[Episode 54429] [Episode 54429]At the time, Genma Saotome has seemed like a godsend. As a practitioner of a powerful and adaptable combat style, his art would merge well with her own. His school's known practice of training via lingerie theft, though exceedingly tasteless, indicated that he'd likely be receptive to Sexcraft practices. Finally, the vagabond and isolationist aspects of the Anything Goes Ryu meant that she and her children would be somewhat shielded from the ongoing feud with a rival school of Sexcraft practicioners. Genma himself has seemed quite ammenable to the agreement, breezing through the omiai and quickly agreeing upon the dowry.
Sadly, the maxim that any deal which looks too good to be true probably is turned out to be correct in this instance. Genma's years of abuse under Happosai's tutelage had left him subtly phobic around women. Marriage to a sexually aggressive (and highly knowledgeable) wife had swiftly reduced him to abject terror, a state which he concealed behind a mask of increasingly repellant misogynistic behavior. By the time Nodoka had realized the truth about her husband's mental processes, he had already begun avoiding her. Weekend training trips would last half the week. The occasional evening of drinking with a friend became a nightly affair, often lasting until nearly dawn. Ranma's birth served to give Genma even more excuses to avoid the house, ranging from the macho "putting bread on the table for my growing family" to the surly "can't even hear myself think with all the whining." By the time Genma had decided to take Ranma on an "extended" training trip, Nodoka had known that there was no way to prevent the seperation; and hearing news of how poorly her family's blood feud was progressing, she put up only a token resistance. Her son would be safer on the road.
Of course, so would she.
Within hours of Genma's departure, Nodoka had already begun the task of renting out their home and preparing for her own journey. Had he known that she was following him, her husband would have run as if the host of hell were baying at his heels; but the school of Sexcraft which she had grown up practicing could be as subtle as it was potent. Her own mastery of her inner chi allowed her to trace the bonds of blood which linked her to her son while her more mundane skills enabled her to hide behind a constantly changing array of disguises.
And so time passed. Ranma and his father traveled the length and breadth of Japan while Nodoka followed discreetly. Sometimes, late in the night, she would enter their camp, engage a sleep shiatsu to ensure that her spouse remained at rest and spend time with her son. She'd ask him about his day, listen attentively as he described his recent training with the sort of enthusiasm only a young boy could generate, tell him stories about his heroic demon fighting ancestors (steeped in enough metaphor that they were rated 'G' rather than 'XXX') and teach him the basics of meditation and breath control. Afterwards, when his bright eyes would begin to close despite his excitement, she would caress a few of his own shiatsu points, ensuring that he rested well and would not consciously remember their time together until she should next visit. It saddened her to have to do such, but it was necessary to prevent him from unduly panicing her husband.
It was less than a year after their journey began that Nodoka came across the first of her husband's great mistakes. Feeling the bond between her and Ranma rapidly stretching as her husband spirited him along at a greater speed than she had ever known him to assume while traveling between training grounds, she hurried along the road that they had taken and found a young girl weeping uncontrollably in the dirt. Finding that this was the same child whom her son had gone on and on about in their recent talks, and learning of her (an amusing surprise, that) situation, Nodoka had quickly taken responsibility for the girl. With some concilatory words and a little motherly care, she even repaired the breech in trust that the incident had caused between her son and Ukyou. Soon the young girl was even accompanying her on her late night visits to her son so that she could continue to play with her friend.
The years after that were almost idyllic for the former Mido heir. Her days were spent traveling with her unofficial daughter, wandering from town to town and teaching her the basic moves and philosophies of her family art (again reduced to a level understandable to children). Things became even easier for the two after Nokoka approached her husband while in the guise of a widowed restauranteur and bought Ukyou's okonomiyaki yattai. Afterwards, the regular source of income (rent money forwarded from her bank in Nerima being difficult to access on a regular basis) combined with fewer unanswerable questions regarding their travels made for a truly joyous journey.
Then came Genma's second great mistake.
They had stopped in an out of the way town in northern Honshu while Genma took Ranma to train at a local monastary said to contain many rare and esoteric martial arts scrolls in it's library. Nodoka had only been able to visit her son once before Ukyou had taken sick. She immediately set to caring for the girl constantly, fearful that Ukyou would suffer the same permanent debility to which she herself had fallen prey. It was not until her son had literally leaped into her lap, instinctively drawn by the same bond that allowed her to track his movements, that she'd known that anything was wrong. Genma had taught him the Nekoken.
