Dr. Moreau was clever to include magic in his flu as well as genetics. He was clever to include a spell that would make the infected and those men around them accept things as if they had always been so that no outcry would be made and quarantines or investigations established.
But he didn't think things through too clearly.
He knew the "it was always this way" cover would be fragile and would fall apart eventually, but he expected it would take a long time...long enough to infect all of Japan.
He certainly didn't expect the infected women to notice, even given their various enhanced mental states. Perhaps he thought they'd be too distracted by their growing sex-drives and subtly altering sexual tastes, but in this the cover spell worked against him. The girls simply assumed their sex drive had always been that high and simply dealt with it. The panic and confusion from a suddenly upped instinct did not manifest, so their minds remained, for the most part as clear as normal.
In addition, each girl kept their own innate specialities. The fact that Ranma's girl form was now a Goth in species did nothing to detract from the fact that she was still an incredibly agile and strong martial genius and chi adept. It just added a better understanding of magic and put her already high healing rate into overdrive.
As it was, different girls around Tokyo were reacting in different ways.
Even as Ranma and the Tendos were making their revelations about other people were thinking things through.
In St. Hebereke high-school, Kodachi-sama finished her gymnastic routine and stepped off the mat so that her attendants could wipe the sweat from her body and start the process of changing her attire for the next class.
The noble samurai-ko frowned as she dressed, unable to enjoy the surrounding display of beauty due to the puzzle that rested in her mind.
For once the question wasn't how to deal with the rivals for the heart of her beloved Ranma, though that was part of it. She remembered bitter battles over the rights of the fiancees to have Ranma as their own, but the reason for those battles no longer made sense to her.
Her altered thoughts kept suggesting that the battles were foolish and it would be a much better idea just to share Ranma as a lover (physical and otherwise) and decide on an official wife later, if at all. The part of the spell that insisted that she had always thought this way made her now wonder why she and the others had never suggested it before.
More immediate than that, though, was her new chi-sight. There was something...odd about the chi-flows of all the women she'd seen recently. There was something that wasn't quite right, the spell kept telling her it was always that way, but her mind kept telling her that chi should not be shaped in such fashions and pointing out that the flows were repairing themselves.
The "don't notice spell" didn't quite work long once it was put under direct question. Kodachi had may have taken hours rather than Ranma's minutes, but Ranma had the benefit of understanding chi and magic better now, as well as the fact that the don't-notice spell adapted slowly to his/her changes.
In either case, Kodachi's eyes widened as her kimono, quite a bit racier than a real traditional garb, was finally placed correctly. The black-rose ground her teeth as her "kami" manifested. Her canines sharpened and a long tail slipped out from under her obi as her ears turned large a bat-like.
"Is something wrong Kuno-San?" one of the sensei's asked in concern as she noticed the sure-fire sign that someone was very angry.
"Nothing, Hana-Sensei," Kodachi said, still bat-eared and tailed for all her stoicisim. "Nothing I cannot handle."
Elsewhere, in Kolkholz high, girls that had become victims of the western fantasy flu were talking with animals that had, by oversight, been left out of the "don't notice" spell. While most of those animals didn't outright say "something changed you" as the majority of animals didn't understand things on a human level, the gist came out over a week or so of conversations.
Azuza wasn't one of these girls. She was too busy collecting things her darlings, though her choice of garb had changed slightly. She was starting to look a bit like a fae thief.
It was happening everywhere, and as it did, women and girls would go "totem" or "familiar" or "anthro" or "mutant" or "kami" as they each figured out that somehow they had been messed with.
This was without factoring in the foreigners who were not fully affected by the flu and against whom the "didn't notice" spell was unravelling just as fast as those affected.
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(Posted Wed, 07 Nov 2007 01:25)
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