Cologne sighed as she massaged her temple with one hand. “I see Nodoka’s finally let you in on her little secret.”
“Yup,” Ranma confirmed flatly.
“And from that scowl on your face, I’m guessing that you reacted the way anyone who isn’t Nodoka would have expected you to react.”
“Two for two.”
“And she mentioned that we knew about it, so now you’ve come here to grill us.”
“Bingo.”
The Matriarch sighed yet again. “Shampoo,” she called to the back room, “could you come here, please?”
Within seconds, the lavender-haired Champion of the Amazons emerged. “What is it, Great-grand…” Shampoo trailed off when she saw Ranma standing before her in full costumed glory. Her eyes widened, and her mouth turned up into a broad smile as she rushed forward. “Airen became Sun Princess! Shampoo so… happy?” The young woman’s attempt at a hug was cut abruptly short when Ranma pointed her katana at her face. “Um… something go wrong?”
“Nodoka Saotome strikes again,” Cologne explained, prompting a groan from her great-granddaughter.
“Awww,” Shampoo said with a wince, “what she do this time?”
Ranma replied, “She told me about this whole magical girl thing and just expected me ta go along with it, no questions asked. What’s more, she didn’t even bother apologizing for anything—it took Amaterasu herself to convince me to go along with all this.”
“Aiyah… so you not know what we actually doing here yet?”
“Nope. Came here to find out.”
“Great…”
“Why don’t you sit, down, Ranma?” Cologne said. “This will take a while.”
Ranma obliged, but as she did so, a thought occurred to her. “Hey, how come you’re not calling me ‘Son-in-Law?’”
“One thing at a time, child,” Cologne replied as she got onto her usual perch on top of her staff. “First, you should learn how the Amazon tribe came to be associated with the Saotome family to begin with.”
Ranma nodded, quietly filing away the confirmation of what she’d already suspected—that the reason her mother referred to her transformation device as the “Saotome family blade” was that her father took her name when they married (something that Genma had conveniently never told his son). “Mom mentioned something about you getting saved by one of her ancestors, and that’s about it—so how much of that is bullshit?”
“Oh, it’s entirely true. Your great-great-grandmother did indeed save me from the clutches of an eldritch abomination shortly after my fifteenth birthday, earning the admiration of my own great-grandmother—the Matriarch at the time, and cementing a semi-formal bond between the Amazons and the Taiyohime.”
“Huh, what do you know—she was actually honest.”
“Oh, your mother very rarely tells outright falsehoods; most of the time, she prefers to use half-truths when deceiving others.”
“Wonderful.”
“In this case,” Cologne continued, “what she didn’t mention is that I also made a personal vow to repay the kindness shown by your ancestor in any way I could. In fact, I swore on the honor of the Tribe itself, which means that fulfilling that vow took precedence over my own personal honor. It’s a matter taken very seriously, to the point that each Amazon can make only one such promise in her lifetime, and it needs to be approved by a member of the Council—but I’m getting ahead of myself.”
“Yeah, let’s start with you being in on me getting cursed.”
“We were ‘in on it’ only in the sense that we knew that the reason you came to Jusenkyo was to acquire the Nannichuan curse, because that’s what Nodoka had told us ahead of time—giving us the distinct impression that you’d already consented, I might add.”
Ranma rolled her eyes; apparently her mother had a rather nasty habit of pulling the same kind of shit with others as well. “And how did you know I’d fall into that spring while training?”
“We didn’t. We thought you were just going to jump in—though we were prepared to give you the ‘appropriate’ curse if you made a mistake.”
“Well, that’s just spiffy. So if you knew it was me, why the whole Kiss of Death thing?”
“There is no Kiss of Death.”
“What?!” Ranma could hardly believe this.
“Nor is there, strictly speaking, a Kiss of Marriage in our culture. In fact, pretty much all of the ‘rules’ about Outsiders are either blatant lies or partial truths.”
“Then what the hell was Shampoo doing?!”
Cologne sighed again. “We’ll need to backtrack a bit to explain that. You see, the way that the Amazons have assisted the Taiyohime is by lending her the services of our strongest warrior to help her in the fight against evil—in other words, a sidekick. I was the first, but ever since that, whenever the title of Taiyohime is passed on to the next generation, we hold a tournament to determine who deserves the honor of assisting her.”
“And that’s what the tournament was for?”
“Yes.”
“And the food…”
“Was for Shampoo, but she was going to share it with you anyway—you simply caught us off-guard by showing up sooner than expected. Now, again, we thought that your mother had told you about us, so Shampoo wanted to spar with you to prove that she was worthy of the honor of being your Champion.”
“Right. And when I won, she kissed me.”
“The traditional Amazon greeting between close friends, of any gender.”
“And then the Jusenkyo Guide mentioned the Kiss of Death.”
Cologne sighed yet again. “in order to keep Beijing from interfering with our way of life, we’ve spread some rather intimidating rumors about ourselves in the general populace. The Guide, unfortunately, hadn’t been at his post long enough to learn the truth, and you and your father hightailed it out of there before we could correct him.”
“Wonderful. So why did Shampoo try to kill me the first time she came to Nerima?”
“Shampoo not try that,” the teenage Amazon protested.
“Um, I believe your words were: ‘You I kill!’”
Shampoo let out a puff of frustration. “That because of Shampoo’s problems with Japanese—never good with languages. Been in Japan more than year, still not get right.”
“Yeah… why is that?”
