First Attempt
Ranma awoke...
She took in the female sleepwear she was in and the feminine look to the room with a sigh.
For some reason she was always raised as a girl when she was found as a found as a baby with the curse.
Sure it was easier to keep her female than male, but didn't anyone care what it did to her sense of sexual identity?
Ok, as a baby she wouldn't be expected to have one, but still you'd think at least once out of all the times this had happened someone would have done something other than take the path of least resistance.
Ranma frowned as she examined her chest and found it to be lacking. She may not have been enthused about being female at times, but she'd been rather proud of her assets as one, plus it was always easier to get things with them.
Hell, she could cloud men's minds with them in ways that would make Lamont Cranston jealous.
Standing up and examining herself in the mirror she realized why she was so underdeveloped she was fourteen again.
'Beats the hell out of waking up as a three year old,' she thought cheerfully. The teen years could be a special hell for aqua transexuals, but at least they weren't boring and rarely involved diapers.
"Ranma, wake up!" a teenage boy yelled from the other side of her bedroom door. "It's time for breakfast!"
Ranma switched her clothes out and used a couple of cleaning cantrips before shifting back to male and summoning a couple of small work droids from his subspace pocket to fix his room up to his standards.
'Having even a single Death Star means never having to say, Who should we call to fix this?' Ranma thought with a grin. Sure being able to blow up planets was nice, especially when you had to deal with a version of the Sailor scouts who wouldn't let anything stand in the way of Crystal Tokyo, but really it was the repair and production capabilities that made it useful.
Humming the imperial march as cheerfully as he was able, Ranma followed his nose down to breakfast. "Decided on being male today, Honey?" the mother asked as Ranma took a seat and began filling his plate.
"Yep," Ranma agreed cheerfully.
"I still don't know whether it's creepy or cool that you can do that," the boy admitted.
Ranma held up a finger and concentrated for a Moment drawing everyone's attention as a pale mist formed around his finger, condensing itself until he held a single drop of glowing blue water that he flicked onto the boy's forehead.
The effect was startling. The boy's brown hair lightened into a sandy blond, closer to his mother's color, and his shirt tightened as he grew a couple of good sized additions that made Ranma sigh, as apparently his brother was an early bloomer unlike himself.
Everyone froze but Ranma, who took the opportunity to deplete the table's bacon supply.
"I didn't mean anything bad by it," the neo-girl said just short of breaking down in tears, between the shock of becoming a female and the surge of emotions and hormones.
"It's temporary," Ranma quickly assured her. "In twenty four hours you'll change back automatically. I thought you might like to see things the way I do for a day."
His newly turned sister immediately cheered up. "Really?"
"Yep. It won't be exactly like my situation since you won't switch back and forth involuntarily, but being female for the day should be an eye opener all the same."
"You've learned to control your power?" Dad asked with a blinding smile.
"Completely," Ranma confirmed, shifting from male to female and back again.
"I'm not sure how it'll help in battle, but I'm proud of you, son."
Ranma smirked and held up a finger like he had earlier minus the special effects, before letting the warmth fade from his eyes and growling out, "You will release the hostages unharmed or you'll be sitting down to pee for the rest of your days!"
"You win!" Dad cried out, "I'll release...I don't have any hostages."
Everyone snickered as he recovered.
"Ok, now that was an effective threat."
Ranma held up a finger and assumed a superior expression. "We want your boss, not you, tell me what I want to know and I'll limit the change to however long your sentence is as well as making sure you're sentenced to an all female facility."
Dad burst out laughing along with Ranma's 'sister'. While Mom was futilely fighting a grin, before joining them.
"That's awful," she finally said after she stopped giggling.
"Ranma shook his head. "No, awful is a number of other transformations I could use. They range from temporary and water triggered, to permanent, animals, myths and legends, and the most horrible ones are the ones that affect the mind of the person themselves."
Silence descended on the table as Ranma spoke, "For instance despite being female my brother is basically unchanged, but I could have just as easily changed him into a girl determined to be a bride or a pacifist, but truthfully I think it's more moral to kill someone than to alter their mind. I'd only consider using those either temporarily or if someone requested the change. Say for instance a villain had no choice but to be a violent maniac because of something that was done to him. If he requested it I could turn him into a pacifist with a clean conscious."
"That's my boy!" Dad beamed.
"So what name do you want to go by for today?" Ranma asked his sister, figuring he could get her name without admitting he had amnesia, as he'd rather not deal with that, since it was a temporary problem anyway. After all there was no sense in worrying anyone, it wasn't like his ego made it difficult to admit weakness, right? Right?
"I'll just stick with Will," she replied. "Anyone asks I'll say its short for Willow and I'm Will's cousin. Now if you'll excuse me, I need a shower and to change into a larger shirt."
Ranma chuckled when Will vanished back upstairs.
"What's so funny?" Mom asked.
"Will is about to take the longest shower of her life."
"Huh?" Dad replied, confused.
"She is going to be soaping up bits that she has no idea how they'll respond," Ranma explained.
