- Prologue: The Wish -

Jirachi the Wish pokemon was possibly a bit out of its normal location, but a chance wish to let them see other worlds by a kind child had at least given the star shaped Legendary a couple of their seven waking days in this strange place with lots of cities and very few monsters. A different kind of place to where they usually lived, but for two or three days they could grant wishes to some of the people here too.

"Not again," they heard a young blue haired girl grumble from the good sized yard of one of the homes it was flying over tonight. She was standing next to a fish pond staring at the stars. "I wish I was better at baking," she said in the tone of a girl who just failed at a task.

Jirachi giggled a bit at the simple wish, and considered the best way to solve it. There weren't any pokemon they could sense in this world, and taking or making a pokemon for the girl didn't seem right. Just giving her better ability at baking was also a bit too boring for a wish, as anyone could simply practice for that. So, they thought, obviously the correct answer was to make it so she could become something that was automatically better at baking, and Jirachi knew just the pokemon to let her transform into: Alcremie the Cream pokemon.

They were experts at baking, and cooking in general really. Sure they were technically a slime like pokemon, but they were living frosting, and everyone loved frosting. Jirachi couldn't see any problem with this idea.

Akane Tendo did not understand why her attempt at cupcakes, admittedly a bit of a foreign recipe as well, had gotten such a bad reaction. Sure they were a bit dense, and sour, and somehow they had really hard bits, and the added rice didn't seem to work out the way she wanted it to, but they made it out of the oven with only a few blackened spots.

"I have heard your wish!" a squeaky voice declared from the sky. "And I will grant it by giving you the ability to transform into a creature with supernatural baking skills!" Akane cringed at how an attempt to half sarcastically wish on a star had apparently caused yet another issue for her. "Naturally you will be given the knowledge to both transform into a pokemon and return to your human form, along with a knowledge of what your pokemon form can do!" the voice excitedly continued, and suddenly Akane felt light headed.

There was then a gooey sensation all through her body, a feeling that everything inside of her was moving around, and the solid foundation of her bones vanished to be replaced by a strange way of holding herself up in the proper shape with only more of herself. It was as if she was melted down into icing. Which was a strange enough thought to Akane that she wondered where it had come from, at least until she looked at what had happened to her body. Using the pond to help with a bit of reflection she could see she was in fact was somehow made entirely of a fancy swirl of white and light blue icing with a couple of blueberry clusters on her head where it looked like hair. "You made me into food to help me make food?" she questioned, simultaneously fully aware that Alcremie were excellent bakers, and having no idea how she knew what an Alcremie was let alone that she was one.

"Yeah!" the squeaky voice actually replied. "Well, you should be able to turn back too, but now you're an Alcremie! Perfect for making better baked goods! Sorry about how the extra knowledge is a bit confusing, but that would happen even if I answered your wish another way."

This was far too nice, Akane thought with a bit of confusion, and decided she must be dreaming at this point. There was no way that some sort of nice genie had granted her wish by turning her into icing. "Okay," she vaguely said, and then moved back to the kitchen in a bit of a daze.

That faded quickly as she looked at the room, and then focused. She mostly let her Alcremie instincts take over. Those had her taking out measuring cups, cleaning stuff all the time, and double checking every ingredient. It was so different from how she usually tried to cook that it added to the dreamlike atmosphere. Despite that she didn't try to make a very large cake, and once it was out of the oven and cooled she quickly used the icing from her body to decorate it in a simple way.

It looked great, and with a happy smile Akane half instinctively returned to being a flesh and blood human, put the cake away, and barely made it upstairs to collapse into her bed.

The entire household, Akane included, stared at the perfect little cake the next morning.

"Did ya wish for a fairy to make you a cake last night, tomboy?" Ranma Saotome asked with a tone somewhere between joking and worried. Her fiance seemed as uneasy with the idea as she felt.

"Yes, but I kind of thought that was just a dream," she answered in a daze. "And I was kind of an icing, slime monster, cake fairy thing too?"

"Did you eat too many of your 'cupcakes' last night?" Nabiki Tendo questioned dully. "Are we sure we want to try this?"

"I'm certain it will be fine," Kasumi gladly informed them all as her older sister moved to cut the cake. "We All can have a small piece," the eldest Tendo daughter said firmly towards the greedy looks on Genma Saotome and their father.

"Yes, a small piece of it should be fine," her father agreed quickly and the cake was sectioned and passed around. Kasumi clearly was going to be the last to try it in order to keep up the glare the eldest Tendo daughter had not stopped sending towards Genma through the entire process.

