Son Turned Daughter, Chapter 60
An unusual disclaimer: Ranma 1/2 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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The time bug belongs to the Ah!/Oh! My Goddess universe, which Ranma ½ is now a part of in this alternative universe. And, yet, for the most part, Son Turned Daughter, still means to be mostly faithful to canon. The only real, intended difference follows from: What If.
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Chapter 60
"Come on, bug! Take me back to when I first met Cologne! WhooHoo!" Happosai commanded with glee.
"Don't!" Pearl-san countered, waving a handful of silvervine. "Time-bug, take me back to when I first met Happosai!"
"Bug?! I still don't see any bug," Akane said. Though, judging its size by where the two elders were looking, she thought she maybe should be glad that she couldn't a huge insect.
"I think I m beginning to see this bug," Ranma said, focusing her trained senses on the vague blur the size of a, what, a pillow. But with legs, with two on its head? She narrowed her focus on the whatever in the middle of a pentagram inside a circle. She was uncertain if she could follow it. Once it escaped from the trap, she may not be able to. And why hadn't it? It had been fenced in by five time-related objects but there was now an opening made by escaped molester kicking the calendar out of the arrangement.
Suddenly the clock's hands circled madly. The alien whatever leaped over the timepiece and attacked her! The alarm going off, Ranma lost all the sense of ease that had remained from her roll in the Japanese catnip. She attacked back!
A flash and Ranma was no longer in the high valley at the foot of Mount Hida. She was in a low valley, rural town. It was the kind she was too familiar with. Her Old Man had favored them on the ten-year training journey she had been drug through. Back when she was always a boy. And she was not the only stranger to this one: Akane, Pearl-san and the rotten, shrimp ninja was with her. And they were drawing the attention of the locals.
Especially her. "Ranma(!)" Akane cried in a low voice. "You're wearing only your lingerie."
Lacking modesty, it was only then that Ranma realized it was a problem. She had to think fast! "Eek, eek! This pervert stole my clothes!"
"I didn't!" Happosai yelled back at her. "I only steal silky darling lingerie!" he insisted!
"There: he admits to being a pervert!" Pearl-san announced to the townsfolk present and those coming out of their homes and businesses. "And he's an eat-and-run, too!"
"We don t take to thieves!" was among the angry things the mobbing people said.
"You're mean! You're all mean! Just because I'm an elderly man, you think you can gang up on me!" he whined.
"Does he actually think that will work?" Akane asked Ranma. This was East Asia, where the elderly were—
Happosai was ganged up on and attacked. He managed to avoid most of blows, but couldn't seem to find a technique that kept him from being stomped on. Akane watched the scene from her knowledge of martial arts, but Ranma noticed a small detail that didn't sit well with her.
After a minute a middle-aged man with a sword and a badge on his pleb uniform came running up. Between his whistle blowing, he yelled, "No fighting! Fighting is forbidden!"
"He's a thief, Kimura-san!" he was told by several and which the rest agreed with. "He has a bad aura."
"Then I'll arrest him!" And he held up his sword. The ten attackers, mostly women, stepped away from the trampled outsider.
"Man!" Ranma commented. "The first time I see the police since I returned from China and it's in a small town and not Tokyo, the word's biggest city."
"Come with me!" the officer ordered, reaching down to grab the disturber of the peace.
"No, no!" Happosai pleaded. "Let them step on me, stamp on me! I deserve it!"
"Now I know what he was doing wrong!" Ranma spoke up. "Even as he was being stomped on, he was looking up women's skirts! He was pantie peeking!"
"But he was also grabbing the female, yin, energy they were putting into their attacks," Pearl-san told them.
"So, he isn't just a masochist who enjoys women hurting him?" Akane said. Suddenly, she remembered: "The Code! He's the Founder!" The idea that she owed her martial arts knowledge to the pervert still didn't sit well with her.
"Hush, Child," Pearl-san warned her.
