Disclaimer: Ranma Nibbunoichi © Rumiko Takahashi, and is used without permission.

Author's Note: Similar to most of my other Ranma stories, in this, Ranma is aware, and even works against the basic elements of the Engagement, plus I don't sugar coat the less than honest aspects of the characters, like Nabiki's uncontrolled and unmanaged greed and avarice.

This does mean that the blindness of characters like the Amazons, Kasumi and Ryoga, the egotism of Akane and the Kunos, Genma's fondness for get-rich-quick schemes, and Soun's inability to do anything but exacerbate a situation will be used liberally. Similar to other stories I've done, Kasumi and Nabiki will be portrayed as very intelligent, while Akane… I don't know what happened with Akane. Adopted maybe?

Helping The Tendos

Chapter 1: The True Man Amongst Men

No-one could call Ranma Saotome dumb. He acted like that in order to keep himself from being associated with his father, who had earned quite a sizeable reputation with several police forces in both Japan and China. He had even ratted him out to several of them, with little success. The main thing he did to spite his father involved his main get-rich-quick scheme, which was to engage him to the most suitable daughter of a mark, while really robbing the place blind.

As soon as they left a place, Ranma doctored his cheap sake and went back and sat down to discuss what his father had said. He didn't like how he could just use the same words every single time, just changing pertinent names and key details, suspecting his father also used a script. As a result, he invariably found himself on good terms with the boyfriends, and sometimes girlfriends, of the girl he'd been apparently going to marry in the near future, and left his phone number when they asked if he might be willing to be their best man.

He'd actually also kept a diary, and would, a few years from now, have a very busy few months, as he attended those weddings he could. He'd actually had to turn down a few, with the sheepish admittance his father was so bad, he'd been, in some cases, quadruple booked for a date. What he didn't know at the time, but discovered later, was that some of the items he returned, which they felt he had earned the right to keep as a reward for his honourable and generous conduct, were mailed to his family home, after they looked up his address.

The side effect, which he never discovered, was that his mother, who had expected thinly-veiled lies and empty platitudes, had opened the letters attached to these gifts, and had been surprised to find out that her son was the most charitable, generous and kind man she had ever seen or heard of, a true pillar of the community, who no-one had any bad things to say about. Only glowing praise reached her ears from the numerous letters attached to some highly valuable items that now belonged to him through honest work.

What Genma had painted as a 'Man amongst Men'… That would not be Ranma. He would not be the lothario who used girls as status symbols, not committing to settling down with any of them, purely stroking their own egos for the short time he was around. Ranma would be a man who's charitable deeds and good nature would be a great source of honour well into the future, single-handedly restoring what his father's criminal record had lost the family in reputation.

At that moment he was sat in the home of the latest mark he'd met with, a girl named Seiko he'd been asked to befriend, who was giving him somewhere to stay as thanks for not revealing she was dating her long-time school friend, partially since she was attending an all girl's school, Ranma hoping it would work out between them. He was studying the nature of a poorly written contract supposedly made between the Saotome and Tendo families that he'd found recently while checking his father's belongings.

A well-paid, discreet investigator, who was coming to be a very good friend and confidant, had investigated what he couldn't, due to Genma avoiding central Tokyo like the plague. He then mailed him what was known about them, and Ranma reminded himself that one of the tenets he'd figured out of his father's school was that you had no friends or family, only really good marks to scam from, as he read the results.

"Well, Now I know why you're training me so well... It's since you need to make the ultimate mark for your biggest scam yet," Ranma mused, since he knew exactly what Soun Tendo planned to get out of the arrangement, and it wasn't money or prestige. If Genma didn't know about this, he was pretty much being out-scammed by his 'good friend'... But he likely did know about it, possibly having made it a game between the two of them over who could make the biggest scam.

The crux of the problem was his youngest daughter, who was the same age as Ranma, within a few weeks, and was also a 'martial artist', in the same way as someone who watched kung fu movies "knew" kung fu, being trained to the bare minimum level to scare away a typical thug, maybe even give a more intelligent mugger a bad time, but Ranma himself would not even feel was worth five minutes of his time. However, this arrangement effectively made her his problem. This was since she was proclaimed as the Tendo School's star pupil.

