Update 2 January, 2017: I've changed the title from The Mustang and the Salamander to The Honor of the Wild Horse. This is because Honor doesn't get nicknamed the Salamander until later in the series than the book this story is based on. Also as one reviewer points out, Mustang refers to something specific in the Honorverse that doesn't apply to Ranma in this story, so I've fallen back to the fan fiction standby, Wild Horse, as a nickname for Ranma. The Honor of the Wild Horse also refers to the title of the book this is based on, The Honor of the Queen.
Ranma Saotome was created by Rumiko Takahashi. Honor Harrington and her friends were created by David Weber. This is fan fiction created for fun.
Author's Note: This fic is not related to my other fic, A Pleasant Sort of Hell, other than having the same settings and an identical jumping off point for Ranma. The Wishing Sword is ideal for transporting Ranma to the future, especially to Sphinx, since Hexapumas would be Ranma's worst nightmare. It also is too early for Ranma to know the Mouko Takabisha, which I wanted to not have for this story. On the Honorverse side, this fic slides right into the second book, The Honor of the Queen, which is where Grayson is introduced. Ranma slots into Carolyn Wolcott's position on the Fearless. I believe that this fic should be readable without knowing much about Honor Harrington. A little bit of knowledge about Ranma would be useful, but you can get by with the knowledge that he's a martial artist with a sex-changing curse.
I'm targeting a much more sci fi adventure feel for this fic than in APSoH which basically just gave Ranma a tour of the highlights of the Honorverse. Ranma will be the only time traveler in this one and there won't be any romance.
Ranma smiled charmingly at Kuno and gushed, "Kuno-sempai, you're so manly!"
"Verily, it is so, My Pig-Tailed Goddess!" Kuno said, standing up straighter.
"Let me see the sword, Kuno-sempai," she said coquettishly.
"Certainly, My Love!" Kuno raised the Wishing Sword above his head. "Behold the instrument of the destruction of the Foul Sorcerer Saotome."
"I want to hold it, Kuno-sempai," she said.
"Nay, My Love," Kuno said condescendingly. "Though thou art indeed a warrior maid of some skill, this is a man's weapon. It is only fitting that it be wielded by the premiere example of manhood in our generation, the Rising Star of the Kendo World, the Blue Thunder of Furinkan High School, the undefeated Kuno Tatewaki, age 17!"
Ranma gritted her teeth and tried not to show her disgust at the supposed object of her affection. She fluttered her eyes and grasped her hands together to enhance her girlishness. "Please, Tachi-kun!" she wheedled. "So we can be together!"
Kuno looked like he might give in before steeling himself. "I will vanquish the Foul Sorcerer immediately so that nothing can stand between us and our love!"
He raised the sword above his head and thrust Ranma into his chest in a one-armed hug. Ranma tried to reach for the sword but was denied leverage. As she tried to wiggle free, he declaimed, "I wish that Saotome Ranma be banished from this earth to his personal hell for thousands of years!"
"What no!" Ranma cried as she was yanked out of Kuno's arms. Her last sight before she was swallowed up by a bright light was Kuno's startled face.
Ranma felt herself drop about half a meter. The surface she landed on was furry. She felt corded muscles under her hands. As she blinked her eyes to try and get her sight back, she heard angry hissing and yowling. She thanked her ancestors that the sound was not that of a certain furry plague upon the earth.
However, her relief was short-lived as her sight returned and she found herself latched onto the back of a distinctly feline looking creature and surrounded by two others. They were black, muscular creatures with six legs and very sharp-looking teeth. They were about twice as long as she was tall and looked like they out-massed her by a factor of 10, but the thing that worried her more than that was the feline cast to their face.
She felt the fear bubble up inside her. It came so quickly that she could not try to stop it even if she wanted to. Her conscious mind retreated as the Cat Fist took over.
Ranma awoke to the feeling of cool water streaming onto her. She found herself on a broad tree branch some distance above the ground. It was currently raining. The tree she was in blocked most of it, but she was unlucky enough to be right under one of the places that runoff streamed toward the ground.
She moved out of the stream and toward the trunk of the tree. Looking around, she could tell that the tree was different than any she had seen or heard about in Japan or China. The trees were very large and had broad trunks and branches that spread out almost horizontally. The trees seemed interconnected through the branches.
