Hinako’s hand took firm hold of Ranma’s waistband, and easily stripped the too large pants down around her knees, leaving her shapely rear exposed and vulnerable as Hinako raised the leather crop high in the air “NABIKI-CHAN!”
“Huh? Wha,” Nabiki shook her head to banish the delightful daydream she’d been having and blinked her eyes as she looked up at the frowning figure of Hinako.
“Really, you girls,” Hinako said with a frown. “I said that if you and your friends wish to play such games, you can go and find a more suitable place for it. The library is for serious study, not childish games. I will be most unhappy if I find you ‘playing’ in here again. Do I Make Myself Clear!” she demanded. Both Nabiki and Ranma hastily nodded their heads.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
“Whew,” Ranma said some time later as she walked down the street beside Nabiki, her hands behind her head. “I thought we were in real trouble there.”
“What you mean we, Saotome? From where I was, it looked like you were the brute attacking an innocent student. It was your ass on the line, not mine.” Nabiki’s voice took on a certain wistful quality as she said the last bit.
“Hmmpppp, I’ve been drained before. I’d have gotten over it,” Ranma said.
“Ah, but you’re forgetting, we’re not in Kansas anymore Toto.”
“huh? You feel all right, Nabiki. You ain’t making no sense.”
Nabiki let out a sigh. “Forget it, Saotome. All I meant was that this Hinako would not have stopped with just draining you. Or do you think that crop she was waving around was just for decoration. Remember last night, when Daddy was just about to give Kimiko-chan a switching, before he got distracted by needing to go to his council meeting?” Something in Nabiki could not let her call Kimiko mom. Maybe it was the fact that the girl looked like a high-school senior, or maybe it was because Nabiki had already suffered the loss of one mother, and was not ready to take the chance of loving another.
“Ah, heh, yea,” Ranma said, her voice not so confident, and a hand slipped behind her to hover protectively over her rear for a moment.
“Take my advice, Saotome. Walk real quite around Hinako-Sensei when you’re a girl. That is, if you don’t want to end up having some of the nasty things you want to do to me, happen to you.”
“Well, you deserved it. You kept me waiting for hours,” Ranma said, not trying for a minute to deny Nabiki’s accusation. “What was so important anyway?”
“Ah, I’m glad you asked me that, Saotome. How about the fact that we’re going to live to be over two-hundred years old, and maybe a hell of a lot longer than that?”
“Huh?”
“Let me start at the beginning,” Nabiki said, while mentally arranging what she’d learned in the simplest terms she could manage. There was no point going into great detail over how the present social system had grown out of the total collapse of human civilization over seven-hundred years ago. Nabiki had found it fascinating. Ranma would likely just get bored.
“Eight or nine hundred years ago . . .”
“Oh, man, not ancient history,” Ranma complained. “I was happy that the school’s here don’t teach that crap, and now you try and teach it anyway.”
Nabiki bonked the shorter girl on the top of her head with her knuckles. “Listen up, this is important. Try not to fall asleep!” As she said this, she filed Ranma’s comment away for some time when she had time to think about it. From the textbooks in the library, ‘her’ school had a very large history curriculum.”
“Ouch, you are so going to pay for that,” Ranma complained rubbing her head.
“Shut up and listen! The more you interrupt the longer this will take!” Nabiki replied. “As I was saying before I was interrupted, about eight to nine hundred years ago, there was some type of plague that started in Japan, and spread all over the world over the next five hundred years, till every human being on the planet had been infected. The last non-infected humans were in the Americas, though they call them the Westlands in this world. Explorers from Japan and Europe carried the plague to them, just as they did smallpox in our world.”
Ranma yawned. “So?” she asked.
“I’m getting to it,” Nabiki complained. “You just need to know that everyone got this disease. Or at least, what they think was a disease. The problem is, there is only flimsy written history to hint at the epidemic. The real proof didn’t happen till nearly fifteen years later. During what is now called the baby bust, or the great die off.”
Ranma’s eyes widened. “Great Die Off?”
