Chapter 1:

Ranma stared, and stared, and stared, and to change it up, she stared some more. She knew she hadn't put this fancy little kindergartener drawing in her pocket. She was in the vacant lot she and Ryoga would usually fight in staring a piece of paper she had found in the pocket of her suit that she had been wearing during the failed wedding. It actually wouldn't have been ripped up as bad as it was if she hadn't been beaten for ruining Akane's wedding by the mad gal herself.

Ranma grumbled as she looked the paper over, '"Make your desires come true.' Yeah right. This will probably be just one more thing to bite me in the butt. I am seriously at the end of my rope though."

Ranma turned it over a few more times, knowing that a large part of her frustration was caused by a person she had killed someone to protect. Betrayal seemed to be a constant in her life, but this one hurt the most because she had declared her love for Akane whether she was willing to admit to it or not. Ranma sighed once again as she held the little paper in her hands.

She took a deep breath and said, "Please send someone who can help me." She didn't know whether it was a prayer to the heavens above, or the other place below, but she knew something heard her when the flyer lit up and glowed a brilliant red for a moment.

Not a second after the glow from the flyer had died off, an even more impressive one burst into being before her as a magic circle formed on the ground and glowed brilliantly. With a final flash of light, Ranma was left staring at another red-head in a school uniform with bat-like wings spread out behind her. The other red-head opened her eyes and looked at Ranma, starting a little bit at seeing someone with similar features to herself, if only shorter than herself.

The winged beauty bowed to Ranma, "Greetings, my name is Rias Gremory, and I am the devil you have summoned to grant your wish."

Ranma blinked before scratching the back of her head, "Saotome Ranma, of the Anything Goes School of Martial Arts."

Rias looked around curiously, "So what did you need a high-class devil like me for?"

For Ranma, that question opened the flood-gates of her sorrows, and she told Rias everything. The girl was such an emotional mess that she almost ended up balling in places where she would have otherwise been just fine. Rias listened to her woes, and multiple times she was wishing a certain Panda would show up so she could wipe it off the map. Neither Rias nor Ranma really realized when it happened, but at some point they had moved to the logs on the side of the lot and had sat on them, with Ranma being hugged as she poured her heart out. Rias seemed to be able to bypass her usual aversion to having beautiful women get close to her without even trying. It was a little disconcerting to Ranma that she had just had a meltdown on and in front of a complete stranger, but she was sufficiently drained to the point that she stopped caring.

Rias still wanted to try some Panda Steak after she let Ranma calm down a little bit. The smaller redhead gently pushed Rias away, her face burning from the embarrassment of having cried on a complete stranger. Something about her fellow red-head seemed to bypass her normal aversions though on a level that she didn't understand.

Rias let her stew for a few seconds before questioning some things that had been bugging her since Ranma had revealed the fact that she was cursed, "Can I see your curse in action? I may be able to remove it for you."

Ranma blinked at her, "It is active right now though. This body is proof of it."

Rias shook her head, "I can feel the curse's power, but something is odd about it. It is almost like you have multiple curses on you."

Ranma tilted her head slightly to the side, "I wouldn't be surprised, maybe we could make a list of them and categorize their effects on me."

Rias nodded, "That would be a good idea, especially if you want to be rid of them. I should also mention that one thing has been confirmed about personal curses."

Ranma raised an eyebrow as Rias made to summon her best friend, "I am getting someone to confirm my suspicion about your transformational curse, but the more personal curses a person has on them the more negatively their intelligence is affected."

Ranma was stunned, "Knowing the number of cursed people I know, that could actually explain quite a lot."

Rias nodded as she finished her preparations and answered Ranma before actually summoning Akeno, "Given what you have told me about your own adventures, it is entirely possible that you have a super-genius level intellect buried beneath all those curses of yours."

Akeno appeared a moment later while Ranma was thinking over the implications of that statement, "What can I do for you, Rias?"

Rias gestured at Ranma, "Can you help me catalog the different curses my young friend here has on her."

Akeno was slightly surprised by the request, knowing that Rias should have been able to do that on her own. That meant that something was bothering her with the curses. So Akeno scanned the girl for curses herself and "read" off the results like a reporter who can get along without a teleprompter, saving the most troublesome one for last, "You have about 10 basic curses on you. I will tell you what they are:

"Number one is a minor curse of contradiction, and you are lucky it is a minor one cause at this low level the worse it will do is cause you to say the opposite of what you mean at times.

