Genma laughed nervously. “Nodoka! What a… pleasant surprise! What are you doing here?”
Nodoka’s expression didn’t change. “I was looking for my husband and my son.”
“I see… and how long have you been there?”
“Oh, I came into the room around the time you accused me of deserting my family for a sexual escapade with a foreigner.”
“Ah… yes… about that….”
“I don’t care what your excuse is. It’s obvious that you came up with it in an attempt to discourage these young ladies from seeking me out.”
Genma made another attempt to recover some moral ground (or an unreasonable facsimile thereof). “Look, honey, it’s not that I didn’t want to contact you—it’s just that something has come up in Ranma’s life that I felt needed our full attention.”
“What? The fact that he got married, or the fact that he’s cursed to turn into a girl when splashed with cold water?”
Genma went from “shocked” to “panicked.” “How… how did you—”
“How I found out about the curse doesn’t matter; right now, I’m more concerned about you. And to answer your next question, no, I don’t think that Ranma’s curse necessarily violates the contract, so you get to keep your head for now.”
“Um, Mrs. Saotome?” asked Akane.
Nodoka finally started paying closer attention to the others in the room. “Oh, I’m sorry. I meant to introduce myself to the rest of you after I came in, but when I told Kasumi my name, she said that there was something I needed to hear in the living room—and that certainly turned out to be true.”
“Uh, but why did you come here?” asked Soun.
“As I said, I was looking for my husband and son. As Genma’s former training partner, I thought you might be able to provide a good lead as to where to find him.”
“Well, coming here certainly made it a lot easier to find him,” Chibi-Usa commented idly.
“Yes… though I still don’t know where to find my son. Is Ranma one of you girls in his cursed form?” she asked hopefully.
“Sorry, no,” replied the middle Tendo sister. She then proceeded to introduce herself and the others in the room. “I’m Nabiki, this is my little sister, Akane, you’ve already met my older sister, Kasumi, and the girl with the pink carrots on her head is Chibi-Usa, a friend of ours who’s staying with us for the time being. As you might have guessed, the tall guy with the mustache is our father, Soun Tendo.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you all.” After everyone else in the room reciprocated the belated introductions, Nodoka turned the subject back to her absent son. “I suppose that Ranma is living with his wife, then.”
“Ah, yes, he is, actually,” replied Nabiki. “Though that has me a little confused. Ranma got married at the end of December on his eighteenth birthday, but these two didn’t find out about it until about two weeks ago. How did you find out about it?”
“That simple. I tell her.” Heads swiveled again, this time towards the new voice. A woman in her twenties stood in front of the koi pond, her chartreuse hair in a variant of the traditional Chinese “ox-horn” style that bore more than a few similarities to Chibi-Usa’s “pink carrots.”
“Who are you?” asked Akane.
“I Ti Xiu, Granddaughter of Ku Lon, Matriarch of Amazon tribe at Joketsuzoku. Also Genma’s second wife.”
Nodoka had no visible reaction to this; she simply continued glaring as she spoke once again to her husband. “My conversations with Tissue have been quite interesting. We have much to talk about, Genma.”
Genma was really in a bind now, and he knew it. Fortunately, he also knew exactly what to do in situations like this—he fainted.
Having finished her mini-marathon of telephone calls (with no intrusions from Hypercorp, amazingly enough) Michiru walked back into the room she shared with her lover. “Haruka? I’ve set everything up—the Inners have been able to clear their schedules for the day after tomorrow, and Rei thinks she can clear out the shrine that evening.”
“And you told them the reason for all of this?”
“Not exactly… I told them that you needed to tell them something in order to keep it from becoming a major issue that could hurt us as a team, and that it would be best if you did it in person, rather than having a conference call over our Senshi communicators.”
Even as she was mentally kicking herself for not coming up with a “conference call” idea, Haruka had to admit that Michiru was right: something like this had to be done in person. “So what do I do until then?”
“I suggest you figure out exactly what you’re going to say to them.”
