Hey all! Let me once again assure you guys, that this IS a Ranma+Akane story, no matter how much Mousse bothers our little heroine. Here’s chapter 19 and the chapter 20 will be the LAST! Yay! :D So since you guys have prodded and prodded me with your reviews until now, stick it out and send me reviews for this chapter, prodding me to finish the story with the very last chapter- number 20!! hehe

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Chapter 20- Fun and Games

As we left, I could see Mousse pondering how I’d gotten to see Ranma naked. Let him wonder, the naked-butt-flaunting weasel. Then I looked around the room. And stopped.

“Oh my God,” I breathed.

“Hm?” Mousse paused in the doorway and turned his head to see me. “What is it, Akane?”

“Th…this room…” I breathed. I hadn’t seen it till now, and who can blame me when Mousse was the distraction, but the walls of the room were covered in every sort of sexual torture device I had never conceived of. There were the routine red leather handcuffs, true, and various whips coiled in shining loops on the walls, but here, there was a device that had some sort of black leather seat, which had a hole in it, and the seat itself was attached to gleaming silver chains. And there, a mysterious-looking, knotted, strappy thing, where the straps were linked by small silver circles. One device had hooks. The array went on and on, and for a long moment my heart quivered in atavistic fear as I stared at this gleaming display of sadism. My eyes slid to the bed. It was round, and covered only by a black, rubber fitted sheet. I shuddered and looked at Mousse for his reaction. He was grinning at me.

“Too bad we can’t stay and play,” he said, “but we have villains to catch.”

“You might like these kinds of fun and games,” I shot back, “but Shampoo isn’t here to flick the whip, so you’re out of luck, buddy!” Implying that Mousse was the kind of guy who likes to be on the receiving end, if you know what I mean. As far as I knew, anyway, it was true. I shoved past him and checked the corridor. It was empty, so I pulled out the small gun Mousse had given me and leaving the nose pointed down, I proceeded down the hallway.

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Shampoo stared furiously over her gag at Zhang’s henchman, mentally consigning him and everyone in that wretched fortress to hell. She berated herself for the hundredth time for allowing Zhang to catch her sending a message to Mousse. He wasn’t generally fond of the Chinese secret service and finding out that one of his prostitutes had been in the service for five years did not make him a happy villain. He already feared what information she’d given out, and the only reason he’d kept her alive was so he could bargain for the Mogul diamond from Mousse.

“Ahh, when you were a high-class whore, you were out of my price range,” crooned the henchman. “Now that you’re a traitor, though, you’re easy meat!” He ripped at Shampoo’s bodice, baring her to the waist. She sneered at him.

It’s all Akane Tendo’s fault! She cursed silently, her left cheek numb from the blows she’d received earlier. Before she came along, Mousse and I were solving this case perfectly fine. Then that stupid Akane comes along, after somehow getting back together with Ranma, who appeared from God-knows-where, and wrecks everything!

Shampoo only hoped Mousse was able to rescue her. She had complete faith in him as a partner. He’d never leave her to hang. But he, too, had lately been showing an inordinate interest in that black widow…whoops, Akane Tendo.

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“I can’t explain my inordinate interest in you,” Mousse murmured behind me.

“Is this really a good time to discuss this?” I asked, irritated. I was actually starting to wish that Ranma was here, which was a sign of how much Mousse was disturbing me.

“With our lifestyles, there’s never a better time,” he said pertly.

“How about AFTER we rescue Shampoo? Shampoo…you know, your partner?”

“I never felt like this in Nerima.”

“You were never this annoying in Nerima.”

“Shampoo would tell you differently.”

“Waiting for her to tell me is definitely a solution that works for me!”

“When I saw you in that red dress…”

“In fact, ‘never’ is good, too!”

“I know you feel the chemistry…”

“Look, Mousse…” I turned to say something and kicked out. A henchman groaned and slid to the ground behind Mousse, who stared down at him.

“Maybe we should put this discussion off till later,” he said finally.

“That sounds like an excellent plan,” I said as dryly as I could manage.

