Ranma was bored. I have been  been sitting in the police
station for almost two hours, waiting to find out what would
happen to him.  Pop had been arrested for at least three
cases of grand theft. I warned him that this city had an
especially powerful protector but Genma just laughed and
said " This Flash-in-the-Pan can't be as good as a trained
Martial Artist. I am better than any unskilled person no
matter what POWER they might have."

Now I have  to wait until they either located my mother and
found out what she wanted him to do or his Pop broke out of
jail and found him. I imagine they would make me go to
school and stay at either a reformatory or an orphanage,
just like the last time this happened back in Japan. I
haven't heard from  Mom since  Pop had taken him on this
trip. Shucks to be honest, he didn't even know if she was
alive or not, after all it had been four years since the
last time he saw her .

Well when you have nothing else to do, meditate, as that
Cherokee Shaman had taught him. I  could practice raising
and controlling my Ki. I can also review my life and see
what had lead me here.

Well the first thing he remembered clearly was his Pop
hitting him with that needle, when he was four. I never did
find out what that was about. Then Pops took him on a
training trip to some Dojo where he learned to focus his Ki
and to draw in Chi. Just as the lessons started getting
useful his idiot Pop had taken him home. The next two years
were basically a repeat of this. Getting lessons on some
aspect of Martial Arts and  then going home when the lessons
where half done.

Finally when he was six, Oyaji had tried training him in the
cat fist. Boy had his Mom flipped out when she saw what
Genma had done to her son. For a while they had thought he
would lose his left eye and his right arm but he had managed
to get the Ki healing working. He hadn't let off on that
since, not even when he slept. It cut his total power by
half but it also was the only way to survive the idiotic
things Genma kept coming up with. Like the time he had done
a surprise attack by rolling those boulders down the cliff,
what was it he called it, Lion's Cub or something like that.

After the first attempt with Cat Fist training, with cats of
all sizes, from wild cats to tigers to his  Mom's pet cat,
Genma had gone crazy. He    had  demanded to take Ranma on a
prolonged training trip, visiting several Dojos in a row, so
his son could integrate the knowledge he would obtain in a
greater whole.

Or so he said.

Actually thanks to some small luck, several Masters had left
Japan for America. As a result I got considerably more time
at each Dojo and I learned far more than Genma wanted me to.
Especially about the links between Meditation and Ki
production. I also learned more about the difference between
Chi and Ki and the limitations on Chi use.

I also got a lot the information in a different order than
he preferred. The trip through Asia and India taught me how
to increase my production of Ki a millionfold. Whereas the
old man used Chi, I could duplicate anything he could do
with Chi by using my Ki.

Then we hit the motherload of esoteric knowledge,
Joketsuzoku and the Amazons of China.

When we first entered the village, we were just looking for
a place to rest and get some food. Pop had some relatives
near there, in the Musk village. Thinking about it, that
Pops was related to those idiots is   no great surprise. Now
if he had been related to the intelligent ones, the
nobility, that would have been a surprise. I saw some of the
stuff they were doing around the village and refused to move
on until I could understand how at least  some part of it
was done.

Of course wanting to know and learning can be two different
things. Especially with Martial Arts, many of the techniques
were taught in ways that bore no resemblance to the final
uses. The Bakusai Tenketsu as an example, who'd suspect you
would have to have boulders smash into you for a week or two
to toughen you up so the explosion wouldn't cut you into
ribbons. Of course I improved on the explosion part but that
came much later.

About a week after we had arrived, I was outside the
village, wandering around,  contemplating one of the skills
and trying to reason out how train my self to do the same as
I had seen and walked into a group of teenage girls with a
couple of women monitoring them. They were being trained for
hunting skills and some basic guard skills. Unfortunately
the Musk tribesmen who found them were much much better at
fighting skills. They were about to kill the only effective
fighters, the two older women, when I found them.

It took me about three minutes to knock all of the dozen
so-called fighters out. They all relied on their powers too
much. I had no real trouble in handling them. Of course by
then my Ki levels were on a par with the matriarchs, though
neither they  nor I knew it. I escorted the women and girls
home, to their dismay. They were ashamed of needing a male
escort, shucks they were disliked the idea of being rescued
by a male. I stopped just short of the village, so they
could enter alone. I didn't tell them but I had found almost
a dozen more warriors trying to ambush them. I kept ducking
off to one side or the other and leaving them out cold. So I
couldn't just leave them alone as they requested.

