Walking around a bit, Sayoko uncertainly looked around at the surrounding buildings. Finding a particular skyscraper in the skyline, she pointed it out. “I think that’s the right one. One of your properties in Shibuya. It should be overlooking Yoyogi park.”
Ranma glanced around, pointing in a different direction. “Yoyogi park is that way.”
Distracted by the correction, Sayoko turned in that direction. She was confused when Ranma led her off the main street into an alley between buildings. It almost seemed like he was looking for privacy instead of trying to take a short cut.
The slut’s mind was pulled out of the gutter when Ranma picked her up in a princess carry. “Hold tight.”
Sayoko wrapped her arms around his neck, snuggling close which was an unfamiliar situation for her.
Whatever she was expecting, it wasn’t for Ranma to run up the side of the building casting a shadow on them, quickly alighting on the fourteenth story roof. Ranma walked along the rooftop towards Yoyogi park, scanning the highrises for which one it could be. “I’ll need more of a clue to figure out which one it is. Should I jump across a few more buildings and set us down near the park?”
Sayoko didn’t answer immediately since she had her face buried in his shoulder while her heart beat like a jackhammer. So he was apparently superhuman, no wonder yakuza didn’t bother him as much as they should. She had a more pressing problem. She was being held in the arms of a handsome young man that also happened to be both intoxicatingly rich and powerful that was making her feel disturbingly like a schoolgirl with a crush.
This might be a little bit difficult for her.
Keeping ahold of herself, Sayoko raised her head and looked out towards the park, noting the impossible seeming distances between rooftops. “Ah, it’s about half a big block east of Meiji Shrine, thirty-two stories tall.”
The young man’s gaze locked onto a particular gleaming tower of glass. “Ah, that should be it. Nice, looks like it has roof access.”
Sayoko didn’t whimper when she realized he’d noticed the helipad because she was a big girl. Her reaction was more girlish than she was comfortable with however. “Can you fly?”
Ranma glanced around, checking out the skies while pondering the question. “Well, sort of... but not the way you’re thinking. Last time I tried it that way, it didn’t work and I don’t think I should try while carrying you.”
The tanned bleach-blond woman was normally assertive and cynical, recklessly tossing herself into situations at times. At the moment her normal self was on vacation, blown away by the surrealness of her situation. She should have insisted they safely return to the ground where they could travel there in a way that wasn’t ridiculously dangerous. Somehow that objection didn’t occur to her. “Go in through the lobby, I don’t know if I have a key to the roof door.”
Ranma ran a lazy lap around the roof to get in position to build up speed, only because he wanted to limit the sudden accelerations he inflicted on her since that required him to negate the forces to prevent her from being injured. Also she might be scared by stuff like this, although she was handling it better than Akane.
Jogging into position, Ranma prepared to build up speed for his first hop with a short run towards the edge. “We’ll check the roof first anyways.”
From the Shibuya station shopping center where they were at, it was about two kilometers north to the building, a distance that would normally be a twenty to thirty minute walk. At a leisurely jogging pace of giant strides that would be sprinting speed for most people, Ranma covered it in just over three minutes, high rises rapidly giving away to more modest two and three story family homes. Other than the initial leap from the starting high rise to the lower residential homes, the only large leap he had to make was over the six-laned four-thirteen road that connected Meiji Shrine to the Minato ward where Azabu-Juuban was situated.
Getting to the top of his building meant running up the side of the building again, something Sayoko had decided not to worry about since he could clearly do it.
The view from the top was worth it as Ranma took in his surroundings. Less than a kilometer west was Meiji Shrine, surrounded by one of the largest forests within Tokyo proper, with Yoyogi park bordering it to the south-west. A kilometer north was Shinjuku Gyoen Park, marking the nearest border to the Shinjuku ward. A similar distance to the east was another park, this one in the Minato ward which continued east to Tokyo harbor. All things considered, it was quite the view and pleasantly adjacent to a number of interesting places.
Done drinking in the view and orientating himself to his surroundings, Ranma hopped over to the roof access door, finding it unlocked. Setting Sayoko down, he found the slender woman clinging to him as she wobbled on shaky legs.
Although she wasn’t in her normal state of mind, embarrassment and shame were still two things foreign to the sultry woman. Instead of stumbling around on her own, she kept her arms wrapped around Ranma’s neck and pulled herself in closer. “Would you mind carrying me the rest of the way?”
Ranma picked her back up, glad to be appreciated at least a little by a girl for once. Going inside, he found both stairs and an elevator. “It’s just one floor down, right?”
Getting a nod, Ranma chose the stairs, quickly reaching the the next floor. There they found double doors that Sayoko unlocked with a card swipe. “If you can find a couch or bed, I think I need to sit down.”
