Son Turned Daughter, Chapter 57
An unusual disclaimer: Ranma1/2 is the trademark of Rumiko Takahashi and VIZ Communications, and its characters have been borrowed without permission. And Son Turned Daughter was originally written back in 2002 by fanfiction author Tangent. Please see the first two chapters of this series under his pen name. This series has been written for noncommercial use only.
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Events are speeding up again! A whole slew of people, places, things that appear only appear much later in manga and/or anime canon are going to start appearing now! Son Turned Daughter has and will greatly mix and shorten the timeline.
And Ah!/Oh! My Goddess people, places, things are also being added to this mix!
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Chapter 57
Deep in the Hida Mountains, the Shinto priestess at last came to a stop. Looped by the end of a locket chain, the ladle she was holding had swung like a pendulum to the side instead of the forward-backwards that her footsteps encouraged. She brought out the map Benten had divined and checked it. She nodded, "X marks the spot."
Like on a treasure map? "We have to dig?" the redheaded Ranma asked.
"That will be easier once you know the Bakusai Tenketsu!" Pearl-san laughed. She was back with her inscrutable, insider jokes. During the trip here, she seemed more out of it than in it. It could have been because she was meditating, casting her mind out to look into a future, …or it could be because she was half-senile and not entirely in the present.
"Or it could because the best way to pull a prank is to keep a straight face," she grinned.
"What?"
She laughed, then chuckled, "I never really had a chance to prank you with my tossing water in my harai ritual. You decided to be a girl for most of the time."
"I'll have to remember to stay away from you, then, when I want to stay a guy." Which she didn't. She felt almost wholly girl and liked it!
"May I have my other hiking pole?"
The frail looking woman wasn't, but she was aged. Though hiking without a pack in her shrine priestess uniform (but also boots), the two poles were needed. Ranma had come to appreciate them ("walking" with them exercised the upper body) and had started using fallen tree branches as a staffs, and had even played at bō-jutsu. Akane (of course?) stubbornly insisted on not using any help, clinging onto the straps of her camping pack as it weighed her forward. It reminded Ranma of his pop's of having to do things "manly" way.
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The computer bug and time flies. But, now without her angel, Pearl-san did not see it.
Ranma woke up when Akane kicked her out of their tent. "What did you do that for!?" But when she was coming back in she saw that the other martial artist was sleepfighting. She sighed in relief. It had nothing to do with their friendship. "It's morning," she said, leaving and stretching. "Might as well get the day started." Only then did she see that the white bra was pulled up, off her boobs.
And her panties were missing! "Akane?(!)" Did she have her way with her while she slept? It felt like a betrayal. "She at least should have asked me!"
"She didn't molest you." Pearl-san had just started the campfire. "Most females don't like having the elastic dig into their soft flesh and going into them."
Going into them? Ranma blushed when she figured that out. "So I took them off myself while I was asleep(?)" That disappointed her. Lingerie had become important to her: Wearing them was the outside sign that she had inwardly accepted being a girl! But they couldn't please her at night? For her to like being a girl didn't mean she loved everything about it. She still hadn't gotten used to the differences between the two bodies. Like how sleeping on her side made her back take an awkward turn at the jutting hip; on her back, she had to think of the "S" of the back and the extra padding of the butt and thighs; on her front, how her boobs were squashed. She would have to remember to ask Akane how long it took her to get used to those things. Still, they were all there because she was now a woman, not a girl.
"But you're not in bed, now."
"What? Oh, right. You don't want to see me nude."
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Returning from the icy river after bathing and slapping clean her laundry's 'dedicates', Ranma saw Akane was up and already wearing her t-shirt and canvas dōgi. And she knew Akane had stubbornly kept her lingerie on all night. "Aren't you going to take a bath first?"
"I already did."
Uh, right. She had. It was then Ranma remembered that doing it at before bed was a Japanese custom. It made her frown. Her stupid Old Man's Battles at Dawn conditioning had gotten her the habit of taking morning baths. And the last month, she had wanted them to be hot. Well, no more! And she didn't care if she remained a girl! Freedom!
"Would you like a hot soak?" Pearl-san asked.
"It doesn't matter to me," the redhead said.
"It matters to me!" Akane said. But then had to say, "Only we can't. Cologne gave us the Cat Tongue! Hot water feels scalding!"
"Heh, heh!" Pearl-san chuckled at their pure youth. "You just have to be in water cooler than hot. Your increased sensitivity will make it seem warmer than it is."
"Why didn't I think of that?!" Akane cried.
"I know why I didn't." Ranma (and Shampoo the Warrior) had bathed in cold rivers and lakes most of the time. (And Ukyo the world-traveling street vendor are learned to, more or less, cope to them.)
Taking her ladle on the chain, she dowsed for water. "Japan has more hot springs than just about any other country in the world."
Only it ended being pulled to the water in the pot over the campfire. Throwing the ladle into the pot, she gave up, telling her students, "Later! We'll begin your lessons." And stepped to a boulder that had fallen from the mountain.
"The hardest substance, diamond, can be shattered if tapped at its breaking point. Everything has a breaking point. Find the Bakusai Tenketsu and you can shatter it!"
"Shatter it!?" Akane wanted it to be true. Ranma didn't.
"And with one finger." The old woman touched down on an stone‒It exploded! The fragments struck mainly Ranma, some getting by the small human shield to Akane!
Ranma looked through the cloud of grit to see her friend disheveled, dirty and bruised. But unharmed. It was with relief she smiled, "You look a mess."
"Look whose talking! You're not very "feminine" now."
