------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Sax and Time" by Angus MacSpon Based on characters and situations created by Rumiko Takahashi, Naoko Takeuchi and others, and used without permission. Comments and criticism welcome! Email: macspon@tamaneko.org Web: http://macspon.tamaneko.org/fanfic/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "What!" Akane stared in shock at her sister. "Mother is alive?" Her words were echoed a moment later by Kasumi. "It ... it can't be," the oldest Tendo girl stuttered, looking more astonished than her siblings had ever seen her. "Are you sure?" "Quite certain," Nabiki said, looking rather like the cat that had eaten the canary. "It seems that Mother didn't really die in that car accident a year after Akane was born. Instead, she was kidnapped by Mancunian separatists, brainwashed into joining them, and spent six months on the front lines fighting against the Scouse junta." Akane stared at her, open-mouthed. "Wha--" "Then," Nabiki went on, ignoring her triumphantly, "in mid-battle, she was struck on the head and left for dead. A wandering saxophone player saved her and nursed her back to health. The blow had given her amnesia, so she went with him, and they travelled together for some time. He would play the saxophone and she would perform exotic dances and pass the hat afterward. "A few months later, he was unexpectedly gored by a rampaging elephant, so she went on alone. But without his sensuous saxophony, she couldn't earn as much, and she ended up, penniless, in Norway. There she captured the eye of the visiting Maharajah of Gopal, who ..." Nabiki frowned at the notepad in her hand. "Well, the next part is pretty irrelevant. Anyway, eventually she settled down in Juuban, where she remarried, became a doctor, and had a fourth daughter. She's divorced now, but she and her daughter still live in Juuban." "Mancunian separatists?" repeated Akane, dazed. "Wandering saxophone player?" said Kasumi, a romantic light in her eye. "Apparently, yes." Nabiki studied her notes again. "Well, I did hear another story that she was caught up in a strange beam of light and transported to a mysterious world called Gaea. But there's no need to get silly." "Just how did you find all this out, anyway?" Akane asked suspiciously. Nabiki cleared her throat. "Putting that aside for the moment," she said, "our mother is alive and well, and we have a sister we've never met. Don't you think we ought to go see them?" "You have the address, I suppose?" inquired Ranma, who had been listening. Nabiki smirked. "What do you think?" * * * "You knew all that stuff before," said Akane angrily, a few hours later, "so how come you didn't know that Mother's away on a medical conference in Bengal?" It was starting to rain, which did not help. Irritated, Nabiki kicked a stone and muttered something under her breath that sounded a little like "... spy satellites." "Well," she said aloud, "at least we should be able to meet our sister. According to my information," (she shot Akane a look) "at this hour she should be visiting friends at the Hikawa Shrine. Right up here," she added, indicating a convenient nearby sign. The rain was thickening, and they climbed the steps to the shrine hastily, Ranma lagging a little behind as she readjusted her clothing. Moments later they were being shown into a room where several young girls were sitting. Nabiki looked around the faces quickly, then stepped forward with a confident smirk and said to one of them, "Mizuno Ami? My name is --" "MOTHER!!!" Without warning the tallest of the girls, a chestnut beauty with her hair in a ponytail, hurtled to her feet and launched herself into Ranma's arms. She was gabbling, "You'realiveyou'realiveohkamiyou're aliveIalwaysknewyouweren'treally ..." Ranma looked at the girl in her arms, baffled. Then her eyes widened. "Wait a minute," she said. "Makoto? Mako-chan? What are you doing here?" "Oh, Mother," murmured the girl, relaxing in Ranma's embrace, and presenting a slightly odd picture to the others as she was a good foot taller than Ranma. "I'm so glad you're back at last." Ranma felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned to see Akane, whose battle aura was lighting up the room like a carbon-arc lamp. "Er --" she began. "'Mother'?" said Akane simply. Ranma gave a feeble little laugh. "Um," she said. "That's sort of a long story." * * * "Let's see. It all began