"Number two is a minor curse of chaotic destruction, and that basically means that if there is something even mildly destructive in your general vicinity, it will somehow involve you to one degree or other.

"Number three is a minor curse of death, which means that more often than not most things you interact with will end up trying to kill you.

"Number four is a minor curse of aging. This is one is seemingly not active, but your internal aging clock seems to have become messed up by it considering you seem to be physically younger than the age of your soul.

"Number five is a 'May you live in interesting times' curse. This wouldn't ordinarily be considered a curse, but with the malignant energies of the other curses infecting it, well… It would ordinarily make it so you would never be bored with life, but this variation of it makes it so that interesting is interpreted as being hazardous to your health.

"Number six is a minor curse of 'may you and your descendants always be hungry,' and this one seems to be an inherited one."

Ranma interrupted at this point with a snort, "Probably someone my Pops ticked off at some point gave that one to him."

Rias nodded in agreement from what she had heard of the man as she motioned for Akeno to continue, "The last four curses are all in a similar vein and seem to be about as old as your physical age, and given their nature, it seems someone was seeking to control you. The seventh is a minor curse of enslavement. At this level it just makes you dependent on the one who cast it.

"The eighth is a minor curse of intelligence, ensuring that you would not be able to have intellectual or emotional abilities higher than the caster.

"The ninth is a curse of power limiting, and this one seems to have locked away about half of your available life energy behind a dam you would not be able to open yourself, and it locks away all your magic such that I can't actually tell anything about your magic besides the fact that it exists.

"The tenth is a curse of mutually assured destruction, and that is honestly the worst one in my opinion, because if you were able to rebel against the one who inflicted these on you and killed them, then you would die as well."

With each word she spoke the anger on Ranma's face became even more pronounced, and what might she could command from her ki, which was still considerable, she unleashed in an unannounced beam of a red Shi Shi Hokodan that lanced out and destroyed a small group of trees to the side of the abandoned lot, annihilating them in a blast of power that atomized the trees and dirt they were in and kicked up a powerful wind that caused the clothes of all three to snap rapidly back and forth, not that they could hear it happening over the deafening noise of the explosion.

Elsewhere in Nerima, many an ancient master that made the place their home winced as they felt a wave of power carrying the concept of rage within it wash over them. It was out of the sensing range of all but the very best martial artists, but even the normal folks in Nerima felt like someone had just walked over their grave and then spat on it for good measure.

Happosai, who was in the vicinity of the Nekohanten when it happened, turned to his old flame Cologne and said, "Twenty thousand yen says it was the boy."

Cologne sighed from her position near the ancient pervert, "You know I would be a fool to take that bet and say it was someone else."

Happosai shrugged, "Meh, doesn't hurt to try, does it?"

Cologne shook her head, "You need help, Happy."

Rias and Akeno's eyes were bugging out at the ridiculous display of power from what should by all rights be a mere human, and Ranma was breathing hard as her rage was still not gone, "Perhaps we should continue, so I can figure out just how much the stupid Panda did to screw me over."

Akeno got her expression back under control and continued, not wanting to earn a destructive beam to call her own, "You also have seven unique curses bonded to you.

"The first is another power controlling curse, and this one cuts the physical power you can bring to bear down to twenty-five percent of your actual power.

"The second is another death curse, this one says that you will die by the one you love the most.

"The last five all seem to be related to each other, in that they seem to come from the same ritual. The third is a phobia curse that makes it so that you will become catatonic if you are exposed to cats for too long, with the length of time necessary depending on the number of cats.

"The fourth is a berserker curse that locks away twenty-five percent of your power and makes it so you can only access it in extreme instances.

"The fifth is a conditional alternate personality curse that requires you to be rendered catatonic for it to work, and it seems to be patterned after a cat.

"The sixth is another physical limiter that makes it so you can only move at half speed when not in the berserker state.

"The seventh is a memory curse that makes it so you do not remember anything while in the berserker state."

Ranma was really getting sick of all the new ways it seemed her life had been planned out from the start, but she pointed out something that had yet to be mentioned, "I know there is one more curse, out with it."

Rias winced, "That is actually the reason I called for Akeno. There is something weird about that curse, but I can't get a proper read on it because it is currently inactive."

Ranma stared at the two of them long and hard, making Akeno squirm a little, "I can tell that it is a composite curse, but I can't tell how many parts it has or what it does while it is currently inactive."

