Chapter 7: Furinkan
An hour later Akane, Ranma, and Nabiki were well on their way to school. Akane was tugging at her sleeve, a frown on her face.
"Problem?" Nabiki asked, swinging her bag idly. Furinkan was just a block away; this was a bad time for Akane to be getting cold feet.
Akane glanced up from her uniform. "No...yes...I don't know. I think my uniform shrunk."
"Kasumi's better than that," Ranma said.
"And it's not tight, exactly, just...uncomfortable."
"It'll never fit your hybrid form," Ranma said. He plucked at his own loose shirt. "I didn't feel comfortable until Kasumi adjusted my shirts for me."
"Well that's fine for you, but some of us actually follow the dress code," Akane grumbled.
"I followed the code at my old schools," Ranma protested. "My girl form would never fit the guy's uniform here. Face it, Akane, we got reasons to dress different."
Akane grumbled a bit.
Air wooshed and suddenly a fourth person was walking with them. "Hi, Ranchan."
Nabiki whistled. "How'd you pull that off?"
"I wasn't running that fast," Ukyo complained.
"Yes you were, but I meant the outfit."
Ukyo looked over herself. "It's the same outfit I always wear." Indeed, the blue chef's outfit with the masculine cut, the bandolier of spatulas, and the heavy battle spatula on her back were the only defining features of her outfit. She had her hair back in a hard, tight ponytail that befit a young man with long hair. Even her tail was groomed to avoid fluffing up and looking poofy. Oh, and she was over six feet tall, furred, with a tail. But that wasn't so important.
"Konatsu?" Ranma asked.
"I swear, that boy could give Kasumi a run for her money in feminine skills," Ukyo muttered.
"Um," Akane asked, "how did you keep your, um, that is, you still look like a boy?"
Ukyo quashed a grin at the prudish Tendo's embarrassment. "Turns out you were right about the muscle training. I'm a lot slimmer than either of you. And I have a lot of experience masking my figure. It's all in the walk. See?" She took a few steps, exaggerating her strut. It looked ridiculous. Then she changed again, and she looked like a girl wearing men's clothes. Another change and the illusion was nearly flawless again.
"Wow," Akane said. Nabiki and Ranma just nodded; both had known that part of Ukyo's boy act for a while. They had learned to read body language at a young age, for their own reasons.
"Anyway, Ukyo," Nabiki cautioned, "you should probably change to human if you don't want to be mobbed."
Ukyo pouted but let her form collapse in on itself. She adjusted her outfit for a moment and looked just like the same old Ukyo, just with blonde spotted hair.
Akane wowed at the sight. "How did you pull that off?" she asked.
Ukyo grinned. "Same experience. I'll give you some tips after school."
"Speaking of which," Nabiki said, attracting everyone's attention to where they were walking. They turned the corner and there before them was Furinkan High School. And their welcoming party.
"At last the foul demon has come to meet his just punishment!" Kuno stood at the school gates, bokken in hands and raised skywards in a high guard. Behind him was a crowd of what looked to be about half the school.
Ranma, Akane, Nabiki, and Ukyo all sighed in unison. Kuno ignored them. "I will give you a moment to repent!"
Ranma rolled his eyes and took a swaggering step forward. "No sword today, Kuno?"
"I need no blade to end you," Kuno boasted. "This noble instrument with which I teach my lessers is more than adequate to destroy you and banish your curses from Akane Tendo and the pigtailed girl."
Ranma turned his back to Kuno and looked to Akane. "Do you want him?" he asked casually.
Akane glared at Ranma. "How can you ask that?" she asked, gagging at the thought.
"I mean to fight!" Ranma snapped.
Akane blinked, anger and disgust both collapsing in on themselves. "Oh. No, you can have your fun."
"You see! The fierce Akane cannot be so easily compelled to harm my magnificent self!"
Akane rushed Kuno in the blink of an eye and her fist embedded itself into his stomach. She held that pose for long enough for his eyes to focus on her outraged expression and then she pulled back and spun away. Her fist pulled out of his gut as she pivoted, but she brought up her opposite foot and kicked the side of his head with punishing force. Rather than kicking up as she usually did, she caught him on the downswing of her kick and knocked him to the ground hard enough to bury his face down several centimeters. She finished her spin looking down and Kuno, hands on her hips. "Hmph," she snorted and spun on one heel to walk back to Ranma. She was pleased by his stunned expression. "You may get rid of him now," she said with the grandeur she knew Nabiki pulled off better than she ever did.
