4/7

Instead of anything that looked human-like Ranma stared up into trees that weren't quite like any trees he'd never seen before. They looked shiny almost, and while their trunks looked like oaks, their leaves looked like pine, save for small flowers here and there which for some reason were on the portions of the branches pointing down toward the ground rather than the sky.

Here and there those trees gave way to even larger trees, ones that looks like baobab trees except their colors were all wrong. Rather than the normal sort of gray brown trunks they looked black and green, and they had vines hanging from their branches which seemed to sway gently in the wind.

Okaayy…. Ranma thought, wanting to pull at his pigtail for a moment, a habit he'd gotten into when he was thinking, but he was simply unable to get up the energy to so much as twitch his hand. Even so, his thoughts were still relatively clear. This is interesting. So where have I landed? Africa, South America? I'm pretty damn certain I've never seen any pictures of trees like this so some kind of rainforest is the best guess.

Slowly Ranma looked down to where he still felt something nibbling at one of his fingers. He grimaced slightly when he saw his hand, the hand he had been holding the mirror with. It was badly cut about, sliced here and there when the mirror shattered, slicing his hand badly though he also noticed that he wasn't holding any of the shards of the mirror itself any longer. Given his limited knowledge of magical devices Ranma decided that probably meant it had used all of its energies and simply disintegrated. It wasn't the strangest thing he had ever heard of after all.

Though the thing licking daintily at the blood on his hand... It was small, about the size of two of his fingers put together, and it looked like a cross between a mouse and a lizard. It had reptile eyes, but fur, a small mouth and six legs that looked like those of an iguana or something, but it had the tail of a squirrel. He slowly licked his dry lips and said softly. "You're the strangest little critter I've ever seen. And I've seen quite few strange things in my time."

His voice startled the little critter off, and it raced away. Ranma shrugged, making a note to bathe his hand in hot water to kill off any germs the little thing might've been carrying. Wearily he closed his eyes once more, trying to take stock of his body. He didn't feel any broken limbs or anything, which was a good sign, but he was so exhausted!

And he had absolutely no ki left to speak of, just barely enough to keep his body running. Still it worked, and I'm not about to complain. After a moment he began to concentrate, sending out his senses and trying to connect to the ambient chi in the world around him.

That was how he termed it anyway, ki was inner strength, chi was the ambient energy of the world. The difference between the two energy fields had been explained to him, but since he'd gotten both the Japanese and Chinese explanations, they had sort of jumbled together, leaving him only certain of the name both schools of thought used for the same energy field.

Ranma had thought up a technique after watching Happosai drain energy from girls underwear and girls themselves to do the same thing. Though it wasn't so much draining as simply connecting himself to the infinite loop of the energy all around him. It was not something he had ever attempted before but right now, he just needed at least a little to move around with.

And for some reason, I can't feel the little loop I set up to feed my ki space. The technique Mousse used and Ranma had learned drained a tiny, very tiny but constant trickle of power from the user, the cost of keeping it running increasing or decreasing by how large a ki space or how much organization you put into it as well as your skill with the basic technique.

Mousse had taken it to extremes, and actually poured far more of his ki into the technique than any of Ranma's other rivals actually had access to. Since he had found that out Ranma had always wondered how good the boy would become if he stopped pumping all that ki into what Ranma saw as a gimmick rather than a real skill, but now he'd never find out.

Ranma had never gone to that extreme of course. He kept two small ki spaces, one for magical items people had used on or around him in the past, and one for everything else. Neither were organized of course, since that would have taken more energy. But not even feeling the little bit of ki I put into it…that either means the technique failed for some reason and I didn't bring any of my shit with me, or… Ranma shook that thought off and began to concentrate, sending out his mind into the world around him.

His eyes opened wide however when what he had thought would be a trickle was instead a torrent. Holy crap! That should not have been that easy! It was as if the chi of the world was simply waiting for him to draw on it. That was just weird. Cautiously Ranma reopened the connection to his environment, trying to control the torrent as it flowed into him, re-filling only his physical energy. For just a moment, there was a sense of something, an emotion, but Ranma couldn't quite grasp it and it was gone before he could even say it was there with any certainty.

