Ranma sighed as he continued to walk around the Academy, looking for some girl Nabiki swore up and down they needed for their team.
Not that Ranma knew who she was talking about; he’d missed those apparent anime episodes while in China dealing with Saffron. Damned bird keeps wrecking things for me. Made me miss my shows… What happened if I missed a super-cool move I could learn here…
They had been there several days so far with still no word from Mihoshi, making him question just how long a genie meeting could go on. Don’t get him wrong, he didn’t mind what he was picking up here—the prospect of using what he learned here the next time his rivals decided to challenge him was too good to ignore. But part of him wanted to get back home.
A much larger part however was ecstatic to be away from that chaos and learning new things. This world was built for someone like him: challenges, new techniques and styles, new challengers.
But must of all: no damned fiancées!
Oh sure, in this world the fathers were dead, the mothers lived—he’d admit that Kimiko Tendo was obviously the main support in that family after having met the woman a few times—and the Tendo sisters were still around, if age-reduced by a year when compared to him. There was also that damned Jusenkyo curse still on him—not that anyone he’d met would explain just how he’d gotten it on this world, at least not without saying he needed to achieve jounin before his mother would explain it to him—but there was not one damned person claiming his hand/honor as their own or insulted by his family somehow.
Well, there were probably a few ninja clans his father had pissed off—Genma Saotome had apparently been a pretty descent ninja before he died … of food poisoning at a hot spring—during his adventures, but they were foreign shinobi, so they didn’t count.
Plus he was in a school he could actually get behind! Sure, it had some boring classes, but nowhere near as many as Furinkan did—plus the staff was nowhere near as insane as Furinkan’s.
Who the hell institutes a three-day weekend in honor of the pineapple?
Add to that the fact he had gotten to kick the Uchiha’s ass in taijutsu spars today, and Ranma was running high on success. After all, they’d get back home … eventually.
Well it wasn’t like someone wouldn’t come looking for them in time. After all, they’d been gone for a week. Someone was bound to show up and try dragging them back … right?
Right?
Anyway, he needed to focus at the moment. According to Nabiki, they needed to ‘recruit’ a third person not assigned a team in canon to have a shot at staying alive long enough for the genie to come get them. She proceeded to outline some huge plan, but he was lost after the first few moments, and started to doze off.
That resulted in him learning that Mrs. Tendo apparently let her daughters learn some low-level suiton techniques—techniques he was going to have to beg Mrs. Tendo to learn, since his own mother here refused to teach him high-level techniques above what could be expected of a low-level genin until he passed his exam. He was halfway drowned before he finally understood her plan.
He was to look for some girl who was a genjutsu prodigy and find a way for her to not only get out from under some somewhat lazy jounin, see if he could fix whatever issues she had that made her so weak, and get her to be assigned to Iruka’s class so that she could be in the same genin pool for their team.
Ranma of course took the challenge … and had no idea how he was going to pull it off. Sure, he’d managed to swipe the repaired moxibustion scroll from the Old Ghoul—thanks to flirting with Shampoo … and the Cologne being out after Happosai for some reason attacked her.
Not that he had anything to do with it; you’d never be able to prove differently. Besides, he never knew when the Old Perv would pull out something similar from it again, let alone suddenly remember some of the other points on it.
He also had what he learned from Tofu’s books while ‘visiting’ the good doctor. Granted, he wasn’t a Hyuuga, but if the good doctor could do so much with a few taps, what could someone with Ranma’s capabilities do?
But first, he needed to find this pale girl. It would have been easier if Nabiki could pull off a proper Henge.
But in the end … he would have to guess it was someone behind the door with three guards outside of it; not something one saw everyday at the Academy.
Walking past them as innocently as possible, even waving at them, Ranma rounded the corner and engaged the Umisenken. If Naruto had no trouble fooling ninjas of ANBU-level skills, surely the Umisenken could do better at keeping him hidden in plain sight.
“Now … where’s a window?” he murmured, as he doubled back. It probably would be better not to try and sneak past the guards at the door when Academy windows were so poorly guarded.
Nabiki sighed as she looked at her wall, now filled with posters of medical images, chakra flows, and human dummies to draw the flows with. With any luck and the hope that Saotome could follow a simple plan—find girl, observe energies, come back to think of way to win her over—he’d be there soon.
Looking around, she double-checked what she’d been able to get discretely from the Tendo Library. If they had any chance of pulling this off and getting such a powerful force into the mix—and hopefully on their team—they would need to pull off a miracle.
And hopefully give the girl enough of a push not to have Yakumo’s Idou come out or at least give the girl the tools to keep the inner demon at bay, if not outright kill it.
It wasn’t that difficult of a plan. If Yakumo got into the class—especially if the duo managed to help improve her stamina—then not only would the girl be assigned to a team to help her development—much like Kakashi to help Sasuke thanks to similar eyes—but they’d want the girl to be surrounded by those she trusted and who were valuable to her development. With that done, it would almost be assured—hopefully with some words from the Mothers Tendo and Saotome—that they would be a genin team. Then all she would need to do is hope that they didn’t stick them as a team under Kurenai.
“Maybe Yamato,” she murmured, as she looked at her coded diagram. The guy was certainly dedicated to strengthening a team, something they would definitely need thanks to that damned genie.
Chuunin Exam, Invasion by Sound/Sand, Akatsuki… It wasn’t like she could request missions to get them out of everything. Sure, it would be easy to tank their chances for the Exam, since it required all three to attend. But if they kept ‘leaving’ before bad things happened, it would raise eyebrows.
And she most certainly did not want to visit Konoha’s favorite interrogator. If they learned what she and Ranma knew about the future of this world, the duo would never see the light of day again until the ditzy genie finally arrived to take them home.
Assuming of course Orochimaru’s spies didn’t take them out first. She had no desire to be a lab rat or receive a cursed seal, thank you.
Knock-knock!
Blinking, she turned towards her window, spotting the familiar pigtailed boy’s face smiling at her. “That was quick,” she murmured, as she went to let him in. She had expected it to take longer to study the girl’s aura and see what he might be able to do.
“Heya, Biki!” he said with a smile as he entered in … with someone clinging to his back.
Someone very pale and very familiar… “Oh no…” she said, palming her face. He did not just do what she thought he did, did she?
“We’re here!” smiled Ranma, as Yakumo Kurama clung to his back. “So, we gonna do this or what? Oh! And can we get some of whatever your mom’s cooking? Using the Umisenken for so long makes a guy hungry!”
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(Posted Sat, 03 Jan 2009 14:05)
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