right after that martial-arts takeout race -- you remember it? I was walking home when I ran into this old man who said he was my great-great-great-great-grandson who'd come to teach me the secret of Martial Arts Time Travel. "Anyway, we went up into the mountains to start training, and he --" "Wait a minute," said Nabiki. "You _believed_ him?" Ranma blinked at her. "He was my great-great-great-great-grandson. Why would he lie to me?" "Right. Silly question. Go on." "Well, he taught me this really weird kata, then gave me this special soup to drink. He said it'd open my Fourth Eye or something like that ..." "A special soup to help you time-travel?" said one of the girls, the blonde with the bow in her hair, dubiously. "Umm, yeah. That does sound a bit funny, now I come to think about it. Mind you, he did say there were leeks in it." (At the back of the room, another of the girls, with long green-black hair, stiffened.) "Anyway, I drank it, and the next thing I know, I'm standing in this park at night. There's this girl there, and I'm about to ask her where I am, when suddenly this strange beam of light shines down on her out of nowhere, and she starts to drift up in the air. So I grab her leg and pull her down again, and she says thank you, and then these weird guys with guns run up and glomp onta her. Well, I'm about to save her again, but then the time soup kicks in again and I'm gone. "This time I find I'm standing on this little, you know, hillock in the middle of this real big city, and there's lots of people everywhere shouting in English, and suddenly I see this guy right next to me has got this gun to his head and he's about to kill himself! So I try to grab the gun away from him, but I'm too late, I only jog his arm, and the gun goes off and I see this other guy driving past in the back of a car jerk, so I figure he got hit in the shoulder or something ... only then I vanish from the knoll again, so I never got to check on him. "Next thing I know, I'm in the middle of this battle, people shooting at each other all round me, up ahead somewhere this guy's shouting out 'Death to the Scouse!' ... and then I see this woman nearby is about to get shot, so I knock her down out of the way -- stunned her, I think, but it was the only way to save her. Then I'm gone again. "So next I reappear in this hot, dry countryside, and I'm standing looking round, and I say to myself, 'Man, this place could use some rain. A _lot_ of rain.' And this old guy in these funny, real old-fashioned robes is walking past, and he hears me and says, 'What would become of me, then, and my sons and my herds?' And I figure he's joking, right, 'cause when did a little rain hurt anyone? So I say, 'Well, maybe you better build a boat then, big enough for your sons and all the animals.' And he gets this funny expression, but then I disappear again ..." Ranma sighed. "Anyway, that's how it went for quite a while -- wandering around, popping in and out all over the place. Sometimes I stayed in the same time for quite a while. After a bit I noticed that I wasn't aging, either. Maybe the soup did that. "I did a whole bunch of different things to pass the time -- even learned to play the saxophone once, travelled around for a bit as a musician, until I had this really bizarre accident. After that I tried cattle-herding, archery, architecture, masonry -- all kinds of stuff." "I suppose you build the pyramids as well?" asked the black-haired girl, Rei, sarcastically. "No, that was Ryoga. I stayed well out of Egypt -- too many cats around." "What was Ryoga doing in ancient Egypt?" asked Akane, startled. Ranma scratched her head. "You know, that's a good question. I'll have to ask him, next time I see him." "But what about me?" asked Makoto plaintively. "Oh, right. That was a weird one. I'd been in Scotland for a while -- I got to be friends with some of the guys there, I invented this game where you have to knock little balls into holes in the ground, it's harder than you'd think, and they got pretty enthusiastic about it -- when I popped out and appeared in this bizarre laboratory kind of place. There was this crazy little red-haired girl there, she said I was just the specimen she'd been looking for, and she caught me in this weird mechanical thingummy and started this experiment where she --" She broke off suddenly and coughed. "Well, anyway. Later on, she said she was doing an experiment in cloning. She