Disclaimer: Ranma ½ and its characters and settings belong to Rumiko Takahashi, Shogakukan, Kitty, and Viz Video. This story based on the anime, not the manga.

Chapter 4: Dreams Come As They May

He blinked. The sight before him didn't alter. Her hand was still on his left arm; with his right, he reached up and rubbed his eyes. Still no change. It was Ukyo, with no hint about her now of any darkness blacker than the night. She was dressed in her usual okonomiyaki outfit, typical white bow in her hair, looking about the same as he remembered her. Except that this time she wasn't gripped by fury or sorrow.

"Ucchan… what… how…?" The whisper was all he could manage.

"Can I give you the short answer for now?" When Ranma nodded hesitantly, Ukyo continued in a dry, self-deprecating tone. "Most everybody around here has had magic bite them in the butt. A couple of months ago, my turn finally came up."

It was hardly an informative reply, but Ukyo hadn't really been trying to answer his question. She'd mainly just hoped that the humor would help him recover from his shock. When he simply blinked and continued to stare at her with a look of desperate incomprehension, Ukyo sighed again. "Ranchan… I know this is kind of jolting. Especially coming on top of the day you had." She took a deep breath, then gave him as warm and reassuring a smile as she could manage. "But you don't have to get a handle on this all at once! I'm here for you. You're not alone, and you don't have nowhere to go." She grimaced at the verbal stumble, realizing again that she was a bit more nervous in this moment of truth than she had hoped to be. "I mean, there's a free room in my restaurant. No strings attached. You don't have to crawl under a bridge for the night or anything."

The chef fell silent, watching him for a reaction. She gave one last reassuring squeeze of his arm, and then let her hand drop. Ranma took several deep breaths, obviously struggling for composure… and then, with a great deal of effort, he pushed everything aside, for the moment simply accepting that things had changed. Thinking about the alterations would come later; for now, he would just focus on the moment. What he really needed tonight was peace, quiet, shelter, and sleep, and Ukyo had just offered a place where all these things could be obtained. "Okay," he said. "Can we go there now?"

"Thought you'd never ask," she replied, her nervousness diminishing somewhat. The familiar darkness appeared again, spreading out from her (but no longer hiding her identity from his sight) and surrounding them both. For an instant, it was just the two of them, inches apart in an endless, lightless void…

And then the shadow receded. Instead of moonlight, wind, and the vast expanses of the sky, Ranma now saw walls and a ceiling around him. It was much darker in the restaurant; he could barely make out the shape of the long counter where Ukyo performed her Art.

She got to her feet and offered her hand to Ranma. Absently he took it, and let her pull him up as well. Ukyo held the contact just a second or two longer than was really necessary, which is to say nowhere near as long as she would have liked. "You know where the spare bedroom is, Ranchan." He did remember, from the time he'd stayed over here after Soun had thrown him out during the affair with the Gambling King. "I already set out a futon."

"Thanks." Unsure of what else to do or say, Ranma hesitated for a moment, then turned and started toward the stairs, moving cautiously through the dimness.

He'd only taken a few steps when he stopped, and turned back to face her. "Um…"

"Yes, Ranma?"

"Ah… could you…" He was having some trouble putting his request into words.

"Yes…?"

"Could you maybe… make sure I don't have any dreams tonight?"

There was a long moment of silence. At last, Ukyo said quietly, "I wasn't planning on showing up there again without asking you first."

"Huh?" Ranma blinked. "That ain't the kind of dreams I meant. I just… I don't wanna have to remember the stuff that happened today."

"Oh. Right." Even through his fatigue, Ranma noticed the brightening of Ukyo's tone. "Sure thing, sugar. I'll make sure you get a nice, relaxing, dreamless night's sleep."

"Thanks." He turned again and resumed his careful pace toward the stairs. Not until he reached them did something else occur to him.

Turning, he squinted through the dimness to where he thought Ukyo was still standing. "Ucchan?"

"What is it?"

Ranma jumped; her voice had come from upstairs. Convenient for Ukyo these new abilities might be, but they were going to take some serious getting used to. It took him several moments to remember what he'd been about to say. "Ah… We left my backpack back at the Tower."

"Oh… shoot!" The exasperated tone and the unmistakable sound of a stamped foot made him feel better. Whatever had happened to Ukyo, at least it hadn't completely swallowed up the friend he knew.

True to Ukyo's word, no dreams disturbed his slumber that night. When Ranma awoke, late the next morning, he was refreshed, relaxed, and incredibly confused. This wasn't his usual bedroom. Where was he?

He spent several seconds staring around the room, eventually matching the pattern of his surroundings against the memory of the time he'd sought refuge here during the difficulty with the Gambling King. The realization that he was in Ukyo's spare bedroom brought one last moment of puzzlement… and then, all at once, the floodgates of memory opened. Ranma's breath exhaled in a hard, involuntary *whuff* as the events of the previous day rushed back through his mind, hitting with nearly the impact of one of Ryoga's punches.

Ranma wasn't sure how long he sat there, mind whirling through painful recollections of change and loss, and dizzying paths of questions without answers. He was here because the Tendos had thrown him out… but all he'd done was keep Akane safe like he was supposed to… he was here, at Ucchan's Okonomiyaki, when Ukyo herself had said he wasn't supposed to come back unless he was ready to honor their engagement… but last night she'd brought him here herself, and said there were no strings attached… and even though she'd told him to go away she hadn't stayed away from him, it had been her in those dreams all this time…

The dizziness seemed to be overwhelming the pain; no surprise, as Ranma had known plenty of frustration and loss in his life and had lots of experience pushing it away to the back of his mind. However, never before had one of his friends turned out to be some kind of supernatural entity. Coming to terms with that development was a little harder. Consideration of this felt better than thinking about what had happened with the Tendos, though, so Ranma concentrated on thoughts of Ukyo.

Just what had happened to her anyway? How long had she been like this? After some thought, Ranma managed to pull forth a murky memory of the previous night. He'd been pretty out of it at the time, all but floored by the recent revelation, but he vaguely remembered Ukyo saying something about having a run-in with magic two months ago.

The thought of that specific time span triggered another thought. It took a fair bit of effort since he didn't have a calendar handy, but Ranma eventually worked out that that would mean whatever Ukyo had been referring to would have happened just before she broke down that first time, when he'd told her about Kaori. It didn't take much insight to suspect a connection.

Further thoughts on the matter were tabled for the present, however, overridden by a sudden sharp protest from his stomach. The growl reminded him in no uncertain terms that he'd only eaten one meal the previous day, and it hadn't been supper. With his thoughts pulled back to the here and now, Ranma realized that he could smell something quite delicious, something he hadn't smelled in too long. The odor of cooking okonomiyaki was wafting up from the restaurant below.

"Figured that'd wake him up," Ukyo muttered with a slight smile. The first okonomiyaki wasn't even done yet before the sound of footsteps came from the floor above. That one had only been a smaller portion intended for herself — despite what she'd said, she hadn't really been that confident that Ranma was ready to get up yet. He'd had a very hard day yesterday, after all.

She listened with half an ear as she spread the makings of several oversized deluxe okonomiyaki on the grill for her guest, doing her best to stay calm and collected. With all the butterflies cavorting through her innards, it wasn't easy.

Judging from the sounds from upstairs, Ranma might have felt the same way. His stride started out quick and decisive, but after only a few steps the tempo changed, becoming slower and more tentative. He made his way out onto the stairs, and then, after descending the first couple, he stopped dead, then turned and fled back into his room. Ukyo blinked. Even as hard as he'd been hit by the events of yesterday, she wouldn't have thought it would destroy Ranma's confidence to this extent. Her own nervousness diminished, replaced by a wave of sympathy, sorrow, and determination to help her Ranchan in this time of grief.

Safely back in the privacy of his room, Ranma gathered up and slipped on the shirt and pants he could only barely remember removing the previous night. He was hungry, and he had questions that needed answers, but he wasn't about to head down to face Ukyo in just a T-shirt and boxers.

Now looking a bit more presentable, the pigtailed teen left the room once more. His pace continued slower than usual as he made his way downstairs, trying to hold on to Ukyo's comforting words of the night before, but all too aware that the last two times he'd been in this restaurant, he'd seen his oldest friend seriously hurting because of him. The memories surfaced again, memories of her outstretched hand and downcast face, the tears that had fallen and her demand for payment for his okonomiyaki. All these tugged at him, making him feel as if he were treading over very thin ice indeed.

The okonomiyaki she'd cooked for him were cooling on plates as he finally made his way into the main room of the restaurant. Ukyo had already consumed the one she'd made for herself, and was now preparing another. Ranma paused in the doorway, taking a good long look at the friend he'd thought he had lost. She looked up from the grill, gesturing wordlessly toward the plates and giving him a quick smile. It wasn't a carefree happy grin or anything like it — her eyes were clouded with hesitance, sympathy, the memory of pain; a mixture of too many emotions to list, far too many for such an untroubled expression to have been anything other than a lie — but there was honest warmth there, and tenderness, and it comforted him.

Still, he felt like he ought to be a little cautious. "Um, thanks, Ukyo. I should warn ya, I don't have twenty-one hundred yen on me."

The smile faded, which amazingly enough was the first clue he had that what he'd said hadn't been a sensitive statement designed to show consideration toward her.

"That's okay, Ranma," she said quietly. "That stuff doesn't stand anymore."

Ranma just nodded, hesitantly crossed the remaining distance, sat down in his old seat right before the grill, and began to eat. As he started on the third okonomiyaki, Ukyo began cooking a couple more, which she passed over to him as he finished the one he was working on. Ranma accepted these with a smile and a sense of relief; he was still hungry, but despite what she'd said, he wasn't feeling certain yet about asking for more.

The process repeated itself, with Ukyo cooking two more okonomiyaki as Ranma worked on the pair she'd just given him, and then repeated itself again, and again, and…

Ranma eventually shook his way free from a sort of waking dream, realizing that he was stuffed to the gills and Ukyo was still cooking another two specials. "Um, Ucchan? I'm kinda full here."

"I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to say something," she said teasingly. "Ye gods, Ranchan, the only time I've seen you eat more food in one sitting was when I had that cooking contest with Shampoo and Akane and Kodachi." A shadow flickered briefly across her face as she uttered the last name. She turned back to the grill, removing the two just-finished portions to plates for her own consumption.

"I wouldn't've asked you to cook this much," Ranma said, looking away as well, for the moment finding the plate before him an easier resting place for his gaze.

"Maybe that's why I did it without being asked," Ukyo responded between bites.

He was still trying to figure that one out by the time she finished. Ukyo looked over at him again, with an air of expectancy now. After a long pause, she prompted, "You know, Ranchan, I did tell you last night that from now on it's okay to ask questions."

"Okay, right. Questions," Ranma said nervously. He glanced around the room as if searching for inspiration. "I got my first one."

"Yes…?" Ukyo asked after a moment.

"Did you ever go back and get my backpack from the Tokyo Tower last night?"

For this, he was treated to perhaps the most sarcastic look Ukyo had ever sent his way. "No, I thought I'd leave all your worldly possessions sitting in the street for some bum to carry off. Course I did, Ranchan. And I dropped it off in your room afterward. Didn't you see it this morning?"

"Nope."

"Well, now we've both asked one stupid question," Ukyo said, wry humor replacing the sarcasm. "Your turn to try for a better one."

"Okay." Ranma took a deep breath. "How about this… What's happened to you?"

