“At last the foul demon has come to meet his just punishment!” Kuno stood at the school gates, bokken in hands and raised skywards in a high guard. Behind him was a crowd of what looked to be about half the school.
Ranma, Akane, Nabiki, and Ukyo all sighed in unison. Kuno ignored them. “I will give you a moment to repent!”
Ranma rolled his eyes and took a swaggering step forward. “No sword today, Kuno?”
“I need no blade to end you,” Kuno boasted. “This noble instrument with which I teach my lessers is more than adequate to destroy you and banish your curses from Akane Tendo and the pigtailed girl.”
Ranma turned his back to Kuno and looked to Akane. “Do you want him?” he asked casually.
Akane glared at Ranma. “How can you ask that!?” she asked, gagging at the thought.
“I mean to fight!” Ranma snapped.
Akane blinked, anger and disgust both collapsing in on themselves. “Oh. No, you can have your fun.”
“You see! The fierce Akane cannot be so easily compelled to harm my magnificent self!”
Akane rushed Kuno in the blink of an eye and her fist embedded itself into his stomach. She held that pose for long enough for his eyes to focus on her outraged expression and then she pulled back and spun away. Her fist pulled out of his gut as she pivoted, but she brought up her opposite foot and kicked the side of his head with punishing force. Rather than kicking up as she usually did, she caught him on the downswing of her kick and knocked him to the ground hard enough to bury his face down several centimeters. She finished her spin looking down and Kuno, hands on her hips. “Hmph,” she snorted and spun on one heel to walk back to Ranma. She was pleased by his stunned expression. “You may get rid of him now,” she said with the grandeur she knew Nabiki pulled off better than she ever did.
“I...fight...on...” Kuno groaned.
Ranma obliged by kicking Kuno over the school.
Nabiki watched the delusional projectile. “Roof of the nurse's office?” she asked.
“I was feeling sorry for him,” Ranma said.
“You know they haven't gotten around to putting the mattress on the roof yet,” Hiroshi said conversationally, walking over to Ranma.
Ranma shrugged. “Oops.”
Hiroshi's approach triggered a reaction in the crowd which surged forwards. A dozen lungs filled to yell out three times as many questions. In moments the air was an unintelligible clamoring. Akane ducked into a defensive stance and pushed away people trying to stroke her hair to see if it was real while trying to get some headway. “Get off me you perverts!” she yelled.
Ranma was only having slightly better luck. He was being mobbed mostly by girls who knew he wouldn't use force against them. Instead of pushing his way through, he was trying to jump out. But every time he landed he was mobbed again.
Ukyo was the least experienced at being a freakshow and had her battle spatula out, using its flat sides to leverage open a path to safety. Her obvious intolerance for the attention quickly made her an unpopular target, and she was the first to make it into the safety of the school.
Nabiki held back with her own mob of attention. Most of these were students with yen trying to buy answers, but a few were her lackeys looking for instructions. She turned to the latter and opened up her bag. “These are info packets. Page through them quick,” she said, handing out stacks of small pamphlets. “Then get into that crowd and sell them off.”
One girl glanced at the price stamp in the corner. “Is this a misprint?”
“No,” Nabiki said. “I need these answers out there.”
“But this isn't even half the usual rate.”
“It'll come out of my cut, don't worry,” Nabiki said. She was barely operating above cost; with the blow to her credibility last week this mess was seriously damaging her local income. “Just this once. We'll be back to business as usual tomorrow. Anyone wants to buy info not in there, they see me at lunch. Got it?”
“Right,” the girls said. They dispersed into the crowd and got busy hawking their wares.
Nabiki glanced up at the clock. Ten minutes until class. They were right on schedule. The crowd should thin to a third of its current size in the next twenty seconds, the remainder would be more or less willing to listen to quick answers. Two minutes after that the warning bell would sound and everyone else would retreat, except for the trio's classmates. The venue would change to the classroom, they'd miss the first two or so periods in intense questioning, the teachers wouldn't intervene out of their own curiosity. Not that they'd admit it; ignoring the weirdness as much as possible was the only way most of them got the courage to come in every day.
