Consequences of Vision
A Ranma 1/2 Marvel Universe crossover

The following is a work of fiction liberally borrowing settings, characters, and even entire universes from other published work. I disclaim any ownership of the characters or settings, which properties belong to the appropriate authors and media companies.

A meeting at a non-place, during a non-time

Human perceptions were crafted in, and for, a normal world. A geometrically regular spacetime full of relatively immutable matter, with light to illuminate it, and air to breathe, and sounds and scents carried in that air. Human minds are designed to take this input and craft it into a fine tuned picture of the world around us, one which allows a human to interact usefully with the world and those in it. A world where effect follows cause, understandable physical laws apply, and in which the remarkable machinery which is a human brain functions like a well crafted swiss watch.

Here, at this sort of non-place, and in this sort of non-time, none of these norms applied. Still, should a human observer somehow make it to this place, and somehow survive the experience, the observer's senses would have tried to present some picture of the surroundings, and his or her mind would have tried to make sense of them.

Were such an observer present, he might have heard something like "Father, are you certain?" Or perhaps not; even in a mortal world, only a tiny part of the being offering the query would have been visible, and the speaker was not precisely using language as a human would recognize it. A human's best perceptions might be of massive solidity, and strength, carefully tempered battle fury, and perhaps mounds of red hair.

The tiny, visible part of the being so addressed might be perceived to be an old, white haired and bearded man in a gray cloak and hat. He straightened from peering into a what may or may not have been a deep well, and what might, or might not have been a bright eye flashed from underneath the hat. The old man regarded his son, the other eye was not visible as he nodded.

Wordlessly, the first speaker held out what might have appeared as a heavily muscled arm and offered the old man a massive hammer. Even here, even to these two beings, two of the vanishingly few who could handle it at all, it radiated power. And death. A small network of lightning briefly cascaded across it's surface.

As the old man touched the hammer, the visible form of it shrunk into that of a simple walking stick. The old man first dipped the stick into the well, then held it above his head, where it was snatched from his hand by a particularly bright eyed raven with a loud caw.

The perceptions of the strongly muscled man soon lost track of the raven and its stick. This did not disturb him, it was not his primary task. Instead, he merely reattached the hammer, somehow still in his hand, to his belt. This complete, he offered a query, or perhaps a benediction: "Even that shadow will require a strong warrior..."

The gray cowled ancient merely grunted and bent back over his construct of a well.

Modern day Nerima, Japan

The morning was good in Nerima ward, Tokyo, Japan. The sun was bright and the weather was clear, shining down on a small group of teenagers walking to school. Sex-changing 16 year old martial arts jock extraordinare Saotome Ranma was showing off, err, that is, practicing his balance, by walking atop the fence separating the street from the canal it paralleled. The air was filled with the sound of him bickering with his not entirely unwilling tomboy fiancee Tendo Akane. If the bickering was by now more pro-forma than real and belied the true feelings of the couple involved, well, few would be able to tell who did not know the participants well. Even some who did know the pair well might be deceived.

Best of all, the morning was filled with lots of opportunities for making money.

Tendo Nabiki normally tried to leave for school slightly earlier than her younger sister and near brother in law, but today she had delayed a bit to extort a little more money from the clueless jock. Really! He made it so simple it was almost pathetic. Just threaten to reveal some innocuous factoid that'd later become obvious anyway and he melted like hot butter. It was always things that would be better off in the open regardless, like in this instance; Akane would discover he had been to the Ucchans last night as soon as his so called cute fiancee, Kuonji Ukyo, opened her mouth at school.

Oh well, if Ranma was too clueless to see how his reticence hurt Akane, far be it from her to stop him. And if he learned to be more forthcoming and sensitive, all to the better, right ?

Satisfied with her reasoning and fingering her now larger roll of yen, Nabiki tailed down the street after the two younger teenagers. Nabiki's smirk was interrupted, however, by an abrupt moment of disorientation. Suddenly, the scene of the street in front of her was oddly overlaid, and became ghostly and indistinct. Instead, a crystal vision of a familiar, concerned looking, and notably wet redhead filled her vision; positioned as if she, Nabiki, were looking up. She seemed to hear a familiar contralto voice clearly saying "Hey, you okay?", yet at the same time she knew she was not hearing this. "Ranma, back away, give her room!" her younger sister's voice seemed to reply in the same odd, clearly heard, yet not heard manner.

Nabiki blinked, and the street faded back into view in front of her. There walked Ranma, arrogant, dry and male as ever. A quick shake of the head dispelled the remnants of the odd vision, but proved to be a mistake. A previously unnoticed dizziness jarred her off her feet into a graceless fall.

"Nabiki?" Akane heard the thump and turned around, concerned. She quickly started back toward her older sibling.

