Seeing that the tide of spamfics generated by Lurker's challenge 
has finally died down, I can safely post the first chapter of a 
small project I've been working on in my spare time.  It'll hit 
RAAC when I finish revising the second chapter and get around to 
writing the third.

Anyway, here's the obligatory link to the place where I store the
rest of my stuff:  http://www.humbug.org.au/~wendigo/transp.html

Commentary is welcomed and appreciated.

***

Eidolons

Ranma belongs to Takahashi.  The Dreamlands are the creation of
H.P. Lovecraft, and belong to whoever now own the rights to his
works.  Anyway, both are used without permission, as you no doubt 
have already guessed.

...

One - Threshold

Now I pierce the darkness, new beings appear,
The earth recedes from me into the night,
I saw that it was beautiful, and I see that what is not the earth
     is beautiful
-Walt Whitman

...

     Ranma Saotome knew nothing of the basalt spires of 
Dylath-Leen; he had no knowledge of the crystalline air-boats of 
the city of Yerthardt that plied the skies above the pearly 
ocean that lay a thousand miles south of the pleasant land of
Sona-Nyl; nor even had he heard the old dreamers tell in hushed
voices of the Tree-Without-Roots of the Iron Forest, the sight of
which is said to bend the minds of men, that their eyes shall not 
see as other men's see.  He would not know of them before he grew 
to be an old man, but in time, he would know them all and more; 
he would know of the perfumed jungles of Kled; of the mad things, 
no longer men, that dance in the Hills of Implan by the moon, and 
sing wordless songs of praise to gods who never were of this 
earth; he would know of the Doom That Came to Sarnath, and why it 
had come.  He would even dare, though only once, to stand outside 
the colossal walls of dread Thalarion and listen to the laughter 
of spectral Lathi as it came drifting from within, but even he 
was not so brave (or some might say foolish) as to step inside 
that cursed place.

     In time, he would come to know many of the delights that the
Dreamlands had to offer, and no few of the horrors as well.  He
would be one of the few men to hear the voice of the Black Siren
and not have his skin line the walls or floor of her pit.  And 
while he never looked upon the throne of Azathoth as it is said
Kuranes once did, he did once glimpse the Basalt Pillars of the 
West from his perch in the crows-nest of a trading ship of 
glorious Celephais, and see for a moment how all the oceans of 
the Dreamlands pour off into that sear gulf of unlawful space  
which lies hungry and waiting beyond to devour it.

     Where it all began, though, was in the kitchen of a small
Chinese restaurant, the Nekohanten by name.  Ranma had gone there
for aid with an affliction of the mind.  A long-ago incident of
his childhood, brought on by a feckless father's imbecilic 
actions, had left him with a severe phobia of all things feline.
That in itself would be bad enough, but with sufficient exposure,
he would cease to be terrified of cats for a time and come to 
believe that he himself was one; reverting, as it was, to a feral
state.

     The complexities of Ranma's personal life need not be 
explained here; the details of that alone have filled volumes.  
Let it only be said that he had, at long last, been coerced into 
an evening out with Akane Tendo.  One that had, astonishingly, 
been uninterrupted by the intrusion of any of the other claimants 
to the love of either himself or his lady.  A pleasant dinner 
with little conflict was spent at one of the nicer restaurants in 
town, and both had, though they would not have admitted it, an
enjoyable time.  Walking home, however, they chanced to encounter
a stray cat wandering through the darkened streets.  Stricken
with fear, Ranma fled into a nearby alley, thereupon to encounter
a dozen more cats picking through the refuse bins.  Unaware of
this fact, Akane shooed away the single cat outside the alley and 
then entered to retrieve her wayward fiancee, only to find that 
the cats had surrounded him.  Already nervous from the alien 
events of the date, Ranma had become, in mind, a cat.  Thus, he 
avoided further mental trauma from his fear.

