Chapter 23. Tuesday, July 26

Ranma dreamed… She was backstage with her J-pop band. The dressing room was adorned with posters of all of them, looking youthful—almost prepubescent—with smiling faces and fantastic hair. There was a secret their screaming fans didn’t know about their favorite boy band: the boys were all girls. If anyone found out, of course, that would be the end of their success, but the only way to be this good at being a cute boy was to be a girl. That much had been obvious to all of them when they’d formed the band. They could hear the crowd roaring outside, and it was time to take the stage, to sing songs that had cute beats but were really about tearing down the patriarchy. They had all grabbed their instruments and headed for the stage when Ranma woke up.

She sat up in bed. That one was pretty decent, as far as her dreams went. She closed her eyes again and took a moment to enjoy visualizing her proper self in the mirror and then opened them to see the real thing, her alter ego, Ranma-kun, in all his sleepy morning glory. She was right yesterday when she’d made the remark about the boy-band look. He could pull it off, no problem.

I just need better clothes! Ranma-chan thought. Ranma-kun was such a frump. He needed a makeover, to emphasize that boyish charm, and make other girls envious of Akane when she showed off her catch. Heck, maybe she might even fancy him and add a whole new meaning to the phrase, “Go fuck yourself!” Okay, maybe that made no sense, but did anything these days? But, yeah, shopping with Akane could be fun, bring her in on the makeover gig.

* * *

Akane dreamed… She and Ranma had had to move to Thailand as that was the only place where people like Ranma could be themselves. People called her a “lady boy”, which wasn’t the kindest of terms, but it was really the sex work that Akane didn’t like. She felt out of her element here, but she…

Akane forced herself awake, more annoyed than ever by the dreams her sleeping brain offered up to her.

At least she knew the driver for this one. She’d looked through those books and articles that Dr. Tofu had left last night. There was a lot to digest, but one thing she’d picked up on right away was this: Not in Japan.

All the stories were about people living in other countries, like Thailand or the Netherlands, or little pockets of America like New York or San Francisco. There were a few stories about people who were Japanese, but they’d all moved abroad to live as their true selves. And no one was in high school. Not one—not even in other countries.

Reading all that stuff hadn’t offered any hope that someone in Japan who wanted to be a girl could find a path to their goal; on the contrary, it seemed to extinguish it completely. That cold, hard fact made acceptance of the situation essential for both girls; they would have to manifest and embrace Ranma-kun as best they could.

Akane got up and headed to the bathroom, where she was not surprised at all to find that, yes, right on time, she’d gotten her period. Whatever. Just one more thing to deal with among many.

When she got downstairs, she found that Ranma had insisted on making breakfast for everyone to give Kasumi a break, and was nearly done making tamagoyaki when she arrived. It smelled delicious.

“Hey, bestie, sleep well?” Ranma asked cheerfully.

Akane was glad she was cheerful. Wait, no…  Glad he was cheerful. “The dreams, Ranma, the dreams!” she said theatrically.

“Tell me about it. I had this whole boy-band dream, and that gave me an idea for us to go shopping and work on my look.”

Akane nodded at her—damn it—his suggestion, but she didn’t respond verbally. She was distracted by trying to process her own cognitive dissonance. He was standing right there, definitely shooting for that boy-band look, but there’s generally a boy in “boy band”. And yet Akane kept thinking “she”. It was disorienting. She tried to pin it down. It was… the voice? Or… Something else, anyway, something you couldn’t really pin down, just some sort of subconscious recognition of conflicting signals.

Akane tried again: It was like someone put on a disguise to fool you, but you weren’t fooled at all because you knew how they moved—that kind of thing. Yes. That made sense. Maybe it was openness and vulnerability rather than carefulness and defensiveness that she was picking up on. Wait… she had it now: there was Ranma when she was just relaxed, and then there was Ranma performing Ranma-kun. It was a subtle shift, but that had to be what she was picking up on. Performing-Ranma-kun–mode Ranma was definitely he, but when Ranma’s behavior was less deliberately performative, what she saw depended on the balance between how much her brain was weighting what she said over how he looked. It was complicated.

