“Sooooooooo BORING!” Ranma summed up what he saw in front of him before leaning forward to float in the air and face the ground.
It was now the tenth day, and twelfth hour of Ranma Saotome’s afterlife, and he had already run out of things to do. When he had first ‘signed up’ for this little thing, he hadn’t counted on a number of things. The main one being that the old ghoul just up and leaving Japan. Although not the brightest bulb in the package, like all children of Japanese decent, he had heard all the legends and ghost stories passed down the years about people coming back from the dead (even if some were a little living impaired afterwards) and thought that if anyone knew of some trick to do it Cologne would. But instead of holding a séance, or some other form of ghostly commutation, she just packed her bags, splashed the other two amazons before throwing them in cages, and then hopped on the earliest flight leaving for China… literally.
Of course Ranma supposed that Happosai might know a trick or two, but quite frankly he’d rather stay dead then owe that freak anything.
So after twenty four hours of hanging around the Tendo household, Ranma had left that rather fucked up place of mourning and gone out to see the world; or Tokyo anyway, Ranma really didn’t feel like going across the ocean at the insanely slow pace that he seemed to be restricted to. Just thinking of the place made Ranma frown at both himself and the people who still dwelled within. Soun of course, being Soun had gone into a day long weeping fit with Genma about the schools never being joined now, while Happosai did mostly the same thing because of he’d never be able to feel up Ranma’s body again. Kasumi, being Kasumi, barely seemed effected by the whole ordeal, and was back to smiling within half a day, while the middle Tendo sister only stopped her usual routine long enough to check and see who made the bet that Ranma would of lasted this long living with Akane.
As for Akane, she had been torn up about the thing, just… not in the manner Ranma would have expected her to. She had of course cried, whined, got angry, and… that was actually it. Ranma realized he probably would have been more upset if it weren’t for the fact that the entire time he was there the house and dojo was filled with Akane shouting ‘WHY DID THAT STUPID IDIOT MAKE ME DO THAT’ or ‘THAT MORON, I CAN’T BELIVE HE DROWNED HIMSELF’ and other phrases along those lines. Although Ranma did feel a little sorry for Akane, when his murderer was saying that she killed him because he made her, and then went to go have ice cream with her friends so they could cheer her up, it put a real dampener on the whole notion of pity.
Although those were the reasons Ranma had taken off at first, another had come shortly after to make Ranma wonder if all the actions of the past year had been worth anything. No one close to him really cared that he died. Kasumi had just ignored it, Nabiki shrugged it off, Akane denied it, and Soun… well, okay Soun may have cared, but as far as Ranma was concerned the reason that he did made that fact even worse than not caring at all.
It wasn’t that none one cared bothered him a lot, okay it did, but there was also something else in those moments that he saw everyone’s reactions to his death that made Ranma realize something about himself: he was a clown. Despite everything that had happened to him in the one place that he had called home in his entire life, he was just some sideshow to everyone else, and when he was done they just clapped a few times before turning back to the main event that was their lives. In short, he meant nothing to them, because he was nothing.
Then after they had his body removed, with the police just chalking it up to another Nerima related incident and going on their way as if it never happened, everything started to take its normal course. Genma left the dojo, Nabiki started making phone calls, Kasumi went to finish making snacks for the party, and Akane headed off to the dojo. Ranma really didn’t care where his father went, by then he had seen enough and taken off on his own to try and talk to Cologne, only to arrive in time to hear the old hag getting off the phone and see her start packing.
That had been about nine days ago, since then he had pretty much did everything a dead guy could do; well, except taking a trip to the women’s side of the public baths. Ranma had already gone and seen all the movies playing around town, despite the fact that he wasn’t really a moviegoer to begin with, given up on improving his martial arts since there was nothing he could actually use it on, and actually met a few other ghosts while just wandering around. Although he quickly ditched them since they had been on their way to the nearest high school girl’s locker room, the fact that one was dressed like a samurai and the other like an old railroad construction worker just made the whole thing even more disturbing. How many more Happosais were actually floating around out there anyway?
Getting himself back upright, Ranma looked over to the giant digital clock that he was floating next to and then up to the sky. Once again he had found himself reminiscing so long that it was already past noon; he had been doing that a lot these past few days. “Well, looks like thing good is gonna be happening around here I guess. Might as well go catch a movie,” Ranma mumbled to himself. There was some old new one that was supposed to be opening today, a martial arts one, and while Ranma thought those were completely unrealistic and just plain sucked, it still would of beat that chick flick he went to go see last night.
A few hours later, Ranma found himself wanting to slump in the seat that he was floating only a few inches above, but knew he would of just passed beneath it. Thanks to the fact that it was a school day and only noon, the place was pretty much empty except for about a half a dozen people, most of whom being either kids that were obviously skipping school, or bums that didn’t have jobs, so there were no good conversations to listen in on, or comments to make fun of. But even if their was, since Ranma was only sitting next to one guy neither one was likely to happen unless he was a nutcase. “You know, the biggest pain about being dead is that you can’t fall asleep when you’re so bored you want to die,” Ranma said to himself.
Read the comments on this episode
(Posted Mon, 10 Jan 2005 02:39)
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.