Yes, another chapter!

Chapter 15

I was dreaming. I knew that because I was floating through the sky, warm currents of air carrying me along with them. It tempted me to lay aside my worries, my cares, that constant nagging part of me that kept wondering out aloud in my mind why Ranma was with me. Weirdly the voice sounded a lot like Shampoo's voice. Akane no can cook! Why Ranma stay with her? Akane pervert girl! Akane like girl Ranma, too, no?

Yes, I wanted that voice to go away. Just float, Akane...

Something brushed my foot. I giggled, but the air was too heavy for me. It entered my mouth and I began to choke. Panic hit, and I struggled to open my eyes, automatically trying to bring up my arms for balance. But I couldn't move them. Something held me tight. Damn.

My eyes finally popped open, which unfortunately wasn’t the improvement I was hoping for. I immediately wanted to scream like a banshee.

I was up to my neck in the Amazon river, submerged in lapping green water choked with weeds and dead leaves, and tiny insects skating across the surface. The only thing that had kept me alive was my body’s unconscious instinct to kick and keep me afloat.

But all this I only noticed subconsciously. What was actually taking up the whole of my attention was the giant green and black anaconda undulating about ten feet in front of me. Oh gracious kami don’t let it eat me oh frick where did it come from?!My heart began to beat so fast I felt like it was sending out submarine signals through the water. How big was the thing? At least 15 feet long from what I could see, and there was only five feet something of me. Not exactly a win-win situation.

It wasn’t paying a lot of attention to me, however. So I slowly eased my gaze away. Because anything was better than LOOKING at it.

Where was Ranma? And Jain? Well, it was a certainty that Djavan had kept Jain, but Ranma too? I gritted my teeth at knowing that Djavan and Ikkoko had dumped us in the Amazon river as croc food, or snake food, in this case. If I ever made my way out of this, I would hang Djavan screaming over an abyss of reptiles, and laugh while he peed his pants. Although this was comforting in fantasy, it didn't exactly help my current situation. And where was Ranma?

I saw Ranma’s red head at the exact same moment that I realized my hands were tied behind my back. Real nice. Apparently there were no undiluted blessings to be had here.

Ranma was floating face down in the water, and her tied hands were visible. Half her body was resting on a clump of weeds, but she was sliding further into the water even as I watched.

“Ranma!” I hissed, alarmed. “Wake UP!” Obviously the amount of gas she's inhaled as a guy had taken a greater toll than expected with her reduced body mass.

My voice drew the attention of the snake, which swung its head toward me and regarded me out of muddy brown eyes. I couldn’t take my eyes off the scaly green muzzle, which no doubt hid sharp and dangerous fangs.

"Nice snakey snakey, there's no one interesting here...why don't you go look for a nice big Jaguar to eat? Maybe it'll claw your freaky face off." Obviously insulted by my death threats, the snake began to swim towards me. Either that or it was getting hungry.

I muttered a quick prayer and began to kick backwards in the sluggish water, but two things were working against me. First, the current was pulling me toward the snake, and second, really what hope did I have of outswimming a water snake in the water?

I looked around, wondering where the bank of the river was. Surprisingly, it wasn’t too far away. Damn anaconda! Without it I actually may have had a chance of reaching the shore!The snake reached me fairly quickly and began to wind itself around me, the strong bands of muscle coiling around me smoothly. I began to wrench at my bonds, but they’d cuffed us with thick steel, and I didn’t have a lot of leverage to use.

“Akane!”

“Ranma? Oh thank..” I raised my head to see a tall man dressed in a Chinese robe and loose pants standing lightly on the floating mass of weed that had been supporting Ranma. For a second my confused brain wondered where Ranma had suddenly found hot water to change in the middle of the river. However, the still-female redhead hung unconscious off his shoulder. I saw the long braid whip out behind him in a sudden gust of wind, and blinked.

Kalia.

“You!” That seemed to be my usual reaction to him. Well, what did he expect when he kept popping up like a jack-in-the-box?

Kalia leapt into the water and began to swim with strong strokes toward the shore, carrying Ranma in a swimmer’s hold.

