I'm sending this from the University, so I can only hope the formatting
isn't screwed up.

Came through fine.  Fear not.

    Konatsu woke up to soft, weary darkness.  Someone was
holding his head in their lap, and there was a pain behind his

Since it's only one person, 'their' isn't correct. If you don't
want to use a pronoun because that would indicate a gender, you
could rephrase as 'His head was held in someone's lap' or somesuch.

I'll probably just make it a female pronoun.

    "Konatsu," she said softly, "don't talk like that.  It's not
important what other people want you to be.  Who do you want to
be?"

"Whatever I'm told to be!" :)

Precisely the problem.  :)

    He moved down the hallway towards one of those kitchens now.
Ukyou had been unconscious for almost two days, rising fitfully
out of her sleep to murmur words he did not understand before

"Ran-chan, you $%#%%! @#$#@^%$#^%#$#^%#%@#!!!!!!!"

Or variations on that theme, no doubt.  

    No peace here.  Desolation, perhaps.  The boards of the
wooden floor creaked alarmingly beneath his feet at times as he
walked.  He shouldn't have been here.  He should have been in the

The "have been" tense seems wrong here; sounds like he's referring
to sometime before the current point in the story. I'd write it as
"He shouldn't be here." Or, if you want to make it explicitly in
the past tense, "He knew that he shouldn't be here" or "He shouldn't
be here, he thought" or "It was a bad idea for him to be here."

Will think about changing this.

    He crossed the room to the lightswitch by the door, and

Light switch is usually two words.

Probably.

    "Konatsu," Ukyou interrupted, "what happened to my spatula?"

"Damn it, Konatsu! We can't do a lemon scene without my spatula!"

How long do I have to keep on telling you people?  NO LEMON SCENES!

    "Thank you," she said simply, and reached her arms around 
his waist, laid her head against his chest.  The glossy darkness
of her hair spread out across the red silk of his tunic.  His eye
was drawn to individual strands, held like a caged thing by the
beauty of her.  After a moment, she spoke again.  "You're 

Might sound better to say "her beauty" instead of "the beauty of
her."

Depends on the way I want the rhthym of the sentence to go, I suppose.
Will consider the change.

    It had dropped whatever it had held onto the sill when it
spoke.  A pale, slender thing, gleaming in the moonlight.  
Konatsu picked it up and stared at it.  

"'Trojan?' Hey, Ukyo! What's THIS for?!"

<bap>  Get your mind out of that gutter, Gary.  ;p

    And about then, they crested the slow rise of the hill that
they had been walking on, and joined Rouge and Lang Bei as they
looked down upon Jusenkyou spreading out below them.  The rising 
sun spilled down across the dip in the land, cradled in the arms
of the mountains, that held the pools and they shone like 
mirrors in the light.

That last part doesn't look right. Seems like it should say
'...pools AS they shone...' Or maybe you just need a comma before
'and'.

Yup.  I see what you mean.  Will fix.

    "Is Nyannichuan," she said wonderingly, holding up her hands 
in front of her and staring at them disbelievingly as she waded 
to shore.  "I... cured."

Not necessarily... that could've been the "spring of drowned female
serial killer" or something like that. Or the "spring of drowned
demon who happens to look exactly like Shampoo."

Yup.  However, Shampoo would probably like to believe it's plain 
Nyannichuan, now wouldn't she?

    Nabiki settled down across from him, trying to arrange her 
dress in such a way that it would protect her bare legs from the 
chill ground.  Kuno tracked her with his eyes as she sat.

'Chill' should be 'chilly'.

My dictionary seems to think they can mean about the same thing, and I 
think chill sounds better in the situation.

    His eyes went hard again.  "The man you report to reports to
my grandfather."

Kuno-chan's a formal speaker, so he probably ought to say "The man
to whom you report reports to..."

Perhaps.  However, Kuno-chan in the manga is essentially a giant facade 
by WUE canon.  I will think about changing it, however.

    "Yes," Nabiki snapped.  "Do you think I've got no heart at
all?"

    A long silence.

Hard to answer that one tactfully....

Particularly given Nabiki's depiction up to this point.