"Huh?" Ranma noted the disappearance of his vocal sparring partner. "Akane, what's ...", at that moment, an apparently random splash of water hit the boy, transforming him in a moment into a her. Used as she was to the transformation, Ranma didn't even stop to wring out her now wet hair and easily beat her fiancee to the prone Nabiki.

"Hey, you okay?" Concern clearly showed on the redhead's face as she leaned over the prone girl, filling her view of the sky.

"Ranma, back away, give her room!" Akane's voice cut in from behind Ranma, causing her to pull back a little. "Nabiki? Are you alright?" Akane continued. Nabiki's only response was to lay gazing at the two teens crouched over her, appearing oddly stunned, shocked to the extent of unresponsiveness.

Seeing her sister's apparent disorientation, concern creased Akane's face and she made a decision. "Ranma, pick her up. We'd better take her to the doctor."

"Hey! Why do I gotta carry her? You're the one who's as strong as a gorilla, and I'm wet anyway."

"Ranmaaaaa ... just do it, you baka."

Belying the apparent disagreement, the voices of the bickering teenagers rapidly faded back down the street, accompanying their rapid departure toward the doctor's office, concern evident in their haste, if not their manner.

Deep in the bowels of a large, hidden, underground complex located on the grounds of a private school in the state of Massachusetts, United States of America, there lay a large, complex, and highly sensitive machine. The machine was, in essence, a uniquely designed and highly sensitive instrument, combined with certain computer functionality, notably more advanced than the current state of the art which should currently exist on the planet of its residence. Always active and scanning, at least passively, the massive machine made an internal notation recording the activation of the particular type of energy emission it was built to detect.

20 years earlier

High in the mountainous, rugged and wild north of Japan, an attractive young woman dressed carefully walked a steep path. Dressed traditionally, if warmly, in kimono, obi and peasant's straw hat, the surrounding frost enshrouded pine forest muffled the rapid click-click of her geta. Only the closest of observers would have noticed the gleam her eyes acquired at at the sudden suppressive silence that covered the normal forest sounds.

Taking great care to hide her readiness, the woman prepared herself. When the fusillade of thrown weapons attacked her from several angles, they merely tore and tangled an empty kimono, suddenly free floating over an abandon pair of geta sandals, still moving slightly from residual momentum.

The rapid staccato of numerous bladed weapons embedding themselves into tree and earth had ceased by the time one of the sandals finally fell over. Torn scraps of kimono drifted on the breeze.

In the surrounding forest, several human bodies clad head to foot in dark, concealing cloth thudded limply to the ground. A few moments after they landed, the bodies and all they carried disintegrated into a dark mist. Only a few bent twigs and depressions in the ground were left to show they had ever been there.

Gradually, the interruption faded, and the forest noises returned.

High in a tree some distance away, the young woman, now revealed as wearing a similar concealing outfit, silently bound a makeshift bandage around her thigh, and consumed a generic antidote to several of the common poisons she knew her former clan used. Her carefully schooled face showed none of the concern she felt. They had found her far earlier than she had hoped. Escaping was going to be difficult indeed.

Current time

Nabiki smiled to herself as she slid into class and handed her note to the teacher. She didn't know exactly what had happened to her, but whatever it was, she would quickly take advantage of it.

When she recovered her senses in the doctors office, to the sound of a bickering Ranma and Akane, Nabiki made a careful, if private analysis of her experience. If she was right, she actually saw something which occurred in the future. The exam and questions which followed provided her with other evidence which quickly proved her supposition. As she avoided answering the questions, several more short visions occurred. Always when she looked at one or another person for a longer time. Critically, she discovered two important things.

First, she found she could hide her reaction, and still answer the doctor's questions or act in other ways even while still envisioning the next question the doctor would ask her.

Second, she discovered that some things she could influence. Several times, watching the doctor closely, she envisioned the doctor asking her several questions, all overlaying each other, and blurring the sounds and sight she envisioned. With a little practice, she discovered she could choose which future question was asked by giving different answers to the current question. It certainly made it easy for her to give the right answers to get out of the doctors office with the note she needed for school, but without further, awkward, future questions or consequences.

Oh yes, this could be fun!

Why, even right now, looking at the pile of papers on the desk, she could see the current image overlayed by a set of graded, but not yet returned quizzes. Walking back to her seat, she wondered how much her classmates would pay for the answers she saw? And that would only be the start. Take Kuno for instance. Looking at him, she could see a blurred outline of several overlaying images, some with a much fainter Ranma-kun and Ranma-onna. Hmm, perhaps she could try ...

"So, Kuno baby, would you like to know where your pig-tailed girl will be waiting this afternoon?"

Sure enough, the vision she saw instantly gained definition. The Ranma-kun images nigh vanished, replaced by a clearly definable, if still slightly blurred, Ranma-onna along with a noticeably less blurred Kuno.

Nabiki grinned like a shark at Kuno's near instant enthusiastic response. She didn't need to see her own future to know it would involve many, many yen signs.