"That's more like it." The chef fell silent, marshalling her thoughts. At last she said, "I think I told you last night that it all started two months ago. But it was actually more like two months and two weeks…"

"Shoot," Ukyo muttered as the first fat drops of water splattered to the ground around her. "Why couldn't this stupid rain have held off another couple of hours?" Due to one thing or another—nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual hectic pace of life in Nerima—she'd been putting off a trip to the market, and by now she was running critically low on several key sauce ingredients. If her restaurant was going to open tomorrow, she had to go shopping today. And so she had hurried home, dropped off her books, thrown on a quick change of clothes, grabbed her shopping list, and set off toward the market.

She hadn't quite liked the look of the clouds, but the quantity of purchases she was going to have to make meant that she wasn't going to have a free hand to hold an umbrella on her way back from the market. So Ukyo had put her luck to the test, with the usual result. The clouds had waited until she'd walked a fair distance away from her restaurant… just long enough that she had reached an area with no sign of shelter. And now the rain was beginning, coming down in those fat preliminary drops that indicate a true downpour is only moments away.

Ukyo recognized this quite handily, and, muttering something unladylike under her breath, charged off at top speed. Just as the sky opened, she came upon a shop with an open door. The place looked like a gloomy little clutter-filled cave, but in that moment, as she zipped through the doorway inches ahead of a solid curtain of rain, Ukyo found nothing to complain about.

Nonetheless, her first glance over the disorderly shelves and alcoves didn't leave her particularly interested in this shop's contents. If there was any cooking gear here, it was well and truly hidden. She turned back and regarded the rain sheeting down in the street. "Hope Ranma-honey's not out in this," she mused. "But knowing his luck, I wouldn't bet against it."

Ranma blinked. "Hey, I think I remember that day. Last time I saw Kodachi. She chased me through that stupid downpour for almost half an hour, tryin' to nail me with her ribbon."

Ukyo's musings were interrupted by the sound of a throat clearing behind her. She turned, to find an older man seated behind a desk some little ways off. He had just put down a newspaper and was regarding her with an irascible stare. "Young lady, this shop is for customers, not for idle people to just come in out of the rain."

"C'mon, you wouldn't send me back out into that, would you?" Ukyo asked, giving him her best "cute" look.

"I'm not saying you have to buy anything, but you could at least browse the shelves! Who knows what sort of rare and wonderful treasure you might find here? You'll never know unless you look!"

Ukyo rolled her eyes, but decided to humor the guy, especially since the rain didn't look like it was going to stop anytime soon. She turned away from the doorway and made her way deeper into the shop. Something was nagging at the back of her mind, though, and she'd only taken a few steps before she stopped, and glanced over toward the proprietor. The lighting in the shop was conspicuous by its absence; this plus the man's position behind the desk made it rather difficult to get a good look at him, but eventually Ukyo realized what she'd been trying to remember. "Hey, wait a minute. I know you. You're the jackass who sold that goon Kuno his stupid phoenix egg, aren't you?"

The man looked up from his paper, raising his bushy eyebrows high enough to nearly touch his knit maroon skullcap. " 'Jackass'? You know, girl, it's awfully wet out there."

Ukyo raised her hands in a placating gesture. "Sorry, sorry, it's just a habit. I even call my fiancé that sometimes." She turned back toward the nearest shelf and began looking over its contents, picking up and fiddling with several objects in order to show her intense interest in his inventory.

When she touched a twisted, polished branch of driftwood, only to have purple sparks fly and all her hair stand straight up, Ukyo decided that maybe she ought to think this through a little more.

The proprietor dropped his newspaper and nearly fell out of his chair as Ukyo zipped through the intervening space, leaned over his desk, and fixed him with the brightest-eyed sparkly look of youthful enthusiasm he'd ever seen. The fact that her hair was still rising vertically took something away from the effect, though. "Hey, are you trying to tell me that phoenix egg wasn't the only 'special' item you've got here?" she asked eagerly.

The man glanced up at her hair. "I believe that has been implied. This is the Cursed Antique Shop, after all. What kind of fraud would I be if all that image was built around just one item? Especially something as silly as the egg… I mean, that phoenix legend is just plain ridiculous. Nobody in his right mind would believe in it!"

The chef rolled her eyes again, but refrained from commenting on that particular statement. "Well, great. Glad to hear it. Say, I'm in the market for something kind of special… maybe you could help me out?"

"Be glad to." Especially as she was the first customer he'd had all day. "What were you looking for, young lady?"

Ukyo didn't really hear the question. She'd already drifted off into a pleasant little daydream of presenting Ranma with the cure to his curse, and how happy he'd be after she solved that problem for him, and how much fun they'd have going out to celebrate afterward, and…

"AHEM!" She blinked her way back to reality to find the proprietor giving her an impatient look. "What exactly were you looking for?"

"Oh. Right. Something to cure curses. Jusenkyo curses specifically." Ukyo paused, remembering a not-so-funny story Ranma had told her once, about a date with Shampoo and a bogus one-time cure. "And I don't mean any stupid cure that only works for a little while and then quits. I need something that'll kick a curse's butt for good."

"I'm sorry, Miss. I don't have anything like that. I don't carry curse cures, not even temporary ones."

She frowned, and thought hard. "Okay, nothing that'll specifically cure a curse. How about something more general? Got anything that grants wishes?"

Ukyo broke from the flow of narrative, giving an exaggerated shudder at the memory. "I kid you not, Ranchan, the next thing he did was try to sell me a monkey's paw."

"I DON'T THINK SO!!" She barely resisted the urge to unsling her battle spatula and pound the living daylights out of him. The chef had never expected to feel this grateful to her English teacher.

"Well, that's the only wish-granting object I've got here." Some gaijin tourist had bought the Cube of Chaos a couple of months back. The proprietor rather enjoyed being one of the few people who really understood how Quebec had become the fifty-first of the United States. "If you tell me the details of the curse, maybe I can find an item that would work around it."

"Never heard of Jusenkyo, huh?" Ukyo asked, somehow managing to make it sound like anyone who had any pretense of worldliness and sophistication should know exactly what the name of the Cursed Springs implied. "It's a water-based curse. Any time a friend of mine gets hit with cold water, he gets stuck in the body of a girl. He has to splash himself with hot water to change back."

The proprietor stared at her for several moments. "Ah, I do think I have something that could help your young man," he said at last. "Got it right here, in fact." He turned, bent down, extracted one volume from a stack of books on a lower shelf, and handed it over to Ukyo.

She paused again, brooding over the memory. "What was it, Ucchan?" Ranma asked after several silent seconds had passed. "Some kind of cursed spellbook?"

"Nope," she said, grimacing. "Just a stupid joke, that's all."

Ukyo stared blankly down at the translated-to-Japanese copy of "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff (and it's all small stuff)". "What's this for?"

"Have your friend read it. Maybe it'll help him put a silly little condition like that into perspective."

The rain was pouring down more thickly than ever outside, and even less light was coming through the windows. Nevertheless, it was suddenly a bit brighter inside the shop, as Ukyo's rising battle aura cast an eerie glow. In a sort of reverse-DBZ effect, the chi burning out from her finally eliminated the last remnant of the magic holding her hair up; it settled back into place even as Ukyo's power output increased. "Listen here, jackass," she growled, taking a step forward, and then another when her target began edging away. "My Ranchan has to deal with more stress than any man ought to suffer. He's got psychos who want to date him or kill him, depending on which body he's in. He's got one so-called fiancée from the backwaters of China who turns into the stuff of his worst nightmares, and another who's a damn dominatrix-in-training. His old man pushes every broken promise he ever made off onto Ranma honey's shoulders to deal with, and believe-you-me Genma's broken a lot of promises. He's got guys who want to pound him for 'stealing' the girls they're interested in, never mind whether Ranma even wants those girls in the first place." This litany of her fiancé's problems was actually starting to depress Ukyo, so she cut it short. "My point is, the poor guy needs all the stress-reducing I can give him. So screw the stupid book, and either help me or tell me you can't!!"

The proprietor gulped. By now he was backed against a wall, with Ukyo's nose less than six inches from his own. He was sweating profusely, and not just from the heat emanating from her battle aura. "Ah… let me think… water magic… that rings some kind of bell…" Ukyo didn't back away, but her aura began dying down, which allowed him to think a little more clearly. "Okay, I've got it." He slipped to one side, disappearing off into the shelves.

A few minutes later he returned, carrying a long narrow box of about the dimensions necessary to hold a wakizashi. He passed this to Ukyo, who opened it carefully. Inside was a short scepter made from mahogany. The wood had darkened further with age, and into it was carved angular runic letterings in a language Ukyo had never seen before. "What is this?" she asked.

He resisted the temptation to preface his explanation with "I'm not saying I believe in the darn thing, mind you." This could be a hard sale, and he didn't want to antagonize her. "If I remember correctly, this thing is supposed to allow you to contact a very powerful elemental spirit. Or something like that. Maybe you could ask it to break your boyfriend's curse."

Ukyo gingerly ran one finger along the scepter. "Why do you think that would work?"

The proprietor shrugged. "Elemental… water… maybe it could fix things so that only hot water would splash him by accident? Anyway, this is the only thing I can think of that might help you."

She chewed her lower lip. "Well, I guess I can give it a shot. How does the magic work?"

"I'm afraid I don't know," he replied apologetically. "The scroll that came with this thing was ancient when I was a little boy. It disintegrated a long time ago." Specifically, it had disintegrated when he tried to read it, which had been a pretty traumatic event for a nine-year-old who hadn't been supposed to be messing around with "special" items in the inventory. As far as he was concerned, his customer should count herself lucky that he even remembered as much as he did of what it had said. He opted not to mention this, though.

"Is that right?" Ukyo said sourly, giving him a flat stare. "So what you're saying is, as far as we know, this stick might not even be magical."

The proprietor took it from her fingers, and slammed it against the edge of his desk as hard as he could. The Formica of the desk cracked, the wood of the scepter didn't. "I wouldn't say that, young lady."

"You could be right," she agreed. Ukyo accepted the artifact back, and began turning it over idly in her hands while considering things. Perhaps she would be able to figure out how to get it to work. She didn't have all that much free time, but for something like this, she could make the time to hit the library and look for a match for the letters carved into the wood. If worse came to worst and all other avenues failed, maybe she could ask Shampoo's great-grandmother for help. She'd rather not share Ranma's gratitude with anyone else, especially not Shampoo… but there was a lot of truth in that old saying about half a loaf. "Okay, I guess I'll take a chance on this. How much you want for it?"

"Only five million yen."

Somehow, she wasn't surprised. Ukyo unholstered her battle spatula and took a few practice swings to limber up her muscles. "Y'know, you tried this same thing during that deal with the Phoenix. Do you enjoy making people beat you up so you'll lower your price?"

The proprietor gave Ukyo a careful glance, determining that she was nowhere near as agitated as she had been earlier. Satisfied that she would probably be reasonable now, he coughed, and indicated the one piece of modern technology present in his store — a security camera. "Young lady, if you beat me senseless in my own shop, I'll haul your hide in front of a magistrate."

Ukyo frowned, surprised at this turn of events. When she'd asked Ranma for the earlier details of what had happened before she got involved in the affair of Kuno's phoenix, he'd mentioned this guy folded like a wet paper bag under just a little violence, reducing a price of one million yen to one hundred. 'Probably that was just because he WANTED to get rid of the phoenix or something,' she thought grumpily. Aloud, she said, "Listen, I don't have that much money. And who are you trying to kid anyway? Nobody's gonna shell out that kind of yen for something they don't even know how to use."

"You might be right," he allowed. "Okay, one million yen."

"Try a hundred thousand," Ukyo said flatly.