To escape those thoughts, she forced herself to focus on the food. The tamagoyaki was excellent, not quite to Kasumi’s level, but getting ever closer. Ranma had also made miso soup with tofu and wakame, with rice and pickles on the side, too. It was a nice breakfast. The conversation meandered, with a little discussion of their upcoming rehearsal and Ranma reiterating her idea that she and Akane should go shopping together. Akane thought about announcing her period; she felt that Ranma-chan probably would in her place, just as a way of pushing back on the way it was so often stigmatized and hidden, but she suspected that Kasumi and Nabiki would think she’d gone mad if she announced it triumphantly like someone in a commercial.

When they were nearly done, Ranma got up, went to the kitchen cabinet, and brought her some ibuprofen and some water. “Here, bestie, for your… uh… situation,” she said with a wink.

“Wait, how did you know?” Akane asked, surprised.

“Ranma-chan knows, bestie,” Ranma replied enigmatically.

Ranma was happy to let it be a mystery, but it hadn’t been that hard for her to put it together. For one thing, if Akane had had her period in the last few weeks, she’d have told her about it because they were close. But it was the motion planning when they were in the kitchen that really gave her away. She’d tracked Akane’s eyes going to the cabinet three times while they’d been in there, but for a variety of factors—probably including not wanting to give such an obvious tell to Ranma given her situation—Akane hadn’t followed through. But Ranma saw the intent; she knew.

And Ranma thought she’d done a fantastic job of masking her initial reaction when she put it together; her own grief that it was an experience now forever denied to her. She pushed the thought out into icy space beyond the moon and tried to be rational about it. And anyway, if she did like awkward encumbrances between her legs, who needed max-flow pads when you had flesh attached there 24/7? She had to let it go.

Back in the moment, they caught each other’s eyes, paused for a beat, and then said in concert, “I feel ready to take on the day, no matter what!”, echoing the tagline from a long-running series of tampon commercials. They laughed. They were both trying so hard, and it was working; they were pushing through, together.

* * *

They decided to head back to the Seibu department store in Ikebukuro to shop for some new clothes for Ranma-kun, since they’d probably have the kind of boy-band look Ranma was going for. Before they left, Akane made an unfortunate misstep when she asked if they should return the swimsuits while they were there. Ranma hadn’t been prepared for that one; it came out of the blue and hit her hard as the grief washed over her and felt rather too much like drowning. It was hard to rally after that, but, she told herself, there was always that spot beyond the moon to try to cram things into, and with a bit (a lot) of comforting from Akane, she was back to normal (well, somewhere orbiting the new normal) after only a few minutes. Akane learned an important lesson about being careful about what she said. Maybe they’d have to have a sort of funeral and bury the suits in the garden alongside some other hopes and dreams.

After a quick visit to the bathroom, Akane honestly had to admit that Ranma already looked pretty boy-band chic.

“To the world! And beyond!” Ranma-kun exclaimed, striking a heroic pose. He was definitely channeling him now, and all systems were go.

“Don’t overdo it, Ranma,” Akane cautioned gently, “Men aren’t all posing and arrogance; they’ve got nuances, too.”

“Boyfriend and girlfriend out for shopping and fun together, that’s us. No grandeur, just ordinary folks,” Ranma-kun ventured. “And secret besties!” she added in a hushed, conspiratorial tone.

They made a cute couple as they walked to the station, Ranma, with… say it… say it… his arm around Akane’s shoulders. There had to be some advantages to this oversized frame, and surely this was one of them. The heat and humidity weren’t too bad, although obviously it’d be nicer to have a bit more airflow around your legs, but Ranma-kun wasn’t about to wear shorts; that wouldn’t be the right look at all. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, until….