Ranma merely grunted in acknowledgement, happy to move along. The apartment turned out to be quite large, taking up all of this floor plus the floor below, all arranged in a loop around the central elevator shaft. Finding a large room with couches early on, Ranma set Sayoko down on a couch and joined her near the windows looking out towards the setting sun over the Nerima ward.
Feeling just a touch awkward since she couldn’t seduce her boss, Sayoko instead tried to distract herself with her job. “Let’s see, this building has been mostly completed and apparently suffered from a lack of clear ownership in decision making. With a little work it can be finished and brought to full occupancy, but right now it’s mostly empty space. This apartment’s design was a poor choice, taking up two prime floors to create a mansion that was too expensive for most buyers. It would have been more profitable in the current market as several smaller places, but the cost of redoing the stairs and other mergers between the two floors would be too high to make the conversion profitable.”
Ranma gave an, “Ah,” of understanding as the reason for choosing this place became clear. “So since I need a place of my own, getting the place that’s too expensive to sell well is how it works out?”
Sayoko thought it was worth mentioning the place was suitable for a rich young man, but let it slide. “Mhmm. The current net value of this building is low, but the potential value after development is finished is very high.”
Ranma nodded his head in understanding. “It shouldn’t be too hard to get this place in order since it’s pretty much finished already. I’ll just have to check and make sure it’s clear after what happened last time.”
That sounded a little too specific to the still-shaken woman. “Wait, do you know this place?”
Ranma leaned back into the couch, spreading out his arms along the back. “Sure, was here three weeks ago for the big battle. Those guys deserved their Darwin Award for setting up their base here, the Shinjuku-Shibuya-Minato area is magical girl central, not to mention we were having our demon queller meeting over at Meiji. So it was me, some miko and a cluster-fuck of magical girls rolling into the place from all directions at the same time. Me and the Precures busted in the doors so to speak and the rest mopped up. They were mostly set up in the ten floors below us, standard twisted space and barriers, plus they had most of the people mind-controlled from what I heard, which explains the ownership confusion, although some of them were bad guys too. In the end some of the magical girls purified the place and repaired it, so it should be fine now.”
Letting that sink in for a moment, Sayoko hazarded a guess against her sanity. “So... this place was a bad guy base that you and some magical girls cleared out?”
Ranma glanced around, checking the place out. “Yeah, heard they took it over during construction. Good thing I was in girl form that time, would a been awkward to be the only guy at the celebration afterwards. Well, it wasn’t really a celebration, kinda odd how much magical girls distrust each other.”
Another oddity caught her attention. “...girl form?”
Ranma looked surprised when she mentioned it, leaning forward and looking at her. “Oh yeah, I need to show you that.” Getting up, Ranma headed off towards the kitchen area he remembered from the after party. “One moment.”
Sayoko didn’t know what to expect next as he came back with two glasses of water.
“So, simple version, cold water girl, hot water guy. Most the other people with curses like this turn into animals.” Dipping his hands in one glass, Ranma splashed his face with water as if to wake himself up.
Instead of waking up, a petite red-headed girl was standing there with Ranma’s new suit draped loosely on her frame, the button up shirt hanging suggestively over her breasts. “Boom, like my sister woulda looked I guess. I look like my mom’s daughter at least.”
As the red-head pulled on her clothes to check how the fit adjusted, Sayoko stared. “So... you turn into a magical girl?”
The curvy girl looked offended. “What? No. I mean this is magic, but I just turn into a girl. That’d be a damn sight, it’d be completely unfair if I turned into something like a Precure.”
Unsettled by the change in topic, the red-head splashed her face from the other cup. Ranma returned just as quickly, pulling his clothes back into place since the size change had shifted them around a bit. “Anyways, that’s it. Figured with my luck I’d get splashed at dinner in my new suit and have to explain it then.”
Suddenly genie wishes and magical girl battles didn’t seem so far-fetched to Sayoko, although her earlier trip across the rooftops had made an impact as well. It was almost like she’d stepped into another world. “Then this building is in the state it’s in because magical bad guys used it as a base and brainwashed the former people involved... and after your wish, you ended up owning a building you helped save from the forces of evil?”
Ranma lit up in understanding as he hadn’t thought of that angle. “Oh, that’s kinda nice.” Satisfied, Ranma put his hands on his hips and looked around. “Guess those kinds of places have to be put to use afterwards, right? Well, we’ll put it to good use then.”
Walking off, Ranma realized that even with prior experience, there was plenty of space in this apartment he hadn’t seen. “Well, how about we find us some bedrooms and then go get the other stuff done? I think I know where the master bedroom is.”
