When Ranma came to he found himself somehow floating upside down above a very familiar Koi pond. "ha, ha, yeah! Home!" Ranma cheered to himself while turning himself right side up. His celebration was cut a little bit short though as Ranma quickly realized he didn't exactly know how to get down. Normally gravity did the job of pulling him down and all Ranma had to do was manage some kind of landing. Only since he wasn't falling, Ranma obviously needed a different means of getting back down.
After several minutes of futile kicking and arm flapping, Ranma finally managed to figure out how to move about in the air. He didn't know why he was floating in the first place, but all Ranma had to do to control where he went was to mentally push in the opposite direction of where he wanted to go. It was kind of like what Ranma always did when he wanted to pull tricky maneuvers in mid air; only now that same 'little push' was enough to let Ranma basically fly about the place. In fact, when Ranma consciously forced himself to stop 'pushing' down he was finally able to fall back to the ground below.
Now that he was finally back on the ground again, Ranma felt that he was ready to go inside and tell everyone that he'd finally made it back home. Except that Ranma encountered another strange obstacle along the way. This time the problem was opening the outside door to the living room. It wasn't that it was locked or anything, a lock on a sliding paper door would have been completely pointless anyway. The problem was that Ranma's hand kept going through the door instead of gripping it.
It wasn't until the third time Ranma's hand passed through the door that he remembered why he was having this problem. It had to be the amount of mass he'd lost on the way back home, that had to be the reason why Ranma's hand kept passing through the paper door. For a moment Ranma considered simply walking through the door instead of bothering with it. But he eventually decided that it was more important to find a way to make himself solid enough to move things around instead. It took him a couple dozen tries, but Ranma finally managed enough control of his remaining mass to open and close the door when he wanted to.
After he managed that, Ranma finally entered the house and announced that he was home. Only to get no reply, from anyone. "Huh? That's strange, someone's always home. Did they go on some kind of vacation or something?" Ranma wondered aloud as he searched the house for the occupants that should have been there.
While he looked, a few things about the house seemed to be oddly different as Ranma checked the house room by room. For starters the kitchen was arranged slightly different, Kasumi's spice rack was next to the dish cabinet instead of the oven, and the microwave was missing entirely. Then the old pervert's room looked like a normal couple's bedroom instead of a panty-thieving freak's. The television in the living room looked like an older model than the one Ranma remembered.
Ranma didn't check the bath or the laundry, he'd be asking for trouble if he found anybody there, but he did check the bedrooms upstairs though. Ranma knocked on each of the Tendo girl's doors several times before risking a peek inside. Like the rest of the house, the rooms were oddly different, yet the same too. The only exception being the guest room Ranma shared with his father, Genma. The simple room that Ranma had shared with his father for most of the last year was currently as bare as the day they first arrived at the Tendo's.
"What did they do, kick the old man out after I went missing?" Ranma asked no one in particular as he left the empty room for the kitchen. "Hmph, can't say that I blame them any, pops isn't anything but trouble anyway," he grumbled to the empty room while helping himself to some leftovers from the fridge.
After decimating the leftovers inside the refrigerator, and then cleaning up his mess, Ranma took a shortcut back upstairs through the kitchen ceiling. Above the kitchen, Ranma's old room was just as empty as when he'd left it a short while ago. Even so, Ranma decided to take a nap in there while he waited for someone else to return home. Yet without his futon, or even his old sleeping bag, Ranma wound up taking his nap floating a few feet above the floor near the window instead.
When evening came, Kasumi was ready to just pull the leftovers out of the refrigerator and serve everyone that for dinner, then just go to bed for the night. She'd just spent all day with her father and younger sisters mourning in front of their mother's newly filled grave. Her father and little Akane had taken turns wailing about their mother being gone the entire day. She and Nabiki had been stoic by comparison to their father and Akane, but then it wasn't like they had a choice with those two looking to them for comfort.
