4

I wished hard on a Chinese satellite

His routine was monotonous. Ryoga spent most of his time filling his thoughts thinking about what other people might currently be up to—because they sure as hell weren't reconstructing a new, sturdier shelter on an island in the middle of nowhere, like he was. Or, he sure hoped they weren't as unfortunate as him.

It was early June. Probably. Everything was a bit of a give-or-take kind of thing around here, most especially time. Ryoga doesn't like the idea of losing track of time, however. Tallying the days on a rock or something would only make this place feel even more like a prison cell, so he prefers to just try to do the math in his head. It also helped to have a general knowledge of the seasons passing by the changes in the weather patterns.

Ranma's birthday was coming up this month. Three months ago, back at the end of March, Ranma and Akane would have graduated from Furinkan High. Ryoga wondered if Ranma even managed to graduate along with Akane—he probably got by on the skin of his teeth, just like he did with everything.

What would the two of them be doing, now that they had graduated? Ranma would no doubt be thrilled to finally be done with school. He had never shown any interest in continuing education past high school, never talked about trying to apply for universities. Akane had always been so smart, and really cared about her education. Maybe she would follow in her sister Nabiki's footsteps, and go to university, too.

That could put their engagement at a real standstill, thought Ryoga. Akane away at school, and Ranma left to his own devices back at the Tendo Dojo. And if Ranma still hadn't gotten the whole Fiancée Situation dealt with then Ranma's other "betrothed" would certainly waste no time taking advantage of Akane's absence.

Unless, Ranma panicked at the last second and went to school with Akane after all. He was such a hopeless dope, no doubt the thought of Akane going off to university and leaving him all alone would be enough of a fire under his ass to get him to flounder his way through some entrance exams. Ranma did always work well under pressure; maybe that would be enough to let him pass the exams and not be left a lonely ronin, stuck at home with just his father, Mr. Tendo, and Kasumi to keep him company.

Not that Kasumi's company was anywhere close to a bad thing, but even that wasn't enough to spare Ranma from going slowly insane at being left with only the family patriarchs, who would likely be constantly hounding Ranma to hurry the hell up and marry Akane already so she could come home from university and they could start bringing in students to the dojo.

It would probably only take a week before Ranma was slapping a ring on Akane's finger, just to spare him from their father's grief.

Perhaps it was a little weird, to be so concerned with the affairs of others. When he had still been crushing on Akane, the progression of Ranma and Akane's romantic strifes had been something of great concern to Ryoga. That was no longer the case, but Ryoga still felt an obligation to see to Akane's happiness all the same. He feels incredibly helpless, stuck here on this island while Ranma is certainly back at home still acting like a huge jerk and upsetting Akane every chance he can get.

Ryoga hoped that Akane does wind up leaving Ranma in the dust to go to university; it would be nothing he didn't deserve. Serves him right for leaving her hanging, being a damn coward and not confessing to her sooner! Ryoga had never had the patience for Ranma's flightiness over his own feelings, and being on the island only intensified the feeling. Now Ryoga was only too aware of how time is incredibly fleeting, and that this one life they've all got on this earth shouldn't be wasted, and nobody should be wasting their precious little time pussyfooting around when they could be spending their lives with their loved ones.

Even though Ryoga had very little faith in the fact Ranma finally screwed his head on straight and married Akane already, he found himself imagining that was the case, anyway. Even if it wasn't true, it was still a nice thing to think about.

He could live vicariously in that happiness, and forget about where he was for a little while.

The island was smaller.

Ryoga was almost certain it was getting smaller.

He wasn't an expert geographer, of course, but even someone like him couldn't spend two-hundred and ninety-five days (and counting) in a single spot and not start to notice even the smallest of changes to his surroundings.

At first, he had thought it was only the changing of the tides. But now, after several laps around the entire perimeter of the island, he was convinced that the shape and size had changed over the last couple of weeks.