“Well, Shampoo thought being forced to speak Japanese all time make better with practice, but Japanese understand Shampoo speaking like this, so only need to grow vocabulary. Now Shampoo think in Japanese, but grammar still bad.”
“Right.”
“But even worse when Shampoo first come to Japan. Used pocket Japanese-Mandarin dictionary, forget it not include Amazon figures of speech. So word Amazons use for very hard training…”
“…got mistranslated as the word we use for murder, and you wanted to jump right in, because you’d assumed Mom already told me the truth about the Kiss of Death, or something like that, so you started wailing on me with your chúi.”
Shampoo nodded. “Very confused when Ranma run away.”
“Right… so, why the Kiss of Marriage thing? That another fake rumor?”
“Absolutely not,” Cologne replied, stiffening a bit. “Do you really think we’d force members of the Tribe to marry people who knew they could physically abuse them if they wanted without giving them a choice in the matter? Defeating an Amazon of the opposite sex only makes an Outsider eligible for consideration.”
“But the Amazon rule book…”
Shampoo winced again. “Shampoo translate herself as part of Japanese lessons, make another mistake.”
“So when you glomped me with the whole ‘Wo Ai Ni’ thing…”
“Shampoo give consent. After all, you Taiyohime. Already know you honorable. Also, closer relationship make job easier, yes?”
“Uh, I guess… So, the shampoo you used on Akane?”
“Thought reason you not able to talk about being Taiyohime that you need keep secret.”
“Shampoo…” Cologne said with a glower.
“And to get rid of competition,” Shampoo admitted. “Ranma never make any indication he accept marriage arrangement. Thought Akane obstacle to making decision.”
“But I’ve said no a lot of times since then.”
“Yes, but you’re also allowed to change your mind at any time,” Cologne replied, “so there was no reason for Shampoo to stop trying.”
“Wonderful. So why’d you leave the first time?”
“When Ranma show Shampoo curse, start telling all sorts of things that Shampoo knew, as if not already known. Shampoo… really confused. Went back to Jusenkyo to talk with Great-grandmother. She go to Guide’s home to use telephone to call Nodoka.”
“And that’s when we learned that your mother had basically screwed you over, and that you in fact didn’t know anything about the Taiyohime. Amaterasu had already expressed her anger rather vehemently, and I figured that if it was good enough for a Sun Goddess, it was good enough for me.”
“Right. So why’d you come back?”
“Well, that’s when your mother cashed in that promise I made centuries ago. She wanted us to help train you for your role as the Taiyohime, to fill in the gaps that your father never imagined needed filling. That, in and of itself, we would have gladly done on our own. However, she didn’t want us to mention the Taiyohime until she had the chance to bring it up with you personally. So, since we had to come up with a cover story, we decided to base it on the misconceptions you already had. Nodoka used her considerable wealth to set up the Nekohanten—she’s the one who actually owns the restaurant, while I’m just the manager—and we came over, with the primary goal of helping you with learn how to defend against various magical and mental techniques, since your father pretty much had the physical covered.”
“That why Shampoo get Maonichuan curse to help with Neko-ken,” Shampoo added.
“Of course, being the Matriarch of our Tribe, that meant that local politics occasionally followed me here,” Cologne said. “Hence Herb, Pink and Link, and the entire Saffron incident.”
“Okay… so what about Mousse?”
Cologne’s sighs were beginning to get repetitive. “How much time do you have?” she asked, although it was obvious that she hoped Ranma would give an answer along the lines of, “not much.”
“Well, I guess that depends…”
“Short version, Mousse is member of traveling Amazon drama troupe. Best actor in Tribe,” Shampoo said.
“And the long version?”
“Better Ranma hear from Mousse himself. That one is… doozy.”
Seeing that the two Amazons were hell-bent on passing the buck on this one, Ranma moved on to her final question. “Okay… so… why did you let this bullshit keep going?”
“We promised your mother that we’d do it until the ‘proper time’ arrived for her to tell you about the Taiyohime. Unfortunately, by then, she’d realized that she’d made a big mistake, and she became very nervous about figuring out how to tell you. So, she kept procrastinating, until she finally got up the nerve to tell you, which, as you’ve already mentioned, did not go very well.”
“Ya got that right,” Ranma agreed. “So… I’m supposed to just forgive you for all this, then?”
“Although that would be convenient, we aren’t that foolish. We plan to do all we can to make amends for our part in this charade.”
“Um, Shampoo still want to be Champion for Taiyohime,” the teenage girl added somewhat timidly. “That… that okay?”
Finally, it was Ranma’s turn to sigh. She was still mad at the Amazons, but she’d also never seen such a pleading look on Shampoo’s face—it seemed that she really did want to make up for what she’d done, and becoming her sidekick would certainly give her the chance to do that. “Yeah, we might as well give it a shot.”
Shampoo squealed in delight as she glomped onto her new boss. “Thank you thank you thank you!” She then gave Ranma a kiss—traditional Amazon greeting, the magical girl reminded herself—and released the embrace. “Shampoo been designing costumes for year now, go get drawings from room to show Taiyohime, yes?”
“Uh, sure.” As Shampoo scampered off to her bedroom, Ranma turned her attention back to Cologne. “As for you, I’m assuming you want a chance to make up for your part in this mess, too, right?”
“I believe that’s what I said…. Do you have something in mind?”
“Depends,” Ranma said with a smirk. “Can you read 2,000-year-old Japanese scrolls?”
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(Posted Mon, 27 Sep 2010 06:15)
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