Ranma slowly opened his eyes, and pressed at the flimsy wall of organic mass that had been his bed for… for… just how long had he been asleep anyway? He knew it must have been a long time, two or three days a least. Apparently, vampires took long naps.
After opening the cocoon and stepping out, Ranma frowned at what he saw. He was in some kind of room with concrete walls and a ceiling at least nine feet high. There was a woman with short hair dressed in a business suit with a short skirt standing in front of him with a new pair of pants, and a blood red silk shirt. It actually took him a second to recognize her. “N-NABIKI?”
The woman’s diamond earrings made a slight jingling sound as his servant bowed her head. “Master.” She quickly presented the boy with the clothing in her arms. “I’ve already prepared a bath if you need it, or you can eat first if you want.”
“Uh, Nabiki?”
The woman looked back up to her Master. “Yes?”
“WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO YOU?”
And so, several hours of explanation later…
“So, it’s 2005,” Ranma said as he finished getting dressed. He had decided to let the bath go in favor of a shower. After about ten years of sleeping in a rock of… well, he didn’t really know what his cocoon had been made of, but he thought high pressured jet streams were better for getting the remains that stuck to him off than just soaking in a pool of water.
“Yes.”
“And we still haven’t managed to invent the flying car.”
Nabiki sighed. “Right. We also don’t have any cool robots, ray guns, space ships, and all those guys who said the world was going to end in the year 2000 have now switched to 2014.”
The other chiropteran shrugged. “Ah well, not that I really care about it all that much.” Still, 2000 was supposed to be the big turning point. The fact that nothing happened at all was kind of a let down. “So what’ve you been up to while I’ve been out of it?”
As Ranma came out of the bathroom and started walking down the hallway towards the stairs, Nabiki summed up her life up until today as quickly as possible. “Just normal business. Well, these years anyway. In the time right after you went to sleep I had some trouble.”
The boy blinked at her reply. “What do ya mean?”
“I’m a VAMPIRE Master,” Nabiki explained before she caught herself needing a correction. “Okay well technically, we’re called chiropterans. But the main point is: we drink blood, turn into giant monsters… or at least I do anyway, and we have inhuman powers. With all those idiots that lived around us, do you really think all of them wouldn’t have tried to kill us for just being what we were?”
Ranma looked down at the stairs in contemplation. “I suppose you’ve got a point there.”
“You should just forget about it anyway. That was a long time ago, it doesn’t really matter anymore,” Nabiki told him. “Right now, let’s get you something to eat, and I’ll show you around.” Although Nabiki had kept Ranma’s ‘bed’ well moisturized with blood over the years after finding out it absorbed the stuff, Nabiki had never known a time when Ranma’s wasn’t hungry.
Nabiki’s house wasn’t expansive as Ranma had originally thought after seeing her basement, but it was still pretty big for someone living in Japan. There were two floors and an attic, with the top floor being fully carpeted and the bottom only having some in the living room. It also had a front and back yard, and Ranma guessed his former sleeping quarters actually ran under both places.
What the building lacked in size, it made up for in decadence. Paintings adorned the walls, along with small and medium sculptures, and the furniture was obviously top rate. The whole place obviously said ‘I have lots of money’ to visitors.
“So how do you afford all this?” Ranma asked. “More blackmail and porno?”
Nabiki rolled her eyes. “Oh please, I gave that up years ago.” That was just chump change to her nowadays anyway. “I got my start with the money from the Tendo and Saotome families. Since all the members were dead I inherited everything, which turned out to be a sizeable amount.”
There was a bit of surprise at that news. “The old man actually had some money?”
“Well, the Saotome family home was worth something, and my father actually had a good deal stored away thanks to some stocks mother owned before she died.” She looked back and smirked at the younger boy. “You didn’t think we paid the bills with the money I made from… extortion and porno, right?
“Of course that was all just to get me started. Since then, I’ve mostly, just made money off investments,” Nabiki explained before listing a few. “Yahoo, Google, the iPod.”
“You. Making sense. Not,” Ranma replied in chopped up speech.
As they got to the kitchen, Nabiki sighed at her Master’s lack of familiarity with technology. “It’s computer stuff. Basically, I just find the latest up and coming thing before it comes into style and try to make money off it. It’s risky, but I’ve made more profit than I’ve lost.”
After getting two packs of blood from the bottom of her fridge, Nabiki handed one to Ranma. “Do you want to drink it or, I think they said we can feed via transfusion. I’ve never tried it though.”
“They?” Ranma asked before ripping the bag open with his teeth and dumping the cool red fluid into his mouth. Until the blood had actually touched his lips, Ranma had no idea just how famished he had really been. The stuff was more watery than he remembered, but was satisfying all the same.
The way Ranma fed made Nabiki cringe, she saw tiny dribbled of blood run down his chin and past the neck of his shirt. She was lucky he didn’t end up spilling half of it on her floors.
As he finished drinking, Nabiki cleared her throat. “Yes, it uh, seems that there’s more to our kind than just you and me.”
Ranma threw the plastic bag on the nearby counter and looked back over to his servant. “More vampires?”
“Chiropterans, they uh, don’t like to be called vampires,” Nabiki explained uncomfortably. “Which we technically aren’t, at least not like in the movies or anything. Our species is very similar to the bat on a genetic level, hence the name, but aside from the need for blood and other physical abilities, you and I have nothing in common with those old Dracula movies.”
“How’d you meet?” Ranma asked before grabbing a napkin to wipe his mouth. “Those ‘others’ you just mentioned, I mean.”
Nabiki sighed. “There was this company I wanted to invest in a few years ago and I ran into one of them. He knew what I was almost right away. After some… initial conflict, we decided to form a partnership for the benefit of both of us. That’s also something I need to talk to you about Master.”
“Wait a second,” Ranma told her as he held up his hands in a stop gesture. “What do you mean, initial conflict?”
After directing Ranma to the living room and a seat, Nabiki collapsed on a cushioned chair and rubbed her head. For her to have any hope of Nabiki’s plans with Amshel to work, and thus insure the survival of her race, they needed Ranma to go along with it. Still, it wasn’t as if she could disobey a direct order from her Master. “They beat me half to death and injected something into me, I think it was blood. When I didn’t actually die from it or anything, they were a lot more… courteous. After they found out I really was a woman, and you were really male, we made a deal.”
Why do I have a bad feeling about this? Ranma asked himself before asking the question Nabiki seemed to be begging him to speak with her last explanation. “What kind of deal?”
Nabiki let out a half-hearted laugh. “Well, it seems that their Master is a girl vampire that looks about the same age as you. Diva, that’s her name by the way, is kind of wanting to… well, breed.”
“Say what?” Ranma asked with a dumbfounded expression.
“Which does make sense. Our race is actually pretty low at the moment Master. Counting you, there are just three chiropterans that were actually born, all the others were created from humans by mixing the blood of a purebred with a human and turning him or her into one. But, a chiropteran queen can’t produce offspring with someone she created, they have to come from a different bloodline; like you, for example.”
Nabiki shrugged before continuing. “Of course you could always refuse and doom us all to eventual extinction, but that’s your choice, not mine.”
Read the comments on this episode
(Posted Tue, 07 Aug 2007 16:25)
Questions? Problems? Suggestions?
Send a mail to addventure@bast-enterprises.de
or use the contact form.
らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
All other series and their characters are © by their respective creators or owners. No claims of ownership of these characters are implied by the authors of this Addventure, or should be inferred.
The Anime Addventure is a non-profit site.