As he thought about Nabiki, his expression turned into a hint of a smile. She seemed like a nice girl, certainly a lot nicer than her younger sister Akane. Ranma wondered just what Akane’s problem was; she seemed to dislike him greatly. He hadn’t done anything to her; apart from beating her in that match. It wasn’t his fault that compared to him, the girl was little more than a beginner. Why did she have to get so angry about it?
He decided she just had a bad temper, and wrote her off as a nuisance. He wasn’t engaged to her anyway; apparently Nabiki had spoken up for herself before he and Genma had even arrived at the dojo. He supposed Genma would be playing Go or some other game with Mr. Tendou this afternoon. Maybe he could talk his adoptive father into a spar: he needed to work off some frustration.
Just thinking about the source darkened Ranma’s mood. Yagami hadn’t changed much at all: he was a few inches taller, a bit more muscular, but just as cold and dismissive as ever. The other Ranma and he had been frequent sparring partners for most of ninth grade; their paths had happened to intersect at a local school in a town just outside of Hiroshima.
Ranma wondered just what could make the other boy so harsh. It couldn’t be his life in general, for they’d grown up in much the same way: on the road with only their respective fathers, training in martial arts. Perhaps it was because of the elder Yagami? He didn’t think so. He’d met the man briefly, and thought him to be much like his son: a little cold, but probably a good sort if you kept out of his way.
What Ranma wondered about was just how powerful his friend really was. He’d always been a little in awe of the Yagami boy’s flames. It was apparently an inherited technique, one that ran in the blood. That was more than a bit of a letdown: it was obviously a powerful technique, and it was out of his reach. He knew that if he trained hard, he might eventually learn ways to project his ki, but they wouldn’t be like the Yagami fire.
He’d first seen Ranma use the purple flame after a sparring match in a junkyard. Yagami had held his arms out at his side in a T formation, made a fireball in each hand, and threw each at a different dead car. Both cars exploded when the fireballs hit. What didn’t explode soon melted into slag. And even with as much energy as had to be within those fireballs, the Yagami boy had seemed to shrug it off. This obviously meant he could use a lot more power than he did, but how much more? Ranma didn’t know.
Ranma had never known his friend even had the ability: he’d never used it in any of their previous matches. But, he decided, that may have been for the better: he put up a brave front with his fiancée around, but fights with the Yagami boy had always gone badly for Ranma. He would stagger back to his campsite battered and bruised, often bleeding as well. And Yagami never had anything worse than some minor scrapes, which were usually gone by the next day. That, apparently, was another advantage of his blood: very fast healing.
He’d watched his adoptive father go up against Iori Yagami once, and with just the same results. It seemed that as far as he and Genma went, the Yagami men were untouchable. And that disheartened Ranma more than a little, but since the other boy always treated him with a sort of quiet respect, he had no real reason to dislike him. He knew what bullies and braggarts were, having seen more than a few of them in his years on the road. Ranma Yagami was neither of those.
As Ranma walked atop the fence, he wondered a little at what might have been for the boy who’d been born as Ranma Saotome. He knew that the boy had been present when his own parents were killed, and had died in the same event; but somehow Ranma couldn’t summon up any images of him. Possibly the memories were just too clouded by emotion and time. After all, it had been almost eleven years.
Ranma, born Ryuu Kumon, had met his namesake’s mother and remembered her with fondness. He hadn’t seen her in a couple of years now, but he knew that she lived in a district of Tokyo not terribly far from Nerima. He hoped that he and Genma would go and visit her soon. Although, he suspected she wouldn’t like the curse.
The curse. Now that was the true problem of Ranma’s life. All it took was a splash of any cold liquid, and everything that made HIM as he was vanished: Instant girl, just add water; long hair, soprano voice, pouting lips, and big breasts included. Ranma hated anything and everything about the curse, as well as how he’d gotten it, and he was utterly astounded that Nabiki didn’t seemed to mind.
Mind...he thought...and then shivered. THAT had been something else.
He wondered, idly, what Yagami’s reaction would be to seeing the curse. And then he shivered again: he’d heard Yagami’s laughter before, just once, and it was a thoroughly unpleasant sound. Hearing it once in a lifetime was enough. He imagined seeing the curse would send the stoic young man nearly to tears, and the thought chilled him to the bone.
In the distance, he saw the entrance to the Tendou grounds, and he broke into a run, still on the fence. He ran atop it effortlessly. As the railing was maybe five inches wide, and probably less, this was quite a stunt. When he reached a convenient point he leaped into the air, somersaulted, and landed on the pavement as easily as walking. He then walked casually onto the grounds and into the home.
It didn’t take more than five minutes before he found himself female again, from Genma dousing him with water from the koi pond. He wondered idly how he’d managed to make it through the school day without a change. He decided, after a while, that it didn’t really matter.
But in the back of his mind, he knew it couldn’t possibly remain a secret forever. He just hoped he could stem the inevitable backlash when it finally broke.
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(Posted Tue, 02 Mar 2004 20:58)
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