Moments later, a process that should've taken him several hours was finished and he stood up, cracking his neck and stretching his arms up above his head explosively. He had taken enough to get his body up and going, not enough to fill his ki reserves since that went against his beliefs. Take what you need and no more from nature, else it would harm the area around you. Though here that might not happen so quickly as it would back in Nerima. Where the hell am I?

He stared around him, taking in the trees and everything else around him much more clearly now, and noted that baobab trees he had noticed before seemed to have small spikes sticking out of their trunks and the vines that fell from their branches. Nasty. Somewhere nearby he heard what sounded like a wolf's howl except it hiccuped, sounding very odd indeed, and he could see or hear lots or tiny birds or other things moving about.

Nearer to where he had landed, Ranma could see a smallish impact point where he had been lying. Scattered widely around it however was the remains of what he had been holding in his ki space. "Fuucckkkk…."

Ranma really didn't like to think about what that said about how low his own reserves had gotten. His ki space had never failed him before, not even when he was fighting Saffron or Herb. If it had failed, then he might have literally been an inch away from dying. And if I came this close without that blast of Ryoga's helping me…

He laughed suddenly, scaring a few more birds and other critters away from having a rummage around his scattered junk. "Thank you Ryoga you asshole, you might've screwed me over way more than I ever did you, but that last attack of yers might've saved my life."

He looked down at himself wincing a little. His pants were ripped and he had a few tiny bruises from where things had imploded towards him when the ki space gave out, sending everything inside outward like an airtight bag bursting. His hand was badly cut about, and his chest too had some lacerations on it. Everywhere he looked any of his skin that had been exposed looked as if it had been badly wind or sunburned. His body also creaked and groaned in a way he was unused to, as if it had been put under great strain or perhaps pressure recently.

His stomach gurgled, reminding Ranma that regaining some physical energy wasn't quite the same thing as filling up his physical form. "First, I find something to eat, then I'll try ta figure out where I am. If the little critters here've already eaten all my emergency food I'm gonna be pissed, or more pissed than I am now." Ranma knew he still had to really deal with his anger and grief issues caused by the events in the past week.

Routing through the stuff he had kept in his ki space he quickly separated it into useful and not useful piles. The unusable pile was much larger than the usable one. Damn, he thought to himself shaking his head, I really build up a lot of junk didn't I? The unusable pile consisted of used towels, the fluffiest of which he grabbed, old videos he had seen a time or two, maps of places he had been with his father, several dozen weapons he'd 'confiscated' from Mousse, a few take away boxes of food that he never got around to eating from Shampoo's place which were well past their sell by date, and even a few from Ukyo's.

The usable pile was much smaller, but still contained a lot of the necessities. It consisted of four sets of underwear, one Chinese silk shirt, his old long-sleeved communist shirt and pants combo, one muscle-T, a dozen exercise bars which were actually still edible despite a few of them having been torn open. It also contained a few surprises: a tiny flashlight and a Walkman that actually worked for all that they had been banged up something fierce when his ki space had given out.

The best parts were a large backpack, the same one he'd used for years on the road with Genma, a first aid kit, an outdoor cooking kit, and a sleeping bag. Those last three he'd added to his ki space the moment he'd learned how to do it in the first place, and they had proven useful time and time again.

After gobbling down four of the energy bars, Ranma disinfected his hand with some of the rubbing alcohol from the first aid kit, then bandaged it lightly. With his ki healing the cuts would be gone within a few hours, or at least he hoped they would be. But he would still have to be careful about weird ass diseases in a place like this. It was true that he hadn't really been sick his entire life, but that didn't mean he was going to take any chances. Then after pulling on the muscle-T and a new pair of pants Ranma packed his backpack as well as he could.

That took him some time, since he didn't have the ki available right now to enlarge the backpack's interior. He ended up tying the sleeping bag to the top of the backpack, but had to leave the first aid's kit's box, stuffing its contents in here and there. By the time he was done the sun was right overhead, shining down into the forest or jungle. Looking at the unusable pile, which included the love-pill bracelet and a few other magical items, he decided to dig out a hole and bury the stuff. He really didn't know if there was anyone around here, but some of those items they were just too dangerous to leave lying around on the jungle floor.

