumpily huffed in acknowledgement of what Dyna had said. He clambered to his feet, brushing off the worst of the dust with his hands.
"So... that happened. Now what?" He asked, the question only half rhetorical.
The brassy humps of Dyna's shoulders lifted and fell as she experimentally flexed fingers and battle-claw in a strangely human gesture. "Logic would dictate that we ascend to the highest island. The captain will doubtlessly seek revenge against Shiki, and our assistance may be required."
Ryoga thought it over for a second, and then smiled cruelly, cracking his knuckles dramatically as he said, "Well, I can't let just any bozo think they can get away with attacking me. I mean, Ranma, sure, they can beat the shit out of him anytime, he deserves it, but when they aim at me, that's crossing the line!"
"Your loyalty to your captain is truly a sight to behold," Dyna declared, her typical mechanical monotone somehow reaching new levels of dryness, the sardonic attitude of her words washing off of Ryoga like water off of a duck's back.
"While I certainly don't object to the sentiment, I have to redirect you both; we need to head downwards. To the lowest island."
Man and machine turned as one to regard Umok, the imp floating silently in the air and staring calmly back at them as he took a final drag on his cigar before spitting the ashen stump onto the long green grass.
"...Okay, I'll bite; why?" Ryoga demanded bluntly.
Umok didn't answer at first, instead fishing out another of those repugnant cigars that he was forever smoking... but this time he didn't light it, instead looking at it with all three of his eyes as he turned it over and over in his hands.
"I... am no seer. To be honest, I hate messing with that aspect of divination magic. Too airy-fairy for me. But that doesn't mean I can't see a few things... believe me, we are needed down there."
And, having said that, he finally stuck the cigar in his mouth and lit it with a greenish-black flame he summoned with a snap of his finger.
Ryoga gave the imp a look that could have curdled the milk in a cow's udder. "...Seriously? Do you think I just fell off the turnip truck?"
Umok and Dyna both looked askance at that statement.
"Do you really believe that I'm going to just do what you say because you say it's due to magic crap? Hell, I'm not even so sure you can do anything magic! We've been sailing this...this lunatic funfair designer's nightmare of an ocean for months now, and I've yet to see anything supernatural from you! I don't think you can even do magic!" Ryoga spat, thrusting an accusatory finger at Umok.
"...Then what do you call his persistent denial of gravity?" Dyna asked Ryoga, and there was no mistaking the unspoken inference of, "You idiot" in her tone.
"A basic chi trick! Shampoo's great-grandma could probably do it if she wanted to show off like that!" Ryoga immediately replied, brushing aside Dyna's critique with an aplomb that Kodachi would have found eerily reminiscent of her brother.
Umok calmly blew a smoke ring. "You want to see some magic? Very well..."
He began to chant softly, alien syllables that made no sense to Ryoga, gesturing with his free hand and sketching bizarre glyphs in the air with his smoking cigar at the same time. The wind suddenly picked up, rushing past Ryoga with an unnatural chill given the hot, arid climate that they had been enjoying up until that moment. The grass began to rustle, the susurrus of leafy stems seeming almost like a chorus of ghostly voices whispering in alien tongues. Sparks of iridescent lightning began to play over Umok's body - first one or two at a time, but within heartbeats they were like a swarm of glowing spiders crawling feverishly across his body, sliding through the folds of his robes and leaping jauntily from the tip of his conical hat.
As the imp's chanting reached its crescendo, an image of a great padlock wrought from twisting coils of silver smoke and blue fire shimmered into view. It quivered, cracks forming in its ghostly surface, and then violently shattered apart into a cascade of twinkling shards that burst into crimson flames and then guttered out like embers in the wind. As they burned, the wind died down and the chanting stopped, leaving all as it had been before Umok had begun working his magic.
Somehow, even through the darkness and wrappings that perpetually shrouded Umok's face, they could tell he was smiling. Maybe it was the way that his three eyes glittered in the shadows of his hat. He sucked in a deep breath, then threw back his head and roared.
"FFFFUUUUUUUU-"
Somewhere else in Merveille...
Nabiki's ear twitched, and she looked up from the torn throat of the grizzly-sized, scale-armored squirrel she had been greedily exsanguinating. She burped softly before she asked, "Did anyone else hear that?"