"Nine hundred thousand."

"One hundred thousand."

"Eight hundred."

"Sold!" Ukyo said cheerfully, pulling out eight hundred yen.

"I meant eight hundred THOUSAND, girl."

"Okay, let me spell this out for you. My last name isn't Kuno. I've got my own restaurant, which is how I can afford to go as high as one hundred thousand for this. But that's it. No more. The buck stops here."

"That's just not adequate. How can you possibly expect to buy a piece of real magic for such a ridiculously small sum?"

Ukyo spared a moment for wondering how much Shampoo had spent on her Red Thread of Fate, before replying, "Look. This stick isn't doing you any good here, is it? You haven't had anybody want to buy it in all this time, have you? I think a hundred thousand yen is very reasonable."

"Not a chance."

Inspiration struck. "Well, how about you just let me rent it? I mean, you can't argue that it's doing nothing for you here. Let me take it, try to figure out how it works. If I can do that, and it cures Ranma honey's curse, then I'll pay you the hundred thousand, and I'll give you the stick back, and I'll tell you how to work it. Nothing but profit for you."

The proprietor's face twisted into a wistful, what-might-have-been expression. "That sounds like an excellent deal, except for one problem. Using an item of powerful magic generally gets you into trouble if you're not its true owner. At the very least, it usually doesn't work out how you want it to. I'm sorry, but I can't just rent this out without warning you of that." Of course, now that he'd warned Ukyo, if she still wanted to go through with the deal he wouldn't hesitate for a moment.

"Blast it!" Ukyo snapped, glaring down at the rod, and then back to the proprietor. She took several deep breaths to calm herself and aid the creative-thinking process, then said, "Look. How about this? You sell me the thing free and clear. I pay you seventy-five thousand for it… and I'll give you a lifetime free lunch pass to Ucchan's Okonomiyaki."

He stared at her. "That's your restaurant?!" He'd never actually been there himself, but at least once a week his wife picked up an order to go for their lunch. A beatific grin creased his face. "Sold!"

Ranma frowned, a piece of his mind offended at a loser like that old guy mooching so much food off his friend. "Won't that cost you too much in the long run, Ucchan?"

Ukyo shrugged. "Nah, if it gets to be too much of a problem, I'll just relocate and change the name."

She spent awhile longer puttering around the shop, examining the inventory with a much more respectful attitude while waiting for the rain to stop. Ukyo would long remember the irony of seeing genuine magical items interspersed with junky little knick-knacks — although sometimes the genuine magical items looked exactly like junky little knick-knacks themselves. She wasn't sure whether that lessened or increased the irony. Eventually, though, the rain slackened and ceased, and Ukyo made her way back to her restaurant, preferring to get her newest acquisition to relative safety before resuming her interrupted trip to the market.

On returning, a glance at the clock informed her that she wasn't going to have time to get to the market, buy everything she needed, and still be able to open in time for the dinner rush. "Stupid rain. Oh well, maybe it'll be worth it," Ukyo muttered, looking down at the box containing her purchase. She opened it and took the scepter into her hands, turning it over and over and inspecting it closely. "If this thing can really help me find a cure for Ranma honey, it'll be worth a lot more than I've paid for it.

"Wish I knew how it works, though." The chef made a series of experimental motions with the scepter, which was meant to be a string of mystical gestures. To an observer it would have appeared rather more like she was attempting to conduct an invisible orchestra of lunatics. "Too bad I can't just wave this thing around and say, 'Rod, do your stuff!' "

An indescribable jolt of sensation blasted out from the scepter. Ukyo would have dropped it, except that her hand had gone temporarily numb, her fingers frozen around the artifact. The air before her rippled, distorted, and stabilized into a circular field roughly six feet in diameter. Ukyo stood there, mouth gaping open, staring at the effect for quite some time. It was as if a hole had been torn in midair; Ukyo, examining it, sensed that this was a tunnel, a gate, a passage to another place.

All that could be seen in the boundaries of the field was a formless grayness. She stared at this and knew, somehow, as if the knowledge were creeping up from her still-frozen fingers, that that wasn't what the destination on the other side really looked like. If she should step forward and walk through, she would find herself Somewhere Else, not Nowhere.

After taking several deep breaths, and pushing her fear and uncertainty to the back of her mind, Ukyo did just that.

Ranma frowned at her. "Jeez, Ucchan, that wasn't real bright. You just went right ahead into who-knows-what kind of magical trouble? Without even calling somebody to tell them what you were doing?"

Ukyo gave him a Look. "Put a sock in it, sugar. I was doing it for a cure for your curse. If it'd been you there, you'd've run through that portal fast enough to leave a trail of smoke."

Somewhere Else seemed rather rocky, and dark, and empty.

Ukyo stumbled as the light disappeared, and the floor changed from smooth regularity to a stony, uneven surface. She caught herself before she could fall, and spent the next minute or so staring around, waiting for her eyes to adjust and trying to get an idea of where she was.

It seemed to be a natural passageway cutting through the living rock. The path twisted away before her, making a sharp turn and vanishing from sight. There was almost no light, but Ukyo was able to make out that the floor and the walls were of unpolished, uncut, untouched stone. She knelt down and placed her hand against the ground before her. She couldn't feel anything to suggest other people had ever walked this way, at least not in numbers enough to have smoothed a passage before her. She could hear nothing except the whisper of her own breath; when she held this and strained her ears she could barely make out the thud and rush of her pulse. No other sound broke the stillness. Ukyo stamped down hard on thoughts of tombs and burial.

She turned around, and the sight of the portal still hanging there behind her reassured her quite a bit. It was glowing slightly, which Ukyo realized was the source of the faint illumination. After a few moments of silent debate, the chef turned away from it and began to carefully walk down the tunnel. She might have liked to return home and fetch a lantern before trying this again, but she had a strong suspicion that the portal would close behind her once she made her return trip, and who knew whether it would open again? After all, the stick clutched between her still-numb fingers might have a limited number of uses. It would be just like her luck — Ranchan's too, come to think of it — if she did go back only to discover she'd used up the last of its magic.

Even moving as slowly and carefully as she was, it didn't take her long to get to the part where the tunnel made a sharp turn. Now that she had reached it, she found that the angle was much sharper than she had thought, and the walls were coming rather closer together than had previously been the case. It wasn't narrow enough yet to hinder her passage; even with her spatula in place on her back, neither edge of the weapon would quite be touching the walls. But the diminishing space and the fading of the last of the light brought new feelings of apprehension and uncertainty rising in Ukyo's heart.

She stood there for quite some time. Eventually, though, she reminded herself of what she was doing, why she was here. This was for Ranchan. What did she think she was doing, shrinking back from helping him with his biggest problem? Cowering back like a little kid scared of the dark? With an impatient sound of disgust, Ukyo began moving again, feeling her way forward as she passed beyond the reach of the feeble light. The tunnel twisted, then twisted again…

…And then the walls opened up. Ukyo had been moving slowly, but now she stopped dead, staring forward with far more shock and wonder than she had felt when the portal first opened.

She was standing at the very edge of a massive open space. There was light again, or something like it… it illuminated the room before her, though it didn't penetrate into the tunnel from which she'd just exited. The light emanated from a point not far away from Ukyo. And in that point…

Ukyo paused. "I don't think I'm gonna be able to do justice with words to what I saw there, Ranchan. It was the spirit the old geezer had said the rod would let me contact. It's… it was like…" she struggled for words "…like I was looking at it, but it wasn't really there; at least not all of it. All I could see was just glimpses and pieces, and even then I get the feeling my eyes were translating it into stuff I could kind of understand, not seeing it as it really was."

A wheel of fire hung in the air, spinning and roaring with the fury of a thousand sunstorms…

In the next instant, the glow of the fire was swallowed by the blinding glory of a light so bright Ukyo felt like it should have stricken her blind…

The wind howled, and the waves of the ocean surged and fell…

Fire again, hiding in a womb of earth, burning in darkness at the heart of the world…

Rain fell in twisting, violent sheets, water and air struggling for dominance…

A waterfall lay frozen in ice, and light glinted off the edges with brilliance enough to dazzle the onlooker…

Fire crackled through a forest, reducing deadwood to ash, returning it to the earth from which it had come…

The sun sank below the far horizon, light departing slowly and reluctantly, as darkness came creeping forth out of hollows and corners…

Ukyo felt as if she were a pinball, her awareness being bounced from one vista to the next. Earth and fire and dark and water and air and water and dark and light and air and fire and water and dark and then, with a gasp and a jolt, she found herself staring up into the very heart of the force before her. She was closer now, with the mouth of the tunnel some little distance behind her; apparently she'd walked half the original distance separating her from the other without even realizing it, drawn forward like a moth to a flame. Glints and fragments of such things as she'd already seen continued to play about on the edges, but here, from her new perspective, they weren't really noticeable. Ukyo's focus rested instead in the center of the entity, a sight beyond words or even understanding, a tumultuous whole greater than the sum of the parts she'd already glimpsed. She could feel it staring at her, an awareness before which she trembled.

Emanating forth from this terrible eye came a clear, unmistakable response. Ukyo staggered back with the force of the emotion. In that instant, beyond any words or explanation, she knew that she had been regarded, weighed, judged, measured… and found utterly, completely inadequate. In that instant, she was no longer the young woman who had trained hard enough to master both her family's Arts… no longer the chef who owned and operated her own restaurant while still keeping her grades up… no longer the fiancée who supported Ranma even as there was no one to support her. All these things were stripped away, and Ukyo was again the little girl who'd been abandoned by her best friend and fiancé, hiding her misery as best she could while the other children whispered speculations about why'd she get dumped like that, what was wrong with her, why wasn't she good enough.

Some wounds never fully heal, no matter how much time may pass. Scars and memories remain. But while scars may be ugly, they also are marks of a survivor, and a bone that was broken may heal stronger than before.

It took everything she had, but Ukyo struggled free of the choking despair. She strode forward, defiantly, staring into the heart of the other with an incandescent gaze, daring it to repeat its pronouncement. "Damn you, you have no right to say that! Unworthy?! Not good enough?! SHOW ME!!" she screamed, trembling with the force of her white-hot rage. "PROVE IT!! Show me just what's so goddamned inadequate about me! IF YOU CAN!!"

"Ucchan…" Ranma whispered. He didn't know what else to say. Ukyo wasn't looking at him, and hadn't been for quite some time. Occasionally, tears would slide down her cheeks, but her voice had held steady so far. She was silent now, a pained silence that Ranma didn't want to continue, but didn't know how to fill. He gulped a few times, then said, "You don't haveta tell me this stuff."

"Yes, I do," she returned. "You want to know, don't you?"

"Not if it's gonna make you cry! Not if it hurts you more!"

Ukyo sighed, then turned back to face him. "Ranma, this is the first time I've said anything about any of this, to anybody. I need to get it all out." She forced a grin. "You need to stop being such a chicken, anyway."

"Chicken?!" Ranma squawked. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"I mean you're scared of a woman's tears." Ukyo blinked the last one out of her eyes, then pinned Ranma's gaze with her own. "Pain is a part of life, Ranchan. You've got to accept that."

"Being a martial artist means I'm supposed to protect people from getting hurt," Ranma said. "Not hurt 'em myself."

"Oh, so if my arm got wrenched out of its socket, you wouldn't reset it for me?"

"That's different!"

Ukyo gave him a sad look. "It's only different as long as you won't see it for what it is. Listen, sugar, I need to talk about this. You need to know what all happened. If it bothers you that much to see me drop a few measly tears, then close your eyes."