The train. That was the first sign of trouble. It was such an ordinary moment: a train arrives and you board. So it hadn’t been on her radar as a possible trouble spot, but… all the people. It was a weekday, and there were a lot of them, just ordinary people going about their ordinary lives, and, of course, many of them were women. It took her by surprise that just seeing people could be so hard to handle. Virtually every one of these women had a gift they didn’t even know they had: their own identity. They all took it for granted. There was a joke about two young fish swimming along, and then an older fish passes by and says, “How’s the water?” and the younger fish just look at each other and say “What’s water?”. It was exactly like that. They couldn’t see it. They couldn’t see what they had, how precious it was. Take it away and then they’d know. Put them in a male body, and they’d know. Maybe some would say “Wow, this is actually better!”. Others would say “Oh God, make it stop!”, and maybe a few might even say “Meh, makes no difference to me!”, but so many more would see the water. As it was though, they couldn’t see the water, and Ranma, beached on dry land, gasping, could only look at the fish swimming around merrily and mourn that she could never return to the ocean.

Thanks to Dr. Tofu’s reading material, Ranma knew enough to be able to name this feeling. It was just one of the ways that “gender dysphoria” could manifest itself. It took other forms, too, she’d learned. In fact, she had to admit that her ambivalence towards the body she was in was another one. But this experience… this was a whole new level of torment.

Come on, Ranma! What are your coping strategies? Think! Dissociation, maybe? Distraction? Visualization? The last one was out, sadly; her skills at overlaying reality with an imagined one were best used at night in her bedroom with her eyes closed, and here she had her eyes wide open in an ever-changing space. Wait! That’s it! Just close your eyes! Poof! Pretend it’s all gone. Pretend the train is filled with strange genderless dryads. You don’t need vision to sit and ride a train. She should have come up with this idea sooner, but then again, this was her first time out since Sunday’s disaster, so she shouldn’t be too hard on herself. She needed to get back into character. Um. Check on Akane? Hmm. Akane was looking concerned, but it hadn’t taken her that long to figure it out. A minute, tops.

Akane had been watching Ranma with some concern. He’d been doing really well right up until they boarded the train, and then he was clearly struggling with something. She could see it on his face, but she just waited. After a minute or two she watched him close his eyes and smile. Whatever it had been, it looked like he‘d sorted it out now.

“Just trying to take a micronap!” Ranma lied, eyes shut tight.

“I’ll watch over you. We’ll be there soon,” Akane said comfortingly. There were barely more than ten minutes to go until they could get off the train and she was there for support. They’d get through this little hiccup, whatever it was. They were a team.

Ranma found that walking through the station to get to Seibu wasn’t so bad. The problem with the train was being stuck in one place, with nothing to look at but the people around you. Next time, bring a book! Duh, that was at least half of it. She’d forgotten to bring a proper distraction. No wonder it’d been so hard. Well, she was new at this, but she was a quick study. She’d master it yet.

Their arrival at the entrance to Seibu revealed the true depths of her miscalculation. To reach the men’s section, they would need to cross the gauntlet of the women’s clothing section that was right at the entrance.

It wasn’t the clothes per se. Yes, clothes were nice. Ranma had some lovely dresses in her closet that she’d never be able to wear ever again, but she’d read some things where people made out that all the gender stuff was about clothes; some desire to put on something frilly and prance through the fields like in a tampon commercial. For Ranma, that definitely wasn’t it. She had some pretty dresses, sure; maybe that most recent one Akane had talked her into was a bit frilly; and she could certainly prance with the best of them (watch out for that girly girl technique!) but that wasn’t it. She’d be happy to live her life wearing a gray boiler suit if she could just have the right body to go in it. No, it was the whole thing. All these other women—wandering around, looking at the clothes, touching them, holding them up to a mirror to see what they’d look like on them—completely unaware of what a gift it was to have the body that went in the dress.

Ranma had ground to a halt just a few steps into the store. Inside her head, it was like a scene in a movie where there’s someone at the controls of an airplane and half the systems are failing, alarms are blaring, lights are flashing, and none of the hundreds of buttons, switches, and levers do what they’re supposed to do. On a sci-fi show, it’d be red alert, for sure.

Come on. This isn’t so hard, is it? Just stride across the floor in a proper, dudely way and get some cool boy-band clothes. But no, the controls were all haywire. She wasn’t moving. Damn it, she wasn’t supposed to have the breakdown now. She had been pretty sure how things would go. She was supposed to cope for a while before it all came crashing down. She’d had it all planned out.

