About eighteen months ago, on a timeline not quite parallel to the one you’re thinking of…
“Daddy, ‘he’ is a girl!”
“Do you think you could confirm that more gently, please?”
“Oh, poor daddy. He’s so disappointed.”
“He’s disappointed! Some fiancé this is!”
“Stop it you two! He – she is our guest.”
“This is all your fault, Daddy,” accused the short-haired girl. “You should have made sure.”
“Well, he said he had a son!”
“Do you see a son here? Do you?”
“Ah, you do realise that the last guy to do that probably hasn’t got the use of his hand back yet? I’m giving you a little leeway for being female, but it only goes so far and you’ve already felt me up once when I arrived.”
The resident froze, her hand grasping the visitor’s breast. Before she could fully process the urbane comment – with distinct undertones of truth and threat – her sister interrupted.
“Hey, you want to see our dojo? I’m Akane.” She smiled naturally. “Do you want to be friends?”
The sparring match was not going in Akane’s favour. She didn’t much mind that; it was only a sparring match, and she didn’t really have many opportunities for friendly matches. With her father not teaching, and also not permitting her to visit other dojo to practice against their students, her principal practice was… not something she liked thinking about when she didn’t have to.
On the other hand, she would have liked to offer her guest more of a challenge. Not only had Ranma declined to take a stance before they began, she had so far declined to so much as block any of Akane’s varied attacks, instead avoiding them by a series of ever more acrobatic dodges.
Finally, though, Akane cornered the smaller girl. With a loud cry, she lunged forwards in a power-blow she fully expected her opponent to at least have to deflect… and was rather surprised a second later to find herself staring at a hole in the wall with her own fist in it, with Ranma nowhere in sight. Which was when a finger jabbed at the base of her skull.
She turned her head slowly. Sure enough, the redhead was standing lightly behind her, one hand extended and smiling shyly.
Akane breathed, and that broke the silence, and Ranma chuckled. Akane smiled back, and joined in.
“You’re pretty good,” she admitted after she got her breath back. Ranma just nodded. “Well, I’m just glad you’re a girl.”
“That’s good,” replied Ranma. “Makes a change from having to apologise for bein’ one.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, Pops has been trying to pass me off as his son for as long as I remember.” She shrugged. “Stupid idiot. I generally let him try to explain himself. Any particular reason you’re happy I’m a girl? The engagement thing? Boyfriend?”
Akane shuddered. “No! Boys, argh! I hate boys.”
Ranma blinked at her vehemence. “They do have their uses, you know. Ice cream money, for a start.”
“Ranma.”
The petite figure relaxing on the engawa twitched and looked towards the gentle voice.
“Wouldn’t you like to take a bath?”
“Oh, yes please. I’m all sweaty and horrible,” replied Ranma, jumping to her feet.
Akane skipped down the stairs and slipped into the bathroom, a bundle of clean clothes in her arms. She wondered why Nabiki had changed out of the kimono, and for that matter why she had put it on in the first place. Quickly stripping off while sher pondered this conundrum, she slid open the door and stepped into the inner bath to be faced with a wet and naked figure just rising from the furo.
“Aah!” “Eeep!”
Both girls covered themselves with their arms. Akane had a slight advantage, since she was carrying her towel.
“Ah, more warning next time, please?” asked Ranma, relaxing a little at the realisation that the interruption was female.
Akane nodded as she backed out.
“I’ll explain. This is my old friend and training partner...”
“Saotome Genma,” interrupted the burly stranger. “And this is my son…”
“Daughter!”
“Ranma, abandon this foolishness! Oh, the shame that my son should be such a deviant, pretending to be a girl!”
“Your daughter has been a girl her whole life!”
“You must make sacrifices for the Art, boy, but your manhood is too much!” cried the man, grappling the curvy redhead and quickly flipping her out of the open shoji. She landed squarely in the pond with a massive splash.
