Power Creep, Power Seep,
Hello, everyone. Sorry this update isn't very big, but this set of stories has been driving me slowly mad due to the fact that they're incomplete, so I hunkered down and wrote something for the third, and final, WMG of the trinity.
It's not the best thing I've ever written, told in a similar style to Genma's story from the viewpoint papers, but my pre-readers seemed to like it and I think some of the ideas are neat, so... yeah.
Here ya go.
START.
Anyone could have told them that it was a horrible idea, if they'd asked. Of course, they didn't, and now we're in this mess. Well, it's not precisely a mess, really. The world is much more stable now than it ever was before, but that's mostly through sheer luck, and the one part of their plan that went somewhat too well.
Who am I? I'm Urd. Goddess of the past, second class, limited. At least, that's who I am now. I've been the Norn of the past since the world tree began hundreds of thousands of years ago, or for about seven years, depending on who you ask. Though granted only I and a few others would give the second answer.
I'm writing this to explain exactly what the hell went on, just in case some future incident needs intimate knowledge of how our world actually came to be the way it is, rather than what it looks like.
You see, it all started with a girl named Haruhi. For reasons... I have very little idea about, she seemed to have the unwitting ability to rewrite reality. She was also a bored teenaged girl, so this caused... issues, which drew attention from something outside of her plain of existance.
Now, I'm not talking about the three realms, Asgard, Earth and Niflheim, but something much larger, and much more alien. I can't really speak to their motives, which is ironic since I was one of them, but they interacted with the girl, Haruhi, several times, and one of these times one of their terminals killed one of her friends, a boy by the name of Kyon.
Given Haruhi was, as I mentioned before, a teenaged girl with the ability to twist reality at her whim, the emotional distress this caused soon caused physical, spatial and temporal distress to the world and universe surrounding her. She lashed out in an uncontrolled fashion, her grief destroying and recreating the world half a dozen times in the span of twenty minutes, before these outside entities managed to restrain her power. They resolved to destroy her, and tried, but were unsuccessful. Their attempts pissed her off even more, and containing her became more and more difficult, however they did eventually hit upon a solution.
While they couldn't destroy her, she was using her abilities instinctively, and wasn't capable of more subtle defense, for example against them altering her mind.
This is the part I don't understand. Well, there's a lot of this I don't understand, primarily because I'm now an anthropomorphic personification of a concept rather than a part of a huge, incomprehensibly vast data entity. We, the gods and Demons, simply don't think the way the Data Overmind or Sky Canopy Domain did. Everything so far has been an educated guess, and I have no idea why they chose the solution they did rather than, say, just rewriting time so that the girl didn't remember this Kyon, bringing him back to life, or even lobotomizing the girl and leaving her to drool out a window for the rest of her life.
What they did do was completely restructure her. Rebuild her from the ground up. I can continue taking guesses at why they tried what they did, though. They remade Haruhi as a young child, the son of a prominent, respected martial artist. Why they changed her gender, I have no idea, but the martial artist was an easy one. They probably hoped that the discipline that such a teacher would impart would keep random, destructive reality alterations from happening again. In addition to this, they kept on suppressing any large outpourings of power, though there were very few of them.
The new child, named Ranma, had very little to be upset about, other than the usual child's problems, at least at first. And this brings us to why this plan was doomed.
When a new, previously non-existent bundle of joy was dropped into Genma and Nodoka Saotome's lives, Genma was a wise and just, if balding, teacher of the martial arts and Nodoka was his quiet, traditional wife. Ranma was quite happy being taken care of by them, but at the age of five, Genma decided to start the boy on a few exercises in hopes that he would be a strong man, and an heir to the school.
The thing is, to children anything an adult does is a little strange and arbitrary. All Ranma knew was that his father was interrupting his play time to do strange dances with little explanation other than 'for the art,' and while the other-worldly entities were watching for large, obvious changes, they didn't notice a slow, subtle one that took place over the course of a year.
Eventually, Genma didn't just think that it would be nice for Ranma to be his heir, he was determined to have it happen, talking of training trips, and new styles. The two left home a week after Ranma's sixth birthday, a tearful Nodoka feeling that it wasn't her place to stop her husband's newfound passion.
Another opinion Ranma had of his father, as most children with parents in physically demanding jobs usually do, was that he was the strongest ever. Genma had been very good at his art, but wasn't placed highly in the world, primarily because of a bit of a fondness for food and a lack of precise coordination, but as the two traveled and Ranma witnessed masters of every kind, he just knew that his father could still beat them, and that he was being trained to be better than that some day. And so it was.
Even as Genma's skills were growing, his morals, and intellect, shrank. While Ranma knew that his father loved him and wanted to train him to be the best, he missed his mother, and hated that he had to do the taxing training that he was given. He thought of his father's demands as stupid, and as his thoughts slowly effected reality, they became so.