     Upon spotting Akane, he grew affectionate and leapt upon 
her.  The precise detailing of what occurred afterwards would be
unnecessary; let it only be said that the end results were one
ruined suit, one ruined dress, and one very angry and upset
fiancee.  Ranma's phobia had, in her mind, spoiled what had
otherwise been a most pleasant time.  For this, she blamed Ranma
himself, rather than the phobia.  Such was her wont to do;
reasonableness had never been one of her foremost points, nor had
been the proper assignment of blame.

     Ranma himself felt horribly guilty.  His mental difficulties
had destroyed what should have been a very pleasurable outing for 
him.  His feelings for Akane, uncertain and nervous as they were, 
were strong.  Their engagement had been difficult before, but now 
it seemed to Ranma that no chance of taking a step beyond 
engagement, or even of attaining a normal life, existed while he 
lay under the curse of his ailurophobia.
     
     Thus he found himself that day in the Nekohanten speaking
to the aged proprietor, a woman renowned for her wisdom of the
eldritch lores and judgement in applying them, if no longer for 
her beauty.  And so began a grand and terrifying adventure, into 
a realm of nightmares and dreams, gods and monsters, beyond the 
veil of sleep.

...

     "Ya gotta help me out, Cologne."
     
     Cologne regarded him with a steely gaze across the wooden
table in the kitchen of the Nekohanten.  A mountainous pile of 
carrot peelings was slowly obscuring her from view as she worked.  
"Why?"
     
     Ranma blinked.  "You're the only one who can.  You know 
about all that mystical stuff.  You gotta know a way to cure the
Neko-ken."

     The peeler rasped, and another long shaving of carrot
dropped into the pile.  "Assuming I did, what reason do I have 
to share it with you, son-in-law?"

     "Umm... because... uhh..." Ranma grasped at straws.  "It
would be a nice thing to do?"

     "Who ever told you that I was nice?"
     
     "Err..." Ranma snapped his fingers triumphantly.  "You 
helped me learn the Hiryuu-Shouten Ha after Happosai stole my
strength.  That's just like this."

     "No, it isn't," Cologne refuted.  "A weak husband is a shame
for a Joketsuzoku.  The Neko-ken, on the other hand, is an exotic
and powerful technique when used correctly."

     Straws were disappearing rapidly.  "You... uhh..."
     
     "Ranma, you done talking to great-grandma?  We go on date
now?" 

     Ranma looked to where Shampoo stood hopefully in the doorway
leading between the kitchen and dining room of the Nekohanten, 
the curtain that covered it half-drawn away by her hand.  "Uh...
not yet, Shampoo."

     "You hurry and finish, okay?  Then we go on date."
     
     "Uhh... maybe," Ranma said non-committally, trying to focus
on both Joketsuzoku at once.  Cologne was silent, watching the
dialogue between the youngsters with all the intentness of a 
hawk.  

     "Date be very fun," Shampoo said brightly.  
     
     "Shampoo," Cologne said finally, "I am in the middle of a
conversation with son-in-law.  Please leave us."

     Shampoo nodded, suddenly tight-lipped, and turned away, 
letting the curtain fall behind her.  Ranma sighed with relief 
and turned his full attention back to Cologne.  

     "Look, old ghoul--"
     
     A slice of carrot bounced off his forehead hard enough to 
make his eyes cross.  "Don't be rude."
     
     "Cologne, if you don't--"  A second carrot slice smacked off
the tip of his nose.  "Listen, you withered--"  Flick.  Bounce.
"Oww!"

     Cologne's usually bulging eyes were narrowed and annoyed.
"One more try, son-in-law."  The paring knife was pressed lightly
against the end of a carrot, anticipating his response.

     Ranma opened his mouth.  "I--"
     
     "And think before you speak, for once."
     
     The knife blade cut slightly into the orange flesh of the
carrot.  Ranma gulped, and, for once, thought before he spoke.

     "Cologne," he asked, "please help me out with this.  It's
destroying my life."

     The ancient woman nodded in seeming approval, and a thin
smile grew on her lips.  "Not bad.  You even used 'please'."  The
carrot fell to the table with a thump, and Cologne did something
with the knife that made it vanish.  "I'm more inclined to help
you now.  I know the why of this.  But what about the who?"

     Ranma blinked.  "Huh?"
     