"I...fight...on..." Kuno groaned.
Ranma obliged by kicking Kuno over the school.
Nabiki watched the delusional projectile. "Roof of the nurse's office?" she asked.
"I was feeling sorry for him," Ranma said.
"You know they haven't gotten around to putting the mattress on the roof yet," Hiroshi said conversationally, walking over to Ranma.
Ranma shrugged. "Oops."
Hiroshi's approach triggered a reaction in the crowd which surged forwards. A dozen lungs filled to yell out three times as many questions. In moments the air was an unintelligible clamoring. Akane ducked into a defensive stance and pushed away people trying to stroke her hair to see if it was real while trying to get some headway. "Get off me you perverts!" she yelled.
Ranma was only having slightly better luck. He was being mobbed mostly by girls who knew he wouldn't use force against them. Instead of pushing his way through, he was trying to jump out. But every time he landed he was mobbed again.
Ukyo was the least experienced at being a freakshow and had her battle spatula out, using its flat sides to leverage open a path to safety. Her obvious intolerance for the attention quickly made her an unpopular target, and she was the first to make it into the safety of the school.
Nabiki held back with her own mob of attention. Most of these were students with yen trying to buy answers, but a few were her lackeys looking for instructions. She turned to the latter and opened up her bag. "These are info packets. Page through them quick," she said, handing out stacks of small pamphlets. "Then get into that crowd and sell them off."
One girl glanced at the price stamp in the corner. "Is this a misprint?"
"No," Nabiki said. "I need these answers out there."
"But this isn't even half the usual rate."
"It'll come out of my cut, don't worry," Nabiki said. She was barely operating above cost; with the blow to her credibility last week this mess was seriously damaging her local income. "Just this once. We'll be back to business as usual tomorrow. Anyone wants to buy info not in there, they see me at lunch. Got it?"
"Right," the girls said. They dispersed into the crowd and got busy hawking their wares.
Nabiki glanced up at the clock. Ten minutes until class. They were right on schedule. The crowd should thin to a third of its current size in the next twenty seconds, the remainder would be more or less willing to listen to quick answers. Two minutes after that the warning bell would sound and everyone else would retreat, except for the trio's classmates. The venue would change to the classroom, they'd miss the first two or so periods in intense questioning, the teachers wouldn't intervene out of their own curiosity. Not that they'd admit it; ignoring the weirdness as much as possible was the only way most of them got the courage to come in every day.
Nabiki nodded. The plan was going to work.
She had forgotten that a lot of plans had worked lately. Nerima doesn't look kindly on that. In this case, Nerima manifested in the form of Gosunkugi.
Gosunkugi was not wearing his uniform. Nor was he wearing his ritual garb, exactly. He kept the candles strapped to his head but below that was dressed in a tunic wrap, straight pants, and soft leather shoes all a matte black, with a cape of black and red. A set of plastic fangs completed the costume, making him look like Dracula's inbred nephew more than anything else. He carried in his hands a small mallet and a polished nail. He cackled and pointed the nail at Ranma. "And now you will fall before me, Saotome!"
Ranma hung his head and sighed. "What are you on about this time, Gosunkugi?"
Akane frowned and looked over. Why was Gosunkugi yelling at Ranma? He wasn't being a jerk. Yet.
"This time I know your real weakness!" Gosunkugi cackled. He turned the nail so Ranma could get a good look at it. "Silver!"
Ranma tensed slightly, so slightly only someone who had seen him fight a lot could tell. Akane's gasp and Ukyo's suddenly hard expression clued everyone else in that Gosunkugi actually had something.
Gosunkugi grinned wildly. "And now you will face my true power!" In a flash he had the nail poised, the mallet ready...and hammered the nail through a Ranma doll into a tree. "You fool Saotome!" Wham. "You fool Saotome!" Wham. "You fool Saotome!" Wham.
