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Clark shifted Jane to hold her carefully as he slung the baby bag to his other shoulder as the family got out of the old, faithful jeep to walk to the elevators of the Daily Planet through the parking garage.

Lois smiled back at him as she mimicked his actions with their other daughter Mary. The jeep was parked inconspicuously back out of sight in an unused section of the parking garage.

Both girls looked unhappy as they recognized that they were soon to be parted with their parents. In just minutes, the babies were in the daycare center and the hottest reporter team in Metropolis was on the job. They were following up on a lead on the newest crime boss in Metropolis. Several of the lines of investigation were pulling up blank in a very familiar way. They both looked up an hour later and stared off to the east.

"Jimmy!" Clark called out. "Lois and I have to meet a contact. We should be back in a couple of hours!"

"Right, CK!" Jimmy called out from where he was making copies of some research he was doing.

"Thanks, Jimmy!" Lois called out as followed Clark to the stairs. In just moments, there was a double woosh off in the distance.

"Lois! Clark! My office!" Perry bellowed out from the door to his office. He looked around in puzzlement, as he didn't see his star reporters. "Jimmy!"

"Yes, Chief!" Jimmy called out as he headed over from the copier with his pile of papers that he set on the edge of Clark's tidy desk. He shook his head. How did he keep everything so clean? And Lois had started to keep her desk just as tidy.

"Where in the Sam Hills are those two?" he said, pointing at the empty desks.

"They said they were on their way to a contact!" he called out, turning to run his next errand.

"Turn on LNN! Superman is at a building fire!" one of the reporters called out. The person closest to the TV turned it on. On the screen red/blue and pink/turquoise blurs were circling the fire at high speeds.

"Help, Superman!" a man yelled out his window. Smoke billowed out from behind him.

With a zoom, Ultra Woman appeared in front of him. "I hope you don't mind, but Superman is busy on the other side of the building." She smiled confidently as she gripped him. "Is there anyone else in there?" she asked.

At the shake of his head, she held him carefully and floated him quickly down to the waiting paramedics. Superman appeared with three children in his arms and their mother hanging on his back. "It looks clear."

"Let's put it out from the basement up," Ultra Woman said, motioning to the blazing fire.

"Right, fires go up easier than down." In a blur, they entered into the building and started to blow out the fire.

Just another day in the life of the super heroes.

"Baker-one-niner, you are cleared for insertion!" the voice over her minature radio said to the darkly colored female that was dragging four soldiers in each arm through the air.

GI Jane accelerated to four hundred miles an hour, heading to the darkened city up ahead. Baghdad and their target. They had been ordered to secure Saddam Hussein and his top leadership even as the main military force pushed over the southern border. She had been watching from long distance for movement.

Lucille Newtrich smiled to herself. Her 'stealth' outfit had consisted of a tight body suit in muted colors that didn't have a zipper at all. No metal was included, so she was entirely invisible to normal radar. As a matter of fact, the radio she used had the most metal in the group, and even it was mostly invisible to radar and such systems.

The Special Forces operatives with her were dressed similarly. Even their guns were a special ceramic-plastic for low visibility and radar invisible.

With a mighty fling, she threw the four soldiers left onto the ground near one entrance of the bunker. They dropped to the ground from over a hundred feet, landing cat-like and instantly moving. A second fling threw the other four at a second entrance. With a sonic boom as she accelerated, she smashed in the third entrance like it was tinfoil.

The war had started.

The thug looked up from where he was holding a glowing green rock in front of a figure in white and red. "This isn't affecting you at all?"  They were in a dark alley behind a very posh and expensive jewelry store in downtown Tokyo.

Rising Sun sighed, putting her fist on her hips. "No, it isn't. I think it is some sort of glow-in-the-dark pigment in a clear glass."  Luckily her helmet hid her expression and she just managed to have enough self-control not to laugh in his face. "I will have to take it for evidence. Are you going to come along quietly or not?"

Another thug was sneaking up behind her with a baseball bat. As he got closer, Rising Sun raised her hand, waggling a finger in front of  him. "I really wouldn't do that. Assaulting an officer of the law is a far more serious offense and you will get a much longer sentence. And you might scuff my suit, which would upset me."

The second thug sighed and dropped his bat. "Can't blame a guy for trying, can you?"

Rising Sun just sighed to herself. Some people. 

After she deposited them at the local police station, she headed towards the business district. One super-speed change and Kasumi Tendo walked casually down the block towards a modest business building. She waved cheerfully to the security guard behind the desk and used her card to gain access to the elevators to the Section 13 secure elevator.

The elevator dropped fast and opened to a small room with another security guard sitting behind a desk.

"Hello, Miss Tendo! Out late tonight?" he asked.

"The paperwork never ends, I'm afraid," she replied with a chuckle.  She presented her ID again, and then let the scanners at the door check her biometrics. Retina and fingerprints matched and she was let into the very secure headquarters of the Jade Kingdom.

Ranma glared at Akane over the dinner table. "How is that my fault?" he snapped.

She glared right back at him. "It's always your fault!"

"I was with you all day! And what would I want with a bunch of girl's underwear? Besides, do I look like this midget demon they mentioned?  It sounds like that Happosai character your dad mentioned." He was really getting steamed about this whole mess.

"RANMA!" Soun Tendo shouted as he stormed into the room. "What are all these IOU's?" He proffered a whole stack of notes from various restaurants in the area.

Ranma snatched the IOU's from his hands. "What the?"

