Soun and Nabiki ran back into the living room, followed by a panda. Ranma's voice calls from open air "Cut it out, pop! You're scaring them!"
"Are these your friends, Father?"
Soun silently denied it.
"So, a panda and a ninja just happen to drop by unannounced?"
"Show yourself!" Akane demanded.
Ranma's voice apologized. "It's not that easy. The panda has taken my clothes hostage again. Even my boxers."
Kasumi and Akane redden slightly, while Nabiki sublimated her embarrassment with sarcasm. "So, we're engaged to a naked ninja who regularly gets blackmailed by endangered animals. Where's Kintaro when you need him?"
"Oh my. Can we help you? It must be awkward hiding naked in a strange house."
"You don't know the half of it." Ranma thought. Travel through several towns, and half of Tokyo had inured Ranma somewhat to the sight of nude people. But the three Tendo daughters were all pretty, and might become his wife, and were talking with him which made it hard to pretend they were part of the background scenery. "Could you pull my pack out of the rain into the entryway, and leave a cup of hot water? Then I can get dressed without flashing anybody, and enter like a normal person."
"What's the hot water for?" Akane didn't like the idea that there was a naked possible fiancee in the house, even though he did sound like it wasn't his idea. But that meant there was a bigger pervert somewhere for setting this situation up. Still, if it were Kuno, he'd probably have strode in, holding a strategically placed bouquet of roses, and assume he was doing us a benison.
"It'd take a while to explain. Could I get dressed first?"
"Of course. I'll get the water. Akane, please drag the pack inside?"
As an uncursed Ranma walks fully clothed, carrying the cup of hot water back into the living room, Soun asked "You wouldn't be..."
"Ranma Saotome. I'm sorry about all this."
"At last! You're here!" Soun grabbed him in a bear hug, causing Ranma to inadvertently pour the still warm water from the cup all down Soun's front."
Genma hurried back from the furo as a human, worried in case the rain had let up, and Ranma considered grabbing his pack and doing a runner. His arrival allowed Ranma to breathe as Soun ended the hug, and greeted his best friend.
A little while later, the six of them had settled around a table drinking tea.
"How can I explain?" Genma considered throwing his son into the pool to demonstrate the curse, but the boy would just disappear. Soun would just think he taught Ranma the Umi-sen-ken.
Genma reluctantly decided to forgo visual aides, and merely tell the story from his point in view, trying to hide his culpability, and omitting mention of his panda's gender.
He referred to the spring Ranma fell into as the spring of drowned ghost based on his observations of Ranma's abilities. He didn't know enough Chinese to translate the name of the pool into Japanese, and the guide had no idea what type of spirit drowned in the pool anyway.
Nabiki refused to accept a story as silly as cursed pools. Since this fat fool was willing to lie to her family she had no compunction against flinging her cooled tea over the two of them. "How stupid do you think we ... are?" Genma was replaced by a panda, and Ranma's empty clothes fell to the floor.
"Damn it! I'm sick and tired of being stripped naked every five minutes!" Ranma could see the oblong block of hot water overhead, which had to be the furo. "May I use the furo to change back?"
"Of course."
"Could one of you carry my clothes up for me? I'm unable to move them."
"Nabiki will be glad to."
While Nabiki was gathering up Ranma's clothes, Kasumi gathered up the tea things, and left the room followed by Akane. Akane approached Kasumi in the kitchen and stated quite clearly, "I refuse to be engaged to any boy I didn't chose."
"It IS a matter of family honor..."
"It falls to the oldest daughter to uphold it, unless she is somehow unable. Then to the middle daughter, and to the youngest only if there is no other choice."
"Let's go talk to Nabiki before she gets back to the living room and see what we can come up with before daddy forces the issue."
Meeting Nabiki upstairs in the hall, Akane announced "Unless you're willing to accept the engagement yourself, we have to discuss what to do about it right now."
Nabiki sighed. "We better rope Casper into our discussion. I doubt we'll be able to do it without his help."
Shortly afterwards the four of them are gathered in Nabiki's room. "Ranma, you said your pop was holding your clothes hostage to get you to come here. I take it you didn't want to get engaged?"
"Yeah. I'm too young. I've never even had a girlfriend, and now I'm expected to marry someone. It's just wrong. And he didn't bother to tell me about it until two hours ago. If it was that important, he shoulda told me years ago."
"So how do we derail it?"
"What would your father do if we just ignored it, Ranma?"
"He'd make my life hell. Worse, he'd ignore my objections. He might even try to force me to marry."
"That's what he's doing now!"
"No, I mean physical force. Or blackmail. Or drugging me. Can you get your father to break it?"
"Not without tearing the family apart. How about we pretend to comply, but drag the process out for months or years?"
"Yeah, if we had a few months we should be able to work this out. How do we get them to delay?"
"Well, they're only able to do this due to tradition, but traditionally this would require alot of formal negotiation. If they don't agree to the stupid rituals, then they can't force the engagements. There'll need to be three omiai before a decision can be reached, and each of those would take weeks or months to arrange. And the omiai could be failures requiring us to start over, but leaving all of us free in the interim. And even after a successful Omiai, there's supposed to be a year period before the actual marriage."
"Best of all, Omiai are not run by the males. It's the job of an older female to represent the boy and girl."
A little while later, all six of them were downstairs, and Soun lectured to Ranma as though Soun were an incompetent pimp. "These are my daughters. Kasumi is nineteen, Nabiki is seventeen, and Akane is sixteen. Pick whichever one you want; she'll be your fiancee."
"Father, it will take weeks to set up the omiai. There's no way we could decide something as important as the merging of our families without having a formal omiai for each of us. I'll call tomorrow morning to see when we can reserve a hall. Oh my, there's so much to do."
"Yeah. If I gotta uphold family honor and select a wife, then we gotta do it formally. After all, we're not the kind of people to ignore things 'cause they're inconvenient. Not when family honor's at stake."
The father's complaints and grumblings were easily handled.
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(Posted Sun, 06 Mar 2005 22:16)
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