Disclaimer: Ranma 1/2 and the characters associated with it belong to Rumiko Takahashi and whomever she has sold the rights to. Any characters you don't recognize belong to me, for whatever that's worth. This work of fanfiction is not intended for monetary gain, but was written just for the fun of it.
The Gang of Four sat quietly around the chabudai in the Tendo/Saotome dining room the night before the big date. For Ono Kasumi and Kanzen Konatsu, quiet was an integral part of their nature. Tendo Ranma, not truly a quiet man at heart, had learned to fake it when necessary over the years. Only for Saotome Akane was the quiet a strain, which explains why she spoke first.
"I'm still not sure that this is a good idea," Akane said.
"As weird as things can still get around this town, I don't see how we can take the chance," Ranma shot back. "Ukyo and Mousse are friends of ours. Three out of four of us think they shoulda gone out years ago, sorry Konatsu, and I don't see anything wrong with... uh..."
"Smoothing the path?" the ninja finished for him. Ranma nodded in agreement.
"I am surprised that you're taking this so calmly Konastu-san," Kasumi said to her coworker.
"I favor whatever makes Ukyo-sama the happiest. If that is a relationship with Mousse, whom I consider a good man, I am content." His personal feelings for Ukyo ran deeper than that and everyone there knew it. That he wouldn't let those feelings interfere with the task at hand was equally clear.
Akane said, "Well, if we are going to do this, we need to know what we're up against."
"We do for the most part," her husband replied. "Mousse is taking her to dinner and a movie."
"But where?" Kasumi asked.
"Some French place where he knows one of the assistant chefs. Means he gets to bypass the waiting list for reservations."
"That's nice, but I meant 'where' as in 'where on a map' Ranma-kun."
"Oh. Uh..." Searching through the pile of student evaluations on the table failed to yield anything resembling a map. "Coulda swore I had that thing earlier." Ranma got to his feet and began searching the room without positive result.
"Try the office," Akane said helpfully and more than a little hopefully. Ranma headed upstairs to what had once been Akane's bedroom and moments later his cry of "Found it!" preceded his return. After some necessary rearrangement, Ranma spread his map across the chabudai.
"It's a little south of Takadanobaba Station in Hyakunincho," Ranma said.
Akane nodded knowingly. When she'd attended Gakushuin University, she and many other students had flowed through that station on a daily basis. At least they wouldn't covering completely unfamiliar territory.
"I am simply happy that it isn't here or Juuban," Konatsu said.
"Yeah, that's a break all right," Ranma said. "Most of the really weird crap in Tokyo happens here, there or at Tokyo Tower."
"So what will we be up against?"
"Nothing too drastic; gang bangers, yakuza, drunks, punk kids that ain't learned they're mortal yet, that sort of stuff."
Kasumi raised her hand, as if she were still in school instead of ten years beyond that point in her life. Prompted by Ranma, she said, "I read in a magazine that my husband had in the office that 'Revenge from the Cursed Spring 6' starts filming on Monday. That means Chon Wang is in town..."
"And he's always a threat," Akane finished before sighing disappointedly. One of the few that had turned down the opportunity to be cured of his curse, the former Taro Pantyhose no longer held any malice toward Ranma or those associated with him. He just made the occasional attack to 'toughen up' for his recurring movie role of 'Nihooman the Dark Beast.
"So much for this being easy," Ranma muttered.
"I do not see why that should not be so," Kasumi said. Konatsu, Ranma and Akane all turned to face her. Under their combined stare, she continued, "There are solutions to problems that don't involve someone hitting someone else. I have one in mind that should work here."
Ranma opened his mouth to reply, but shut it upon realizing that Kasumi was right. Eventually, he said, "All right, Chon Wang is all yours unless you want help."
"Ranma!" Akane nearly shouted as Kasumi nodded in acknowledgment. "You know how dangerous he can be. Why are you letting my sis..." Akane trailed off upon noting the look of absolute serenity combined with absolute confidence her sister wore. Turning to Kasumi, she quietly said, "Fine. But if something goes wrong, call us first thing."
"Certainly," her sister replied.
Considering the matter of Chon Wang settled, Ranma continued, "I'll check in with Lieutenant Oda in the morning to see what's up with gang and Yakuza activity. Shinjuku may not be the weirdness magnet Nerima is, but it's got a higher crime rate."
"Not that Ukyo-sama or Mousse can't handle such minor problems as those themselves," Konatsu observed.
"They would probably consider fighting a street gang stress relief," Kasumi commented before adding, "not that we should arrange such an incident."
"Stress relief? More like comic relief," Akane deadpanned, drawing laughter from those present.
