Nodoka Saotome was faintly impressed.
Kodachi Kuno, who had made such a... memorable impression during her last visit to the Saotome home, was walking quietly next to her son, showing no sign of the crazed gymnast who had had a part in demolishing her recently-rebuilt house, or intruded on Ranma's would-be wedding. Indeed, this Kodachi Kuno fairly radiated concern for her son.
Maybe later, Nodoka could ask about the possibility of grandchildren. Right now, she was more worried about her child.
He'd sent Kodachi's brother running without striking a single blow (she hadn't quite seen Ranma incinerate Kuno's bokken from her vantage point), but he didn't seem to be fully in control of himself. Although he wasn't burning with that blue fire like with the Kuno boy, she still caught a flicker of blue out of the corner of her eye every now and then.
Altogether, she didn't think it would be a good thing if any of Ranma's rivals or other fiancées were to show up. In his current condition, he might not care enough to hold back, and she was fairly sure that none of her son's fiancées or rivals were gods...
"RANMA!"
Oh, no...
Ranma sprang into action, grabbing his mother and Kodachi and pulling them out of the way of the descending bore... er, boar... er, Ryoga. "What the hell are you thinking, P-chan!?"
"Shut up, Ranma!" Ryoga snarled. "First you make my life a living hell, and now Akane's! Prepare to die!"
Now, never let it be said that Ryoga Hibiki was a MENSA candidate. But today, he was descending into Darwin Award-level stupidity.(1) Let's Review:
First, we have Ranma Saotome. A seventeen-year-old boy who killed a god in hand-to-hand combat just a few months previously. A young man who has just found out that three of the four girls who have been chasing, beating, glomping, and just making his life miserable for the past year... have been doing so only to keep their own sexual preferences from the eyes of the public. That the girl who had asked if she could be his friend a year ago... was only interested in him because of a curse he hated, that she was attracted to. That all the madness, all the fights, all the "RANMA NO BAKA!" followed by that damned mallet... was all a smokescreen, so that Akane, Ukyo, and Shampoo could sleep with each other like rabbits with Viagra-spiked carrots, while Ranma was the sacrificial lamb for the wrath of the others who wanted them.
Next, we have Nodoka Saotome. A mother bereft of her son for over a decade because her husband tended to use his stomach rather than his brain for making important decisions. Even after she had been reunited with her son ('Ranko' notwithstanding), she still didn't know much about him. She knew that he had four fiancées, that they tended to fight each other often, and that he was usually caught in the middle when they did. She knew that he turned into a girl when splashed with cold water, and that he did not like doing so, especially when his father had convinced him his own mother would kill him because of it.
And she knew that Akane Tendo, one of his fiancées, had a pet pig, whom Akane had named "P-chan," who wore around his neck a bandanna identical to the one this boy challenging her son wore.
And finally, we have Kodachi Kuno. For four years, she has hidden behind madness and poisons, pretending to be the psychopathic Black Rose to keep away her brother, who sought her for intentions less honorable than he would make them sound.
A year ago, she had been thrown out a second-story window at the Tendo Dojo, only to be saved by a boy whose physical prowess caught her attention no less than the hint of pain in his blue eyes. And although she has made his life harder than it strictly had to be for the past year, she knew the time had come to cast aside the Black Rose, to see if she could ease the pain that radiated much more clearly now from those eyes.
She would face any foe to help him, even his own mother. She had heard some time ago about the contract, and there was no way under Heaven she would let it be fulfilled, at least not by Ranma (she was still contemplating whether or not to feed his father to Midorigame, as she had ever since Kuonji's arrival).
So, it was only a matter of who got to Ryoga first...
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(Posted Fri, 12 Sep 2003 10:08)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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