Akane then snatched them right out of his hands. "Ranma! I can't believe you'd do that! You are a guest here!" She casually blocked his return grab. "I thought your father was the glutton of the family!"

He grabbed her wrist finally and then grabbed one of the notes. "Ha!" He started to look at the note closer.

The female martial artist fumed, then in a blur of motion put him into half-nelson with a leg-lock. "I was looking at that!"

Discomfited, her trapped fiancé snapped back, "I was looking at it first!" He then whispered to her, "Hey! No super-strength around your Dad!" Noticing that his face was nearly pressed into the dropped note, he kept looking at it. "This isn't my writing!" he almost shouted in glee

Soun just shook his head at the two teenagers. Ever since they got back from their adventures in the United States, they had been quite rambunctious.

Akane shifted her position a bit to look over his shoulder. "You're right. That's even sloppier than you!" She released him carefully. She let her concern show for a second then hid it when Ranma looked over at her.

The young man grabbed another IOU from another restaurant. "Heck, I was in school when this one was printed out."

"Happosai!" Soun shouted. "This is his revenge for my insubordination."

Ranma and Akane shared surprised look. Slowly, the aqua-transexual slowly asked with a very cool sarcastic tone with heavily lidded eyes, "This is his revenge? What sort of stupid revenge is this?"

A sturdy metal smoking pipe smashed into the back of his head, knocking him over and stunning him. The pipe bounced off a wall and then landed back in its owner's hand.

"How dare you belittle me!" the very short, very old and very, very ugly man shouted in comical anger. He was truly gnomish in appearance.

"Why you! How dare you!" Ranma shouted as he recovered. He lunged at the gnome.

With a flick, Happosai diverted the boy. In seeming violation of natural laws of inertia and momentum, Ranma was snapped through the ceiling and into the night sky with a mighty crash.

"Ranma!" Akane screamed even as she crouched and leapt through the hole.

"My, she's sure improved," Soun said dryly. He wondered how long she was going to try to hide that she was now ultra-enhanced?

"Pretty girl!" Happi shouted as he stared up her skirt as she was, of course, above him to do her leap. You could just see her panties

"That's my daughter!" Soun shouted, suddenly glaring at his diminutive master. Damn Genma for abandoning him in his time of need.

"Would someone mind explaining to me exactly why I had to rescue these two from hundreds of feet in the air," a muffled, female voice asked suddenly. Floating above the koi pond, Rising Sun held Ranma in one arm and Akane in the other.

"Oooooooh!" the perverted master of Anything Goes shouted. He suddenly bounded forward in a startling blur of motion. He snuggled into her bosom like a leech.

Rising Sun tensed suddenly at the very unwelcome and shocking groping that she was being subjected to. In shock, she dropped Ranma and Akane into the pond. She snatched up the old man.

"My pretties!" the old man called out as he was yanked away from her bosom. With huge, sorrowful eyes, he looked back at her. "Why are you torturing me so?"

"Torturing you?" she asked in confusion.

Happosai suddenly procured from thin air a flimsy bra. "You have to wear a bra or they'll sag!"

Akane and Ranma winced at that. This wouldn't be good.

"Pervert!" Rising Sun shouted even as she flung him high into the sky. She floated down to the ground, as she realized what she'd done.  "Oh no!" She was quite startled when her hands were suddenly gripped by Soun.

"Thank you! Thank you so very much! You've freed me from that devil again!" he said, tears of gratitude in his eyes.

"I have to go save him! He'll die!"

"Die? What are you talking about? From that little fling? Not possible!" the older man snorted. "I should know. I've blown him up, dropped boulders on him and ended up having to get him drunk and collapsing a cave onto him and put up Shinto wards to keep him trapped!" He seemed to think it over for a second. "I would have thought he would have suffocated after decades in a cave."

"Say what?" Akane and Ranma shouted in shock.

"I dare say, he's done so much evil that he's been barred from heaven and hell," the martial arts master said.

"Well, this is it," pretty Sailor Mars said, holding up an arcane looking box. "Inside it is the Talisman of Weft. I'm pretty sure that it was what allowed the spirit to slip into our world."

"Another legacy of the Moon Kingdom?" Sailor Moon asked.

"Yeah, the third one this week," Sailor Mercury said as she deactivated her holo-visor. "Each one of these things seems to be allowing one of these other-dimensional creatures to leak into our world."

"So all of those magic items are the cause of the demons that we have to fight? But there are thousands and thousands of these items," Sailor Venus nearly shouted as she let her shoulders droop.

Mercury gave a small glare at the bubble-headed blonde. "They aren't really magic. The black etheric crystal shards that power these items are just acting on a quantum plane that we can only dimly understand through mathematics-"

"She knows, Ami. It's just way above her head and because it looks like a duck..." Sailor Jupiter said as she leaned over to grip the smaller defender of Mercury and tussle her hair.

"...quacks like a duck..." Sailor Moon continued with a smile.

"...it must be a turkey!" Sailor Venus shouted, holding up her fingers in a 'V' for victory.

The other four pretty soldiers for truth and justice just stared at her in shock. Jupiter let Mercury go and walked up to poke Sailor Venus on her breastbone. "You did that on purpose."

"Did not." Sailor Venus looked crestfallen for some reason.

"That does make sense," Sailor Mercury said as she started to walk off. "No one could mutilate sayings like that on accident all the time."

"Hey!"

All of them started to laugh as they walked off away from the scene of the last battle.