Ranma also glanced around from where he had just finished using a body-slam to impale his own monstrosity - a wolverine's front half leading to the tail of a trout, the whole thing easily the size of a polar bear - onto a broken redwood. He ignored its agonized death flops and nodded as he confirmed, "Actually, yeah, I can hear it too!"
"That loudest profanity Shampoo ever heard. Even louder than auntie Lotion when she give birth to surprise triplets," Shampoo marveled from where she had just finished eviscerating a spiky-shelled land crab the size of a bull. Then she cracked open the claws and started stuffing herself on the succulent meat inside, because waste not, want not!
Back again...
"-UUUUUUUuuuuuuuuckkkkk!"
Umok slowly lowered his head and sighed in relief. "Oh, that feels so good! Talk about a weight off your mind... Starting to worry I'd never scrape up enough power to break that stupid curse..."
Ryoga suddenly found his face hitting the dirt hard enough to leave an imprint detailed enough that you probably could have made a decent plaster mask in it. He clawed his way back upright, spitting a mouthful of mud to the side before roaring in incredulity, "That's it?! That stupid lightshow was just to get back your ability to swear?! What good is that supposed to do anybody?!"
"HHHRRRROOOOOAAAANNNKKK!"
All three of them looked up as Merveille heaved forth yet another of its manifold horrors. Loping out of the forest, smashing aside smaller trees as it barreled towards them, came a bizarre melding of grizzly bear and goose that Shiki's mutagen evidently had decided wasn't enough of an abomination against nature, as it had seen fit to equip it with not one, but seven heads. Seven sets of beaks gaped open at the peak of seven long, serpentine necks, seven tongues lined with barbed fangs thrusting past the already terrifying fangs lining the edges of those beaks as a discordant chorus of bellowed honks split the air. Seven pairs of mad red eyes fixated on Ryoga as it barreled forward, wing-arms and webbed hindlegs working in unison to propel its massive body - easily fifteen feet long from shoulders to rump - across the ground.
Ryoga cursed softly to himself, readying his ever-present umbrella to be used as a weapon. Dyna raised her own left arm, armor plates sliding to reveal concealed gun barrels made from her former rotary rifle.
But Umok beat them both to the punch.
"Spatial Cracks!" The imp declared sharply, fingers curling into a splayed, upwards claw. There was a sound like glass breaking, mirroring the way that the thin air above Umok's palm seemed to... for lack of a better word, shatter - thin glowing streaks eerily reminiscent of cracks forming in a broken pane of glass blooming into a crazy tangle that shimmered with an unnerving iridescence.
A contemptuous flick of the wrist launched the glowing lines right at the charging bear-goose-thing, which barreled headslong into the attack. A decision it instantly regretted, skidding to a halt and rearing up with a many-mouthed shriek of pain as its flesh ruptured and tore, blood geysering into the air and one of its heads actually falling free of its body as the eldritch light tore into it like a spider's web made of knives.
"Elemental Cascade!"
Pinpricks of technicolor fire suddenly bloomed into life around the beast, coalescing into a series of short-lived holes in space. Each was only about the size of a baseball, but that was large enough; billowing flames gushed from one, a lightning bolt was spat from a second, and jagged crystals of ice so cold it steamed in the air spewed from a third. Burned, shocked, and frozen, the creature screamed its agony and flailed blindly at the air itself, its six remaining heads stretching upwards in a gesture half-evasive and half-intimidating.
"Spatial Slash!"
Another of the thin, rippling, eerily luminescent lines sprang into being as Umok made a horizontal swiping gesture with his finger. It flew through the air and caught the beast in all six of its necks... which parted as cleanly as meat run through a deli slicer. The cuts were so sharp that even as its heads fell to the earth like grisly flowers, the body lumbered forward, claws reaching blindly for its killer before its mutated biology bent the knee to reason and it collapsed into a lifeless heap on the forest floor.
Ryoga and Dyna stared silently at the still-bleeding carcass, and then, after several moments that seemed to stretch into an awkward infinity, they turned to look at Umok.
Shrouded face or not, the imp practically radiated smug the way a blast furnace radiated heat. He took a long draw on his cigar, and then languidly exhaled smoke before he deigned to speak.
