Chapter updates after this should happen once a week for as long as I can keep up my current pace at writing (which for the record is an insane pace). If I start getting too close to my unedited work, I'll roll it back to bi-weekly. Thanks and shout-outs to my beta reader imperfetc, who, despite enjoying the stuff that Denny's Restaurant calls 'cheese sauce' is otherwise a flawless human being and who has given me valuable input.

Reviews: Okay, so first off I didn't expect this to get this much attention after less than a day. Pleasantly surprised though. Please keep it coming!

snowfalldevice: Short version is that Ranma can use materia, but does not yet know how. There's also some other things that will happen soon that may render it... less useful for him.

Render unto Takahashi that which is Takahashi's, and render unto Squeenix that which is Squeenix's. The remainder belongs to me.

Chapter Two

Just Another Day

[ ν ] - εγλ 0007, November 27

Ranma let out an exasperated sigh, walked over to Elmyra, who had collapsed into a heap on the floor, and unceremoniously dumped the remains of her cold water on top of her head. Elmyra almost immediately gasped in shock and skittered a few inches on the wooden floor, breathing heavily, her eyes focusing on the redhead in front of her.

Aerith's eyes and head tracked Ranma's movements, but appeared to still be in shock herself. Ranma rolled her eyes and reached out with one hand, giving Aerith a gentle but unmistakable pinch on the cheek. "Aaahh!" she gasped, snapping out of it.

"Both of you gonna be okay?" Ranma asked, glancing between them.

"Y-y-you-you're a…" Aerith stammered.

"I'm a girl, yes," Ranma replied, starting to wish she had just kept the whole thing quiet. Even being as used to this curse as she was, she still didn't like it, and probably never would. Except for the discount on ice cream.

"But… you were... "

"I was a boy," Ranma confirmed. "And now I'm a girl." She took the cup of hot water, noticing it still steaming, and decided to get it over with despite the likelihood of pain. The hot water scalded slightly, but was otherwise normal as it dripped down to the floor "And now I'm a boy again, any questions?" he concluded.

Aerith stared at him for a long, tense moment, then walked over and poked him square in the collarbone. "'Any questions,' indeed!" she responded forcefully. "How in the world did you do that? Where'd the rest of your body go when you became a girl? Where did your breasts go when you became a guy? What kind of place is this Japan, anyway?" she finished, jabbing him in the collar with each question.

Ranma gently pushed aside Aerith's accusatory hand, and nodded towards the table. "Maybe if we all sat down for this one?" he suggested calmly, reaching out a hand to help Elmyra to her feet. Aerith and Elmra both nodded, Elmyra taking Ranma's hand. A few seconds later, each of them were seated around the table, Aerith notably sitting much closer to her mother.

"Okay… so, as you can probably guess," Ranma began, "you're not the first people I've had to explain this curse to. But, since you don't know where I'm from, this is going to be a little difficult." He picked up a pencil lying on the table and flipped over a sheet of paper. Taking a moment, he drew a rough approximation of Japan in one corner. "This is Japan, and this is my home," he said, drawing a circle to represent Tokyo. "And this…" he began drawing a significantly larger landmass on one side, "is called China. To give you an idea of the scale, you can drive the short way across Japan in about half a day if you're not tryin' too hard. My pops and I went way into the middle of China a couple years ago, for what was supposed to be a bit of martial arts training. That ended up going… not so great.

"There's this place up in the mountains in the middle of China, called Jusenkyo," he continued. "It's an ancient training ground for martial artists, but it was abandoned… too dangerous, they said. It's a bunch of little pools of water fed by underground springs. There's a... " he paused for a moment, trying to consider how to explain bamboo to someone who might not actually be from his own planet. "There's a single wooden stake planted into each one. The idea, a long time ago, is that it was supposed to test your balance and focus, which especially in martial arts are very important. Lose your balance, and you get tossed in the drink for your troubles. Turns out, though, nobody else was usin' this place for a reason.

"Over somethin' like three thousand years of this place's history, a lot of people and animals had drowned in the different springs," he went on. "For whatever reason, though, this place was cursed, so when people fell in the springs, they'd take the form of whatever drowned there last. Normally, that wouldn't be a problem for me, the Saotome School specializes in midair and high-mobility strikes. So, we climbed up, and started our warm up bout. I drew first blood and knocked Pops off his pole... and right into what turned out to be the Spring of Drowned Panda.

