(Note: This option is based on one particular part of the storyline in the multiple-series crossover Suikoden 1/2, written by MadHat886 and currently available at Fanfiction.net. A gracious nod to him, of course. G.)
Nerima…
"Ohayô!"
"Ohayô, Onê-chan! Whoo! What smells so good?"
Kasumi smiled as she turned back to her stove. "We're going to do a little Korean today, Nabiki. Some sundubu tchigae, a tofu stew I learned about when I visited the Korean food store on the other side of Nerima. I wanted to try it."
Nabiki hummed as she walked over to deeply breathe in the mixture of tofu, seafood, vegetables and hot chilli pepper. While it seemed odd to create such a dish in a traditionally Japanese household, Nabiki knew her elder sister loved to experiment (as a way of chasing away the boredom of working 24/7 as the unofficial housewife in this place) with foreign foods. Of course, given that their houseguests had travelled all over eastern Asia (including Korea and China) to enhance Ranma's training, such servings of Chinese and Korea dishes … even the odd foray into Vietnamese, Filipino and Malaysian cuisines … was often applauded loudly by the Saotome men. Sôun, who had travelled far and wide as well in his youth, didn't mind the odd change or so. The only one who didn't really approve of it was Nodoka, though she didn't openly complain about it as doing such would be rude. Not that all the other crap that woman has unleashed since she came here hasn't been rude enough, the middle Tendô daughter mused as she turned to get the cutlery out and set the table.
As soon as she was in the living room, she stopped on seeing a sobbing Sôun with the morning paper. "What's with you, Otô-chan?" she asked.
A sonic wail responded. "WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! RANMA-KUN AND GENMA ARE NOWHERE IN THE HOUSE! NOW THE SCHOOLS WILL NEVER BE JOINED! WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
CLONK!
Sôun was sent sailing through the air to land head-first into the koi pond. "Quiet, boy!" Happôsai snarled as he took his place at the table. "We don't need to hear that racket this early in the day!" He then smiled. "Ohayô, Nabiki-chan! Sleep well?"
"Well, it's nice to NOT be woken up in the morning at the crack of dawn because Oji-chan wants to get some early morning exercise and tosses Ranma-kun out the window into the koi pond," Nabiki admitted as she finished setting things up, and then she sat down across from the aged grandmaster. "I've got a good idea where Ranma-kun is, but where did Oji-chan went off to, Ojii-chan? I'd figure he be nursing a hangover, too."
"Went up to Gunma to visit an old friend of his, Haeko Mago," Happôsai stated.
Nabiki blinked. "Oh, Tsueko-san's mom. Sounds good."
The door to the kitchen opened. "Ojii-san, will Oji-san be back soon?" Kasumi asked.
He shook his head. "No, he's gone the whole day."
"Hai, dômo."
The door closed as Sôun staggered back into the living room, using a towel to wipe his hair dry as he stared wide-eyed at Happôsai. "HAEKO MAGO?!" he bellowed in disbelief as he placed himself immediately before the grandmaster, nearly shoving Nabiki out of the way, which earned him a resentful look from his daughter. "Master! Why are you allowing Saotome-kun to go visit THAT monster?! You know what she is!"
The older man seemed to freeze Sôun in place with an icy stare. "Sôun, regardless if Haeko-chan is tôshi or not, I will say only this: that woman, even now, demonstrates TEN times the determination to master her skills than you AND Akane show COMBINED!"
Sôun awked as he tried not to prostrate himself in front of the grandmaster, and then he jolted on feeling a billowing battle aura erupt from his left. "Otô-chan," Nabiki snarled. "Next time you want to kiss the feet of your master, don't do it from MY place at the dinner table." She then looked away. "Just for that, if you come crawling to me for booze money this week, you won't see a single yen."
Sôun instantly jumped back into his traditional place at the table, and then he froze as the rest of Nabiki's message sank in before another shower of tears exploded from him. "WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! NABIKI YELLED AT ME! NOW THE SCHOOLS WILL NEVER BE JOINED! WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
"SÔUN TENDÔ!" a voice shrieked out from nearby.
Sôun balked as he spun around to find Nodoka glaring at him. "N-n-n-Nodoka…"
The Saotome matriarch was trying not to tap on her feet as she stared at him. "Honestly, Sôun! Such an unmanly display in front of your daughter like that! Grow up and act your age! What would poor Kimiko think if she saw you like this?!"
"Saotome-san!"
Nodoka herself froze as Kasumi stood at the doorway to the kitchen, a very displeased look on her face. "K-k-Kasumi…!"