Ranma stared. Akane stared. Ukyo stared. Everyone stared. Nothing else particularly remarkable happened.
Gosunkugi blinked. "You didn't burst into flame. You should have burst into flame. Why didn't you burst into flame? Um. Can, uh, can we pretend this never happened? At least until I figure out what I did wrong?"
Nabiki shook her head, walked over, and scraped a yen coin against the nail. She glanced from nail to coin and looked at Ranma. "It's not even real silver."
Gosunkugi felt what little blood he had drain from his face. "Uh. Oh."
Ranma cracked his knuckles. "Gosunkugi..." he growled.
BONG
Nabiki glanced back up. "That's the bell!" she called. "Better get to your classes if you don't want to be late!"
Gosunkugi was the first one inside, a trail of dust behind him.
"Feh," Ranma snorted.
Hiroshi burst out laughing. "Well, I bet you weren't expecting that to be the first challenge you got, eh Ranma?"
"So," Daisuke asked, glancing over at Akane and sidling up to Ranma, "what does Akane look like when she gets furry? Rowr?"
Ranma glared at Daisuke. "What?" he snapped.
Daisuke blanched and took a step back. "Hey, just asking, no harm in that right?" he laughed nervously. Ranma cracked his knuckles and turned towards the school. Daisuke trembled slightly and let out a breath. Stay of execution, granted.
Sayuri leaned in to Akane. "So, what does Ranma look like when he gets furry?"
"Saruri," Yuka chided. Akane's blush was all the answer she needed to that question, but if they were going to get anything from Akane other than how she couldn't love a pervert like Ranma, they had to get her on a different topic fast. "So was that nail really so scary?" she asked.
"If it had been silver, yeah," Akane said, recovering. "Imagine if that nail had been glowing white, so hot that you'd barely have to touch it to be seriously burned. That's what all silver is to us, now."
"Yikes," Yuka said. Sayuri whimpered sympathetically. "Anything else you need to look out for?"
"Well, they say magic has a tendency to react to us in the worst possible ways," Akane mused, "but I'm not sure we'd notice the difference." She smiled. "But really, I'm tired about talking about what happened to us. We missed a bunch of classes last week; what did you study?"
The girls thought that over as they headed into the school.
A few hours later it was time for Ranma's second favorite part of school: gym class. Of course, first he had to deal with the locker-room.
"Yes, I still have my curse," he growled, "and if you get anywhere near me with that water I'm going to make you wish you were the girl."
Hiroshi gauged Ranma's expression for a moment with all the intensity of a deer in the headlights. "Fair enough," he said. He threw the cup of water over his shoulder, away from Ranma.
"HEY!" Daisuke yelped.
Ranma rolled his eyes and got back to changing. It had been like that all day. He hadn't been besieged by so many questions since that bout with Kodachi...was it really less than a year ago? It felt like a lifetime since he had shown up on the Tendo's doorstep and met the world's least cute tomboy. He shook his head out of nostalgia and returned his attention to putting on his shorts. He'd learned from those mistakes. Denying his weirdness just made people ask about it more, so he'd be open about it. He was a werecheetah, and he'd be proud of it.
Minutes later, Ranma, Akane, and Ukyo were just staring at their teacher as he explained that they were going to be running laps around the track.
The three werecheetahs looked at eachother and grinned. "Race ya," Ranma offered.
"You're on," Akane answered.
"I'm in," Ukyo laughed.
The three made a leisurely walk to the track and lined up behind the rest of their classmates. Daisuke looked to Hiroshi, behind them to the three werecats, and back to Hiroshi. "Dive for cover?"
"Good idea," the other boy agreed.
"Go!" the teacher yelled.
Most of the class went off at a comfortable jog. Hiroshi, Daisuke, and a few others lunged sideways to get out of the martial artists' way. Ranma, Akane, and Ukyo just stood where they were, looking rather unconcerned with the whole affair.
"I said go," the teacher huffed.
"How many laps are we making?" Ranma asked.
"As many as you can," the teacher snapped. "Look just because you brats dyed your hair doesn't mean you can goof off. Get going!"
"Brats?" Akane snarled.
"Dyed?" Ukyo gasped.