Ranma sighed, "Either of you got hot water."

Rias paused, "We have some back in the clubroom, but it would require us teleporting there to get it. I would also truthfully like to be there when we remove your curses so I can be assured that there would be no outside interruptions."

Ranma nodded, "That is fine by me, truthfully, if a certain Panda showed up to interfere, I don't think I would currently be able to keep myself from outright killing him at the moment."

Rias formed a magic circle on the ground, and she led Ranma and Akeno to it, and once they were on it there was a brief flash of light and they were in the Victorian style room that belonged to the Occult Research Club of Kuoh Academy. Ranma looked around, "Neat trick."

"It certainly does come in handy," Rias dryly commented as she motioned for Akeno to get the hot water.

It didn't take long for the black-haired beauty to return with a small kettle of warm water, and par for the course, Akeno tripped on something and ended up spilling it accidentally down the back of Ranma's shirt. The transformation was over in a moment, but that moment was enough for the two girls to feel a blast of magic as the transformative powers of Jusenkyo got to work, changing the nature of her physical being. Before them stood a black haired boy, and it took a few moments for them to realize why the reading on the last curse was so muddled.

Rias felt her hand go to her mouth in shock, and Akeno's eyes were bugged out, "No wonder we weren't getting a straight reading on it."

Ranma's blue-grey eyes looked at them in alarm, "What is it? What is weird about this curse?"

Rias answered because Akeno was still in shock from the kind of feedback she was getting on it, "It is composed of two spells, both are transformative in nature and are competing against one another for control of your body. The oldest is a permanent transformation curse that turns you into a boy. The youngest, which is only a couple years old, is a blessing that makes it so you transition from the cursed male form to your natural female form with the application of cold water."

Ranma's eyes were wide upon hearing that, and he whispered, "How old is that first spell?" Though the question was asked of them, he somehow already knew the answer and wanted to plot revenge against a certain Panda.

Rias winced, and Akeno dutifully answered her friend's strangest client, "Based on what I can tell, it was put in place well before you were born, and that is not including the abuse your body seems to have suffered over your life. I detected evidence of extended malnutrition and someone seems to have used a number of pressure points on you to control your body and mind even further, and these seem to have been put in place over time. All that is on top of various injuries that never seemed to heal properly, also decreasing the amount of physical power you can bring to bear."

I hope you do not mind if we temporarily leave this scene, it and the words coming from Ranma's mouth would not be fit for polite conversation for several minutes. So, we shall instead turn our attention to the various residents of Nerima. The first one would have to be Genma. The man, the myth, and the stupid all rolled into one. Most would assume that the current Panda was out of his mind with how many curses he had saddled Ranma with, and they would be partially right. His insanity was actually the same as his wife's, a controlling form of love for his son. He and his wife did truly believe that everything they were doing was an expression of love for their son, and that goes to prove that they should never have been parents in the first place.

Genma-panda was engaging in a very regular pastime of his, cheating at shogi with his old friend Soun Tendo. A sign was held up, "Tendo, we need to get a move on to get our children married."

Soun nodded, "Speaking of Ranma, where is the lad? He still needs to help with the repairs to the dojo."

Genma nodded, another sign flipping out, "That is right Tendo, a man must take responsibility for his actions after all."

Kasumi had brought more sake to them, and innocently asked Genma, "Mr. Saotome, do you take responsibility for your actions during my younger sister's wedding."

An older red-haired female, known to some as Nodoka, held her sword to her tighter, "Shirking your responsibilities seems most unmanly." She continued speaking not noticing the significant distraction she had provided for Soun to cheat against Genma, "Genma dear, can you please go retrieve our wayward son."

Genma-panda nodded rapidly and took off out of there like the hounds of the underworld were after him. Nodoka smiled airily, "Such a helpful man."

Nabiki rolled her eyes from her position near the TV, tallying the damage numbers to the dojo to add to her future brother-in-law's bill.

Meanwhile, a certain tsundere was in the middle of her favorite pastime, murdering helpless bricks that never did anything to her. The number of bricks she had broken during her time as a martial artist (cough-bully-cough) could have been used to build several houses, but as they say, to each their own.

Ukyo was currently working hard at her grill, ashamed of what she had done at the wedding. She knew for a fact that she didn't have romantic love for Ranma, even though she wouldn't mind having children with him. She was just afraid that Akane would end up taking away or killing her first childhood friend.

