Umino walked around, almost as if in a daze, utterly stunned not only by the sudden, unexplainable improvement of his extremely poor vision, but by the amazing clarity of his current eyesight as well. As things stood, his eyesight was now even better than it was when he was wearing his prescription lenses—and he’d only had his last eye appointment about six weeks ago. No, something told him that his vision was now better than 20/20; part of it was just some vague cosmic sense that he had just had (and still was having) a most extraordinary experience, but most of it came from the fact that he was now able to read a newspaper article with no trouble whatsoever—from across the street, using only his peripheral vision. Actually, it wasn’t quite right to call it “peripheral,” since most of it was just as clearly focused as his “direct” vision.
It wasn’t just the focus of the images that was different, either: Umino was now somehow able to detect the a huge range of subtle color variations at a glance where previously he wouldn’t have noticed any difference at all. Where before he wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between turquoise and blue-green, now they were as different as purple and yellow.
He might have made a comparison between his current situation and the experience of switching from a standard definition television to a high-definition one, except that his leap in focus and clarity so utterly dwarfed that of your average boob tube connoisseur that to draw such a comparison would be almost insulting. For despite her faults, one could not say that the Djinni Mihoshi wasn’t thorough. Naru had wished that her boyfriend had perfect vision, and by golly, his vision was going to be perfect. The problem was that Mihoshi wasn’t human, and had never been human, so her idea of “perfect” vision was a bit more involved than 20/20; no, Umino now possessed what a Seniwan would consider to be perfect vision, and to Mihoshi’s mind, a “perfect” ability implied all-but-unattainable nigh-supernatural qualities, an ideal which the average sentient being could only aspire to from a very long distance. When Naru said “perfect,” she had actually meant “normal.” When Mihoshi heard it, she had thought it meant “paranormal.”
Of course, none of this mattered much to Umino: at the moment, he just wanted to sit down and rest before he got a headache. All of this new vision, interesting though it was, was also starting to overload his brain, which was just not used to processing this much visual information. Placing his head in his hands (mostly to block his peripheral vision), Umino stared straight down at the featureless sidewalk.... Well, actually it wasn’t that featureless; the concrete’s texture was readily apparent to him, forming all manner of unusual patterns. However, after nearly ten minutes of staring, things started becoming... distorted, as though the sidewalk, rather than being flat, was bulging towards him. But however disturbing the initial implications of this were, they were nothing compared to the feelings he would through when he later realized what was actually happening. His vision hadn’t been distorted: rather, his depth perception was so acute that he could actually perceive the earth’s curvature while looking at the ground. For now, though, Umino had to be content with his confusion. What the heck is going on?
Naru hung up her phone with slight disappointment.
“So? How is he?” Mihoshi asked, eagerly awaiting the change to demonstrate her wish-granting skills to her fellow djinn.
“He’s not home—his mother said he’d gone out for a walk to clear his head.”
“Oh...”
“Don’t worry about it, Mihoshi. I’m sure he’ll be back real soon,” Ranma said. “In the meantime, I’m gonna enjoy the fact that I ain’t a girl!”
“I can help you with that,” Nabiki said slyly, sashaying over to him and brushing a hand over his bare pectoral muscle.
“Um, that’s not what I meant, Nabs.”
“What are you talking about?” Naru said, confused.
“Well, ta be honest, I ain’t entirely sure, but I think Nabiki here was talkin’ abou sex.”
“Ack! Not in my room—I’d never be able to explain the stains to my mom!”
Nabiki sighed. “Take it easy. I was just teasing him. It’s going to be quite a while before I can get Ranma in the sack.” She then turned to the male genie, who was still noticeably blushing. “That said, you know perfectly well that we’re going to do it eventually. Curiosity mixed with boredom practically guarantees it. I’d think you’d want to make sure that your first time wasn’t while you were stuck in the bottle.”
“Well, yeah, but that don’t mean we gotta do it now.”
“Or perhaps you want to wait until a lonely gay master wishes you into bed for himself?”
“Ah...”
“You know you’re bisexual now.”
“Um... well... yeah...”
“That means that if and when that happens, you’re probably going to like it.”
“Ah... er... well...” Of course, intellectually, Ranma had already figured all of this out; it was just that he didn’t particularly feel like contemplating the possibility at the moment.
Fortunately for him, though, he wasn’t the only one who was feeling uncomfortable with Nabiki’s line of questions. “Do you have to talk about this now?” Naru asked, getting rather embarrassed from the whole conversation.
“Sorry,” Nabiki said. “I’ll wait until you aren’t in the room next time. You are the master, after all. Though that does leave a rather burning question.”
“And that is?”
“If it’s going to take a while for this boyfriend of yours to get in touch with you, what should we do in the meantime?”
Read the comments on this episode
See other episodes by Kwakerjak
(Posted Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:00)
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.