“I’m getting to that. Most of this was theorized from preserved records. The people at the time didn’t know what was happening. All they knew was that suddenly women were not having any babies. Any woman born after the theorized original plague had great difficulty getting pregnant. Which is one way they tracked the spread of the theorized principal infection through records. They traced birth rates, which were recorded in various ways in most civilized countries. Demographics showed a radiating pattern of near zero birth rates moving outward from Japan over a measured period of time which would correspond with a disease using an air born vector.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Ranma complained.
Nabiki rubbed her forehead. “There was a disease. It spread through the air. But the first sign of it was when the women who were infected had children, and those children grew up. Those grown up women hardly ever had any children. I can’t remember the exact numbers from our world for that period, but the birth rate dropped to no more than a tenth of what it had been.”
“So, women weren’t having many babies. We’re still around, so they must have fixed it.”
“No. That’s the problem. They never did. Didn’t you notice how few students there were at school. Going through the previous years records, there are only about two-hundred and forty students in my school.”
“Oh, yea. Conan mentioned something about that.”
“Conan?”
“A kid I met. Nice little guy. He said something about some sort of fertility drug.”
“Yes, I read about that. They tried it in this area about twenty years ago. I t worked effectively for about four years, and then simply stopped working at all. And it didn’t work on anyone else outside the tested area when they tried it there later. As a result Furinken had a big baby boom. Which is why there are so many students around our age, and why I have two sisters.”
“Wait, you said Furinken had hardly any students, how is that a baby boom?”
“Compared to what we are used to, it’s not. But compared to what is normal here, it was a big jump. That’s the thing, the birth rate dropped all those years ago, and except for a brief blip every now and then, it’s never returned to what we would consider normal.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. There seems to be lots of people. If this has been going on for all that time, how come there are so many people . . .? Wait a minute!” Ranma’s forehead creased as she held out a hand to keep Nabiki quite while she thought. After a minute, she said. “This is what you meant about living longer, and why everyone seems to young.”
“I’m impressed, Saotome,” Nabiki said, and meant it. She had really though she was going to have to draw him a picture, with crayons. “Yes, the birth rate dropped off the chart, but people in general lived much longer. Much, much, longer. There have been recorded ages of over three hundred and fifty years of age. This is assumed to have some sort of correlation to the birth rate. Whatever was causing the one, also caused the other.
In any event, there were enough people being born to replace those that died, at least once all the people born before the plague died off. There was a massive population crash at that time. Which caused its own problems. Their children all lived very long lives, however. Oh, yes, and before I forget. It’s not unusual for a woman to get pregnant when she’s over one hundred years old. So they ended up having enough babies over that time to keep the population steady. Except for when war or some other large scale disaster killed a lot of them. When that happened, it took centuries to re-build a population base. And there were a lot of wars when this was first discovered. People panicked when their women started having so few babies. They didn’t know the children were going to end up living so long, didn’t know for over fifty years, till they started to put it together.”
“So they started raiding each other for women,” Ranma suddenly interjected. “That makes sense. The more women you get, the more children you’ll be able to have, even if the birth rate is low”
“That’s right. That was when women truly became property, though it took centuries for it to stabilize into the present social order.”
Ranma frowned. “Ok, I can see where a real good war leader could end up with lots and lots of women in his country. Lots more than there are men. Does that mean that Japan is stealing women from other countries? You don’t even have to look hard to see that there are more women than men around.”
“No.” Nabiki said, shaking her head. “The raiding ended long ago. Too many people were dying, and the desperate need faded as they realized that they could maintain their population if they just avoided killing too many people. The reason there are so many more women than men is the other trick this little disease played. There is only one man born for every four or five women.”
Ranma blinked. “Well, that would explain a few things.”
“Except why the women haven’t kicked the men’s hairy butts and stuck them in nice love houses like the Amazon’s did?” Nabiki muttered to herself thinking of some of the world history she’d researched.
“Huh, what was that, Nabiki?”
“Oh? Nothing, nothing, just thinking is all.”
Ranma and Nabiki continued down the street, each lost in their own thoughts as they considered what Nabiki had discovered.
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(Posted Sun, 05 Sep 2004 04:22)
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