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"Ryouga! I'm gonna kill ya for destroying those aging mushrooms!" yelled the now six year old Ranma as the child chased after the laughing teen. Ranma leapt onto the young man's backpack and held on as vertigo assailed him when the scenery abruptly changed several times in a row as his foe fled chortling all the while about how he had finally gotten revenge.

One swift turn later and Ranma fell off and dizzily watched Ryouga vanish around a corner, literally.

"You alright?" hesitantly asked a green eyed boy about his same apparent age.

Ranma's understanding of English was just sufficient to understand the simple question so he merely nodded.

"My name is Harry," the boy said with a hesitant smile.

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Ranma sighed as he responded to the hesitant overtures of the younger child. "I Ranma," he haltingly said in badly accented English. Ranma may have been sixteen, nearly seventeen less than a month ago but physically he was now only six years old and despite any bravado he might want to delude himself with; he knew he was in deep trouble.

He recognized the landscape, the architecture, the signs and the language. He was back in England. It didn't matter if he went east or west; either way, home was on the opposite side of the globe from here. He was stuck. "I wonder if 'V-chan' is still here?" he murmured to himself.

Ranma frowned; he was getting mixed signals from the other boy. The child was broadcasting a mix of hope and fear. Ranma smiled slightly at the boy as he quickly studied him. Internally he frowned as his heightened senses told him the child was in pain but striving to ignore and conceal it.

One of the things that Ranma had been gradually coping with as a result of getting some self healing training from Doc Tofu was understanding the difference between martial arts training and child abuse. Doc Tofu had used examples from Ranma's own training trip to make some of his points. Ranma had finally admitted to himself that he was in fact an abused child; both physically and emotionally.

Making the admission to himself had allowed him to release a lot of pent-up emotion that had once fueled so many of his nightmares in the past. There was no way he'd ever make that same admission to anybody else but realizing that it had happened to him had resulted in generating a fierce protectiveness toward any abused child he encountered.

Despite his own problems, Ranma was hesitant to leave the other boy alone. The bruises he could see on the child despite his baggy ill fitting clothing made the martial artist want to protect the other boy. Ranma smiled warmly and asked, "Friends want be?" as he held out his hand in the western manner that he recalled from his last visit to England several years ago. In fact it was just before he and Genma had made their ill-fated trip to China.

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Harry warily watched the other boy. Arriving by piggyback was odd in itself but Harry had never met an Asian before given his limited social life. Some of his tension released when the other boy asked to be friends even if the wording was awkward.

He gratefully shook the other boy's hand and shyly stuttered his acceptance. "Ye . . ., yeah, I'd li . . . like that." The two boys shook hands quickly and then stood there in silence awkwardly before the green-eyed one asked the newcomer, "Ah, where do you live?"

The Asian boy sighed and grumbled, "I lost, friends far away. I all alone."

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C & C to Cloud Dreamer

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