========================= RELENTLESS A Ranma 1/2 Fan Fiction By Grayson Towler ========================= ----------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER ELEVEN: Fall Into Place ----------------------------------------------------------- The first rays of dawn struck like weightless arrows against the walls of the Tendou Dojo, beaming their golden radiance through the crisp autumn air. Nabiki welcomed the sparse warmth that the early morning sun afforded. She didn't have to be up at this early hour - this was one of the days she hadn't scheduled herself to go to the restaurant in the morning - but she seemed to have lost the ability to sleep in. she thought. Nabiki hunched in her sweatshirt against the dawn's chill and angled towards the open front door, hoping to catch a stronger dose of the sunrise. Savory aromas drifted in from the kitchen where Kasumi was preparing breakfast. Natsume was already working out in the yard, unfazed by the cold in her tank top and loose pants. No doubt her sister was still dead to the world - now that was a girl who knew how to sleep. It was a little strange to see Saotome Genma up so early. The bulky, bespectacled man sat on the edge of the porch, scribbling sporadically in a small notebook and occasionally muttering to himself. Nabiki drew a little closer to try to catch what he was saying. "Golden morn... the golden orb... hmm." Nabiki looked over curiously at Genma. "What are you doing?" "Oh!" he seemed startled by her presence. "Ha, um... good morning, Nabiki. I was just writing a little poetry." Nabiki raised a cynical eyebrow. "Do tell." "Poetry is it, Saotome?" Tendou Soun said from the hall as he shuffled towards them. He was brushing his teeth as he walked - Nabiki never had understood her father's peculiar fixation with dental hygiene. "Well, just a little bit, Tendou," Genma replied with a laugh. "How long has it been since you wrote poetry, my old friend?" Nabiki's father asked. "Why, I haven't heard any of your poems since we were training." "Yes, that was the last time," Genma said with a nod. "I used to write a great deal, but old Happosai hated all my poetry. Do you remember?" "Mmm, yes." Tendou Soun took a seat beside his friend and cocked his head, recalling old memories. "Yes, now I recall. You had a big journal full of poems, and he was going to burn it. I seem to remember we gave him a substitute book at the last minute, didn't we?" Genma shrugged. "It didn't matter, Tendou. He threatened to make leather shoes out of my hide if he ever heard another one of my poems. But now, since he's no longer our Master... well, I decided..." "Ah!" Soun exclaimed. "You're free to write again! That's splendid. So, let's hear what you've written, then." Genma scratched the back of his neck and looked self-conscious. "Well, I'm a bit out of practice, you know. But here goes: Oh how I love to watch the morn, The golden sun that shines, Up above to nicely warm These frosty toes of mine. The wind doth taste of bittersweet, Like jasper wine, and sugar, I bet it's blown through others' feet, Like those of... eh?" Strange gurgling noises issued from the front lawn, distracting Saotome Genma from his reading. Nabiki looked up and was surprised to see Natsume thrashing spasmodically on the ground. The young martial artist, normally so controlled in her every motion, clutched onto the trunk of a tree with both arms, one leg twitching and flailing while the other stuck out like a wooden beam from her hip, its every muscle cramped tighter than stone. Natsume squeezed her eyes shut and stammered inarticulately: "B...bbb... bba... b..." "Natsume?" Tendou Soun called worriedly. "What on earth...?" Nabiki began, heading tentatively towards the flailing young woman. "Morning, everyone," came a voice from behind them. Kurumi shuffled down the hall in her nightshirt, her hair still tangled chaotically from sleep. "What's up?" "I think something's wrong with your sister," Nabiki observed, pointing to the lawn. "Nats... NATSUME!" Kurumi shouted, jolting awake. She sprinted past the three of them in a pink blur towards her sister. The small fighter cradled Natsume in her arms, covering the elder girl's ears with her hands. "Was somebody reading bad poetry?" she asked. "Uh..." Genma adjusted his spectacles nervously and sweated. "Well, er... I didn't think it was..." "Yeah," Nabiki answered, jerking a thumb towards the recalcitrant culprit. "He was. Is THAT what caused this?" Natsume's fit seemed to be passing, fortunately. She relaxed her grip on the tree trunk, letting her fingers slide out of the grooves she'd dug into the bark as her body slowly came back under her control. "B...bad..." she whispered, panting. "Come on, get up," Kurumi told her gently, squirming under her sister's arm and hauling her to her feet. "You're okay." "What was that all about?" Nabiki asked. Kurumi helped her limping sister over to the edge of the porch and sat her down. "When we were just kids," she told them, "our mother had a box of things that we thought belonged to our real father. When she died, we went through everything there trying to find a clue about who he was." "I thought that was where we got the scroll of Anything-Goes techniques," Natsume whispered, still trembling slightly. "But I guess I'm remembering wrong, if Happosai was the one who gave it to us." "We were very young," Kurumi said with a sigh. "Anyway, one thing that I'm certain that was in the box was a book of... well, poetry, for lack of a better term. I was too young to read it, but Natsume was determined to go through the whole thing to get to know our father better." "That couldn't have been our father's work," Natsume said darkly. "The book must have been put there by some cruel spirit or something." Nabiki raised an eyebrow. Natsume wasn't the sort of girl who normally resorted