“Oh, that’s all right,” expressed Akane with a smile. “You might have fallen in something really horrible.”
“Huh?” asked Ranma, giving her a puzzled look. Opposite, and slightly out of Akane’s line of sight, Kasumi looked at her sister uncertainly.
“Well, you could have… um…” She glanced aside, nibbling her lip. She saw inspiration. “What if you’d fallen in the Tiger spring, too?”
Ranma stared at her. “Uh, y-yeah. That would be worse…”
“Or you could have fallen in the Spring of Drowned Boy,” continued Akane. She shuddered. “That would be horrible.”
Ranma blinked. “But…”
Whatever she was about to say was cut off by a piercing scream. His. “Hot!”
“Ah, so your problem isn’t that bad,” declared Tendo Soun, setting aside the kettle and slapping the young man genially on the back. “Why, it’s hardly an obstruction at all!”
“Hot water!” hissed the black-haired boy, gingerly tugging at his shirt. “Not boiling!”
The Tendo sisters blinked, and completely ignored their father as he blathered on. Cautiously, Akane reached forwards, pressing a finger into their guest’s chest where his shirt had been pulled taut over a rather enviable bosom. “But – but – you – but –“
“Er – ehe.” He froze as she touched him. “Wouldya, um, n-not do that?”
“You’re a boy,” accused Akane.
“Well, yeah,” replied the boy, still frozen as her hand felt across his chest. “I toldya that.”
“Of course he’s a boy,” reassured her father. “I always knew my good friend Genma’s son was a boy.”
“But you’re a boy,” repeated Akane irately, without any evidence of hearing her father.
“My daughters, Kasumi, she’s nineteen, Nabiki, she’s seventeen – Nabiki – where did Nabiki go, Kasumi?”
“Yeah, I told you that.”
“Oh, she went to call someone on the telephone, father.”
“You sat on my lap!”
“I wonder what for? This is much more important than talking to her friends. This is Akane, she’s sixteen,” finished Mr Tendo. “Pick the one you like, she’s your fiancée.”
“I’m sorry,” Ranma told Akane. “I didn’t mean to.”
“You jumped on my legs as soon as I sat down!”
“That was the c-c-ca-c-cat!”
“I suppose it was the cat that was petting my thigh?”
“Wha – I wha –” Ranma stared at the young girl leaning towards him, her eyes dark with emotion and her fists clenched above her knees. Unfortunately this pose led his eyes inward; either upwards from her knees, or downwards from her shoulders, focussing towards…
“Pervert!”
“Eeep!” She began a furious lunge, and he turned to run for it. “Ahh! C-c-cat!”
Akane had been sure the boy was a pervert – he had to be, looking at her like that, and sitting in her lap, and pressing at her leg with his hands while she stroked her head – his head! And that was even without him turning into a girl. When he turned to run from her righteous wrath, she had been convinced.
When he screamed in terror and leapt back at her, she really didn’t know what to think, which gave him time to evade her furious charge and hide behind her.
“Oh, my, he really is afraid of cats.”
“What a disappointment,” remarked Mister Tendo, looking down at the teenaged boy clinging to the back of his youngest daughter’s legs. He raised his eyes to the ceiling and wailed, “Oh, Saotome, however did you raise such a coward?”
“Father, you weren’t awake when Ranma explained how his father trained him in the Neko-ken,” began Kasumi gently.
“Oh, I heard,” reassured her father. As he spoke, Akane stopped trying to prize the boy off her ankles and started to frown. “Why, it reminds me of my own training, and I don’t suffer from any silly fears like that.”
“That wasn’t training,” asserted Akane. “That was torture!”
“It is an ancient and sound training method, developed over centuries, daughter,” replied her father sternly. “No doubt it took Saotome years of effort and sacrifice to uncover the details.” At Akane’s feet, Ranma started shaking his head, although whether that was in disagreement or because he had heard the tiger starting to splash wakefully in the pond wasn’t obvious.
“It’s an ancient and sound method for driving people insane!” retorted Akane. “Would you have thrown me into a pit with hungry animals for training?”
“Of course not. As a Master of the Martial Arts, I know what my students are capable of,” he said seriously. “A girl would never be able to learn the advanced techniques of the Tendo School, so I stopped teaching you when you managed the intermediate forms.”
Akane’s eyes narrowed. Innocently, her elder sister said, “Oh, I thought you stopped teaching her from grief over Mother?”
“Of course not! A man must work through grief and infirmity – only women can indulge their emotions like that,” asserted their father, his eyes brimming with tears. “I would have continued teaching if Akane had been a boy, but…”
“Daddy no BAKA!” erupted Akane as she prevented her father from digging himself further into a hole by hitting him with a large mallet. Encumbered by the youth clinging to her calves, she managed neither her normal wind-up nor a proper follow-through, and he sailed in a low arc through the shoji into the garden.
Saotome Genma was accustomed to awakening with a pounding headache. He invariably told himself it had been caused by blows to the head and again resolved to further practice the Art to prevent losing another fight; a resolution which would manifest as ever-tougher training for his student and son Ranma. The more reasonable conclusion of a major hangover never seemed to occur to him.
He was becoming accustomed to awakening with a fur coat (rather worn and shabby). It was a consequence of the last training site he had taken his son to, combined with another factor in his life: the fact that tents leak. He had developed the habit of checking carefully whether his son had awakened before him, and of very carefully getting out of the immediate area if he hadn’t, because the sensations of being beaten about by an angry tomcat were not pleasant.
He was not accustomed to awakening submerged to his neck in cold water. He had lost his familiarity with that particular sensation after disposing of the Master, although he didn’t remember flying through the air as he was dropped off the cliff this time. Memories of what normally followed these dunking penetrated his conscious mind, and he dragged his feet under him and scrambled out of the muddy pond, shaking his head to clear his eyes.
He just had time to register the body flying headfirst towards him before it slammed into his sensitive nose. Blackness closed over his consciousness slightly before the water closed over his head once more.
“Well that, he had coming,” murmured Kasumi. She glanced down at the younger teens, seated in a pile on the floor.
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(Posted Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:04)
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