Oddly, it was probably Nodoka's own late night visits which had allowed her son to endure the training as well as he had. These same visits would lead to an entirely new set of problems as well. Her repeated use of a disassociative shiatsu technique had accustomed her son to subconsciously compartmentalizing his experiences. When the horrors of the cat fist training had threatened to destroy his sanity, his mind had adapted the existing technique by simply generating a third compartment and strengthening the seperating mental barriers. Although not technically a case of multiple personalities due to the fact that he only actually had one personality, from that point onward Ranma's memories and behavior were dictated by situational cues. Around his father he would act in one manner. Around his mother and Ukyou he would behave in a second. In the presence of cats he would react in a third. In each instance he was still Ranma Saotome, he was simply conditioned to act differently in different situations, much like most people will act differently when attending church than when hanging out with some friends. Ranma simply took the tendency to extremes.
Nodoka would have used the opportunity to seperate her son from the father who would do such a horrible thing to his own child had Ranma's mental compartmentalization not become so complete. In her presence he became incapable of consciously recalling anything about Genma or their time spent together, including his martial arts training. Worse, he was incapable of learning any standard martial art as such things were associated with his father. Similarly, it slowly became apparent as Ranma entered adolescence that he was incapable of expressing any degree of sexuality outside of his Sexcraft training sessions. That too had become compartmentalized. Lacking the knowledge needed to readily break this conditioning, and afraid of the potential consequences should she try to force the issue while the trauma was so fresh, Nodoka simply continued with her nightly lessons (frequently aided by Ukyou, in the role of 'sparring' partner) while trying to build subconscious ties between her training and Genma's.
Then had come China.
The day that Nodoka had stood on a beach overlooking the Sea of Japan, feeling the link between her and her son growing weaker and weaker as the distance between them had increased, had reduced her to helpless tears. Too weak of health to swim the distance on her own, the time that it would take to get passports for herself and her 'adopted' daughter would leave them so far behind as to make it nearly impossible to catch up. And so, Nodoka had set up their yattai at the beach and waited. As weeks passed into months and her 'daughter' practiced her family art against the pounding surf, Nodoka waited. As spring turned into summer and summer gave way to autumn, she waited. And as autumn began to take hold and the school year began, her waiting paid off. Far in the distance Nodoka felt the link to her child strengthening. Hour by hour it grew until late in the night a petite readheaded girl and a panda pulled themselves from the cold surf. And thus Nodoka learned of her husband's third great mistake.
Of couse, learning about the effects of Jusenkyou were a trifle difficult. A certain amount of spying had been necessary as in her presence, Ranma did not remember getting the curse as that had happened while with his father. To alleviate her son's bewilderment over his newly shifiting gender, Nodoka had been forced to claim that the 'curse' was actually an advanced training exercise. Once it had been been explained in that way, he had taken to it like a fish to water, and he and Ukyou had driven each other to new heights of Sexcraft skill; his inhereted talent balanced by Ukyou's more extensive training.
Unfortunately, his acceptence of the curse in Nodoka's presence did not translate to a similar acceptence while around his father. Genma's rampant misogyny had instilled in his son a dread of femininity and of his own female form. Nodoka subtly watched over her son as he moved into the Tendo home. Seeing that he was adjusting poorly to the situation, she judged that her son's only chance at ever leading a healthy life lay in slowly decompartmentalizing his mind. After extended discussion it was decided that she and Ukyou would use some of their accumulated earnings from the yattai to open an okonomiyaki shop named after Ranma's childhood nickname for his friend. Ukyou would then attend school in a male guise in order to evoke Ranma's memories of time spent playing with his old (supposedly male) friend while on the training trip with his father. A carefully arranged 'revelation' of Ukyou's true gender was meant to nudge open a link between the two sides of his double life. Little headway was made.
Having little success with this tactic, Nodoka eventually entered Ranma's life herself. Using Genma's absurd contract of manliness, she sought to goad him into the sort of intimate activities which would call upon his Sexcraft training, thereby breaking through the mental barrier and healing the schism within his mind. Which brings us to the present.
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(Posted Thu, 02 Oct 2003 16:09)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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