A different upbringing had a fairly different Ranma take shape. He still had characters with whom he was friend/rival with, and one of these was over there looking somewhat embarassed.
"As if I couldn't guess, Felnor the Chicken Summoner," drawled Ranma.
Felnor had the grace to look embarrassed. He was overweight, wore glasses, and fell apart regularly whenever a pretty girl (of almost any vaguely compatible species) was involved. He was a klutz and accident prone - which was fairly dangerous considering his line of work.
Felnor was the apprentice to the Court Wizard, Mei Lynn The Nearly Divine. (Mei Lynn being three hundred and twenty years old, but looking closer to fifty, didn't qualify as a pretty girl.) Which meant that he was a wizard himself, or at least an apprentice. He knew a fair number of spells and was considered quite talented, if he could just learn to keep his mind on what he was doing. He also was one of the kids Ranma's age who could be talked by Ranma into any number of hare-brained schemes.
Felnor's spells were fairly varied but simple. He was fond of Thrindle's Combustion and he'd used Eknerwal's Lesser Invisibility to sneak Ranma out of the castle once before.
Why sneak? Because Ranma was the Prince. If Ranma wanted to see anything or do anything without having an entourage or soldiers or some pomp and circumstance - he needed to sneak off.
So Felnor was a sometimes rival (Felnor felt with some justification that his Art was more powerful and all around useful than Ranma's), sometimes friend, sometimes co-conspirator. Of course, sometimes he was just a general nuisance as the time he had attempted to cast Tracel's Levitation and had somehow conjured up thousands of live chickens which had promptly overrun the castle.
(That had been bad with all the chickens leaving feathers and chicken poop, not to mention all the confusion and fussing. However it had turned out all right by Ranma's estimation, as the very next day saw a great deal of grilled chicken being produced. Mei Lynn noted the changes that had accidently been made in the spell, and the Wizard's Guild was considering whether Felnor's Summon Chicken Horde would make it into the list of officially sanctioned spells.)
Ranma knew well that Felnor was studying divinational spells, which were so tricky that it was often the work of a specialist but most wizards included one or two in their grimoires just for completeness, and likely had discovered something about the planned trip. All it would take was a deep breath from any number of girls associated with Ranma and he'd have given it away.
"Anyone else learn of this?" asked Ranma of his associate.
"Just her," said Felnor with an apologetic look.
Ranma nodded. This actually wasn't that bad. If he took a discrete guard with him, like Sakura, people would be much less alarmed if it got out that he'd snuck out again.
"So where are we going?" Felnor asked eagerly. "There's that new place at the docks serving these 'pizza' things. There's also supposed to be some sort of ritual going on at the Dark Maiden's temple. There's even been talk of some foreign wizards over at the Drunken Dragon. Just arrived by spelljammer from some far off world beyond the Fringe."
Ranma shook his head. He planned on visiting this food place sometime in the near future, there were always weird wizards and adventurers coming into port, and if he went to see the dark elves dance at the temple he would likely get a lot of girls really really mad at him for some bizarre reason. He wasn't too clear on why, after all - he had a standing invitation to attend. "None of that. We've got something I've been wanting to check out. It's:"
(Posted Fri, 23 Jan 2004 10:02)
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