Kasumi strode across the lobby of the Asakusa Prince Hotel dressed in her best 'modern businesswoman' attire. Non-coincidentally, it matched the dress code required of the hotel's female management staff. This meant the basket of baked goods she carried looked somewhat out of place, but not so much that she drew undue attention.
Whether or not Kasumi knew that the trick to wandering through places one is not supposed to be is to appear like one belongs there is moot. Bypassing the front desk, she went straight to the management offices to obtain a passcard that would allow her entry to the penthouse suite. A harried manager, busy with half a dozen crises of his own, waved vaguely at a drawer when Kasumi politely requested an access card in order to make a delivery. Rooting through the indicated drawer, she quickly found a card marked 'Penthouse'. Politely thanking the manager, she headed for the service elevator. That Kasumi wasn't a fellow employee never crossed the man's mind.
The security that prevented journalists, photographers and rabid teenaged fangirls from disturbing the 'no longer up and coming, but not come and gone yet' Chon Wang wasn't so much dealt with as simply bypassed. Upon reaching the Penthouse's vestibule, she found the door to suite open. A man, holding a clipboard and talking into a cellphone, pointed Kasumi toward a long table heaped high with fruit baskets, boxed candy, western style deli trays and enough alcohol to kill a dozen hardened salarymen in a bewildering variety of forms from beer to sake to champagne.
'Hmm, perhaps this won't be quite as easy as I believed,' she thought. Undiscouraged, she glanced around the room before heading for the patio that served as the roof for the rest of the building. Due to his Jusenkyo curse, he frequently stayed outdoors in case of accidental wettings. The reinforced structure was one of the few hotel roofs in Tokyo that could take the extra weight.
Before she reached the patio, a door slid open in front of her to reveal the target of her search. Time and success had changed the former Pantyhose Taro. In the years since they had met, his face had matured from its somewhat bishonen appearance. He wore his hair is a less fanciful, more masculine, style. But the arrogance was still there, undiminished by experience.
It took him less that a second to overcome his surprise and recognize the intruder. "How did you get in here?" Chon asked sharply.
"Through the door Wang-san," Kasumi answered truthfully.
"..." Chon closed his mouth without speaking. Knowing she couldn't possibly be that stupid, he dropped the inquiry. Instead, he continued, "Why are you here?"
"I came to give you this," she indicated the basket filled with a variety of home-baked breads, muffins and cookies, "and to wish you well on your upcoming film." The absolute sincerity in her voice soothed the irate movie star. Instead of formally thanking her, Chon grabbed a blueberry muffin and took a large bite. It was as good as he expected.
After a brief conversation, Kasumi left the suite, returned the 'borrowed' key card to its source with thanks for its use and left the hotel. The herbal sedative she'd laced the food with would do no lasting harm, but made it unlikely that Chon would cause any trouble until after Ukyo and Mousse's date was complete.
"How do I look?" Mousse asked.
"You look fine," Ranma replied.
"Ranma, no offense, but I was asking Akane."
"You look quite handsome," the woman in question said. "Ranma here could take some pointers from you." Abandoning the robes he normally wore, Mousse was sharply turned out in a dark gray three piece suit and highly polished matching shoes. His long hair was bound at the nape of his neck and again in the middle of his back.
Mousse briefly smiled at the exaggerated frown Ranma gave his wife before the nervousness he'd been feeling returned. Despite numerous cautions not to worry about the impending date, he couldn't quite shake the agitation he felt. He felt the situation far too important to risk screwing up. Sparing a glance into a mirror, he wondered how things were going over at Ukyo's.
Ukyo nearly jumped out of her skin when Kasumi knocked on the door to her bedroom. Ritsuko laughed at this; she felt that everyone involved in this 'date' thing was taking it way too seriously. She knew that Uncle Mousse liked her mother and the other way around. They had been friends like, forever. What was the big deal? The explanation of exactly why it was a big deal was not quite understood by the five year old.
After two deep breaths,
as requested by Kasumi, Ukyo found her center and sat down to have Kasumi assist with makeup. She seldom wore anything other than a little lipstick, being blessed with a clear complexion and skin that was neither too dry nor too oily. When Kasumi opened the kit she'd brought, Ukyo's eyes opened wide in shock.
"Do I have to wear all that crap?" she asked. Half the stuff she didn't even recognize, let alone know how to use. Eyeliner, eye shadow, mascara, foundation, concealer, rouge, powder blush, lipstick, lip gloss, nail polish and nail polish remover, make up remover, false eyelashes, tweezers, small scissors, brushes of various types.
"Only if you would like. I just wanted to make sure I had the basics covered."
"Basics?" Ukyo squeaked out.
"I didn't think I needed the green eye shadow or the black lipstick."