When he wasn't wailing about mother being gone, he was constantly telling Kasumi how much like her mother she was. Kasumi wanted to be like her mother, she really did, and being told that she was a lot like her mother made her feel really good about herself. But hearing her father say that over and over again also made Kasumi feel scared too, no matter how much she didn't want it to.
But that didn't matter right now, all she had to do was feed her family one more time and she could be herself until morning came. Then she would have to try and fill her mother's empty shoes again. Only when nine-year-old Kasumi looked in the refrigerator for the leftovers she intended to heat up for everyone they weren't there any more.
At that point little Kasumi couldn't contain herself anymore, all of her hard work was gone and it would take her two hours at least to fix something from scratch. It was bad enough that she wasn't as good of a cook as her mother yet, but Kasumi was certain that her mother had never lost a whole meal before either. She just couldn't help it anymore, so she started to cry over the lost meal.
Upstairs, Ranma woke to the faint sounds of what he thought was crying. He didn't know why anyone would be crying, but at least it meant that someone else was home now. Since it sounded close, Ranma tried peeking downstairs in the kitchen to see if that was where the sound was coming from.
Poking his head through the floor like a ghost, Ranma found the source of the quiet whimpering almost instantly. It was a little girl apparently, a strangely familiar girl that couldn't be any older than nine or ten at the most. Feeling bad that the little girl was crying, Ranma of course decided to try and cheer her up. "Heya, what's with all the tears?" he asked drifting the rest of the way through the floor and into the kitchen.
Unfortunately he didn't manage to finish the maneuver before the little girl saw him come through the kitchen ceiling. "A-are y-you a ghost?" asked the little girl in a frightened tone. Ranma could almost literally kick himself for scaring her like this.
Ranma put his hands up in a reassuring gesture as he finished his decent to the kitchen floor. "Er, no. No I'm not," he attempted to reassure the girl. He actually sighed when the little brunette visibly calmed down. "Although I did almost wind up one a little over a month ago. But I kinda met somebody that prevented that from happening. Although so far I'm not entirely sure there's any difference between being a ghost and what she turned me into," he complained as an afterthought.
"So then, does that make you an angel instead? If you are, do you know my mommy? I know she only died recently, but we really, really miss her," the girl immediately asked in response to Ranma's little complaint. The way her face lit up just then, Ranma really hated the idea of having to tell her no.
So he did the next best thing, he tried to avoid the subject altogether. "You're mom died, huh? That's terrible. So was that the reason you were crying, kid?" Ranma asked her, silently hoping she would forget her other questions.
"No, not really. It does make me sad that mommy's gone, but that's not why I was crying, Mr. Angel. I was crying because I somehow lost the leftovers I was going to make dinner for my family out of tonight. So now I have to make something from scratch, and that'll take practically forever, and everyone's hungry now, and now I won't have any time to myself today," explained the girl in a tearful rush.
Ranma felt his stomach sinking with every word after 'Mr. Angel'. He was the reason the leftovers were missing, which by association meant that Ranma was the reason this girl had been crying. "Um, oops. That's kinda my fault, sorry about that. It's just that I was really hungry when I got here and I'm used to Kasumi making dinner from scratch anyway. . ." Ranma explained, only to trail off as the girl gave him a really surprised look.
"But I'm Kasumi, Kasumi Tendo, and I haven't been cooking very long, not well anyway. Are you sure you have the right house, Mr. Angel?" argued the little girl that Ranma now knew was Kasumi. The same girl that had been nineteen when he'd left.
"Um, Kasumi; forgive me for asking, but how old are you?" Ranma asked Kasumi feeling a bit stunned. He had a pretty good idea what was going on, but Ranma really didn't want that idea to be right.
Kasumi didn't even hesitate in giving her answer. "Nine, and I'll be ten in three more months!" she told him in a cheerful voice. Her angelic smile making Ranma feel worse and worse with every second.
Ranma tried to suppress a groan, but was only partially successful in the attempt. "Hnn, so Washu sent me back home. Only I wound up ten years in the past too. Well, heck if this isn't going to make things interesting," he muttered as the pieces undeniably fit together.