    Now that she knew the connection, she was sure.  Kuno's eyes
were like the older man's had been on that day five years ago,
staring down at the girl who'd grabbed onto the sleeve of his
expensive suit at the corner.  The image of the man was still
firmly fixed in her mind after all the years; she compared him to
Kuno, found traces of the same features.  "I told him I'd do 
anything if he gave us the money, but he explained that dad 
didn't want to take money from him."

Dad should be capitalized when used as a name.

Yup.

    She remembered her father crying, sweeping her up into a hug 
as she showed him the fake letter and the cheque, and told him
about what she wanted to do with the money.  It had made her feel 
smarter than everyone else, it had made her feel important, even 

Technically, this is a run-on; you might want to start a new
sentence after 'else' or at least change the , after else to a ;

Technically, yes, but it's also a way of conveying Nabiki's thought 
process at this point.  I'll read it over carefully and see what sounds 
better.

    "From what my grandfather has told me," Kuno said quietly.
"Those who he reports to have been watching Ranma for a long,

Again, should be "Those to whom he reports have...."

Will think about it.

    Fear was nothing.  Fear was a word for what she had felt
before, when she had been entrapped in something she could
understand, something she could reconcile with the world of
numbers and dealings that occupied most of her time.  Fear was
not adequate; terror, perhaps, as if she had lit a candle in some
deep, dark pit only to see that all around lay all the bones of 
all the dead.

Very effective way to convey Nabs' feelings here.

I thought so.  The whole paragraph is probably my personal favourite 
piece of writing in the whole chapter.

    "I had a dream," he replied.

Yes, it's Martin Luther Kuno! :-p

<bap>

    He turned his eyes to Ranma.  They were simply fire in the
sockets.  "A deal, perhaps, Lord of Waters?"

"Okay... seven card stud, nothing wild...."

Okay, the truth comes out.  The ultimate power in WUE is... the Gambling 
King!  (Hitcha by surprise, didn't it, folks?)

    "Choose two of them," the World-Hater repeated.  "I will let
them and yourself leave this place.  The other three will stay
with me."

Welcome to the Ranma/Sophie's Choice fusion.... :)

Source is fairly obvious, isn't it?

    It was astonishingly easy.  If the Ravager had been 
expecting it, it would not have been, but he was taken by
surprise as Ranma began slicing, with a bright blade of purest
will, at the weave and wind his trap.  

Seems like there's an 'of' missing there or something.

Will check the paragraph and see.

    As he had so many times before, he gathered the tortured, 
fragmented soul of the woman who had sacrificed herself to send 
him here, and made it whole, and inflicted agonies upon her that
would have broken the strongest will.  She broke, of course.  She 
always did, in the end.  But such a thing gave him little 
pleasure after so much time confined, and he casually threw the
essence of her being into the lightless space, as he had so many
times before.

You used 'so many times before' in the paragraph preceeding this
one. How about a synonomous expression here?

Actually, the continued repetition of that phrase is intentional; it's 
intended to create an atmosphere of monotony similiar to the one that 
has been experienced here for the past four thousand years.

    In time, though, he heard the voice of his master calling -
like him, only a part of a part, though a far greater part than 
he - and he left, returning to merge with the Dark like a river 
comes in time to merge with the sea.

Likewise here, you've got two 'merges' where you could probably
use a synonym for one... 'meld' for the first one, maybe.

Probably true in this case; the repetition was not intentional, as it 
was in the previous paragraphs.  Will change.

Overall, a good chapter with some really good character
development. I liked Kuno quite a bit more here than in previous
installments; he seemed less like Nabzy's all-knowing
conscience and more like a guy with troubles of his own.

Glad to hear it.  

I noticed also that you've also managed to give a logical answer
to one of the great mysteries of Ranma 1/2 -- how the Tendo family
supports itself.

That and a logical answer to just why Nabiki got stuck being a yakuza 
dupe in the first place.  She's been a very unsympathetic figure in WUE 
up to this point, and I'm hoping that this chapter gives her a bit more 
balance.

Looking forward to the next installment!

Hopefully will be out sooner rather than later.  ;)

Thanks for the comments, Gary.

Ciao,
-Alan Harnum

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