Hey there ladies and gentlemen! This is my first fanfic, inspired by the "Ever Wonder If" story by lucesw. I figured I'd give that sort of story arc a try, but there are a few things I should say here before you start reading the actual story. For one thing, I tend to abhor describing typical anime things like sweat dropping and nosebleeds, even though I do recognize them as easy ways to convey characters' emotions and general feelings. This story won't have any of that, though, because it's not my preference to have those things in it. This story also isn't going to be described as cartoonishly as some others I've seen, which is also part of my writing style. Another thing, is that this is a tastefully chaste fanfic. There are no NC-17 things in here. Perverts get bashed painfully by Naru and that is the LAST thing I want. Lol. Oh – and by the way, I have almost no knowledge of the actual life of a person living in Japan other than what my girlfriend told me of her experiences as a 6 month exchange student and what I've seen of the anime, so everything else that seems out of place is because I don't have the knowledge to make this fan-fiction accurate. Gomenesai, and all that jazz - I'm going to warn my readers now, that there may also be some new out-of-character things, mostly with Keitaro, who will exhibit some personality shifts and special abilities later on and in turn, this will affect some of the other characters. Anyway, have fun reading! LordandMaster

-I do not own the copyrights to Love Hina, any other existing copyrights that pertain to it, or anything else that may or may not appear in this story that is not of my original creation. All credit is rightfully due to the persons deserving of it. This is a simple non-profit fan fiction that I wrote on my own time, just for kicks-

Chapter 1: The Wish

It's just another sunny, winter afternoon at the Hinata Inn, a couple of days after New Years. It's Friday, today. The heartbeat of the combined lives and their effects on each other is evident in everyone's activities: Keitaro Urashima is busily performing one of his many maintenance duties as the Resident Manager by washing the floors on the second-story promenade, cleaning up a gooey mess that one of Su Kaolla's failed experiments left behind. "JELLO TAMAS" she had happily shouted at him. Narusegawa Naru is studying in her room, Su is preparing another fun surprise for Keitaro in her room, Shinobu Maehara is preparing the next delicious meal in the kitchen, Mitsune Konno Nickname Kitsune is sitting in the living room nursing her most recently opened bottle of sake, and Motoko Aoyama is in her room meditating with her sword balanced on her knees, across her lap. Mutsumi Otohime is in her room in a dead faint on the floor, her face in a piece of watermelon, as is one of her typical activities. The whole day has been cloud-free and sunny, the snow covered world outside unblemished in its perfect beauty.

Kitsune picks the TV remote up from the coffee table while taking another swig of her beloved sake and presses the "on" button. The channel that she first sees as the TV turns on is the weather channel. She sits there for a moment, listening to the announcer's voice as he explains what the weather is going to be this week. Shinobu sighs disappointedly as she prepares rice, hearing that there will be a bad blizzard for most of the week. On the bright side, though, school will be canceled. Kitsune smiles, thinking of an indoor snow fight, and proceeds to channel surf.

As Keitaro finishes making sure the floor is clean, he has the misfortune of knocking over the bucket of water he's using. The water flows in the direction of Naru's room, and he sees the imminent danger of her slipping and hurting herself, so he frantically begins to mop up.

"Please don't let her walk out of her room right now, please don't let her walk out of her room right now," is his nervous mantra.

However, Keitaro's horrible luck rears its ugly head, and Naru slides her door open and begins striding towards the stairs, slipping on the soapy water and landing on Keitaro. The two tangled ronins slide a short distance, Naru with a look of honest surprise on her face as she had done a back flip after slipping that landed sitting on Keitaro's face. (Awwhawww and tell meh you love meh!) Keitaro, taking immediate notice of where his face is, blushes a beet-red while having a resigned look of acceptance because he knows what's coming to him once Naru disentangles herself and stands up.

"So, spilling soapy water on the floor in front of my room, eh? Nice plan, PERVERT!" Naru stands over him with a look of repressed rage, holding the bottom of her skirt down self-consciously.

Without giving him a chance to explain - all he can say is "uh-uh-uh" through his embarrassment - she winds up and decks him solidly in the face with a well-placed punch. He flips backwards, and lands headfirst into the bucket, which slides on the still wet floor towards the stairs, which he cartwheels down out-of-control towards the front door. Su, giggling about how her timing is perfect, opens it for him as he rolls outside. Kitsune looks idly out the window to watch Keitaro roll at a violent speed to crash against a tree.

"Like always." Kitsune smiles, and takes another sip of her sake.