With that done, Ranma hopped up from where he had been standing on the floor of the jungle up into the canopy quickly leaping up until he stood standing on top of one of the trees tops, staring around him. Once he reached the top of the tree he had to pause, gasping in breath for a moment. Then he looked around taking in the view with a faint smile on his face.

Nowhere where Ranma looked could he see even a hint of civilization, which reinforced the Amazon jungle/Congo idea he supposed. Turning around 360° Ranma stared up behind where he had begun to look around, noticing that he was on the side of a huge mountain that was gradually heading up into the distant clouds. Ranma laughed somewhat crazily. "I've always enjoyed nature and livin' off the land, but this is a little ridiculous."

His smile widened into a grin when he pulled out the Walkman, taking one of the earbuds and sticking it into an ear. It had been a gift from Hiroshi, who was into American rock for some reason. One of the songs however was just too damn appropriate for the moment, and he put the headphones on his head as he began to move forward, one ear still uncovered so as to let him listen to the surrounding sounds while "Welcome to the jungle" began to blare.

Deciding to head further up the mountain in an effort to get a better idea of the lay of the land Ranma turned in that direction, making his usual good time through the canopy. He stopped at one point to fill up all his water bottle, which haven't had had any water into the last at a small stream marveling at the clear water and the small fishes that actually thankfully looked like normal fishes is of a type he hadn't seen swimming around in it.

After that he took to the canopy once more, heading further up the mountain as the day wore on. As he moved through the canopy on autopilot his thoughts were elsewhere. His emotions thankfully had settled down from the roller coaster they had been, the challenge of his local environment having driven out his anger and grief at his fiancée cheating on him and his mother reacting as she did. For the most part anyway, Ranma knew it would come back when he settled down for the evening, but right now he could set it aside to concentrate on the major issue at hand.

His ki was flowing better, stronger and faster. Even with the local chi being so easy to access and so powerful, regaining enough energy to move around easily should've taken him far longer than it did. It was as if his ability to regenerate ki had been heightened tremendously. But there was something else there too, the chi carried things to him, connected in a way to the material world that was so beyond his understanding it was insane. So beyond his comprehension Ranma refused to allow the chi to interact with his ki reservoir, cautious of it and the effect his brief spurt of hate had on it.

Ranma paused suddenly, feeling eyes upon him, not human eyes but animal, though what had warned him he couldn't say. Before he could figure out where the feeling was coming from, several large apelike creatures bounded towards Ranma from the trees surrounding the one he had stopped at. Like the little creature that had been nibbling on his fingers they looked like a cross between a mammal and a lizard. They had long lizard like claws coming out of their paws, but bodies that looked like a monkeys', and faces that looked sort of like a lemur yet with a mouth full of large fangs.

They all roared some kind of challenge, charging at him from all sides. Ranma frowned, looking around for an escape route then decided to hell with it, and charged to meet the ones coming at him from the front, leaping into the air which seemed to startle them. He slapped one hand down using it as a springboard to flip himself over the two coming at him from the front, his other hand lashing out with a punch that caught one of the beasts in the side of the head mid-leap, sending it tumbling down to the floor of the jungle below with a startled squeak, though not doing much other damage, as weak as Ranma was at the moment.

Landing on the next tree over Ranma chance to glance around him. He then noticed down below what looked like small family units hurrying away on the lower bows. There even seemed to be a few very crude huts scattered around on the lower boughs. "Oh."

Now knowing why they were attacking him Ranma decided to simply run off, quickly racing through the trees. Noticing that a few of the hunters or guards were still chasing him Ranma frowned and sped up further, going as fast through the canopy as his weakened state would allow. With that he left them behind quickly, though he had to stop and rest for a few hours afterward. Geez, is this how normal people feel all the time? I need to find a place to stop and start working on building up my strength and reserves.

After his rest Ranma reoriented himself to move up the mountain again, now not letting himself be lost in his thoughts as he took in the surrounding with much more seriousness. Doing so he noticed several animals on the floor of the jungle. There were a few varieties of small critters that scattered here and there as he moved through the canopy and one large herbivore of some kind that looks like an armored rhinoceros the size of an elephant and with an elephant's trunk.

