Coping
A Ranma Nibonnoichi/Matrix crossover
By: Amberion(amberion@gamespyarcade.com)
Disclaimer: "Ranma Nibonnoichi" was written by Rumiko Takahashi,
and is (c) Shogakukan, Kitty Films, and Viz Video. The movie "The
Matrix" is (c) Warner Brothers. I worship twice daily at my shrine
to the great Rumiko-kami, and perform all the necessary sacrifices
to ward off evil lawyers(trust me, you don't want to know).
This story was written for entertainment purposes only, and may
not be distributed for profit. If it is, I will personally come
after the perpetrator with a hatchet, metaphorically speaking.
Author's Rant: I don't have to justify ANYTHING to ANYONE!
Mwahahahaha! Ahahahaha! thud
Chapter 1: Too Much Confidence Can Kill A Man...
Internal Scan Alert: Glitch detected, sector 326, area 17.
Intermittant neural feedback in uplink of subject 1437624849.
Investigate and/or eliminate.
Ranma Saotome was walking home from school, balancing on the
fence, and taking in the fresh, crisp autumn air as he moved. It
had been almost a week since he had learned the Mouko Takabisha
and trounced Ryouga in his latest match, and he was still riding
high on the rush of pure confidence he got whenever he used his
latest move. He was nearly home when he felt the familiar tingle
of a pair of eyes on the back of his neck.
Rounding a corner, he ducked into an alleyway. A stream of cold
water hit him right in the face. Resignedly, she wiped her eyes
and glared at the shopkeeper, who stared back with a shocked ex-
pression, water hose dangling from nerveless fingers. Sighing,
she leaped up to the top of the building and began hopping from
rooftop to rooftop, keeping an eye out for the person she had
sensed. Finally, she got a good look at her pursuer.
He was caucasian, and dressed in a snappy black suit. Other than
that, there was nothing really remarkable about him, and all
westerners looked pretty much alike to Ranma. She wondered why he
hadn't tried harder to find her after losing her on the street.
She got her answer when the man turned another corner and walked
up the street towards the Tendo Dojo. 'He probably figures I'll
come home sooner or later,' she thought as she abandoned the roof-
tops for the stone wall that bordered the house across from the
Tendos.
He didn't seem inclined to do anything more than hang around
across the street from the Tendo Dojo, supporting Ranma's theory,
and Ranma was already getting bored just watching him, so she
decided to deal with him head-on. Dropping down behind the man,
she challenged him. "Hey, mister! You looking for somethin'?"
The Agent turned and considered the young woman in front of him.
She was short, less than five feet tall, and was extremely, er,
'healthy' in her feminine attributes, which he supposed he would
have found attractive if he was interested in that sort of thing.
She had thick red hair, bound in a short pigtail, and wore a
chinese-style blue silk shirt with a neat little bow-tie at the
neck. Her pants were black cotton, designed both for combat and
everyday use. Clearly she saw a lot of fights, judging by her
stance and form, yet her clothes were unmarked. This suggested
that she was either very good, or had a fast tailor. A pair of big
floppy slippers completed the odd ensemble. Her clothes were all
very large, too large for her to be comfortable in, yet she wore
them with a casualness that spoke of long use. She also appeared
to be very wet. 'Interesting,' the Agent mused to himself, 'but
hardly relevant.' "Ranma Saotome?" he inquired.
She blinked. "Eh? Uh..." She stuttered, caught off guard. "Um...
sorry, you, ah, got me mixed up with someone else. I'm, uh, Ranko
Tendo."
"Enough, Saotome, I am aware of your 'curse,' as you call it."
Ranma sighed and dropped the pretense. "Allright, who are you and
what do ya want?"
The Agent's mouth curved ever-so-slightly upward into what might
have been called a 'smile' by anyone who didn't know better. "I am
a member of a private organization. We have been informed of cer-
tain events that have occurred in this area over the past year.