A sigh. "While I do understand and applaud your desire to see Otô-san act his age, NEVER invoke Okâ-san's memory while in this house! Do you understand me?!"
The older woman rapidly nodded, and then she meekly moved to take her place at the dinner table. She then blinked before looking around. "Where is Ranma?"
"That's what I'd like to know, too!" a new voice declared.
"Ohayô, Akane," Nabiki said as Akane came downstairs, an empty bucket in her hand, which she put in the genkan before taking her place at the table. "Something wrong?"
"Hai, something's wrong!" Akane snarled. "Ranma's nowhere in the house!"
Sôun jolted, and then he spun around to stare at his youngest, his eyes wide with panic. "What?! Ranma-kun's not here?!" To Nabiki. "Where is he?!"
"Don't look at me, Otô-chan. I'm not his keeper," Nabiki stated.
Sôun blinked, and then he shuddered, the ki billowing around him as he moved to form a demon head to scare Nabiki into obeying him. Unfortunately — thought Sôun himself never could make himself believe this — all of his children had long ago learned how to make that particular technique of his useless. "Otô-chan, keep bothering me and it'll be no booze money for a month!" Nabiki warned.
The proto-demon head vanished as the Tendô patriarch instantly curled in on himself. By then, Kasumi was walking in with trays of earthen bowls filled with steaming stew. Happôsai's and Akane's noses instantly twitched on detecting that welcome scent. "Oh, it's tofu stew!" the latter said as Kasumi placed the tray down and distributed the bowls to everyone there. "Looks good!" she said as she picked up her chopsticks.
"Indeed it does!" Happôsai said as he picked up his chopsticks and dug in. "You get this recipe over from Kim-san over at the market in Kasuga-chô, Kasumi-chan?"
"Hai, Ojii-san, the very same place," Kasumi said.
As soon as everyone was served, people called out "Itadakimasu!" before digging in. "Pity Ranma isn't here to enjoy this," Akane mused. "He loves Korean food."
Nodoka tensed on hearing that. "He's busy with his first true student at this time, Akane," Happôsai stated. "He'll be gone the whole weekend."
Akane and Sôun both froze on hearing that, and then they spun as one to stare at the diminutive grandmaster. "'FIRST TRUE STUDENT?!'" both screamed out.
"Hai, first true student," the older man said as he glared at them both. "What's wrong with that? You two still believe that fiction that Akane here should be Ranma's first true student? Hah!" he spat out before turning back to his meal. "Get serious!"
Akane snorted. "Not that Ranma's ever taught a thing!" she snapped.
"He has, unofficially," Happôsai stated. "He's helped increase your speed by making sure he dodges all your attempts at trying to hit him while you spar with him in the dôjô. That's as far as he knows I'll allow him to do."
Silence.
"Why will you not allow my son to train his fiancée?" Nodoka demanded.
"Two things. One: Akane is technically still Sôun's student, even though he's totally abandoned any attempts at teaching her," Happôsai stated.
Sôun broke out in a wail. "I never abandoned Akane!"
"Shut up, you!" Happôsai snarled, his glare making Sôun duck, before he turned to gaze on Akane. "And two: you constantly treat martial arts as a hobby! You have all this potential and you don't even begin to tap into a small percentage of it! Even if you've tried to push yourself, you don't have even the barest IOTA of dedication to the Art that Tsueko-chan has! Therefore, until you change your mind, I will see to it that Ranma will NEVER look upon you as a potential student! Understood?!"
Akane shuddered, and then she seemed to pause. "Tsueko Mago? Is that the girl that was on the television news last night with Ranma, that alien and that other girl?"
"The same."
"The one with the magatama earring?"
Happôsai smirked. "The same."
Sôun gasped. "MAGATAMA?! MASTER, YOU CAN'T…!"
"QUIET!"
Sôun was instantly frozen by that horrible roar from the elderly grandmaster. Even Nodoka was stunned speechless by the thunder in Happôsai's voice. As soon as things fell quiet again, the grandmaster nodded. "Much better," he said before turning back to his breakfast. "Akane-chan, you father and current school sensei has completely abandoned your training as a student of Musabetsu Kakutô-ryû," he then declared as he gazed on the youngest daughter. "As the grandmaster of the school and your father's sensei, it is my right and duty to grant you release from your father's school if you so desire it because of his unwillingness to teach you. Do you desire this?"