She knew that the whole Ranma-kun thing was a long shot. That it probably wouldn’t work. That she’d never be the leopard that forgot. But the whole point, for her, was to at least build up the story. Build up Ranma-kun as plausible, so that when Ryoga finally got his bearings and came back in his quest for vengeance, dying in the fight would just seem like the ultimate consequence of male stupidity—a fitting epitaph for an idiot; an object lesson in the foolishness of prideful fighting. That option had been in her head as a backup plan in one form or another ever since Ryoga found her at the café; like Chekhov’s gun, locked and loaded. And now she found she couldn’t even handle the most basic of basics. Ryoga could hardly dispatch Ranma-kun if she couldn’t even pull off being him well enough to make it to the fight in the first place.

In the cockpit of her mind, all her coping strategies were failing. Yes, she could dissociate. She could shut out the world; hang out on a far asteroid, but that wouldn’t help her make it across the store. It was far too late for some kind of distraction—everything was way too present.

Even if she tried closing her eyes and navigating through the department’s deliberately winding maze of a path, she wouldn’t be able to imagine that all the people—all the women—she sensed among the racks were just genderless sexy dryads. No, none of this was working. She’d thought Sunday night was torture—ha—but now… now was actually worse, because back then, as the fathers worked their destructive idiocy on her body, at least no one had expected her to function. She’d been tied down so she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t do anything to help herself except hope.

But at least then she could hope—and her hope had been answered: a hero had even shown up in the form of the always amazing Akane with her valiant attempt to save the day—but there was nothing that could save her from this. This time, the bonds were inside her. They couldn’t just be cut away. This time, she needed a gag on the inside to keep herself from screaming. A lifetime of this hell stretched out in front of her.

Akane could tell Ranma was going through something major, barely holding it together, and it was pretty obvious that all the cute dresses weren’t helping. He’d stopped moving and was just standing there. People were having to detour around them; there was grumbling. She waited for a little bit longer to see if he’d recover, but time dragged on and he was still frozen. This feels a lot like that night at the Nekohanten, she thought, remembering the one previous time she’d seen Ranma exhibit this much distress. She put her hand on Ranma’s arm and carefully guided him to a seat in the nearby shoe section. “Let’s take a break, Ranma. You look like you need it.” She sat down beside him, trying to provide a reassuring presence and not make any demands. Just be there.

“I’ll be okay in a minute,” Ranma said, trying to manifest it as truth.

A young assistant came over to them and asked, “Can I help you girls with anything?” but Akane shook her head and waved her away.

They both did a bit of a double take. Had the assistant really said “you girls”? Ranma was very clearly presenting as Ranma-kun right now. It didn’t make a lot of sense.

“Maybe she reads auras?” Akane suggested, half jokingly.

Eventually, after many repetitions of her guiding him for a bit, him halting, and her taking him aside for a break before trying again, they made it to the men’s section. As far as Akane could tell, Ranma was nearly catatonic.

She picked out a few items that looked like they might fit Ranma-kun’s purported boy-band style, but Ranma didn’t offer any opinions. Akane paid for everything and then they headed back to the station, taking a different route out of the store that passed through a kitchenware section. Ranma perked up a bit there, saying that Kasumi had been complaining about an issue with the rice cooker and they should check prices and features. It was nice to see some spark of life return.

Akane was a bit surprised when Ranma picked up some random shōjo manga at a newsstand while they were waiting for the train. He buried his nose in it all the way home, barely looking away from it for more than an instant. She guessed he was using it as a coping strategy, and it seemed to be helping. After the swimsuit incident this morning, Akane had been more careful about considering everything she said to Ranma before she said it, so she decided she wouldn’t mention that he should have picked up a shōnen manga instead.

Once the train arrived at their station, they got off and headed for the exit. Akane paid close attention to Ranma’s expression, but he seemed to be mostly okay. He was walking at an appropriate speed, and he hadn’t locked up since they’d left the department store, although she did notice him walking with his eyes closed on several occasions a few times along the way. Their homeward walk offered no further drama, and they finally made it back home and into the house.

