Author's Notes: So, you guys were awesome pollers, with lots of compelling reasons for why we should use various girls. In the end, my coauthor and I ended up breaking the rules for a quartet of protagonists, simply based on all the suggestions that you guys made. Still, I hope you'll forgive us, and enjoy this most unusual crossover!

Chapter 1: The Nightmares Begin!

The sound of footsteps on marble echoed through the halls of the police station as detectives Haruto and Riku made their way to the interrogation room.

"So, what's the story on this one?" Haruto, the junior of the two detectives, asked his senior partner.

"Nobody knows yet. Bunch of teens just wandered down from the mountains, supposedly hitchhiking their way into town, covered in blood and exhausted. Three girls and one boy. Spooked locals gave us a call and we picked them up. The girls are resting in the observation room, but the boy agreed to speak to us," Riku explained.

Swinging open the door, the two detectives entered the interrogation room. The object of their discussion, a black-haired Japanese boy in a ripped red Chinese silk shirt smeared with dried bloodstains, glanced up as they entered the room, but otherwise he might as well have been made from stone. He didn't move, he didn't fidget, he didn't seem nervous in the slightest. Just icy cold, even bored about the whole situation.

The detectives took their seats, before Riku switched on the official recorder. "Interview beginning April 3rd, 1995, Senior Detective Riku presiding," he said, addressing the recorder before turning to the boy. "Please identify yourself for the record."

The boy sucked in a tired breath, almost a reverse sigh, and replied, "Ranma Saotome."

"And where do you come from, Mr. Saotome?"

The teenager shrugged, the gesture rife with physical and mental exhaustion. "Don't really know. Been roaming my whole life. I'm currently living at the Tendo Dojo in Nerima, though," he admitted.

Haruto jotted that down on his notepad, before Riku continued, "Do you know why you and your companions were brought in, Mr. Saotome?"

Another reversed sigh. "Because we scared people spitless by wandering into town all covered in blood," Ranma replied with a gallows humor smile, idly waving a hand that both detectives noted was virtually crimson-tinted black with dried blood.

"And what exactly happened to leave you covered in blood? Our medical examiners said all of you were unhurt, despite minor bruises and abrasions."

A bitter chuckle emanated from the teen on the other side of the table. "You wouldn't believe me if I tried to explain," Ranma declared softly but emphatically.

"Son, we're the police; it's our job to listen to people who've been in trouble," Haruto interjected.

That elicited a reaction from Ranma, who cast an evil eye at the junior detective. "Don't call me 'Son'," he warned him.

"But alright, fine..." this time he did sigh in the proper order. "It was just supposed to be a vacation, you know? We went up to the mountains for a camp out - dunno whose bright idea that was."

"Sorry, 'we'?" Riku interjected, exchanging a look with Haruto that said 'we might need to pick them up after this.'..

"The whole gang for once. Me an' pop; and the Tendos - that's Soun Tendo an' his daughters Kasumi, Nabiki and Akane; Ryoga Hibki; Happosai, Ukyo Kuonji, Tatewaki an' Kodachi Kuno, and Shampoo, Cologne and Mousse."

"I'm sorry, who were those last three?!" Haruto asked incredulously, doing a double-take to the names he'd written whilst under autopilot.

This elicited a tired, somewhat bitter laugh from Ranma. "Yeah, I know. They're Chinese, from some little village in the Byankala Mountains. Everybody from that neck of the woods seems to have funny names..."

"And how exactly do you all know each other?" Riku asked with a curious expression.

"We're all martial artists... but, well, it's complicated," Ranma said after a long pause.

"We need to know for the record," Haruto insisted, tapping his paper with his pen impatiently.