"Something I have chosen to withhold until now; that censorship curse? Also impeded my efforts to access my offensive spells. I will admit my reserves are still quite drained, permitting me access to only the more... basic... tricks in my arsenal, well, I'm sure you can concede that I am no mere trickster, hm? No fraud seeking to separate you from the fruits of your brow?"
Ryoga slowly nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
"Then let us be off; your destiny awaits, Ryoga Hibiki..."
Team Epsilon - Harumi/Penelope
'I... am so conflicted right now...' Penelope thought to herself. It was a somewhat mad train of thought, admittedly, but it wasn't every day she was rescued from the deck of a ship seemingly falling to its doom.
'I have always dreamed of being swept off my feet by a handsome man... okay, Harumi may be more accurately described as a beautiful man, but do I really care? ...No. No, I do not. He is pretty, and kind, and sweet, and honestly, I think he might just be the man of my dreams... but he is also in love with someone else. Now I think I understand the plight of Kodachi and the others more succinctly... This knowledge does not comfort me. And Miriam, she is my friend - and I have had precious few of those! I cannot hurt her by making a move on the man she loves!'
"Lady Penelope? Are you okay?" Harumi's voice cut through the fog of her thoughts, and she looked up into his eyes, letting herself drown in their dark, warm depths, a smitten smile unconsciously blossoming on her lips.
'But... surely she cannot blame me for enjoying this moment, while I can?'
"I am being just fine, mon ami 'Arumi. S'ank you for saving me," She sighed in genuine gratitude and a touch of longing as she permitted herself the luxury of burying her head in the crook of his shoulder, her tail instinctually curling around his hip. His scent filled her nostrils; herbal and earthy with just a touch of tropical flowers, mixed with the distinct undertone of Miriam's scent - salt and sawdust spiced with gunpowder and blood.
Harumi's cheeks flushed with warmth, his ever-present smile twitching a bit as the admittedly quite beautiful skunk-woman wrapped herself around him in a rather intimate embrace.
"Ah...Lady Penelope? It was nothing - I know you're still struggling with Moonwalk. But...Y-You can get down now..."
He'd almost swear later that he heard a soft, disappointed sigh as the mink's breath ruffled his long hair, but Penelope nodded - the gesture somewhat hard to make out when she was still pressed face-first into his collarbone - and gently unwound herself from him before stepping gracefully down to the soft, leaf-strewn earth of the forest floor.
"So, what now?" She asked him politely, tail sweeping grandiosely as if in emphasis of her words.
Harumi looked guiltily first upward, towards the highest of the manifold islands making up Merveille, and then out and down towards its lowest counterpart. "I...I am sorry, Lady Penelope. I know the captain will be heading upwards to face Shiki, and I should be going to his aid, but... I cannot leave Lady Miriam alone! I have to see if she's alright!"
Penelope simply smiled and placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. "Ze captain would be understanding, Harumi. Come, let us go and find her..."
Harumi started, looking at her with naked shock. "You want to come with me? But you could get in trouble!"
"I cannot simply be leaving you alone - these woods are far too dangerous!" Penelope asserted in response.
Almost as if it had been waiting for such a statement, a long sinuous shape suddenly shot down from the canopy, wrapped itself tightly around Harumi's upper body, and yanked him up into the trees.
"Harumi!" Penelope cried, but before she could try to leap after him, a second writhing appendage exploded out of the leaves and dove upon her like a starving hawk after a mouse. Quick as lightning, supple as an eel, it wrapped itself around her in a grip that was strong as steel, pinning her arms against her sides so she couldn't reach for her trusty machete before yanking her from her feet and into the treetops.
Leaves smacked into the skunk-woman's face, catching between her teeth and flooding her tongue with an awful acrid taste. Such petty irritants faded away in the face of being confronted with her and Harumi's assailant.
High in the canopy, concealed within the dense leaves and branches, hunkered an enormous, malformed ape, easily the size of their erstwhile wotan companion. Instead of limbs, it had four tentacles; two where its legs should be, wrapping themselves into a complicated knot around the branches and trunk to anchor the creature in place, and two more where its arms should be, coiled around the two pirates. With a start, Penelope realized that it wasn't simply a case of replacing the ape's limbs with those of an octopus - rather, each limb had somehow lost its bones and stretched to several times longer than it should be, complete with those iconic hand-like paws still twitching and clutching at the end of each writhing limb.
