Okay, Sorry to say it, but I will not be Harem-ing this story. Maybe a different one, but in this one one of the focal points is the escape from his old life and that means having only one girl to worry about. Those of you who voted for harem or two girls for Ranma I'm afraid they didn't count.
The current vote is at six for Ember and six for Dani, votes for more than one girl not included. Now, you can each vote once per chapter, so don't worry if you have already voted previously. Again, voting continues until the fourth chapter.
-: Fan or Student?:-
Tony Jessup, a business man from L.A., sat in first class, sipping an orange juice with vodka, unaware that, down in the cargo hold, his dog was under possession by a half ghost hoping to get to America.
'I should have just taken over one of the passengers,' it was eight hours into the flight and Ranma could only make the dog, Scruffy, stay asleep for so long. At least there weren't any cats nearby. He really wasn't sure how the nekoken would react with his ghost powers.
"Well," Ranma's voice came out of Scruffy's mouth, "I guess I could always explore for a bit then come back down here."
Ranma exited the dog and floated into the air. Focusing his meager stores of energy he turned himself invisible and intangible and floated up into the fuselage. The rest of that flight was spent playing petty pranks and stealing a few snacks.
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Ranma's personal record for least amount of switches between boy and girl in two weeks was four hundred ten, before the incident. After the incident his all time low had dropped to nine. Nine times in the last two weeks he hadn't been expecting water to hit him and turn him into a girl.
The ninth time just so happened to be on his first day in America. He blamed jet lag. A storm had started just as he exited the airport and he hadn't been in the best state of mind to use his intangibility and so was struck with the cold precipitation turning him into her.
Ranma cursed her luck for a second before giving a resigned sigh and moving along. She needed to find a place to rest and eat before even attempting to start the next step on the journey to Amity Park. She barely had the energy to turn invisible, let alone possess someone for another few hours on an airplane.
Luckily it wasn't all that hard to find a good hotel with an unused room for the night. Two minutes after entering the room she laid down on the bed and let herself be taken into blissful unconsciousness.
What felt like too damn soon after she fell asleep, Ranma woke up choking on a red mist the forced itself out of her mouth. She hacked and coughed as she sat up quite quickly. She held a hand to her throat to try and ease the aching muscles.
"What the hell was that?"
At about that time screams and crashes could be heard just outside of the hotel. Ranma walked over to the curtains and ripped them open. Her left eyebrow twitched in annoyance.
Just outside of her hotel room, on the street, was a somewhat...thick man in a black beret, purple sunglasses, and a black trench coat. He was floating three feet off the ground and his hands were glowing with a magenta energy. Around him what looked like movie props were floating and sometimes attacking the people walking around the street. The lighting from his hands and the still pouring rain gave him quite the sinister look.
"...I gave you gold, GOLD! But did any of you give me a chance? NO! You gave it all to that hack, Spielberg!" He sent a dinosaur brought to life by his ghostly telekinesis after a young couple, "Now, even if you don't respect me," he lifted his glowing hands into the air and all of the props lifted into the air above him, "you will fear me! Behold, my greatest horror creation!" The props all began swirling before combining together in to a singular monstrous form, "Behold! The Pickle Man!" The giant pickle with arms, legs, and a face roared at the citizens of L.A.. "Go my creation! Crush their bodies like the crush my-Hrrk!"
The director clawed ineffectively at the petite hand that was crushing his windpipe. He was pulled down to look into green eyes quite literally glowing with rage. He would have gulped in fear if his throat wasn't being held so tight that, if he had been alive, he would have suffocated.
"I have had a long day, I'm tired, I. Want. To. Sleep. If you don't cut this shit out, now, I will make you feel such pain that you will wish you had ascended when you had the chance. Got it?"
The director stared into those eyes for another full moment before nodding emphatically.
Ranma let go of the fat ghost and watched as he fled the area as quick as he possibly could. She then turned invisible, floated back into her room, and went right back to sleep.
(##!$%
Another week and Ranma finally found himself in Amity Park. He stood in the bus stop just after leaving the last person he possessed. The good thing of nearly constantly possessing people he needed to while traveling did wonders for his pool of ectoplasm. He had actually doubled the amount he had for whatever use he needed.
Another red mist forced its way from his mouth not five minutes after his arrival. This sensation, which he had come to associate with the appearance of another ghost, caused Ranma to look around for the ghost that set off this somewhat painful expulsion.
He saw immediately that the problem was a man in overalls wearing an orange cap. The man was floating around terrifying citizens and stealing their boxes. Ranma prepared to transform and take out the creep, but he was beaten to it when a tall man in a black Hazmat suit with white hair and glowing green eyes that were a few shades brighter than Ranma's own ghost form's eyes, descended from the sky with his thickly muscled arms crossed over his chest.
After a brief exchange of words that Ranma didn't really hear, the guy in the orange cap launched the contents of the boxes at the obviously more fit ghost. The other ghost, whom Ranma recognized as Danny Phantom from Kasumi's newspaper clippings, phased through the objects being thrown at him, blasted the box obsessed man with a green beam that grabbed our favorite aqua-transexual's attention right away to stun him, then used what looked like a thermos to pack away the trouble maker.
Just before Danny could fly away, Ranma called out to him, "Hey! Danny-"
"Oh, uh, hey," he interrupted the Japanese teen, "Look, I'd love to sign an autograph or... whatever, but I've really got to go right now. Sam is gonna kill me if I'm late again," and the man took off to meet Sam before Ranma to get another word in. Ranma would have followed, but the elder halfa had taken off at a speed that Ranma had not previously thought possible.