"Alright... don't blame me," Ranma drawled with a tired roll of his eyes. Holding up his hands, he began to recite, ticking things off on his fingers as he went as an obvious mnemonic aid. "Pops and Mr. Tendo want me to marry one of Mr. Tendo's daughters; by de facto, that's Akane, although her an' me, we fight all the time. Ukyo, Shampoo and Kodachi all want to marry me themselves, and they fight with each other and with Akane to try and impress me so I'll run away with them. Ryoga and Tatewaki are in love with Akane, and Mousse is in love with Shampoo; all three of 'em are convinced that if they can beat me in a fight, the girl they're chasing will fall head over heels for them. Cologne is Shampoo's great-grandmother and she supports Shampoo's claim to me. And Happosai? He's an old pervert who also happens to be a wicked strong martial artist - he trained my dad and Mr. Tendo, so he hangs around despite being unwanted..."

"Sounds like a volatile mix," Riku observed.

Silently, Haruto was scribbling double-time to try and jot the complicated web of relationships down in his notepad; keeping that mess straight without it would be a real pain!

This earned a mocking chuckle from Ranma. "Y'think? Get us together in any one place, and sparks are gonna fly... at least, that's what normally happens." He shook his head and sighed. "But not this time..."

"What happened this time?" Haruto asked gently.

"Everything was normal, at first," Ranma began, staring off at something only he could see. "The usual dull roar of chaos, simmering tension, wondering who was going to make the first insult or throw the first punch... then we heard the screaming..."

"Screaming?"

"We'd gone to a public camping site this time. Maybe the old men thought we might behave ourselves better in public. Bunch of families, couples, just ordinary people. Then the dogs came out of the forest; a pack of dozens that just attacked without warning or mercy. They dragged people down, ripped them apart, then attacked again. I've never seen anything like it," Ranma explained.

"I shouldn't think you had. Wild dog attacks are usually quite uncommon," Riku replied reassuringly, only for Ranma to shake his head and continue.

"You don't get it... I grew up on the road and in the wilderness, alright? I've been around wild dogs my whole life. I have never seen an attack like the one we went through. It wasn't natural, not in the slightest," Ranma vowed with a quiet certainty that was hard to fake. "Not to mention how messed up these dogs were..."

"Messed up...?" Riku pushed.

"Battered to hell. Skin torn off in great big chunks, exposed bone and organs... they should have been dead, but they were still running, still hunting!" Ranma shook his head, his eyes clouded with recollection of the event. "It was total pandemonium. People running around, screaming everywhere, dogs attacking... we tried to rally to fight 'em off, but we were caught off guard an', frankly, teamwork ain't exactly our strong point. It all broke down into chaos..."

He sighed softly. "I don't even remember things all too clearly... I just remember Nabiki screaming as some of the dogs cornered her. I ran to her aid, picked her up, and ran for it. I barely even noticed Shampoo and Kodachi flanking me, I was just trying to get away from the dogs."

Ranma paused for a moment, an expression of dawning realization spreading across his face, before he let out a bitter laugh. "If I was thinking clearer, I would taken to the trees; got us up high to be safe and started throwing branches down at them. But nope! I just ran like an idiot into the forest and got us all lost... then we saw it ahead; a mansion, hidden in the forest. We didn't stop, we just leapt the fence and burst in through the front door..."

"And what happened after that?" Riku asked, Ranma having trailed off.

The teenager looked him dead in the eye and smiled a cold, bitter smile. "That's when things got really weird..."

The door slammed with a reassuringly solid thud behind the exhausted quartet of teenagers, Ranma slumping and panting as if his life depended on it as fatigue hit him like a brick to the face, barely cognizant of the scraping sound as Shampoo and Kodachi, still hopped up on adrenaline, grabbed a pair of nearby cabinets and bodily dragged them in front of the door to barricade their pursuers out.

"That... was too damn close..." Ranma huffed and puffed.

"Yes, too-too scary!... Airen? Is you okay?" Shampoo asked, tentatively touching Ranma's back.

"Just winded...Damn, those mutts could run! I haven't had to sprint like that in a long time..." Ranma confessed, his legs feeling the burn in a way he hadn't experienced in a couple of years.

"It's most fortuitous that you led us here... I shudder to think what would have happened had you not," Kodachi chimed in, brazenly walking over and resting her cheek against Ranma's shoulder.

Ranma promptly shuddered and took a pointed step away from his first unwanted girlfriend, who pouted at the action.