Luckily, the attentions of the townfolk were on their policeman and the perverted outsider who now leaped to his feet. "I've been arrested only a handful of times in my 300 years, and those were when I was still young and inexperienced! I challenge you to arrest me!"
Kimura-san held up his sword to the sky and declared, "Lottery, strike!" Energy surged and its end took on the form of a fist. It came down hard onto Happosai's bald head.
"I didn't expect that," he said as he staggered three times before dropping unconscious.
The hand picked him up as if he were a nasty piece of trash and held him in front of the swordsman as the man took him to wherever the local jail was.
"H, how?" Ranma asked. Yes, how; Akane , too, wanted to know.
"Come inside and I'll tell you. The redhead is too entertaining," an matronly woman told them. And they did see that Ranma was being ogled by local men. There were trying not to show their interest in seeing a cute girl in just her lingerie but weren't very good at hiding it.
As the woman led the way, Ranma noticed she was carrying a large spatula. Yes, she was one of those who were beating up the lingerie thief. That was where its dents came from. "I have something you can wear, redhead."
"Ranma. My name is Ranma."
"Ranma?" She turned around and was about to say something to a girl that had an unusual named for a girl.
But the long-haired girl in a torn and dirty martial arts uniform smiled and said, "And my name is Akane! We're both of the—"
Pearl-san was quick to interrupt her. "You didn't find Ranma's missing clothes on Happosai, did you?"
"Happosai!" Anger returned to the woman's face. "Is that who the little creep is!? The last I heard that name, he had stolen just about everything not nailed down in the next town. Including all of the women's lingerie!" The way she gripped the handle of her spatula it was obvious she would like another chance to dent it even more than it already was. Giving it a mold of his face would be satisfying.
Pearl-san gave the two young martial artists a meaningful stare. They nodded. Message understood. Pearl-san returned to her usual relaxed tone, "Well, the Old Goat does know a technique for making things disappear. Including himself."
"Well, he's going to have a rough time doing that. Not while Kimura-san has his lottery sword." She had reached her place and opened the door for them.
As they went in, Akane asked, "Lottery sword?"
"He won it?" Ranma asked as she looked at where they were.
"He did. He won it at the Kojitsuke Temple, as he's told us too many times to count. Once a year, now, they have their contest to see who could pull a sword from a stone. Kojitsuke was the 888,888th one up and he was given the second to the last of their Wishbringer Swords just because he was."
Pearl-san, of course, found it very amusing. "8 is considered a lucky number here in Japan. And so is 6. And he was lucky. He was lucky enough to be standing where his place in line was counted as 8 repeated 6 times."
"Wishbringer?! And he wished to be your local police(?)" Akane asked.
"That must have been the loophole that allows him to have 'more than' three wishes," Pearl-san smiled. "The last wish isn't completed until the sword is no longer needed for him to be a police officer."
"And Kimura was pretty useless before he started using his sword," the woman confirmed.
Ranma hadn't really been listening. She was too interested in what she saw. "Your parlor looks sort of set up like a restaurant. It even has a couple of large griddles."
"You hungry?" the woman smiled.
Ranma eagerly nodded, of course…. Until she remembered, "I don't have any money."
"Give me a piece of paper," Pearl-san said. When she had it and a pen, she wrote something on it and gave it to the woman to read.
The woman smiled and nodded. "Deal! This looks like an excellent recipe. Three orders of the Special coming up.
"But after this Ranma is dressed. Stay here while I get something for her."
When she was out of the parlor, Akane asked, "What was the recipe, Pearl-san?"
"Recipes are meant to be secret. At least, this one is. It is even called the Secret Sauce." She found that amusing.
"Secret sauce?" Ranma had a flashback. Feeling guilty, she pushed the memory away. She sat down on the floor in front of one of the short-legged chabudai tables. "This place doesn't look like it was meant to be a restaurant; it looks like a house."
"In a town where everybody knows everybody else, a business doesn't have to advertise," Pearl-san reminded them.
