Looking out the classroom window at the birds outside, Usagi's mind was most definitely not on the lesson. Unlike most days, the teacher was willing to cut her some slack considering the circumstances.
It would surprise the teacher however to learn that Usagi wasn't particularly torn up over her mother's death. To her, her mother had always been like an angel in her life. The manner of her death, fading away into sparkles, hadn't been particularly traumatic either. She never for a moment doubted that her mother would still be watching over her, or even the possibility of her showing up one day, angel wings and all.
If she were a different girl, she might have even resented Ranma, both over her mother's demise and for getting so much attention. Truthfully though she tended to give Ranma even more attention herself. He might have been born from a humble family, but in her eyes he was every bit a magical prince and her own personal hero right next to her mother. Not only was he the one to grant her mother those wonderful powers, but he was also strong and brave in his own right.
Even though he was two years younger, it was her that clung to him for comfort. Even though she wanted to follow in her mother's footsteps, the idea of being the one to protect him instead of the other way around was a difficult one for her to swallow. It wasn't that she didn't want to be strong and protect him, but he was just so strong, even more so than Makoto or some of the older girls. Perhaps though he could be her inspiration in the way he trained so hard to be able to protect himself and others.
Even if she was a scaredy-cat and weak, she was the one that had to look out for him now.
In a similar contemplative mood in his own classroom, Ranma was lost in somewhat divergent thoughts. More to the point he was considering the magic girls around him and his role with them.
The principal reason he in a class full of girls was simply because he was a magister magi. Unlike other young magi, Ranma could support dozens of probationary contracts with the girls attending school. Close to his grade he had a dozen such pactio contracts. Among other girls he had two dozen more, going up in age far past his own grade school level. He wasn't actually at any sort of limit, he just thought he had enough girls bothering him at that point, not that he ever told anyone that in so many words.
His main issue with the girls wasn't that he was besieged by magic girls, though that could be bad enough on its own considering how optimistic and enthusiastic they tended to be compared with normal girls. More to the point, his issue with them was they expected to be his bodyguards, and several were shooting for the role of love interest. He didn't mind the girls being magic girls, but when it came to the idea that he should sit in the back and maybe just fling some spells, that never sat well with him.
That was the reason he spent so much of his time studying martial arts under a select few sensei. Quite frankly he'd rather be the guy that saved magical girls from nasty monsters than some high and mighty prince type. That also allowed for quite the comparison against the magical girls at the school, and considering the fact that he used the older ones as sparring partners, that didn't speak well of their ability to protect him if it came to that.
After seeing what happened to his two guardians, both of whom he naturally acknowledged as strong in their own rights, he wasn't quite so optimistic about letting these weaker girls continue thinking they'd be able to protect him.
Some though were actually alright by him. Tomoyo Daidouji for instance, who happened to be Sakura Kinomoto's cousin and best friend, she was one he wasn't particularly worried about. For one she wasn't particularly the combative type and wasn't looking to get in fights or protect him. Instead, she had a strange, but in his opinion, very useful and neat skill of being able to alter the outfits and artifacts of magic girls. While she typically used this ability to give Sakura a very expansive wardrobe of sometimes ridiculous looking magic dresses, it was that same power that allowed him to form his own outfit.
He wasn't the first boy to attend the school in this capacity, and each one was basically allowed to choose a suitable personal uniform of sorts. His was borrowed from Sora of Kingdom Hearts II, and he was quite thankful to be able to wear something comfortable and cool instead of that dorky little sailor outfit. As nice as the design of the outfit was, even more important to him were the number of innate abilities it granted him, replacing the need for both a weapon and a magic staff.
Tomoyo had argued for a keyblade, but Ranma had eventually just decided to reinforce the gloves of the original design for martial arts and add black leather bracers to the forearms. Like a standard magical girl outfit, the cloth was magically reinforced to the point where it offered significant protection despite the low amount of tough leather and steel armor in the design. The final promise of the design was in the form abilities and the promise that eventually he'd be able to fly without using something dorky like a broom or carpet.
The form change was also what added to his combat ability. Valor form shifted the outfit to a red and black motif and came with magical enhancements to speed and physical strength. The trick to those was that instead of having to cast an enhancing spell, he just had to channel extra power into the existing enchantment if he wanted more out of it. In addition to that it allowed him to make jumps in mid-air, which was extremely valuable for making aerial dodges and combos. In short it was his close combat butt-whipping form.
Wisdom was the other form, using a blue and black motif and just as easy to get into as the Valor form. If Ranma ever felt like playing magical artillery, this was the form for that as it greatly boosted magic and spell casting. More importantly to Ranma however, it came with the natural ability to glide and float about, a somewhat limited form of flight.
Beyond that were two forms that were still too strong for him to master using just yet. Both combined physical and magical enhancements to be all around powerful combat forms. The next strongest was Master form, with a yellow and black motif which promised the power of short range combat teleportation. The strongest was the aptly named Final form with a glimmering white on black motif which finally promised true flight.