There was a very slight swish of air, and I jumped back just as a giant six-foot blade sharpened to a shiny edge suddenly sliced through the air in front of me, so close that its passage sliced the edge of my bangs so that the fine hairs drifted down to the ground. Mousse and I stared at the tiny severed hairs wordlessly.

“What is this- Indiana Jones and the Nerima Gang?” I demanded.

“Zhang’s known to be fond of his little toys, as you saw in that room,” Mousse said thoughtfully, an index finger under his nose and a frown on his face. “There’s bound to be more of these little traps. That must be why the outside wasn’t as carefully guarded as I expected.”

“Why don’t YOU go first?” I said graciously.

“Ladies first,” Mousse said politely.

“I insist,” I growled. Mousse shrugged and walked forward. I followed him, my heart suddenly beating like a snare drum. Mousse walked carefully, studying the floor on which we walked, sometimes avoiding certain tiles…I followed his path as exactly as possible.

The next trap was quite obvious. In fact, it blocked our way. We stared at it with trepidation.

“What the hell is that?” I asked.

In front of us was a long, long trough that completely blocked the hallway. In the trough, mechanized blades crossed and uncrossed in their own particular rhythm. The trough was too long to jump over and the ceiling was too low to allow you to try. Obviously, you were meant to calculate when and where the blades were going to uncross and hop, skip and jump your way across. Not that difficult in theory, but make one mistake and you were gonna lose a foot.

“There must be a pattern to the way the blades cross,” Mousse was obviously thinking hard, staring at the clanging blades as he made mathematical calculations.

“Must be,” I replied sourly, mentally calculating whether I was really ready to lose a foot to save Shampoo.

“Look. Look at the way the blades cross. It’s a rhythm, Akane. You just have to follow the beat.”

“Yes, I see it,” I said, and I did. I’d never had a math block, after all. If you picked one spot where the blades uncrossed, if you were spry enough and, more importantly, kept the beat in your head, you could follow a zig-zag path all the way to the other side.

“I’ll go first,” I said. Don’t ask me why, but I knew watching Mousse dance across those lethal beams first would destroy any courage I could scrape up. I walked forward slowly, my eyes following the path I would take. Yes, I could follow it almost to the end, and I started to hum the beat out loud.

“DA da da, DA da da, DA da da, DA DA,” I said.

“No, it’s da DA da, da DA da…”

“Shut UP!” I muttered fiercely, narrowing my concentration. “Don’t screw with my beat. If I lose a leg, Mousse, I’ll gnaw yours off!!” I walked forward, intent not on the blades, but on the spaces that opened up that would give me passage through that killing field.

 “Here goes,” I muttered, and leapt forward. “DA da da, DA da da, DA da da, DA DA!” I skipped and hopped across the moving blades, expecting one of them to slice through muscle and bone at any moment, leaving me to topple one-legged into that awful shifting mesh. Spaghetti Akane. Then, I couldn’t think about that anymore, and my vision narrowed until all I could see was the next free square, and the next.

Then I fell, but that was because I’d reached the end, and so my knees only met the cool marble as I knelt there, shaking. Then I stood up and turned to watch Mousse do the dance of death.

“Good job, Akane!” he said, and began his own crossing. It was almost worse than doing it myself, and I watched with my breath caught somewhere between my throat and my lungs. He looked nimble as he sang out his own beat and skipped across the blades. Then a shout came from the other side, and he fumbled the beat, just for a second, but in that second he lost his hard-won concentration. He lost sight of the square he was aiming for, and his right foot began to come down onto an unfamiliar square. He could have frozen it of course, but already the blades were beginning to close on his left foot.

Not stopping for thought, I sprang towards him (he was close to my side by now), heaved him up and landed on a blade just as it shut over another, and jumped with all my might (Mousse was heavy) towards the other side. We landed awkwardly, rolled and ended up in a heap. I disentangled myself before Mousse could try a quick grope, and sat on the ground marveling at my quickness.

“Much as I would like to thank you for that fantastic feat,” Mousse said, coming to his feet, “we’ve got company!”

I looked, and saw Zhang’s guards screaming at us from the other side of the field. Four more suddenly appeared around a corner on our side of the field.

“Dammit!” Mousse cursed.