"That's right!" the woman said, returning with a garment bag. She proudly stated, "Everybody in town knows my cooking and prefers it over my husband's."
"Your husband is also a cook?"
"He's the cook. I'm the chef," she said, freeing the hanger from the bag.
Ranma and Akane were startled. Thinking so much on what she was holding up, woman didn't notice their reaction, intent on telling them, "This what I wore in my younger days, before, let's say, I put on a few extra kilograms."
There was no doubt about it. It was exactly like the okonomiyaki uniform Ukyo wore. It was Pearl-san who asked the question, "Are you a Kuonji?"
"Only by marriage," the woman said. She tenderly touched the uniform she was holding. "This is the traditional okonomiyaki uniform of my clan, the Jinja." She let gravity straighten it out. "My husband wears our uniform because he and his clan wants to have a reputation as being as good at making okonomiyaki as my clan's." Her face became serious as she eyes turned to the redhead. "If I lend this to you, you will respect it," she demanded. Perhaps she felt her husband had dishonored it?
"Of, of course," Ranma swore. She would never think to dishonor anything one of her few friends cared about. She accepted it palms up and bowed. "I will wear this with the respect your generosity deserves, Jinja-san."
"What is your given name?" Pearl-san, her elder asked.
"As you can tell by my treatment of you, we are rather lax on the rules of formality around here. But it is still rude to ask to call me by my given name from our first meeting. Even some of those of this town still prefer to call me Jinja-san."
"And the others?"
"Mama! I'm home. And I brought my friend!" a little girl's voice called out.
There were barefoot thumps on the floorboards as small feet ran ahead of her. And a young body flung itself into the parlor. "Old Lady!"
"I'm not an old lady," she tolerantly answered.
"But you're not my Old Man!" the little boy said happily.
It took a long moment for Ranma to recover even enough to think. In an instant she had recognized the little boy as…herself. Or himself. Six years old. The age when everything in his life was changed. And the only comfort he found during that traumatic time was—
"Ranma, you said you'd play martial arts with me!" Little Ukyo had finally come into view. She was wearing a child-sized version of her mother's (and father's) Jinja okonomiyaki uniform. And she wasn't happy that her playmate was no longer interested in her.
Her mom had squatted down to hug the boy. He received it but didn't hug her back. He turned when she had loosened her embrace. But instead of talking to his friend, he was distracted. "The lady is in her underwear!" he innocently stated.
"Now, see what you've done!" Jinja-san told her. "You've corrupted a young man. Go now; scat out of here and get dressed(!)" she said in a soft exclamation.
Ranma the redhead's mind was in a dazed swirl.
"The time bug!" Pearl-san said as she caught its movement. It poofed out a wall and she hurried out the front door, chasing it.
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All five of the time objects was needed for the "fence". Once broken, though, the time-bug didn't have to escape through the way Happosai was standing at. It weakened the clocktime and got out through that new, self-created opening.
Happosai is one of the most powerful martial artists of his time, yet he allowed women and girls to beat him. He was a perverted martial arts master, yet it was he who set the Code for the schools of Indiscriminate Grappling (renamed by Soun and Genma as Anything-Goes). The Code states it is dishonorable to fight girls. For all his faults, he never physically attacked females. Why? Because he collects Yin(female) energy to counteract his aging.
As said in the previous chapter, Happosai is weaker at this time than he is as he is shown to be in canon because he is still recovering from keeping himself alive for over ten years and using what power he had left in trying to break out of his cave-and-boulder prison. Will he be able to call on his martial arts knowledge that doesn't depend on great ki energy to make a jailbreak?
The Wishbringer story arc was in chapters 147-149. And it was retold in S04 E19, "Ranma and Kuno's... First Kiss". According to this fanfic, there were more than one magic sword and they were won by different people throughout the history of the lottery. Also note, that each sword had less wishes available to its wielder than the one before it. Kuno got the short end of the sword.