Ranma cracked his knuckles. "What's the record anyway?"
"You set it a few months ago," the teacher grumbled. "Twenty laps."
Ranma saw that the majority of the class was a quarter of the way through their first lap, with the group that expected to get trampled only a few dozen meters away. "Feels like a good time to set some new records," he said, stretching his legs out.
"Not at this pace," the teacher snapped. "I want you at the head of the pack by the fifth lap or you're in for it, Saotome."
Ranma grinned. "Done." He took off down the track.
"No fair!" Ukyo yelled, running after him.
"JERK!" Akane howled in hot pursuit.
The teacher twitched slightly. He'd seen martial artists run. They were impressive, but they didn't turn into a blur unless you were looking at them closely. Ranma was a blur on the other side of the track. A golden blur. It was either time to hit the sake or sober up.
Ranma chuckled. He wasn't even breaking a sweat and he knew he was going several times faster than he could have a week ago. He could feel his hybrid legs move, powerful muscles pushing his body forward so hard that by the time his other foot came down he was meters away from his last footprint. His heart hammered in his chest, his lungs filled and emptied in a steady but rapid pattern. His tail swayed in the air behind him, balancing his powerful strides and hurling his weight to maneuver without slowing. And damn, could he dance at this speed. He didn't pass his classmates, he slipped around them. Waiting for them to get out of the way seemed ridiculous at this pace, and swinging out around them was so far out of the way. Why bother, when he knew that all he had to do was push his weight like so and he'd slip around Sayuri by barely a centimeter and be on his way without slowing down at all?
And he could go even faster. But that wasn't a good idea. He could feel the magic in his body. He knew what it felt like to sprint, to run, to jog. His body was sprinting, but his reserves felt the drain of a heavy jog. The enchantments that made him what he was were keeping his stamina up, his temperature down. He could go faster easily, but the magic couldn't keep up. He'd tire, slow, stop, just like a real cheetah. He had his limits.
His heart soared. Pushing those limits would be a challenge worthy of a Saotome.
Ranma wasn't alone in his exultation. Akane was right on his heels, laughing in the wind. Ranma glanced behind him to see her whip around Sayuri twice before racing on. "You need to do better than that to catch me, tomboy!" he teased.
"Ooo, just you wait, tomcat!" Akane growled.
"Don't forget about me!" Ukyo yelled. She ran past both werecheetahs with the same ease they ran around the other students.
Ranma frowned. "Ukyo! Don't wear yourself out too much!"
Ukyo was running too hard to yell back. She knew that was a bad thing. Ultimately there were always diminishing returns as the body was pushed closer to its limit, and Ukyo was feeling the strain of her little stunt eating away at her stamina. Like the tortoise and the hare, she'd have to take a break and her hard won lead would be lost, and then some.
The teacher jumped as the fastest blur ran off the track and resolved into some kind of massive cat woman in girl's gym shorts and top. She didn't quite collapse, but she was panting hard. "Wh wh wha? Who? What?"
"Relax, teach," a cat man said. The teacher recognized Saotome's pigtail. "It's just Ukyo. C'mon, breathe Ucchan. Let's get you some water."
"How fast were you running?" the teacher asked warily.
"I dunno," Ranma said. "I think I made five laps. Ukyo made six or seven."
The teacher looked at his stopwatch and made some calculations. He twitched. "That's not possible."
Ranma chuckled. "Haven't heard anyone say that in a long time."
Ukyo chugged the rest of her bottle and sighed. "Dammit. I didn't know it was going to be that hard."
Ranma nodded and handed Ukyo a fresh bottle. "Don't feel too bad. Akane and me did the same thing last week. We're born sprinters. You have to get a feel for how fast you can go before you wipe yourself out like this."
Ukyo took another gulp and looked at the empty bottle. "I don't think I've been this thirsty in my life."
Ranma chuckled. "How did Brit put it? High performance body. You can work it hard but you'll pay for every demand."
"Good to know," Ukyo grumbled. "Any other catches you forgot to mention?"
"Probably," Ranma said. "But I can't think of any."
Ukyo didn't have a chance to retort before a pineapple landed between them. "Oh crap," she said instead.