Likely he'd be required to spar with her, and he knew that he'd held back every time he'd sparred with the star pupil of a teacher, especially if he knew she was his daughter. He would be married on the spot if he went and approached it blind, since it would be clear that his skill level was high enough that a marriage would only 'benefit' both of their families. Every single time he'd been in that situation, he'd discreetly gone back a few days later, doing a one-to-one lesson with them to help them with their problems.

But this wasn't like one of those situations, where he could unravel the scam and help out the poor girl in his own time. When he went to the Tendos, Soun would have planted the seeds of how Ranma was engaged to them 'since birth', an archaic concept, and would marry one of them. Her ego would demand he didn't hold back, and when he won, the yen would drop, and he'd be pretty much the poster boy for Genma and Soun's style, and his whole life would be stage-managed by the both of them.

He didn't want anything like that. The charitable and kind man that he'd made himself into would be stifled and curbed under the thumbs of Soun and Genma, and he'd end up the latest cog in their scams.

The next item he found in the file told him exactly what would happen to his generosity. Nabiki Tendo was visibly running an information brokering and extortion ring while she was still in school, her father using his current position on the civic council to keep the criminal charges from sticking, Ranma suspecting that the family's continued solvency was due to her desperate accounting. Due to her desperation, she'd sell his secrets as fast as anyone else's, and his contacts would cut him off in seconds if he was compromised so freely.

And living with someone like that would mean he'd need to keep his private information locked away and encrypted. He already did his information storage with a trusted partner because he suspected his father would either sell his computer or, if he was intelligent enough, the information on it. So his encrypted computer was nowhere near here, and he'd not be getting near it until he'd settled in Tokyo, and definitely not near Nabiki if he couldn't control her or get her to notice her actions were deliberately encouraged by her father.

He opened the next file, then his expression darkened, Seiko looking across at him worried as she noticed the mood change. She could recognise the signs straight away. He'd read something unsettling in the folder. He was not going to let this be handled except in person. Ranma's whole outlook since he'd begun fixing his father's mistakes, including the private tutoring and the assistance with various problems that Genma's presence caused, meant that, if someone was an innocent party, he focused on helping them out more than anything else.

And, in this case, what he was reading of was the outright sabotage of someone's future for their own ego. Kasumi Tendo's school reports were glowing. They talked of someone who could walk into Todai, and get a scholarship of her choice. Then, abruptly, on the day before those reports were to be vindicated by the examination boards of the Japanese educational system, she excused herself from school due to a family emergency… and never returned to take the exams.

What Ranma noticed was that she'd been given ample time for family emergencies, with the exams being left open for her to attend a one-to-one session with the examiner for that entire month, and that, when they decided to submit her grade on coursework only, the coursework had also vanished. This meant that the examiners, due to the missing proof she'd even done the work, had to mark her courses as Ungraded, and the Japanese Education Board put on her file 'Final Year Unfinished.'

As a result, she would be unable to get a course at university, since practically all universities would look at her file, see a row of invalid qualifications and then the damning evidence. She'd dropped out of school with no qualifications. The investigator had looked into it, and she had initially submitted a leave of absence the week after the examiners were present, which the school had accepted with no complaint. She had every right to do so, and the coursework had been ready to submit while she sat the exams. This had been all above board and done in person.

However, after the coursework had vanished, Her father came in to tell them that she'd needed to do some last minute corrections, and gave the date that the funeral and wake would be for her recently deceased mother, the 'family emergency' being laid bare at the time. Unfortunately, this clashed with the exam dates that Kasumi had just finalised, and he said he'd try to reschedule, and return the coursework, when they said that they couldn't reschedule again without Kasumi's explicit permission.

What made Ranma frown was that only students were aware of the exact dates and times of the exams, Kasumi herself having approved the dates only a day earlier, and one of the printouts found in her sister's files was an exact timetable of Kasumi's exams. Nabiki had even put a comment under it, recommending the 'funeral' be the day of the first one. Due to this curious change of plans, with her coursework being found in the same drawer as the timetable of exams, as well as the fact her father openly discouraged her from returning to school, Ranma knew what was going on.