"Yes... that makes the second time that you saved my life, Ranma," Nabiki conceded from her position in a bridal-style carry in Ranma's arms. After a moment passed without recognition, she looked up at him with a wry expression. "You can put me down now," she said with a teasing tone, giving a wiggle for good measure.

Ranma proceeded to drop her like a sack of rice, eliciting a startled yelp of shock from the middle Tendo. "I didn't mean literally!" she protested, rubbing her aching rump and ignoring the way that Shampoo giggled at her plight.

Ignoring his one-time fiancée, Ranma turned to Kodachi. "So... do you know where we are, Kodachi?"

She blinked, staring at him in obvious confusion. "Why do you ask me, Ranma darling?"

"Well, this is obviously some rich person's house, and you're rich..." Ranma explained, shrugging as he did so.

"I'm afraid, my darling, that just because the wealthy tend to exist in similar social circles, that doesn't mean we all know each other," Kodachi gently explained to him, resisting the urge to pat Ranma on the head.

"Whoever own this house, we no can stay here," Shampoo interjected, her eyes never still as she saw the many many avenues that someone could attack them from.

"What do you mean, Shampoo?" Nabiki asked with a bit of concern. She felt woefully out of her depth here and having someone who knew what they were doing, even if that someone was a crazy, magic-using big-boobed Chinese killing machine, was something she was going to take full advantage of.

"We jump fence to get in here, yes. But you want trust that it keep dogs out? This big house... many doors, many windows here," the Chinese Amazon elaborated, whilst pointing at the various exposed areas.

"...Which means that there could be all kinds of openings for those things to get in here," an appalled Ranma deduced, and got a nod of approval from Shampoo.

"So what we do, airen? Start covering up all doors and windows down here?" Shampoo suggested.

"That's a fool's errand; we don't know the first thing about how this place is laid out! Surely the smart thing to do is get up to the second floor; we can blockade the stairs coming up much more easily, and there's going to be far fewer of them to deal with," Nabiki countered; she knew high ground and limited places of entry were good, and so she hoped the second floor would fit the bill.

"But what about the residents here? Shouldn't we look for them and try to help them as well?" Kodachi brought up, which made all three of the other teens give her surprised stares. "...Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked defensively.

They were spared the need to answer when three loud, overlapping bangs echoed through the empty halls.

"Those were gunshots! C'mon, somebody must be in trouble!" Ranma barked, rocketing off in the direction the sounds had emanated from, with Shampoo and Kodachi hot on his heels.

"Most people would run away from the sound of gunfire!" Nabiki complained loudly in their direction. After a moment's hesitation, she chased after them, afraid to be left alone without her super-strong martial artist bodyguards around.

"And you happen to know what gunfire sounds like?" Detective Riku asked pointedly, a raised eyebrow directed towards the scruffy teen.

Ranma let out a sardonic laugh. "I had an... unusual... childhood, detective. I've probably been in more fights than you'll ever see. Although even for me, gunfire was a rare occurrence indeed..."

"So why run towards it? Did you really think you could help?" Detective Haruto asked.

"Mister..." and here Ranma pushed through his fatigued, possibly shell-shocked mein to deliver a cocksure smirk, "I can beat anyone if I put my mind to it... but, you're right, I had no idea at that time what I was running towards...

Ranma literally smashed down the door, spurred on by a terrified shriek that died out in a horrifying wet gurgle. "What's going on here!?" he demanded.

The room was nothing special. Some kind of antechamber, maybe? A glorified corner where two corridors intersected, with a lounge chair and a broken coffee table and one of those little waist-high cupboard things.

Utterly unremarkable... save for the human figure sprawled across the floor, with another man hunched over him. The sound would haunt all four teens; wet, ghastly ripping and squelching, interspersed with guttural moans and raspy panting.

"What the hell?! Get off of him!" Ranma snarled, lashing out in a kick that audibly broke the assailant's ribs and sent him flying across the room to sprawl in a heap on the floor. Confident that he wouldn't be getting up, Ranma turned his attention to the victim.