Konatsu, her loyal ninja helper, was of a similar mind to her. Coming from a background of abuse, the male kunoichi (what an oxymoron) had been learning what normal people went through growing up by listening to the customers of the shop, and he was learning of some rather disturbing parallels between his situation growing up and Ranma's home life, past, present, and future. Of course there were some obvious differences, but Konatsu actually supported Ukyo in her efforts to remove Ranma from his situation because of the similarities, despite the fact that he could be considered a rival for Ukyo's affections.

The two were both stewing in their respective problems, even as customers came and went every few minutes or so, as they did day after day. Ukyo sighed as she absently flipped another okonomiyaki onto a customer's plate for them to enjoy. She was tired of the status quo here in Nerima and hoped that when things finally broke, that it would be for the better. Konatsu correctly interpreted her thoughts based on the look she gave him and nodded his silent agreement to the sentiment.

Ryoga had just gotten back to Akari's farm, wincing from the strike he had gotten from Ranma that he rather begrudgingly admitted he deserved. He walked in the front door of her house, only to be greeted by a bucket of water to the face.

"BWEEEEEEEE!"

"Oh Ryoga, I am so glad you are home," Akari gushed as she picked up the little black piglet from the piles of clothes it used to inhabit.

Ryoga sighed in a pitiful way that only a pig could, "Bwee…"

Akari hugged him tight to her chest, heedless of the precarious predicament it put Ryoga in, "What a pigful greeting, Ryoga. Let me get you a mud bath and then you can tell me all about your pigful day."

Ryoga actually started crying piggy tears at the ridiculousness currently happening to him. It would only take one more round of what he viewed as insults for him to decide that enough was enough, and he walked out the door later on as a human, determined to never look back.

Cologne and Happosai were still together on top of the Nekohanten, watching the hustle and bustle going on beneath them. Both Shampoo and Mousse were taking off from the restaurant on the final delivery runs of the day. Both of them had been severely reprimanded for their part in the disaster of a wedding, when they were on the clock no less, but it only seems to have sunk into the head of the one who was only there for a cure.

Cologne turned to the other diminutive elder, "When do you think I should tell them about Ranma's curses?"

Happosai let out a puff of smoke, "Probably soon. At least based off of the two devils I sensed earlier, we can safely conclude what Ranma asked for, and that the child is now in possession of the knowledge of what Genma did."

Cologne nodded, "I will also need to prepare for the ceremony of sisterhood at a date of Ranma's choosing."

Happosai chuckled wryly, "How do you know Ranma won't choose to keep the curse that makes him male"

Cologne rolled her eyes, "If you actually believe that is what will happen, Happy…"

Happosai smirked at his old flame, "Then I am a greater fool now than I was when we first met. Right?"

Cologne sighed, "Perhaps you should be there for when the fireworks erupt so you can minimize the damage."

Happosai nodded, "I will, though I do think it would do Genma and No-chan some good to get a whooping within an inch of their lives from Ranma. It may teach them to be better parents for if they have a kid in the future."

Cologne sighed yet again as she moved to go back into her restaurant, "That is assuming that there will be anything left of them."

Happosai let loose another puff of smoke as he stared into the distance, "True."

Ranma plopped down on the couch as he ran out of steam on his tirade of panda torture, "Why does Pops do these things?"

Rias wisely did not answer his question, being quite glad that the building they were in was still in one piece and Akeno said, "If we remove your curses, it would probably be less painful for you in your natural female form, and I would like to heal the damage done to your body before we get started on the mystical side of things."

Ranma nodded his assent and got up, grabbed a glass of water, and poured it over his head for transformative purposes for possibly the last time. She stood there a moment, and after some silent contemplation, sighed and motioned for Akeno to start the healing process. It was over fairly quickly, though Akeno was surprised that the unique pain caused from healing old wounds didn't knock out Ranma in the same way it did Kiba.

Ranma rolled her shoulders as she waited for whoever was going to remove her curses to get started. Rias walked up, searching her eyes for any sign of hesitation, "This next part will be really painful Ranma. There is a chance you could die. Are you sure you want to go through with it?"

Ranma cracked her neck, getting rid of the last dregs of stiffness from the earlier healing out, "Yep, and one more thing before you get started."

Rias raised an eyebrow, "What?"

Ranma smirked, "Call me Ranko."

Rias nodded, and almost the moment she got to work, the newly dubbed Ranko passed out from the pain.