Somehow, that little detail made the mutations all the more grotesque.
But what was far more concerning was the way the beast was looking between the two of them, rivers of drool running over its protruding chin. Black, rubbery lips curled back like the furling sails of a ship, exposing triple pairs of saber-like tusks in both upper and lower jaws. It almost seemed to be grinning sadistically as it drew the struggling Harumi closer to its face, teeth parting hungrily in anticipation.
Penelope watched as Harumi fought in vain to break free of the mutant's grip, and felt a wave of rage wash over her. Frantic sparks began to dance under her skin, hot coals sizzling and popping in her stomach, heartbeat thundering in her brain like the beating of war-drums. Plump, kissable lips (if she did say so herself - not that she would have ever been so bold!) curled back into a feral snarl, teeth glinting white as her eyes began to glow like tiny spheres of ball-lightning.
"Libère-le ou meurs, sale créature!" She screamed at the top of her lungs, even as her whole body lit up in an incandescent aura of pulsing electricity.
The mutant ape howled in agony as its whole body lit up with surging waves of killing energy, high voltage searing through its nerves and burning into its organs. One of its eyes burst like an overripe pustule, sparks dancing between its tusks as foul-smelling smoke and steam billowed from its body. Its grip went slack and it plummeted from its former perch in the canopy, branches tearing under its bulk before it finally slammed into the ground, its arms falling limp and releasing its intended victims to land beside its remains with considerably more grace.
Harumi looked at the smoking ape-beast with eyes wide in wonder, gasping in amazement, "Lady Penelope - that was incredible!"
A soft 'thump' sound drew his attention to his companion, and he recoiled in shock as he realized she was laying face-down on the ground.
"My lady! Are you okay?!" He cried in dismay, even as he raced over to her side.
The skunk-featured mink moaned softly before she blinked her bleary eyes and gave him a feeble smile. "S-Sorry, Harumi... that was taking more out of me than I was thinking... I am not making ze habit of using that trick..."
"What even was that?! How'd you do that?" An amazed Harumi asked, even as he stooped to scoop her into his arms in a bridal carry.
"If I am being honest, I am not sure. Ze texts on ze Minks say they can wield ze power of ze storm, but they are rather short on ze details, non? I try to avoid it if I am having ze choice, because, well, I am not knowing how to use it properly yet..." Penelope explained in a soft, tired voice.
Harumi blinked softly to himself as he let Penelope's explanation sink in, before his expression firmed and he nodded to himself in confirmation of his decision.
"Well, that settles it; you'll have to come with me, then. Hang on tight, Lady Penelope..."
As he jogged decisively towards the edge of the island, Penelope chuckled sleepily as she snuggled up closer to him. "That, I can most certainly do," she sleepily murmured.
Team Gamma
"Back, foul creature, back, I say!" Snarled Kodachi, her words punctuated by the thunder of her pistol as she blasted away repeatedly. "What manner of depraved lunatic attempts to fuse a hermit crab with a bear, anyway?!"
Her shots bounced harmlessly off of the beast's head with metallic chimes as the creature - a six-legged bear with patches of chitinous armor and eyes on extendable stalks, its lower body hidden inside a mass of large rocks that had been somehow welded together into a makeshift shell - cautiously stalk-dragged itself forward on its four long lower legs, its primary limbs snapping their tri-fingered crab-like claws.
"And you could be doing something far more useful!" Kodachi added irritably, firing a shot that hit the bearmit crab right between the eyes and scowling as it bounced off of concealed chitin. Her new pet danced manically around her feet, all three pairs of legs working to some alien rhythm as it hooted warnings that the bigger mutant promptly ignored.
"It's not exactly my fault! How was I s'posed know this thing's shell was held together with some kind of... beeswax glue! My spatula's stuck!" Ukyo spat back, her whole body glistening with sweat as she strained with all her considerable might to dislodge her beloved weapon.
'...My word, look at those muscles at play. What a woman...' Kodachi couldn't help but cringe a little at the sudden intrusive thought, but even as she mentally had it dragged away into a dark corner of her mind in anticipation of being shot, there was a sucking sound like a million pieces of peanut-butter-side-down pieces of toast being peeled from a shag rug all at once as Ukyo ripped her weapon free. A rock the size of her head and what looked a lot like half-again as much bear fur came with it, but details, details.