She was a Japanese girl in a maid's outfit, her pretty face was frozen in an expression of terror, and Ranma knew that she was dead. Whilst he did have a rudimentary grasp on medicine as a consequence of his lifestyle, even an idiot could have seen that nobody was getting up with their throat torn open like this woman's had been.

And that was when her assailant suddenly tackled Ranma in a clumsy lurching charge, catching the teen martial artist off-guard and knocking him over in turn.

"Hey, get offa me - gaaah!" Ranma's instinctual protest turned into a scream as he beheld his assailant. Or, more specifically, the great bloody mess on the right side of his face, where the skin had been peeled away from scalp to chin to leave bare bone and crimson muscle exposed... not that his enemy seemed to even register what should have been incredible pain at his flayed state.

The half-faced man moaned desperately, wet gasps burbling in its ravaged throat as he snapped his jaws, trying to push closer to Ranma and bite at Ranma's own face. But the crazed cannibal hadn't reckoned on the teenage martial artist's superhuman strength, which allowed him to hold the lunatic at bay with one arm even as he wriggled and squirmed.

"I said get off!" Ranma barked, punching his attacker square in the solar plexus... which achieved absolutely nothing! That was impossible - even Ryoga would have flinched at a blow like that!

He punched the madman again, and again, holding back less and less with each strike. Bones audibly crunched under his knuckles, but the crazed cannibal didn't even seem to notice!

Finally, Ranma punched his attacker in the face, smirking as the blow simultaneously threw him back and audibly shattered his jaw.

That sense of triumph faded as his assailant jerked back to his feet, still mindlessly gnashing his teeth, even as his broken jaw clicked and squelched as it was forced to move.

"What the fuck are you?!" Ranma demanded in dumbfoundment, leaping to his own feet in anticipation of the next attack.

The thing - there was no way it was human, not anymore at least - simply moaned pitifully. Its head lolled around, and it began lurching forward... not towards Ranma, this time, but towards the girls, who had been watching the struggle in horror! A trio of feminine screams split the air, and Ranma saw red as protective instincts surged to the fore.

"You leave them alone!" he snarled, leaping at the monster in a flying tackle and bringing it crashing to the floor. He pinned it there like a bug in a collection, even as it moaned desperately and clawed at the carpet. "Dammit! What's it take to make you stop?!" he spat, grinding his knee into his victim's spinal column, to no practical response.

"The head! Smash the head!" Kodachi cried out.

"It's a monster! Kill it!" Nabiki pleaded.

"What they say!"

On any other day, Ranma would have ignored a suggestion like that. But right there and then, Ranma was running on pure adrenaline, his conscious mind slipping away in a red haze of instinct. So, after a moment's hesitation, he raised his arm and delivered a straight-armed vertical punch directly into the back of the creature's skull.

In Nerima, had you asked the average student at Furinkan High, they would have probably declared Ryoga the strongest martial artist around, at least when it came to brute force. Ranma would have resented that statement, but even if he was Number 2, that was still a position far above what any normal person would have considered possible.

With restraint thrown from the window, Ranma poured on power like he would never have used in a fight with anyone other than Ryoga - perhaps even then. A fist that could cleave through concrete and knock over a full-grown tree landed in a precisely aimed blow to something far less imposing, with the result that everything above the cannibal killer's shoulders simply vanished in a spray of gore, with teeth and skull fragments tinkling almost musically as they bounced across the floor.

"Bullshit!" Detective Haruto blurted, jumping from his seat to loom over Ranma.

"What's your problem?" Ranma spat back.

"Aside from the fact you just confessed to killing a man? At least make it believable! Beating a man to death is one thing - popping his skull like an egg? Nobody's going to buy that!"

A tired look that screamed "I do not have time for this shit." spread over Ranma's face and without warning, the teenaged martial artist shot out a punch to the side towards the wall, "This will go a lot faster if you don't waste my time questioning everything I tell you. Unless you got other… 'considerations', as Nabiki would say."