“You owe me, pal,” I said, sprinting off. “You take care of it.”

A few corners later, I was well and truly lost. I had honestly expected Mousse to catch up to me by now.

“Hmph!” I snorted. “Ranma would have!”

I heard a faint, tinny voice screaming in Chinese.

“You putrid piece of crap! You think you can get away with this?”

“That’s gotta be…” I said, swinging open the door behind me. “…Shampoo. Hello, nemesis!” Predictably, the room contained one bound-to-a-chair, sexily disheveled Shampoo with a loose gag around her throat and one armed goon leering evilly over her extravagant, bare breasts heaving from fear and distress, or knowing our Amazon, rage and fury.

“I didn’t take off your gag so you could…” the man was saying, but he turned when he saw me. “Oh, another woman! Come to join us?” Shows you how far into fairyland he was.

“Perhaps another time,” I said pleasantly, waving my little gun at him and watching his face pale. “I just can’t see myself in a threesome at this point in our relation ship.”

“But you’re willing to consider it eventually?” Shampoo shot back spitefully. “I always knew you were a dyke.”

“I liked it better back when we were talking in English,” I said. “You sounded so much more stupid then.”

The goon was watching us, switching his gaze between us like he was at a tennis match. Then he charged me. Admittedly, I was a bit distracted from dissing Shampoo, so you can’t blame me for skidding across the floor like an ice cube with Zhang’s turkey on top of me, grappling to get his fingers around my neck.

“You’re so pathetic, Akane.” I could hear Shampoo’s contemptuous voice as I wrestled with the turkey.

“This…is…the thanks...I get,” I growled out.

 “You haven’t saved me yet. And nobody asked you to, anyway.”

“Mousse…ouch!...did.” The turkey bitch-slapped me. That pissed me off.

“That idiot. Is he around? I told him to leave me behind if I was caught.”

“Apparently…” I kicked the turkey in the stomach. “…he has more loyalty…” I spun and smashed my heel into his legs “…than some people…”

The turkey was down for the count. I stood, breathing a bit heavily, staring at Shampoo who stared at me as calm as a cucumber, as though her assets weren’t hanging out for the entire world to see. Was it a Chinese thing? Or a Chinese secret service thing? Were they ALL required to be comfortable with nudity or something? I knew I wouldn’t have made the cut. I turned away uncomfortably and walked around Shampoo with my eyes averted, stopping to untie her bonds.

Shampoo shook her hands, to bring the feeling back, I suppose. She bit her lip as the blood flowed back into her fingers. I wondered how long she’d been in that chair and felt a reluctant sympathy for her.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, looking around. I found a tunic and threw it to Shampoo, who shimmied into it. Well, at least now she was decently covered, I told myself uncertainly, looking at the gaping neckline.

“Where’s Mousse?” Shampoo asked, sweeping her hair away from her face. “If he came to rescue me, where is he?”

“He’s out fighting the bad guys, princess,” I said, heading for the exit.

“Where’s Ranma?”

I didn’t stop walking, and as I got into the hallway I carelessly threw over my shoulder, “I’m not his keeper.” I slammed the door shut just in time to hear Shampoo’s kick thud against the wood.

“Ahhh, thank you, shishou, for increasing my battle awareness,” I breathed, in memory of my long ago college martial arts instructor, smiling as I heard Shampoo’s scream of pain as the door’s wood splintered.

Little did I know that fast approaching the fortress, Ranma too was dreaming of inflicting on me the kind of pain I’d inflicted on Shampoo. Or suffering of some kind, anyway.

“She’s gonna learn to listen when I say no,” Ranma growled to himself a he climbed another snowy rise, following the footsteps of Mousse’s Chinese soldiers. “And if Mousse has laid a lip on her, I’ll deal with him. I’m gonna show him Akane is mine. And when I get her all to myself, she’s going to beg before I let her go.” Beg for what, Ranma wasn’t yet quite clear about, but his secluded little cottage in the mountains was gonna be the perfect place to teach Akane everything he wanted her to know, that he was sure about.

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 Hey, think of it this way. This is the last cliffhanger in this story you have to worry about! :) So be nice and review!