Ranma Aqua-Isekai'd, by Chaos Orchid
Chapter 13: Ranma Joins the Sorority
Ranma shoved Tsukiko's hand away from his mouth. "Yeah, that's it: Magic! Magic's given me a curse! And curses are supposed to be bad!" And he stood up and laughed sort of maniacally. "It ain't my fault! The bad thoughts and feelin's aren't me! They're caused by the curse! Hs, ha, ha…"
"The curse can give us them. But the ones now were because Cologne put some Instant Change in your food."
",,,ha, ha- What did you say? It was something important, wasn't it?"
"The boy said I gave you a couple of the herbal medicines my shop sells," Cologne said as the beautiful young woman came back into the tearoom. "And I feel very gung ho about doing it again. Indiscriminately so."
"Oh, you do, do you!?" Ranma was now ready for an attack. He was more himself, now that he was back on familiar, solid ground again.
"Lie to me about not belonging to the Anything-Goes School! I know it all too well! Listen and listen well, Ranma, I will not allow a pervert loose among my tribe or any group associate with it! Not again! Step out of line and I swear you will be punished!"
"Are you callin' me a pervert!?" said Ranma, forgetting he was naked at the moment.
"Your master most certainly is!"
"Pop? He's a lazy, lyin', cheatin', stealin' idiot, but he ain't a pervert!" That's when he thought to look down and remember he was naked.
"I am talking about Master Happosai!"
"I told you I don't know who he is! Ask Pop!" He reached into his weapon-space for clothes.
"I will, when we capture him! But let this 'date' be a lesson to you! There is more where that came from. Worse things!"
"Aw, I don't have to put up with your threats! This time I am goin' back to Japan!" The clothes in his fists, he moved to the door, daring her to try and stop him.
But she didn't. She let him get halfway down the hall before she said, "Go! Eyeshadow doesn't need you to be her sensei. I'll train her myself. With your power as her base, she'll be a greater martial artist than you soon enough."
"Hey! That's no fair!" Ranma spun around, keeping the clothes down in front of him. "And no girl can't be better than me!"
"You're talking to an Elder of the Women Heroes, young whelp! I know better. In fact, I know martial arts techniques you can't even imagine! And I will see that Eyeshadow learns them! I said before that the more she is properly trained, the less she will need your abilities. She will have abilities of her own.
"But!..."
"I knew there was gonna be a 'but'." In a show of coolness-under-threat, Ranma stepped into his pants.
"But there is a technique that will allow her to not just draw on the power connection she has with you, but use it to drain you of all your talents, abilities and training!"
Ranma almost stumbled as a foot caught inside a pants leg. But he saved face and got his pants on and up. "Go ahead and do it! Once I see a technique, I can learn to do it myself-And better 'n the guy I got it from!" And he was almost certain he could do the same with this one. If the Meddler really did know a technique like that. "I'll use it to take back all of what she stole from me! I'll drain her dry and she'll never be able to take nothing from me again!" He began to laugh as maniacally as he had before.
"You will have to be near Eyeshadow and see how she does it, won't you?"
His laugh died. She was right.
"Eyeshadow will show you where you will be living."
"I will?" Tsukiko asked.
Splash! "You will," Elder Cologne told the boy who was now a girl.
Eyeshadow sighed. Using a jar of water had become her main weapon against him.
"Come on, Ranma, you're billeting with me and my sisters."
"I'm comin'. I wanna get away from the Witch, anyway."
"This 'witch' will be keeping an eye on you, Pervert." Then she muttered to herself, "Hmph! Flash me, will he!"
When they left the shop, the still frowning Ranma had to ask, "If she thinks I'm a pervert, why does she want to keep me around?"
"Isn't it obvious? For the same reason as me: Draftees in the army of Women Heroes. I have a special grudge against the Phoenix people, but there are other enemies out there. One is the Musk. There are others, but those are the only ones I've fought so far. And believe me, they're more than enough! So far, it's been a stalemate between us all. At least the Secrets of Jusenkyo is safe from them. So far."
It was dark out in the village's street with the only light coming from windows that had their shutters and curtains open. And there weren't many of those. "You're lucky your other half on That-side isn't dead. When he does and cold water can change you into a woman, you will be. This place is run by women and they really want only women to be heroes. They don't really trust men."
"And I don't trust women! Pop's always says I should thank him for keepin' me as far away from them as good as he has. Uh, had."
"Irony, coming from somebody who now actually becomes one. But even when you're not a girl, there's no getting away from them now. Not with you living in the Village of Women Heroes and…," she gestured to the building in front of them, "...living with them in bachelorette barracks."
"Barracks? As in army barracks?" Then his mind heard what was even more disturbing, "Bachelorette!?"
"It's more like a dorm, really. I think of it as a sorority."
The door opened and Eyeshadow's older sister was there to greet her (and him). She wasn't the uber-male Powder this time, but Yue. And even in the raw chill of this mountain night, the angelic woman was showing her perfect figure by wearing only a bikini. "Eyeshadow! I'm so glad to see you back!" She then looked at Ranma out of the corner of her eye. "How did everything go with you and your fiancee?"
"It didn't go!" Ranma told her.
"But Cologne still insists we're engaged," Eyeshadow said, slumping. "And yet she's right. We're stuck with each other."
"Only until you're trained good enough so you don't drain my battery!" Ranma insisted. Or, better, he learns how to drain her!
"I see. Oh, why are we standing out here in the darkness! Come inside, I saved dinner for you."
"Dinner! That's right! I didn't eat on that date dinner!" And Ranma made her move by squeezing past her.