to supernatural explanations. "What do you mean?" "No human mind could conceive something so awful," the dark-haired martial artist stated grimly. Kurumi sighed. "The poetry was really bad," she explained. "I never read it, so I don't know for sure..." "I'd never expose you to something so horrible," Natsume said. "But anyway, it had to be pretty terrible. Big sister was up all day and all through the night, forcing herself to read every word. When I came to check on her in the morning, I found her on the floor, like that," she said, indicating the lawn where Natsume had been so recently writhing. "Ever since then, she's been vulnerable to bad poetry." Genma coughed violently and mopped the sweat from his brow. Tendou Soun looked rather thoughtful. "Well," he said. "Every great martial artist has a secret weakness, I suppose." Nabiki smirked. "So all it takes is a little bad verse, and you're history," she observed. "Hmm... Pointy birds, pointy, pointy, Anoint my head, anointy-nointy..." Natsume's legs kicked out from under her, one snapping straight while the other flailed like a loose garden hose. She grabbed onto the support beam and clenched her jaw tight. "Nabiki!" Kurumi shouted accusingly. Nabiki held up her hands in a gesture of innocence. "Just testing! Sorry!" "T...take my word for it," Natsume hissed through her gritted teeth. "It works." Nabiki thought as she watched her adopted sister's spasms die down. There was nothing in particular that she wanted out of Natsume at the moment, but it was so nice to have an ace like that in your hand, just in case. "Doesn't work with bad song lyrics, does it?" she asked. "Nope. Not bad prose either," Kurumi explained. "Just poetry." "Well, that's not so awful, then," Tendou Soun reassured Natsume. "Still, you'd better hold off on reading your work out loud, eh Saotome?" Genma laughed nervously and fumbled with his journal. "Heh heh, well, I guess you're right, Tendou," he stammered. "Well, I guess I'd better be going!" Nabiki watched the stocky martial artist scamper away, then regarded Natsume and Kurumi thoughtfully. she thought. - - - - - - Ranma-chan drifted out of the blackness of unconsciousness, returning from the distinctive abyss of oblivion she'd learned to associate with the Neko-ken technique. Low signals of pain - soreness from her limbs, mostly - began to thread their way into her thoughts. The pungent odor of fish-cakes lingered in the air. Ranma-chan stretched out of the tight, fetal posture in which she'd been sleeping and slowly rose to her feet, yawning for air. she thought. She'd known the Neko-ken technique was a perfect strategy to use against this monster. It allowed her to do everything you were supposed to do when you fought the Reikoku - it gave her new abilities the thing had never seen before, allowing her to fight with a completely different style. What's more, the monster would essentially waste a whole set of adaptations when it rose again, coming up with a host of countermeasures to the Neko-ken which wouldn't do it any good if Ranma-chan didn't attempt to invoke the technique for the next battle. In fact, Ranma-chan had hoped she'd be able to save this particular card to play if and when she tangled with the Reikoku for the third time, rather than the second. It would have been awfully nice to get it to waste its adaptive powers going into its fourth and final incarnation, if matters came to that. she thought. She looked down at herself and noted some shallow but significant cuts and scratches across her limbs. The Neko-ken was undeniably powerful, but it had some serious drawbacks. The primary problem was that it made Ranma-chan as mindless as the Reikoku itself. Using the technique meant she completely abandoned control of a fight, which was a risky proposition when the stakes were this high. At least her training had worked, thought. That was something. She'd known that the odds were pretty much nil that she'd have a cat handy when she had to face the monster, so she'd needed to devise a way to access the Neko-ken's power without direct feline intervention. Her dream training had cost her a whole string of nights full of self-induced horror, followed by mornings featuring a lot of fish stench and cold baths, but it had worked. It had all been worth it. she thought. The sky was mostly dark, with the last traces of sunlight diminishing through the evergreens. She couldn't have been out for more than an hour or so. Now, the only question left was where the Reikoku's body lay. Ranma-chan closed her eyes and tipped her head back ever so slightly, gently sniffing the air. Even when the Reikoku was dormant, it put off a nasty aura. She felt it almost immediately - back in the direction of the river. Her cat-self must've decided to get a little distance from that ugly beast before settling down for a nap. She understood completely. It didn't take long to find the clearing where she'd fought the Reikoku. Ranma-chan surveyed the carnage and whistled in surprise. She always left a mess when she used the Neko-ken, but this was an exceptional scene even by that standard. The grass by the river was chewed up into wads of lumpy mulch, peppered with streamers of sliced stone that were cut into improbably thin ribbons like strands of excelsior paper. The surrounding trees had taken a beating as well - Ranma-chan counted almost two dozen full-grown conifers that were nothing more than stumps now, chopped into uneven masses of kindling and sprayed across the clearing, like handfuls of immense toothpicks hurled to earth by a petulant god. In the midst of this devastation lay the Reikoku. It seemed like little more than a limp heap of black rags, unless you counted the corrosive aura of menace which radiated from its unearthly form. "This round goes to me, ya ugly bastard," she spat. Her voice was the only