What clinched it was that the only letter Kasumi openly received was the one where she was told that, due to her failure to attend during the assigned block of time for her examinations, her grades had been annulled with little hope of recovery. She hadn't however opened several handwritten and heartfelt plea letters telling her that, even if she was in mourning, she had to make some kind of arrangement to get the exams done, due to the risk they could invalidate her grade, returning them 'undelivered'.

Ranma had a sampling of those letters, which stated that they knew why she failed to return to school, her mother's death, and that they would put their own reputation at risk to overturn any decision by the Board, and help ensure she could take her exams next year. When the letters were returned, unopened, they closed ranks and quietly left Furinkan-cho, and had quit teaching, citing that their one star pupil brought them crashing down to Earth, never naming names, but he knew who they meant.

As far as Kasumi had known, her exams were effectively cancelled, pending her returning for a period of time the following year, her coursework adequate for a preliminary grade, which her father arranged with the school. She'd been surprised when she'd got the letter, and mortified. She'd been completely unaware one or other of her final graduation exams had sat, waiting for her, a very annoyed man checking a watch nearby, every day for an hour each day, her graduation day cancelled when the deadline passed with no action.

This was as bad as a man he'd heard of named Dan Hibiki, who was supposedly the sensei of a style he called Saikyo-ryu. He'd met him once, at an exhibition tournament. What wasn't mentioned was that he had only two students, Sakura Kasugano, a pachinko parlour stewardess who used a personally developed variant of Shotokan-style Ansatsu-ken, and a wild man named Jimmy Blanka, whose style also wasn't anywhere near Saikyo-ryu. He had no actual students of his style. At all. But he still claimed he was a master sensei.

If he fulfilled the marriage contract how Soun and Genma had set it up, they'd form a super-school which likely Ranma would be the only teacher of, with both men leeching off his savant-level skill at martial arts, while Soun and Genma made excuses as to why they didn't teach, likely that no-one was suitable for their advanced level. Well, Unless they were like that boy… What was his name again? Oh yes, Jack Dawkins. He'd take to Advanced Level Saotome-Tendo Anything Goes very well… as well as taking anything not tied down.

"What is it about the Anything Goes style and outright theft? Yep, it's Anything Goes alright... We'll steal anything, and get away with it too." Ranma grumbled, before getting out a phone he'd got around the same time as he'd started on his attempts to dispose of his connection to his father, calling a number, adapting a professional air. He was meant to be the same guy who likely found out about this convoluted scam in the first place.

"Hello, I am calling in relation to a reopened investigation into an educational irregularity, and noticed something odd… We are calling about Kasumi Ten… Don't hang up..." He stated, in a firm, official tone, "She filed an approved leave of absence which would have begun around the same time as she was blacklisted, then an unapproved leave of absence was filed after the coursework was stolen… Yes, Stolen, and recently recovered. We wish to note that only one piece of correspondence was opened and read by Ms. Tendo, and that was, Yes, that one,"

There was a pause, Ranma waiting, as the examination board checked with the teachers.

"They backed up our findings?… Sent out letters offering to reschedule the exams, were terribly unhappy with how her mother had passed away, offered to schedule for during the break… All never opened with a letter apologizing for wasting their time and effort attached… Yes, We have copies. We checked them against her handwriting from coursework written at the time. All of them have exactly the same words written in exactly the same way, It's copied, not handwritten..." Ranma offered, a partial lie.

The letters had been studied, but not by him, and he didn't have more than a sample photocopy, with the duplicated phrases circled, and a photocopy of where the passage was cloned from in the coursework, which still was in Nabiki's possession. There was another pause as they digested the information.

"She likely did not open them due to feeling they had nothing new to say. Have the exams changed in a noticeable way since she completed her study?… Please send all examination paperwork to Ms. Tendo, on the understanding that it is returned with the proper coursework, and a massive apology for the problems," Ranma finished, then smirked. He already knew what would happen to Akane, and had a way to deal with Nabiki.

If Nabiki did want to get out of scamming everyone including her sister, He had a nice card dealing job she could do at a casino. She'd feel it was beneath her… until the first platinum-coated chips dropped onto the table, and she realised that the commissions she'd get from a night would eclipse anything she could earn in a week with her penny ante schemes. His father and his drinking buddy would soon find themselves holding nothing, and their big plan would be destroyed, and those they used… would be reaping long denied benefits.