Keitaro gets up, painfully rubbing his back, and trudges dejectedly back into the Inn, wrenching the bucket off of his head as he goes. He walks back upstairs, trying keeping his distance as Naru passes him on her way down, but she clips him with her shoulder almost knocking him off-balance again. Sighing again, he finishes cleaning up his mess.

As evening approaches, Keitaro finds time to study by himself, while nursing his bruises at the same time. "Things have not changed at all, " he sighs unhappily. "But at least now I have some time to study." He forgets his woes for a while as he buckles down and starts working on what is in front of him. Before he begins his work in earnest, he glances up at the hole in his ceiling as he hears Naru moving around above him.

Naru sits down once again at her desk and begins to study as well, thinking about how irritating her perverted RM is.

(RM Resident Manager. I'm refraining from using too many random Japanese terminologies i.e. Baka, Kanrinin, and etc, because it's not my style. I'll continue explaining things like that as I continue to write this.)

An explosion rocks the Inn, followed immediately by a cry from Su, "It's okay, just workin' on somethin'!" and Keitaro sighs exasperatedly. Putting his pencil down on his desk, he looks out his window at the night sky in order to collect his thoughts before dealing with whatever blew up in Su's room.

The stars shine back, twinkling merrily even though he's not, as he gets up and pokes his head into the hallway.

Apparently, Su had been working on some kind of smoke bomb, because the hall was filled with the results of her botched project: Bright blue smoke. She skips on out, taking a jumping leap to tackle Keitaro back into his room, and then proceeds to jump up and down on top of his rib cage, shouting,

"La la la! Everything is fine! Nothing to worry about! Keep studying! La la la!" She doesn't leave, however, and continues bouncing up and down on top of Keitaro repeating herself. (Author's Note: I was listening to "The Safety Dance" when I wrote this part. It struck me as funny.)

Keitaro rolls out from under Su, but she continues jumping in place and repeating her little song. He raises his hand while rubbing his sore chest with the other, smiles, and says, "Thanks for the update, Su, but we need to open up the windows to let the smoke out."

Su nods in her energetic way, and dances her way out of his room, still shouting her song. Keitaro gets up, and pokes his head back into the hall to see if the coast is clear. He sighs again, noticing that Su once again left him to clean up another of her messes, and begins opening all of the windows halfway in order to let the smoke out.

He sits on the windowsill when he finishes, watching the night sky. (In case you're wondering how he can sit on the windowsill, I did a little reading about it and couldn't help but notice that windows in this type of inn slide to the side instead of sliding up.) The sky is clear, a calm before the blizzard that is due to arrive in a few days. The stars reflect off of the calm water of the bath, and he breathes the air for a bit, his breath condensing in the cold air. After a while of watching his breath in the air, he looks down the hall to see if the smoke has cleared enough.

Nodding in satisfaction that it has, he shuts all of the windows and steps back into his room. Looking at his clock, he surmises that he has about an hour more of study time before his bedtime. He sits down to start, but once again finds that he distracted by how clear the night sky is. Suddenly, a shooting star streaks across his line of vision. He smiles, as it is the most clearly seen shooting star he's seen in a long time. After spending another ten minutes of watching the sky, he looks down at his study materials, and decides that he would do well to go to bed early.

Looking one more time at the night sky, he hesitates as he sees a particularly bright star, of an odd magenta color.

He gestures to it. "I wish tonight, upon a shining star," he says aloud. "I wish to fully understand women, so that I can stop making them so angry at me. All this month Naru and Motoko have constantly punished me for my daily mistakes, more so than normal. I wish that one day, I will truly understand how they think, to understand why they do some of the things they do, why they sometimes get angry for things that wouldn't normally upset them. That is my wish tonight, upon a shining star."

He sighs again, and pulls his futon out. He changes into his pajamas, takes off his glasses, and climbs into bed after turning off the lights in his room. Sighing again, he turns his head to the side and looks at the night sky out the window.

"Wishes are just a superstition, but it never hurts to try," he says to himself before falling asleep.

Hours pass at Hinata Inn, its tenants and Resident Manager sound asleep.

As Keitaro slumbers, the star he wished on shines brightly on his sleeping form. The old annex behind the Inn, its power long dormant, begins to charge up. After a minute or two it discharges its unseen energy into the sky.

A beam of light from the magenta star shines into his room, lighting it up, and a womanly shape forms within it. This womanly shape's features define themselves more and more until a tall, slender, winged woman stands in the middle of his room, wrapped in flowing robes. She looks in the direction of the annex, as though she could see through the structure of the Inn, and smiles faintly.