living sound for miles around. Now, another challenge presented itself. They'd already seen the way the Reikoku selected its targets - it homed in on whichever of its designated victims was closest at hand. So, in order to protect Ukyou and Ryouga, who'd be stuck in the Amazon village for who-knew-how long, she had to make sure SHE was always closer to the monster than they were. It promised to be a tricky game of cat-and-mouse, and this time she definitely was not the cat. Ranma-chan took a deep breath and steeled her will. She didn't have much choice - she had to get this monster as far away from the Amazon village as possible before it woke up. She regarded the inert black mass dubiously. "I don't like it," she told it, "but I guess I'll have to carry you for a while." Ranma-chan recovered her pack from the edge of the clearing, then approached the dormant beast cautiously. She wondered how much it weighed. There was only one way to find out. Her hands sunk into the folds of black cloth, seeking something solid upon which to gain purchase. Touching the creature set her nerves into a shrill, metallic cacophony of revulsion. The dark fabric seemed to be sucking at her, hungering for her life and vitality, flooding her bloodstream with oily hatred, until her fingertips finally found its chitinous flesh... Ranma-chan jerked back with a screech, tumbling away from the creature's body in an awkward sprawl. Her reflexes took her scrambling away from the beast for a few seconds until she finally regained mastery of them and brought her body to a halt. She lay there on the shredded turf, gasping for air as a clammy layer of sweat lay cold across her flesh. she thought ruefully. Prolonged contact with the creature was unthinkable. she realized. Somehow, the thought didn't appeal to her. The idea of sleeping beneath a piece of cloth that had been poisoned by that monster's hideous presence chilled her bones. Perhaps it was irrational, but she didn't want to expose that thing's corrosive aura to anything she planned to keep. she thought. She glanced about, regarding her surroundings. She did have a fair amount of raw material handy, especially in the form of chopped timber. Surely there had to be a way... Ranma-chan's gaze fell on the river, and she smacked her fist into her palm. "A raft!" she exclaimed. "It's PERFECT!" The water flowed away from the Amazon village. Ranma-chan hauled out her map and double-checked, but it did look like the river flowed for many kilometers along roughly the same course. She'd just send the nasty creature downstream and get to a comfortable distance before it woke up. She tucked her map back into her pack and got to work. The full canvas of starlight had revealed itself across the evening sky by the time she'd finished. The raft wasn't pretty and it sure as hell wouldn't be comfortable if a person tried to use it, but that was irrelevant. It would float, and that was all she needed. Ranma-chan picked out a long, straight branch, slightly too large to be a walking stick but cut to size with the eerie precision of the Neko-ken's phantom claws. "Okay, ugly," she said to the motionless Reikoku as she planted the stick into the dusty folds of its robes. "You're goin' on a nice long trip." It was heavier than she'd anticipated, but she was able to roll it across the ground and up onto the surface of the makeshift raft without having to touch it again. She braced her foot and gave a mighty shove, propelling the wooden raft across the mud-slicked river bank and into the water. "See ya later, you son of a bitch!" she called as the current took hold of the awkward craft and drew it away from the shore. She watched the diminishing form of the raft with satisfaction as it rocked its way down the river... until the edge hung up on an outcropping of rock and the misshapen vessel stopped, swaying like a starched flag in the wind. Ranma-chan sighed and trotted down the river bank, her long pole in hand. she thought. Ranma-chan glanced back upstream as she jabbed at the raft with her stick to dislodge it. she thought. - - - - - - Ukyou awoke bathed in cold sweat, clawing her way out of an endless swirling labyrinth of nightmares. The sound of her wheezing breath filled the still air of the straw hut. She cast about herself with wide eyes, clutching the coarse blanket to her damp chest. Nothing registered as familiar. She didn't have any idea where she was, couldn't remember how she'd gotten here. Maybe she was still dreaming. After a moment, she discarded that idea. This was much too peaceful to be one of her dreams. Minutes passed - Ukyou stayed frozen in place. The tempo of her breathing grudgingly decreased and the sound of her hammering pulse slowly faded in her ears. Thin tendrils of sunlight shone between the wooden slats of the windows in the hut, creeping across the rushes on the floor, the tangle of covers on her cot, her bare shoulders, her matted hair. The whisper of churning water from the river outside drifted to her ears as the din of her gasping subsided. She could hear the barest hint of voices through the walls now, girls laughing and speaking words she didn't understand. A goat bleated in protest at some outrage visited upon it, and the laughter rose for a moment in a gentle wave. Several realizations came to her as the slivers of sunlight finally banished the last black tentacles of nightmare from her mind. She was in the Amazon village. Ranma was gone. Ryouga was hurt. Tarou was dead. And she was terribly thirsty. The last problem, at least, was something she could deal with. Ukyou disentangled herself from the blanket and inspected the room for her clothes. She didn't find them, but there was a simple cotton shift on the stool in the corner that she assumed was meant for her. She put it on, and then the bamboo sandals she discovered underneath it.