Prometheus had spent a rather large slice of eternity being tortured on a mountainside with no chance of escape or hope of rescue. His tolerance for pain and frustration if known would be legendary, even among the damned in hell.
He had know ahead of time what the punishment was going to be for taking the Spark to mankind, and that he had little hope of escaping it.
It hadn’t dissuaded him for a second. Giving mankind the ability to grow beyond their primitive roots was all that mattered to him.
He lasted exactly six months teaching Ranma before realizing, as many teachers before him had, that teaching Ranma anything without the words ‘martial arts’ attached was almost a lesson in futility. Almost.
He knew that something had to be done when he started to actually miss the birds. He was sure he could have taught one of the birds the technique by now. The one that had come by once a year to sharpen it’s beak on the mountain was the only one he was certain would have taken longer.
Prometheus thought on this and reached the following conclusions;
It wasn’t that Ranma was stupid. He wasn’t.
It wasn’t that Ranma was lazy. Well… maybe in the mornings.
It wasn’t that Ranma was incapable of learning. He could absorb martial arts techniques that would take masters decades to perfect in the space of a week.
It was the fact that Genma had trained him to learn only martial arts. For over two thirds of Ranma’s life, and as far back as his memory extended, he had devoted nearly every waking moment to learning the martial arts and nothing else.
If it wasn’t a martial arts technique you had a window of exactly five minutes a day (per subject) to train Ranma in it before he fell asleep, and even waking him up and trying again had no lasting effect.
That first five minutes were all you would get. Anything told to him abought that subject after that first five minutes would pass from his mind the moment he went to sleep. His brain would actively resist learning the material at that point.
Experimenting with different methods of teaching and presenting the material had expanded that time to a total of 15 minutes. Making it a challenge involving a martial arts technique, and talking at extremely high speeds, had allowed him to triple the amount he could teach him in that period of time.
Two more months passed in this way before Prometheus decided the training was a tentative success. Ranma did indeed have the basics down, if just barely.
Learning to narrow the focus down to where he wanted to go was going to be a problem for decades if not centuries to come. Even using a strong emotional connection to someone at the target point would only give him a slight increase in accuracy.
Prometheus sighed, ‘This would have been a lot easier if he had a decent Ki level. Poor underdeveloped kid.’
*****
At this point you may well wonder what Prometheus meant by that. Well… simply put, Prometheus is a titan. The average titan was on an equal footing with the gods if not above most of them.
Prometheus was not your average titan.
Even before the mountain.
… and as for after the mountain?
It was doubtful anything short of the end of existence would phase him, and with his knowledge of alternate timelines and realities, the chance of that event catching him unaware was unlikely to say the least.
While they had chained his body to the mountain, nothing created could have chained his mind. While he had been torn apart over and over again on the mountain his body had grown in power, and while that was occurring he had spent a portion of each day with his mind soaring free among the worlds.
He had figured out that the mountain was just a test after the first millennium had past. Some event had killed his jailers before they could release him. Exactly what that event had been not even he knew. Nor was he interested in finding out any longer. Now he simply wanted what any being of enormous power and knowledge wanted after having spent so much time in chains.
He wanted to get drunk and laid. He was still a man after all, and spending eight months to pay an honor debt was seriously nearing the limits of even his patients with freedom so close.
*****
Ranma practically glowed with health and happiness. It had taken eight months to learn the technique, but it was finally done.
Most of the time had been split between trying to raise his Ki level through various exercises, and trying to teach him the basics of what he needed to know to learn the technique itself.
He had grown six inches taller and eighty pounds heavier during that time. He would have been shocked to know that however as Prometheus had simply imbued Ranma’s clothes with a drop of his blood so they would always fit regardless of his current size.
At times he had been convinced that he had reached the limits of what he could learn or the amount of Ki he could handle, and every single time Prometheus had shown him how to surpass them.
While Saffron would still have snickered at the amount of Ki he had, Herb would at least have acknowledged it as a decent amount if not as much as his own.
The knowledge crammed into his head in the last eight months was impressive, if rather useless in day to day life. Unless you were a cosmologist it had little use and the languages needed to talk abought it correctly were ancient beyond belief.
Ranma shrugged ‘At least I’ll ace any math test they give me.’
Prometheus grinned as he watched his student attempt to put the technique to use. It would take at least a week to regain the Ki spent, so his aim had better be perfect on the first try.
Not that he expected Ranma to get home on the first jump, but crazier things had happened and Ranma was determined to try.
He should reach home within a year at any rate.
Watching the slight ripple in the air as Ranma vanished he wondered who it was he had chosen as his anchor point. Ranma had talked abought home quite a bit with Prometheus and he was a little curious abought who Ranma had finally picked.
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(Posted Sun, 02 May 2004 14:33)
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