The Tales of the Dragon Warrior

A Story Told and the Dawn of Danger

Six months. It had been six months since Jade had fallen out of the sky and became the Dragon Warrior, and in the span of that half a year, a lot had changed. She had gone from a punk-ass highschool graduate who made grown men cry, to a kung fu master who made grown men cry and rizzed up her enemies on the side (just ask Tai-lung).

Since two and a half months ago when Jade defeated Tai-lung, things in the Valley of Peace had changed drastically. For starters, no one said the name 'Tai-lung' with fear in their voices anymore. Instead, they said the name with fondness, usually as they recalled some kind thing he did for them or when they saw him around town with Jade, who to the surprise of no one, had become his girlfriend a little less than two months ago. Well, no one except Mr. Ping, who had threatened the great kung fu master with castration by meat cleaver if he ever dared to hurt his daughter. The sound of Tai-lung's girlish scream as he got a kitchen knife thrown centimeters away from his sensitive parts cracked the people of the valley up for weeks.

But other than those events, no other drastic occurrences had happened. There had been a few bandit attacks, petty thefts, and Vashir had broken out of prison once and tried to go after Tai-lung, only to end up getting judo-flipped by his brother before the white haired man ever caught wind his self-proclaimed 'nemesis' was there, but other than that, there was hardly any crime. So, like they always did when there wasn't anything else to do, the Five (plus Jade and Tai-lung) did what they did most often in their free time; trained and made-out, and not necessarily in that order.

When Jade wasn't honing her ability to throw hands, she was with one of her six boy friends in any part of the Jade Palace having 'fun'. Making out with Hou in a closet, getting hickies from Laofu in the forest behind the barracks, kissing Tai-lung while sitting on the kitchen counter. Jade was sure there wasn't a place in the Jade Palace she hadn't kissed at least one of her boyfriends in, much to the chagrin of the servants that occasionally stumbled upon them (fortunately, none of whom were Zeng). Shifu knew about his students 'shenanigans', but never said anything about it. He knew it was better for them to get caught kissing then for them to get caught doing... other things and end up scaring the staff for life. Still, Shifu sometimes wondered if Master Oogway would have condoned his students' behavior, before remembering what the old man was like and realizing he was probably cackling giddily in the Spirit World at his predicament.

For nearly three months, Jade had been living out halcyon days of bliss with the men she loved. Sure, she missed her family and friends in her world and sure, she hadn't told her loved ones in China the whole truth about where she came from, but she wasn't planning on doing that for a while. She was gonna wait to tell them until after Lord Shen was dealt with, but that wouldn't happen for months... right? Truth was, Jade really didn't know when Shen would make his appearance. The timeline she had been living and the Kung Fu Panda timeline were very different from one another. Tai-lung took half the time he took to get to the Valley of Peace in the movie than he took to get there in real life, not to mention Tai-lung was already out of prison when Jade was chosen as the Dragon Warrior when he didn't break out until afterwards in the movie. Nothing was absolute. Little deviations from the timeline were all over the place, and Jade had no way of predicting what would change.

Shen could rear his ugly head next year or next week, but Jade would never be certain. And she didn't want to go after him herself and risk screwing with the future. So she just shoved thoughts of Shen's impending appearance to the back of her mind and pretended like it wasn't an issue. It wasn't something she could control, at the very least. And besides, it wasn't like there was anything she could do to prepare for Shen and his weapons short of re-inventing the nuke, so what was the point in worrying? At least, that was how Jade looked at things, until one untimely interruption turned everything on its head.