     "Who do you want to rid yourself of the Neko-ken for?"
     
     A dozen answers sprang to mind that he could give, all of
them false.  Cologne's gaze was flat and hard as ice, heavy with
the weight of years.  He was not, he realized, a good enough liar
to fool her in this.  "Akane," he said in a whisper.  "I gotta 
get rid of this thing for Akane."

     Cologne let out a weary sigh, and managed to look both 
disappointed and pleased at once.  "Very well.  I'll help you."

     Ranma punched his fist into his palm in triumph.  "Great!
So how ya gonna do it?  Some kinda ancient Chinese secret mystic
mumbo-jumbo?"
     
     Cologne nodded.  "Something like that, yes."  She hopped 
down from the chair she'd been standing on to reach the table,
and hopped on her staff to the bottom of the stairs that went up
to the second floor.  "Stay here, boy, and don't touch anything."
     
     A series of taps, gradually decreasing in volume, echoed
through the kitchen as Cologne made her way up the steps.  Bored
without an immediate source of stimuli, Ranma rapped his knuckles
on the underside of the table in a rhythm only he knew for a few
seconds, and then began to juggle a half-dozen uncut carrots.  
>From the second floor, he heard a series of crashes, as if 
someone were sorting quickly through a huge closet filled with a 
lot of junk that had simply been thrown in there and forgotten 
about.

     Another series of taps, ascending in loudness this time,
alerted him to Cologne's return, and he quickly snatched the
carrots from the air and replaced them on the table.  Holding
something under one arm, Cologne came down the stairs atop her
staff.  

     "Found it!" she crowed triumphantly, and deposited a small
wooden box atop the table after sweeping the carrot peelings 
onto the floor.  Still balanced on her staff, she leaned over the 
table almost eagerly.  "Open it up, son-in-law."

     A cloud of dust puffed into the air as Ranma blew a breath
over the box.  Intrigued, he traced his fingers over the carving
atop the box, and the unfamiliar letters underneath.  Some of 
them were recognizably English, but others weren't - a triangle,
an inverted V, an O whose bottom was two outward-facing feet.  
The carving itself was weathered and half-vanished, but appeared 
to be a profile of a man with two faces.  One face wept, and the 
other smiled in a slightly cruel manner.

     "What's in it?" he asked, still unable to take his fingers
from the wooden surface.  

     "Open and see," Cologne said.
     
     Ranma flicked up the tarnished brass latch, and opened the
box, which sent up another cloud of dust.  Inside, the dark wood
had been lined with red velvet, and in two rows of three, six
cubes of a scintillating silvery colour lay.  The composition of
them was powdery, and they gave off a fragrant smell of roses.

     "Huh?" Ranma questioned with a glance to Cologne.
     
     "Incense, boy," Cologne explained.  "Burn it as you go to
sleep."

     A frown grew on Ranma's face.  "I've had some bad 
experiences with magic incense..."

     "Happosai?"
     
     Ranma nodded.  "Happosai."
     
     "This is different," Cologne said.  "It is not the cure in
and of itself, but it is the gateway to where you may find the
cure."

     "Huh?"
     
     Cologne looked troubled.  "I can say no more than that."
     
     "You mean you won't say more than that."
     
     Long white hair swirled as Cologne shook her head.  "No.  I
mean I can't.  Close the box, Ranma, and watch."  Ranma closed 
the box and latched it with a soft click.  Cologne dropped to the 
table-top and caught her staff before it fell.  With a wrinkled 
hand, she touched the latch of the box and just as quickly drew
it back.  The carvings twisted, and came to life.  The impression 
was of a badly-filmed movie playing out upon the wooden surface.  
First the two-headed image turned left, until the full face of
the smiling head stared out at them.  The wooden face had a
terrible look of vitality to it, and the eyes were bright and
cruelly clever.  Then it spoke, in no language known to human
tongue, inside Ranma's head:

          "None whose dream-soul lies in glass-
     
     The head turned, wooden image blurring, and now the weeping
face stared out at them, as the voice spoke on:

          -beyond the dreaming-gate shall pass"
          