You have made quite a name for yourself here. We would like to
talk, and discuss certain opportunities for a person of your
skills. It may be that we could be of... mutual assistance." They
would also like to dissect her to find out what was wrong with her
uplink, but he certainly wasn't going to tell her that. He may not
understand much about humans, but the self-preservation instinct
was well-documented.
Ranma's eyes narrowed. Opportunities? Everything about this guy
screamed 'Yakuza.' What would they want with a teenage martial-
artist? Ranma would make a lousy assassin. "Sorry to disappoint
ya, but I ain't interested. You go peddle your 'opportunities'
somewhere else." she turned to leave, just in time to note the
long black limo stopping at the curb.
The man opened the rear door, exposing the plush black leather
interior, and gestured politely for her to enter. "Don't dismiss
this so hastily, Saotome. This offer will not last forever. We are
willing to offer something rather valuable in return for your
services."
"Oh yeah? Like what?" Ranma asked.
"You desire to be rid of your 'curse.' We may be able to help you
find your 'cure.'"
Ranma looked at the man standing before her. A part of her was
tempted. A cure... but no, not a cure, a promise of a chance for
a cure. And how many times had that kind of thing panned out? No
one would blame her if she was a bit bitter. She'd be damned if
she fell into that trap again. She shook her head. "Thanks, but no
thanks." She cleared the limo in a single bound and trotted across
the street.
Behind her, the Agent watched her go. Tiny muscles lining his
jawbone twitched in his irritation. This had not gone exactly as
planned. He had hoped to get Ranma out of public view before sub-
duing her. Time for 'Plan B,' as these humans would say. He strode
quickly over to the boy-turned-girl, grabbed her by the shirt, and
hurled her back across the street to slam into the concrete wall
next to the car. Ranma slumped to the sidewalk, small cracks in
the concrete and a slight indentation in the stone evidence to the
force of the throw. The Agent took a moment to adjust his tie
before treading slowly over to Ranma's crumpled form. She seemed
to be unconscious, which was just fine by the Agent. Grabbing her
by the collar, he dragged her one-handed toward the car.
Suddenly, she came alive in his grip. Grabbing his arm, she tried
to haul him off-balance, which failed miserably. Hitting a
pressure point in the elbow to numb his grip, she used his arm as
leverage to kick off his chest, bounce off the concrete wall she
had recently made such a nice impression upon, and land a short
distance away to take up an aggressive fighting stance. The Agent
looked at his right arm. The escape maneuver the boy-turned-girl
had performed had twisted his right forearm into an unnatural
position, at a joint he was pretty sure didn't exist. He grabbed
his arm by the wrist and pulled. With an audible *snickt*, it
twisted back into its proper position. He flexed it experi-
mentally.
Ranma gawked. Bones did NOT knit like that! Who the heck WAS this
guy? At the very least, his arm should have been useless for a
long, long time. Bracing herself, she kicked off her useless
slippers and prepared for the assault she knew was coming.
The man dashed towards her, impossibly fast for a man of his bulk.
Rolling aside, Ranma cursed her misjudgement of her opponent. Her
evasion took her out onto the street. Since Ranma had had to stay
behind after school cleaning the classrooms this whole week,
rush hour had long since finished and there were no cars on the
road. 'Darn,' she thought distractedly, 'that would have made it
interesting!' Righting herself into a crouching stance, she braced
yet again, determined that THIS time, she would not be caught by
suprise. When he rushed her this time, she grabbed his out-
stretched wrist and twisted it all the way around. He didn't react
to this move in quite the way she expected. Instead of moving with
the twist, which would have inevitably led to a submission hold or
a throw, he ignored the move completely and continued the assault
with his other fist. With a sickening crunch, the recently
repaired arm was dislocated, this time near the shoulder. 'This
guy... is impossible!' Ranma thought frantically as she shifted to
avoid his other strike. 'He can't be human!' She followed up her
twist with a series of sharp kicks to the midsection and head,
then used the distraction to pull away from her opponent.