Neither Haruto nor Riku replied. Their eyes were fixed on the solid concrete wall of the interrogation chamber, now sporting a hole big enough that two people could have walked through it abreast. The junior detective slowly and silently slipped back into his seat, Ranma's bone-weary stare boring into his soul the whole way down.

"That's better... Now, where was I...?"

"Ranma! Is you okay?" Shampoo asked, hurrying over to her airen's side in concern.

"I... I killed him..." Ranma murmured, the red haze snapping from his eyes as pure shock hammered its way into his forebrain. He looked up at the girls desperately, a pleading expression on his face. "I-I tried to stop him normally, I really did, but he just kept coming!"

"Ranma darling, listen to me," Kodachi declared, stepping over to him and squatting down so that she could place a hand on Ranma's cheek and look him in the eye. "It was self-defense against a creature that only looked human. You did nothing wrong," she assured him.

Ranma stared back into her eyes as a very unfamiliar feeling washed over him; gratitude, towards Kodachi, of all people! "I... thanks, Kodachi," he mumbled.

Trying to break the awkward feeling, he looked away as he withdrew his hand from the small crater he'd left in the marble... which left him intimately aware of what his hand now looked like.

"Oh, eww," he groaned in disgust, grimacing as he held the red-and-gray appendage caked in thick, viscous fluid at arm's length, blood and cerebral fluid seeping from his fingers to dapple the floor with an incongruously delicate pattering sound.

The three martial artists politely ignored the sounds from the corner as Nabiki promptly lost her lunch, stress and disgust overwhelming even the Ice Queen of Furinkan's legendary self-control. Instead, Kodachi withdrew a towel from a ki pocket and tried to clean the gore from Ranma's fingers as best she could.

"So, it seems that we're no safer here than we were outside," the youngest Kuno observed darkly as she made sure to get all the gore and viscera off Ranma.

"Not quite so," Shampoo rebutted. "At least here, we have solid walls, can fortify ourselves. But if there more things like that here... this place dangerous. Not as bad as outside, though, where dogs get us all."

"Great... talk about being between a rock and a hard place," Nabiki interjected, wiping bile from her lips with a napkin that she then tossed aside with a shudder. "Go back outside and be eaten by dogs, or stay here and be attacked by these...these... whatever they are."

"Hey, whatever they are, Nabiki, I promise, I won't let them hurt you," Ranma blurted out. He then shuddered as Kodachi took that opportunity to seize him in a hug.

"Mmm, I love it when you get all protective like that, Ranma darling," she purred, giving him a little snuggle for emphasis.

Before the situation could deteriorate into another 'fiance free for all', their attention was drawn to a meaty "Thunk!". Turning around, they saw Shampoo had wandered over to the dead woman's body and unceremoniously chopped off her head!

"What'd you do that for?" Ranma spluttered with shock and a bit of disgust. "She was dead - show her some respect!"

"Man that kill her was dead, Ranma. He still kill her, try to kill you. Shampoo just making sure that this one not get back up," the Chinese Amazon replied calmly, wiping her dao off on the dead woman's dress.

"...Dead?" Ranma replied, blinking in confusion.

"You saw face, how he no flinch at Ranma's attacks. No living man do that! No, man was jiangshi," Shampoo explained, the fingers of her free hand flicking through what was obviously a Byankhala provincial warding gesture at the mention of the Chinese undead.

"...That actually makes sense. Almost. I've never heard of jiangshi that acted quite like that," Ranma muttered, as some of the stories he'd heard from various Chinese temples he and pops had… 'visited' came back to mind. "Actually... now that I think about it, the dogs looked like they were dead too. Maybe they're connected somehow?"

"Who cares? Let's just get out of here before something else happens!" Nabiki demanded before she visibly forced herself to calm down and pleaded. "Can we head upstairs now? Barricade ourselves somewhere that we can't be reached by dead things?".

"I must confess, I think that Nabiki has a solid idea," Kodachi admitted, who was loath to admit she needed a few moments of security to recoup.

"Make sense to Shampoo."

"Alright... let's go then, girls," Ranma declared.