The anaconda seemed to be heading in the same direction, only it was pulling me. I flexed my arms, but it turned its head, opened wide its jaws, displaying gleaming fangs, and hissed at me.

“Oookay, dinner doesn’t move, gotcha,” I muttered. When Ranma wakes up, your ass is grass, buddy, I fumed at it.

Kalia placed Ranma on the ground and sprinted toward me. He landed in the water with a splash, startling the anaconda, and catching it just beneath its jaws, began to squeeze. The surprised snake immediately released me, leaving me to roll onto the muddy ground.

"Ouch!" I yelled, as I landed in some sort of thornbush.

Kalia ignored me as he continued to squeeze the snake's neck, staring up into its face dispassionately as he did so. It began to thrash and tried to get its length around Kalia, but he was too quick for it, and kept sidestepping nimbly, all the while continuing the increasing pressure on its neck.

Finally, the anaconda hung limp in his hands, and he tossed it into a bush. It weakly slid away.

“Wow, that’s some cage fight,” a voice muttered behind me. I squiggled around, and saw Ranma weakly trying to sit up, water trickling down her soaked clothes.

Kalia knelt behind me to break my shackles. “Who’s your friend?” he asked. “And where’s the other one?”

I sighed. “They’re the same. Long story short, he’s cursed. What are you doing here? In the middle of the Amazon jungle? Last I saw you were in Japan…”

“Who IS this guy, Akane?” Ranma asked as she broke her own shackles and began to wring out her clothes. Kalia watched slack-jawed as Ranma casually took off her tunic and began to wring it out, leaving her breasts quite visible.

“This is Kalia…” was as far as I got before Ranma’s head swung up, and there was a dangerous glint in her eye. Similar to the anaconda perhaps.

“There’s a real Kalia?” she whispered.

Kalia looked puzzled. “I didn’t know I was a legend,” he said dryly.

I suddenly remembered that I’d given the name Kalia to my father as my new ‘boyfriend’. And Ranma had heard.

“Give me one reason I shouldn’t kill him now,” Ranma continued in that oddly hoarse voice, still looking only at me.

“How about I saved your lives?” Kalia replied.

I pulled my ass out of the stupid pincushion thornbush and began wringing out my own clothes. With me still in them. “Ranma, it’s not what you think. Honestly. I met Kalia a couple of times since we began this mission. It’s always been quite sudden, and always seems coincidental. Not this time, obviously.” I turned to our rescuer, looking for an explanation.

He looked at Ranma, then at me. “And this is your boyfriend, you say?”

“Ranma Saotome,” I replied, once again dodging the issue. Ranma frowned at me to show she’d noticed.

Kalia gave a great big sigh. “I don’t know where to begin,” he said.

“Why are you following us?” Ranma, ever pragmatic.

Kalia looked back at us. “Jain is my son,” he said simply.

“WHAAAT???” Ranma and I yelled in unison. Birds in the area squawked and took off into flight, startled by us.

“Bu..you..wh…” I shook my head and started again. “Then why was he being sent to the Blue Heron temple? Do you know about the map on his back? Why did Kelly Noriega have him?”

“Kelly Noriega is an acquaintance of mine,” Kalia said. “She helped me transport Jain back home.”

“Why didn’t you do it yourself?” Ranma asked. She had put her tunic back on, and was making her way though the undergrowth to us.

Kalia hung his head. “Jain is afraid of me,” he confessed.

Ranma stopped and suddenly looked like she’d realized something. “Wait, you have a braid. Is THAT why he was so afraid of me in the beginning? He thought I was you?”

Kalia nodded sadly. “I haven’t seen him for three years. I don’t think he remembers my face very well, but he does remember my braid.”

Ranma had reached us, and suddenly, without warning, she pulled me into a crushing hug. I was too stunned to do anything but stand in her embrace. She placed her head against my shoulder, and squeezed. This suddenly reminded me of the anaconda again, but before I could protest, Ranma released me and looking up into my eyes, smiled and placed a quick peck on my lips. "I'm glad you're okay, Akane."