She turns around and smiles mischievously at Keitaro, as he sleeps, and says quietly, "Your luck is not always terrible, Keitaro Urashima.

Keitaro snaps awake, sitting up. His eyes widen at the sight of the winged woman before him, and he immediately assumes the worst.

"I'm not ready to die!" he says in a hushed, panicked voice.

The woman giggles, a sound like tinkling glass. "I'm not an angel. I'm a Granter of Wishes. When you wish upon the right star, your wish will be granted. There is only one thing I have to tell you before I grant your wish, Keitaro."

Keitaro sits there, his mouth slack in surprise. He finally speaks, "You heard my wish to fully understand women?"

The Granter of Wishes nods, smiling her little mischievous smile. "To fully understand a woman, you must first be a woman. Your wish is one that most men never get answered because of their sleazy natures. Nine times out of ten, a man who becomes a woman would never leave his room. You are different though, Keitaro, you're more innocent than most men, so I shall grant your wish." She raises a hand, index finger extended, and traces a symbol of power out of the air.

Keitaro blinks in surprise at what she said, and replies, "I-uh-I don't think I like the idea of being a woman very much."

She pauses in her design of the midair symbol of power, and frowns at Keitaro. Her eyes, of an indeterminable color, glow a slight purple.. "You don't seem to understand, Keitaro. A wish you make on a star that is granted, cannot be taken back. The wishes we grant are deals that are made for all time, which means you'll be a woman forever. The other thing you don't understand, Keitaro, is simply because you don't know."

She finally finishes drawing the symbol out of the air with her fingertip. She raises her arms and points her palms outwards at Keitaro before adding, "And that would be the fact that you won't remember me. You will only remember the bright light and a single phrase."

Keitaro raises his hands in defense of what is surely to come, whimpering, "What bright light?"

"This bright light."

And then there is nothing but a bright flash of purple light. There is a lot of bright light. In an instant, the light is gone, the woman is gone, and Keitaro is once more soundly asleep. He groans a bit in his sleep, his voice no longer that of a man. A voice echoes through his mind, "You will have this form forever…"

It's Saturday. This weekend is not exactly like any other for the tenants of Hinata Inn, but they don't know it yet. Things go as they always have, Motoko waking up before anyone else does, Su already bouncing off the walls. Shinobu, out of habit and the kindness of her heart, is making enough breakfast food for everyone to eat even though only a select few are awake in time for it. True to the weatherman's forecast, the skies are overcast with the approaching blizzard.

Keitaro's clock radio goes off at 8 AM. He rolls to his side, blinking the sleep away and waving a slender arm at the radio to slap the button that turns the alarm off.

…Wait a minute, a slender arm?

(Alrighty, I'm going to refer to him as a girl now, because he's physically a she.)

Keitaro looks at the arm, half expecting it to be Kitsune playing another joke, but she sees that the arm is attached to her shoulder, and when she sits up, there are new soft weights on her chest that weren't there yesterday.

Keitaro looks at her hands, and recalls a bright flash of light in the night that simultaneously woke her up and put her to sleep. She also vaguely recalls a voice, "You will have this form forever…"

She turns her hands over, looking at the slender fingers in dumb shock. In a moment of panic, she raises the bed sheets and looks under the covers at herself. Blushing a deep red, she sits up and wraps the sheets around herself, wondering what she'll do now.

Naru woke from the sound of Keitaro's alarm clock, realizing she had fallen asleep at her desk while she was studying. She stretches, working the kinks out of her back that had developed from her slumping over. Looking down at the problems she had been doing, she realizes that Keitaro was supposed to be studying the same ones.

She chuckles a bit to herself, wiping the tiredness from her eyes. "I bet he's going to pop his head up any second now and tell me about the problems he can't solve."

And the Resident Manager of the Hinata Inn does in fact lift the board off of the hole that joined their rooms together, but to talk about a different set of problems.

They lock eyes, Naru not yet realizing why Keitaro doesn't look like what she expects him to look like. She takes in the sight before her, trying to make sense of it. It's got Keitaro's hair, and Keitaro's glasses, but from there it becomes only similarities. The face is nearly the same, but the eyes that peer at her have thick dark lashes. A slender hourglass figure is swathed in bed sheets and pajamas originally intended for men, and two long slender arms hold the sheet in place.

"This has GOT to be some kind of joke," Naru thinks to herself, as her face gets steadily redder.

The girl that looks like Keitaro raises a hand at Naru, gesturing for her to stop and listen, and speaks, "I'm in deep trouble."

