The aim of the game was to kill god - the one whose subconscious desires were used to create the current simulation. Somewhere, somehow, that someone had just been terminated. With that lynchpin removed from the equation, all other connections were pulled and a new simulation was being generated for their reinsertion.
Ranma had no idea what this mean, or even that it was happenning. All he knew was that the floor beneath him just opened up and dropped him into a curving tunnel, rather than the room below. He tried to grasp, or wedge himself against, the walls, but they proved to be completely frictionless. There was no way he could stop himself from sliding along the impossible distance.
Interesting enough, this meant that Ryoga was wrong: it was not all Ranma’s fault.
Eventually the tunnel, and Ranma’s slide, came to an abrupt end. It seemed to Ranma that he’d been dropped into an obliette. He floated then in complete sensory deprivation. All sense of his body disolved into oblivion.
He drifted in that state until he became aware of a drum rythm which he eventually identified as a heart beat. However, it didn’t seem to be his. Concentrating on the olny sensation, he found that he could speed it up to a blur or slow it down to a dead stop.
He slowly became aware of other sounds, like noises and voices filtered through an ocean. He could also control the rate of these noises through the metronome of the heartbeat.
Then it seemed that there was warmth and water suround in him. And he began to gain a distorted awareness of his body, though he could not seem to influence it’s clumbsy, aimless movements. Strangely he wasn't bothered by his condition - it seemed extremely comfortable and natural to float, unbreathing, inside a warm bath.
He was just getting used to his condition when, suddenly there was an enormous pressure and he was squeezed through a contriction. Light burst around him as he was pulled out of his warm cocoon into cold air. Ranma cried out an took his first breath.
“So this is what being born is like?” Ranma wondered. “I don’t like it at all.”
It seemed that there were two of him. One was an observer who had all the memories of his last incarnation but could not act. The other was moving through the new life without any awareness of the past or the observer’s existance.
Ranma soon found that he didn’t have to watch his other self plot through babyhood. He could speed up his awareness of time and fast forward through the boring bits. He also became aware of the knowledge that he could merge his two awarenesses into one at any time, though he couldn’t tell from where that certainty came. Ranma choose a point sometime well passed toddlerhood and did so.
They merged. The observer gained the ability to act on his knowledge, the actor gained memories of his other past, and they became one.
Ranma clutched his head as memories of another lifetime seemed to cram themselves into his skull. He remembered being Ranma Saotome, of growing up, learning martial arts, getting engaged to more girls than he knew what to do with, and having it all yanked out from beneath his feet. He also remembered his current life from two view points - that of the observer and that of the one who had lived through it.
He was Ranma Saotome. However, he was also ...
(Posted Thu, 21 Nov 2002 11:21)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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