Ranma was silent for a few moments, then shook his head ever so slightly. "So what happened next, Ucchan? What'd the thing say to you?"

"That's the billion-yen question, isn't it? What did it say to me? Nothing, Ranchan — never once did that thing 'say' anything. And there's a real good reason for that, but I didn't understand it just then. That spirit…" Ukyo paused for a moment, considering how best to explain this, before continuing. "Obviously it wasn't human. But I was still expecting it to think like humans do, and it didn't. That wasn't how it worked. When it stared at me and put out that sense of thinking I was inadequate, I thought it meant it like a person would. And I was wrong."

"You were? It didn't mean it like that?" Ranma said, a frown creasing his brow. "Wait a minute. Just how else can you mean something like that?"

Ukyo shrugged. "Simple enough. It didn't mean I wasn't a good enough person. It meant I was human… only human. Nothing more. A powerless, clueless little creature, bumbling through the world without any understanding of it. And when I stepped forward and made my little speech, it didn't understand me any more than I had understood it. The way the spirit saw things, I was accepting its offer… An offer I didn't even realize was there."

Ranma considered that. "Is that when you got… changed?"

The shadows began to shift and coil around Ukyo again. "Yep. Earth and air and fire and water and darkness and light. Elemental magic. I got given power over darkness."

In an instant the other was moving, no longer whirling about in the air above her, but now descending toward her in a rush. Ukyo barely had time to flinch before everything changed.

She hung motionless, suspended in a void. Fear and courage alike drained out of her, along with her anger, the remnants of her pain, and everything else. Ukyo felt herself being emptied, poured out like a glass, the contents of her soul laid bare. As before when she had sensed the judgment of inadequacy, here she could feel the regard of the other once more, scrutinizing her, categorizing her, judging her far more thoroughly than she had been before. However, empty as she was for the moment, this didn't particularly bother her.

Ukyo had no idea how long this lasted. She had no way to mark the passage of time, nor was she even capable of caring. It might have been moments, it might have been years. When the change came, though, it came swiftly indeed.

Before, she had been emptied. Now, in the reverse of that, all her cares and thoughts and hopes and dreams and memories were surging back into her, each as fresh and forceful as it had been when it first became part of her. The pain of abandonment was there again, sharper even than it had been back in the cavern. The uncertain happiness that came when Ranma pushed aside ten years of thinking she'd been a boy, looked at the girl she really was, and called her cute. The triumph of cooking a perfectly-prepared okonomiyaki. The shock when she first lost to the Crepe King. The fierce satisfaction of her comeback victory. All the joys and sorrows of her life, condensed into one searing burst of restoration, poured back into her in an instant, accompanied by new knowledge. She didn't have time to process it now, but she had just been given some understanding of what was happening, glimmers and partial glimpses of insight that had come from the one changing her.

Around her, the emptiness of the void cracked, collapsed, and was replaced by darkness.

"What happened next is hard to describe, Ranchan. It was like… I was still me, but I'd left my shape behind… or maybe just lost the rules that say you have to have a shape. I flowed like water, I was as thin as a gust of air. I was everywhere in the world where there was shadow. Faint ones under the early morning sun that almost weren't there at all. Thick ones that had lain for years in closed-up houses. Deep caves that hadn't know light ever, where hundreds of years ago water had seeped through the rock and dissolved it and carried it away, and left only darkness behind. There, where the darkness was stronger, I could feel the echoes of how it had happened.

"The deeper and stronger and older the shadow, the stronger I felt like I was." Ukyo spared a moment for a digression. "You ever heard of the Marianas trench?" When he shook his head, she explained, "It's a really, really deep trench in the ocean floor. Deepest place in the whole ocean. Bottom of that sucker is actually harsher and less hospitable than outer space, Ranchan. No light ever reaches there, and the pressure would crumple anything man-made like so much tinfoil. But as my spirit passed through there, I felt strong enough to turn cartwheels through the water. If I'd had a body, anyway. Like I could swing my spatula and tear a hole in the face of the world.

"That was the fun part." Ukyo fell silent.

After waiting for her to continue, Ranma prompted, "Fun part? What happened next?" In a pathetically weak attempt at humor, he added, "Or shouldn't I ask?"

"You might as well ask, because I'm going to tell you." Ukyo decided it was time for another digression. Hopefully it would help make this next part come easier. "The thing is, Ranchan, this power's kind of divided into two sides. You've seen 'em both already, but you probably don't get what I'm talking about. Do you?"

"Lemme guess," Ranma said, thinking hard. "Um… stuff that's real and stuff that isn't?" When Ukyo blinked and gave him a questioning stare, he elaborated. "Like, when you teleport around and beat the crap out of a couple of muggers. That's real. But when you send me dreams and stuff like that, well, it's not real. Not really. Right?"

"Actually, sugar, you're on the right track," Ukyo said with a smile, "but your thinking's a little off. It's not whether or not something's real… it's whether I'm touching the physical world, or using some kind of spiritual ability."

"Spirit?" he echoed, then paused, considering. "Huh. Maybe that would be better than saying those dreams weren't real. I mean, I always felt a lot better after I had one." He gave Ukyo a bit of a challenging look. "Guess it's just that I'm still kind of in the habit of thinking they weren't real."

"You figured that out, huh? That I put something in them that kept you from realizing they weren't just ordinary dreams?"

"Yeah," Ranma said quietly. "I felt it real clear in that last one, where it finally ripped itself to pieces."

"Are you angry?" Ukyo met his gaze unflinchingly. "Are you mad that I did something like that, and didn't even ask you first?"

"I dunno," Ranma said. "I guess I just want to know why. Why'd you do it like this? Why didn't you let me see those weren't just ordinary dreams?"

"Because the whole point of this was to help you out, Ranchan. I wanted to help you lose some of your stress. It'd kinda defeat the point if you were spending your daylight hours worrying about the new batch of weirdness that was popping up in your life."

"Okay." That answer hadn't made all that much sense to him. He hoped it would after he'd gotten a few more pieces of the puzzle. "Then let me ask you this…" Ranma took a deep breath, then demanded, "Why'd you do it this way in the first place?! Why all the stupid secrecy? You wanted to help me out, then why'd you throw me out and tell me not to come back?! That hurt, Ucchan. It'd be one thing if you really meant all that stuff, but you didn't really leave me alone, you just pretended like you did. So tell me. Why'd you do it like this?"

Ukyo looked away. The darkness surrounding her grew a little deeper, a little more noticeable. "To answer that, I need to get back to what happened next. The not-so-fun part that came after me skipping through shadows all around the world.

"That first part… that was when I got my physical powers, Ranma." She turned back to face him, blinking new tears away. "The spiritual part came next, and it was the closest thing to Hell that I'll ever live through."

Her jaunt around the world ended in a deep cave. Ukyo only had a second of wonder to sense the barest echoes from a night that had lain there since the creation of the world… and then the cave was gone, and she hung motionless once again in the void. However, it was different this time, shot through with darkness in some indescribable way. Ukyo felt as if there were two realities here, the darkness and the emptiness, each overlaying the other. She knew without a shadow of a doubt which one she'd prefer, but if there was any way for her to affect her surroundings, she couldn't find it.

A voice interrupted her thoughts. It came harshly, discordantly. It wasn't that the words had been spoken in a harsh tone; it was rather that the speech itself didn't fit. Such a mundane means of communication was as out of place here as if someone had grafted a spark plug into the living wood of a bonsai. In the back of her mind, in the fragmentary understanding she'd gained from her earlier contact with the elemental force changing her, Ukyo sensed that this voice wasn't really part of the process. It was instead the equivalent of a recording, something left by a mortal, someone who thought as she did, to give a little extra clarity to what was happening.

For all the sense of discord, the words themselves were clear enough: "One who would gain power over darkness must face the dark night of the soul."

"The dark night of the soul? What'd that mean?" Ranma asked, unsure whether he really wanted to know.

"Simple." Ukyo squeezed her eyes shut, displacing a few more tears. "Dreams. Dark emotions. That's not just a figure of speech, Ranchan. Think back to those times you were hurting. All that anger and fear and sorrow and betrayal and hurt. You remember how you couldn't hide it anymore, in those dreams? How you couldn't choke it back and pretend you weren't feeling it? How you had to let it out, and then once you had let it out, it was gone?"

"Yeah," he said. "Is that what you had happen next? It wasn't that bad, for me."

Ukyo gave him a sad smile. "I was drawing it out of you and neutralizing it, Ranchan. That's only half of what happened to me. Actually, less than half. All the stuff I had stored up in me was shoved up to the surface, and it wasn't pulled out and destroyed.

"All the junk I'd pushed away, or that I'd forgiven and forgotten… BOOM! It was all back, all at once. All the bad, with none of the good mixed in. And then…" Ukyo took a gulping breath, "…then it got worse. Stuff that I really hadn't seen before. Not just what I hadn't let myself see, but things that had gone on when I wasn't around."

"Like what?" Ranma whispered. The words emerged almost against his will. He had a very strong suspicion that he wasn't going to like whatever was coming next.

Ukyo stretched out her hand, laying it flat in the air above the countertop. A ragged wisp of shadow, faint and ephemeral, streamed down, forming the ghost of the screen she'd used once before to show him something out of the past. "I can't do sound, Ranma. But maybe you can recognize this scene anyway."

Inside the screen Ranma saw himself, clad in a tuxedo and carrying a bunch of roses. Ukyo was there as well, confronting him with a challenging scowl. Ranma watched as the miniature pigtailed boy leaned forward, put his hands on Ukyo's shoulders, and asked her something. Ukyo's anger faded in an instant; she looked away, fidgeting nervously, struggling with her response.

He knew now what he was seeing. Ranma rejected the impulse to close his eyes. Echoing back from the corner of his mind came the words he'd spoken then, and the words she'd said in reply.

"Ukyo, this is very important." He'd paused then, so he could look into her eyes for a silent moment. And then, he'd asked, "Do you love me?"

"Ranma… I… I… O-of course I l-lo-love you…" Ukyo had barely been able to get the words out, her emotion fighting its way through her shyness. The embarrassment had caught her up a second later, and, demanding to know how he could make her say something like that, she'd slapped him silly and run off in a cloud of dust.

But this scene didn't fade with the removal of Ukyo from the picture. Ranma watched, feeling a sick heaviness weighing down his heart, as the little tuxedo-clad boy got back to his feet, chuckling maniacally at the reassurance that he hadn't lost his power over women, and then hurried off to seek the same response from Shampoo.

The image winked out. Ranma didn't even try to meet Ukyo's eyes. "I'm sorry," he whispered.

Her words sounded as if they were coming from far away. "I'm sorry too. Sorry I built so many dreams on top of a foundation that wasn't really there. Sorry I didn't see how things really were. I'm sorry I fell in love with someone who doesn't love me."

"Ucchan… I care… it's just, not like that…"

"Don't kid either of us, sugar." Suddenly there was an edge in Ukyo's voice. "You never even tried. It's just like you said that night after you came by and told me about Kaori. You remember then, Ranma? How you went off to that park and practiced and told your protests to the night wind?"

"You were there?"

"I was strong enough to tell you to leave." The edge was gone again, replaced by weariness. "Not strong enough not to follow you and see how you would take it.

"And I guess I did. How'd you put it, again? 'I'm not ready for this stuff'; 'I just keep going on and hoping things will work out'."

"Is that some kinda crime?" Ranma asked bitterly. "Is any of this my fault? Did I ask for it?"

"No, Ranchan, it's not your fault." At least, not all of it. "And it's unfair as hell that you got it all dumped in your lap. I'm sorry. And I'll do everything I can to help you deal with it."