"You use..." The question died on her lips.
"Oh my, no. Most of this is Joji's."
Ukyo sighed in relief and the two sat down to work. A little clear mascara to provide additional volume, some well blended rouge to highlight her cheeks plus lipstick and nail polish to match her dress completed the minimalist approach that Ukyo chose.
Claiming she had errands to run before she returned home, Kasumi left Ukyo to wait for Mousse's arrival. To cover the nervousness she felt over her impending 'first real date', Ukyo went downstairs to make sure the plans for the evening were set. They were, even if they weren't quite the ones she thought they were.
"Looking good boss," Joji said before Ukyo could say anything. Many of the male diners agreed, but only a few of the regulars dared to comment, although she did notice a surprising, to her, number of furtive glances and outright stares.
"Thank you," she replied automatically. "You know what to do?"
"Keep Konatsu away from the register, put Ritsuko to bed around eight, close at ten thirty, clean up and wait upstairs for you to get back," her employee replied. "Oh, here comes Mousse."
Ukyo rushed over to the entrance just as Mousse opened the door.
"Wow."
Five minutes after Mousse and Ukyo left, Kasumi returned to 'Ukyo's As You Like It' and took over the grill duties from Konatsu. As he changed clothes, Kano Joji made a phone call, said two words and hung up. Less than two minutes later, Konatsu slipped out the delivery entrance in full ninja regalia, and blended into the shadows. He would have to hurry to catch up.
Ranma smirked at the pile of unconscious bodies. Not really even a light workout by his admittedly irrational standards, but the gang that claimed the movie theater as its turf, at least the part that hadn't fled once Ranma started cleaning house, would not be the source of any trouble for a few hours. But just in case, Ranma headed to the movie theater. He'd long ago learned not to underestimate the powers of stupidity or bad luck.
Kanzen Konatsu knew where a lot of bodies were buried in Nerima. Not that he'd buried any of them himself. He had far better ways of dealing with problems. But eavesdropping on the Yakuza faction that nominally claimed the Furinkan section of Nerima as its territory was an occasionally useful hobby.
Konatsu was the key to the unofficial truce between the Yakuza and what was still occasionally referred to as the Nerima Wrecking Crew. He was far more willing to deal with the seamy underbelly of Tokyo than any of his friends. Not that there were many deals that needed to be made once the Oyabun decided to use Furinkan as a wisdom test.
When presented with an overly ambitious thug, an excessively eager up and comer or a woefully ignorant fool that needed humbled, the Oyabun would make a 'gift' of Furinkan's territory. The wise quickly realized that operating there in an assertive manner was not cost effective in men, time or effort. The fools tried to enforce their wills on a population protected by some of the most extraordinarily talented martial artists on the planet. The fact that some of them were as sneaky as they were skilled, like Konatsu, only made the fools' eventual failure more certain.
As a compromise, it worked. Usually.
In the preparations leading up to Ukyo and Mousse's date, he'd heard nothing that should directly interfere with the evening's plans. But a bar frequented by the Yakuza's Shinjuku faction was on the direct route between the restaurant and the theater, so close surveillance was called for. He left the restaurant a good ten minutes before his friends to scout things out.
A beautiful woman in her mid twenties entered the bar, dressed in tight dark red leather motorcycling gear that covered everything and yet left little to the imagination. Unlike Ukyo, Konatsu was intimately familiar with make-up and how to use it. Not to mention the corset that constricted his waist or the falsies that provided a slightly more than modest bosom. The seeming woman made a beeline for the backroom where he knew from prior surveillance, the local Yakuza members could be found.
A large paw descended on 'her' shoulder before 'she' got within three steps of the entryway 'she' was heading toward. "Where d'ya think you're going?" a bear-like man asked rudely as he spun 'her' around to face him.
'That's one', Konatsu thought. "I was told I could find Tanaka Fugimori here," 'she' said in a husky contralto. Konatsu could no longer pull off the higher pitched speaking voice he'd used nearly a decade earlier when he'd first met Ukyo.
The bodyguard was momentarily taken aback. Tanaka-san was indeed in the back room. But nobody, nobody, was supposed to know that and nobody, nobody, was supposed to be looking for him under his real name instead of his alias of Kuroi Tora, Black Tiger. With a flick of his head, he summoned help.
'That's two and three,' Konatsu thought as they arrived.
"I'm sorry miss, but that's a private area." Without taking his hand off Konatsu's shoulder, the large man ordered one of the new arrivals, "Go see if there's anybody named Tanaka hanging out back there." Implied, but no less understood, was a request to find out what to do with the unexpected visitor.
