He had always been the strong one. Just as she had focussed her mind, so he had focussed on physical skills. He was a superior fighter, one of the best of the best, and his punches could do surreal amounts of damage.
He hadn't neglected the spiritual/philosophical parts of the Art, but he was more physically oriented than philosophically oriented.
Right now he was troubled. Very troubled. A stranger could have seen that, where she had been with him for most of their lives. She could read him like a book, and what she was reading was that his very core beliefs had just taken a beating.
He had witnessed her transformation to Sailor Mercury. He likely had figured out who Sailor Moon was. He hadn't met Sailor Mars or Rei yet. He was not likely to be the mysterious Tuxedo Mask, though Usagi had thought he might be when she had first met him.
Somehow Ami couldn't picture her brother standing on the sidelines giving motivational speeches and throwing flowers. It just didn't seem a Ranma sort of thing to do.
Then Ranma asked one of those questions that revealed what track his mind was going on.
"Ami? What exactly is magic?"
Sailor Pluto wondered what exactly was going on.
When had Ami gotten an older brother? Why had her attempts to scry on him fail half the time? What was going on?
The Sentinel Of Time looked backwards, pausing at some of the more WAFF moments that came across the surface of the Gates. Time had been altered, but it looked less like something deliberate and more a side-effect. There were clearly snippets of things out-of-place that made no sense at all except when you considered the possibility of some paradox settlement by reality itself.
Viewing things through the Gates Of Time, scanning the images of the past, was difficult. That was not the purpose of the artifact, and so its performance in that was sorely lacking.
So this 'Ranma' was a child 'born on the wrong side of the sheets' of one of Kumori Mizuno's relatives. Except that didn't make much sense either.
Ranma was considered good on a regional level in European fencing (foil), iaijitsu, Japanese archery, naginata-ryuu, go kart driving, English, Chinese (Cantonese), and Cooking. Pluto double-checked that last. Apparently with their mother gone most of the time, Ranma as the eldest had taken over those duties. Ami would subsist on sandwiches given her preference, while Ranma insisted that the juku student eat proper meals. That meant he had to fix them and he'd gotten pretty good at it.
On a higher level of skill, Ranma was at least regional level or considered a Master of several different arts he'd studied. Kendo, kempo, shotokan karate, judo, tiger-crane style kung fu, hwarang do, tae kwon do, muay thai, escrima, and so on. He could have been a track and field star if he so chose, but mainly concentrated on martial arts. He seemed to have a natural talent in that regard.
The Garnet Orb flared when she tried to go back to when Ranma was five and the Gates slammed shut.
Sailor Pluto stared for a moment. Some sort of security protocol she didn't know about?
Going back to when Ranma was four, she found nothing. No indication of Ranma Mizuno in any of the places she checked.
The earliest image she could pull up showed definite space/time distortion, and was of Ami's parents leading the young naked boy home.
She double-checked. Not a yoma. Something else.
SOMETHING drastic had occurred an hour before that first image. Something that had wrinkled the fabric of space-time in both directions. There was a two hour gap she couldn't account for where the Gates Of Time flat out refused all access.
Holding the key tighter in her hands, Sailor Pluto:
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(Posted Fri, 01 Oct 2004 21:58)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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