     The scent of roses was gone.  Now what clung to everything
in the room was the aroma of dust and impossible age, desolation
and decay.  Again the head turned, visage after visage spinning
by, laughing, weeping, laughing, weeping, laughing, weeping 
inside Ranma's head--

     The table shook with the impact as Ranma's hands slapped
down atop the box.  For a moment, he felt the box writhing under
his hands like a serpent, and then it was still.  A deep breath
calmed him slightly, and he slowly slid his hands off the
surface of the wood.  The box was as it had been before; old and
worn, the two-headed profile carved upon it without the animate 
monstrosity it had possessed before.

     "Do you see now, Ranma?" Cologne said softly.  "I am
constrained by a power beyond myself.  Do not undertake this
lightly, child.  Consider what chances you are willing to take 
in freeing yourself from the Neko-ken."

     Ranma laughed uncertainly.  "What's the worst thing that
could happen to me?"

     "I cannot describe it," said Cologne.  "Save that it would
make you wish many times over that you had died."

     "Well," Ranma said, scratching the back of his head, "that's
the worst thing, huh?"

     Cologne nodded and placed an ancient hand atop the carven
lid of the box.  "If you do not wish to..."

     "This is the only way, huh?" 
     
     "The only way of which I know that might have some success."
     
     Ranma frowned.  "And you can't tell me any more?"
     
     A struggle seemed to pass across Cologne's face.  Her mouth
opened, but no words came out.  Beads of sweat glistened on the
parchment skin of her forehead.  The hand she held her staff with
tightened until the knuckles were bone-white.  Soundlessly, her
mouth worked, as if she tried to speak but something held her 
voice in thrall.  At last, it passed, and she shook her head.  
"I cannot."  Fear, unfamiliar, showed on her face.  "I am sorry, 
son-in-law."

     "Okay," Ranma said, frown deepening.  "No hints?"
     
     The words came from Cologne, all in a rush.  "Do not be
consumed with phantoms child for within each mortal lies--"  Her
voice cut off with a strangled squawk, and it took her a few
seconds to draw breath again.  "I can risk no more than that."

     The box seemed heavier than it should have been as Ranma
weighed it up and down in one palm.  "Okay," he sighed.  "I don't
like it much, but if ya think this'll work..."  Cologne nodded 
and wiped damp hair out of her eyes.  "...then I might as well
give it a shot."

     "One thing," Cologne said wearily as she slumped into her
chair.  "You'll have to be alone when you use it.  Don't have
anyone else in the room when you burn the incense."
     
     "Why not?"
     
     "It would not be good."
     
     Answers, it seemed, were not forthcoming from Cologne.  The
box was a comfortably solid presence under Ranma's arm as he got
up from the table and turned to go.  "Thanks, Cologne."  
Suddenly, he turned back, eyes narrowing with suspicion.  "Wait a 
minute.  What are you getting out of this?"

     "Confirmation," Cologne said enigmatically.  "And maybe
something else."

     "No strings?"
     
     Her smile was thin and humourless.  "The strings you tie
yourself are more binding than any I might."

     The urge to scratch his head was there, but he resisted it.
"Okay."

     "One more thing."
     
     "What?"
     
     Cologne pointed.  "Go out the side door.  Shampoo will be
waiting in the dining room."

...

     For the next three days, some force unseen appeared to be in 
conspiracy against Ranma Saotome's efforts.  It was enough alone 
that he was forced to share a room with his sire (the source, as 
he saw it, of so many of his ills), but each effort he made to 
find a secure place to take rest while burning the incense met
with failure.  The first night, he waited until his father slept
and absconded from their bedroom after retrieving the carven box
from beneath his underclothing in the drawer, only to encounter a
somnolent Akane Tendo on her trip back from the bathroom.  As 
this encounter happened to take place outside the door of her
room, and as Ranma happened to have looked inside the open door
on the off chance that something was wrong with his 
supposedly-sleeping fiancee, the end result was a sound thrashing 
due to Akane's presumption that Ranma had some nefarious end in 
mind - 'walking around the house in the middle of the night and
peeking into my room like some sort of weirdo pervert' were her 
words, more or less.