Even better, mastering those forms promised bleed-over in abilities, particularly the movement abilities. The day that he could fly freely in any form wouldn't be far away if he had anything to say about it.
So, Tomoyo was a bit creepy sometimes, but cool nonetheless. Unfortunately she came paired with Sakura, who was apparently going to be something along the lines of a magic knight. Sakura would bring along Hikaru Shidou the cat-girl and her two compatriots who were definitely on the magic knight route.
Well, there was also Aoi Sakuraba in his class, a fairly nice girl that mostly seemed to suffer due to being from a wealthy family as they rarely seemed to consider what she wanted. She was nominally the only other human in class, though Ranma didn't like that term. She was quite nice and would apparently end up being a white mage and healer of some sort if he was any judge of that sort of thing. Definitely the kind of girl he could deal with as he didn't see her going and getting into trouble, instead being more likely to accept that he'd be the one to rescue her if it came to that.
Of course that brought up the whole confusion over people using the term human too, since it didn't have a very definite meaning. Pretty much everyone in the world now was some sort of mongrel mixture of various supernatural races. There was actually a theory that in the past such creatures were more common and somehow bred into humanity, and that the dimensional shift only awakened those genetics while opening paths to new worlds.
The average human typically wasn't human, but instead just too much of a mongrel to apparently be anything else. Then their were those that had enough of a predisposition to look like say a cat-girl, but didn't have any particular powers.
That was why Ranma mostly stuck with a modified Pokémon system for IDing people. Hikaru for instance was obviously a cat-girl, but she wasn't pure cat-girl. As far as he could tell the factor marking people as something other than human was an elemental focus, in Hikaru's case this was fire. Magic and abilities of that element would naturally come to her, but she had pretty much no chance with anything else. In that regard he would label her a Fighting/Fire(cat-girl) type.
Sakura on the other hand wasn't physically different from a human, yet he could clearly label her as a Wind/Nature type of girl. Her artifact deck of spell cards gave her access to a wide variety of elements, but only wind was truly in her nature, though she seemed to have an affinity for nature as well. Ranma guessed it was her name, but most people labeled her as a flower spirit.
In the end, that brought him back to Aoi and himself. The average human typically didn't show much in the way of powers or alignment, but when they bred with say a full dog demon-beast, they would end up producing a half breed of less power. If the partner wasn't human, demon-beasts tended to only breed with something similar, like another demon-beast or perhaps a spirit wolf. In his case however, such a child would be expected to be either half or full breed and likely more powerful than the other parent.
Ranma didn't particularly have an interest in breeding or genetics, but instead just a natural curiosity about what made him so special. His current running guess with what he knew about genetics was that a magi was sort of like a typeless creature with magic power attached. His other guess was that it was perhaps a combining of opposites, like say a Light/Dark type that somehow blended together into something different. Either way an elemental alignment tended to mark a non-human, while an all around gift with magic was the mark of a magi.
In short, Ranma's mind was wandering.
Waiting patiently by the door to Ranma's class, Takamichi Takahata was wasting time as he'd had to show up early. Supposedly he was here to escort Ranma out of school for security purposes, even though the school's security forces were already handling that. It was somewhat amusing watching shinobi try to skulk about a gradeschool, so it wasn't like it was a total waste.
Truthfully he didn't know how the boy would react to being set up with replacement Ministra. Considering that one was essentially an adoptive mother and the other a rather indulgent martial arts sensei, such a move only a day after those events could be taken very poorly. Of course even with knowledge of his potential, no one at the school had taken the possibility of such an attempt too seriously. The guards at school were mostly there due to the boy's father, who was something of a ninja himself. Other than the possibility of Genma or someone of his level taking the boy there wasn't much else expected on that front for a few years at least.
In that regard they didn't expect anything serious to go after Ranma until he'd ether developed his power more or possibility acquired an enemy by opposing them when they were doing something bad. Quite frankly Takamichi was fully expecting the boy to acquire all the trouble he needed playing hero rather than just getting attention for his potential.
Tragically, expecting the enemy to play nice was quite possibly directly responsible for the current events. Serena had ended up the boy's Ministra quite possibly by accident, and mostly had the position from playing mother to the boy. Chiyaka likewise was essentially the boy's main martial arts sensei, teaching him the Taijutsu she knew so well. Her pactio could mostly be attributed to wanting to demonstrate what having a Ministra was really supposed to be like.
The final pactio with Evangeline was one the school had actually arranged, a type of probation on good behavior for the bound demon-vampire. To his knowledge nothing had really come from that, Eva probably continuing on with her hard-ass bad-girl image being the likely cause.
In short they had never assigned him a Ministra on the grounds of actually giving him a bodyguard before this.
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(Posted Sun, 17 Sep 2006 11:10)
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