Ranma suspected that she would become accustomed to Akane’s temper rising along their route to school. Now she was looking for it, she saw her friend’s shoulders begin to tense as they walked out of the house, and her fists clenched as they rounded the last corner before the school.
As expected, the school gate was blocked by a crowd of boys atired for a mixture of sports and martial arts. At the sight of Akane running towards them, they let out a great cry and prepared to meet her.
Akane slowed uncertainly. She was used to meeting a crowd of boys at the gates, but…
“Why are they already fighting?”
“Don’t ask me! What I want to know is who they’re fighting!” snapped Akane. “I don’t need anyone to fight for me!”
“Well, it looks like they’re fighting each other,” said Ranma slowly. “I mean, yesterday the ones round the outside were just trying to get to you, not hitting each other…”
As the pair reached the gates, some of the embattled boys tried to come to meet them, but their opponents took advantage of their distraction to drop them to the floor. Other fights redoubled in intensity, the combatants resorting to more powerful (or more flashy) techniques, and several rapidly paid the cost for that as well.
“What is the meaning of this?” demanded Akane, pausing on the threshold.
“We’re fighting for the right toooh…” said a baseball player, distracted from the boxer he was facing.
“I will show you I’m the only man fit to date you!” cried the boxer, shaking his hands over his head in the pose approved for match victors in that discipline. A tennis ball ricocheted off the back of his neck, and he dropped to one knee, shaking his head woozily.
“It-it’s all y-your fault,” gasped a golfer nursing his gut against the wall, “Ranma. I was preparing to defeat Akane, and the baseball club said you said girls preferred guys to fight each other for the right to date them…”
“No I… oh, maybe I did, actually,” said Ranma, a bit nonplussed. “But, fighting hasn’t got much to do with dates at all, really…”
“Tendo Akane!” cried a voice from one particularly persistent knot of fighting. “Fear Not, for we remain true to the True Way! You shall date a member of the Kendo Club, as you truly desire!”
“You cheats!” screamed another voice from the crowd. “You keep ganging up on anyone else! Fight us fairlOWOowww.”
Akane twitched. “Well, then…” She stomped forwards, carefully stepping over the fallen, making her way directly to the Kendo Club.
“Uh, is this really a good… never mind…” Ranma smiled weakly at the golfer and trotted after her friend.
“At last! The worthy battle!” declared the spokesman for the Kendo Club, turning to meet the girls. Five paint splats appeared on his armour, and he clawed at his mask as the green splattered through the bars into his eyes.
“Yatta! I gottim!” declared a paintballer from the edge of the greater melee.
“Dishonourable cur! How dare you interfere in a battle of honough,” said another member of the Kendo Club as Akane’s fist began the task of reducing him and his friends to groaning bodies once more. The club, to a man, turned their attention to the girl, and were rapidly beaten to the ground, many of them by the remainder of the boys. When the last of the bokken-wielding opponents had fallen, Akane turned her attention impartially to those who had attacked from the back of their huddle.
In moments, the only boys standing in the schoolyard were the paintballer – and Kuno, who chose that moment to stride imperiously out of hiding.
“Ah, What Fools these Mortals be,” he declaimed. “Thinking that competition amongst themselves is the manner to win a maiden’s hand and heart…”
splatter “Yatta! I gottim!”
“Hello Sempai,” said Akane, setting her bag down for a moment. “GoodBYE, Sempai,” she finished, stepping through the guard he had opened completely when hit by the paintball and punching him nearly to the far wall of the compound.
She scooped up her bag. splatter She turned to look at the last boy standing. “Are you serious?”
The paintballer lowered his gun. He pulled off the facemask, to reveal that his mouth was hanging open at the sight of the girl who had just caught his projectile in her bare hand. “Man, that was so cool. You wanna join my team? We have a round-robin tournament every weekend…”
“Are you asking me for a date?”
“If that’s the only way to get you to join the team, hell yeah!”
As their first-period teacher wound up his lesson, Nabiki slipped a magazine from her bag. The short break between classes was plenty of time to catch up on her reading, and it helped her business for her customers to appear to have to interrupt her – it made them feel as though they had something to apologise for, and therefore they tended to accept worse deals.
The exception, of course, sat next to her. “Tendo Nabiki, your sister was accompanied on her arrival this morn by a young woman in boys’ garb, with flaming hair. Do you by chance know of whom I speak?”
“Red hair in a pigtail?” said Nabiki, resting a finger between the pages of her magazine. “Sure, I know who she is.”
“You do?” he exulted. “Tendo Nabiki, do you speak truly?”
Her eyes narrowed. She nodded briefly. Instead of speaking, he turned eagerly to his desk and began inking a message on a piece of paper – paper, she noticed, of substantially greater quality than even he used for school. Without being too obvious about it, she read the message as he wrote it, her eyebrow rising curiously as he wrote the address with a flourish of the brush.