"Like you helped me that night?" he replied, hating himself but unable to stop the words. "When you threw me out and told me to get lost?"

"Don't you get it?!" Ukyo exclaimed desperately. "Do you really not understand what happened then? What I meant, why I said what I did, what it meant today when I said that stuff didn't stand anymore?! I told you to go. Said don't come back unless you wanted to honor our engagement. You didn't. And last night I said you could come back here, that it was okay, no strings attached."

"Ukyo, if you're tryin' to say something, just spit it out already," Ranma said tiredly.

She closed her eyes and hung her head. She'd known this was going to hurt, but she hadn't expected it to be this painful. Was he being deliberately dense? Okay, maybe she had failed him a little, with that damned relapse when he came by her place after the date with Shampoo. Maybe she had reacted incredibly stupidly, clinging for a few moments to a hope she knew was dead. But she'd made up for that failure! She'd left subconscious hints of this truth in various dreams… he should have already realized it for himself. There should be no need for her to drain these final dregs of pain!

But apparently he did need her to spell it out for him, and so she answered, "I was letting go. You want it put in words, all nice and official? Fine. I renounce our engagement, Ranma. I finally saw how things really are, got it shoved in my face with no more room for wishful thinking or stupid, foolish hopes. As far as I'm concerned, you're free. One less honor chain hung around your neck."

Silence fell. Ranma turned this new development over in his mind, wondering why he didn't feel even a little relief. "Then what are we?" he eventually asked, quietly, and with more than a little fear.

Ukyo sighed. "Friends. Nothing more, nothing less."

The last of the morning had slipped away while Ukyo told her story, and it was now early afternoon. In sharp contrast to the stormy day of her tale, the air outside the restaurant was balmy, the sky free of clouds. The sun overhead shone brightly.

To Ranma, currently seated on top of Ukyo's roof, it felt inappropriate as hell.

"I'm sorry, Ucchan." She wasn't here with him, at least not as far as Ranma could see. He didn't really have anything like a good idea of the extent of her powers yet. Maybe she'd hear this, or maybe not. He didn't care either way. Right now, he was just trying to collect his scattered thoughts. "Didn't understand what you meant. Guess that's no surprise, though… I haven't understood a lot of things."

Ranma thought back to that moment when he'd thrown what she'd done in her face, when he'd made that crack about helping him by kicking him out. For a few short moments, it had all seemed to make sense… or at least a kind of sense. Ukyo had all these new abilities. She could see and do and understand stuff she'd never been able to before. So she was fixing things up to go the way she wanted them.

She'd taken herself away while he was in a really rough patch. She didn't give up spending time with him, but he hadn't realized — hadn't been allowed to realize — that his oldest friend was still with him, still thinking about him. Still there for him. She'd watched and waited, keeping tabs on what was going on in his life, keeping a low profile as things got worse and worse with Akane… peering into his soul and knowing he was missing her, even as he did his best to keep his mind off it… and then, when he'd hit the bottom, she'd stepped in to tell him it was okay, he wasn't alone, she was ready to be with him again.

He'd had to ignore a few minor details to fit everything into this picture, but Ranma had plenty of experience not thinking things through fully. In matters not related to martial arts, only if something was as obvious as a mallet to the head did he usually grasp it without effort.

The significance of Ukyo's final explanation seemed about that obvious.

His strategy of waiting and hoping that his problems would resolve themselves seemed to finally be working. He'd gotten perhaps the most die-hard of his fiancées to give up, to finally let go of all hope of getting what she wanted. Not only that, he still got to keep her as a friend… a friend who was offering him a place to stay and food to eat, and the benefit of her newly-acquired supernatural powers to help him solve his problems. And asking nothing in return anymore.

It was almost funny, really. He'd never thought success would feel like his heart was being cut out of his chest.

"How the hell have I screwed up this badly?" he whispered, resisting the urge to pound his fist into the rooftop beside him. That'd be a real nice touch — let out his stress, damage Ucchan's restaurant. "I just… I didn't know what to do. I wanted things to get better! Not keep on sinking further and further down the toilet!"

He clenched his eyes shut. 'Guess I really am as stupid as Akane always said. It's not like things just got real bad all of a sudden. They've been screwed up ever since Jusenkyo. I've had problems left and right ever since I got to Nerima, and I only managed to solve a few of 'em.' He gave a snort as he remembered that the engagement to Kaori was a problem he'd thought he solved, all those months ago. 'Each time I did get rid of something, it wasn't by keeping my head down and hoping it'd go away. Anytime I did that, it just let whatever it was drag on and on. But did I learn anything?' A louder, bitterer snort. Aloud, he muttered, "Hell, no. I just kept on doing what wasn't working. Real good there, Ranma. Real smart."

It hadn't just dragged him down; anyone too close got burned as well. Kaori hadn't spent a whole lot of time around him, but she'd received her fair measure of grief. His lie about just which body was the real him had sent Shampoo fleeing home in tears, only to return with a Jusenkyo curse. It certainly hadn't kept her from being stuck here in Japan, lonely. He still felt like a heel when he thought back to that rooftop discussion, and remembered that he'd never even suspected this. Akane had spent so much time angry, either because of something he'd done, or something someone else had done for him. At least Kaede hadn't endured any real trouble yet, which was one small bright spot… one bright spot that felt very small indeed, insignificant even, when his thoughts turned to the last of the fiancée brigade.

He'd never really let himself think about what Ukyo had lost, what his father's action had cost her. The theft of the yattai had to have been a serious financial blow to her family. Follow this up with ten years of hiding who she really was… Could she have had any real friends during that time? With the secret she had to keep? Now that he was actually considering such things, he doubted it. And yet, even after all that, she'd been ready to forgive him. Had satisfied herself with her "revenge" against Genma… a beating less painful than many Ranma himself had inflicted on his old man.

She'd taken the path of temperance and forgiveness, and what had it gotten her? Things she'd said two months ago came back to him now, clearer and more painful than ever. What Ukyo had here, she'd worked hard to achieve. The chef had made a place in Nerima for herself by sheer hard work and determination, and how much had she had to sacrifice to do that? How much time could she possibly have for the things she wanted to do for herself, when she had school and her restaurant to run? And who had ever supported her?

He could only think of one time when he'd really come to her aid. He wasn't even sure he and Akane hadn't done more harm than good, though, in that affair with the Crepe King. Contrast this to what Ukyo had done for him, such as giving him free food anytime he asked… and putting everything on hold to help him when Happosai had sealed his strength… and providing a place for him when the Tendos threw him out during the affair with the Gambling King… well, maybe that last one wasn't such a big deal, given her feelings for him (cue mental wince and hurried shift to next thought). But she'd also let the Tendos themselves stay, after they'd had their own rash of losses to the King and just come to her restaurant and let themselves in. She hadn't exactly been happy about it, and she had tried to get them out of there… by helping Ranma himself train to take down the Gambling King so they'd get back their dojo and the lost pieces of their home.

Ranma spared a minute to contrast this to the Tendos' behavior during the affair with Ukyo's secret sauce, and the efforts they had made to get rid of her, before pushing those memories away again. His own behavior during that time was nothing he cared to think about just now.

And things had come at last to the final bitter extent. She'd lost so much already… and now she'd even had her humanity taken away from her. And how had it happened? Had she been messing around with a magical artifact that'd let her control him? No. Had she ticked off some kind of mystical prince? No again. She'd been looking for a cure for his gods-damned curse. And instead she got given power she'd never asked for, and a boatload of pain that she'd never, ever have wanted. That he'd never, ever have wanted for her.

"I'm sorry, Ucchan," he whispered again. "So sorry. It shoulda been me. You shoulda come to me with that stupid stick and let me be the one who took the hit. You sure didn't deserve this. Not any of it." She got dark knives of pain tearing holes in her soul… and what did he get? What was his part of this bargain? He got his oldest friend still firmly in his corner, asking less in return than before, more determined than ever to help him out, and stronger than ever to be able to do so. If there was any justice, there had better be some good come for Ukyo out of this whole debacle.

The trouble was, he'd seen precious damn little justice in his life, or in the lives of his friends.

'Guess this is where I need to learn something, though,' Ranma thought grimly. 'Can't just expect justice or an even break. You've got to work for it. I'VE got to work for it. I'm not gonna just blow this off, this time. I damn well will find some way to make things better for Ucchan.' He sighed. 'And everyone else too, or at least as many as I can.'

Here, with the old established patterns of his life finally pulled down and ruined, Ranma could admit that he had screwed up, and that it was time for a change. Unfortunately, that was the extent of his new-found clarity. He knew he had to do something different. What that something might be, he wasn't sure yet.

But just because he didn't have an answer now, that didn't mean he wouldn't find one. Now that he was actually facing some of these issues, rather than ducking his head under the sand, Ranma found that at least he had an idea of what his immediate next step should be. He usually had the most success in life when he viewed things through the paradigm of martial arts… and in a fight when you don't seem to have any winning option, it's time for the Saotome Final Attack. Get some distance between yourself and the battle, come up with a new plan, and then attack again when you're ready.

The best part was he was already doing this, thanks to Ukyo's provision. He was out of the battlefield, and given the way she'd acted in the previous two months hopefully no-one would think to look for him here. He had the necessary distance separating himself from the conflict, and he even had someone with abilities he couldn't match to help him come up with a plan.

Ranma allowed himself one tiny, guarded smile. It would be enough. It had to be enough.

Feeling a good bit better now, he got to his feet and began to perform a slow, tight kata. There wasn't all that much room on the rooftop, but that was okay. He might not be in the depths of despair anymore, but he was nowhere near ready for any exuberant, gravity-defying leaps and bounds.

Still, he thought absently, it might be nice to have another one of those fly-the-heck-away-from-Nerima dreams tonight. He'd have to remember to ask Ucchan about that. It would feel a little strange to see her there without her disguise, but like she'd told him herself, sooner or later change must come.

That thought triggered another. He spared a brief moment to wonder what was going on elsewhere in Nerima, and what other sorts of changes might be taking place.

The two soon-to-be-combatants stood in a vacant lot, separated from each other by roughly half its length. For the moment neither carried visible weapons, though that could and probably would change before too long. The bright sunlight streamed down around them, raising brilliant highlights in the long lavender hair of one girl. To the other, whose hair wouldn't glow like that even if she were bombarded with large amounts of radiation, it was just one more of her opponent's annoying, unfair advantages.

After a long moment of brooding silence, Kaede spoke. "Is there any kind of special form to follow?"

"What you mean?"

"I mean, for the fight." Kaede put on her best challenging look. "For the agreement that after I kick your butt, you won't give me a Kiss of Death."

Shampoo allowed herself an amused sniff. "No. We just agree beforehand that it will not apply. You say you want that, Shampoo more than happy to go by it too. Law of Kiss of Death does not count for match we is about to have."

"Glad to hear it." Kaede assumed a ready stance, staring into Shampoo's eyes. "Anytime you're ready, China girl."

"Shampoo always ready for good fight." The Amazon smirked at her opponent. "You going to give me one, Kaede? You no do so good in last match, and that was not that long ago. You sure you ready for this?"

Kaede began stalking forward. "Guess we'll find out," she retorted.

Shampoo let her come. Underneath the carefree mocking attitude, she was experiencing a bit of uncertainty. Like she had said, it hadn't been very long since the battle in which she had utterly squashed this member of the competition. From what she had seen so far of Kaede, she was willing to give the other girl the benefit of a doubt… but if it turned out that she was pulling an Akane, and challenging Shampoo again when she was nowhere near ready, the Amazon was going to be very, very disappointed.