His arm useless, the Agent took stock of his situation. There was
no time to fix his arm again, as it appeared the boy-turned-girl
was going on the offensive.
"KACHUU TENSHIN AMAGURIKEN!" Ranma shouted, her fists blurring
faster than the eye could see. To her absolute shock, the man's
body blurred too, first left, then right, then all over the place,
dodging every one of her punches. He finished off with a low punch
that caught Ranma right in the gut, launching her down the street
and into a telephone pole, which collapsed with a *crack* and
missed her skull by a few scant inches. She blinked and shook her
head before jumping up once again. 'This guy is absolutely imposs-
ible,' she thought dazedly as she watched him fix his arm yet
again, still showing no signs of feeling any sort of pain. 'Time
to bring out the big guns.' "MOUKO TAKABISHA!" She cried as she
launched a Ki-blast at him.
The Agent's eyes widened as he detected the enormous buildup of
bio-energy. He dodged wildly out of the way as an enormous yellow
ball of energy exploded into the ground where he had been standing
not moments before, leaving a shallow crater. The Agent was soon
dodging constantly as blast after blast impacted around him.
Finally, he decided to give it up as a lost cause - there was no
way the boy-turned-girl was going to go with him now, and he had
lost the initiative when she started tossing those things around.
He phased out.
Ranma was readying another Mouko Takabisha when the man shimmered
and collapsed. She was relieved. After this last blast, she
doubted she could pull enough Ki to tickle someone. She reabsorbed
the Ki and carefully made her way over to the man. Where the
western man she had been fighting once stood, now lay an over-
weight construction worker, clearly dead. She blinked confusedly.
"What the heck's going on here?"
In another place, three men and a woman stood around a computer
console. Multiple monitors displayed lines of characters that
streamed down in an intricate pattern. In the center of the
console, one of the men sat, tapping at a keyboard and staring
intently at one of the monitors in the array.
Tank rubbed his eyes and sat back in his chair. "Man," he groaned,
"Have I got the mother of all headaches!"
"Did you find it?" Trinity asked, leaning over his shoulder.
"Yeah. Tokyo. Some street in the residential section of the Nerima
district."
"Can you pinpoint exactly what it was?" asked Neo from his chair.
Tank shook his head. "Nope. You're gonna have to go in," he con-
cluded unhappily. They all exchanged nervous glances. Their recent
adventure 'inside' had left them all a little shell-shocked. After
their last encounter with the machine intelligences that admin-
istered the Matrix, accounting for the loss of half their crew,
they had hoped to return to Zion for some rest and relaxation.
They had just started on their way when the computer detected
sporadic energy surges disrupting the pattern within the Matrix.
The Matrix had been affected to such a degree that the 'fabric'
had briefly begun to 'unravel,' before quickly repairing itself.
Tank had spent hours pouring over reams of data, trying to work
out what could have caused such damage, to no avail.
Neo slumped back into his seat and considered the possible
ramifications of the loss of the Matrix. The Matrix was a virtual
world designed to keep the world's population occupied while the
AI used their bodies as living energy sources. Neo would have
liked nothing better than to free every man, woman, and child from
the Matrix. The problem was, there was literally no way they could
take care of the billions of people still trapped. The old human
civilization had long since been destroyed, so completely that
they weren't even sure what year it was. As detestable as it was,
the Matrix was the only thing that kept all those people alive.
Not to mention the fact that the world within the matrix was
infinitely better than the one out here. So what if it wasn't
real? Looking up, he noticed the rest of them staring at him, and
for the nth time he wished he didn't have to be the one to make
decisions like this.
He snorted inwardly. He was 'The One.' What that translated into,
was that he was the one who was ultimately responsible for the
safety and well-being of every free human alive. He still hadn't
had time to let it sink in yet; he hoped it never would.
Sighing, he nodded. "let's do it."