Seconds later, she rose, dripping and furious, crying, “What the hell are you doing? You know that has no effect on me!”
“A father can hope!” retorted the man piously. “Ah, the ignominy! The shame to my family!”
“Yes, you are!” replied the girl, hurling her father into the water.
“Oh! There’s the panda!” remarked the eldest of Soun’s daughters. “I wondered where that went.”
“Daddy?” asked the middle daughter, “Why are you friends with them?”
“They weren’t like this before they went to China,” alleged Soun, watching as the guests battled in his back garden, “and had that horrific training accident.”
It had taken a while, but the odd pair had calmed down and made their way to the furo to clean up and change. Ranma returned quickly, her hair still damp, dressed in a dry copy of the outfit she had arrived in. She resumed her seat in front of the Tendo family.
“Why does your father turn into a panda?” asked Akane, beating her elder sister to the question by a moment.
“Jusenkyo,” replied Ranma succinctly. “It was the last site on our planned journey through the great training sites of China, although it’s really a bit of a disappointment at first sight and I think I could have gotten more out of Joketsuzoku if we had stayed longer.”
“What has a bad training site got to do with you father turning into a panda?”
“Well, it’s not – well, I guess it is a bad site to train. Thing is, Pops had heard of this great hidden training ground, and we’d spent ages searching for it without ever finding out what made it so great, and then when we got there, it…”
FLASBACK
“…don’t look so impressive, Pops. Ya sure this’s the right place?”
“You is very odd ones, no, sir and miss? Is very dangerous, no one use any more.”
“Follow me, Boy!”
“I’m a Girl, you idiot!”
“Ah, honoured customers, what you do?”
“I won’t go easy on you, Boy,” declared the portly man balanced on one of the many swaying bamboo poles scattered across the valley floor.
“Not even for a ‘weak little girl’ like me?” replied the redhead balanced opposite him.
“Sooner or later I will beat this foolishness out of you! No girl could ever learn an art like the Musabetsu Kakuto!”
“Really?” said the girl, springing out of the way of the man’s first lunge. “I must be practicing something else, then…”
The guide watched as the pair battled over the pools, alternately calling pleas for them to cease their foolhardy exercise and advice on the consequences of falling into whatever pool they happened to pause over. He winced as a poorly blocked punch caused the teenager to miss the pole in Xiaojiniichuan, then sighed in relief as she caught the one over Haoniichuan and used that to propel herself out of the way of Zhengkeniichuan. He was especially thankful of that, since he had standing orders from the Chinese Communist party to execute anyone who landed in that spring. In the next exchange, her father missed a dip in Songshuniichuan, nearly dunked his daughter in Huangyouniichuan, and touched the ground just on the edge of Xingxingniichuan.
“Who need to go easy now, Pops?”
“Hah!” snorted the man, leaping to a new pole. “Oy shoh toh!”
At first, the guide thought the girl had completely misjudged her counter, but then she used her father to change her course in mid-air, coincidentally sending him arcing directly into the centre of a pool.
“Aiyah! Mister customer land in Shonmaoniichuan! Tragic story of panda what drown in spring two thousand years ago,” he called, carefully not moving any closer in case the emerging victim should splash amything nearby. “Now whatever fall in spring, turn to panda!”
“Hey, Pops,” called the teenager after gaining her balance. “We done…Whoa!”
Startled, she jumped back, but not quite fast enough. The oversized panda clipped her, sending her tumbling to her knees at the edge of a pool.
“Aiyah, miss customer very lucky! Nyanniichuan have no effect on women!”
The redhead gasped explosively and stopped patting herself down to discover what she had been turned into. She scrambled out of the shallow water and turned to the guide.
She never saw the returning panda.
“Aiyah, Mister customer push miss customer into Huniichuan! Terrible tragic story of fox what drown one thousand three hundred years ago!”
FLASBACK
“Oh, my! So you turned into a fox?”
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(Posted Sat, 09 Jun 2007 23:17)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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