"Damn," he cursed softly before he grinned while holding a hand before his face, "An energy beam, huh? That's gonna come in useful." Ranma turned to follow the general direction he'd seen the man he wanted to teach him go, hoping he'd run into him again.
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Two hours later he'd not seen hide nor hair of his would be teacher. He was actually getting a little frustrated with it.
"Damn it!" He said aloud on the busy street, "Where the hell is Danny Phantom?"
"House number forty four, fifty five on New York Street, corner of fifty third," a man who overheard him mentioned in passing.
"Huh?"
"It's where Phantom lives with his wife."
"Oh, uh, thanks. Thanks a lot!" Ranma looked at the current street he was on. It was the twentieth. He started north from his current position in a light jog and came running back a minute later when he found out he'd been actually running the wrong way. The man who gave him directions just chuckled and mumbled something about energetic youths.
Another half hour later and Ranma stood at the door to house forty four, fifty five. He rang the doorbell, heard a voice yell that he was welcome to come in, and opened the door. Inside the house was a small amount of chaos. It almost seemed as if the entire living room was split into two separate environments.
The right side was colored in blues and greens and seemed devoted to technology for fighting ghosts and schematics for further improvements on the tech laying around.
The left side was a mix of blacks, purples, and greens. There were sketches and paintings, varying between complete and just starting, a couple of posters for some of the more well known Goth rock bands, and even a strategically placed poster of the town's well known hero that contrasted the theme of that half of the room almost obscenely.
Ranma would have continued his evaluation of the house, moving next into the kitchen to look for who he hoped would be his instructor, when he came downstairs in a rush in human form.
"Tuck, thank god you're here," He rushed around, not even looking at Ranma as he hurriedly picked up pieces of scattered tech and put them away in the cabinet under the stairs, "Sam's gonna be here in fifteen minutes, the ghosts have been going crazy, I still haven't found her a gift..." he continued to ramble on, making it impossible for Ranma to get a word in edgewise.
Five minutes in the doorbell rang again.
"Could you get that for me, Tuck, I gotta fly to the store to get Sam's gift. You start on the salad." The lithe black haired man summoned a ring of blue light around his middle that split and arched over his body much like Ranma's own transformation and turned him into the hero of Amity Park. He then took off at the same speed he'd demonstrated earlier.
Ranma sighed, sat his pack down by the couch and went to the door. On the other side was a skinny black man talking to a taller, voluptuous black woman.
"Er, hi, are you Tucker?"
(##!$%
"Okay, you get struck by green lightning, wake up in ghost form, find out you're actually half ghost, and came all the way to America to get training from the only half ghost currently known to the rest of the world, right?"
Ranma nodded.
"And you need this training because before it happened you were a top martial artist who had, but lost in the transformation, the ability to toss ki around like fire crackers which it turns out is necessary in your day to day life because of a situation your father and his friend have either made or perpetuated for you, constantly putting you in the line of fire, most recently being the incident with a phoenix god in a remote mountain range in China?"
Ranma nodded.
"And why should we believe you?"
"Well, I can't prove the part about the constant battle over my marital status yet, but I can do this," Ranma proceeded to transform into his ghost form. It was a bit different from his original appearance when he first attained this form. Nabiki had decided that teal was not his color so forced on him a new, although similar, outfit. He shifted into a form with the same hair and eye colors as Danny, but his clothing turned from a pair of blue jeans, a black shirt, and a light jacket into a pair of white-silver pants, a red sash, and a white silk, Chinese shirt that had no sleeves. He stayed like that for a second before switching back to his human form and quickle adding seasoning to a Japanese dish he decided to make for Sam's early graduation in an attempt to curry favor with Danny.
"That's good enough for me," Tucker Foley said as he went back to making the salad.
Valerie, the woman he was dating, did not look quite as accepting, but she decided to wait for Danny's judgment before passing her own. She set a glass of water she'd been sipping down and turned to dice some more vegetables for the salad and her elbow hit the glass. The water of course spilled out, but instead of taking the logical path and flowing towards the nearest edge of the table, it flowed in the opposite direction, around a salt and pepper shaker, a bottle of ranch dressing, and a bowl of fruit where it then spilled into Ranma's unsuspecting lap turning him into a short, busty, red headed girl.
At that exact moment Danny came back into the house through the front door, leading his wife of one year in, laughing nervously as she questioned him on the present she was getting from him.
A 'What the hell!' from Valerie turned all of their attention to the kitchen and, consequently, to Ranma.
Sam turned an inquisitive eye to her husband and nodded toward said busty redhead, "Something you need to tell me?" It was said in a tone half joking.
Danny stumbled over his words and vehement denials of knowing even who Ranma was, when the aqua-transexual spoke up in a nervous voice while eying Valerie who was not so subtly reaching for a weapon, "Hi, I'm Ranma... and I have some explaining to do."
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Chapter End.
And I hope that that is good enough to sate you all until I get the next chapter up.
Again, just real quick here, I got to remind you that Ranma WILL NOT have more than one girl. And the current leaders are Dani and Ember who are tied for the lead with six votes each. If, by the time I post the fourth Chapter, the vote is still tied I'll flip a coin. Heads: Dani. Tails: Ember.
Enjoy.