     The second night, Ranma made the excuse of practising late
in the dojo, intending to sleep there that night and make use of
its isolated status from the rest of the house.  Unfortunately,
the arrival several hours after dinner of a rival of his, one
Ryoga Hibiki, resulted in a rousing battle of several hours that
ended (as many of their battles did) with no clear victor either
way.  By the end, Ranma was in such an exhausted state that he
was incapable of considering anything beyond simple sleep.

     The third night, he again used the pretext of a late night
training in the dojo to avoid his regular sleeping-hour.  When it 
was pointed out to him that his conflict the night before had 
left a large hole in the roof of said dojo, he rebutted that he
would enjoy sleeping under the stars.  When it was pointed out
that the forecast called for rain that night, he said that a
little rain wouldn't hurt him.  When it was suggested by Akane's
father that he simply spend an hour patching the roof that he 
had indirectly damaged, he had already left the room.  That 
night, he carefully made a bed in the corner of the dojo, far
from the hole, and waited until such a late hour that he was sure
the rest of the household would be abed.  Then, carefully putting
light to a single cube of the incense placed in a small burner,
he settled into his sleeping bag and stared up at the small 
amount of ceiling that remained, his head pillowed upon his 
hands.

     Soon a scent of roses such as the incense gave off, but
multiplied, began to fill the dojo.  Ranma's nose quivered at the
soporific odour, and his lids felt suddenly heavy.  Arms and
legs, his body, they seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.  He could
not lift them.  Panic filled him for a moment, and then panic 
went away under the lovely scent of roses.

     The floor, he thought, is rising, bearing me up with it
towards the holes in the stars.  Laughter came, and went.  The
ceiling dipped and bulged, and the walls ran like wax in 
polychromatic shades.  His body was a prison.  Flesh was hateful. 
The stars laughed at him.  Roses rotted on the vine.  Thorns 
pierced his skin.  Vines wrapped around his limbs.  Vines 
covered his eyes.  The wooden floor was alive, trees rising, mist 
twining about the tangles of their roots.  They waved their 
branches and danced for him.  For a moment, he was sure he saw 
two worlds, one the dojo with the hole in the ceiling, the other 
the night-forest with trees so tall that their limbs had twined 
together and almost blotted out the stars.  Then there was 
nothing at all but sleep, and what lay beyond.

...

     Ranma blinked.  He was lying on a stick, which was poking 
him in the small of back.  That had been... weird.  Had the 
incense been hallucinogenic, or something?

     He then realized that there was not just a stick, but an
entire forest.  A vast forest of towering oak trees, the upper
branches entangled with one another to form such a thick roof
that only in patches were the stars of the night sky visible.
There was no difficulty in seeing though, for many of the oak 
trees were covered in luminescent green fungi that clung to the 
trunks or hung in long streamers reminiscent of tentacles from 
the branches.  The light was eerie, turning the leaf-strewn 
forest floor a strange sickly colour.  Extracting the stick from 
under him, Ranma sat up and looked around.  Trees stretched off 
as far as he could see.

     "Well," he said quietly.  "This is damn strange."  Something
skittered in the underbrush nearby, a quick darting shape, and he
sprang to his feet and warily cast his head from side to side.
"Someone there?"

     Was he dreaming?  It didn't feel like a dream.  The forest
floor felt solid and real beneath his bare feet, though the 
verdant greens and browns of the forest had a murky quality to
them.  A piping sound rose from somewhere deep within the forest,
and Ranma turned and took a few steps in the direction of it,
before he heard it sound again from behind him.  

     Frowning, he stopped and thought for a moment.  The voice in
his head from the carven box had spoken of the dreaming-gate, and
he had to have come to this place somehow.  Oddly, he was no
longer in his pyjamas, but wore his familiar red shirt and black
pants.  He pinched the fabric of his shirt between his fingers;
it certainly felt real.  Weird.