" 'Date dinner'? Did you and him date, Eyeshadow?"
"Don't make me tell what happened, Big Sis."
Meanwhile, Ranma got his first look inside. Instead of a shop, there was a room that, though Chinese in style, reminded him of the few, and traditional, hotel lobbies he had seen. (There had been three times when he and Pop had been hired by men using hotels.) Except it wasn't as neat as they had been. The women heroes apparently didn't think of themselves as 'maids'.
In Chinese-casual clothes, two girls he didn't recognize were on chairs, while one was laying bottoms-up on the floor, doing math on a small chalkboard. After writing her answer in small print on a slip of paper, she erased the slate and rolled onto her side to look at Ranma. "Tell us everything that happened! Bets are riding on it!" Only then did Ranma realize that this was Tint in her original body. No longer a handsome man, but an attractive girl who was Tsukiko's sister, Kaguya.
Before he could say anything, a girl came in wearing a nightgown so short he may have, if he had looked, been able to tell if she were wearing underpants when she yawned and stretched. "Somebody new has been added," she said when she could. "How disappointing. Yet another girl who fell into Spring of Drowned Man, no doubt."
"Doubt!" Kaguya grinned. "Ranma really is a boy! I know, I was his escort."
"A boy? A real boy!?" she was in immediate conflict whether that was good or bad news.
"Don't worry, Tint, I'll still date you," one of the girls on a chair said. "In fact,..." And she swung her hips over to a couch, and patted the spot beside her.
"Sorry, Highlight, this is my day off. I have a betting pool to run."
"Besides, you haven't paid off your tab," the other girl laughed.
"Quiet, Eyeliner. At least I have a tab. When was the last time you dated Kaguya?"
"Man! Pop was right. Girls think too much about datin'," Ranma frowned. And not enough about important stuff like martial arts.
"But how many pay for the date?" Eyeshadow had never been on a date before, not counting what had happened at Elder Cologne's. And she wasn't counting it!
Kaguya laughed and said, "It's easier to get me than into the Daddies Compound. I'm our group's entertainment director."
"Wait in the cafeteria and I'll bring your dinners," Yue said as she lead the way.
The girl in just the shortie nightgown asked as she went by her, "Uh, since everybody's talking about dates…"
"You know I don't date, Concealer." And she didn't slow down.
But she had to dodge a girl who was just coming into the front room. "Hello, my name is Facial! You must be Ranma! I hear you were just cursed today! You'll be a girl, when your other half is a guy! I'm betting you'll be a girl more times than you're a guy."
"That's what the odds favor," Kaguya smiled.
"Caught you! You're smiling! Okay, what do you know!" Facial asked, suspicious now. As were the other girls.
She knows that the boy has a Chaos Seed," Shé said, still wearing nothing but ropes. And slippers; she had replaced her sandals with slippers.
"All betting's closed!" Kaguya said, her glee now released.
"It don't sound like they think I'll be a girl too often," Ranma said to Eyeshadow as they finally got out of the living room.
"Having a Chaos Seed means one of your halves will becoming a girl more than the other. Magic continues to see to that. A curse doesn't stop once it's changed you."
"Hey! I don't mind if it's the other me who has to get soft and puny. And if he can stay that way, that'd be great by me!" Ranma saw in a doorless room what he thought had to be the 'cafeteria'. It had box-like chairs around a single table long enough for ten or so people. Less if Yue was in her tall and bulky male body.
"It's not all a one-way trigger," Eyeshadow said following him in. "You and him are connected though the Jusenkyo door."
"The metaphor," Ranma tried to remember what Cologne had told him about how the curse and it's big brother, the Chaos Seed, worked. But as he sat down on a box-seat, his stomach growled again. Bring on the food!
"The metaphor," and the redhead took a seat beside him. "If too much weight is on one side, the door won't swing like it should on its hinges. That means the magic will sometimes be cursing you more than him to keep things more balanced."
"In other words, the curse will actually keep cold water away from him or make it easy for him to get hot water if you haven't been a girl in a while," Shé sat down next to Ranma. So close, he could feel her feminine body heat. "And it will act as a water-magnet to him if it's worse luck for you to be a male. And 'worse luck' is what it actually attracts. It's powered by trouble."
"Male always attract trouble," Eyeliner said. The rest of the girls in the 'barracks' had now entered the cafeteria. Their mealtime was over, but they were all interested in finding out about their squad's newest member.
"Males can trouble me," Highlight said.
"Yue, can Powder-"
"No, Concealer. I'm serving Eyeshadow and Ranma their meals. I apologize. It's leftovers."
"Leftovers!" Ranma smiled. Leftovers were a luxury for him. Not that he gave himself time to luxuriate in the leftovers. They were gone in one swipe of the chopsticks and two swallows.
Irrationally, the redhead felt this was a challenge and got her meal down in three swallow, Some of it fell out of the bowl, though, and made a small mess on the table.
The mess was quickly gone, though, as Ranma's chopsticks picked every bit of it up at an incredible speed.
I know who's going to be on clean-up duty!" Facial said.
"Alright!" Shé barked. "It's past revelry, time to get to get to your beds!"
"Listen to her, trying to impress the new girl-boy by how strict she is," Highlight said.
"How would you like to sleep in a shibari 'hammock'?"
"Okay! Okay! I'm going to bed like a good little girl."
"Ranma!" Shé looked at him. "You're bunking with Eyeshadow."
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NOTES:
As you can tell, these women heroes less like an army squad when they're off-duty and more like a sorority, with Shé as their 'housemother'. And Shé allows it because it gives her the opportunity to practice her rope-skills when they get too far out of line.