Haruka sighed. “That’s just what I’ve been trying to do for the past two weeks, and I’ve gotten nowhere.”
“Perhaps, but now you have something else to motivate you that you didn’t have before.”
“What’s that?”
“A deadline.”
“I can’t believe he just fainted!” exclaimed Akane. “Wouldn’t he consider fainting to be a sign of unmanliness?”
“If it were an ordinary faint, yes,” replied her father, “but then, this was definitely not ordinary.”
“What do you mean, Father?” inquired Kasumi.
“It’s a variation on a skill unique to the Saotome School of Anything Goes—and when I say ‘unique’ I don’t simply mean that there’s no similar move in the Tendo school, but that you’d be hard-pressed to find anything like it in any other marital art. In fact, I believe that the maneuver is actually called the Saotome Secret Technique because of that.”
“What does it involve?” asked a curious Chibi-Usa, who hadn’t heard very much about Genma Saotome’s capacity for innovation.
“I’m not certain about the details, but Genma essentially developed it as a way to buy time to reassess his strategy when faced with a superior opponent. Basically, he’d wait for an opening, and then hightail it out of the situation.”
“He ran away from opponents he couldn’t beat?” asked Nabiki. “That doesn’t sound like a ‘secret technique,’ it sounds like common sense.”
“Not really… it was more like a strategic retreat than anything else. Genma always expected his opponent to follow him—and he used the time to come up with a better strategy.”
“But still… running away? As a ‘secret technique’?”
“I assure you, Nabiki, that it’s not as easy as it sounds—if it were, there would be a similar move in the Tendo school. It’s actually quite difficult to pull off correctly, and I’ve got the scars to prove it.”
“And what does this have to do with my husband’s loss of consciousness?”
“That’s just it—he hasn’t lost consciousness at all. He’s simply blocking out everything around him until he can think of what he’ll do next. It merely looks like he’s unconscious. Basically, it’s the Saotome Secret Technique, only on a mental level rather than a physical one. Though I’m not quite sure how he expects to gain the upper hand, especially since I’m here to explain what he’s doing.”
This was enough information for Akane, who had a different issue on her mind. “Well, while he’s deciding on his next stupid excuse, how about the two of you explain how you can both be married to him at the same time?”
“Well, you see… um…” Nodoka was having a hard time trying to explain the situation while still maintaining some level of respectability. Fortunately for her, Tissue didn’t really care about outsider notions of decorum.
“Genma defeat Tissue in combat. According to Amazon law, that mean we married. If Genma had said he already married, would have gotten choice, but he not say anything, so marriage permanent in eyes of tribe. Tissue not care if only mistress in Japanese law.”
“And this doesn’t trouble you?” Kasumi asked Nodoka, who sighed before giving her response.
“I’d be lying if I said it didn’t, but as I’m not much of a martial artist, my options were limited. Besides, as long as no one raises a fuss, a mistress isn’t much of a mark on the honor of the Saotome clan.”
“So, what will you two be doing then—spending your time competing over him?” Chibi-Usa’s attempt to mask the disdain she felt for the Saotome patriarch wasn’t entirely successful.
“No, that not going to be problem. Tissue give Kiss of Marriage to Nodoka.” This resulted in a round of gasps from the others in the room, which reminded Tissue that a lot of outsiders weren’t exactly keen on the notion of two people of the same gender being married. She hastily tried to clarify her position. “Wait, it… it not as bad as you think…”
“It’s simply a custom of theirs for group marriages,” Nodoka said with a sigh. “I acquiesced because I would otherwise be seen as a mere concubine, rather than a wife.”
“Right. It no have to mean we make love. It mean that Nodoka is equal to Tissue.”
“So the two of you aren’t expected to have lesbian sex?” Nabiki asked bluntly.
“Um…”
Akane jumped in at this point, giving Nodoka a temporary reprieve. “We can bring that up later—Genma’s coming to.”
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(Posted Tue, 04 Apr 2006 07:28)
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