End Chapter 1
A Ranma Nibonnoichi/Matrix crossover
By: Amberion(amberion@gamespyarcade.com)
Disclaimer: "Ranma Nibonnoichi" was written by Rumiko Takahashi,
and is (c) Shogakukan, Kitty Films, and Viz Video. The movie "The
Matrix" is (c) Warner Brothers. I worship twice daily at my shrine
to the great Rumiko-kami, and perform all the necessary sacrifices
to ward off evil lawyers(trust me, you don't want to know).
This story was written for entertainment purposes only, and may
not be distributed for profit. If it is, I will personally come
after the perpetrator with a hatchet, metaphorically speaking.
Author's Rant: I don't have to justify ANYTHING to ANYONE!
Mwahahahaha! Ahahahaha! thud
Chapter 1: Too Much Confidence Can Kill A Man...
Internal Scan Alert: Glitch detected, sector 326, area 17.
Intermittant neural feedback in uplink of subject 1437624849.
Investigate and/or eliminate.
Ranma Saotome was walking home from school, balancing on the
fence, and taking in the fresh, crisp autumn air as he moved. It
had been almost a week since he had learned the Mouko Takabisha
and trounced Ryouga in his latest match, and he was still riding
high on the rush of pure confidence he got whenever he used his
latest move. He was nearly home when he felt the familiar tingle
of a pair of eyes on the back of his neck.
Rounding a corner, he ducked into an alleyway. A stream of cold
water hit him right in the face. Resignedly, she wiped her eyes
and glared at the shopkeeper, who stared back with a shocked ex-
pression, water hose dangling from nerveless fingers. Sighing,
she leaped up to the top of the building and began hopping from
rooftop to rooftop, keeping an eye out for the person she had
sensed. Finally, she got a good look at her pursuer.
He was caucasian, and dressed in a snappy black suit. Other than
that, there was nothing really remarkable about him, and all
westerners looked pretty much alike to Ranma. She wondered why he
hadn't tried harder to find her after losing her on the street.
She got her answer when the man turned another corner and walked
up the street towards the Tendo Dojo. 'He probably figures I'll
come home sooner or later,' she thought as she abandoned the roof-
tops for the stone wall that bordered the house across from the
Tendos.
He didn't seem inclined to do anything more than hang around
across the street from the Tendo Dojo, supporting Ranma's theory,
and Ranma was already getting bored just watching him, so she
decided to deal with him head-on. Dropping down behind the man,
she challenged him. "Hey, mister! You looking for somethin'?"
The Agent turned and considered the young woman in front of him.
She was short, less than five feet tall, and was extremely, er,
'healthy' in her feminine attributes, which he supposed he would
have found attractive if he was interested in that sort of thing.
She had thick red hair, bound in a short pigtail, and wore a
chinese-style blue silk shirt with a neat little bow-tie at the
neck. Her pants were black cotton, designed both for combat and
everyday use. Clearly she saw a lot of fights, judging by her
stance and form, yet her clothes were unmarked. This suggested
that she was either very good, or had a fast tailor. A pair of big
floppy slippers completed the odd ensemble. Her clothes were all
very large, too large for her to be comfortable in, yet she wore
them with a casualness that spoke of long use. She also appeared
to be very wet. 'Interesting,' the Agent mused to himself, 'but
hardly relevant.' "Ranma Saotome?" he inquired.
She blinked. "Eh? Uh..." She stuttered, caught off guard. "Um...
sorry, you, ah, got me mixed up with someone else. I'm, uh, Ranko
Tendo."
"Enough, Saotome, I am aware of your 'curse,' as you call it."
Ranma sighed and dropped the pretense. "Allright, who are you and
what do ya want?"
The Agent's mouth curved ever-so-slightly upward into what might
have been called a 'smile' by anyone who didn't know better. "I am
a member of a private organization. We have been informed of cer-
tain events that have occurred in this area over the past year.
