First of all... thanks to everyone who wrote :-) I really do appreciate
all the comments I got.

<Jonathan's ego emits a loud belch>

Anyway... I got an awful lot of reactions to the dream sequence in Part
1. They were about evenly divided among those who really liked it, and
those who really didn't. Here's what I was going for. This was my first
try at toying with the emotions of the reader. There's no indication
until the end that it's a dream, and what I wanted to do was to present
something plausible yet repugnant, gradually increasing the violence
until Ranma got *really* out of character, and then end the dream. I
think that even though that somewhat grisly scene was way out of
character for Ranma, it wasn't at all out of character to have Kodachi
dream it. Did it work?

I'm at a bit of a sticky point on how to continue the story. See,
originally it was going to be a pretty dark piece of work (hint: my
working title ain't "Barracuda" for nothing) dealing with the really
horrible things Nabiki was going to do under the influence of Kodachi's
potion. But part 2 turned out to be more comedic than I'd intended, and
I think a darkfic would be out of place here. I'm trying to work it out
so Nabiki does the same evil things, but in a funny way. It may take
some time :-)

Thanks again, everybody.

--JSH