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  Yeah, it is late for the first, but I was watching Four Rooms for 
the ninetieth time on the HoBO.  An avid fan of all things visually 
Japanese, manga more than anime, I was shocked to realize one 
day that I had never written any such fan fiction. I offer this, my 
first effort but not likely my last, into said unfamiliar world. A 
story about five minutes in the world of Ranma, where they 
lose a little bit of Ranma. For a reason. It has no title, nor does it 
warrant one. Private replies appreciated, if you see anything in this 
at all.

  (Please! :)







   An Anime Fan Fiction.



  It was night, maybe still late evening, though the sun was 
not visible, hidden by large opaque clouds to the far West from 
where it would not return. Saotome Ranma sat perched, smoking, 
on the roof of an unknown house in the far reaches of Nerima, a 
house he neither knew the address nor the owners of, nor had he 
ever seen by day. He was squatting on the curved tile spine of the 
roof with one finger pointed out before him for extra balance, and 
he was listening to the rush of flowing water.

  It always started as the sound you hear riding a bicycle 
through thick fog. Just a far away whisper. And then you would 
begin to hear the sloshing around the rocks, then the hiss of the 
faster current, and finally the burbling of the surface water itself, a 
much greater noise, but somehow hidden behind that of the others.

  He stopped breathing for an instant and let the hot smoke 
chimney up his nostrils and burn the sensitive skin. It hurt, though 
it was the fourth time he done so with this long Taiwanese 
cigarette. 

  "Shhhhhhhhhhhh...." he finally allowed himself.

  He sat on the roof of a house in a place he was mostly sure 
that he couldn't possibly run into or be found by anyone related to 
him, either by blood, by law, or rage-uttered personal oath. He 
laughed when he thought about Ryoga, nodded when he thought 
about Kuno, smiled when he considered Shampoo, frowned when 
he visualized Akane, probably asleep on her futon, thinking about 
some facet of her life. All of them, always there. Always more than 
he last counted, and always the bringers of some new emotion. It 
was funny how the more they hated him(or loved for that matter), 
the closer they became up until the onset of a physical conflict, 
which he always won, and always sent the loser home with a 
lesson in personal diplomacy.

  "...it," he finished.

  It filled some small errant desire in him to do this once a 
month and let his mind indulge in the fear of the unknown. Ranma 
had no doubt that he was a model among men, but over the last 
year or so he had noticed the smallest tinge of something like 
xenophobia or possibly agoraphobia. 

  It had happened like this. Weeks ago, he who calls himself 
Ryoga had borrowed a bokken from him with some fairly nice 
kanji inscribed on the handle to practice 'menn' strikes on 
Tatewaki Kuno's head, who had apparently trampled him several 
minutes before in a rush to ogle Akane. Or maybe it had been him 
in his girl form, he couldn't exactly remember. No, wait, it had 
been Akane, because he remembered having some interest in doing 
the same thing when Nabiki had come around letting people know 
that her sister was practicing swimming in the baby pool. Ryoga 
had been shouting his head off about what a simp Kuno was for 
thinking an apology meant anything in this neighborhood, so 
Ranma gave him one of Soun's lesser ornamental weapons to get 
him to go away. Of course there was a fight, and the bokken broke, 
and Ryoga, secretly stabbed with guilt, came running at him again 
that afternoon yelling something about the idea that it was 
Ranma's fault there was a fight, and therefore damage to the 
bokken had been as well.

  Shampoo had been with him at the time, and they were 
chatting about school, and why she should really go if she ever 
wanted to get out from under her great grandmother's thumb 
(Ranma's idea), and upon seeing Ryoga bust through their fence, 
probably with the use of directions supplied by Akane's sister, she 
had smiled and walked away to let whatever was going to happen, 
happen without her. Ranma had looked over at the form of his 
furious friend, felt the intense battle aura tingle against his nose, 
and had waited for the first sign of impending combat. 
That sign was a tightening of his waist usually followed 
closely by a hot flash on his face as his brain shifted its 
concentration to his muscle.

  And of course that happened as he knew it would. But he 
had realized in that long past instant that the reaction hadn't been a 
true reaction this time. No. It had been an instinct, one-second-
delayed and perfectly punctual at the sight and feel of Ryoga's 
rippling shape. 

  Shaking his head at Ryoga after a moment where he 
considered whether or not to care about this little discrepancy, the 
other man cocked his head back, dropped the pieces of the 
shattered wooden sword, and asked, "What?"

