Series Prologue
Li Xiang
"You're here to see... grandfather?" Nobutada stared at the younger man. He was well groomed and dressed in the latest of fashions. He certainly didn't look like anyone his grumpy old isolationist grandfather would know.
The teenaged man before him raked his hands through his hair with a frustrated grunt, "Look, just tell him that Siberian is here, he'll understand."
"No need," both men whirled around to find an absolutely ancient American slumped in the doorjamb, hair and eyes faded, though his eyes still sparkled with humor, "I may not be able to sense ki or your smell your scent anymore, but that doesn't mean my wards have failed. It's been a long time, Kenken."
Hidaka Ken cracked a small grin, "Too long, old friend. Far too long."
Nathan Algren chuckled, slapping his hand against the doorjamb, "Ah... but we both know that the only reason you could find me was because my name finally appeared in Death's book."
"Grandfather!" Nobutada squeaked, "You're not dying!"
"Boy..." Algren shook his head at the grandson of the boy that he had helped to raise so many years ago. Both Hegan and Mogechirou had passed on within the last decade, "I can feel my body shutting down on me, Boy. It's a disturbing but... welcome, sensation. Do you know how old I am?"
The youth looked confused, "Ninety-seven..." he was the oldest foreigner in all of Japan. Actually, Nobutada was sure that he was the oldest man in Japan, period. And the only one who could remember the Samurai for what they had been, not what they had been romanced into.
Ken let out a bark of laughter, one that was abruptly cut off by a small glare from Algren. Ken didn't want to stir that hornet's nest. Daniel had told him well what had happened when he had last met up with the man.
"Boy... Nobutada. I am nearly a millennia old," he chuckled at the boy's dumbfounded stare, "Though ninety-seven years ago, I got the chance to become mortal again. I wanted to die... so I went for it."
"How... how can you be so old."
Ken had to grin, cheekily jumping in with, "I'm older."
Algren whacked Ken upside the head, "You were born three years before me, Ken. I doubt that you are older than I am any more."
"So," Nobutada looked at the younger appearing man, "how old are you?"
"Eight hundred and fifty-two, as of last month," Ken smirked, before looking at his one time friend, "There's a reason I wanted to see you before you died."
"Oh...?"
"How did you do it?" the Shaman turned pleading eyes on his friend, "How did you become mortal again?"
Algren sighed, "When I left the Akatsuki nine centuries ago, that's what I was searching for; a way to be human, a way to join my brother in death. Seven hundred years is a long time to wander, even if I did jump between time periods every now and again, but one hundred and fifty years ago, I found a... crystal, if you will," the old man dug around in his pockets for a moment. He hadn't actually 'found' it. More like... 'liberated it' from his old 'friend', Yoda.
Ken's eyes widened as Algren slapped not only the milky white stone, but the Primary Key of Time onto the table, "You... you're the one who stole the Key?"
Nathan's lips quirked, "I've stolen a lot of things in my old age. But how did you think I got through time if I didn't have it?"
"Never mind," the ancient Shaman shook his head in exasperation. Did age have to make him more annoying? "So how does the crystal work?"
"Note how the Key and the crystal are on the same chain," Algren brushed his fingers across the both, "For as long as they touch, it warps time in my body-- forcing cell degradation at a phenomenal rate of change for a regular human... but it ages me. Slowly, but I do age. Our immortality is not permanent, my old friend, but the changes that occur in the human body over the course of the year... take ten thousand for us."
Ken reached to get a better look at the stone, only to have his hand slapped away, "No touching, Kenken. The crystal will release what every is in it into you."
"What's the problem with that?" Nobutada looked at his grandfather in confusion, having been pretty much left out of the conversation.
Algren patted the boy on the head, "It does the reverse-- it doesn't degrade the cell tissue but... regresses it. You would become a baby again."
"So that's how...?" Ken wondered.
Nathan nodded, "Yeah. The curse apparently can't take such an overload of energy. It was completely wiped out, as far as I know."
"Damn..." Ken whistled, "...hey, Ranma?"
"You can have it when I die," his old comrade in arms smirked, "Until then, stick around. You might learn something... educational."
"Eh?"
"Grandfather?"
Algren slung an arm over Nobutada's shoulders, "Help me over to that chair, kiddo. My old bones are aching. Heh, did I ever tell you about how I met my closest friend?"
"The German woman?" Nobutada wondered with a blink, "Yeah, a few years ago."
"I did? Hmm... well, how about I tell you how I met Ken here? It's an... interesting tale."
"I'd call it violent, personally."
"My story, Siberian, not yours!"
---->End----
Author's forward--
And so it begins; the identity series rewrite.
Do you know how long I've been writing this? Three years now. Thirty-six months. One hundred and forty-four weeks. And not one of those weeks has gone by without thinking about this story, this universe that I inadvertently created.
This thing has undergone so many damn plot changes and revisions, that I can no longer remember the original idea behind it.
But that hardly matters-- there is a new idea behind this, and I think that it's the one I meant to have all along.
It's a journey of discovery, of finding one's self, one's morals-- one's identity in the end. Over the past three years, I've grown and changed. I'm sure that I'll continue to do so, but I like to think that as this story goes on, it chronicles how I've grown as well as how Ranma has grown over his centuries.
To go with this latest revision/rewrite, a new style of writing. I hope you like it.
Priest Jakal
Li Xiang
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