Ranma was still groggy as he came to his senses. He lay on a dusty stone floor, with his nose filling with the distinctly unpleasant smell of decay. “Ugh…” he mumbled to himself, “that wasn’t exactly how I expected it ta work…”
Um, yeah, sorry about that, came Carbuncle’s voice from within Ranma’s mind. It seems there was some sort of mix-up.
“Huh?”
Well, we’re not quite sure how it happened, but it seems that you didn’t end up on the same world as your friends.
“What?!”
Don’t worry, they’re fine. Granted, they’ve probably got a tough slog ahead of them without you there, but we think they’ll be able to take care of things. In the meantime, we need to figure out how to get you back home, or at least back to them.
“Wonderful. So where the heck am I?”
“What does it matter?” came a gruff voice from behind Ranma. “It’s not like the Archadians are going to let you out of this hellhole.”
“Wha?” Ranma managed to scramble to his feet and turn around to see what appeared to be a giant orange lizard slumped against a wall. For a few seconds, Ranma wasn’t quite sure how to react, but figuring that a talking lizard could hardly be considered unusual compared to something like Carbuncle (or a teenager who changed sexes with hot and cold water, for that matter), he addressed the rather forlorn-looking creature. “Whaddya mean?”
“You’re in Nalbina, boy,” the lizard-thing responded. “I don’t know how lived before you got here, but this is where you’re going to die.”
“So, this is a prison?”
“Not exactly the sharpest arrow in the quiver, are you? Of course Nalbina’s a prison. Been that way since the Archadians took over.”
“But don’t most prisons have, ya know, cells?”
“Well, it wasn’t built as one. Archadians pretty much just sealed off the basement to make a convenient dungeon for anyone who happens to make themselves a nuisance. You can roam around all you want; the only exit is so heavily guarded that you’d have to be a madman to try and escape.”
Ranma was getting increasingly uncomfortable with the conversation, and decided to end it. “Um, I guess I’d better look around.”
“You say that as though I gave a damn.”
“Sorry.”
Ranma trudged off to see if there was any place to get food or water, continuing his quiet mumbling. “Hey, Carbuncle, ya still there?”
Yes, I am—and you don’t have actually speak out loud. Just think what you want to say, and then maybe you won’t look like you’re talking to nobody.
Oh, right… good idea. So… what was that?
A bangaa, I believe. I’m not certain, though; I’ve never been to Ivalice before.
Ivalice?
That’s the name of this world. It’s seen a lot of activity over the centuries.
Oh, okay. So… what happens now?
Well, as you’re not really going to be able to do much rotting down here, I’d say some sort of escape is in order, and that probably means finding an ally.
Got it… hey, what’s that? Ranma’s attention was diverted by a rather loud scuffling from down a long hallway. Sounds like a fight! It was difficult to tell if Ranma was concerned by this prospect, or enthused. C’mon, let’s check it out!
As it turned out, Ranma’s instincts were correct: the scuffling he’d heard was indeed a fight, but only in the broadest sense of the term—he probably would have used the term “beatdown.” He’d arrived in a large, sunlit area just in time to see a group of creatures that resembled a cross between an ogre and one of Akari’s sumo pigs—two an orangish-brown, and one (apparently the leader) a grayish-blue—dragging a young human male with sun-bleached hair into a sandy pit in the middle of the atrium, and given that they were also brandishing some rather nasty-looking wooden clubs, he doubted that they were going to be providing medical care. Now, Ranma had absolutely no idea who the teenage boy was, what he was like as a person, or what (if anything) he’d done to deserve this treatment, but he did know bullying when he saw it, and bullying went very much against his personal code of ethics. He rushed to the edge of the pit in time to see the young man backing away from his porcine tormentors, who were clearly eager to give him an enthusiastic bludgeoning, and without a second thought, jumped into the pit himself.
What happened next would have surprised no one who was familiar with Ranma’s character and personality: “Hey, pork breath!” Three pig-creatures turned and stared at him, as if waiting for him to deliver a witty one-liner. Ranma didn’t actually have one prepared, but he figured that if these idiots were dumb enough to pause to wait for him to say something heroic, then a cliché would be perfectly adequate. “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?!”
Okay, so it didn’t really make much sense, but it still managed to insult the thugs enough to recognize it as a challenge, and they began moving towards Ranma as steel doors slammed shut on the ramps that led down into the pit. He glanced at the young man, who was starting to recover, and, deciding that he’d rather not remain cut off from someone who might be seriously hurt, elected to charged towards his opponents, building up his speed before vaulting over the head of the grey-blue creature (much to said creature’s extreme annoyance) and landed beside the youth, who had just managed to get to his feet. “You all right?” Ranma asked.
“I think so… I’m Vaan.”
“Ranma,” the martial artist replied with a nod. “Ya mind if we finish this conversation after we’ve tanned their hides?”
Vaan looked at the disgruntled Seeqs closing in on the pair and quickly decided that this stranger’s advice was worth heeding. “Yeah.”
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(Posted Tue, 09 Jun 2009 02:51)
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