It was with an odd feeling of relief that Shampoo picked her way 
through the remains of the Nekohanten, looking for anything that might 
be salvageable from the restaurant's ashen remains.  The fire had been 
quick and deadly, levelling the structure in a matter of minutes, and 
now all that was left was a pile of charcoal and ashes that gave her 
little reason to hope she would be able to recover any of her or 
Cologne's possessions undamaged.

	<No>, she reminded herself, <not Cologne, an impostor.>  A 
strange being, a mermaid, who had been masquerading as her 
great-grandmother for over half a century.  It disturbed her greatly to 
think that she had been deceived her entire life, and that she had 
never even known her great-grandmother, the real Cologne who had died 
many years before before her birth.  She felt a sense of longing now, a 
strange hole in her heart, and she often found herself wondering what 
her real great-grandmother had been like.  She missed Cologne terribly, 
even though she had never actually met her.  It was a feeling she did 
not like, a combination of grief, longing, and anger that threatened to 
tear her apart.

	It was why she was glad to be doing something productive, even if 
that meant sifting through the remains of the Nekohanten.  She found 
that by being active, she could concentrate on the physical labor of 
whatever she was doing and thus ignore the feelings and emotions that 
wrestled deep within her mind.

	She reached down and turned over a charred piece of wood, only to 
find nothing but ashes underneath.  She stood up and walked a bit 
further, the ashes crunching softly under her shoes.  Something glinted 
in the sunlight, and walking over she found a sooty, twisted piece of 
metal.  She picked it up, brushing away the ash as she did so, and 
realized it was the frame from a pair of Mousse's glasses.  The metal 
was twisted and fused into clumps at places, and the glass was gone, 
but it was definitely a glasses frame.

	She looked around, wondering where the blind boy had wandered off 
to this time.  <He should be here helping me,> she groused.  <Whenever 
I don't want him around, he's around, and whenever I need him, he takes 
off somewhere.  Typical.>  She dropped the glasses back to the ground 
and kicked them, sending a small black cloud of ash into the air.

	For that matter, it had been a few days since she had heard from 
Ranma or Akane.  Ryoga, being his usual self, had gotten lost again and 
that was no surprise.  Still, she hadn't seen Ranma or the Tendos since 
they had visited her the day after she was taken to the hospital to be 
treated for minor burns, exhaustion, and shock.  It was there she had 
learned of Soun Tendo's injury and the death of the Cologne-impostor.  
Ranma had been rather silent, however, and had refused to discuss what 
had happened to him while he had been Cologne's prisoner.

	After that hospital visit, there had been nothing.  She had been 
hospitalized for three and a half days before being released.  
Apparently, they had been worried about the mental trauma she had 
sustained as well as the physical trauma, and they had made her talk 
with a psychiatrist before they had let her go.  She had immediately 
gone to the Tendos, but finding nobody there, she had stayed with 
Mousse at a local restaurant whose owner she had done business with 
in the past.

	She had visited the Dojo twice more on occasion, but both times 
nobody had been home.  She was desperately curious to find out what 
exactly had happened to Ranma, but she had a lot of other issues to 
deal with as well, and so did the Tendos.  So she had been content to 
let the first day pass without being too worried about her Airen.

	Now, with his and the Tendos' absence becoming increasingly 
concerning, perhaps it was time to pay another visit to the Tendo 
Dojo.  She thought about going immediately, but as she surveyed the 
ashen remains of the Nekohanten, she decided to finish what she was 
doing before she was sidetracked by any other distractions.  She 
desperately wanted to find something, anything, in these ashes.  
Perhaps some possession or belonging of hers that had survived the fire 
undamaged, or perhaps even something of the Cologne-impostor's that 
would tell her more about what mermaids were and give her some insight 
into just what had happened here less than a week ago.

	It wasn't looking promising.  The fire had been very destructive, 
and had burned almost everything to a crisp.  It would take hours to 
search through it all, and she once again found herself cursing 
Mousse's absence.  <Where could that boy be, anyway?>

	She saw another piece of metal half-buried in a pile of ash.  
Kneeling down, she gripped it and pulled it from the ground.  She 
brushed away the remaining ash, and gasped in shock at what she was 
holding.  It was a golden mermaid statue, half-melted from the heat of 
the fire, but still intact nonetheless.  The mermaid was quite young 
and lovely, more like the mermaids imagined in modern legends, and her 
face was mostly intact, though the lower half of her body was largely 
melted.  The shape of the body was obvious, though, as was the fin as 
the bottom.  She turned it over in her hand, admiring it and wondering 
if perhaps there were similar objects nearby.  She knelt, placing the 
mermaid statue back on the ground, and was about to begin digging 
through the soil when she suddenly felt as though she were being 
watched.

	She looked over her shoulder, and to her surprise saw a man 
standing several meters away on the edge of the property.  She stood up 
and faced him, and the man, upon seeing that he had been noticed, 
walked closer to her.  The man was tall, and his size, combined with 
the roughly shaven goatee on his lined face, gave a look that was very 
unusual for a Japanese person.  She watched him cautiously as he 
approached, unsure of what to make of the stranger.

	He stopped several feet away, and they made eye contact.  There 
was something very disturbing about his deep brown eyes- they seemed to 
radiate sadness, as if they were haunted in a way that she couldn't 
quite explain, and the lines that ran along his face suggested he was a 
young man with a very troubled past.  "Can I help you?" she asked.

	"Yeah," said the man.  "My name is Ryoushi.  Ryoushi Nayamu.  Can 
you tell me where I could find a woman by the name of Cologne?"

	"I am sorry," said Shampoo as she looked down at the ashes, "she 
not here anymore.  Cologne died a few days ago."

	"Oh," muttered the man, looking around as though noticing the 
destruction and ashes for the first time.  "I'm sorry to hear that.  
I've been looking for her for a long time.  If it wouldn't be too much 
trouble.." he hesitated, "would you mind telling me what happened?  I'd 
really like to know."

	"Yes, I can tell you."  She looked around.  There was still a lot 
she wanted to do here, and something about the man still made here 
uneasy.  She turned back to the ruins.  "I still have lot of work to do 
here.  Down street about half a block, there be sushi restaurant called 
'Gunichi's'.  If you want know what happened, I meet you there in two 
hours and tell you."

	The man looked at her oddly as she spoke, and she realized he had 
been startled by her bad Japanese.  She felt her cheeks flush with 
embarrassment, and not for the first time, her inability to speak 
Japanese well infuriated her.  "Damn this language," she muttered in 
Chinese.

	The man studied her face for a moment, and then bowed low.  "I 
will see you in two hours, then."  She jumped as she realized he had 
spoken in heavily accented Mandarin, but before she could say anything 
he kept talking.  "Thank you very much.  It means a lot to me."  She 
watched him as he turned and walked away, pulling his coat up over his 
shoulders as he walked.  When he reached the street, she sighed in 
relief and found herself breathing a little easier now that he had 
gone.  She looked down at the mermaid statue she had found, but decided 
to wait until later to finish her search.  It was definitely time to 
pay a visit to Ranma.

-END TEASER-