Leaving the corpses behind them, the quartet set off once again, this time at a slower and more cautious pace, careful of what might be lurking in the dark, dusty halls.

In fact, it wasn't far from their first encounter that they met their next walking corpse. What had once been an attractive young woman in a French maid outfit swayed aimlessly in the hall, moaning softly, her front clawed open and bloody tears in her chest and stomach staining her legs crimson. The quartet paused, but the ex-human made no attempt to approach them - it obviously hadn't noticed them yet.

"Leave this to me, Ranma darling," Kodachi declared authoritatively, holding up one of her iconic black roses.

Ranma stepped aside without saying a word, giving the younger Kuno the chance to step forward. With a deft flick of her wrist, the rose sailed through the air like a dart - an innocuous seeming missile, right up until it plunged clean through the corpse-thing's skull as if it were made of paper, sending the mutilated woman crumpling to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Kodachi smirked proudly. "And that's how it's done," she boasted.

"Nice shot, Kodachi," Ranma admitted. He didn't approve of her ethics, or her attitude towards "winning him", but that didn't mean he couldn't recognize her skill.

With the immediate danger averted, the quartet advanced again, creeping through a hall lit by dying lightbulbs and the glimmer of dusk sunlight through the windows. They walked until they found a door, which was when Ranma raised a hand, signalling them all to stop. The three girls held their breath as Ranma listened carefully at the door, before he slowly opened it and took a look inside.

"Just a kitchen here... gah! It stinks! Food's been left out to rot... I don't think there's anyone left here," he reported, withdrawing his head and closing the door decisively.

Onwards the quartet slunk, dispatching another handful of the walking dead in their passage. Evidently, their initial 'heroic' charge had brought them into the servant's section of the mansion, because the few doors they opened simply revealed storerooms or, in one case, an access to the garden. Finally, however, they came to a door that Shampoo took a turn at listening to. The Chinese Amazon frowned, and gestured for them to step back. She rattled the doorknob and shook the door - not hard enough to damage it, just hard enough to make a noise.

Moments later, the door began to quiver as something banged on it from inside, with moaning an inhuman accompaniment to the racket. Shampoo promptly delivered a solid kick to the door with all her strength, shattering it into a shower of splinters and sending whatever was on the other side flying like a puppet. Without hesitation, she barrelled through, the other two martial artists hot on her heels and Nabiki bringing up the rear.

Without breaking stride, Shampoo snatched up a particularly long and jagged shard of wood from the floor, driving it into the moaning corpse's head like an oversized nail with an grotesque wet crunchy squelch.

All three martial artists tensed, ready to spring into action, but no further attacks resulted - they could hear more moaning, but none of the walking dead men were in sight yet. This space from the proverbial horde allowed them to relax, if only slightly, and finally notice what sort of room they'd entered.

"Huh... a library..." Ranma noted with aplomb. Which showed the Saotome heir's talent for understatement; this one room could have easily fit a good chunk of the Tendo household, and it spanned two storeys, with an upper level whose acces they couldn't see from here.

"Why would they have a place like this?" Nabiki wondered, idly looking at the spines on the shelves to see if there was a theme. "Just one of those things that rich people do?"

"I cannot deny that a library like this is a common means to showcase one's financial standing... but this feels more purposeful than that," Kodachi interjected, she was doing the same and recognizing a few from her more...detailed hobbies.

"Focus, please? We kill dead things first, poke around after," Shampoo insisted, her instincts itching that there was still danger to be dealt with.

The three martial artists nodded at that and spread out to begin to hunt down the moaning dead things scattered around the room. Silent as the graves they defied, they hunted down four mutilated dead men and two dead women, dispatching each with quick, efficient brutality.

Nabiki found herself torn between admiration and disgust as she watched Ranma literally twist one corpse-thing's head around backwards with the effort of somebody opening a ring-pull on a can of soda. She pointedly looked away from the sight, feeling her aching stomach roil again, and tried to distract herself by examining the books lining the shelves.

What had been just an idle act turned into genuine contemplation as she took in what she was seeing. "Huh... that's weird," she mused.