Just in case it proved intelligent Ranma waved at the thing, but it placidly kept on eating from the leaves of one of the baobab trees. It's prehensile nose was able to reach into the spikes of the tree to pull out the small flowers that were everywhere on it, unmindful of the vines that were trying ineffectually to grab or choke it. Ranma made a note of the tree's action too, and steered well clear of the possibly carnivorous trees.

Ranma kept on going through the day, moving higher up the mountain, but never leaving the jungle behind or breaking out into any other kind of terrain. Soon it was almost dark out, and he frowned pausing on one of the more normal looking trees to stare around him looking down into the canopy in particular to check to see if there were any of the monkey lizards around. Thankfully there didn't seem to be, and he found a particularly large branch to lay out on for the evening.

He decided not to use his sleeping bag, afraid that if he got too comfortable hit tried to move in his sleep and roll off the limb. Instead Ranma leaned his backpack against the trunk using the sleeping bag as a pillow and tried to get to sleep with the unfamiliar noises of the jungle all around him. He desperately needed it.

His dreams were disjointed affairs, very odd ones in very different ways. Some were simply memories: the fight back on Earth, his battle with Saffron, his fiancée's words and his mother's recriminations. All that he had suspected he would be hit by once he closed his eyes. One of his dreams however was very disturbing, almost as much as the pit which he'd been tossed into to learn the neko-ken.

The dream didn't really have much in the way of imagery, it was mostly a feeling. A feeling of darkness pressing in, a shadow over the sun blocking out all light but it wasn't as if there was one source of light but thousands, all of them very weak individually. Even when they were brought together they were still very weak, far too weak to break through the shroud of darkness. There was malevolence in that shroud a lurking evil, a desire for destruction, revenge and above all power.

It tried to push in on a few extremely bright lights, which had burned some of it away. One by one they failed, leaving only one light burning away against the shroud. Somehow, Ranma didn't know how, but he knew that light was supposed to represent him.

That dream-realization woke Ranma up, staring around him in the dark of the jungle making certain that someone wasn't really searching for him. The sounds of the jungle had obviously changed in the night, but there was no other indication of danger. After staring out around him he fell back to sleep, and the feeling of the shroud was gone as if the presence behind it had moved on unable to find him.

The other dreams he'd almost expected but not quite, their tone if not their content. Given the night before, Ranma knew he'd probably be dealing with the male equivalent of wet dreams which his friends called whack-dreams for some reason. But the content of these dreams was well off what he had thought.

He had thought he would dream about a few of his fiancés. Yet the next morning he woke up after vague dreams and not so vague imaginings focused on a few of the other girls in his life.

His imaginings featured Hinako-sensei, who despite her need to drain ki to retain her real age had a very nice, tight body, with all the muscle of a trained dancer and, as his friends always made certain to point out, huge knockers. There was also one about Kasumi which made him feel guilty for a very different reason than the one he had about Hinako, and for some reason a few dreams Minako and Makoto from the Sailor Moon anime, which was Kasumi's favorite anime. Nabiki too featured prominently in his imaginings though those always ended the moment she opened her mouth afterward, invariably demanding money or something else to keep quiet about it.

Akane didn't feature in a single imagined scenario, not that first night or any other. She did appear in a few memories-turned dreams, but they never ended well. Ukyo and Kodachi didn't show up at all, but Shampoo did rather frequently, though more often than not in the imaginings side of things rather than memories-turned dreams side.

Coming fully awake that first day in his new environs, Ranma groaned finding that his pants had become drenched once again. "Note to self," he murmured as he pulled his pants and underwear off quickly exchanging them for a clean pair. "Need ta get this under control 'fore I find some civilization."

Over the next few days Ranma slowed his progress during the day, taking longer breaks to deal with his thoughts and emotions now being free from the Youthful Mind technique. He destroyed several large boulders that were sticking out of the jungle canopy, ranting and raging but eventually getting over his issues with all those he had left behind.

It was actually rather therapeutic, allowing Ranma to work through even more issues than he had thought he had, not just with Akane and his family but everyone he'd dealt with. He even was able to figure out, at least a little with the help of the romance book, how a lot of the problems had been his own fault. Though Ranma would never admit it aloud a lot of the stuff in Nerima had become so bad because Ranma himself didn't care enough to put in the effort to try and really find solutions, simply coasting along, not caring about anything but learning new techniques.