Akane blinked, and then she stared at Sôun for a moment. Seeing the pleading look on his face — if she did as Happôsai suggested, the Tendô-ryû would be effectively defunct, with only Sôun himself as practitioner — she then stared at Kasumi and Nabiki. Both of them, much to her surprise, were quick to give her encouraging looks. On seeing that, she then sighed before turning back to Happôsai. She then gave him a deep bow. "Sensei, with most profound regret, I must say 'yes.'"
A nod. "So be it. As of now, you are free to seek instruction from a worthy master regardless of whom that master is." He then raised a finger. "I would recommend though, that if the time comes and you seek out your own mastery, do it from one of the independent schools. It'll give you a much better base to work from in the future."
Akane nodded. "I understand, Sensei."
At that moment, Sôun collapsed in a faint. Akane and Happôsai turned back to their food as everyone continued to eat, though Nodoka was staring wide-eyed at the youngest Tendô…
Sometime later…
"Eh? You actually learned who Ranma's great-grandfather is?"
A sigh. "Took me a while to learn it," Nabiki admitted. She and Kasumi were currently seated in the former's bedroom, the door closed and locked as they enjoyed early morning tea. Nodoka was currently in the living room watching television while Sôun was passed out in his bedroom, Happôsai had gone off on his morning rounds and Akane had headed out on the excuse of visiting her best friends Yuka Tokoro and Sayuri Asano. The older Tendô daughters didn't doubt for a moment that Akane was really making her way to either the Nekohanten or Okonomiyaki U-chan's to enjoy a wonderful rendezvous with her lovers and pass on the news that she was now officially free of Sôun and his family school so that the Nyûjiézú warrior-maiden could at last take the youngest Tendô on as her personal student. "Nodoka's family did a pretty good job in hiding who he was. After all, Ranma's grandfather was born during the Second World War. You just couldn't believe the mess things were in back then, especially when the American poured it on and tried to blast everyone into submission." Her eyes narrowed. "But there were people who believed in what the Americans and MacArthur-gensui were bringing in after the war ended and the militarists were tossed out of power. One of them worked in the National Registrar. Try as Nodoka's great-grandparents did to bribe him into making those records disappear, he wouldn't budge." A smirk. "I think he might have been a fan of the man, given how much he did to help Japan recover after the war."
Kasumi shuddered, a touch of real excitement filling her. She had been told the basic truth of Ranma's ancestry by Ranma himself three weeks ago, at the same time as Nabiki when the heir of the Saotome-ryû revealed his plan to abandon Nerima once and for all and go live with his real girlfriend in Kimitsu, with the full blessings of his father and the grandmaster of Musabetsu Kakutô-ryû. However, Ranma had teasingly kept back one important detail: the actual identity of his maternal great-grandfather. When he held back on that information, he had told them, "I need to learn if Hiojii-san's still alive or not." He even refused Nabiki's immediate offer for help, stating that he didn't want to get her in trouble with her father in case he learned what happened and tried to stop it as a way of protecting the future of his dôjô. Much less allowing the news to get to Nodoka Saotome and make things really painful for a lot of people.
Well, to Nabiki Tendô, who did pride herself on her information-gathering skills, that might as well have been a red flag to her. Deep down suspecting that Ranma may have just let her know that so she could go forth and learn the story about his American relations, Nabiki plunged ahead, keeping her inquiries very discrete just in case someone who might have been a friend of Nodoka's picked up on it and relayed the news to Ranma's mother as a warning. Though Nabiki personally didn't think that was really possible. Given the considerable arrogance Ranma's mother tended to display when it came to dealing with things around her — in her own weird way, Nodoka Saotome could be as bad as Kodachi Kunô — the middle Tendô daughter believed that the chances of someone trying to help support a sixty year-old LIE like THIS were small.
"So who is he?" Kasumi hissed, her whole body quivering with excitement. Like her sister, she didn't really care about the fact that Ranma possessed American blood in his ancestry. To spout out rude obscenities at something like that was something that would be expected of a person like Tatewaki Kunô, whom Kasumi utterly despised for what he had done to Akane over the years, not to mention what he had been trying to do to Ranma since the latter had come to Nerima. And while there were many good aspects of Japanese culture that Kasumi respected and adhered to, there were some things that desperately needed to be finally tossed into the dustbin of history. Especially when one considered the impending population implosion a rapidly declining birthrate was about to unleash. "Nabiki, PLEASE! I want to know!"
Nabiki smirked as she handed over a folded sheet of paper to her sister. Kasumi took it with a trembling hand, and then she opened it up to stare at the name written there. A moment later, she then gasped, "Oh, MY!"
"That's right," Nabiki said with a grin. "He's none other than…"
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(Posted Fri, 02 Oct 2009 23:49)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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