was mixing whatsits, genes, from me and this other boy she knew -- did I mention I was stuck in female form at the time? That's a long story too, I can tell you if you want ..." Nabiki waved her hands hastily in an unmistakable 'no.' "Yeah, whatever. So I escape from this nutcase's lab and run upstairs. There's this guy and a whole bunch of girls living there, and they give me a room for the night. And when I wake up the crazy red-haired kid appears and says, 'Ta-dah! Finished!' and we see she's managed to create this actual _kid_ from the, um, samples she took. "Well, the guy says that means the kid is really our daughter -- his and mine -- so we have to raise her. And --" Ranma cleared her throat, looking embarrassed. "Well, I didn't have anywhere else to go. And I have to admit, she was cute as hell. "We named her Makoto. The other girls all helped, but mostly it was me and T-- umm, me and this guy who raised her." Ranma looked down at the girl in her arms, and smiled. "She grew up just fine, too. "Then, a few years later, me and the guy are going on a plane trip, and Mako-chan has to stay behind, and suddenly in mid-flight we're beamed aboard this spaceship and hauled off to another planet and the people there tell the guy that it's finally time that he takes over and becomes Emperor of the Galaxy or something ... and right then, the soup kicks in again and I disappear." She sighed. "That was the last time I saw Mako-chan ... until now." "Oh, please," snapped Akane. "Spaceships and galactic empires? Do you really expect us to believe that?" "Hey, it happened!" "But why didn't you come back and see me, after you finally got home again?" asked Makoto. Ranma cleared her throat. "Ahh, well, to tell the truth, I kinda got the dates mixed up. I didn't think you were going to be born for a few years yet." She gave a sheepish grin. "Umm, sorry about that." There was a slight pause. "So after that," Kasumi said delicately at last, "you finally came home?" "Well, not quite. I was still jumping around at random, you see. I ended up on some other planet, I forget the name ... met this young guy on the run from a syndicate of some kind. He said he wanted to be a bounty hunter. I taught him a little martial arts." Ranma smirked. "And then on another planet, I met this street kid who was trying to work out what to do with himself. He said he was thinking about the military life, but he wasn't sure if it was for him. I told him he should do whatever he wanted to do. He seemed kind of pleased by the idea. "And then I was back on Earth, and I met this poor schmuck who was just wandering around, and I offered to teach him martial arts too, but he said he'd had enough of that for a while, he wanted to try something else, so I taught him to play the saxophone. Then the soup kicked in again and --" "We get the idea," said Nabiki heavily. "Tell me, is there anything you _didn't_ do?" Ranma hesitated. "Well, at one point I may have, umm, well, sort of created the Universe. Only by mistake, though!" she added hastily. "I didn't mean to do it!" Everybody stared at her. "I sneezed at the wrong moment. It could happen to anyone!" The stares did not waver. Ranma scratched the back of her head nervously. "Hey, the life of a martial artist is fraught with peril, y'know." Still no answer. She cleared her throat. "Anyway, about then, the time soup wore off, and I reappeared back where I'd started. So I told the old guy thanks for the soup, and came on home." Ranma glanced at Akane, whose eyes were starting to look glassy, and said hastily, "And right after that Happosai showed up for the first time, so I forgot to mention all this to you. Er. Sorry." She waved her hand in front of Akane's eyes. "Hello?" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Author's Note: So ... in a post on the FFML, Allyn Yonge made reference to a pair of other fanfics: one in which Ranma was Makoto's mother, and in which Ami was Akane's sister. And I misread the message, and thought he was jokingly referring to a single (non-existent) story. And by the time I'd finished snickering over the idea, this was what had come out. I just want you to know ... this is NOT MY FAULT. It's Allyn's. Really. Series used or referred to: Ranma; Sailor Moon; Tintin; Escaflowne; Tenchi; Cowboy Bebop; Irresponsible Captain Tylor; Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Spot them all and win valuable prizes! Maybe.