The tiny cake was one of, although not the, best Akane had ever tasted. Somehow that was worse than it being the best by far, because it made her think of how she had sort of been thinking in the possibly-not-a-dream that she wasn't doing it perfectly. She watched as Kasumi finally took a bite after both Ranma and Genma had finished their own with thoughtful expressions. Kasumi nodded at the taste, and turned towards her. "Akane, can you try to do it again?" her sister asked.

Everyone froze at the idea, although Akane was sure the others weren't worried about turning into some sort of slime monster in front of the rest of them. "Yeah, I can try," she hesitantly admitted, and followed Kasumi into the kitchen again. "I can try," she repeated once it was just Kasumi with her, and this time actually made herself change fully willingly.

This time she watched as her clothes and body merged and melted into the same icing that had been on the cake, which for a moment seemed really awkward but as soon as she finished melting felt perfectly normal. "Oh Akane, you look so cute!" Kasumi cheered at the site of her other form. "I'll go keep the others entertained while you work."

Left alone she grumbled a bit and tried to fall into the same mindset as the dreamlike night before. However, she wasn't half asleep this time, and instead of going with her new body's instincts she found herself reverting to her normal method of just going faster and less overly cautious with only a few changes from before. This quickly made her somehow feel even less solid, as if she was far more fluid and with a bit of a loss of her stability. She was still able to stop herself from using a few incorrect ingredients that she grabbed by accident from their smell and feel. Although some bits of herself did fall in as she mixed things together, and it was only because she could taste the result without even touching it somehow that she was able to do some quick fixes. As she put it into the oven she needed another quick bit of mental consideration to work out how the chemicals involved would react to heat, and as she closed the door and set the timer she realized something horrible.

She was not currently an Alcremie. Instead she Knew, with that same sort of magical wish knowledge, that she had somehow shifted into a different pokemon. Specifically a Muk, she thought with a great deal of horror as she looked down at the swirls of blue and lighter blue toxic sludge she had changed into. She was a living mass of food waste and household chemicals. Akane fell into a bit of a panicked silence as she reviewed the way her thoughts had shifted from how to prepare food to how to manipulate chemicals at some point early in the process, and just how toxic the tiny bits of her would still be after the cake was finished baking.

"Oh! Is this the same form or do you have two?" Kasumi suddenly asked as the timer Akane had barely remembered to set went off. "You aren't quite as cute, but still isn't as bad as 'slime' sounded."

"It's a different one," Akane admitted. She pulled herself out of the large pool of herself she had slumped into and into a solid human form again, her clothes somehow perfectly intact and just as clean as before.

"I'm not sure the Saotomes will be happy to see you can change your clothes too," Kasumi cautiously noted as the eldest Tendo daughter took the cake out of the oven. "Hmm." It looked nowhere near as good as the first one, but before Akane could protest it was taken out to the others.

"We don't have icing for this one," Kasumi said, which was almost a good thing, and then once again passed out slices of the second small cake.

"Huh," Ranma said thoughtfully this time, while Akane's father and Nabiki both recoiled from the taste. "It isn't good, but this is a lot better than ya usually do, Akane," he added in the thoughtful tone that usually set her off.

However, Akane was too busy with how shocked she was by that response. She Knew from her senses as a Muk exactly how bad what she just made was, and somehow that was better than before? Good enough to earn one of Ranma's backhanded complements instead of outright insults?

"Well, he isn't wrong," Nabiki allowed and passed what was left of her piece towards Ranma, who actually seemed to be willing to eat it. "If this is what that wish can do for you then it is better than they usually manage."

"It reminds me of some of the things the Master made us eat," her father unhappily noted.

"Bah, I've had worse on the road," Genma grumbled as he took the rest of other man's slice. "Isn't that right boy?"

Akane simply watched the discussion that followed blankly as she considered that even with whatever had caused her to be a Muk instead, she still had gotten her wish. Ranma was eating a second piece, and she knew if she just figured this out she would be able to do even better.

[Author's Note]
Welcome to "A Wish for Baking", a story that I did not expect to actually start writing, and do not plan on getting to a solid conclusion.
This work is intended to be a side project while I work on other story ideas. I outright plan on having this end up unfinished , and hopefully I can make sure the chapters themselves never set up a larger plot that requires a solid clarification on how it turns out.
I am not the most well versed in canon Ranma 1/2, and I have possibly read too much fanfic of the series to have a perfectly accurate ideal of the characters, but honestly I needed to do something about how bad at cooking Akane is for myself.