* * *

Once they were home, Ranma just wanted to retreat to her room, but Akane followed her, grabbing a few light snacks from the kitchen on the way to serve as a makeshift lunch. Akane wanted to know what had happened, especially in the store, and Ranma was too tired, too broken to deflect or pretend, so it all came tumbling out. The pain of just seeing ordinary people. Ryoga as Chekhov’s gun. The failure of every coping strategy she’d tried. The crushing weight of the world, and her utter hopelessness. Akane listened with growing horror. This was much worse than she’d imagined.

“I’m sorry, but I wish the CPR hadn’t worked, Akane,” Ranma said as her confessions drew to a close. “I would have died there, but it would have been a great place to roll the credits. I vanquished my enemy, and yes, it’s a tragic story, but it would be over, and the audience would leave with tears in their eyes. But it didn’t. It kept going.”

Her head drooped, and she trailed off, almost just speaking to herself, “When I took the bath I knew… knew it was hopeless….”

“Wait, what do you mean you ‘took a bath and knew it was hopeless’?”, Akane asked. She’d had enough misunderstandings with Ranma that she wasn’t going to let this strange phrasing slip by unexamined.

“I couldn’t feel the boundary of the curse anymore. It was gone.”

“What?” Akane said. “Ranma, what do you mean by ‘feeling the boundary of the curse’?”

Ranma explained how—before the set points were moved—she could feel the presence of the Jusenkyo curse when she was in cold water; the sense of gentle pressure, of comfort, of coming home. It was like a warm blanket wrapped around her in the cold. How it felt in the bath compared to the pool; how she could feel the strength of it; but now there was just nothing; nothing to feel.

“Wait there! I’ll be back!” Akane said excitedly as she dashed out of the room. She walked as quickly as she could to the 7–Eleven. She bought all the ice she could reasonably carry and headed back. She was going to conduct an experiment.

In the bathroom, she ran the cold tap until the water was as cold as it got, then filled the bath partway and dumped the ice in. She added a bit more water until she was sure it was deep enough for Ranma to get fully under the water. Then she went to Ranma’s bedroom.

“Come with me,” she commanded. “Right now.”

Ranma complied, confused. Akane showed her the ice bath and told her to get in. Maybe it’d work and she’d transform, but if not, maybe it would be cold enough for her to feel the curse. Akane gave her some privacy.

Ranma slid into the icy water, and managed to completely submerge herself. It was cold. Really cold. If it hadn’t been for all her imagination of ice caves and the bleak vacuum of space, her body might have shivered uncontrollably, but she was suppressing it for now. She tried to feel for the curse. It was hard because her skin was so cold, but the pressure was never exactly against your skin, it was in that other direction. The cold was making it hard to think, but there was something out there, out beyond. If she hadn’t felt the weirdness on her back two nights before, she wouldn’t have been able to place it, but, yes, it was there, but it was out of reach. She called to it, and she almost felt like it noticed her, but it did not react.

She knew her body couldn’t take any more of this cold and managed to stumble out of the bath and into the shower, setting it at lukewarm first and slowly building it up to warm but not hot. She let herself shiver.

When she was done, she toweled off and came out to find Akane waiting in the changing area.

“Well,” Akane said, “was it there?”

“I’m not sure,” Ranma replied. “I think so, but it was really hard to tell. The cold was messing with my senses. I think it was out there, but it’s… too far away.”

After a moment’s thought, she added, “I don’t know whether to feel more hope that there’s something, or crushed because it’s too far away. We could try with more ice, but I don’t think it’ll make much difference.”

But now Akane had hope. She was, it was well established, better at chemistry than Ranma. She remembered a bit more about water than Ranma did, and that gave her some ideas. But she kept it to herself, for now. There was no need to get both their hopes up and have them dashed again; Ranma was fragile enough as it was. Akane needed to do some research.

