Xian Pu was just finishing up her evening training when she spotted Ni Dao sitting on a rock overlooking the Jusenkyo springs. “Hey there, Ni Dao!” the Amazon greeted her friend brightly. “How are things going?”
The tall, blue-haired teenager gave a somewhat forced smile in response. “Oh, they’re just fine, Xian Pu, I guess. I mean, I think I might have an idea about how to find my husband….”
This was especially good news to Xian Pu’s ears, as her best friend normally had a pessimistic, self-depreciating outlook on life. If every cloud had a silver lining, Ni Dao only saw the tarnish. As a result, she was rarely proactive in her actions—but if she’d come up with a possible solution to the problem of finding her husband (whose disappearance was so complete that Ni Dao couldn’t find his trail even with the assistance of the tribe’s best trackers) then perhaps things were changing. “So, what’s the plan?”
“Well, my husband is Japanese, right? So I’m thinking maybe I should try going there first—he’s sure to want to come home eventually, right?”
Xian Pu briefly mulled this over before responding, “It’s as good an idea as any, I guess—I mean, I don’t think I could come up with anything better.”
Ni Dao nodded. “The Council came to the same conclusion, and gave me their official blessing.”
“Oh, that’s good,” said Xian Pu, who paused, and then asked her next question as delicately as she could. “Do you know what you’ll do after you get to Japan?”
“No.”
The pause after this statement was nearly a minute, and the awkwardness was stifling. Then, Xian Pu had an idea: “Hey, why don’t you come with me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I was planning on going to Japan myself, as soon as Ranma sent me a letter telling me where to go.”
“Ranma?”
“The guy with the moronic father who threw him into the Nyannichuan.”
“The one who becomes the redhead with the big…?”
“That’s him.”
“I don’t know…. Aren’t I supposed to go after my husband as soon as I can?”
“I don’t think that means you have to leave right away. In fact, it might do you some good to stay here and try and pick up some Japanese from one of the more well-traveled members of the tribe. After all, it’s not going to be easy finding your husband if you don’t speak his language, right?”
“I suppose….”
“Besides, there’s always a chance that Ranma will know something about him. So how about it?”
Ni Dao thought about it—for about two seconds. “That… sounds really great! It would be wonderful to have your support while I’m doing this—provided I’m allowed to do that.”
“Trust me, it shouldn’t be a problem.” At least, Xian Pu hoped it wouldn’t be a problem.
“That… is surprising,” Nodoka admitted over the phone to Nabiki, who had just informed her of her husband’s recent antics. “I never would have expected Genma to interpret what I said that way.”
“Well, what exactly did you tell him?”
“I told him that I hoped that Kasumi and Ranma would have children as soon they could. But when I said that, I meant that I thought they should start having children as soon as they were emotionally and financially capable of handling them.”
“Yes, well, Genma thought that you meant that they needed to speed up the babymaking process.”
“I may be eager for grandchildren, but believe me, Nabiki, that’s the last thing I’d want! At the very least, Ranma should graduate from high school first. That’s why I gave Genma the recipe for the birth control tea to give to Kasumi.”
“Well, he used it as a pretense to invade Kasumi’s privacy—though he accidentally invaded Akane’s instead.”
Nabiki heard her sister’s mother-in-law sigh over the connection. “Sometimes, I just don’t understand him,” the Saotome matriarch said in a defeated tone. “It’s almost as though he can’t think through his ideas before acting on them.”
Nabiki allowed herself a small smile; Nodoka had just inadvertently provided the perfect setup for the real reason for the phone call. “Funny you should put it that way, Auntie….”
In the dojo, Genma lay unmoving in a shallow hole filled with broken floorboards. He was, to put it mildly, a bit perplexed. The sparring session with Akane had been going just fine, when all of a sudden, the girl had whipped out some moves that he hadn’t seen coming. Sure, he knew that he was a superb motivator—that was his best quality as a sensei, after all—but he was rarely this inspiring when he wasn’t actually trying. At least, Ranma rarely reached that level of intensity, unless he was upset about something….
“That’s it!” It was so obvious now—the girl was still upset about the search he did of her room. It hadn’t occurred to him before because it seemed relatively minor, but she was a girl, and girls did tend to get emotional about things that were unimportant in the long run. But what to do about it?
Clearly, things would go much better for everyone if he could regain her respect. Respect was necessary for any sensei after all. But how to make it up to her? This confounded the head of the Saotome school for a brief time, before he was once again struck by inspiration. “Of course! I’m a sensei! I can just teach her something she can use!” The prospect of teaching the Art was enough to motivate Genma to come to a standing position again. “This will be perfect! Not only will she respect me, but I’ll be back in everyone else’s good graces due to my selfless sharing of knowledge for the benefit of the Tendo school. Genma, you’re a genius!” And the best part was that he now had a reason to try out some of the techniques in those scrolls he’d swiped er, borrowed from those Amazon hussies. Sure, he couldn’t read Mandarin all that well, but he could get the overall gist of things pretty well, and besides, most of the scrolls had fairly detailed illustrations, and he was certain that he could fill any gaps with some good old-fashioned intuition. After all, that was how he’d trained Ranma, and it had proved a magnificent success (well, most of the time, anyway).
Genma was giddy with anticipation—this was going to be great! He only had one choice to make: which technique to teach the girl?
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(Posted Sat, 12 Aug 2006 07:14)
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