Ranma grabbed the fruit and hurled it away. It exploded safely above the track. He spun in a quick circle. "Where are you?" he growled.
"Hey, you keiki no have da right haircuts! Very very bad!" The one (and hopefully only) Principal Kuno jumped off the roof of the school with a coconut-styled parachute.
Ranma held his head to try and force the migraine from taking root. "Great, now I've fought the whole set," he grumbled.
Kuno held up a pair of shears and cut his way free of the parachute. "You bad keiki, growing hair all over body very very against da school rules!"
Ukyo got up on her feet but Ranma pushed her back down. "No. You rest." He looked to the deranged barber. "It's just you and me."
"Cut cuto," Kuno cackled, waving his shears menacingly. "You not be takin me with a full head o' hair!"
Ranma tapped into the Soul of Ice and regarded the delusional instructor calmly. "Then I'll take you bald," he sneered.
"Never!" Kuno yelled as he lunged forward.
Ranma was behind the principal. "What are you lunging at?"
Kuno spun around, his shears making a wide cut to shave Ranma's chest.
But Ranma was behind him again. "Your aim sucks," he complained.
This little dance continued for some time until Ranma tired of the game. He jumped up in front of the principal and struck the sky. Winds roared and the principal was sucked up by a sudden vacuum.
Ukyo's eyes widened. Ranma had only rarely resorted to the complicated Heavenly Dragon Ascension. And this one was different, compact in a way she had never seen before. "What?"
Ranma watched his handiwork calmly for a moment and took one step to the left before the principal landed where he had been standing. He looked to Ukyo. "I haven't had much chance to experiment with a high speed Hiryu Shoten Ha," he explained. "It's a lot easier to get the spiral in tight now." He grinned sheepishly. "Still kinda tiring, though, running in circles fast enough."
Ukyo chuckled and tossed Ranma her last bottle. "I think you need this more than me."
Akane jogged over. "What was that?" she asked. She glanced down and saw the principal. "Nevermind. You okay?"
Ranma and Ukyo nodded. "Yeah," Ranma said. "If we're lucky, the rest of the day will be boring."
Ranma and Akane traded off teaching Ukyo how to manage her speed for the rest of class while the other lounged lazily at the side of the track. This, too, was part of Nabiki's plan to desensitize their peers to their new forms…although Nabiki hadn't counted on the exercise in question being one the lycanthropes would dominate so very hard.
Really, when you considered speeds measured in hundreds of miles per hour a brisk jog, the comparison to everyday highschoolers was just sad. It was fortunate that the entire student body (and the entire staff) was used to being physically dominated by Saotome and the rest of the Nerima Wrecking Crew already. Where such blatant showmanship would usually earn a hefty pile of resentment and jealousy, the simple fact was that those feelings were nearly a year old where Ranma was concerned. All that was left was…exactly what Nabiki had predicted.
Namely, that as students rounded the corner where one of the werecheetahs was taking a break, they would slow down almost to walking, and some would even stop, to stare. The ones that stopped had questions, usually hesitantly, even fearfully asked. This was why they were lounging rather than just sitting: it was a very feline position. Their body language, the mix of human and cheetah, spoke a very simple message to the primitive instincts nestled at the base of human reasoning. I can talk and I can reason and I really have no interest in hurting you, but if I wanted to your blood would be in my mouth before you could even think of blinking. It really cut down on the leering.
Ukyo breathed steadily as she ran, trying to make sense of the conflicting signals her magical body was sending her. Ranma paced her, watching her body and her aura. "How do you feel, Ucchan?"
"I think…I think I can keep this up for a while," Ukyo said. "I should be barely able to speak, though."
Ranma nodded. "Right. Feel the drain on the magic. Gauge it, sense your reserves."
"Yeah…I'd say...maybe an hour?"
Ranma considered his own drain pacing her. "Maybe," he agreed.
"It's just so weird having to think about this," Ukyo complained.
"Naw it isn't," Ranma said easily.
Ukyo turned to look at her fiancé. "It isn't?" she asked dubiously.
"I've seen ya run. You've trained yer speed."
Ukyo blinked. "Well, yeah. I mean you can't win a fight if you can't keep your opponent in range."