“Well, we learned something, and that’s better than nothing. We’ll do some more experiments after the social worker has been and gone, okay?” said Akane, encouragingly. “But right now, we’ve got the rehearsal stuff to do; let’s get your hair dried and put you into some nice boy-band clothes.”

“Bestie,” Ranma declared weakly, with a weary smile. It was good to see Akane with hope in her eyes. And it was a win–win. The next experiment would probably barely move the needle, if anything, but who needed Ryoga when you had your bestie lining up death by hypothermia for you as a shiny new exit plan?

* * *

When their fathers arrived, Ranma stayed upstairs while the Tendo sisters met with them. Nabiki took charge, and explained the plan for the day. She told them she would play the role of the social worker, and she would ask questions of each family member in turn.

Nabiki explained that what mattered most was for them to confidently project the feeling and appearance of a normal, loving home, and that put much of the burden on the fathers. Who were supposed to be the responsible adults, she didn’t say out loud. Akane and Kasumi were probably thinking the same thing, but they kept their mouths closed and their faces (mostly) neutral.

Because their part was so important, Nabiki would start the interviews with the fathers. She expected that the social worker would, too, unless she decided to go straight to Ranma before talking to anyone else.

After all the practice interviews were done, they would allow the fathers a few minutes in a room with Ranma just to make sure that everyone could keep up the pretense for a little bit of everyone-together time to seal the deal. Then the fathers would leave.

Nabiki had just about finished laying things out when Ranma unexpectedly appeared, apparently ignoring the part of the plan that had her staying out of sight until later.

Ranma just casually slipped into the room, sipping from a glass of water, expressionless. Early on, between everything else churning around in her mind since Sunday night, she’d worked out endless variations of grand speeches in her head. They usually started with how her father was dead to her now and how what he’d done was the worst violation anyone could commit against another person. There would be a whole diatribe about who she really was. Sometimes they included a bit about how she would have preferred dying to what they’d done to her. Some of them had her trying to express the crippling emotional pain she felt from existing in this body.

She had the whole monologue pretty much ready to go. But she was too tired now—that emotional pain really was crippling—and anyway, she’d probably be dead soon, so it was better to be magnanimous. She wasn’t going to say “I forgive you”—not today, likely never—but her father was just too stupid to deserve her angst.

“Hey, Pops,” she said weakly. She put the glass down on the table, but in her tired state, she’d placed it right on the edge, and it teetered, then started to fall over. Ranma was slow to react at first, and then dashed forward to stop it from smashing on the floor. She failed to connect properly, and the glass spun, throwing its contents into the air, with the water somehow making it all the way across the room before raining down on her father. His curse responded instantly, transforming him into his panda form and rendering him incapable of human speech. Meanwhile, after a slight stumble, Ranma had caught the glass before it hit the floor and stood with it in her hand, looking apologetic for the freak accident.

Akane saw the whole thing. She knew it hadn’t been an accident. Ranma’s “stumble”, her “missed” grab at the glass that set it spinning, and, of course, her recovering her balance having somehow saved the glass…. She’d seen it all before. Ranma’s apologetic look at the end was the real giveaway. The whole routine was from the same family of moves as Ranma’s girly girl techniques. It had been deployed precisely to silence Genma, who was now holding up a little sign that said “Hi”.

Still looking apologetic, Ranma turned her attention to Soun. “Hey there, Tendo-san,” she began. “You know, that bruise on your face isn’t going to look good to the social worker. We gotta cover that up somehow….”

Soun protested but was overruled. All the Tendo sisters pooled their makeup to find good concealer that would match their father’s skin tone, but Ranma insisted on being the one to do the work. Akane emphasized that from recent experience, Ranma was really good, and in any case, it was surely more manly when your makeup wasn’t being done by a girl but by Ranma-kun.

The bruise from Akane’s mallet covered quite a bit of his face, and enough time had passed for most of it to be a dark purple-blue color, with just a few areas of brown and yellow around the edges where it was starting to heal. Covering a bruise that large and with that range of colors was a significant challenge, but Ranma somehow managed to make it seem to disappear. A little more detailing, and Soun could, if you wanted to be particularly charitable, described as “rocking a boy-band vibe”.