"What is, Nabiki Tendo?"

"Gyaaah!" Nabiki screamed, literally leaping in fright as Kodachi seemingly materialized over her shoulder, bringing Ranma and Shampoo running at full tilt to her side.

"Wear a bell or something!" she snapped at the embarrassed Kuno heir, then she pointed to the contents of the nearest shelf.. "Nearly gave me a heart attack, creeping up on me... Anyway! These books; they're all in different languages,"

Visibly intrigued, Kodachi stepped forward and peered over the various tomes weighing down the solid wooden shelf. "That is unusual... I'm seeing Japanese, of course, but also English, German... even Latin!" she observed with surprise.

"Latin?" Ranma asked, curious despite himself.

"A dead language from the West, mostly preserved these days as the traditional lingua universalis of medical and scientific professions, especially those dealing with biological sciences," Kodachi explained matter of factly, causing much blinking from the surprised Ranma and co.

"There are classes held at Saint Hebereke, as it's also used in Christian religious services, but I... it is not my best subject," she confessed, cheeks flushing rose-pink in embarrassment. "Still, from what I know... this is quite the eclectic collection of material. Medicinal journals, anatomy, biological studies, even books on mythology..."

"That weird... is normal for rich people to have books like that?" Shampoo asked.

"I'm afraid that I can't really say; despite our smaller social circle, not every wealthy individual is truly known to every other wealthy individual," Kodachi replied with a small, if haughty, sniff. "It is a little odd... perhaps the occupants of this house have some ties to the pharmaceutical industry? I would expect books like this to be of interest to somebody who made their fortune from medicine in some fashion."

"Yeah, yeah; this ain't really helping us, is it? C'mon, there's gotta be stairs or a ladder to the next level in here somewhere," Ranma interjected, bringing the group back to focus.

Reminded of their purpose, the quartet circled around the shelf and into a portion of the library set up with desks, clearly some kind of reading room. Ironically, they promptly found themselves distracted again.

"Wow... that's a weird painting," Ranma noted, staring quizzically at the massive piece of artwork hung in pride of place overlooking the room. It depicted in ukiyo-e style a band of four heavily armored, faceless samurai, standing bloody but defiant atop a hillock that stood within a field littered in dead bodies. The quartet were kneeling in submission to what should have been the rising sun... except the traditional solar depiction of a crimson circle and red bands had been replaced by a symbol Ranma didn't recognize; a white and red octagon, with the kanji for "Obedience, Discipline, Unity" at its center.

"Is that red vertical cross or white diagonal cross?" Shampoo wondered, tilting her head to look at it from different angles

"Eeee-heheheheheheh..."

As a thin, uneasy giggle filled the air, Ranma and Shampoo both blinked. They turned instinctively to Kodachi, who just gave them a look of equal surprise and shook her head, before all three turned as one to the last of their number.

"...Nabiki? Are you okay?" Ranma cautiously asked, watching as the middle Tendo daughter's shoulders shook with the force of her repressed laughter, head hanging down so he couldn't see her eyes.

At his words, Nabiki threw back her head and laughed uproariously; a demented cackle with an almost frantic edge to it. "I'm fine, Ranma! Just appreciating how completely and utterly screwed we all are!" she replied, a manic grin stretching her pale lips wide.

"Hey, I said I wouldn't let those things hurt you, and I meant it!" Ranma protested, instinctively reacting to his wounded pride, only to have Nabiki scoff dismissively.

"Those things? They're the least of our worries! Don't you recognize that symbol?!" Nabiki demanded, pointing at it with enough vitriol that it was a wonder the image didn't dissolve.

Ranma nervously shook his head, and spotted Shampoo doing the same from the corner of his eye.

"That's the logo of the Umbrella Corporation! Ya know, one of the biggest, if not the biggest corporation out there?!" she spat.

"Well, yeah - they're that big medical company, right? So why's that got your panties all tied up in a knot?" Ranma demanded heatedly, not sure what Nabiki was getting at and getting rather annoyed she seemed to disregard his promise to her so thoroughly.

