"You let him escape?" Tanya said, aghast. "How could he escape?!"
Ranma remembered the cells well enough a force wall, magically reinforced walls with one small window. It should have been able to hold Ryouga, the window was big enough for P-Chan, but too high up for the pig to jump to.
"Hey, I've heard those words before," Raphiel said. "Some fortune-teller said I'd be hearing them a lot!"
****
In a giant rat cage a dimension away, a blonde were-rat sneezed.
****
"Wait a minute," Thropan said. "Pig-boy? Lost? How does him getting lost explain how he got out of the cell?"
"I don't know," Ranma said, shrugging. "I always thought he just had no sense of direction."
Ranma proceeded to explain Ryouga's direction problems, starting with his inability to find a vacant lot behind his own house.
"Hmm," Thropan said. "We felt some magic on him, maybe he's an unconscious teleporter. But then, we felt the same magic on you, and the prison should have held against teleporting."
Of course, Ryouga's ability, or curse, to get lost had nothing to do with teleporting. He simply had no direction and an inability to recognize land marks for what they were.
He once spent a half day resting in an expensive, narrow lounge with bad food and a whole bunch TVs set to the weather channel and when he came out everybody was speaking German for some reason.
Then came that warehouse he was camping in for a few days. The one that kept rocking in very nerve-racking manner. Ryouga would have almost sworn they were on a boat if he hadn't known that was impossible. Anyway, after he got out of the warehouse finally, everybody was speaking Japanese again.
Ranma and Thropan didn't realize how mundane Ryouga's lost curse was, of course, and most seemed to think it was the most likely cause for his escape.
"An the magic you felt was probably Jusenkyo anyway," Ranma said.
"Jusenkyo?" Thropan asked. Tanya sighed and grabbed a cup of water, upending it over Ranma's head causing him to shrink into a girl. "Uhh...Jusenkyo?"
"Jusenkyo," Ranma confirmed resignedly as Tanya spilled hot water over the red-head, turning her back into a he.
"Wow," Raphiel said. "That must be fun sometimes."
Thropan, Ranma and Tanya, all making slightly gutter assumptions of the comment, turned to face the were-cheetah with aghast expressions on their faces. Though, considering the slight amount that Ranma had colored, it was likely the subject had come up before.
"You could go to town and pretend to be someone else," Raphiel finished, resulting in groans from the rest of the group.
"Pig-boy turns into a little black piglet." He gestured to show how big.
Thropan started pacing, blinking for a moment when he passed the door to another room of the cabin and noticing through the crack it was open that Tanya had apparently jury-rigged an artificer's workshop into the cabin. That was something he'd have to report.
"A pig that size could get out the window," Thropan noted. Ranma snorted.
"He may have gotten stronger," Ranma said. "But he can't make that jump as P-Chan."
"Then he either got 'lost' somehow," Thropan said. "Or he has outside help. Well, thanks for your help, Mr. Saotome. And I hope you and your wife continue building toward a better tomorrow."
Tanya blinked and then rolled her eyes as she walked to the workroom door and opened it to show the work going on behind it. Work that was currently interrupted.
"I've got permission to build a few lesser golems for home-defense," Tanya said bluntly. "Go see for yourself! Ask Sanctuary."
Ranma was instantly at her back, massaging her shoulders and holding her comfortingly.
"Just calm down, dear," Ranma said, knowing his wife's temper and not wanting her to make a bad showing to the friendly were-cop. "I'm sure he didn't mean anything by it."
Clinched fist, narrowed eyes and gritted teeth slowly eased off in Ranma's comforting grasp as Thropan watched. It was no wonder the young woman ended up in Sanctuary if she had that much trouble controling her emotions
"Yeah," Thropan said apologetically. "I shouldn't have said anything, my apologies."
"Forget it," Tanya said finally in a struggling tone of voice, shrugging and leaning back against Ranma.
"Hey," Raphiel said. "What's this do?" He picked up what looked like a large pea-pod.
"No!" Tanya and Thropan yelled. "Don't touch...!"
*POP*
Suddenly everybody was ducking as the pea pod exploded and releasd a small hail of seeds across the cabin, shattering glass and splintering wood.
"Don't ever pick up a blast flower's seed pod without being careful," Thropan told the young were-cheetah.
"That was cool," Raphiel said, apparently not hearing. "Are there more of those?"
Noting the decidely irritated looks an Ranma's and Tanya's faces, Thropan laughed nervously.
"We'll be going back to report now," Thropan said.
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(Posted Sat, 17 May 2003 03:47)
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