No longer a squishy mess of disturbingly girly feelings, Sayoko eased herself onto her tasteful heels. “That sounds fun.”
The building was a rather large one, wider at the base, it narrowed into a tower after the eighth floor, narrowing again after the twentieth floor. A central shaft carried the utilities, elevators and stairs, the floor wrapping around that to give enough floor space for several apartments. This apartment being made of the top two floors, it not only had an abundance of floor space, but also internal stairs leading between the two floors plus balconies that overlooked lower rooms to connect the spaces further.
Some of the rooms were barren while others were furnished, Ranma leading them to a room with bookshelves lining one of the walls. Pushing part of the molding caused the built-in bookshelf to quietly slide backwards a few feet, revealing metal tracks in the floor and entrances to both the left and right beyond it.
Ranma didn’t wait for her to ask. “Not the evil boss’s room so much as the loser that was working with them and profiting, he hid in here.”
Inside was a large room with a large bed on the inside corner being the only thing that marked it as the bedroom. Taking a loop around the room, Ranma walked along the window walls first, checked the view from the north facing corner, with Tokyo Tower in Minato visible to the east before the Tokyo Bay and Nerima off to the west towards the setting sun. Coming to a physical wall, Ranma knocked on a wall panel, revealing a swinging door hidden there. A freestanding wall mirrored the other secret door that had slid open, this one instead featuring a walk through closet on the inside and display shelves on the side facing the bed.
The back wall behind the bed was glass, the light illuminating it coming from a skylight above. Up close it became immediately clear it was the master bath, the glass wall behind the bed being one of the glass walls to the large shower. Walking in, Ranma pointed at the toilet behind another glass partition. “Perverts.”
Finding a button, Sayoko gave it a try, the glass instantly frosting on the electric signal. “Ah that’s better. Watching someone shower is sexy, that is not.”
Ranma found another similar button on another wall pillar. Discovering it frosted the glass between the bath and bedroom, he turned it back to clear. “Okay, that’s cool.”
Gazing out over the spacious room, he noted it could be divided into quadrants that were about ten or twelve tatami mats in area. Each tatami mat was about two square meters, and the Tendo dojo was twenty tatami while the family room there was only eight tatami, making this bedroom about the size of the first floor of that house. He could make that window corner his practice area and still have room left over. “We could make that east corner the office, turn the west corner into a small bedroom and we could camp out in here.”
Sayoko had a quiet chuckle at his idea of dividing up the space and setting up camp within this one bedroom. There was enough room, but the true opulent nature of the room was all of that empty floor space overlooking that view. “I think I can find a bedroom of my own here. We could set up the early work office here and do meetings in the great room we were in earlier.”
Ranma was smiling himself, finding it a bit silly how much space he had and just what all he could put in it. He’d definitely keep at least one area clear for practicing and meditation, probably the area in front of the north corner. “Sure, lets go exploring a bit, then I guess we can go get some shopping done.”
A little more exploring led them to find several smaller bedrooms, the former quarters of the female youma generals that had posed as maids and secretaries. The bedrooms were incomplete now, but in total there was at least enough furniture for one bedroom, Sayoko claiming the most conveniently located room.
Continuing their loop of the floor, they noticed a spiral staircase leading to the lower floor had a small glass elevator on the inside curve of the spiral. Pausing to ride it down, Ranma had to wonder if such a thing was really necessary. Eventually they found the central entryway doors that allowed secure entry into the apartment’s thirty-first floor level, this level having a larger entryway suitable for being a front entrance, while the entryway above seemed more like a private rear entrance.
Exiting out of the ground floor lobby, they were faced with a dilemma of where to go shopping. While the base of the building was part of the local shopping district that exceeded the one in Nerima, they were still faced with a tough choice. The building also happened to be centrally located between three of the most famous shopping districts in Tokyo, Shinjuku to the north was actually the closest. The Shibuya shopping district near the train station to the south was actually where they had come from earlier. To the east in Minato, near Juuban was the upscale Roppongi area.
Sayoko was familiar with the seedier parts of Shinjuku and desired the upscale classy shopping of Roppongi. Ranma had other ideas. “Let’s try around here, we can check the place out at the same time.”
The sexy young woman had to agree with the practicality of that. It was just minor purchases like cellphones tonight, so getting familiar with the condition of the area would save some time on research later as well as travel time tonight. “Mhmm, sure. Let’s see what we can find here.”
Soon they found a good place to buy cellphones, Ranma finding himself confronted with devices he didn’t quite understand. Phones he understood, but the newest models seemed to lack buttons completely along with any semblance to being a phone. The Tendo girls had cellphones, but they were the thin flip-phone kinds, although from what he gathered Nabiki wanted to upgrade to one of these new phones for some reason.