"Because I keep my ear to the ground, and I've heard things about Umbrella... stories of horrible medical experiments, and conspiracy theories. And a lot more stories about people going missing after they meddled in Umbrella's affairs!" Nabiki raved with her arms waving about as if to try, and fail, to illustrate the true size of the situation they were in. "And here we are, in a spooky mansion full of walking dead men, with Umbrella's logo plastered right there - we already know too much! Even if we get out of this with our skins intact, Umbrella will come for us!"

She let out another mad cackle of despair. "So, you see? We're already fucked!" she shrieked, eyes going wider than Ranma had ever seen them as she began to tremble like a leaf in a gale.

Ranma and Shampoo cast dumbfounded looks at each other; neither of them had ever seen Nabiki in a state anywhere near as vulnerable as this! As long as they'd known her, and Ranma admittedly knew her better than Shampoo did, Nabiki had been a bastion of calm, iron-hard certainty, completely unshakable - neither of them had the faintest clue what to do in this situation...

Which was when their world went tilt yet again as Shampoo did something that Ranma never would have envisioned was possible...

Walking over to Nabiki, Shampoo gently but firmly wrapped her arms around Nabiki and drew her into a tender embrace, resting the older girl's head on her shoulder and stroking her hair. "There, there - it alright, it going to be okay," she crooned assuringly. "You with us, Nabiki; Ranma never let anyone hurt you; he far too strong and noble to do that. And Shampoo help him. We all keep you safe, and get through this."

The Chinese looked up from the still-shivering Nabiki and beckoned to the stunned Ranma, who instinctively looked around to see who Shampoo was gesturing before directing a stunned look at her, pointing a finger at himself and mouthing the word, "Me?"

Shampoo's emphatic nod drew Ranma cautiously across the floor to gingerly join her in hugging Nabiki. "Um... yeah, what she said, Nabiki. I won't let anybody hurt ya, doesn't matter if they're monsters or business men or whatever," he said, trying his best to sound assuring.

"I, too, will do my part to preserve your safety, Nabiki Tendo!" Kodachi declared, squeezing her way into the group hug... although she was more interested in hugging Ranma than Nabiki.

"There, you see?" Shampoo asked in an upbeat, if slightly forced, tone. "We all promise to keep you safe, Nabiki. Nothing bad will happen, Shampoo promise."

And that was when, with perfect ironic timing, the floor suddenly swung open beneath the quartet, pitching them into the darkness below with a cacophony of startled yelps and howls. Instants later, the hinged floor swung back into place as if it had never moved, leaving the library empty and silent, save for the moaning of a few stray undead... and the whirring of a security camera, as it swiveled back and forth across its high perch.

Chapter End & Closing Notes

And here we are, our first chapter! I hope this whets your appetite for the rest of the fic to come! I feel I must apologize; many fans who partook in the poll prior to this fic's debut seemed to believe that this would be something more along the lines of "Resident Evil 2/3/Outbreak, but in Nerima!" I won't lie; the thought crossed my mind. But... I'm ambitious. I've never lost my love for the original Resident Evils 1 and 0, and their simple, basic premise: a mansion full of monsters, and a couple of badass survivors trapped inside. So, this fic, which is intended to be part one of at least a trilogy of fics that will depict Ranma and our female leads intersecting with the Resident Evil canon in ways that hopefully will be interesting, without completely throwing the game canon out of whack!

Because I feel it needs to be explicitly stated: I will be setting this fic and its sequels in the continuity of the games - the live action movies were an abomination. I also will be ignoring the 2019 and probably the 2020 remakes of Resident Evils 2 and 3 - definitely 2, maybe 3, it depends on how much I am impressed or anti-impressed by the latter. I have my reasons for this, but the biggest is that I am pretty much not a fan of the 2019 RE2make, and I consider it the worst RE game that I've ever played.

Also, Shampoo didn't call it a "zombie" because that's actually a Western word with no real place in Japanese or Chinese pop culture at this point in time; only somebody with real exposure to the English-speaking world would know that term.