     Deciding to get better oriented, he crouched, sprang, and
grabbed a tree limb a dozen feet overhead.  It bent slightly
under his weight, oddly springy for its size, but held, and he 
hauled himself up onto it and balanced on the broad span of it.  
Another leap grabbed another branch, and he quickly and 
acrobatically worked his way up the hundred-foot height of the 
tree.  Near the top, he had to slow down to pick his way through 
the tangle of branches, but at last he emerged atop the tree and 
gazed off from a perfect vantage point at the land beyond.

     It breathtaking.  Beyond the forest, a blue ribbon of a
river wound through lush fields.  Tiny cottages and farms dotted
the land, and further off he saw clusters of houses that looked
to be villages.  But what stunned him were the mountains.  Two of
them were visible, forested on their lower slopes and rising tens
of thousands of feet into the air to peaks capped with frost and
snow that glowed blue beneath the starlight.  They were bigger 
than Fuji-san - bigger perhaps even than Everest - and Ranma 
realized then that wherever he was, it was not of earth.

     He looked up at the stars.  None of the familiar 
constellations were there, no North Star or the bright glow that 
was Venus.  A sudden sense of smallness overwhelmed him, and he 
felt tiny and insignificant as he gazed up at the night sky.  The 
moon was bright, and seemed too big.  While he watched, a far-off 
shape passed across it on too many wings, or perhaps too few.

      Suddenly, he no longer wanted to be atop the tree, staring 
at alien stars and unknown mountains.  He regretted going to
Cologne, regretted burning the incense.  The flying thing, 
whatever on earth or elsewhere it was, was lost against the sky
now - perhaps he had not seen it at all.  Branches had not seemed
so thickly strewn when he'd climbed up, but as he made his way
down, they seemed to clutch at him as if they wanted him to stay.
A misplaced hand squashed a glowing green fungus that looked like 
a malformed football, and it burst with a wet explosion to spray 
phlegmy liquid on his shirt sleeve and hand.  

     Grimacing, he dropped the remaining short distance to the 
ground and wiped the mess off as well as he could against his 
pants.  Nocturnal rustles came from tangled undergrowth through 
which a few rudimentary trails had been worn, and he glanced 
around nervously as he remembered the vast shadowy not-bird thing 
that had been framed against the moon.

     Still brushing at his sticky sleeve and scratching absently
at his hand, which had started to itch, he began to walk along 
the trail that he believed would lead him from this alien and 
disturbing place to the pleasant fields beyond.  All around him 
the woods murmured, and once, as he stepped over a fallen and 
rotted log, a moth big as his hand with glistening blue wings 
flew by.  

     At last, with the burning itch of his hand having grown only
worse, the trees began to thin out and he saw the fields 
spreading beyond.  For a moment, he paused under the towering
limbs of one of the great oaks and looked at his hand.  

     "Oh god," he whispered, as he realized why it had itched all
this way.  Somehow, he had never looked at it in all this 
walking.  Pulsing tendrils of green moss were slowly growing from
his palm; around them, squashed stains of the ones he'd rubbed
away in his itching were spread in patches on the flesh of his
hand.  From them, tiny fibrous roots were beginning to emerge.

     As if his eyes upon it had been the trigger for some
terrible vitalistic purpose, the moss began to writhe across his
entire hand, enveloping it in a verdant glove.  Numbness coursed
up his wrist, his arm, his shoulder, and stretched tight across
his brain like an enveloping veil.  Horrified and paralysed, he
stared as moss crawled up his arm like the tide creeping up a
beach.  Swayed, staggered.  Shapes and colours blurred before his
eyes as if the world were melting.  Overhead, the stars spun
madly.

     With a thud, he hit the ground.  Half of his body felt as if
a mountain had been laid atop it.  The other half could barely
move.  Unable to scream or cry out, he felt his stomach twist in
wretched disgust as the moss grew upon his clothes, and, even
worse, upon his skin.  Tangled fingers stroked his hair, kissed
his forehead.  The last thing he saw as the moss drew a reeking,
faintly-glowing mask across his face, were the quick dark shapes 
flitting from the underbrush, weird eyes glinting with green
light and hunger.

FIN ONE