Naru felt somewhat conflicted as she took the strange bottle home in a large paper bag. On the one hand, she knew that her purchase should have been for Usagi, but for some reason, a voice in the back of her head was insisting that she keep it for herself and get her friend something else—she certainly still had the money to do that. However, she had a plan for dealing with this: Usagi’s party wasn’t happening for several days, which meant that she’d have plenty of time to decide what to do with her recent purchase. She’d take it home and set it on a shelf in her room to see how well it matched the overall décor. If she decided that she couldn’t part with it, she’d head out and get Usagi something with her remaining money. Otherwise, she’d wrap it up for the party.
It was a flawless plan, if by “flawless plan” one means “a plan wherein the planner cannot perceive any obvious flaws.”
As she stared at the bottle sitting on her nightstand, she wondered why she was so conflicted about it. It was just a bottle, after all. The shade of blue didn’t even go with her room’s interior design. Yet, there was something about it that seemed… special, even though she couldn’t quite figure out what exactly that something was.
But either way, a little bit of cleaning was in order; it was pretty dusty. Plus, Naru didn’t really know if it was functional; the only way to find that out was to open the bottle. The ornate stopper was a pretty tight fit, but with a little bit of twisting, it came out easily enough—and then smoke began pouring out of the mouth of the bottle. Before the redheaded girl could plug it up again, the smoke began forming into three humanoid shapes. Within seconds, they were fully formed and solidified. The three of them were dressed like something out of the Arabian Nights; two of them wore scantily-clad harem girl outfits, while the third…
“Whoa, that was quick. I didn’t think it would be… wait a minute, when did my voice get lower?” The genie looked down and saw his bare and most definitely male chest. He didn’t know why he’d changed back to his normal gender, but he wasn’t about to complain. “I’m a guy again! Woohoo!”
“Yay!” Mihoshi agreed enthusiastically. She was always happy when other people were happy.
Naru looked quizzically at the two people happily bouncing about her room before turning to the third one.
“Um… what’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Nabiki replied. “It’s just that Ranma here has discovered that his situation is slightly less inconvenient than he thought it was. But that doesn’t matter. I’m Nabiki, and the other two are Ranma and Mihoshi, and we’re the genies of that blue bottle you’re holding. Since I assume you were the one to unplug it and let us out, that makes you our new master… uh… mistress… oh, who cares? Point is, you’ve got three wishes coming your way. One from each of us. Let’s see, I’ve got a copy of those rules somewhere….”
“Uh, that’s nice… but… but I didn’t really buy this bottle for me, I got it as a birthday gift for someone else. Well, okay, maybe I was considering keeping it for myself, but I bought it while shopping for a gift for someone else.”
“So? You can use one of the wishes to get this person an even better present if you want.”
“But what could possibly be better than getting to have three wishes granted by actual genies?”
“You’ve obviously never met Mihoshi.”
“What?”
“Never mind. There’s a lot of rules you need to know about, but I think I can sum them up pretty easily: keep it simple, and don’t try to cheat the system in an effort to be clever, because it’ll just come back around to bite you in the ass. Trust me on that.”
“Oh. Um, okay.”
“If you want to know the specifics, you can take a look at this pamphlet,” Nabiki said, producing a slip of paper with the six rules ex nihilo. “Now, you have three wishes, one from each of us. If you like, you can specify which genie grants a particular wish, or you can let us decide.”
“Oh. Well… um…”
“Hey, Nabiki,” Mihoshi said, finally noticing her other companion. “Who are you talking to? Is this our new master?”
“I think so, though she’s not sure.”
“Why not?”
“Because I bought this bottle as a gift for someone else, and I was just cleaning it out when you three popped out.”
“Oh.”
“Hey, Nabiki, guess what?” Ranma said excitedly.
“You’re still a guy?”
“I know! Ain’t it awesome!”
Naru, however, was still confused. “Wait… you mean you aren’t always a guy?”
“Uh, no. Ya see, I got this curse that causes me ta change gender when I get hit with water, which was bad enough, but since I became a genie things have really gone nuts, an’ I can’t say for certain what’s goin’ on with me. I’m just glad I’m a guy right now, since I’m stuck as a girl when I’m in that bottle.”
“Oh. Well, if you want, maybe I can use one of my wishes—”
Nabiki had to cut that idea off before Ranma started taking it seriously: “That would be a bad idea. For all we know, trying to grant a wish that would fix Ranma’s problem would only make things worse. You see, all three of us are relatively new to this genie thing, and Ranma’s curse is really complex.”
“Oh, I see. So I should keep my wishes simple, then.”
“Yes.”
“Okay….”
Read the comments on this episode
See other episodes by Kwakerjak
(Posted Wed, 02 Jan 2008 02:04)
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.