"I tell you, it's disgraceful, Tendō-kun! What did I ever do to deserve such a disrespectful boy as that?! Getting married before we could unite the schools!"
Sōun was trying not to break down in tears. "Why did Nodoka go along with it, Saotome-kun?! If we don't have an heir to the schools, the Master might…!"
Powerful hands slammed the weeping patriarch's mouth shut. "DON'T SAY HIS NAME, TENDŌ!" Genma screamed out in fright before he looked around to see if a certain gnomish grandmaster of Musabetsu Kakutō-ryū might come out of the woodwork to make their already dark lives totally bleak and hopeless.
Sōun's eyes widened, and then he rapidly nodded. As the two men — now quite soused thanks to some sake Kasumi had brought out before the sisters had gone off to visit the Saotome siblings at their home — slumped on the floor, Genma then moaned. "We must find out who this bitch is that my idiot boy married!" he drunkenly snarled. "We must find some way to nullify the marriage so that stupid boy can marry your daughter!"
"But how, Saotome-kun?!" Sōun pleaded. "We've no idea who she is…!"
A laugh. "Hah! I can find out soon enough!"
And with that, Genma rose and seemed to make himself fade into nothingness. Sōun gasped on seeing that his old friend was willing to use the Umisen-ken forms to sneak over to his family home, and then he shuddered as joyous tears flowed down his face. "Oh, at last! The schools will be united…!"
In orbit over the Pacific, approaching Japan…
"Cloak status?"
"Cloak is still stable, Tariko," Yasukawa Reina, one of the three command pilots in Fort Erie's Star Flare detachment from 119 Squadron, called out from her position at the flight engineer's station. On normal flights, the CSV-194 would have a crew of five: pilot, co-pilot/navigator, flight engineer, sensor operator and weapons operator; only the first two being commissioned officers in the Air Force. However, given that pilots were trained in all stations these days on the Star Flare, check flights were an all-officer affair. While Tariko and Narumi were the command team on this check flight, the other pilot/co-pilot pairs — Reina and Nakai Mami (now monitoring the weapons station), plus Honjō Arisa (currently at the sensor station) and Asami Junko (who was in the after section of the Star Flare monitoring the engines) — were also aboard to ensure their trusty mount would work right before they headed out.
"E.T.A. Nerima airspace in seven minutes," Narumi reported. "Airspace scan, Arisa?"
"Wait one," the blue-eyed woman with the long electric blue hair (currently in a braided bun under her flight helmet) replied as she tapped controls. "All clear for a direct vertical drop onto the target pocket in airspace at this time, Narumi."
"Roger," Narumi said as she flipped controls. "Reina, call Ranma-san, please."
"Calling now," Reina said as she tapped controls on her board…
Nerima, the Saotome home…
"As a girl, Ranma-kun, you look pretty sharp!"
"I feel embarrassed," Ranma admitted as she fought down the urge to blush. While the Tendō sisters had been taken aback by how similar Ranma was in female form to her own sister, they had quickly got used to it and began to give the transformed martial artist some fashion tips to improve her looks, especially given the fact that her wife was (despite her Japanese Catholic upbringing) an Avalonian and fully bisexual to boot. "It was bad enough that Oyaji dragged me into that place without understanding a damned word of Chinese — even if we DO share the same kanji system! — but to have me dropped into the Drowned Girl spring?!" A sigh. "Thank the gods that Shān and her great-grandmother were so understanding when we went to their village!"
"Who are they?" Kasumi asked as everyone enjoyed their tea.
"Nǚ Shānpú and her great-grandmother, Nǚ Kělún," Ranma replied. "'Shampoo' and 'Cologne' are sorta okay ways of saying their real names. They're part of the Nǚjiézú tribe out in Qīnghǎi; it's a tribe of warrior-women distantly related to the Amazons of old Greek myth. People call them the 'Chinese Amazons' because of that." She sipped her tea. "They live in a village close to Jusenkyō. Oyaji and I arrived there just after we got cursed and he nearly starts a fight when he tried to eat the first prize banquet because they were having a tournament to prove who was the best warrior there."
Nodoka moaned. "What happened, Ranma?!"
"Well, when Shān defeated her last challenger, she found out Oyaji was trying to scarf her banquet, so she challenged him." Ranma snorted. "He tried to shrug it off on me like he normally does, but I refused, telling him in front of Shān and everyone else that I wasn't taking any blame for the dishonourable behaviour he learned from Master Happōsai." A laugh. "Instant I said that name, they were all over him…"
Laughter filled the living room, and then everyone perked on hearing Ranma's cell phone ring. "Moshi-moshi, Saotome here," she said as she flipped open the device.
"Ohayō, Ranma-san!"
Ranma beamed. "Hey, Reina-chan! Where are you guys?!"
"We're about four minutes out from you now," the green-haired tomboy with the dark blue eyes replied from orbit. "We'll do a straight vertical drop over your home and beam you out when we're fifty kilometres overhead. You got supplies to last you a while?"
"Sure; haven't really unpacked my backpack…"
Ranma then froze as Kanami tensed. "Oh, shit…!"
"What?!" Nabiki demanded.
"Oyaji!" Ranma snarled…
In orbit…
"Damn!" Tariko snarled as she keyed the thruster controls to pour some more speed into the Star Flare as the eastern coast of Honshū loomed ahead. "Okay, it's a combat extraction! Junko, get on the controls! Beam them all out when you get a lock!"
Junko ran over to the materialiser controls. "All of them?!"
"All of them!" Tariko snapped.
"Roger that! Materialiser warming up!"
Nodoka growled as she stood, reaching for the family sword. "That stupid man…!"
"Ofukuro, he's using the Sen-ken cloak!" Ranma warned as she bolted up.
The older woman smirked. "Don't worry, Ranma! I took some lessons from the Shinmei-ryū dōjō in Kyōto while you and your father were gone," she declared as she drew the blade and moved to open the front door, her eyes narrow as she locked in on a certain nexus point of ki before she raised her sword high, focusing her own ki.
"ZANKŪ-SHŌ!"
A narrow bolt of ki energy lashed out from her to slam right into something that was barely visible to most on-lookers, causing people to gasp as a man in a dirty white gi appeared out of nowhere to crash face-first into the street just beyond the front gate of the family home. As people nearly began to chatter excitedly, Nodoka smiled as she re-sheathed her weapon. "Genma, I told you that you were forbidden from coming to this house until you stopped this foolishness about our son marrying any of Sōun's daughters!" she openly scolded as her husband tried to stagger back up, the stunned look on his face quite comical to see given his glasses were knocked askew. Before he could say anything else, Nodoka turned and walked inside, closing and locking the door behind her as a pained groan escaped him before he fell once onto his face!
"Lock's achieved on all of them!" Junko called out.
"Energize!" Tariko ordered.
"Hai!"
And as the interior of the Star Flare echoed with the sound of the materialiser being activated, Junko breathed out as six people appeared on the pad before her, five of them seated as if around an invisible coffee table and the sixth standing. As the new arrivals all blinked in surprise, the lieutenant chuckled in embarrassment. "Um, sorry about that, minna-san," she said as everyone all gazed with both confusion and surprise at her. "Tariko-san ordered you all to be extracted from there when Reina heard that Ranma-san's father was coming to try to kidnap him away from Shinobu-san!"
The Saotome siblings exchanged confused looks with their mother and the Tendō sisters and then…
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(Posted Wed, 12 Jan 2011 05:13)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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