Naru blinks, and tilts her head. Is it Keitaro? Is it not Keitaro? Just who the hell is this?

She folds her arms and stands there. "I won't argue with you there, because I don't know who you are, but something tells me I should. You're a stranger in my room, so you should tell me why you're in here."

Keitaro adjusts the sheet around herself (used to be himself, but not anymore lol) and sits down next to the hole in the floor. She looks up at Naru, and says, "If I tell you, can you promise me that you won't call for help?"

Naru, not quite sure what to make of this request, replies, "You have three minutes."

Keitaro nods, thinking, "I need to talk fast." She says to Naru, "Last night I made a wish to a shining star to understand women. A bright light flashed, and a voice said I was going to stay this way forever, and when I woke up to my alarm clock – well, you can see for yourself." She hugs the sheet closer to herself, looking at the floor.

"What's your GPA?"

"Forty-nine."

"Why does your aunt Miss Haruka constantly slap you?"

"I keep forgetting address her formally."

Naru sits down on the floor hard, wham, in shock. "Keitaro," is all she can say.

Keitaro nods, remaining silent for a while. Naru, on the other hand loses her temper and screeches a single word in a blood-curdling scream that causes Keitaro to wince.

"PERVERT!" She gets up, takes a running start, and punts Keitaro through her door just as Shinobu opens it to inquire whether she wanted to eat lunch. Keitaro collides with Shinobu, and they both bounce off the wall. When the dust settles, Keitaro has already gotten up and rewrapped the sheet around her body, and Shinobu finds herself staring up at someone whose face looks like Keitaro's.

"That girl looks just like Mister Keitaro…" Shinobu thinks to herself.

Naru's scream and the thundering noise of two people hitting a wall attract the other tenants, who now all stand in front of Shinobu protectively with their arms crossed. Motoko has her sword with her, but it is sheathed.

There is a barrage of questions, "Who are you? What are you doing here? What do you want? What were you doing in Naru's room?"

Keitaro looks from one to the other, overwhelmed with questions. She doesn't say anything at all, but leans against the doorframe and hugs the sheet around herself. "Please don't hurt me", is all she says.

Naru stalks out of her room, and immediately raises a foot to stomp on Keitaro. BAM! Keitaro is sent flying back into Naru's room, and she falls down the hole that leads to her room.

Naru looks at the other shocked tenants and says, "That's Keitaro. The IDIOT made a wish to fully understand women. His wish got granted, so now he's stuck that way for the rest of his life."

The tenants walk to the stairs side by side, heading to Keitaro's room. Within seconds, Keitaro's door slides open and all the tenants stand in the doorway, side by side, staring in shock. Su, the only one who doesn't seem fazed, is snickering with a hand covering her mouth.

A bare arm rises up on the other side of the bed, and then falls to rest on it. Keitaro hoists herself over the bed, the sheet barely wrapped around her. She straightens up, readjusts the sheet, and raises one finger. "Not a pervert," she says quietly, standing up. "I need to put on some clothes."

Everyone else is still standing there.

"I need to change into some clothes…?"

Kitsune slowly reaches out numbly, fumbling for the door and starts sliding it shut, still staring in mild shock.

Naru reaches out and stops her from completely closing the door. "This… Pervert… Can't be left alone. You guys wait out here." She steps into the room and finishes sliding the door shut.

She walks towards Keitaro with clenched fists, brushing rudely passed him and stepping over to his bedroom window. She folds her arms, and stands there with her back to him. "Well, hurry up and dress, moron!"

Keitaro hesitates, but sees that Naru isn't going to turn around. She lets the sheet fall from her shoulders, and blushes embarrassingly again as she removes her pajamas, the top not pulling off as easily, as her newly acquired breasts get in the way. After wrestling her way out of the shirt, she grabs a black t-shirt, a fresh pair of boxers, and a fresh pair of blue jeans.

"Okay Naru, I'm done," Keitaro says nervously.

Naru turns around, with her arms still folded, and looks at the getup that Keitaro is wearing. She shrugs, not caring very much about the clothes Keitaro has selected, and grabs Keitaro by the sleeve. She drags her to the door, sliding it open.

-End Chapter One-

There you have it, the first chapter is complete. I hope it was at the very least interesting, as this is the first fanfic I've ever posted on the internet. This is also the first story I've written in present tense in a very long time, and I figured I'd give that a try since I think I'm a bit rusty. I have three other chapters that I have to edit before I post them, so R&R and tell me what you think!