By now Kaede had crossed most of the intervening distance separating herself from her opponent. Rather than continue coming straight in, she changed the angle of her course. Shampoo began moving as well, and the two circled each other for a few moments.

The Amazon made the first move. Abandoning the circular sidling, she darted forward with a yell, then jumped into the air just before she could close within striking distance. Unlike in the challenge to Akane, this leap was angled to carry her a fair distance behind Kaede. However, as Shampoo passed overhead, she shot one fist down, intending to bounce a low-powered — for her, anyway — strike off her opponent's skull.

Kaede hadn't really expected this sort of tactic, but she wasn't caught too much by surprise. She hesitated just for an instant as Shampoo made her initial leap, and then the Japanese girl dropped low and rolled quickly to one side, quickly enough that she would have dodged any weapon her opponent might have seen fit to pull out and throw while she was out of Kaede's line of sight.

It had been an unnecessary precaution, though. Shampoo's fist moved through empty air, but her weapons were all still stowed away. The Amazon twisted, reorienting herself in midair so that when she landed she was still facing Kaede, then darted forward again. This time she elected to remain on the ground, launching a testing series of punches at roughly three-quarters her current top speed.

Kaede blocked the first few, wincing from the force of the impact. Shampoo was also holding back in terms of power, striking at less than half strength. But the Amazon was built for power; Kaede's slight form would never be able to match her for sheer brute force. Shampoo frowned as she felt her opponent's guard beginning to crumble. This was just plain stupid. The girl wasn't even trying to deflect the strikes instead of blocking them. Clearly Kaede had overestimated herself badly, despite Shampoo's hopes to the con—

Through the ache, Kaede smiled. Shampoo had just slowed down in order to throw a stronger punch, which was what she had been waiting for. She slipped to one side and called on all her new speed, one hand blurring from visibility, striking the nerve cluster in her opponent's elbow with the attack she'd meant to use in their first battle.

Shampoo's eyes widened at the sudden dramatic increase in speed, and at the way her entire arm had suddenly become unresponsive. It wasn't numb, though; instead, the acute sensation of pins and needles flooded through her limb, a distraction worse than pain would have been. This threw her off-balance for a critical moment, just enough for her to see but be unable to stop her opponent's next move, a high kick which slammed directly into her jaw.

The impact knocked Shampoo backwards, but she remained on her feet. Seeking to capitalize on her advantage, Kaede pushed forward, twisting for a stronger roundhouse kick while her opponent would still be disoriented and dizzy from the last attack. Unfortunately for the Japanese girl, her previous kick hadn't been nearly strong enough to really affect someone who'd trained to learn the Bakusai Tenketsu. Especially not someone who'd been doing extra endurance training lately, driven by the desire to really impress her husband once the time came for Cologne's offer to train the two of them together.

Kaede didn't have time for more than a blink of dismay, noting an instant after she'd committed to her follow-up attack… an instant too late… that Shampoo's eyes were still hard and focused. The Amazon's good hand shot out and caught her incoming roundhouse kick, closing around her ankle in a grip of iron. Shampoo pivoted, tossing Kaede through the air, getting some distance between them again. Quickly, while she had the chance, she began tapping a sequence of shiatsu points that would increase the flow of chi through the limb. She knew that would speed up recovery from whatever effect Kaede had used; the question was whether it would speed said recovery enough to be useful. If this effect was one that naturally lasted hours, well, cutting that time in half would be nice, but not nearly nice enough.

As she landed from her impromptu flight, Kaede caught sight of Shampoo's attempt to undo the effects of her strike. Knowing that if she couldn't even keep that advantage this fight was as good as lost, she quickly pulled out her tonfa, commended her soul to God, and shot forward at the absolute maximum speed she could manage.

Shampoo cursed in Mandarin, abandoning the healing technique before she could finish hitting all the points, and pulling out a bonbori. She gave ground, backing away from Kaede's charge while using the mace's longer reach to keep her opponent at bay. It was annoying to recognize that the other girl was now actually a little faster than she was. As long as she kept backing away, she could maintain her defense, but retreating like this was something Shampoo didn't particularly like to do.

This kept up for nearly a minute. Kaede herded Shampoo backwards, attempting to pin her against the wall that formed the boundary of their battleground. Unfortunately, when Shampoo reached the wall, Kaede misjudged which direction the Chinese girl would turn. Shampoo twisted like an eel, darting to one side in the split second when Kaede's anticipation was focused in the other direction, changing the path of her retreat by ninety degrees. This left the two fighters moving parallel to the wall; as the path of Shampoo's retreat took her nearer and nearer the corner, Kaede's spirits rose higher and higher. Keeping up this level of speed was beginning to drain her reserves, but that was okay… no way would Shampoo be able to avoid her for much longer…

As she sensed the approach of the trap, Shampoo met Kaede's gaze, closing one eye in a wink… and shifted her defense in rather an unexpected way. She didn't even try to block the incoming tonfa strike, shooting her bonbori forward instead to knock Kaede's empty hand aside. Kaede's weapon slammed into her a split second later. However, since she had been expecting it, Shampoo was able to basically ignore the blunt impact, releasing her grip on her bonbori and then swinging the fist that was now inside Kaede's guard. She landed a solid blow, striking the Japanese girl's jaw with force enough to bounce her off the wall beside her.

Kaede didn't completely lose consciousness, but she was definitely out of commission for several seconds. When the mists cleared away from her vision, she found herself still on her feet, with the rough surface of the wall behind her. Shampoo was standing several yards away, not even looking at Kaede as she resumed the aborted healing technique. Kaede tensed, trying to prepare herself for one last effort… and then she sagged. Her head was still spinning, she'd spent at least two thirds of her strength, Shampoo was just too far away for her to cross the intervening distance before the Amazon could react, and the only weapon she still had on her was the sai strapped to her left leg. Kaede really didn't want to think about what would likely happen if she pulled that out and charged.

She blinked, suddenly realizing that there was one additional impediment. She was currently immobile, held upright by something other than her own strength. Glancing down at herself brought the answer—she was pinned to the wall behind her by a bunch of forks. The tines of the utensils pierced through her clothing, lodging in the stone behind her. A few experimental twists and tugs revealed not the slightest give to any of them.

Since Kaede had no intention of tearing her way free by sheer brute force (mainly because she was all but certain she couldn't), she swallowed her pride and called out, "Shampoo! Could you please let me loose already?!"

Shampoo looked up from her still-unresponsive arm. "How long this take to wear off, anyway?"

Kaede grumbled something under her breath, then replied, "I don't know. It all depends on how strong you are."

"Well, if Shampoo not able to work dinner shift tonight, will tell Great-Grandmother to take it out of your hide." Kaede didn't exactly turn pale, but she did gulp involuntarily, which gave Shampoo a bit of satisfaction. She was getting quite tired of this stupid pins-and-needles sensation. Of course if Cologne were to punish anyone it would be Shampoo herself for her carelessness, and anyway the Cat Café was closed for now, but Kaede didn't need to know that.

"Okay, fine. Are you just going to leave me stuck here, so she knows where to find me?!" Kaede demanded.

"Do you give up? Agree that fight is over, and Shampoo won?"

The other girl heaved a sigh. "Yeah, you win this round. Don't get used to it, though… it's not gonna be like this forever."

Shampoo shrugged, walked forward, and began pulling the forks out of the wall. "Hey, at least you did give good fight," she said in a tone of obvious respect that improved Kaede's mood a fair bit. "As good as if had real Amazon sister here. Is okay for Shampoo to get used to that?"

She had respected his privacy, though it had been a bit of a struggle. So when Ukyo heard Ranma returning from the rooftop, slipping through an open window to enter the guest bedroom, she wasn't sure what to expect. She hadn't thought he would take her story this hard. Probably blaming himself, she thought moodily, even though what had happened had been her choice from beginning to end.

As he came down the stairs and joined her in the main room of the restaurant, Ukyo was glad to see that his spirits had picked up quite a bit. She gave a smile of her own, though it was one tinged with bittersweetness. It had surprised her when Ranma hadn't seemed gladdened or even relieved at her final declaration during their previous conversation… after all, she had been shown quite clearly that there was no hope of her dream of marriage to him ever coming true. He must just have needed some time for her message to sink in.

"Feeling better?" she asked.

Ranma nodded, walking over toward her. Rather than her usual spot behind the grill, Ukyo was seated on one of the stools on its opposite side. He sat down next to her. "A little better," he elaborated.

"I'm glad." A little better would do for now. Ukyo knew there was no way to quickly and easily solve all the problems in her best friend's life.

He took a deep breath. "So could ya pick up where you left off, Ucchan? I need to hear more about what's happened to you." Ranma attempted to smile, but it came out as more of a grimace. "Hope none of the rest of it was anywhere near that bad."

"No, it wasn't." Ukyo thought back over all that had happened since that moment when darkness was woven through her soul. There was still an awful lot to tell him. "You got any specific questions, Ranchan? Anything in particular you were wondering?"

"Uh, okay. How about telling me what all you can do? I bet there's a lot more than what I've seen so far."

"Not really," Ukyo replied. "You have seen pretty much all my powers. But I probably do need to explain them a little more thoroughly." Ranma gave her an expectant, "go on" sort of look, and she continued. "Guess I'll start with the thing I like the best." The dark aura appeared around her again. "When someone's hurting, when they're really angry, when they're miserable, when they're feeling worthless, when they're lonely… I can pull those dark emotions out of them and get rid of them, Ranchan."

She looked down, not meeting his gaze for the moment. "Too often, people will just push those things to the back of their minds, not really dealing with them. And that's really, really bad in the long run. It's not exactly the same thing as if I was healing their spirits — I have a feeling that's a Light-based power — but I can pull the bad stuff out of them so they can hopefully start to heal on their own."

"That does sound pretty cool," Ranma agreed, thinking of it in terms of a doctor removing bits of dirt and gravel from a wound. Then he frowned as something else occurred to him. "Wait a minute. You don't, like, take that junk out of them and carry it yourself, do you?"

"Hell, no!" Ukyo exclaimed, her eyes widening dramatically, as if the question had scared the living daylights out of her. "I wouldn't even be here today if that's how it worked!!"

"Why not?"

His question fell into a sudden, awkward silence. Ukyo mentally kicked herself for overreacting. Still, she had been planning to tell him sooner or later. This was probably as good a way to lead into it as any. After marshalling her thoughts, she spoke one word, three quiet syllables that nevertheless seemed to echo through the room. "Kodachi."

Ranma blinked. "What about her?" he asked, his stomach tightening.

Ukyo opted not to answer with words just yet. Instead, she turned to lean over the counter, stretching out one hand and forming another shadow screen.

The scene depicted within showed a small, plain room. There was a cot along one wall. The only other furniture consisted of a utilitarian desk and a chair. There were several books piled at one corner of the desk, and the chair held something as well — a girl in her mid-to-late teens sat there, looking down at another book spread open on the desk before her. The image held static only for an instant, then zoomed in and began a slow rotation centered around the girl.

Ukyo had generated this scene in response to a question about Kodachi. This fact was the only thing that enabled him to instantly recognize the Black Rose in the girl seated there. Her hair was unbound, streaming down her back in gentle waves. Instead of a form-fitting leotard, she wore unflattering white garments that seemed vaguely reminiscent of hospital garb. These changes were trivial, though, compared to the look on her face.