The key result was that they’d proven that makeup could be used to make Soun look, well, more, normal. Once everyone had agreed (the panda with a thumbs up), Soun immediately went to the bathroom and washed it off.

When it was time for Genma’s interview with Nabiki, Kasumi fetched some hot water and transformed him back to human form. The practice interview turned out to be heavy going; this rehearsal had absolutely been necessary. Genma seemed to be completely clueless about how a normal parent would behave. When asked about discipline, Genma detailed various things he had done in its name, and for each and every one of them, Ranma and all the Tendo sisters would tell him, “No, you can’t say that!”, because the revelation would almost certainly be seen as abuse and added to the report.

Similarly, on the topic of martial arts—which was bound to come up given that they had a literal dojo attached to their house—Genma was eager to talk about all the fights Ranma had been in and won and his pride about Ranma’s mastery of the Cat Fist technique….

Kasumi had to excuse herself and leave the room shortly after Genma began talking about the Cat Fist. She was too raw about it and didn’t trust herself to stay calm. She walked back to her bedroom and stood motionless for a while, trying to center herself. Monster or idiot? Both, probably. She’d love to do something to that man. And then she thought of Ranma’s little accident with the glass of water, and how Genma had been silenced so effectively. Maybe there was a way to deal with him after all. She stumbled slightly. Then she stumbled again and smiled.

* * *

Meanwhile, back at the dojo the other girls had to stop Genma and patiently explain—again—why telling a social worker about how violent and dangerous your child is is not the best way to indicate good parenting. As for the Cat Fist, well, that story checked every possible box in the “No, don’t ever say that!” category, many of them several times over.

They’d guessed Genma would answer the way he did, so Nabiki gave him a list of talking points he could use to talk about martial arts: that it wasn’t about fighting or violence at all, but instead about moving one’s body in space, carefully choosing points of contact, precise control of that contact, using one’s mind and body together, and so on. Vague stuff. The sort of thing someone might tell a mother trying to decide whether her son should be allowed to study martial arts.

Genma wasn’t convinced, arguing that he knew infinitely more about martial arts than Nabiki, and that her suggestions left out almost everything that was really important, but Nabiki insisted that the talking points she’d given to him—and nothing more—was how they were going to go, and that Genma needed to commit them to memory. The page also included a few other phrases that Genma would probably never think to use, such as “I love my child”.

Kasumi slipped back in as Nabiki was finishing up with Genma. She brought some drinks and snacks, making it look (she hoped) like that had been her plan all along.

Soun’s interview went a bit smoother, but Nabiki gave him some talking points to learn, too.

Ranma (of course) passed Nabiki’s test with flying colors; every answer was pitch perfect for a balanced, well-adjusted young man who loved his father, did well in school, and was completely normal. The medical issue that apparently led to her visit was simply an allergic reaction to some food from the Nekohanten. And, yes, of course, everything was fine now, but perhaps the health department should give the place an inspection just to be sure; the woman who ran the place was old and might be losing it.

Soon enough, the fathers were on their way. As they departed, Genma moved forward to say something to Ranma, but Akane excitedly exclaimed, “Ooh, a squirrel!” and jumped for joy in girlish glee. Unfortunately, that caused some of her drink to fly out of the glass into the air, and in a freak accident, it ended up landing on Genma. Akane was a quick study. She could do the girly girl techniques, too. Genma, in panda form, held up signs saying, “Bye” and, “See you tomorrow”, and both fathers finally left.

At dinner later, it turned out that Kasumi and Ranma had made red-bean rice. It was always a good comfort food, and it made Akane smile.

Akane and Ranma tried to have another normal evening and mostly succeeded. It was much better to just be two besties together rather than channeling any performances.

As she snuggled in her bed, calling her true form back to mind for comfort, Ranma-chan reflected that on the day. Much of it had been pretty tense, but there had been a few high points. Akane seemed hopeful, which was nice, and she, at least, had some fun of her own planned for tomorrow. It didn’t take long at all for her to drift off to sleep, chuckling quietly to herself.