You have made quite a name for yourself here. We would like to
talk, and discuss certain opportunities for a person of your
skills. It may be that we could be of... mutual assistance." They
would also like to dissect her to find out what was wrong with her
uplink, but he certainly wasn't going to tell her that. He may not
understand much about humans, but the self-preservation instinct
was well-documented.
Ranma's eyes narrowed. Opportunities? Everything about this guy
screamed 'Yakuza.' What would they want with a teenage martial-
artist? Ranma would make a lousy assassin. "Sorry to disappoint
ya, but I ain't interested. You go peddle your 'opportunities'
somewhere else." she turned to leave, just in time to note the
long black limo stopping at the curb.
The man opened the rear door, exposing the plush black leather
interior, and gestured politely for her to enter. "Don't dismiss
this so hastily, Saotome. This offer will not last forever. We are
willing to offer something rather valuable in return for your
services."
"Oh yeah? Like what?" Ranma asked.
"You desire to be rid of your 'curse.' We may be able to help you
find your 'cure.'"
Ranma looked at the man standing before her. A part of her was
tempted. A cure... but no, not a cure, a promise of a chance for
a cure. And how many times had that kind of thing panned out? No
one would blame her if she was a bit bitter. She'd be damned if
she fell into that trap again. She shook her head. "Thanks, but no
thanks." She cleared the limo in a single bound and trotted across
the street.
Behind her, the Agent watched her go. Tiny muscles lining his
jawbone twitched in his irritation. This had not gone exactly as
planned. He had hoped to get Ranma out of public view before sub-
duing her. Time for 'Plan B,' as these humans would say. He strode
quickly over to the boy-turned-girl, grabbed her by the shirt, and
hurled her back across the street to slam into the concrete wall
next to the car. Ranma slumped to the sidewalk, small cracks in
the concrete and a slight indentation in the stone evidence to the
force of the throw. The Agent took a moment to adjust his tie
before treading slowly over to Ranma's crumpled form. She seemed
to be unconscious, which was just fine by the Agent. Grabbing her
by the collar, he dragged her one-handed toward the car.
Suddenly, she came alive in his grip. Grabbing his arm, she tried
to haul him off-balance, which failed miserably. Hitting a
pressure point in the elbow to numb his grip, she used his arm as
leverage to kick off his chest, bounce off the concrete wall she
had recently made such a nice impression upon, and land a short
distance away to take up an aggressive fighting stance. The Agent
looked at his right arm. The escape maneuver the boy-turned-girl
had performed had twisted his right forearm into an unnatural
position, at a joint he was pretty sure didn't exist. He grabbed
his arm by the wrist and pulled. With an audible *snickt*, it
twisted back into its proper position. He flexed it experi-
mentally.
Ranma gawked. Bones did NOT knit like that! Who the heck WAS this
guy? At the very least, his arm should have been useless for a
long, long time. Bracing herself, she kicked off her useless
slippers and prepared for the assault she knew was coming.
The man dashed towards her, impossibly fast for a man of his bulk.
Rolling aside, Ranma cursed her misjudgement of her opponent. Her
evasion took her out onto the street. Since Ranma had had to stay
behind after school cleaning the classrooms this whole week,
rush hour had long since finished and there were no cars on the
road. 'Darn,' she thought distractedly, 'that would have made it
interesting!' Righting herself into a crouching stance, she braced
yet again, determined that THIS time, she would not be caught by
suprise. When he rushed her this time, she grabbed his out-
stretched wrist and twisted it all the way around. He didn't react
to this move in quite the way she expected. Instead of moving with
the twist, which would have inevitably led to a submission hold or
a throw, he ignored the move completely and continued the assault
with his other fist. With a sickening crunch, the recently
repaired arm was dislocated, this time near the shoulder. 'This
guy... is impossible!' Ranma thought frantically as she shifted to
avoid his other strike. 'He can't be human!' She followed up her
twist with a series of sharp kicks to the midsection and head,
then used the distraction to pull away from her opponent.