"Ah!" Dad exclaimed suddenly getting it. "Are we allowed to laugh?" he asked, not sure if it would hurt Ranma's feelings, but finding it hard not to.
"Laughing in private is fine, but any kind of teasing is not," Ranma replied. "Unless you've gone through the same thing and can commiserate since it'll allow her to laugh at you as well."
"You've matured a lot since last night," Mom said approvingly.
Dad muttered, "Maturity, maturity... that's it! Your powers were fully activated once you matured past a certain point."
"Yep," Ranma said agreeably. "Changing genders with water at random times forces you to mature faster and once I was mature enough I was hit with my full powers."
"So you can change people into animals as well as male to female?" Mom asked.
Ranma nodded. "That doesn't include clothes though. It's strictly on the person themselves."
"Still, it sounds like a real useful power for a superhero to have," he said leadingly.
"Not as all around useful as martial arts, but it can come in handy," Ranma agreed, wondering what he was getting at.
Mom grinned so broadly her cheeks had to have hurt. "You think martial arts are useful? Would you like to practice with me?" she quickly asked not even pausing to let Ranma answer the first question.
"I'd love to," Ranma replied happy to have someone to spar with.
"Does this mean you've changed your mind about going to Sky High?" Dad asked doing very passable puppy dog eyes for a man his age.
"Sky High?" Ranma asked in obvious puzzlement before he could stop himself.
Ranma's adopted parents just stared at him for a Moment like he'd grown a second head and he knew the jig was up.
Ranma sighed and from long practice came up with an excuse that was at least partially true. "When my powers activated it gave me a huge whopping chunk of knowledge which has seriously screwed with my memory. Basically I've got amnesia for a week to a week and a half. I didn't want to worry anyone so I was just going to keep quiet until it went away."
"So you don't remember us at all?" Mom asked, eyes moist.
Ranma quickly cut off the impending tear fest. "I'll remember everything in a week, possibly sooner. Come on, I want to show you something."
The two adults followed their changeling child up to his room where he opened the door and they stared in shock at the changes.
Ranma's room had been a very feminine place with pastel pink and blue on the walls and a few stuffed animals here and there, as well as a poster of the latest boy band on the wall.
Now however the room was something straight out of science fiction. Indirect lighting bathed the room in a neutral glow, highlighting rather than reflecting a room done in black and chrome with technology far beyond Earth's. A 'window' that showed a sun circled by numerous 'Earths' as well as a number of Death Stars drew the eyes.
"I know Mom has given you 'the talk' about sex but we also have one about not being a supervillain," Dad said numbly.
Ranma snickered. "I'm not a super villain or an alien invader, I'm just the latest guardian of this place."
The two looked out into the hall of their house and then around the room again. Spotting a door on the back wall they both froze.
"Dear, what does that lead to?" Mom asked nervously.
"Either the closet or the bathroom," Ranma replied. "Open," he called out causing the door to slide into the wall and reveal a tropical island.
Dad just raised an eyebrow, beyond shock for the moment.
"It has a great little waterfall that makes the perfect shower, so I added some stuff and put a permanent portal to it, or rather one of the previous guardians did."
Ranma guided the two to a sofa opposite the 'window' and hit a couple of buttons, causing it to cycle through a series of cameras.
"That is Planet Wild Horse," Ranma said as the camera showed a world filled with Ranmas. "There was this huge practical joke involving massive amounts of cloning tech and Ranma went from one single magic cursed martial artist in a very high tech civilization to one of over a hundred thousand."
"Talk about being beside yourself," Dad said as he watched several Ranmas walking down the street chatting.
"Yeah the amount of chaos it caused was insane so Ranma decided to do something about it. Being powerful beyond belief he could have simply killed them, but he knew their existence was not their fault so instead he did something equally crazy, he swallowed their solar system into what we like to call 'stuff space' and most people call a Ki pocket."
"That's insane," Mom muttered.
"It wasn't Earth's solar system. See the civilization they were part of was a massive star traveling empire. Ranma simply found an attractive and uninhabited solar system called the Ranmas to it and removed it and them from the universe."
"How powerful was he?" Dad asked.
Ranma shrugged. "Just short of godhood, so his clones while nowhere near his class, having neither the experience nor the personal reserves to match him, were still much too powerful to allow them to run around the universe willy nilly."
"So he locked them up," Mom said disturbed.
"He had a responsibility to them and for them, so simply locking them up was out of the question. He restricted them to a single solar system and worked on re-educating them, since the person who pulled the prank had just been concerned with making them all sex maniacs."
"You're kidding," Dad said.
"Nope, remember it was started as a prank. Well in between raising the Ranmas, Ranma had a lot of adventures, including a couple where he had to swallow an earth or two to save them from destruction. In fact it kinda became a habit when dimensional traveling to remove certain things from the timeline just as a matter of course."
"Like what?" Mom asked.
"See those large metal moons out there?" Ranma asked, hitting a button so the window showed a view of the solar system again.