Konatsu waited patiently, unobtrusively observing his surroundings as he ticked time off his mental clock. By his calculations, Mousse and Ukyo should be walking past the open entrance any second. A cell phone rang and the two men that had been watching that entrance began moving toward him.
'And that's five. Showtime.' Forcing a shudder to pass through his body, Konatsu plaintively asked, "Is something wrong sir?"
The tremble in 'her' voice and apparent fear in 'her' eyes sold it. The bearish man loosened his grip the tiniest fraction.
Konatsu slid out of his grasp with contemptuous ease while flinging a smoke bomb to the floor. As the concealing smoke arose, he slide-stepped to the right and slammed a double punch into the bearish man's ribcage, knocking him into the other gangster. He could have hit harder, but that wasn't the point of the exercise.
By the time the fight got noisy enough to be interesting, Mousse and Ukyo were well past the bar's entrance.
"Well, don't you look handsome?" Saotome Nodoka asked, somewhat rhetorically, of her husband. "Yes dear," Genma said as neutrally as he could. That his wife might want to go out on the town with him after a prolonged absence, he could understand. That she wanted to go all the way to Shinjuku, when there were perfectly good restaurants and movie theaters in Adachi, wasn't understood, but was accepted. But why on Earth did she insist he wear a suit for the first time since his grandson was born? 'A martial artist should look like a martial artist, not a salaryman,' he thought.
Not that he didn't look good for a man on the wrong side of 50.
The nearly year long training trip he'd taken with his son's most promising students, Jiang Gang and Ysuchiya Yasueh, had been good for him. (And better for them in his opinion.) His paunch had been walked and worked down considerably. He'd also stopped covering his bald head and learned to live with it.
As they walked to the train station, Genma put his mouth on autopilot, politely agreeing with the various comments and observations his wife made while his own attention was spent scanning for trouble. As intended, his students had picked up some rivals during their trip. Unfortunately, one of Ysuchiya's turned out to be Kuno Kodachi.
The crazed ex-gymnast had somehow seized on the resemblance between Ysuchiya and his daughter-in-law. The net results of which were that Kuno repeatedly attacked his female student for 'stealing my beloved Ranma-sama' and Ysuchiya slept with a bottle of industrial strength weed killer in hand. Kuno wasn't restricting herself to martial arts in pursuit of her vendetta. Genma was not looking forward to explaining the situation to his son.
Ranma nibbled on a bag of ridiculously overpriced popcorn and scanned the entrance to the movie theater again. His eyes slid right past the large bald man in the suit, but caught on the small, reddish haired woman in the kimono on his arm before sharply backtracking.
'What the hell are they doing here?' Ranma thoughts. He'd known his father was due back 'soon', not that he'd already returned from his training trip with Yasueh and Gang. Several dozen questions flashed through his mind as he made his way toward his parents as they headed for the ticket windows. Mousse and Ukyo were due any second. Finding the three of them there would be a flare lit tip-off that their friends didn't think they could handle a simple date by themselves. "Mom! Dad!" Ranma nearly shouted over the crowd.
Several people known as 'Mom' and 'Dad' turned in his direction, including the two that he'd been aiming for. After making it through the crowd, his mother asked, "Ranma, what are you doing here? Is Akane with you?"
"No." Screened by the crowd, Mousse and Ukyo checked out the 'Now Playing' posters while debating what to see.
"Then what are yo-"
Ranma interrupted, "Mom, Ukyo and Mousse are coming here on their first date and I'm trying to keep an eye out for trouble for them and it'll blow everything if they see the three of us here." Nodoka made a disappointed sound, which both her husband and son noticed. The mother of her grandchild could do much better than some foreigner if she wasn't willing to be her son's mistress.
Genma frowned. He didn't dislike Ukyo or Mousse. Both of them had served, and continued to serve, their roles in his son's life. He weighed that against the probable argument with his wife that would result if they left. Nodding to his son, Genma told Nodoka, "Come along dear, there are other movie theaters in Shinjuku but a young couple only has one first date."
It was just sappy enough that Nodoka allowed herself, somewhat reluctantly, to be escorted from the theater.
Ranma sighed in relief as he returned his chosen viewpoint. He never noticed when Ukyo spotted him in the mirror above the concession stand.
After the movie, the trip back from Shinjuku to Nerima was uneventful, a fact that was appreciated by all parties involved.
Ranma and Konatsu lurked in the shadows near the entrance to 'Ukyo's As You Like It' as their friends paused at the door of the restaurant. After a brief hushed conversation, Mousse's voice came quite clearly to their ears. "Well, I hope you had fun tonight. Even if there was an audience."
Both hidden observers had the common decency to blush before returning to their respective homes for the evening.
END
Author's note: I'm not dead. No promises about when I get another chapter of anything out.