It was when the people in the hotel peered out into the gloom and saw the creatures that several things happened. One was that quite a few of them looked pleased, those who were humanoid seemed to brighten up somewhat and stop in their travels to glance at the building where several sillhouettes were watching them. Some of them were stunned and surprised, freezing absoulutely in their tracks with gobsmacked expressions on their faces. A few of the shiftier looking inhabitants quietly slunk away, always facing the group and backing away at a steady rate to slink into the shadows before outright pelting away. A few even so much as spat at the ground and cursed after eyeing the newcomers.
One of those remaining was something that looked like a bipedal lizard with long and floppy ears, dyed a reddish color that only came into view when he stepped closer to the hotel's perimeters. "Oy, guvs! Youse guys are the Challengers brought in here by the Viewer, right?!" Particular emphasis was placed on "Challenger" as though it had some sort of special meaning and the rest of the sentence was said in a somewhat gutteral dialect.
It seemed that his particular creature also knew something about them that the Viewer either forgot to mention or did not have enough time to state. Said creature was looking somewhat dazed in fact. "Otherwise, you wouldn't have even gotten into that place! I should know, many a bloke got sizzled like sausages trying their hands at filching the place!" He was hollering so much that various buildings nearby were turning on whatever lights they had, and several people began to attempt to listen in on the conversation.
As Ranma Saotome mumbled something in his sleep and shifted, a sense of wariness settled over him. Most of the time, he would have slept squarely until either an uncute tomboy came into his room to dump a bucket of cold water over him or his father threw him out the window and into the koi pond. Utterwise, he was pretty hard to wake up by regular means. But this particular instance was special. It had to do with a cat, the one thing that Ranma Saotome truly feared along with a certain tomboy's home cooking. His eyes snapped open and he glanced around, noting that the place was snowy and he was perched in a tree. "How the hell did I get here? I'm not Ryoga..."
While he was peering about and looking at the strange people situated under said tree (he was pretty desensitized to weird at this point), he felt something touch his hand. It was soft and furry. Glancing down, the pigtailed boy froze as he saw what was currently aiming for him. It was a pink kitten with closed eyes and a tail that looked exactly like a cat's toy. If he had been anyone else, he would have pet the adorable Pokemon. Sadly, he was Ranma Saotome. "C-c-c-c-c-c-c-c..." He grew pale and nervous, skin actually whitening and losing color as his teeth clattered from the fear.
"CAAAAAAAAAAAAAT! GET IT AWAY FROM ME!" Suddenly, the boy jumped straight up twenty feet, grabbed the top of a much taller tree, and clung to the peak in a shivering mess. "C-call off your evil hellbeast!" In his mind, he remembered the horrible training where he was dumped in pit and had starving cats attack him due to his father equipping fish products on him. Meanwhile, the evergreen branches he blasted off of and through began to rain down on the clearing.