"Right," Ranma agreed easily, "but how do you know your limits?"
"What do you mean?" Ukyo asked.
Ranma waved at their classmates as they sped past them. "All them haven't trained. They're going on instinct. They're listening to their muscles."
"And training teaches you to gauge your limits better than that," Ukyo finished. "So what?"
"This is the same thing," Ranma said simply.
Ukyo blinked. "What?"
"Yer muscles are built to hit their absolute limit real easy," Ranma explained. "They hafta to get this fast. So ya gotta learn ta feel the limits on the magic that lets ya keep it up. But it gets real easy once ya get used to it."
Ukyo frowned. Trying to feel out this new part of herself, this magic, felt alien to her. But thinking back, it also felt weird thinking about her stamina back when she started training to ignore her body's much more conservative estimate on how hard she could push herself. When did that become so easy? she asked herself. She had just stopped thinking about thinking about it. Did that even make sense?
Ukyo smiled a wry grin. "The path of a martial artist is wrought with weirdness," she intoned.
Ranma laughed.
The final bell rang, releasing Ranma from the hideous clutches of school and education. He sagged in his seat with a heartfelt sigh, his eyes closing for just a moment as his abused attention span broke down weeping for joy. Then he opened his eyes again. He was surrounded by classmates. They were all staring at him, expecting…something.
Ranma gulped. "I don't suppose you could ask questions one at a time?" he asked hopefully.
"Have you had a hairball yet?"
"Do you chase string?"
"Is it regular silver or alchemical silver that burns?"
"Idiot, he's too big to chase string. He'd chase a gazelle."
"Are you and Akane going to have kittens or kids?"
"What's a gazelle?"
"How many stripes do you have?"
Ranma looked around in a brief panic to see Akane at the center of her own crowd. Dammit, we answered half these questions already! "Akane!" he called.
Akane looked over at him and gave a grim smile. "Saotome Secret Technique Revised!" she called back.
Ranma grinned. Oh, he had been hoping she'd say something like that. Picking the closest pervert as his victim, he grabbed the boy's shoulders and used him as a pole to vault out of his desk and over the heads of his classmates. From there he spared a moment to open the window and made clever use of gravity to expedite his escape from the building. He landed in hybrid form and bolted for the gates. Akane and Ukyo were on his heels, having made their own way through the halls at barely subsonic speeds. They made it to the gate and banked an impossibly sharp left to leave the school behind them.
Silence reigned in the classroom as the questioners watched three furry blurs race out of sight. "Well," someone said at last. "That was interesting."
The three werecheetahs made it safely home minutes later. Ranma made it to the Tendo wall first, thus winning the impromptu race the speed freaks had decided on. Ukyo was next and Akane was only a few lengths behind her.
"Ha," Ukyo taunted her rival. "Someone's been slacking in her training."
Akane glared at Ukyo. "Who was it that chugged a liter of water at school?" she countered.
"Ahem," an unfamiliar voice interrupted. "If the two of you are done squabbling?"
"Running away from your fiancées does not seem manly," a second, more familiar voice added.
The werecheetahs turned to take in the appearance of two sword-bearing redheads. Theodore Diggers was leaning up against the house in the background, but he didn't matter at all. The women in front of them were much more important.
Short hair, red as dark as the last hint of dusk, held up in curls. A traditional kimono, the honor blade of an old clan held behind the shoulder. A stern, loving, somewhat uncertain gaze. A classic Japanese beauty with a hint of the exotic. Nodoka Saotome was a familiar sight at the Tendo home, and a welcome one…usually. The way she looked at the hybrid form of her son...was utterly unreadable. That was bad.
Long hair, worn loose below the shoulders, a crimson to match Ranma-chan's former locks. Tight clothes that revealed an athletic body. A rapier of some unidentifiable alloy at her hip. Confidence oozing out her pores, the equal of Ranma's own insufferable ego. A knowing, calculating, disapproving stare at the girls. A Westerner with the bearing and grace of a model, or a deadly killer. Julia Diggers was a new visitor to the Tendo Dojo.
Ranma gulped. "Hi, Mom." It was just as well that Nabiki wasn't home yet. The bets on how this meeting would go would bankrupt a small continent.