Gone was the usual challenging stare, the haughty expression, the wild look of being ready at any instant to pull off some outrageous and perhaps cruel antic. This girl seemed both calm and peaceful… as peaceful as ever he'd seen Kasumi. On the other hand, Kodachi was focusing on the book below her with a concentration that he hadn't often observed in the eldest Tendo daughter.

Ranma stared at the scene, then turned to look at Ukyo. "Is this happening right now?"

She shook her head. "I can only show memories like this. It's from last week." She sighed. "I check up on her from time to time."

"She really is in a mental hospital, isn't she." He'd realized why those clothes resembled medical garb. "Kuno was just bein' his usual stupid self when he said he'd looked into it and found out that wasn't true."

The scene winked out as Ukyo shrugged. "He did look into it. He did find her. He couldn't accept finding someone so different from the sister he remembered… someone who could stare him in the eye with no hint of recognizing who he was."

"And you did that to her?" Ranma asked. It was a rhetorical question. Even he could see that Ukyo's reactions indicated she felt both responsibility and remorse. He wasn't sure yet why she should feel the second one, but she probably had a good reason. Still, Kodachi didn't seem unhappy, which was more than he could say for Ucchan. Because he didn't want that second part to stay true, Ranma continued before his friend could say anything. "She seems a lot nicer now."

"Nicer, happier, better off…" Ukyo shrugged. "Yeah, I think so too." She looked down. "I did want that. But I didn't mean for it to happen like this."

Ranma waited, and after a few moments of silence, his companion continued. "Before I sent you any dreams, before I saved that girl… there was Kodachi. Figured I'd deal with her and let that be the first time I used these powers to make a difference."

"Did ya mean to do something other than what you did?" Ranma asked. "What did you do anyway?"

"I wanted to help her. Wanted to do what I just told you about a little while ago — draw out and shred the darkness that was weighing her down. But insanity's not the same thing as a flash of anger or a fit of depression. Kodachi's darkness ran clear through her mind. I tried to pull it out and get rid of it, and leave her free." Ukyo chuckled mirthlessly. "Technically, it worked. I just didn't realize it would leave her like this. She's nothing but a ghost of what she used to be."

Ranma looked down at the empty air, still seeing the vision in his mind's eye. "How bad off is she?" he asked. "It didn't look like you reduced her to a vegetable or nothing."

"Nope. Tabula rasa." Ukyo didn't wait for Ranma's expression to shift into a look of confusion. "One of the doctors who examined her used that term. It means 'blank slate'. She's forgotten… no, not forgotten. Even with amnesia you can sometimes get your memories back. It's gone, Ranchan. Everything except some basic skills, like language and toilet training. But everything else, the stuff she'll need to know to live on her own and interact with other people, to have a normal life, she has to relearn it."

'Or learn it in the first place,' Ranma thought to himself. "So that's what's happening now? The doctors are teaching her that stuff?" Ukyo nodded. "How's it going? Do they think she'll be able to make it on her own eventually?"

"Yeah. Kodachi's smart. Probably smarter than any of us." The chef snorted, remembering the I.Q. test she'd watched the doctors administer to their patient. Ukyo had worked on the questions and conundrums as well, in silence, and it was rather annoying that the girl whose mind she'd wiped had outperformed her by a wide margin. "They think she'll make a full recovery. At least… well, maybe 'recovery' isn't the right word, since she won't be the same as she was before.

"What I meant is, they think she'll be as functional as any normal person. A year from now, probably the only thing left in her from this will be her new personality. They expect she'll be quiet and shy for the rest of her life."

"That's a heck of an improvement over the old Kodachi." Ranma gave Ukyo a tentative smile. "You know, just about everything you've said sounds like an improvement. Even the memory loss. She won't have to remember throwin' razor hoops around, or drugging people, or any of the rest of it."

"Yeah. Like I said, she is better off now. Probably better off in every way."

"Right. So why the long face, Ucchan?" he demanded. "Why're you feeling guilty about this?! Heck, if somebody came up ta me and told me to make a decision, have this happen to Kodachi or leave her like she was, I know which choice I'd pick. Wouldn't spend any sleepless nights trying to decide, that's for sure."

"It's not that simple, Ranchan." Ukyo looked away. "It's not really about Kodachi, at least not just her."

After waiting a few moments for Ukyo to say what it was really about, Ranma prompted, "What do you mean?"

"I mean, this isn't what I meant to do!" she burst out. "Never mind whether it worked out for the best. Don't you get it?! I've got these powers, and the very first time I try to use them, I get something that wasn't what I was trying for. Something permanent, that I can't undo, that nobody can undo! What if it had been bad for Kodachi?! What then?!"

"I don't know," he admitted. "But it didn't happen. Ucchan, you shouldn't—"

"Don't say that!!" she yelled. "Don't give me what you gave Shampoo, about not wasting your time looking at the past. Not looking at things I didn't want to is what ripped a hole in my heart in the first place! Not seeing things as they really are can kill you, Ranma! Or make you wish you were dead!!"

She ran out of energy then, lapsing into relative silence broken only by her own deep, heaving breaths. After a few moments, Ukyo felt strong enough to focus on him again… and almost immediately wished she hadn't. Ranma had half-turned in his seat, looking away from her, but she could still see that his eyes were hooded with pain. The chef grimaced bitterly, running the last few minutes back through her mind. "Sorry. I didn't mean to yell like that. I'm not mad at you. It just… it hurts like fire, that I've got all this power, and I don't dare to use it like I really want."

Encouraged by the fact that he was now looking at her again, a quizzical look beginning to displace the pain, Ukyo continued. "That was the first real coherent thought I had, once I got back from my little trip beyond the boundaries of the world. That maybe I'd just had my soul seared and burned on a hot grill, but at least some good was gonna come of it. At least I'd be able to help you like I couldn't have before."

"Why'd you think I needed that much help?" Ranma asked.

"Oh, I don't know," Ukyo said, trying for sarcasm but only achieving bitterness. "Maybe it was the glimpses of possible futures I got shown in that whole 'dark night of the soul' thing. One where you decided seppuku was the easy way out. Another where Akane cracked your skull open in a really nasty fit of temper. That's the kind of stuff I saw, Ranchan. Before then I'd never realized just how bad things were getting here. I'm ashamed of that. And I'll help you, the best I can do. It just hurts that I can't do everything I'd like to."

"What do you wish you could do, Ucchan? Wave your hand and solve all my problems for me?" Ranma asked, with the barest hint of a frown. While part of him thought that sounded nice, his pride — beaten and battered though it was from recent events — rejected the thought. Help would be one thing, but helplessness was something he'd never embrace.

She stared soberly back at him. "I'd like to. But even at the very beginning, that isn't what I was planning to do. My first idea was to fix up Kodachi, then go to you and explain everything, and show you the new and improved Black Rose to back up my claims. So you'd know that I really did have the power to make a difference, to help you out. And then we'd work together to solve those problems. That was the plan."

"And you changed plans, when that very first thing didn't go right for you." He was still a little confused as to why she'd switched over to the dreams, but decided to save that question for later.

"It hit me really hard, Ranchan. I already told you that. I might be more powerful than before, but I was nowhere near as in-control as I thought I was going to be." She dropped her gaze. "Like when you dropped that Kaori bomb on me and I blew up. I don't think I made this real clear earlier, but I hadn't been planning on doing it that way. I knew I needed to end our engagement, but I wanted to find a less painful way of doing it. You just caught me when I was weak and hurting. I'm sorry."

"'S'okay," Ranma muttered. "You got nothing to apologize for, Ucchan."

"Doesn't make me less sorry. Sorry about that, about things in general, sorry I can't help you as much as I first thought I could."

"You warned me about Mousse." The thought blazed forth in a sudden flash of clarity. "Even though you wanted to just deal with him yourself. That was what I felt, back in that dream. You coulda handled him just like you did those muggers, but you let me take care of my own problem with a little help."

She smiled back at him, a proud, sad, weary expression. "Do you think I did the right thing, Ranchan?"

"Yeah." He said it quietly, with no special attempt made to seem sincere. To Ukyo, that quiet response was all the more convincing for its matter-of-factness; some of the weariness eased out of her expression. "Thanks, Ucchan," Ranma continued, and a little more vanished. Hoping to wipe out the rest, and maybe make some inroads on the sadness as well, her best friend forced a grin. "Hey, where were ya when I needed help with Kuno? He actually managed to draw blood on me. Once he gets out of the loony bin, he's gonna brag about that for the rest of his life!"

Ukyo snorted. "Golly gee, can you forgive me? I wish I could've done more. But you see, there's this problem… the brighter the light is in a place, the weaker my powers are there. I barely managed to detect that stupid sword inside Kuno's bokken in the first place; it was all I could do to blunt the edge as much as I did. If it weren't for the darkness inside that shell, between the wood and the metal, I couldn't even have done that."

Humor forgotten, Ranma spent the next several seconds gaping at Ukyo. "You mean… you did…?"

She rolled her eyes. "Well, duh, Ranchan. You pressed your arm straight down against the edge of a katana, for crying out loud. A katana belonging to Mr. Tatewaki Samurai-Wannabe Kuno. That thing would've cut clear to your bone if I'd been out sick that day."

"I'm glad you weren't," Ranma said quietly, recovering at least a little of his balance. "I'm glad you were there, looking out for me."

Ryoga had no idea where he was, but that was nothing unusual. Nor was the fact that he currently stood less than a foot off the ground, his humanity temporarily washed away by water he hadn't even seen coming. He was depressed, angry, brooding over his latest defeat, thinking about how he might finally triumph over Ranma… Again, nothing out of the ordinary.

Except that for once the "latest defeat" hadn't been handed to him by his pigtailed rival. Ryoga was doing his best to keep this pushed to the back of his mind. He had no real desire to think back to the specifics of that battle, or the ease with which the newest Nerima nutcase had taken him out. Ryoga kept the memories at bay as best he could, concentrating on the important stuff. Namely, that the fight — and what was worse, the hateful contempt that girl had shown for Akane — was all Ranma's fault. Whoever the newcomer was, she wouldn't even be here if it weren't for that womanizing jerk. Did Ranma care, though? Did he have even a shred of decency in his heart, to feel remorse over the trouble and dishonor he caused over and over and over again for Akane? Or for Ryoga himself? The boy-turned-pig snorted at the thought. He'd bet every one of his bandanas against it.

Well, if there was any justice, Ranma would pay. Ryoga wasn't quite ready yet, but soon he would have the means needed to finally pay his rival back for all his crimes, to finally earn the victory he deserved. Ryoga thought back to the source of his recent inspiration, and gave a grunting whuffle that was the best approximation his cursed form could make to a dire, ominous laugh. He could almost picture it now… himself walking forward, tall and proud; the mystery girl's face taking on an expression of stunned horror mixed with awe as he dropped Ranma's twisted, bruised, unconscious, defeated form before her and thanked her for the lesson she had taught him… Akane would be there too, thankful to finally be free of Ranma's perversion, thankful too to know who she could really depend on… heck, not just Akane, but the whole Tendo family… he could see it so clearly, even gentle Kasumi facing Ranma with a dark frown, then turning away to regard Ryoga himself with gratitude and relief…

Ryoga blinked as reality suddenly intruded on his fantasy. The world was spinning! The ground was falling away beneath his trotters! He squealed, reflexively struggling, then realized a moment later that he'd just been picked up. Looking up and identifying the perpetrator, he relaxed into relieved amiability.

Kasumi stared down at the little black piglet with an expression of gratitude and relief. "I don't know why you wander off so often, P-chan, but I'm glad you came back just now." She walked back toward the house, grateful that the evening dusk hadn't quite been dark enough yet to prevent her from seeing her sister's pet wandering in the street outside. "Akane will be glad to see you."

