FATE
A Ranma1/2 fanfic by PansutoTarou5925
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Disclaimer to follow at end of chapter
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"You will understand when she tells you," Skuld said. "To get off the subject a bit... there's something I'd like to ask you." Ranma looked at her curiously. "How did you meet Hild?"
Ranma scratched the back of her head. "Well, heh heh. That's kind of a stupid story..."
"I've heard plenty of stupid stories, so don't worry," Skuld said, smiling. Damn, she was getting good at this. Belldandy would be proud.
Ranma sighed. "You know that I'm cursed, right? Well, I met Hild in China..."
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Tired and feeling more stressed out if he had been in a roomful of cats for a week, an exhausted Ranma Saotome collapsed on the floor of a dojo where he and his father had trained earlier that day.
Hopefully the rains would be kind to them; when they were lucky, girl-type Ranma didn't put in an appearance for a while, and that Shampoo girl was thrown off their tracks for a while. Then they could actually get a little training done on the return leg of their training trip.
But for now the training was done. The huge bulk of his father slowly rose, thinking that Ranma was asleep, and crept out the door, no doubt going to the nearest bar in order to waste their meager funds. Ranma himself sat up and shook his head disgustedly. His father's stupidity had gotten him cursed, and his father's greediness had some psycho after his head. He conveniently forgot his own part in the Amazon fiasco.
Unwilling to be the obedient son and sleep, Ranma stood up, stretched, and walked through the city they were in. Usually, they had stuck to the countryside, but ever since Shampoo had started following them they had tried to get lost in the teeming crowds of the Chinese cities. He wandered around aimlessly, taking in the sights, not really having any particular goal or purpose, before noticing an arcade.
Ranma stared through the window as passerby bumped into him and cursed at the crazy Japanese kid standing in the way. He looked in his pockets and pulled out a few coins; enough to play a few games. So he walked in and sat down in front of one of the fighting games defiantly. His father had forbade him from playing such games, on the theory that they lacked realism and would hurt him in a fight. Generally, Ranma agreed: the little animated fighters were too limited in their moves, too rigid in their back-and-forth movement for him to find it anything other than hilariously bad.
But tonight, Ranma didn't care what Genma said. He was going to play those games, precisely because Genma didn't want him to.
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"Wait, wait," Skuld said, seeing where this was going. "You met Hild... in an arcade?"
"I told you this was dumb," Ranma said.
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So Ranma blitzed through the fighting game without a problem. His reflexes were too quick for the game; even the occasional human player who started a game on the other side of the machine was quickly dispatched. He was almost finished with the game when the familiar "A new challenger appears!" dialogue came up.
He frowned. None of the other challengers had been any good, and, to be honest, he was ready to give the whole thing up as being useless and silly, just as his father had said. He got ready to pound the other player mercilessly.
Ranma lost.
He quickly put his other coins in the machine and challenged the other player back. This time he was taking the other player seriously. This time he wouldn't goof around. This time, he lasted a whole five minutes in a long battle. But he still lost. "Feh. It's a stupid game anyways."
"You only say that because you lost," the other player said back, in unaccented Japanese. The girl belonging to the voice walked around the far side of the machine. "You look a little angry because you lost, too. You shouldn't be upset." A beat. "After all, I'm the best there is."
Ranma puffed himself up. "I'm the best there is at real martial arts," he declared. No way that he'd let some oddball blonde in an arcade think he was a wimp.
"How prideful," she replied, and tossed him a few coins. "Another match. It would be a shame for you to finish so quickly, after all. Then maybe you could show me a little martial arts?" She smiled. It was a hypnotic smile, a serpent's smile, and Ranma was paralyzed by it.
"That sounds like fun," he said, once the spell was broken. "I'll show you a few simple things, you know, for self-defense." Then he put the coins in the machine and proceeded to get thrashed again.
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"Afterwards I showed her a few moves. Nothing special. And we talked some. I had a lot of pent up anger at the time and was convinced the gods were dumping on me. I was angry at my father, the Amazons, Jusenkyo, pretty much everything.Hild was really the first sympathetic person who was willing to listen to me," Ranma said, staring at the table.