Confronted with things he didn’t understand, Ranma asked a question he understood. “You got any that water won’t destroy?”
The saleslady wasn’t too surprised by the question. “There is a coating that can be applied to any phone to make it repel water. We also have models that are ruggedized and suitable for surviving the weather.”
Satisfied with that answer, Ranma followed behind Sayoko as she browsed the phones.
After seeing her mess with a few models, Ranma realized something and pulled out something of his own, presenting it to Sayoko and the saleslady. “Is this a phone?”
Surprised by the question, Sayoko turned the thing over in her hand, noting that it did look similar but different to a smartphone. It lacked any visible physical buttons as well as any camera ports, glossy black on one side, matte black on the other with silvery metal edging between the sides. “I’ve never seen one like this.”
Unable to get it to do anything after fiddling with it, Sayoko handed it back. “The battery could be dead. Have you charged it?”
Ranma started fiddling with it himself. “Nah, one of the girls gave it to me a few weeks ago. Didn’t even give me a manual.”
A minute later it lit up and played music as it started up, surprising Sayoko and the saleslady with the sudden noise. “Good evening Goshujin-sama.”
Staring at the smartphone display, Ranma didn’t see how this was supposed to be a phone since he’d never seen a smartphone dialer used before. “Ah, hello. Can I make a call?”
The phone’s display switched to the virtual dialer interface, as it continued responding with a delicate female voice. “Of course.”
Halfway to chiding Ranma as a noob for talking to his phone, Sayoko stared as he started dialing in the number. With Ranma still holding the phone out, the ringing was played over the speaker as it defaulted to speakerphone mode. “Hello? Tendo residence.”
Ranma raised an eyebrow, not knowing if it was good or bad that Akane had answered. “Hey Akane, can you bring my bookbag to school tomorrow?”
Silence reigned for a moment before she spoke up, sweetness replaced with irritation. “Why should I do that? Where are you? What did you do with that woman?”
Ranma stared at the phone, wondering how he should deal with her. Well, since she wouldn’t believe him anyways, why drag things out? “Hey, I did the thing you wanted, I called. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”
Since he was looking at the phone, he’d found the big red button that said end call. Pushing it brought on silence with a soft beep.
Sayoko smirked at the conversation and sudden hang-up. “That’s one user friendly phone.”
The saleslady had a more nervous smile from enduring a vocal customer call in her store, hoping it hadn’t annoyed others too much. “Isn’t it. It looks like a custom android phone with enhanced voice features.”
This was a fine opportunity for Sayoko to tease her cute boss. “You can hold it up to your ear instead of letting everyone hear your conversation.”
The phone screen tinted pink. “I would be more than happy to whisper in your ear Goshujin-sama.”
Sayoko stared intently at the phone as the voice was a little too sweet. “...very advanced voice features.”
The saleslady nodded, a little interested herself. “Very cute, I’m sure that model would be popular.”
Ranma’s contemplation of why it looked like his phone was blushing was cut short as it started playing a musical ring, displaying that the Tendo family was calling. “Mhmm, accept or decline. She must have hit redial. Decline.”
The phone gave a cheery beep and stopped ringing.
Satisfied they had quiet in the store again, they resumed phone shopping. When Sayoko got her phone, another hopefully compatible android phone, they tried sharing phone numbers to confirm Ranma’s worked properly. The phones gave little beeps of confirmation, Ranma’s sounding particularly happy. “Yay! I have a new friend.”
Well, at least his phone was happy now. It had gotten a bit sad after Sayoko questioned whether it worked properly.
---
Waiting for Ranma to pick up the phone so she could chew him out for hanging up on her, Akane heard a pause before it resumed ringing. Hearing the phone pick up, she started giving him a piece of her mind before any greetings. “What was the big idea hanging up on me you jerk?”
The male voice on the other end wasn’t the one she was expecting. “Ah, the fair tigress of my heart, what a pleasure to hear your voice. It is such a surprise for you to call upon me.”
Surprised and a little annoyed for new reasons, Akane switched to the normal mostly respectful tone she used with everyone except Ranma. “Kuno-sempai? Is Ranma there? I was calling him back after he hung up on me.”
Kuno’s ego managed to make it through the phone to further annoy her. “Nay, there are no foul sorcerers here. Since the foul cretin has abandoned you, allow me to take you on a date this fine evening.”
Akane rapidly realized two things. She was too polite to simply hang up on someone, even Kuno. Worse, she couldn’t punch him through the phone to shut him up.
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(Posted Thu, 12 Sep 2013 02:51)
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