Finally, he straightened and handed her the folded letter. “Deliver this to the flame-haired maiden promptly.”
“Indeed,” she drawled. “Now why, Kuno baby, would I do such a thing? Hmm?”
His expression darkened impressively. “Woman, you try my patience. Five thousand yen.”
“Done.” The letter vanished into her bag as the door opened for the next teacher. “I won’t see her until after school – I’ll deliver then.”
The sun beat down pleasantly, and Ranma set aside her bento with a happily satiated sigh. She hadn’t asked for a larger lunch, she was pretty sure Akane hadn’t mentioned it to her sister, but Kasumi had provided her with a bento at least half again the size of Akane’s.
Despite that, all three of the other girls crouched over their lunches protectively as she looked around. “Hey, I’m not that bad!”
“Can’t prove that by me,” retorted Yuka, quickly finishing off the last of her pickles.
Ranma shook her head in mock dismay, and lay back against the tree behind her.
“Um, Akane,” said Sayuri diffidently, “Are we still on for Saturday? I mean, with Ranma coming and all…”
“Oh! I’d forgotten about that.” Akane chewed her chopsticks for a moment. “I still want to go – would either of you mind if Ranma came too?”
“No, that’s fine.”
Sayuri shook her head, and asked, “Ranma, we were planning to go shopping after school on Saturday. Do you want to join us?”
“Hey, thanks. I’d love to,” replied Ranma. “Where are we going?”
“Oh, just the local mall. Maybe the new ice cream shop,” shrugged Sayuri.
“Great. I need some new clothes,” admitted Ranma.
“You could get a girls’ uniform, for a start,” said Akane.
“Yeah,” breathed Yuka. “I’d like to see what you look like in some decent clothes. You’ve got a really good figure.”
Ranma shook her head. “Really not a good idea, girls,” she said sadly. “I will get a gym uniform, but I won’t get anything girly.”
“Why not?” protested Sayuri. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with being a tomboy, but you’ve got to admit you’d look better in something that fit properly.”
“The problem is when I buy girly stuff, Pops rips it up.” The girls gave expressions of shock. “I’ve got Kasumi looking after my bras for me, and I really need some new ones. The cheap ones I could get in China don’t last very long anyway. The worst is, I’m afraid if I get anything too girly and Pops finds it, he’ll start on some stupid ‘plan’ to stop me wearing anything like it.” She sighed. “We got kicked out of one dojo ‘cause he found me with the master’s daughter, trying on some of her clothes. Pops wrecked half of Hikaru-chan’s whole wardrobe before we knocked him out.”
The other three girls stared at her silently.
“I bet if I came home in with a girls’ uniform, Pops would rip up Akane’s and Nabiki’s as well just to be safe. And I’m not sure her father would throw us out for it, either,” she finished disgustedly.
“I cannot believe,” said Yuka slowly in tones that said she clearly did believe, “that anyone could be that, that…”
“Stupid?” offered Ranma. “You ain’t met Pops yet. Lucky you.”
“I’m home!”
“Welcome home, little sister!”
Smiling at the evidence of normalcy in the Tendo home, Nabiki sauntered through the ground floor. She intended to go into the kitchen for a drink and a snack, but seeing one of their houseguests sitting seiza on the engawa she decided to fulfil one of her day’s tasks a little more promptly.
It was the work of a moment to set her bag down on the unconscious panda and retrieve the missive from Kuno.
“Here, Ranma. For you from the ‘Blue Thunder’.”
“‘To the Flame-Haired Maiden’,” read Ranma. She unfolded the paper and read the rather fine calligraphy. “‘On Sunday, at the tenth hour, meet me in the second field of Furinkan High School.’ Man, is this about that thing yesterday lunchtime?”
“Possibly,” replied Nabiki, concealing her curiosity about that incident.
“Sounds like a duel to me,” said Akane, standing up as her television program ended.
“Oh, so Kuno is trying for a rematch then, is he?”
“Something like that,” said Ranma. She called over her shoulder, “Hey, Pops, I got a challenge from that Kuno jerk. You up for refereeing Sunday morning?”
“Ranma, your father’s still…” “growfl” “I thought he was unconscious?”
“Nah, it was a paralysis point, Akane. He probably really enjoyed watching that program with you.”
“It’s a high-school romance soap opera.”
“A sappy one, too,” agreed Ranma, grinning widely.
“Rriight,” sighed Akane. “Why do you need a referee at a challenge match anyway?”
Ranma turned to face the two girls. “Oh, Pops insisted before my first challenge in Japan,” she said, winking broadly. “I mean, that time the guy never showed up, so I won by default, but Pops waited at the site for three days before losing his patience and taking me to China. But he’s refereed all my challenges since.”
(Posted Sun, 01 Jul 2007 11:44)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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