I bet, Skuld thought. Anger, feelings of betrayal, mindless violence - all would be things the queen of demons would find interesting. Along with Ranma himself, of course; Skuld had seen pictures of the younger male Ranma in her Yggdrasil files. Hild wasn't averse to the idea of flirting with mortals. It was how things went from there to Chiyeko being born that puzzled her. "Ranma, forgive me if I'm really blunt, but how did you end up sleeping with Hild?"
Ranma bristled. "I don't see how it's any of your business."
"She's my sister's mother," Skuld says, "and it's really out of character for her... I think."
Ranma shrugged. "I dunno. It wasn't until the night before I left town that it happened. She asked me what I would wish for, if I could wish for anything at all."
"You wished for a roll in the hay with Hild?" Skuld asked. That didn't sound like something Ranma would wish for, and Hild would have made his life a living hell.
"No!" Ranma said, panicky, and waved her hands in front of her like she was warding Skuld off. "I'd never wish for something like that!" she said defensively.
"Well, then, what did you wish for?" Skuld asked reasonably.
Ranma didn't see what the big deal about the wish was, but decided to humor the other woman. "Ahh, I just told her I'd rather she got her wish, because she was the first person who'd been nice to me in China. Even if she did have some fun with my curse from time to time."
"So what did Hild wish for, then?" Skuld asked, annoyed.
"I dunno, she never told me," Ranma answered. She then frowned. "Why are you smacking your head against the table?"
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After being evicted from her apartment, and told to go kill time with her rival, Sifu Morisato wasn't exactly in the most talkative, approachable mood. Chiyeko and she had spent the past ten minutes sitting around outside, completely bored. "Er, Sifu?" she ventured.
The short goddess didn't look at her, and instead elected to continue staring at the ground from her perch on the wall outside the apartments. "Yes?" she said, sounding bored.
"Your parents are normal. I'm jealous."
"What brought that on?" Sifu said. 'If you only knew,' she thought, realizing that her rival had no clue that she was in the same boat - one mortal parent, one immortal.
Chiyeko looked up at Sifu's window briefly, then returned to staring at passing cars. "Nothin'."
Sifu smiled and jumped down from her perch. Normally she wouldn't give a demon the time of day, but Chiyeko seemed completely ignorant of that, so she decided to treat her like a mortal. "Come on, Chiyeko, if it's about your mother-"
"It's not, it's about my father," Chiyeko said, frowning.
"Your father?" Sifu said. 'That must be the demon,' she thought. It'd be perfectly normal for a demon to be completely abnormal, after all. "What about your father?"
"Er... I don't want to talk about it?" Chiyeko said hopefully, not wanting to broach the subject that the person she thought was her mother for her entire life was, in fact, her father. "You'll make fun of me."
Sifu raised her hand. "I promise not to make fun of you about your father," she said solemnly. Strangely enough, Chiyeko somehow knew she could trust Sifu on that.
"Um... have you ever heard of a place called Jusenkyo?" Chiyeko said uncertainly. If Sifu didn't know - and the odds of that were near 100 - then she wouldn't continue. It was too damn weird to explain.
"The cursed springs of sorrow," Sifu said, reciting mostly from memory. She had learned all about them during her training, along with other magial places and artifacts on Midgard. Some were strong enough to cause even goddesses such as herself - or demonesses such as Chiyeko - trouble. "Anything that falls in one is cursed to become whatever drowned there."
Chiyeko blinked and was speechless for a good thirty seconds. "You know about Jusenkyo? How?" she asked, incredulously.
"I, uh, looked it up on the computer." In heaven, but Chiyeko doesn't need to know that. Yet.
Chiyeko shook her head. "My father fell in the Spring of Drowned Girl," she said. Then she looked up at Sifu's room again. "Then after I was born, some jerks locked him in that form."
Sifu opened her mouth to say something, then realized what that meant, and worked her mouth in silence while trying to figure out what to say. Finally, she just gave up and put her hand on Chiyeko's shoulder. "I thought you were exaggerating about having a messed up family. I apologize for doubting you."
"Thanks, I think," Chiyeko said sourly.
The two returned to sitting in boredom for several more minutes before Chiyeko spoke up again. "Apart from pestering me and working on your motorcycle, is there anything you like to do? I'm bored."
Sifu grumbled a bit. "I do have a life, you know..." She then looked at the wad of cash Skuld had given her. "I suppose we could go shopping or something. C'mon, let's get my bike."