More concerning were those feline creatures. Akane had once shown her pictures of every type of feline on earth in an attempt to find the limits of her Cat Fist fears. None of them had looked like those creatures. More concerning was that she had never heard of any vertebrate animal, much less mammal, that had six legs. This place did not look like any type of hell that she had heard of, but it also did not seem like Earth.
Ranma wanted desperately to turn back to her normal self, but did not see how she could. She knew a couple of methods for starting a fire without matches, but they all required tools she did not have. She thought she could figure something out if she had a knife, but she did not. Even assuming she could start a fire, she had nothing that could contain water that did not burn.
The first order of business was to find people, if this place had them. Her limbs felt heavier than they should, but she could handle it easily. If nothing else, it made for a good training environment. She was starting to get hungry and did not know if she could eat the wildlife. She hopped down to the forest floor and began looking for traces of humanity.
After about several hours, Ranma finally found boot or shoe prints along a game trail. She followed the trail, occasionally seeing evidence of human presence until she came to a small building; it was roughly the size of the main room of the Tendo home. The walls of the building looked synthetic, but were much tougher than any plastic Ranma had seen. The door to the building had romanji characters on it arranged into three words inside a shield. The shield also contained three of the strange interconnected trees below the words. She thought they were in English because she recognized the word "Service." The building did have a large window on one side, but the glass was tinted and she could not see inside. She rapped on the glass, but got no response of any kind. Just to be sure, she also knocked on the door to a similar non-response.
After considering it for a few minutes, she decided to force the door. The door was solid and quite firmly locked, so she gathered her ki and then yanked. The door and frame deformed, but did not come free. She tried again and got it open.
The inside of the building looked like a studio apartment. There was a kitchen area, a bed, a work area, all in one room. The only other room was a bathroom with a toilet, sink, and an odd looking shower. After looking around, the first order of business was to see if she could find some hot water. She tested the handles at the sink in the kitchen area to see if they made water come out. To her surprise, one of the handles produced hot water almost instantly. She knew that some kitchens were plumbed for hot water, but they always took a minute or two to warm up. She decided this could not be a hell if it had hot water on demand. She adjusted the temperature using the other handle to get a pleasant yet effective temperature and then splashed her face to turn back to normal.
Pleased to be male again, Ranma looked through the kitchen area and found some sliced meat in the refrigerator and some bread in the cupboards. Not seeing anything more appetizing, he made a few American-style sandwiches and ate them.
After that, he examined the work area to see if he could figure out where he was. This consisted of a desk with objects that he did not recognize. He did recognize the English word "radio" next to a button. Shrugging Ranma pushed the radio button. Instead of music or talking, a good-sized TV screen above the button lit up. He had not recognized it as a screen at first because it was built into the desk and flat rather than curved like the TV screens he had seen. A woman's face appeared on the screen.
"Hello," she said in oddly accented English. "Who is this?" She continued speaking, but Ranma's English was not good enough to follow her. He figured that this was like some type of video telephone rather than the type of radio he had expected.
"Hello," he responded in the same language. He decided to use some of the relevant phrases that everyone learns when learning a foreign language. "My name is Ranma. I need help. I am lost."
She responded with more words that he could not follow. Pretty much all Japanese of his generation learned English in school, but his schooling was spotty and her accent was definitely unusual.
"Slower, please. My English not good," he said once the woman had stopped. "I not understand."
The woman paused before saying slowly, "You wait there, okay? Someone will come in one hour, okay?"
"Okay," Ranma responded. "I wait. One hour. Someone comes."
With nothing else to do, Ranma practiced kata outside while waiting for someone to come. He was incredibly surprised when a small vehicle without wings or rotors approached from the air. Did Kuno somehow send him into the future or was he dreaming?
A man and a woman got out of the flying vehicle and approached him.
"Ranma?" the man said. "Are you hurt?"
"Yes, I Ranma," he replied carefully. "I not hurt."
"What language do you speak?" the woman asked. She was holding a flat device about the size of a hardback book, but thinner.
"Japanese," he said.
The woman poked at her device and then said something incomprehensible to the man.
"Where are you from?" came out of the device in very oddly accented Japanese.
"I'm from Nerima in Tokyo," Ranma responded.