"Uh..." My lips could still feel her kiss, even though she'd moved back. Gosh, suddenly I wished Kalia far, far away. Glancing at Kalia, I could tell he wished the same. I looked back at Ranma. "Me too, thanks." Awkwardly, I moved away, casting my mind about for a change of subject. Ranma merely smirked at Kalia and sat down next to me. I folded my legs and joined her.

I remembered something then. “Waitaminnit, Kalia! Jain told me you were a monk.”

Kalia’s head came up sharply, with something like hope in his eyes. “Jain talked to you about me?”

“Not much,” I said, “but I remember that. You belong to the Green Tiger monastery.”

Kalia nodded. “We are warrior monks, as well as healers.” Finding a handy rock to sit on, he told us about how he’d met a pretty girl in one of the villages near the monastery, and gotten married. When Jain was born, Kalia’s wife passed away, so he took Jain back to the monastery to raise.

He told us again about the plane crashing near their monastery, about the monks going out to check for survivors, and finding the two men. Kalia was one of the searchers, and he had recognized them as men of a brute ilk, gangsters, to put it plainly. They were foreigners, and he had seen them arguing even at the crash site, but he’d disregarded it as their own business.

This last part I’d already heard from Jain, too, though it was all new to Ranma.

After the monks took the men in, Kalia had been going down to their rooms to administer more herbal medicine when he heard a thin screaming. He’d run toward the source of the noise and was appalled when he came across one of the men using a knife on Jain’s back.

“I saw red, all my mental calmness left me, and I went into a sort of berserker fury. A few minutes later, I was standing in the room bathed in the man’s blood, and parts of his corpse was littered across the floor. Jain was staring at me like he couldn’t recognize me, and he screamed when I tried to pick him up. From pain, and shock, I suppose.

I carried him out, and left him with another monk. He fell asleep, but as we were treating his wounds, we saw the map.”

Kalia clenched his fingers tightly, holding his rage within. “That’s when I knew we had to run. Anyone who bothered to draw map on the back of a little boy must surely belong to a group that was determined to get to wherever that map led.”

“So I led a false trail away from the monastery, and made sure Jain was taken away to America, where I knew Kelly would keep him safe.”

“But this year, Kelly began to receive reports of men looking for a kid with a map on his back, so she contacted me, and couriered him back to Japan.”

“To the Blue Heron temple,” I said thoughtfully.

Kalia nodded. “Yes, Kelly is an ex-priestess from there. I’m truly sorry for the burning of their temple,” he said regretfully. “But it only proved to me that Jain continued to be in danger. That’s why I followed you, Akane.”

Ranma sent me a sideways glanced, and frowned. I knew what she was thinking. She was blaming herself for not catching Kalia following us, when she had appointed herself our guardian.

Not that I’d given him a lot of time to do that, considering the hard time I’d given him all throughout the trip.

Kalia spotted Ranma's expression, and made a waving motion with his hand. "Don't blame yourself, Saotome. I stayed very far behind you after the time Akane spotted me. I think there were some times you would ahve spotted me, but I used illusion spells to hide."

“Anyway, Jain remembers me as a monster.” Kalia glared down at his clenched fists. "And I suppose I am. But I still had to keep him safe!”

The man was an emotional mess, I decided. “So you followed us around on three continents because you were too afraid to talk to your son?” I asked.

Kalia rubbed his head musingly. “Yes, I wish his mother was here.”

My heart melted at the thought of little Jain, wrenched away from his home, set down among strangers, and afraid of his phantom berserker father.

“He’s older now, he’s more likely to understand why it happened, ” I suggested.

Kalia shook his head. “I don’t know about that. Either way, Djavan has him now, and I’m not about to let him keep him.”

“Djavan knew about the map,” Ranma interjected. “How?”

The tall monk shrugged. “It stands to reason that it was his men who crashed that plane, three years ago.”

We looked at each other. It made a lot of sense.

“Any idea where we are?” Ranma asked finally.

Well, there you have it, 2 chapters in the space of one day, cos’ I was home sick. I think with another 3 chapters, this story will be done! Woohoo! Review and motivate me- please! :)