The blonde looked at Sifu dubiously. "You want me to ride that thing?" she asked warily, as if the motorbike was a rabid animal.
Sifu shifted her eyes over to Chiyeko. "What, are you scared?"
"Hell yeah I'm scared!" Chiyeko shot back.
Sifu stopped, surprised. "I wasn't expecting you to say that." She had figured Chiyeko was so aggressive and, well, almost macho in her attitude that she'd never admit to being scared. Which, considering that her feminine role model was her father...
Sifu snickered.
"Oh, now you're laughing at me!" Chiyeko said, angrily pointing at the shorter girl. Anybody would be scared by riding your motorcycle - especially when you were driving it!"
"Hey!" Sifu yelled. "If you don't crash once in a while, you obviously weren't riding with all your heart!" She puffed out her chest. "That's what my father and grandfather taught me."
"Your insurance agent must love you," Chiyeko deadpanned.
"I've only been cancelled... twice." Sifu hung her head. "OK, we'll walk, since you're so chicken."
"I'm not chicken," Chiyeko said, "I just got a sense of self-preservation." Still arguing, the two walked their way over to the mall.
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They got to the mall without further incident, and had started off by eating a very light lunch. "My mother - I mean my father - grr..." Chiyeko said, then composed herself. "My father will stuff more food on my plate. It's like she... he... whatever, wants me to be fat."
"You don't look fat," Sifu said. Actually, Chiyeko was the most athletic girl Sifu had ever seen; she couldn't even imagine and overweight Chiyeko. "Besides, you run or walk everywhere. You need more food than that," she said. Then she checked that thought; as a demoness, Chiyeko probably was getting more of her energy from something else. The food was irrelevant, as well as concerns about her weight. "Personally, Chiyeko, I don't feel you need to be concerned about your weight."
"Oh? What makes you so certain?" Chiyeko said, finishing off her salad.
"You could say that it's... intuition bordering on the divine," Sifu said, with an enigmatic smile.
"Sure, whatever," Chiyeko said. The two continued through the mall, uncertain what they wanted to spend their limited amount of money on. They didn't really get a chance, as someone grabbed Chiyeko in a bone-crushing hug from behind.
"Chiyeko-chaaaan!" Hild said happily, having successfully snuck up on her daughter. "Who's your little friend?" She pushed the shorter girl away. Before Chiyeko could even answer, Hild figured it out. "You've got eyes like her. You must be Belldandy's daughter, right?"
Sifu blinked and stepped away from the Daimakochou. "That's right..."
"Hey kid," Urd said to Sifu. "What are you doing here?"
"Auntie Urd!" she said, and took a step closer to her aunt. "I was just going to the mall with Saotome-chan here..."
Chiyeko looked up at her mother with her fists clenched and shaking with anger. "Why didn't you tell me?" Chiyeko said angrily, attracting the attention of many people in the mall. She shot Hild an accusing glare.
"I never told you?" Hild said, feigning innocence, then looked around at the people looking at the scene they were creating. "Hey! Scram! This is family business!" Chastised, the mallrats continued on their ways. "Chiyeko... it would have been very difficult to explain..." she shot an angry glance at Sifu, whom she thought had blown the secret, "that you aren't human."
Chiyeko's eyes opened wide and her mouth opened and closed several times, before she couldn't take it any more and fainted.
Hild caught her before she hit the ground. "Chiyeko? Chiyeko!" She turned to Sifu and Urd. "Why'd she faint?"
Sifu sweated nervously. "Actually, she had just found out that the person she thought was her mother, was her father... she didn't know she was a demon."
"Oh," Hild said, then smiled nervously. "Well, she had to find out sometime, didn't she? Urd, dear, be a good child and help me drag her over to the food court."
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DISCLAIMER: Ranma ½ is the property of Rumiko Takahashi, Shonen Sunday, Viz, and other parties; I make no claims of ownership of any of the intellectual or other properties pertaining to it. Oh! My Goddess belongs to Kosuke Fujishima, Studio Proteus, Dark Horse, and other parties, and I make no claims of ownership of any of the intellectual or other properties pertaining to it, either.
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Author's Note: Another short chapter, again, I'm just trying to keep things moving! I'm not particularly happy with the quality of it, either, but hell, I've got no time right now...