After I reached the village, I tried to talk to the nicest
of the authority figures in the village, matriarch Cologne,
she was busy with her granddaughter Curls though. I warned
the guards about the odd looking fighters we had seen. Some
of them took me seriously, some didn't. I have often
wondered if that made any difference in who lived and who
died.

When I finally got to speak with Cologne, I discovered that
one of the women in the group was her granddaughter Curls,
to be precise the mother of Shampoo. A rather nice cheerful
purple haired girl I had met in a sparring session. We had
become rather close friends, although I had never met any of
her family except her father, well at least to my knowledge
then. Cologne was able to deduce from our descriptions that
the brawlers were Musk, probably lower class ones at that.
It was there that I learned that rank in the Musk depends on
your person power level and that of your average family
member.

Cologne offered to adopt as a grandson, which would enable
me to learn some of the attacks and Martial Arts styles, the
villagers used. I questioned her on the details for a little
while, then agreed. I suggested we do this in a hurry so I
could get back out, as I had a hunch there was going to be
big trouble soon.

Cologne agreed, so I became Saotome Ranma of her personal
family and Shampoo's little brother, at Curls insistence.

I went back out with the next war party. I was as welcome as
fleas, except to Curls.   She defended me, saying I was a
better fighter than any girl and as good as most women. I
resisted laughing , as I could hear Oyaji saying something
similar but reversed about several female fighters we had
seen.

Although I didn't kill anyone in the battles that followed
over the next few months, I managed to distinguish my self
to the Amazons. I saved several battles that they had
thought lost and fought some of the toughest men the Musk
had. I hadn't lost a single fight, nor had the Amazons lost
a battle in which I fought. Of course a fair amount of that
was sheer good luck, but it got me the rank of full warrior
and adopted by the village as a whole, all of the clans were
willing to teach me their styles. I learned as much as I
could, studying with a different family each day, so as to
force the skills into my own style, to make them mine and
not just moves learned.


I eventually learned both the basics and the medium level
skills of  almost all of the styles but two. Cologne's was
based on some serious usage of three energies. Ki, Chi and
Mana, Ki is my energy made by my body and it  is the hardest
to learn to control but also the most powerful. Chi is the
energy form everyone and everything else that is alive, the
unused Ki from every living being. It is very easy to partly
control, but hard to store and slow to gather. Mana is hard
to describe, it is the basis of magic, that is you can turn
Mana into magic or into Ki. It is almost worthless except
that it is very easy to store, with almost no upper limit
and can be changed into Ki instantly or used to power a
spell in less time that it takes to gather an equal amount
of Chi. The really nice thing about Mana is that it can be
created from Chi or Ki and is manufactured by your body,
just exactly like Ki. The amount made increases with
practice, also like Ki. This enables you to keep really big
supplies of power for when they are needed.

I could do some of the lower level attacks and I had already
figured out one of her defenses, the Ki Shield. Indeed my
version, while it used more power per minute, gave more
protection for the amount of power used. Shucks I have never
had anything come through my shield and I have faced off
against some very powerful beings.

The other system required you to be female to use, it was
left over from a lost civilization, supposedly based on the
moon. Needless to say, I learned much of the theory here but
I discovered that it really didn't work well for men. It was
based on various types of crystals and their use to store
and focus Mana in various ways. Six year old girls could use
it better than I could. Still I did surprise them as I was
the first male in their history to get it to work at all.
The only real success I had was in using it to power up and
control a variation of the Bakusai Tenketsu. I was able to
reopen several older mines by turning the excess rock and
water into dust and vapor. Once I tried to remove everything
but what I felt was valuable. I caused a massive sinkhole to
appear, but after I removed the dirt we found several tons
of gold, perhaps a hundred tons of silver and more copper
than the total output of the mine over the three thousand
years it had been in operation. The Elders of the tribe also
found some whitish/gray material they called Mithril.