Would the island eventually disappear beneath the sea altogether? Maybe the sediment was too weak to sustain the land mass or something, and the sand and pebbles would eventually get buried beneath the waves. There had been some heavy rains again, too. What if one bad storm destroyed the island and washed him out to sea again? What if he wound up on yet another island, even farther away from home? He would have even less of a chance of being found than he'd already had.

It wouldn't do him any good to catastrophize. He had promised himself to think positively from now on. He didn't want to fall back into the same deep pit of despair he'd been in several months ago.

Old habits die hard.

The island was buffeted with multiple thunderstorms over the next few weeks, but remained relatively intact to Ryoga's great relief. It was an even greater relief when the storms finally dissipated and came to an end.

One of the coconut trees had gotten struck by lightning not very far from him. In hindsight, it had been pretty cool to witness first-hand. But hindsight requires not getting struck by lightning, which he had come uncomfortably close to being, so in the actual moment, Ryoga's thoughts were very far from thinking of how cool lightning striking a tree actually looked in real life.

His new shelter had held up decently through the storms, a true test of its endurance. And good thing too, because if all those hours of labour getting cooked under the tropical summer sun had gone to waste by a nasty thunderstorm tearing it all apart, Ryoga would have been righteously pissed.

The cut on his left hand had finally healed up well enough that Ryoga could remove his makeshift T-shirt bandaging. One of the strips of fabric had been repurposed to create a wind vane, which was a stick with the fabric strip tied to the top which was built into the roof of his shelter. Of course, Ryoga couldn't exactly tell if the wind was blowing from the southwest or northeast or what—he didn't figure knowing that would do him much good, anyway. But, he did figure it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a gauge for the wind speed, as that could potentially help him predetermine and plan for incoming storms, or even just rainfall. He had kind of just been caught by surprise on all the storms so far, and then would go about in a rush putting out coconuts to catch the rainwater. Ryoga never wanted to find himself caught without drinkable water.

He'd finally managed to work out a decent method for boiling water, too. With nothing but all the time in the world on his hands, Ryoga had been able to hone his Bakusai Tenketsu technique even further to become more precise. It was supposed to just be a construction technique to clear away rubble and debris, but if Ranma had taught him anything over their years of rivalry in the arts it was that no technique only had one cookie-cutter way of being performed. There was always a chance to revise or reimagine any move, and the Breaking Point was no different.

The only way Ryoga knew how to describe it was to look for a point beyond the breaking point. And when he had figured that out, natural objects no longer shattered or split into pieces. His vivid imagination was a large part of the success of the revised technique; it allowed him to visualize the object within the material, and essentially carve it out of wood or stone to create what he needed.

It was how he had built his new-and-improved shelter, a stone bowl, and a set of wooden wished he'd figured it out months ago. Would have saved him a lot of trouble.

"Now, it just needs a name," Ryoga muttered to himself one day, as he used his wood tongs to pluck rocks from the red-hot coals of his campfire and drop them into the stone bowl, currently filled with seawater.

He hummed thoughtfully, tapping at his cheek as he rested his chin in his palm and watched the hot rocks cause the water to burble and steam. "Let's see…maybe an antonym?"

Ryoga dropped another rock into the bowl. The water bubbled even more ferociously.

"Fixing Point? Mending Point? It just doesn't sound as cool…and I'm not really fixing anything, I'm just making an object out of the material instead of shattering it to bits. Let's see…"

Ryoga dropped another rock from the fire into the bowl. Plunk—pssssshhhh .

"Shaping Point, maybe? Changing Point?"

Ryoga sighed.

"Bet Ranma could come up with something good. He always came up with a revised technique and its name right in the midst of a fight." Ryoga said wistfully, "Hell, pretty sure he came up with three variations for Hiryū Shōten Ha in his fight with Saffron alone ."

Ryoga stuck the tongs into the sand, resting his elbows on his knees as he hunched over to watch as the seawater in the stone bowl boiled over, turning into clean, drinkable…

Ryoga perked up, blinking rapidly as realization dawned on his face.