Kasumi frowned at Ranma as he said that. "You really shouldn’t say words like that, Mr. Angel. It'll make other angels look bad if you say words like that," the little girl scolded him with a frown. Younger or not Kasumi was still Kasumi, and she still expected the best out of everyone.
Only now Ranma either had to tell her the truth, assuming she'll understand it, or try and live up to Kasumi's idea of an angel instead. "Er, sorry about that. I haven't exactly been like this long. I'm still trying to get the hang of everything," Ranma countered truthfully, and ignorantly adding fuel to Kasumi's illusion.
Then Ranma thought of something that would, at least temporarily, get Kasumi's mind off him being an angle or not. It was also something that would make up for him eating everyone's dinner tonight and upsetting Kasumi in the first place. "I think I might know how I can help make it up to you, Kasumi. If you'll let me that is," Ranma offered, baiting the nine-year-old a bit. If it worked it would even give Ranma an excuse to stick around a while.
Little Kasumi dropped what was left of her disapproving frown instantly at the vague offer. "If I'll let you what?!" demanded the nine-year-old ecstatically, bouncing on the balls of her feet a little bit.
"Well~, since I had tonight's dinner for lunch earlier, I think it would only be fair if I helped make a replacement dinner for everyone. That way you won't have to do all the work by yourself, and I'll get something to eat as well. Plus, with two of us working on it, dinner should only take half as long to make, right," Ranma offered her, quietly intending to do the lion's share of the meal to better make it up to her.
"But you're a guy angel, Mr. Angel. Mommy always said that men can't cook," Kasumi argued in a scandalized voice, with a bit of a giggle on the end of it.
Ranma laughed at Kasumi's 'reminder'. "Well . . . I wouldn't say guys can’t cook, it's more like they usually just don’t cook, Kasumi. Not that it matters, I can still fix that," Ranma countered conspiratorially, walking over to the kitchen sink with a mischievous smile. Then, before little Kasumi could ask him what he meant, Ranma turned on the faucet and doused himself to activate his curse. "Okay, then. Now that we're both girls, let's get cooking, shall we, Kasumi?" Ranma asked her host with a devious smile. Kasumi just nodded back happily as Ranma snagged an apron off the wall and prepared to help her fix the Tendo family's evening meal.
"Ooh, pretty! See, I knew you were an angel!" Kasumi cheered as got a better look at Ranma’s female form. "Will I be that pretty when I grow up?" she asked in the following breath as Ranma started collecting ingredients for a simple meal.
'Finally, a question I know the answer to,' Ranma thought to herself before replying. "Even prettier," she told the younger Kasumi with a confident nod of her head. Kasumi looked skeptical but beamed back anyway.
"Are you sure? I mean, you're awfully pretty," she countered uncertainly. Ranma couldn't blame her too much for doubting, she did make a pretty good looking girl, and Kasumi was only nine right now.
Even so, Ranma didn't have to feign indignation at Kasumi doubting her future looks. "Of course I'm sure! I've actually seen you grown up after all, and you were one of the prettiest girls I knew at the time. Besides, you're pretty good looking for your age right now, Kasumi-chan," Ranma countered defensively. Not too defensively though, and the suffix she put on the end of Kasumi's name was enough to let her know that Ranma wasn't actually offended.
Kasumi still looked doubtful, yet her ever-present smile had brightened considerably all the same. "You're absolutely positive?" she tried again, just to be sure.
Or at least that's what her tone implied to Ranma anyway, causing her to smile back in return. "Yes~, I'm sure~, Kasumi-chan. Now why don't you fetch me a mixing bowel and cutting board, alright?" she responded to the question playfully, ruffling Kasumi's hair affectionately as she did so.