Rolling the boulder up, Pearl-san said, "You both look like you could use a bath."
Coming over, she flung the pot-water in her ladle against the slope. Where its hot water splashed, a steaming trickle came out…into the basin the technique had made in the stone. "Mix it with cold water from the stream and you'll soon think its as hot as a furo!" she laughed, knowing she had twice impressed the youngsters.
"I'm, I'm going to learn how to explode things." Akane was impressed.
"Exploding people goes against the Code!" Ranma told her.
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Ranma refused to train in the Bakusai Tenketsu technique. But it seemed like she would have to use it against Akane to keep her from training to recklessly explode things. That part of her almost liked seeing her bound in ropes, her only free hand wrapped in a tight brace that left only one finger not in a fist. But that was the only part of her that liked to see her friend trussed up and suspended from a high branch.
Against the bark of an opposite tree, a boulder was also wrapped and hung its own in ropes. "How'd you get that up there without pulleys, trickster!?"
"A prankster should be like a magician and never reveal how their trick works!" Pearl-san laughed. Then they would know about her angel. World of Elegance could be petulant. As it was she had deserted her after setting up the obstacle course while her students slept. Waving her ladle like a wand, the boulder swung free.
And slammed full-on against Akane. "Akane!" Ranma cried as she saw her slam against the tree behind her. Only to swing limply back against the still penduluming boulder.
Stifling cries of pain, she bounced off of it several times before they both lost their momentums. Ranma was in pain herself at seeing at how every centimeter of her exposed beautiful skin was bruised. Would even the dotabata balm smeared on her be enough to keep her from permanent harm!? Disabilities!?(!)
"Again!" their martial arts master demanded.
"But my finger is bent!" Akane whined. "Maybe its broken!"
"Akane doesn't know advanced healing techniques!" Ranma told the old woman who was being as hard ass as her stinkin' old man could be!
"Then she had better give up!"
"Never!" Akane shouted. "Again!"
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After seeing her very best friend being hammered time after time, Ranma became too upset to watch. She would have fought the sadistic witch if Akane had given her the least sign of surrendering. But she stubbornly kept facing her 'martial artist's trial'!
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"I can be Acchan's nurse," the redhead said as she returned to camp. "I'll set up a field hospital!"
While she was rummaging around for the first aid kit, braces and more dotabata balm, she found an apron. It reminded her of Big Sister Kasumi's, only shorter and even more feminine(!) She couldn't resist!
Admiring it without a mirror, the redhead had a wonderful idea, "I'll make comfort food for Akane!"
While she was making rice and curry, Ranma got to imagine herself as a housewife. Kasumi style? Maybe for a husband? She didn't dwell on which. She was intent on being a better cook than she was as a guy. His meals were no-frills basic. And why not? All she had to please was a man who was never pleased with her efforts: One Genma Saotome. And he had become worse since she could become a girl.
Well, too bad for him! Girls were born to cook! And wasn't it said in manga and anime that love was the best spice, even the main ingredient(?)! They had more to give! She was sure she had more and subtler and deeper emotions than she did when a guy. Just like it was with colors. And smells. And touch! And….
Sigh; sure but not certain. Those sensations did put themselves between her and his memories. His male perspective kept being out of her reach.
"Forget about him," she told herself. "I need to put the love of friendship into this! Hmm, it only tastes okay. It needs something…. This? White wine? It had better not be French."
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Ranma was sure he, too, the guy had never felt this before. She had no reference for what she was feeling. Kasumi could have told her. Any wife or mother could have. She had put her heart into preparing to welcome Akane back, even going to the extra effort while she waited of making the camp site "homey". With nothing else to do, she was beginning to worry that dinner was being ruined by being in the pot too long. "If they don't get here soon, everything I've done will be made unimportant!" …Will it have no chance of being important because Akane will be
"‒No! I must not think she's‒"
Finally she heard somebody coming from among the trees. "It's about time!" she said, exasperated.
Then she saw it was Pearl-san. And only her. "Where's Akane?! Is she hurt!?(!) Tell me where she is!"
"The stubborn girl has refused to train under my methods! She's run off where I can't follow her with this aged body. You must go after her!"
Adrenaline pumping, Ranma already had her apron off. "I'll roofhop over the trees!"
"You'll have to go higher than that. She went up the mountain." She pointed. "See that boulder in its side?"
Ranma called on her trained senses to zoom in on her. "Stupid Akane! She's so clumsy she could fall!"
"She said she sensed a breaking point calling her."
But Ranma was already leaping, sliding and leaping higher.
The Evil found that once more, it was too weak to break out of their prison by itself. Still they tried. There was a chance something (a lightning bolt?) or somebody (a fool?) would respond and rescue them.
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Why didn't Ranma-chan notice the time slices like Ranma-kun had/has/will? Besides having a different sense of time (slower, that allows girls to 'live' longer within the same amount of time than men), Ranma was distracted by the novel sensations that came with fully enjoying being a woman for the first time.
While Benten had concentrated most of Ranma's femininity into his womanly body, it was still filtered through the lens of what he had thought and had been told what women should be like. Remember, Ranma had decided to adapt to being a girl because she thought they were more caring.
The Bakusai Tenketsu special technique was the feature of the Breaking Point Arc, chapters 51-55; S2E11 of the anime. And, yes, Pearl-san didn't completely shatter the breccia-stone boulder. Like with the Cat Tongue victims not having to take completely cold baths, I'm adding to the lore to give room to future developments.
In Ah/Oh! My Goddess, Belldandy and the goddesses read emotions by the different colors of auras.