"Turning!" Ryoga crowed loudly, "Turning Point! Senkai Tenketsu!"

Ryoga leapt to his feet in eureka so quickly that his foot stuck and overturned the stone bowl, dumping his freshly-boiled water out into the sand. Ryoga stared down at the knocked over bowl for a long moment. The euphoria was drained from his body as quickly as the white sand drank up his water.

"Damn it…" Ryoga groaned.

Grumbling under his breath, Ryoga picked up the stone bowl and stomped over to the shoreline to collect more seawater.

Well, there was good news and bad news.

The good news was that the island did not continue to shrink. Once Ryoga had noticed the changes in the land mass, he'd set out stakes all around the island so as to keep track, and see if the sand sediments retracted any further past the stake marks.

Over the following weeks, other than for low and high tides, there were no permanent changes to the island's shape and size. It still didn't explain why the island had shrunk, but the fact that it did not seem to be getting any smaller was good enough for Ryoga.

And then, even better news: the island got larger. Once Ryoga had noticed the sand reaching past the stakes, he started to go back and check every day, and then double check at low and high tide just to assure himself he wasn't imagining it. Over the next few days, the sand extended beyond each of the stake marks in practically all directions. Ryoga couldn't be certain when exactly the island went back to its original size, if it ever did. But the island indeed got bigger again, and stayed bigger.

It wasn't like a slightly-bigger island meant more food or resources. It just meant there was more sand today than there had been several days before. But it also meant the land wasn't shrinking, that there was no threat of the island—and Ryoga along with it—being swallowed up by the sea.

Then, there was the bad news: it was September 25th.

He had been on the island for a year. An entire year, and there had hardly been any planes or ships. And the ones Ryoga had seen didn't see him in return.

He hadn't been in a plane crash, or a shipwreck. There was nobody that knew where he was, or where he'd been going, meaning there was no way for anyone to even have a generalized search area. And considering everyone that knew him also knew that he was directionally-challenged and spent long periods away from home, the fact he'd been gone for a whole year wasn't really all that out of the ordinary for him.

A select few may be starting to wonder by now, perhaps. Those casks he sent will have reached the Tendo Dojo by now, surely. They'll know that Ryoga had gone to China.

But China was the world's third largest country, with a land mass of 9.6 million square kilometres. There was 360 million square kilometres of seawater on the planet. 71% of Earth, nothing but salty blue stretching out for ages. And Ryoga had no goddamned clue what part of all that sea he was even in. Had he even started swimming in the right direction to begin with? Maybe he should have asked someone before he just jumped into the water at the first sighting of the ocean.

To get to the Sea of Japan, he would have had to be in the…think, think …

Ranma had told him something to remember this easier once. What had he said? Ryoga scrunched his eyes tightly shut as he strained his brain and tried to conjure up the memory…

Ranma and Ryoga were sitting at the kotatsu in the Tendo-Saotome household, uncharacteristically quiet for a change. Nabiki and Kasumi had gone out shopping together, Akane was at a movie with her friends, and Genma and Soun were off at some shogi tournament at the community centre. If Ryoga hadn't managed to stumble his way back into town earlier that afternoon, Ranma would have been left by himself for the evening. Instead, the two boys were sitting in the washitsu, the shoji doors opened up wide to show the view of the garden and koi pond, all cast in the picturesque amber glow of sunset.

The two teenage boys paid this pretty picture no heed, however. Ranma was crunching on sesame crackers while watching a samurai movie on TV, and Ryoga had his nose in a book. As rare as a quiet night at the Tendo Dojo was, it was even more unique of an event for the two martial artists to be in the same room as one another and not throw a punch or a high-kick at the other's face.

Still in the middle of chewing on a mouthful of crackers, Ranma finally broke the silence: "I think I know a cure."

Ryoga hummed disinterestedly as he turned over the page in his book. Then, the words Ranma had spoken finally caught up and reached his ears properly, and his head shot up sharply as he slapped the book down on the table.