That was more than enough to wipe all thoughts of angst and anger from Ryoga's mind. He closed his eyes, savoring rather different emotions now. As a result, he didn't see Soun or Nabiki as Kasumi carried him into the house. Not that it likely would have made a difference if he had; Ryoga could be as clueless as Ranma about many things, and he probably wouldn't have seen anything worth noticing in Soun's drawn, tired expression. As for Nabiki, she was wearing her usual mask, which flickered only for an instant as she sent a sharp gaze Ryoga's way.

"Is Akane still upstairs?" Kasumi asked. Nabiki grunted, which Kasumi understood to be a "yes". The eldest Tendo daughter headed to the second floor hallway and knocked on her sister's bedroom door. After receiving no response, she knocked again, a little more forcefully, and called out, "Akane?"

"What is it, Kasumi?" Akane's voice came from the other side of the door, tense and strained. Ryoga opened his eyes, startled at the tone she'd used. Akane certainly hadn't sounded happy. Surely that would change, though, when she saw the reason Kasumi was here.

"I found something of yours. Can I come in?"

"I guess so." Akane's reply came with an utter lack of enthusiasm. Kasumi opened the door and entered the bedroom, with Ryoga's gaze seeking out Akane even before the door had swung fully open. She was seated on her bed, working with her weights. She'd evidently been putting quite a bit of effort into it, as she was sweaty and flushed from the exertion. The look on her face made it clear that her workout hadn't been affording her any real relief or satisfaction. That changed, though, when she saw what her sister was carrying. "P-chan! Did he show up just now, Kasumi?"

"That's right. I thought you'd be happy to see him." Kasumi walked over to the bed and passed the porcine parcel over to her younger sibling.

Akane dropped the barbells and gathered him into her arms. "Thanks, big sister."

"You're welcome, Akane." Kasumi hesitated, as if wondering whether to say something else, then bid her sister goodbye and headed out of the room.

"I'm glad you're back, baby," Akane said softly, settling the piglet into her lap. She began to gently scratch him along his spine. Ryoga grunted in appreciation. "I wish you'd gotten back sooner. But at least you're here now."

Akane's hand faltered, ever so slightly. Ryoga didn't notice. "You always do seem to show up when I need a friend, P-chan. You pulled me out of the water after that idiot Ranma almost got me drowned after the fight with the Golden Pair… you were there at Ryugenzawa when I almost got eaten by a dragon… you were there on Toma's island too…"

By now Ryoga was fighting an urge to fidget. He still wasn't sure how Akane could have seen her pet turn up in some of those places and not start to suspect the truth. Hoping to take her mind away from these trips down memory lane, he turned on her lap, gave a playful squeal, and bumped his head against her other arm. Akane obliged by scratching his head as well. Both her hands were beginning to tremble now, strongly enough that Ryoga did notice an odd quality in the familiar sensations.

"I'm glad you're here now…" Akane said again, interrupting the sentence with a curious gulping sound. "P-chan, I'm… I'm so…" Another gulp, or rather a series of them. "Things are r-really bad right now." A single drop of water splashed against the piglet's back. He looked up, eyes widening in helpless, surprised dismay, to see tears flooding Akane's eyes. "It's Ranma. It's, it's always R-Ranma. Why c-can't he ever be n-nice to me, P-chan?! Why… Why does h-he always p-put those other, other g-girls ahead of m-m-me?!"

Ryoga watched, feeling more helpless than ever, as the dam broke. The familiar safeguard would serve no longer; the anger could no longer shield her from the pain. Akane held him tightly and cried hot tears mixed of equal parts anger and misery. It took a long time for the storm to pass, twilight deepening into true night before she eventually cried herself out.

She didn't seem to be feeling much better, though. Slowly, haltingly, Akane told her pet what had happened lately, pausing every so often to sniffle and wipe at her reddened eyes. Ryoga's eyes were red, too, by the time she'd finished, though in his case this was due to something rather different from tears.

Ranma closed his eyes, savoring the feeling of the wind in his hair. It was a rather windy night; the air rushed past him with nearly enough vigor that he could almost imagine he was already soaring through the night sky. Could almost forget that he was currently still awake, and earthbound, and leaning his head out the window of Ukyo's darkened guest bedroom.

For awhile he just stood there, not really thinking about anything, relaxing and enjoying the peaceful moment. It had been a very long day. He chuckled a little, as that thought ran through his mind. This day had to have set some kind of record for him. He'd never processed this much information in this short a time in his life.

He and Ukyo had taken a break for the rest of the afternoon, then spent most of the evening talking again. Ranma had been curious to know whether she'd done anything else to help him out that he didn't know about yet. He'd even guessed that she was responsible for his quick recovery after his fight with Mousse, but Ukyo had denied this. Her theory was that when Ranma called on all his chi, he must have burned most of the paralysis powder out of his system. Ranma made a mental note to confirm it one of these days, with the aid of someone not actually out for his blood.

As it turned out, her sabotage of Kuno's sword was the only other action she'd taken on his behalf that he hadn't already known anything about. The dreams had been far and away her biggest point of intervention. She'd used them in conjunction with her favorite ability, to drain away negative emotions that were building up too high in him; at the same time, though, she had forced him to face those emotions, and to take some hard looks at the circumstances of his life. Ranma felt like he understood now, at least a little better, and though the memories of not being allowed to ask questions were still a little irksome, he could see Ukyo's point. If he had figured out too much too soon, it would have just made things more complicated.

And they were already plenty complicated enough. A shadow rested on Ranma's face for a moment, as he let his thoughts drift away from Ukyo and the refuge she'd offered him here. There were still plenty of problems waiting for him in Nerima… and Ukyo had made it crystal clear that though she'd help him to the absolute best of her ability, her powers weren't anywhere near enough to solve said problems quickly and easily.

He deliberately turned his thoughts away from those matters, focusing for now on the more detailed explanations Ukyo had given him regarding her abilities. In dreams, she could do just about anything she wanted… but only if it involved some other aspect of her power (such as when she had extracted and eliminated his pain) or was intimately tied to the dream itself (such as his compulsion to not view her visitations as anything other than normal dreams) would it endure into the waking world.

There was something of a way around that, though, Ukyo had told him… if she fashioned a dream whose environment matched the real world, the two would synchronize and overlap. She could move through that, or carry someone through it, and still reach through it to reality. That was what she had done on the night they had seen Mousse in the forest, and also on the earlier night when she'd saved that unknown girl. It was fortunate in the extreme that Ukyo had chosen that particular time to experiment with that ability, had sensed the girl's fear and followed along to guard her.

His oldest friend could observe and touch the world from that state, but not actually step into it. For teleporting herself, she needed to be awake, and she could only step into somewhere with fairly deep shadow. The quality of light where she was teleporting from didn't make a difference, though, unless she was taking someone along with her — such as their trip from the Tokyo Tower the previous night.

She could also summon an aura of elemental darkness that could be as solid or as ephemeral as she wished, though the strength and effectiveness of it would lessen quickly as surrounding light levels increased. The shadowy screens she'd used to display scenes out of memory were an application of that, as of course was the familiar mask she'd worn in his dreams.

When Ukyo had finished her explanation, Ranma was forced to agree with her… none of that sounded like it could directly solve all his problems. At least, not in any way he or she would consider acceptable. Sure, Ucchan could send the other girls terrible nightmares of him turning out to be an awful husband, she could torment them in their sleep until their collective nerve broke and everyone quit pulling so hard on him… but Ranma would endure a hundred days like yesterday rather than ask her to do something like that.

Still, he mused, as he pulled back inside the room and shut the window, if he played his cards right they might be able to deal with Shampoo. Ranma hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about a particular revelation that Kaede had made, but the fact that the Kiss of Death need not apply if the Amazon and her opponent agreed to this beforehand was burned indelibly into his mind. It would take a good bit more planning, but maybe he could get Ucchan to challenge Shampoo with himself as the prize. If the fight took place at night, Ukyo wouldn't have any trouble at all subduing the Amazon. He knew better than to think Cologne wouldn't still want him to marry Shampoo, but if he could take Amazon law out of the equation and give Shampoo an honorable way out, it might take a lot of the pressure off.

He didn't have any ideas yet about Kaori or Kaede, and thinking about Akane hurt too much. But it was a start, quite a good start really. Ranma allowed himself a small, guarded smile.

The expression stayed, growing wider and more genuine as he stripped down to T-shirt and boxers and stretched out on his bedroll. He was looking forward to this dream. It might not be a real escape from the chaos of Nerima, but while it lasted Ranma intended to enjoy it to the max.

As he sank down into slumber, Ranma's fading thoughts drifted back to Ucchan, and how she had seemed both surprised and pleased this evening, when he'd wanted the two of them to fly away in another dream. His best friend had had plenty of her own pain this day; Ranma knew that, and wasn't proud of it. But he was proud of the tender, happy smile she'd given when he made that request, and of how much better he'd obviously made her feel.

"Ranchan?" No response. She spoke a little louder. "Hey, Ranchan, wake up!" Ukyo frowned, and reached out to grab his shoulder. Whatever subconscious defense mechanism allowed him to evade attacks in his sleep clearly didn't consider this a threat; Ukyo made contact and gave him a mild shaking, achieving exactly no result. Ranma's breathing remained deep, even, and regular, showing no signs that his slumber was being disturbed in the slightest.

Ukyo rolled her eyes, then pulled back and settled down into something vaguely resembling a meditative posture. She closed her eyes, reaching out with her abilities to grasp at Ranma's slumbering soul. It was rather harder than usual, since he wasn't currently dreaming. The bright sunlight leaking through the window didn't help either. Still, she managed it quickly enough.

Ranma found himself standing on a flat gray surface, under a flat grey sky. The utter uniformity was broken only by the sight of Ukyo before him. "Hey, Ucchan, what's up with this?" he asked, puzzled. The dream they'd shared the previous night had ended several hours earlier, but from Ranma's perspective this was nowhere near apparent. To him, it was as if they had one moment been sitting atop a mountain in North America watching the last of the night slip away before the oncoming dawn, and then the next they were here. Rather a drop in quality in his opinion.

"Ranchan, it's already past seven back in the real world," Ukyo replied. "And it's Monday morning, which means school."

Ranma flinched. "Y'know, I think maybe I'd better give that a miss for awhile. Uh… that okay with you?" Asking her permission like that felt awkward, grating rather harshly against his pride, but it seemed like a necessary evil. Akane had never been happy when she thought he was slacking off, and neither had Kaori, for that matter… he sure couldn't afford to get Ucchan mad at him right now.

"You don't have to ask my permission, silly," Ukyo said. "Besides, I agree one hundred percent. It's not a good idea for you to go back there just now."

"Great. Thanks." He grinned, glad for the support and reprieve. "What about you? Are you gonna go?"

"Well, that is why I bothered to get back into your dreams right now," Ukyo said with amused exasperation. "I tried to wake you up to tell you that I was about to leave, and that was a total bust."

"Do you really have to go, Ucchan?" Ranma asked.

"Unless you want people to start suspecting you might have come here, yeah, I think I'd better."

"Crud. Guess you're right. Okay, I'll see you later on this afterno— wait!!" Ukyo blinked, startled at the sudden urgency in Ranma's tone. "What about breakfast?!"

His oldest friend rolled her eyes mightily. "I left you a big stack of okonomiyaki in the fridge, Ranma. See you this afternoon, okay?" She turned her attention away from him and toward the unraveling of the dream, then turned back as she remembered something else. "Wait, there is one other thing. I can't stay closed fo