Devoting his entire life to the Art like Genma had shown him had hampered his ability to deal with other people, yet even so Ranma should have been able to notice that things tended to get worse when he responded in a Genma-approved fashion or ignored things in the hopes they went away. I really fucked up by the numbers sometimes didn't I? Still don't have any idea how I could've gotten Shampoo off my back and still gotten Cologne ta train me. But I might've, well, I guess, I kinda did lead Ukyo on at first.

And looking back on it it's pretty obvious that always pointing out how my female body was better than hers, or that she might have issues with bein' seen with a girl half the time, especially since she always thought I was a pervert. Ranma tried not to think of Akane's name, since that seemed to be a trigger for some of his anger issues. But damnit, she did the same thing, not just with Ryoga but with that guy from the monster zone too. Why the fuck could she be nice to them right after meetin' 'em, and not me after she learned o' my curse?

During these episodes he noticed that his emotions were actually upsetting the local chi, making it simmer and crackle as if it had taken on the rage and grief of his emotions. It was a very weird effect, as if the chi was actually emotional ki, but it was easy enough to deal with. He knew the hazards of using emotional ki like Akane or Ryoga did, and cutting himself off from the ambient chi allowed him to ignore its feedback effect on his own emotions. It was just one more mystery to add to the list Ranma had been building up since arriving wherever the hell he was right now.

Two weeks passed, and Ranma had finally gotten rid of all of his anger issues, returning to his normal laid back self, though there was a lot more going on under the surface than had been the case back in Nerima. Every night after his normal katas he would read one of the medical books that Dr. Tofu had. He didn't understand a lot of them, but he was getting there slowly, especially on the alternative medicine stuff, moxibustion, pressure points and other such.

However his ki reservoir was only slowly refilling itself thanks to his distrust of the local chi, and having prioritized sending his ki to aid his healing. His aches and pains were mostly gone, but the skin issue had only begun to clear. Ranma wasn't certain why that was, he was simply happy his skin had begun to turn back to normal. But Ranma had run out of emergency bars about ten days after he arrived wherever he was, making his ability to replenish his ki much slower.

He was beginning to think of trying out some of the local animals to see if any of them were not poisonous (always better to assume they are and be surprised when you're wrong) when he at last broke out of the jungle at last, coming to what looked like the outside of a huge caldera. He had seen it coming, which was why he knew it was a caldera in the first place, but the rock face was almost sheer, with few handholds.

Ranma was about to turn away and find another direction to head thinking that the view he would get from up there wouldn't be worth the effort of climbing when he heard a dull roar in the distance. Much louder than any animal could've produced, the noise was coming from almost directly overhead. Frowning Ranma retraced his steps jumping back further into the jungle and stopping on one of the highest trees in the area to stare up into the sky.

From there he saw silhouettes barely visible moving through the upper atmosphere. They soon resolved themselves quickly into several large shapes, which seemed to gleam dully in the light of the sun.

They kept on coming down, moving towards the interior of the caldera, resolving themselves further into five large ships of some kind, though four of them resembled one another, while the fifth was larger and seemed less maneuverable. They all looked about as aerodynamic as bricks though, which made Ranma wonder how the hell they were still flying at all, and then it suddenly clicked on him. "Weird ass trees that no one's ever seen or taken photos of, even weirder animals that look like a cross between mammals and lizards, and now flying ships that look a lot as if they should crash the instant they try ta lift off. Toto, I don't think I'm in Kansas anymore..."

Despite the thought that he had somehow landed on an alien world Ranma almost sighed in relief, knowing now that he had been right to head up the mountainside. After all, ships like that wouldn't be simply touching down randomly. There had to be something there, some city or other.

Ranma eyes narrowed when he saw lights began to blossom moving from the ships down towards the ground and other, far fewer lights from the ground up. Ranma hadn't read that much science fiction books, but he had read a few graphic novels. Those had to be weapons of some kind, and that couldn't be good. A second later and Ranma began to hear faint booms in the distance.