"So, I knock Pops into the pool, and when he comes out," Ranma gestured wildly with his arms raised, "he's this three thousand pound behemoth of a bear, growling at me, and standing up on the wooden pole, looking like murder. I'm stunned speechless, and before I can try to get Pops to cool off, he wallops me of the pole I'm on, and I go flying." Ranma sighed. "Can you guess what spring I fell into?"

Aerith and Elmyra shared a Look. "Is… this something that is normal, where you come from?" Elmyra asked incredulously. "People changing shape because they took a swim in the wrong watering hole?"

Ranma opened his mouth, and then closed it. Pops, Ryoga, Shampoo, Mousse, Taro, Herb… he thought. Aloud, "I wouldn't say it's normal... Though now that I think about it way too many people I know have been there and had it happen to them. Some of them even after they knew what it was." Ranma shrugged. "But, no, it's not something that happens anywhere else in the world that I know of."

"And…" Aerith interjected, "it doesn't hurt? Like, physically, having your body drop or gain a foot in height, having your… chest… swell up like that?"

Ranma was actually stunned at the question. "Nobody's actually asked me that before, that I remember," Ranma answered slowly, more than a little surprised about how off-script the question was for him. "But, no, there's no physical pain from the transformation. The problem isn't the switch itself, the problem is the damn curse attracts water, and tends to do it at the most awkward possible moment."

"You're saying that there's a non-awkward time to shapeshift from a girl to a boy?" Aerith countered, a slight smile on her face.

Ranma blew a raspberry at that. "I'll give ya that, but… If you were to plot out your day and pick a point in your day where something completely insane would happen that could only be made worse by suddenly being the opposite gender, you'd get splashed about three seconds before that."

Aerith grimaced. Elmyra looked thoughtful. "It's just… hot and cold water?" Elmyra asked.

Ranma nodded. "Don't ask me why, I don't make the rules."

Aerith waved her hands vaguely. "Okay, stop, time out," she implored, shaking her head. "I need a minute for all of this. Ranma, is there anything you want to know about from us?"

Ranma thought back to their earlier conversation. "What's 'materia'?" Once again, there was the stunned look from both women to his words. "Yeah, I know, I get it, it's something common here. Explain it to me like ya would to a kid."

Aerith glanced over at Elmyra, then tugged at what Ranma had assumed was just a large gemstone in the thick bracelet on her wrist. It came loose, and she set it down on the table. It was green, translucent, almost perfectly spherical, and seemed to radiate some kind of energy to Ranma's perception. "This," Aerith explained, "is materia. There's a lot of different information about what it actually is, but everyone agrees on what it does. It's a way for humans to use magic."

Ranma stared at it. "...magic," he repeated doubtfully.

Aerith nodded. "Come outside, I'll show you," she insisted, standing up and grabbing the little green orb. Ranma followed, deftly slipping his shoes back on as he stepped through the door. "Do you always do that?" Aerith asked suddenly.

"Do what?"

"Your shoes," she indicated, walking away from their house. "You took them off before you got more than three feet indoors."

"It's a custom, I guess, where I'm from," Ranma explained. "Guests remove their shoes at the entrance so they don't soil their host's home with dirt or grass tracked in from outside."

Aerith looked down at her own heavy boots, which probably carried enough mud and dust to, on average, make any given place in Midgar slightly dirtier. "I… see," she considered thoughtfully. "Okay, this should be a good spot," she indicated a piece of heavy sheet metal propped up over top of a junk pile. She slotted the materia back into her bracelet, and closed her eyes in concentration. After about two seconds, there was a faint glow around her, and suddenly a ball of fire emerged from her outstretched hand. It accelerated forward and impacted hard against the steel plate with a thud, leaving a scorch mark surrounding the point of contact.

Ranma felt his jaw involuntarily drop away as he glanced back and forth between Aerith and the burn mark on the metal. "How…" he began.

"Don't ask me, I don't make the rules," Aerith mimicked Ranma's earlier dismissal.

Ranma screwed up his face in frustration. "Fine," he said in a grumpy tone.

Aerith giggled a bit. "It's… difficult to put into words," she said after a moment. "Different materia have different effects, but one materia will always make the same effect between different people," she explained.

Ranma nodded, trying to follow this. "Is it something you learn? Could I learn to use these myself, even without materia?"

"Uhhh…" Aerith responded uncertainly. "Yes and no? Materia can grow in power the longer you use it. But that power is linked directly to the materia, not to the wielder. For example, I have a Fire materia, and a Cure materia," she elaborated, pointing at the two orbs slotted into her bracelet. "If I gave you the Fire materia, you'd be able to cast Fire, and I wouldn't, unless you gave it back. You could use it for a while until you learned to cast Fira, a stronger spell. Then if you gave it back to me, I could cast Fire and Fira, and you wouldn't be able to do either."