"No planet known as Tokyo exists in the database; did you mean Shin-Tokyo?" asked the device.
Ranma wondered if he was dreaming again.
"Tokyo is on Earth," Ranma responded. "What year is it?"
"The year is 1894 Post Diaspora," responded the device. "How did you arrive on Sphinx? Are there others in your party?"
"Post Diaspora?" Ranma questioned. "What's that in Common Era?"
"The year is 3997 Common Era," responded the device. "How did you arrive on Sphinx? Are there others in your party?"
Ranma felt lost. It was supposed to be 1988. "I don't know what Sphinx is or how I got here. I think I'm the only one."
Ranma's claim to be born in 131 Ante Diaspora (1972 CE) on Old Earth caused an uproar. The fact that he was genuinely confused about a lot of the technology that even people from poor, frontier planets took for granted, and that there was no record of his birth on Sphinx or his arrival led credence to the fact that something odd and inexplicable was going on. This was only multiplied when his Jusenkyo curse was discovered two days after he had been "rescued." He spent two very uncomfortable days being poked, prodded, and splashed by various doctors before Child Services insisted that they stop after he had been verified non-contagious. When no logical explanation could be discerned, his gender-changing condition was simply accepted and noted in his files.
The Sphinxian authorities ultimately decided to just accept his presence and placed him in a foster home. The couple he was placed with, Jim and Vanessa Miller, were nice enough, but Ranma had a hard time relating to them. While their were some people on Sphinx that were of Asian descent and even some that kept some superficial customs, Sphinx overall was very Western.
He learned that Sphinx was one of three planets that made up the Star Kingdom of Manticore. The government was a parliamentary monarchy, like Japan, but the unelected, hereditary House of Lords controlled the budget and selected the Prime Minister. The Queen of Manticore had more real power, but less respect than the Emperor of Japan did. This is not to say that the nobles ran roughshod over the rest of the kingdom; overall the standard of living for the average person on Sphinx was very high.
The Millers insisted that Ranma attend High School after his English had improved enough. Vanessa quickly determined that Ranma was very competitive and persuaded him to do well in school using reverse psychology. Ranma figured out what she was doing before too long, but when he confronted her about it, she told him that if he were book smart, people would not be able to trick him like that. This led to a discussion about his life in Nerima, and Vanessa pointed out how much he had let Nabiki and others push him around and manipulate him, which could be ameliorated if he were knowledgeable about more than just martial arts.
After the Millers became frustrated with all the water accidents in their home, they insisted that Ranma experiment to see if there was anything he could do to "placate" the curse. To his irritation, he found that if he spent half his time as a girl, the number of water accidents he had diminished to almost nothing. More psychology from Vanessa had him alternating days as male and female. He found that alternating days made water accidents disappear. He decided that he did not actually mind being a girl that much unless she had to deal with too many boys flirting with her. She found she enjoyed receiving it in small amounts because it stroked her ego, but Ranma was a firm heterosexual male and unreasonable persistence made her angry. Vanessa also managed to intimidate Ranma into developing feminine modesty. The Miller woman's personality had the persistence of Nabiki with the serenity of Kasumi. Ranma stood little chance against her in an argument even if one did not consider her degree in psychology.
Ranma graduated High School in the top ten percent four years later. By the time he did, he had decided to become a citizen of the Star Kingdom. He had no real way to make it back to Earth and nothing was waiting for him there if he did.
Yawata Crossing, where the Millers lived, had many martial arts studios. However, none of them taught anything like Indiscriminate Grappling. It was mostly vanilla karate, tae kwon do, or kung fu. There were a few schools that he had not encountered before that incorporated Western martial arts styles, but nothing that really excited him. He tried teaching as a part time job, but the few studios that were willing to hire him without certifications insisted that he "dumb it down" for the students. He idly considered starting his own studio, but found out that he could not get a loan without a teaching certificate. Further thought made him realize that he would almost certainly have to start off teaching beginners, which he knew by then he would find incredibly boring.
The Millers encouraged him to attend college while also subtly encouraging him to move out so that they could help someone else who needed it more than he did. He considered it, but while he no longer hated school to the extent that he had hated Furinkan, the idea of studying to get a desk job did not appeal to him.