"Wait, what? A cure? Really?" Ryoga blurted, leaning eagerly across the table towards Ranma. "Did you find another vein of Nannichuan water here in Japan, or something?"

Ranma looked at Ryoga with a brow arched deeply in confusion for a moment as he finished chewing and swallowing his bite. Then, he shook his head.

"Uh, nah, I don't mean a cure for the curse. I meant a cure for your whole," Ranma paused for a moment, looking up to the ceiling while he spun his hand around in search of the word, "directional affliction."

Ryoga's eager expression fell instantly. "Oh," he mumbled, lowering himself back down.

Ranma rested his chin on his hand, blinking at Ryoga curiously. "…ain't ya gonna ask me what it is?"

Ryoga let out a frustrated sigh. "I was born with that curse, Ranma. It runs in my entire bloodline, remember? There's no cure."

Ranma pouted. "Well, maybe nobody's ever bothered lookin' for one," he grumbled, "or, uh, well…maybe they did, but…they got lost on the way."

Ryoga's gaze narrowed. "What's your point, Ranma?"

Ranma perked up, looking glad to see Ryoga probe for more details. "My point is that you don't need to look for a cure," Ranma explained, jabbing a finger towards Ryoga. "All you have to do is have a cheat sheet!"

"A cheat sheet?"

Ranma nodded eagerly. "Yeah! You just gotta remember a few important facts and that'll be how you can find your way around easier. Have you ever heard that whole bit about how moss always grows on the north side of a tree?"

"Sure, but most trees and rocks have moss growing all over them, so that's not really a fact. More of a myth."

Ranma snapped his fingers. "Exactly! If you waste your time relyin' on myth, you're just gonna get even more lost! So, you gotta only heed by the stuff you know is true, and is rooted in that truth. Rules of the universe that can't be changed or disproven no matter what."

"Like what?" Ryoga pressed, sounding no closer to being convinced than he was before.

"So, Japan is called The Land of The Rising Sun, right?" Ranma went on, "You know why that is?"

Ryoga rolled his eyes. "Because Japan is closest to where the sun rises."

"Right. And what direction does the sun rise?"

Ryoga blanched. "Uhh…south?"

Ranma nearly face-planted into the table. It took him a moment to collect himself and level Ryoga with a flabbergasted look.

"…y-you're joking, right? Tell me you're joking."

Ryoga felt his cheeks begin to burn. "Y-yeah, I was just messing with you. Obviously I know what direction the sun rises in!"

Ranma blinked. "Alright, so tell me."

Ryoga chewed on his lip. "It…rises in the…the, umm…"

"East, dude." Ranma said, aghast. "The sun rises in the east."

"Ah. Yes. Right. Of course."

"Shit, you're hopeless," Ranma said with a defeated sigh, rubbing at his face. "Maybe this ain't gonna work for you, after all. And here I thought I'd cracked this whole thing wide open…"

Ryoga frowned. "What does the sunrise have to do with my sense of direction, anyway?"

Ranma took his hand away from his face, looking Ryoga over thoughtfully for a moment. Then, he plucked one of the sesame crackers out of the bowl on the kotatsu and held it aloft.

"It's got everything to do with it," Ranma said, "whenever you're lost, you use the sun as your guide. The sun always sets in the west," Ranma moved his arm in an arch, "and rises in the east. That ain't no myth like moss on a tree stump. It's a proven scientific fact. No matter where you are in the world, Japan will always be in the direction of the sunrise. And that's how you find your way back. You just keep followin' the sunrise and eventually, you'll wind up back in Japan."

Ryoga stared at the cracker, still held up in the air. "Follow the sunrise, huh."

Ryoga reached over to the bowl and plucked out one of the crackers himself, turning it over in his fingers like it was his first time seeing a sesame cracker in his life.

"I can't even figure out left versus right most of the time." Ryoga admitted quietly.

