"In that case I will show you the gymnasium so you can prepare for your match," said Ranma.
She would make Akane give up. If the threat of ending up in the hands of a real pervert was not enough to make her say uncle, Ranma would be forced to use his alternate plan. Luckily she had already prepared this earlier.
The building, that housed the castle Ranma had conquered, had originally contained a small company gym. When the Lichtenburgers had removed the insides of the office building to make room for their castle, they had left most the gym as it was and build the castle around it. Probably because of all the support columns that its walls contained either that or they had wanted to stay fit, too.
Ranma still in her kitchen drudge disguise now lead Akane from the dungeons to where the Gym was located. On the way they passed several corridors and windows where guards could be seen from a distance.
But only from a distance. Ranma had made sure of that when he had plotted this route. If you got to close it would be easy to tell that the guards were mannequins. Ranma had found a whole batch of them stored in the lower levels of the building and decided to dress them in uniforms the previous owners had left behind to liven the castle up a bit.
Akane appeared to be fooled.
"This," said Ranma as they finally reached the gym, "will be your locker room the guards outside are forbidden from entering here or the gym proper as long as you are there."
"This door leads to the gymnasium and the showers are over there," pointed Ranma out, "You can undress here. If you give me you clothes, I will wash them while you are training."
Akane slowly began to undress as Ranma waited. Ranma hardly could believe that she was for once not getting bashed for seeing Akane undressed.
"The underwear, too," she added after several moments.
After Akane was completely naked and Ranma had collected all of her clothes Ranma went to leave. She had almost reached the door when she was brought up short by a cry from Akane.
"Hey! What am I supposed to wear for training? Where are my exercise clothes?" the girl demanded to know.
"This is a traditional Gymnasium. You exercise 'gymnos' — in the nude," Ranma explained as she hastily made her escape. "Surely you would not want to be so unhygienic and unaesthetic as to wear clothes while exercising."
"But... but... ,"Akane tried to stop her.
"Oh I see," Ranma acquiesced, "some girls get that problem when jumping around all the time without any support. You can use this to bind your breasts."
While Akane caught and inspected the item thrown to her, Ranma hurried out of the room.
A cry of "This is a roll of cellophane!" could be heard just as Ranma closed the door behind her.
A few steps further Ranma opened a door, dumped Akane's clothing in the maintenance closet behind it and pulled two guard mannequins out. Hastily she put them up with their backs facing Akane's locker room.
Unless she wanted to give her 'guards' a free show Akane was trapped in the gym.
Getting out another bag of clothes and locking the cupboard again Ranma hurried away.
Akane did not know what to do. None of the lockers had contained as much as a handkerchief and there were no towels in the showers. She had briefly considered to make some makeshift clothes of one of the lockers itself — she was strong enough to bend and punch holes in the material where necessary — but she feared that the noise would only alert the guards.
The door through which the stupid little maid had escaped was unlocked, but a glance through the keyhole told her that there where two guards standing to attention behind it.
Her only options were to either wait here in the locker room until the girl returned or move on to the hopefully empty gym. And the only thing she had found to cover herself were half a roll of toilet paper and the roll of cellophane the maid had left her.
Akane decided to go without either.
Cautiously covering crotch and breasts with her hands Akane shuffled into the large hall.
She was positively surprised. Not only was the gym empty of any peeping perverts it also contained a good and surprisingly modern assortment of training equipment: A weightlifting bench, a treadmill, several exercycles, a multifunctional thing with all kinds of ropes and levers to push and pull and stacks of weights. There also were some mats in the corner, a large mirror covering an entire wall with a rail running along it and enough open space to do all kinds of kata and exercises in.
The prince really had kept his word to allow her to train and if Akane had had some clothes she would have gladly taken advantage of it. She uncomfortably shifted from foot to foot as she stood alone and naked in the large empty room.
Finally she let her arms drop to her side. There was no one here to see her. She started to do some warming up exercises not because she seriously planned to train in the nude, but mostly because she wanted to keep warm.
Next door in a darkend room behind the large mirror that was actually a two-way mirror Ranma watched. At the moment Ranma was less concerned in seeing his fiancée in the altogether although that was certainly an appealing sight. No Ranma was interested in seeing just how Akane trained when she wasn't breaking bricks or strawmen or trying to hit a merrily dodgeing Ranma. Seeing the answer delighted Ranma not nearly as much as it had seeing her stretch and bend during her hesitant warm-up. Akane trained stupidly!
She was using the weights and the exercise machines but she was not really getting anything out of it. No wonder Akane had shown so little improvement since they had first met. The tomboy was doing it all wrong!
She kept using her chi to boost her strength. And then she looked satisfied with lifting what was little more than her own weight.
No wonder Akane mostly used her gorilla-strength if she was angry. She was almost exclusively depending on her chi to perform acts of strength and that was strongest when she was feeling extreme emotions.
Her muscles would hardly be stressed the way she was execising. And if she did not go to her limits she would never get stronger. Either she should use much heavier weights — not that the gym had much in that direction unless you counted lifting the machines themselves — or she would have to stop using her chi to boost her strength.
If she simply lifted normal weights with muscle power alone, she would get stronger and the stronger her normal muscles got the stronger her chi-boosted muscles would get.
Akane likely did not even know what she was doing. She probably would not even know how to stop doing it.
Ranma could not watch it any longer. Something had to be done about this!
Read the comments on this episode
(Posted Sat, 30 Oct 2004 21:42)
Questions? Problems? Suggestions?
Send a mail to addventure@bast-enterprises.de
or use the contact form.
らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
All other series and their characters are © by their respective creators or owners. No claims of ownership of these characters are implied by the authors of this Addventure, or should be inferred.
The Anime Addventure is a non-profit site.