  Ranma had looked down after a second and shrugged. "I 
don't know," he had said. "Something just felt wrong."

  "What are you sick?"

  "No, it's nothing." He had looked over his shoulder to the gate 
where Shampoo had exited and saw her on her bike pedaling away 
down the street. Then he turned again and walked into the dojo. 
Ryoga followed him for a few steps, until he thought he heard the 
cry of the Blue Thunder from somewhere close by, and took off at 
a run to conclude his revenge, the other bitterness apparently 
forgotten.

  Ranma had been thinking about that afternoon off and on 
for a solid month now. It had completely stopped 'bothering' him, 
but the fact that it had been such a weird, uncharacteristic thought 
had not let him forget it; especially the moment where he realized 
he was actually going to try to figure out why the reaction had 
been fake and not real.

  He hadn't figured it out yet. Sure he had many believable 
theories, but they hadn't assuaged his curiosity like they usually 
would, considering the flighty quality of his memory of instants of 
self doubt. They sat in his mind as just that, good, solid, theories 
that certainly might be true. One of them was, obviously, since he 
knew his own body better than anybody and the voice of true 
reason must have spoken up in his mind at some point.

  But he just didn't seem to care about that. This was less a 
case of curiosity, and more a case of slight unintentional interest in 
a self of the recent past. A self that had fit in, otherwise perfectly, 
in the sequence of selves up until that second and for every fraction 
of a second afterward until the present. He realized that a small, 
otherwise unemotional part of him had taken interest in that 
moment of reflection and made it its personal goal to get him 
thinking about it as much as possible.

  And he had. He thought about the reaction, the second he 
knew that it had been fake, the second he knew he had no real 
memory of ever having a fake reaction before. Especially there 
was that in-between second where he had unconsciously compared 
his readiness and prediction for the upcoming reactions with the 
reactions themselves and saw that they shared a single line of 
causality with each other and nothing else. The reaction had been 
an extension of the prediction, and therefore was caused by the 
prediction. (Not directly by Ryoga.)

  He stopped breathing once more and let his nostril bite a 
small whiff of smoke. 

  Good. This time there had been no interruption in the sound 
of rushing water. This meant he must have listened to the sound of 
it for enough minutes to get it stuck in his ears and be unaffected 
by smaller outside impulses. In deep meditation, he had been able 
to drown out the much greater pain of freezing water and quick 
blows as his father and other teachers had trained him. He had 
known he could do it as well, even before experiencing it. He knew 
his body worked like that. He knew his body liked to pick and 
choose what it wanted to feel, in order to give his growing 
personality and grip on reality what it needed to stay warm and 
comfortable. When it could, anyway. Training allowed greater 
chances for that, and this simple exercise with the cigarette fell 
well within those bounds. 

  He didn't even like cigarettes. 

  He let it fall from his mouth and roll haphazardly down the 
tiled roof onto the street below, where it would land safely in a 
puddle. 

  Or maybe it wouldn't. Maybe it would fall into a waste 
basket and catch some papers on fire. The paper on the side of the 
trashcan that sat partially under the roof would still be dry after the 
earlier rain shower. Eventually the flames would coalesce and melt 
the plastic garbage can, then set something else on fire. He could 
visualize it easily, the wooden doorways catching sparks and then 
consuming the structure wholly within minutes, an inferno, hot 
flames licking up at the tail of the retreating black cloud, people 
running around to find hoses, he and his female self possibly 
caught in a very bad situation.

  But no, it had fallen into a puddle. He did not know this 
based on knowledge of the area surrounding this house's northern 
roof, though he had a good idea. He knew it because the 
visualization of himself on the burning house was suddenly 
interrupted with the snide question, "Hey, would your first reaction 
to that little situation be all fake as well?" And he hadn't even 
thought about the Ryoga incident in at least five minutes.

  So he squatted there, rocking himself back and forth mere 
millimeters as his single finger made tiny, minuscule corrections in 
applied force in completely subconscious reactions to the tiny 
changes in a barely perceptible wind; and he looked at the clouds 
in the distance, and he wondered where the sun was, and then he 
thought about what a damn riot it would be if he had Shampoo and 
Akane both in one of his harder classes next year.



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  I didn't label this dark or anything because it isn't. Just unusual, as 
is explained herein. And not OOC, not because I haven't seen 
other spam way more ooc than this without the tag, but because I 
think this is very in-character, and see no reason why it wouldn't 
be, considering the premise. I hope the point of this came across, I would
love to hear what you think.




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