His brow furrowed with the shame that confession brought, even though nobody knew Ryoga's sense of direction better than the one sitting across from him right now.

"Aw, that one's even easier," Ranma said, before popping the cracker in his mouth.

He brought up both of his hands and stuck out his thumb and index finger on both of them.

"Now, ya gotta do this with your own hands or it won't work," Ranma said, "But you remember when we learned 'bout the English alphabet when we were in junior high? Well, if you put your hands out in front of ya like this, then the left hand is always gonna be the hand that makes the same shape as the English letter 'L'. Try it out."

Ryoga eats his own cracker and then does as Ranma instructs, holding his hands in front of him and sticking out his thumbs and index fingers at a 90 degree angle on either hand. Sure enough, one of his hands forms an "L" shape. Ryoga drops his right hand and stares down at his left for a moment, still making the shape. When he looks up at Ranma again, the pigtailed boy has his hand up by his forehead, still making the L-shape, while his other hand pulls down one of his eyelids.

Ryoga jabbed his middle finger across the table at Ranma. Ranma stuck out his tongue in retaliation.

"You're an ass." Ryoga muttered, dropping his arm and picking up his book once again, flipping it back open.

Ranma reached for another cracker. "Yeah? Well, I hope your lips ain't chapped 'cause you'll be kissin' my ass when you realize I'm a genius and totally cured your family curse."

"Yeah, I'll be sure to stock up on lip balm."

Ranma snorted loudly, holding back a wide grin as he turned back to the movie, as the sun continued to set behind him.

Ryoga's eyes popped open.

That's right. East.

The sun set in the west, and rose in the east. Japan, the Land of the Rising Sun.

Japan was East. So that meant…Ryoga had to be in the East China Sea, to eventually get to the Sea of Japan.

Is that where he was now? Somewhere in the East China Sea? Or had he screwed up, and gotten in the South China Sea, instead? Knowing him, he probably did.

He really should have tried to get some clarification from somebody before he'd jumped in the sea and just started swimming aimlessly. He'd just been so happy to finally reach the ocean, so eager to get himself home at last…and that had cost him.

Maybe he could wait until morning, and start swimming in the direction of the sunrise? Just keep heading straight in that direction, and he would have to reach Japan eventually. That's what Ranma had told him to do: follow the sunrise.

But the ocean was temperamental. It wouldn't allow Ryoga to continue on in a straight line any easier than Ryoga's own sense of direction—one or the other would have him going the wrong way eventually.

Plus, he'd already determined that simply swimming off of this island wasn't a possibility. The waves coming in towards the island were too big, too strong. He would get knocked to bits against the reef before he even got a chance.

Every idea had some kind of a road block, something that kept the thought from even fully forming in Ryoga's head.

He'd told himself ages ago, staying put was his best chance. He had already weighed the other options. Nobody was looking for him; nobody probably even suspected he was any more lost than he always was. The only way to get off this island was to signal for help, and pray that one day one of those passing planes or ships would eventually notice him.

Ryoga had been here a year without any success. But, he was still alive. Roughly ten or fifteen pounds lighter, in a constant limbo of sunburnt and healing from being sunburnt, sick to death of eating nothing but seafood and papaya and coconuts, but alive.

He just needed to stay alive, positive, patient…and one day, he'd get struck by another bout of good luck again.

Hopefully before getting struck by lightning.

He wished he'd been born on a more auspicious day. He'd probably be off this damned island by now if he had.

Ryoga used to stare up at the night sky and wish upon the stars. Once, he thought he'd seen a shooting star and had prayed upon it with all his might that he would one day make it back home. When he looked back up, he realized that the meteor was moving across the sky far too slowly. It turned out to be a satellite.

Now, every morning, Ryoga wakes up in time to watch the sunrise.

He stares out across the vast expanse of blue, watching that glowing ball of light travel farther and farther up into the sky. It's the only time that Ryoga ever knows for certain that he's actually looking in the right direction for once; that he's looking at home.

It beat wishing on satellites.