Ranma blinked at that. "Yeah, I thought there would be a catch," he confirmed. "So no matter how good you get, all of that skill and power can be circumvented completely…" he trailed off, stepping behind Aerith, "...by doing this."

Aerith blinked. "Doing what?" she inquired. Then she looked at him. Or more accurately at his hand.

Which was holding her bracelet.

With her materia still in it.

"What?" she gasped, looking down at her wrist. It was, indeed, completely bare. She hadn't even noticed. "How did you do that?"

Ranma smirked. "I don't make a habit of that," he explained, handing her back the bracelet. "But I'm a martial artist of no small amount of skill. I've trained since before I could walk. And deft hands are a bit of a fringe benefit to that." He smiled broadly. "The point I'm tryin' to make is, if I'm understanding alla that correctly... if you use materia, then your strength, your ability, can become defined by that materia, even though it's not a part of you. You lose the materia, you lose that strength. You can be disarmed and rendered almost completely powerless… by something as simple as removing a bangle from your wrist."

With that, he stepped forward to the same steel plate that Aerith's Fire spell had struck a few minutes ago. He took a moment, examining the metal, then moved into a precise stance, one arm couched by his side, and thrust out that arm with a short kiai, striking the metal hard. There was a brief sound of metal fatigue, and then he stepped away.

Aerith looked at the steel plate in awe. There was a neat, fist-sized hole just to the right of the scorch mark she had made not even a minute before. "There's a certain amount of talent to it," he admitted, "but even discarding that, the training, the techniques, the skill is all me. And you can't remove that skill from me without removing… well, me." He grinned and started walking back over to Aerith. "So if all this materia is necessary to survive in this world, I'll use it. I might even use it to boost what I can already do, in a pinch. But otherwise… I'm probably going to go without it."

Aerith looked at him for a long moment. "And to think, I was offering to protect you while you found your way home." She smiled at that, holding back a laugh. "Maybe a bit presumptuous of me…"

Ranma shook his head. "Don't get me wrong," he corrected. "I'm still asking for your help. This is… very definitely not my world. I could do or say the wrong thing, I could offend someone by missing a social cue, I could get taken advantage of because I don't know how much a bowl of noodles costs. Two hours ago I didn't know the name of the city I'm standing in. Five minutes ago, I didn't know what materia was. And unless something major happens in the next few minutes," he said, winding down, "I still have no idea how I got here, so I don't know where to start looking for a way home. So… yes… I still need your help," he finished, sitting down on a chunk of scrap, running one hand through his hair.

Aerith looked at him. Despite the facade of bravado and confidence, she could tell that this was not an easy thing for him to be experiencing. She sat down next to him and smiled. "They say that a problem shared is a problem halved," Aerith offered. Ranma looked up at that. "I'll help, if I can. I'll teach you what you need to get by here. If I find out anything that might get you home, I'll tell you. I'd like to ask one thing in exchange, though," she continued in a singsong tone.

Ranma stared at her. "And that would be…?"

Aerith grinned. "I don't think I'm ever going to be able to punch through a chunk of steel like that," she admitted, gesturing at the plate Ranma had torn through. "But if you've been training yourself like that for that long… tell me," she finished, "what do you know about staff fighting?"

A/N: This chapter is the exposition fairy coming in to drop backstory on us all, yeah. Ranma needed to learn about what makes Midgar tick. And the Gainsboroughs needed to learn more about Ranma.

The explanation Ranma gives of the experience at Jusenkyo is, admittedly, a really simplified version of Ranma's story of how he became cursed. Chances are good that if you're reading a fanfic involving Ranma, you might already know a bit about Ranma and the mechanics of his curse. The explanation Aerith gives about materia and how they work, and also how they *don't* work, is likewise a highly simplified version of FF7's universe mechanics. Chances are good that if you're reading a fanfic involving FF7, you might already know a bit about materia and materia growth. The point is that each doesn't know all the basics of the other automatically. They've known each other less than a day. Aerith always struck me as kind and warm-hearted, so it made sense to me that she'd do what she could to make sure Ranma could survive. She volunteered to help Cloud in the base game after knowing him all of a day, and Cloud wasn't exactly helpless.

There's so much more to come, I promise. Let me know what you think!