Nabiki nodded. The plan was going to work.
She had forgotten that a lot of plans had worked lately. Nerima doesn't look kindly on that. In this case, Nerima manifested in the form of Gosunkugi.
Gosunkugi was not wearing his uniform. Nor was he wearing his ritual garb, exactly. He kept the candles strapped to his head but below that was dressed in a tunic wrap, straight pants, and soft leather shoes all a matte black, with a cape of black and red. A set of plastic fangs completed the costume, making him look like Dracula's inbred nephew more than anything else. He carried in his hands a small mallet and a polished nail. He cackled and pointed the nail at Ranma. “And now you will fall before me, Saotome!”
Ranma hung his head and sighed. “What are you on about this time, Gosunkugi?”
Akane frowned and looked over. Why was Gosunkugi yelling at Ranma? He wasn't being a jerk. Yet.
“This time I know your real weakness!” Gosunkugi cackled. He turned the nail so Ranma could get a good look at it. “Silver!”
Ranma tensed slightly, so slightly only someone who had seen him fight a lot could tell. Akane's gasp and Ukyo's suddenly hard expression clued everyone else in that Gosunkugi actually had something.
Gosunkugi grinned wildly. “And now you will face my true power!” In a flash he had the nail poised, the mallet ready...and hammered the nail through a Ranma doll into a tree. “You fool Saotome!” Wham. “You fool Saotome!” Wham. “You fool Saotome!” Wham.
Ranma stared. Akane stared. Ukyo stared. Everyone stared. Nothing else particularly remarkable happened.
Gosunkugi blinked. “You didn't burst into flame. You should have burst into flame. Why didn't you burst into flame? Um. Can, uh, can we pretend this never happened? At least until I figure out what I did wrong?”
Nabiki shook her head, walked over, and scraped a yen coin against the nail. She glanced from nail to coin and looked at Ranma. “It's not even real silver.”
Gosunkugi felt what little blood he had drain from his face. “Uh. Oh.”
Ranma cracked his knuckles. “Gosunkugi...” he growled.
BONG
Nabiki glanced back up. “That's the bell!” she called. “Better get to your classes if you don't want to be late!”
Gosunkugi was the first one inside, a trail of dust behind him.
“Feh,” Ranma snorted.
Hiroshi burst out laughing. “Well, I bet you weren't expecting that to be the first challenge you got, eh Ranma?”
“So,” Daisuke asked, glancing over at Akane and sidling up to Ranma, “what does Akane look like when she gets furry? Rowr?”
Ranma glared at Daisuke. “What?” he snapped.
Daisuke blanched and took a step back. “Hey, just asking, no harm in that right?” he laughed nervously. Ranma cracked his knuckles and turned towards the school. Daisuke trembled slightly and let out a breath. Stay of execution, granted.
Sayuri leaned in to Akane. “So, what does Ranma look like when he gets furry?”
“Saruri,” Yuka chided. Akane's blush was all the answer she needed to that question, but if they were going to get anything from Akane other than how she couldn't love a pervert like Ranma, they had to get her on a different topic fast. “So was that nail really so scary?” she asked.
“If it had been silver, yeah,” Akane said, recovering. “Imagine if that nail had been glowing white, so hot that you'd barely have to touch it to be seriously burned. That's what all silver is to us, now.”
“Yikes,” Yuka said. Sayuri whimpered sympathetically. “Anything else you need to look out for?”
“Well, they say magic has a tendency to react to us in the worst possible ways,” Akane mused, “but I'm not sure we'd notice the difference.” She smiled. “But really, I'm tired about talking about what happened to us. We missed a bunch of classes last week; what did you study?”
The girls thought that over as they headed into the school.
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(Posted Wed, 27 Jun 2012 18:53)
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