His arm useless, the Agent took stock of his situation. There was
no time to fix his arm again, as it appeared the boy-turned-girl
was going on the offensive.
"KACHUU TENSHIN AMAGURIKEN!" Ranma shouted, her fists blurring
faster than the eye could see. To her absolute shock, the man's
body blurred too, first left, then right, then all over the place,
dodging every one of her punches. He finished off with a low punch
that caught Ranma right in the gut, launching her down the street
and into a telephone pole, which collapsed with a *crack* and
missed her skull by a few scant inches. She blinked and shook her
head before jumping up once again. 'This guy is absolutely imposs-
ible,' she thought dazedly as she watched him fix his arm yet
again, still showing no signs of feeling any sort of pain. 'Time
to bring out the big guns.' "MOUKO TAKABISHA!" She cried as she
launched a Ki-blast at him.
The Agent's eyes widened as he detected the enormous buildup of
bio-energy. He dodged wildly out of the way as an enormous yellow
ball of energy exploded into the ground where he had been standing
not moments before, leaving a shallow crater. The Agent was soon
dodging constantly as blast after blast impacted around him.
Finally, he decided to give it up as a lost cause - there was no
way the boy-turned-girl was going to go with him now, and he had
lost the initiative when she started tossing those things around.
He phased out.
Ranma was readying another Mouko Takabisha when the man shimmered
and collapsed. She was relieved. After this last blast, she
doubted she could pull enough Ki to tickle someone. She reabsorbed
the Ki and carefully made her way over to the man. Where the
western man she had been fighting once stood, now lay an over-
weight construction worker, clearly dead. She blinked confusedly.
"What the heck's going on here?"
In another place, three men and a woman stood around a computer
console. Multiple monitors displayed lines of characters that
streamed down in an intricate pattern. In the center of the
console, one of the men sat, tapping at a keyboard and staring
intently at one of the monitors in the array.
Tank rubbed his eyes and sat back in his chair. "Man," he groaned,
"Have I got the mother of all headaches!"
"Did you find it?" Trinity asked, leaning over his shoulder.
"Yeah. Tokyo. Some street in the residential section of the Nerima
district."
"Can you pinpoint exactly what it was?" asked Neo from his chair.
Tank shook his head. "Nope. You're gonna have to go in," he con-
cluded unhappily. They all exchanged nervous glances. Their recent
adventure 'inside' had left them all a little shell-shocked. After
their last encounter with the machine intelligences that admin-
istered the Matrix, accounting for the loss of half their crew,
they had hoped to return to Zion for some rest and relaxation.
They had just started on their way when the computer detected
sporadic energy surges disrupting the pattern within the Matrix.
The Matrix had been affected to such a degree that the 'fabric'
had briefly begun to 'unravel,' before quickly repairing itself.
Tank had spent hours pouring over reams of data, trying to work
out what could have caused such damage, to no avail.
Neo slumped back into his seat and considered the possible
ramifications of the loss of the Matrix. The Matrix was a virtual
world designed to keep the world's population occupied while the
AI used their bodies as living energy sources. Neo would have
liked nothing better than to free every man, woman, and child from
the Matrix. The problem was, there was literally no way they could
take care of the billions of people still trapped. The old human
civilization had long since been destroyed, so completely that
they weren't even sure what year it was. As detestable as it was,
the Matrix was the only thing that kept all those people alive.
Not to mention the fact that the world within the matrix was
infinitely better than the one out here. So what if it wasn't
real? Looking up, he noticed the rest of them staring at him, and
for the nth time he wished he didn't have to be the one to make
decisions like this.
He snorted inwardly. He was 'The One.' What that translated into,
was that he was the one who was ultimately responsible for the
safety and well-being of every free human alive. He still hadn't
had time to let it sink in yet; he hoped it never would.
Sighing, he nodded. "let's do it."
End Chapter 1