"Yeah, I was wondering what those were," Dad said.
"They're called Death Stars," Ranma replied.
His parents winced.
"Nothing good comes of anything with the name Death in it," Dad said firmly.
"Exactly," Ranma nodded. "They have a huge laser designed to blow up planets. Rather than allow people to use them for that purpose Ranma stuck them in here. If you need to scare an alien armada off of attacking your planet, nothing works better, but mainly they have large manufacturing plants on board and tons of storage space."
"And where do you come in?" Dad asked.
"The Ranmas weren't aging past their prime, in fact for the most part they turned out to be damn near immortal. They didn't complain about being stuffed in a Ki Pocket, because there was plenty of room and the company of people like themselves, but as the centuries passed things got a bit boring, so in between martial arts tournaments and orgies, one of the Ranmas made a request of the original for something new to do."
"Martial arts tournaments and orgies?" Mom asked wide eyed.
"Yep, martial arts is in the genes and while Ranma managed to get them to stop being obsessed with sex, it was still their second greatest pastime," Ranma explained.
Seeing his parents understood, Ranma continued, "So Ranma would send any new games or movies he ran across to one of the Death Stars and the droids on board would manufacture a multitude of copies to help keep the Ranmas busy. Boredom is the enemy of the immortal as we've had a handful of Ranmas end themselves because they were tired of life."
"Where do you come into this?"
"The original Ranma either died or retired to be with the Ranmas, but he knew a guardian would still be needed so he created a clone and imbued it with powers and abilities beyond the other Ranmas and sent it outside to grow up."
"And that was you?" Mom asked intently.
"Nah, that was over a dozen guardians ago. They all grew tired of the job at some point and made a replacement before either retiring or choosing to die. I'm just the latest one."
"So what's your orders?" Dad asked.
"No orders," Ranma snickered. "But I will be following what the others before me did, since it's my nature. Any book, game, or movie I find I send a copy to the Ranmas. Have fun, save people, make friends, you know generally live life and be a hero."
The two parents smiled at that.
"Remember, mums the word about all this. Normally I wouldn't say anything but even though I can't remember you yet, I know you can keep a secret somehow."
The two smiled proudly at their child.
"Well I guess we'll just have to remove our masks as well," Dad said. "I'm Steve Stronghold one of Maxville's top realtors and in my spare time..." He removed his glasses and unbuttoned his shirt enough to show he had a red, white, and blue costume under it. "I'm The Commander."
Mom grinned. "I'm Josie Stronghold one of Maxville's top realtors and in my spare time..." She took off her glasses and floated off the couch. "I'm Jet Stream."
"Starscream?" came a deep voice from the window.
"Jetstream," Ranma corrected. "This isn't a transformer's universe, Bob."
"Understood," the voice replied before falling silent.
"What was that?" Steve asked.
"That was Bob, he's a sentient Death Star, the only one in fact. I promised or rather The First promised, that as soon as we reached a universe like his I'd let him out to fight Unicron, the planet eater. Running across those universe's is rare, so he sleeps most of the time and monitors the pocket for problems."
"Any problems?" Steve asked.
"No major problems, but the population of Ranmas has doubled," Bob's voice boomed from the 'window'.
"How did that happen?" Ranma asked confused.
"Approximately fourteen years ago, the female Ranmas started getting pregnant. After each had a child they swore next time they'd make the other ones go through it. The end result has been that each Ranma bore one child, doubling the population. The prevailing theory is that this universe is of a more stable time configuration allowing for pregnancy and birth by Ranmas," Bob provided efficiently.
"Son, your people are a strange people," Steve said seriously.
Ranma nodded. "And part of the reason they are kept isolated from the rest of the universes other than just being too powerful for most races to deal with."
"Wait, wouldn't children of clones from the same person have genetic problems?" Josie asked.
"Negative. Ranma DNA contains no genetic flaws or undesirable recessive pairs," Bob answered.
"The lunatics who decided that releasing 100 thousand sex-crazed Ranmas on the universe was a good thing, were thorough enough to insure the clones' DNA suffered no degradation through the cloning process and was reproducible with itself," Ranma replied. "It's only the fact that we've been at places in the timeline where time itself was unstable that prevented pregnancy among the Ranmas and we always left before the timeline straightened itself out."
"When we found you as a baby, there was an adult male and female version of you lying dead in the crater, we always thought they were your siblings," Josie said.
Bob spoke up, "Ranma 1629L and Ranma 1629R tired of existence after thirty four hundred years. They volunteered to take the cloned guardian to a safe place to be raised among its people before offing themselves for the next great adventure."
"Wow, I can see why they decided enough was enough," Steve said thoughtfully. "Even if you remained in perfect health the years would wear you down."
Ranma nodded. "Life is only supposed to last a set amount of time but we Ranmas never do anything small."
Typing by: Stephenopolos
AN: My first attempt at crossing the Looping Ranma with Sky High. Then I lost it and started a whole new one.