While the Genma Saotome who first held young Ranma couldn't possibly hold a candle physically to the one who ran from Ukyo Kuonji's Okonomiyaki stand when the boy was seven, he probably would have viewed his older self in contempt, hardly recognizing him.
For a while, things continued on like this. Ranma traveled with his father, the two training in more and more extreme ways, the boy sometimes only surviving because of what he was. Everything changed for the first time when Ranma reached eight years old and made a decision. He'd been on the road for two years, and was getting used to it. He liked going to the new towns and Dojos, meeting new people and learning new things, and even though he still missed his mother, he took on his father's goal of becoming the best martial artist of his generation.
Ironically, he already was. In the world Haruhi lived in, the strongest human weight lifters could barely backlift 2.5 metric tons. When Ranma made his decision, Genma was capable of that, and Ranma himself could handle several hundred pounds.
His speed, strength and reflexes were amazing compared to the human norm, and were only getting better. Of course, even though he knew that he was going to be the best one day, he also knew that he was still a student, and that a lot of masters were better than him. After all, many of them had fought his father quite hard when he was younger. And so it was.
Three symbiotic cycles had been set up. Ranma knew that Genma was as strong as any master they fought, or stronger. He also knew that he was still learning, and could learn more from them to grow his skill, and that his father would try ever more insane training methods to reach that goal.
This continued for two years, new training instructors popping up along Ranma and Genma's route as they went, each stronger than the last, until things changed a second, and final, time. Genma had thought of his dumbest idea. The Neko-Ken.
The Neko-Ken is a 'martial arts technique,' though I use the term loosely, in which your subject is tied up in ropes of fish sausage, and tossed to a pit of starving cats. In our present reality, it's an ancient technique designed to create berserkers, but in actuality Genma thought of it himself out of a clear, blue sky one day.
He gathered the ingredients, and told Ranma that he was going to be training in a new technique. It was then performed. Up until this point, all of Genma's training ideas had taken relatively little time and hadn't really been repeated. The Neko-Ken was an exception, as he was sure that it would work. Ranma was dropped into the pit three, four, five times, and each time his dread of what would happen made the reality worse.
On the sixth attempt, his mind snapped. He didn't, however, go into the Neko-Ken berserker state that the 'ancient technique' speaks of.
Haruhi Suzumiya had lashed out at the universe in a state of rage and grief, but an understandable one. Ranma Saotome lashed out in primal fear, with a burning need to make the pain stop, and a wavering, but still present conviction that he had to be going through this for a reason. And so it was.
When we were born, twisted into shape from the Data Overmind and Sky Canopy Domain, none of us knew what had happened. Some of us, including me, had pretty massive headaches that day, but I just slugged back more of the hair of the dog I'd thought had bit me and went on with my life. That last alteration Ranma had made had changed the universe fundamentally, because not only did everything he was going through now have a reason, it had a reason he could understand. That is why we, the gods and demons, are now humanoid manifestations that think, act, and feel mostly as humans. That's why we monitor and maintain the Yggdrasil, the world tree computer that stabilizes reality, that's why the kind of martial arts that Ranma can do is, if not common, at least not that rare on earth,, and that's why, for the most part, things have stabilized since the point when Ranma turned ten.
The power he once wielded is now bound up into the tree, regulating the world and only altering it when a wish is made, and in a controlled fashion. We never even would have noticed anything wrong, if an incident hadn't happened about a month ago.
Ranma and his father continued on their training trip in the changed world after the Neko-Ken, and got into many adventures. When the boy moved to Nerima, well, things got... perhaps insane enough that even Haruhi Suzumiya wouldn't have been bored. The last adventure, for the moment, wasn't a very fun one. Ranma and his group of friends tangled with a being known as Saffron, the king of a race of phoenix people in the interior regions of China. During the conflict, Ranma's fiancee, Akane Tendo, was killed. The details are more complex than that, but a retelling of that entire adventure is really too big to fit here.
When Akane died, Ranma showed that he was still, in some way, the being that the otherworldly intelligences had tried to seal. He took control of Yggdrasil at the root level, and revived the girl. I am absolutely positive he didn't know he'd done it, and I also know that it'll take a lot more stress for him to do it than it would've taken Haruhi, so Lenneth can stop having a heart attack over the security concerns. Still, this resulted in me being saddled with the responsibility for finding out what had happened.
After I pulled the boy's current file and noticed no irregularities, I used my ability as the Norn of the past to look into his history. And found out all of this. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to get drunk.
Command - Archive - Clearance level Ragnar Alpha, accessible only by class 1 or special dispensation from Kami-Sama.
END.
And there it was. The WMG in question is "X character is Haruhi, or Haruhi is causing the events of X series for amusement."
The title of this chapter is also named after a trope that I think suited it pretty well.
Aaaand we're done!
Please leave a review, and tell me what you think.