Even as Ukyo brandished it and screamed triumphantly at the sky, the creature she was riding took offense to this assault on its mobile den. Its largely bear-like muzzle unfurled like some nightmare flower into a gaping array of chitinous petals lined with fangs as it roared hungrily, trying awkwardly to twist itself around so it could lash up at Ukyo with its paw-pincers.
It's possible that the creature might have regretted opening its mouth around someone who was a dead-eye shot with high explosive-laced dart weaponry. But such musings were the very definition of academic.
"Roses of Hell!"
Three black rose darts disappeared into the open gullet, the many-flanged jaws snapping shut instinctively as their sharp tips pierced the soft flesh at the back of its throat. This crushed the roses tipping each dart, and set off the small but powerful incendiary devices concealed within them. The end result being the bearmit crab's head disintegrating in a burst of fire, bony shrapnel, liquified flesh and steaming blood.
Even as its headless corpse collapsed to the ground, Ukyo sprang nimbly from its back to land at Kodachi's side. Her upper lip curled in disdain at the unwanted attachment to her weapon, and she went to bash it into dust against another boulder pile... Then she thought better of it and instead crushed it to powder with a squeeze of her hand.
She scowled openly at the patch of dust that remained stubbornly clinging to the face of her spatula's blade. "Tch. I'll be an hour or more scrubbing this clean..."
Kodachi winced in sympathy as a fellow blade-wielder, and pro-offered, "I have a special oil in my room that I use as part of my sword maintenance. It should dissolve the glue and leave it clean in no time at all."
Ukyo blinked in surprise, but her lips curled in a tiny smile before she realized it. "Well... thanks, sugar, that'd be mighty helpful."
"What I don't understand is... if that bear-thing made its shell from bee's wax... where did it get the wax in the first place?" Kodachi wondered, idly reloading her pistol as she spoke.
A thunderous humming noise suddenly filled the air, both girls snapping into defensive postures as the droning of hideous wings swelled into a deafening cacophony. From the forest shrouding the lake exploded a swarm of enormous bees, swollen to the size of sheep and bristling with venom-dribbling stingers, eerily human eyes blazing with hatred as they hurtled madly towards the pair of girls.
"You had to ask..." Ukyo sighed, her spatula already starting to glow fiery red. "Hot Plate Special!"
Team Beta
The ostrich-like bird stamped its feet, its red eyes throbbing with excitement as it spread its wings and shrieked, before spitting a writhing, slime-dripping worm at Ryoga like a biological bullet.
"KWEEEEHHH! Hrrrk-ptooie!"
Ryoga snapped open his trusty umbrella, blocking the ballistic worm and grimacing in disgust as it wetly splattered against his steel-reinforced parasol's membrane. "Eeewww... Why would you spit worms?!"
"Recommend avoidance of direct contact. Parasitic potential beyond safe parameters," Dyna coolly observed, indifferent to the choking, indignant flailing of the ostrich-thing she had seized by the neck in her left hand. Three metallic clangs rang sharply through the air as it tried to peck her wrist, whereupon a simple flex of the gynoid's fingers broke its spine with a gristly crunch.
"...These islands are messed up," Ryoga complained, side-stepping an attempt by his own ostrich to disembowel him before crushing its skull with one blow of his umbrella.
Team Epsilon
Harumi took a deep, slow breath, chanting a mantra that Shampoo had passed on to him as he angled his blades and exhaled softly, mind and body united as one to repel the oncoming attack. He was intimately aware of Penelope at his back, machete clutched in both hands, knees bent as she tensed in anticipation to strike.
Surrounding them were dozens of massive toads, each the size of a basketball. An eerily human malice burned in their eyes, and the bloated throbbing pustules on their backs glowed red, like hot coals.
"Croak," went one of the toads, before it made a flying leap right at Harumi's face.
Harumi's longer sword flashed out, a gleam of silver in the dark, gloomy surroundings of the marshy forest, and intercepted the creature, splitting it cleanly in half. Those two halves sailed almost majestically past the pair of pirates... and then exploded in mid-air into twin pillars of fire several times the height of either of them.
"...This could be a little tricky," Penelope calmly observed.
And then the toads began leaping at them, and there was no time to talk.