I got one of the biggest laughs of my life when they dug out
the bottom of the mine though, they found almost fifty tons
of Diamonds! It seems my method crystallized all of the
carbon down there, including some wood and coal. Almost
everyone in the village fainted when they saw the hundreds
of shapes of diamond. We found out I fused some of diamonds
into a shaped crystal that absorbed all magic or Mana, I was
able to use this gold crystal to cure several cursed
individuals. Strangely it wouldn't work except in the hand
of a male, so I kept it and it is in the backpack behind me.
After that the Elders became  odd in their actions toward
me. Excepting Cologne and her tribe, they acted almost
scared! Cologne suggested Oyaji and I should hunt down the
masters, that had gone to America...

I landed here in America on the west coast, with over a
thousand pounds of gold coins, ten times that much in
Chinese Amazon silver coins and about fifty million dollars
in American paper currency, my share of the copper I had
mined, I refused any of the Mithril, as I saw it meant far
to much to them. I did take some of the diamonds and the
gold crystal. I was very glad, that  I had learned Hidden
Weapons. This way I could carry my fortune and Oyaji didn't
know how much I had or where to find it. Cologne's had also
taught me a simple pocket dimension spell, which worked with
the Hidden Weapons to make sure that no thief would find
anything I didn't want them to find.

Cologne had admitted that there was  many more attacks she
could teach me. She also told me I would do better to learn
to produce more Ki and Mana and learn to store the power for
future use, before trying to learn some of the more advanced
attacks.

After Oyaji and I left China, we stopped in Japan for a bit.
I took a hotel room each  ( you should have heard Oyaji
scream. He sounded like a little girl, who had had her
lolliPop stolen. He really wanted to use the money for food
and Sake for himself.) I stayed in mine and meditated and
read a huge amount of manga. I also watched a lot of anime
and practiced making Ki and Mana. After a few weeks I tried
some new tricks. The first one was to defy gravity. I
managed to get my weight down to near zero, close enough
that I could stroll on the surface of water with out
sinking. I gave some tourists quite a shock, when I walked
down to the Ocean and kept right on strolling out.

The other idea I considered, I waited until we were out in
the desert in America. Then I threw a Kame Hame Ha, a Ki
blast. I used maybe a tenth of a percent of my Ki and almost
started a nuclear war. The blast was that big. I fused
almost a half mile diameter circle of sand into glass, five
feet thick. Fortunately I grabbed Oyaji and we ran for it.
The American government finally announced that an
experimental weapon had destroyed itself. Boy did I sweat
that one out. Oyaji was as worried as I was for once. It was
one of the few times Pop was willing to do something
Honorable. We had decided that if things got too bad we
would surrender our selves. The next such blast I tried was
a couple of million times weaker. It still hit like a
lightning bolt. I finally got one that was more like a Chi
blast but faster, safer and I could control it after it left
my hands.

As we moved across the country, I reminded Oyaji of the
Super-humans that were appearing. The Super heroes and the
super powered villains. I tried to  make him realize that
some of them could probably catch him and hold him without
too much effort on their parts. If he made trouble for them.

Finally I reminded him of my old friend Superboy. We had
been in America on a trip with Mom, and had stopped for the
evening in Smallville. I had watched as some fugitives from
the funtom no Phantom Zone had fought with Superboy. Then
one of them tried to take Mom as a hostage. Big mistake! I
threw them all over the place. Even then I was a tenth dan
in Judo, Jujitsu and Ti Quan Do among others. I kept them
busy long enough for Superboy to get some kind of red
machine which put them back in the jail they had escaped
from.

Mom suggested that Genma, she and I should teach Superboy
how use Martial Arts. We spent most  of a month trying to
get the basic concepts into his head. Then he fetched some
kind of red light which turned off his powers. We trained
him into a third dan in several types of unarmed combat and
two types of sword play. Shucks I learned more from Mom
then, than I ever learned from anyone else about how to use
a weapon effectively. That is one thing, Pop, never could
do. Even Cologne wasn't as good at using and teaching
Weapons as Mom.

Well here comes the Sergeant. I guess I will find out what
happens to me now. Humm I wonder who the woman is?


--
Rick Robinson
RICHARDROBINSON@prodigy.net


If violence is not solving your
problems you're just not using enough of it.

     Misato

"I guess I'm just an old-fashioned sentimentalist at heart.
I refuse
 to accept a no-win scenario.  I hate the thought of a
universe without
 justice.  If the maneuverings of dark powers can't be
exposed and
 defeated by the pure of heart, then there's no point in
anything.  I
 can't believe that."
                               -- Benjamin Hutchins



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