Ranma had been slammed by boards, then bricks, then cinderblocks to toughen him up.
Ranma had been tied to a tree and starved while his father ate a few feet away, endurance training.
Ranma had been tied up with weights and forced to run through a swamp with howling wolves chasing him.
Ranma had even been thrown into a pit of starving cats while tied up with fish sausages.
Genma, you see, hardly ever considered the consequences unless he was directly confronted with them. Most of the time it was his son who had to deal with consequences - and that wasn't as concerning to him.
Genma HAD been the pupil of Happosai after all.
That Ranma was afraid of anything catlike, even such hardly cat-looking things like Hello Kitty, was of no concern to Genma. When the time came, everything would work out.
The differences in the training journey were because of the technology of the Tribals, not their presence. The Tribals were easily avoided as there were considerably less of them than there were humans. The refugee aliens had ended up scattered but also forming "clumps" of individuals. That they bred true when paired off with humans meant that they wouldn't die off, but that wasn't the only concern.
With less than a hundred million Tribals scattered across the world, colonies on the Moon and Mars, the LaGrange space stations, and in remote areas ceded them by individual countries - one could avoid interacting with aliens easily enough. Many humans sought them out anyway - a combination of fascination with the exotic and the near-celebrity status. Genma saw no reason to as he had not heard a word about martial arts styles practiced by the aliens.
The technology though - that was harder not to run across. Genma tried adopting some of it to his training. The Zero-G exercises conducted on the L-5 colony New Amsterdam worked out for the most part. The "Vaccuum Skin" nearly ended up in tragedy as apparently sucking all the air out of a room did not encourage an eight year old boy to hold his breath longer than five minutes nor protect him from bruising from the lack of air pressure on his body.
Worse, that had ended up with rescue personnel coming after the idiot playing with the airlock. Genma had fled and it had been two weeks before he'd been able to get Ranma back.
After that, Genma had tried the Martian colony. Things had been going well until he'd overheard something about the Hermit Of Mount Olympus knowing some exotic techniques.
The Hermit had turned out to be a mad scientist and one who practiced genetic engineering as he tried to discover how Tribals and humans could interbreed.
Useless to Genma by himself, but the fellow had put them on the track of another group who had similar traits as the tribals except that they had great power and were martial artists. All the mad scientist, Doctor Schtalbaum, had was a name and a general location. The Musk Dynasty in the Bayankala Mountain Range in China.
By the time the two Saotome had returned to Earth, Ranma was eleven and had spent four years in space. The two had also been one step ahead of pursuit a lot of the time as neither had money to buy food and messing with centrifuge settings among other things tended to get people upset at you.
Another year had passed travelling from the Houston Space Center to China, with a brief period among the Apache tribe learning several martial arts techniques and how to ride horses. They had left the Apache after Genma had heard of the practice of tying horses to each limb and making them gallop away. It had sounded like a perfectly feasible martial arts training technique to him. It had upset the Apache a great deal, and Ranma hadn't exactly been as forgiving of this as he had been the "Vaccuum Skin" training.
Which led to Ranma being halfway through his twelfth year, and seriously considering the possibility of running for cover, when the two Saotome finally came in sight of:
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(Posted Sun, 15 May 2005 08:58)
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