Team Alpha
Ranma, Shampoo and Nabiki perched like a trio of gargoyles in the branches of a petrified tree, watching the battle taking place below them.
On one side, squirrels the size of toddlers with crimson-streaked black fur and tails that burned like braziers screeched defiantly, gnashing iron fangs and launching fireballs at their opponents with deft flicks of those self-same fiery tails.
On the other side, ants the size of Dachshunds swarmed relentlessly towards them, bloated green abdomens audibly sloshing as they swayed with each step. One spread its mandibles wide and vomited a streamer of sizzling emerald fluid that caught a fire-squirrel square in the face and reduced it to a bleached-clean skeleton steadily dissolving into a puddle on the stony ground. It had only a brief moment to enjoy whatever insectile facsimile of triumph it might be capable of before a fireball caught it squarely and cooked it into ashes in a second, toxic-looking fumes exploding from its corpse as the acid in its abdomen was flash-boiled in an instant.
As the two armies of small but deadly creatures tore into one another with savage abandon, fire and acid traded back and forth, slashing claws and gnashing incisors against ripping mandibles, the three teenage pirates watched the carnage from on high.
"...Is Shampoo only one what think these make good pokemon?" The Chinese Amazon wondered aloud.
"No, I can see it. A fire squirrel would be pretty unique... heck, even like this, they're cuter than Pikachu," Nabiki observed. Then she winced as one of the squirrels bit an acid ant in half and amended, "In a mindless killing machine sort of way."
"Honestly? The squirrels remind me of Kodachi, for some reason, not sure why," Ranma confessed, rubbing his chin as he watched the carnage, clearly lost in his own thoughts. Then he shrugged his shoulders. "Anyway, this ain't getting us nowhere closer to Shiki, so let's take off and leave 'em to it."
"Right behind you."
"Shampoo with you, airen."
As dusk falls...
Shiki sat contentedly in his throne in the control room, letting the babble of voices as his minions scurried to attend the various tasks he had charged them with wash over him like the soothing waters of a warm bath, soaking up their obedience and their underlying fear like a daisy drinking in the noonday sun.
"How goes the recruitment drive, Dr. Indigo?" He asked, lazily extending an open hand to his side, where the doctor was calmly picking his way through a bowl of fruit.
Indigo paused from his munching to toss a kiwano to his captain before he made his report. "All is proceeding according to schedule, captain! We have scoured Paradise for the cream of the crop in order to assemble the new Golden Lion Pirates. Not a single pirate captain was considered unless they had a bounty worth at least fifty million beries, as well as a crew of at least a hundred soldiers, and I'm pleased to report that we have managed to win the interest of the vast majority of crews meeting those conditions. Sadly, those exceptions do include the so-called Supernovas..."
"Jihahaha, it's no matter," Shiki chuckled softly, splitting the spiky fruit in half between his thumbs so he could suck out the seed-laced green flesh within. "Those are the most powerful and promising of these youngbloods; if they had the drive to get as far as they did, I doubted they would be willing to bend the knee to a relic like me. Still, we'll crush them if they interfere with us... Now, how is the loading coming?"
"Also proceeding well, Captain Shiki!" Indigo's facepaint accentuated the sincerity of his grin as he responded, half-peeled banana frozen halfway to his mouth. "The last crews are coming aboard as we speak. They should be settled into their respective reception halls in the palace within the next ten minutes or so..."
"Good, good, then it's getting about time to get this show on the road..."
Shiki grinned to himself as he heaved himself upright, metallic clinking echoing over the hubbub of the control room as he began purposefully striding towards the exit, a huge, sinister grin nearly splitting his face in half. Indigo lingered just long enough to cram the whole banana into his mouth, peel and all, then jumped up and ran after his captain, the sounds of rapid-fire flatulence ringing out like a barrage of pistol-shots.
"Are those really the only shoes you own?!"
To be continued...
And here is where we'll stop, but hopefully this has whet your appetites for the true finale! Yeah, not gonna lie, Strong World is a tough movie to adapt; it's very action-centric for a One Piece tale, and it doesn't help that we already largely covered Strong World's story beats on our first visit to the floating archipelago of Merveille a good, what, ten chapters back? I promise, I'm going to work as hard as I can to get the second half of this story out as soon as I possibly can! Who knows, I might actually reach Sabaody before Oda reveals Laughtale...