"Okay!" Kasumi squealed in delight as she raced to find the requested items. It wasn't anything fancy, but Ranma had decided to make a vegetable stir-fry since it should be relatively quick to make. Although she would have to chop up a few vegetables first, and fix some rice, but that shouldn't take too long either, Ranma decided.
A moment later Kasumi-chan returned with the bowel and cutting board for her. "Okay, I'll need a pot in a second too, but first we need to wash and chop the vegetables. You do like stir-fry, right, Kasumi-chan?" Ranma said as she accepted the items from her younger host.
Kasumi nodded her head vigorously at the question. "Mm hmn!" she agreed excitedly. Ranma ruffled her hair again appreciatively at the younger Kasumi's enthusiasm.
"Good, because it's one of the few recipes I'm much good at," Ranma told her in a mock relieved voice. "Well, without help anyway,"she amended, remembering an occasion or two she'd temporarily forgotten about.
"You can make stir-fry without help? Who taught you how to do that? I always have to use mommy's recipe book to even get it mostly right," wondered Kasumi aloud. Looking over at her, Ranma saw that Kasumi-chan was honestly quite impressed that Ranma could cook the dish.
Her response stopped Ranma short for a moment, but then again it did make sense that she hadn't always been a master cook. Still, Ranma recovered quickly and gave Kasumi-chan a one-armed hug before answering, "why you did of course. I'm from the future, believe it or not. And just so you know, you're the best cook I knew before I came back here, too." Kasumi-chan was blushing with embarrassed pride when Ranma finally let her go again.
"Really," she tested.
"Really~," Ranma answered teasingly before resuming her preparations for the meal.
After that, Ranma and Kasumi chatted idly to one another as they put dinner together. The only interruption was a six-year-old Akane stepping in to complain about why dinner wasn't ready yet. Kasumi told her sister that it was cooking and that it would be ready soon. The younger Akane didn't even question Ranma's presence as she left to tell everyone what the delay was.
But other than that one interruption, Ranma had a grand time impressing Kasumi with her knife skills and occasionally testing her new powers of flight and phasing through things. Surprisingly, Kasumi didn't ask about the future much, not that Ranma would have minded telling her. But she did ask Ranma all kinds of questions about angels, much to Ranma's dismay. Fortunately though, Kasumi-chan excepted the excuse that Ranma hadn't been ‘like this' very long, and forgave him for not knowing much.
By the time they finished though, Ranma discovered yet another new power she had, she could apparently teleport now. She didn't know how far she could go like that, but Ranma had discovered the ability while trying to protect Kasumi from a falling stack of dishes. The unexpected act also got Ranma upgraded from an ordinary angel to a Guardian Angel in Kasumi-chan's eyes. Apparently this also explained Ranma's coarser language, too, at least as far as Kasumi-chan was concerned anyway.
At least Ranma had gotten Kasumi to stop calling him Mr/Ms. Angel in exchange for using her real name. Ranma had practically had to insist on it after Kasumi-chan promoted her to guardian angel. By the time Kasumi gave in to using her proper name, without any ridiculous suffixes like ‘sama’ on the end, the stir-fry was ready to be served.
Kasumi had already set the table for everyone, plus Ranma. So all they had to do was bring the food out to the table. Ranma had insisted on changing back into a guy first, but that had only been a minor delay. As soon as he was male again, Ranma and his young hostess grabbed the bowel of stir-fry and took it to the dinner table.
Kasumi's introduction for Ranma was a bit embarrassing, however. Mostly because Ranma still hadn’t found the guts to tell her that he wasn't really an angel. But despite that, everyone seemed to accept his introduction as an angel, especially after Kasumi made Ranma 'prove himself' for her.
Little Akane wanted to know how her mommy was doing in heaven, as did her father. But Kasumi saved Ranma from the awkward questions by explaining that he was brand-new angle brought here from the future to look after them all. Ranma wanted to protest the idea, only he thought better of it before saying so, he did need some way of justifying his presence here, and them feeding him.
Read the comments on this episode
See other episodes by Shadowelf1
(Posted Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:42)
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.