Check Back Later
A Ranma 1/2 Fanfiction
By MrThou
Disclaimer: I disclaim any ownership of the characters in this story. They were created by Rumiko Takahashi. I'm just borrowing them for a bit. This is also a work of parody based on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. Being a work of parody, it is protected by law.
Prologue
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Qinghai province of central China, there lies an utterly forgotten training ground.
To the north of this training ground at a distance of approximately forty kilometers, is a largish cluster of villages, whose insignificant population numbers less than four digits, and are so amazingly backward, they still think wind-up watches are a pretty neat idea.
These villages had a problem, which was this: Most of the people in it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. The men were unhappy because they were treated like slaves, and the women were unhappy because the men kept running away. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of them involved the movements of the men away from the village and being eaten by the local wildlife, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the local wildlife that was unhappy.
And so the problem remained; the women beat the men, the men ran away, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with wind-up watches.
Some people had speculated that moving from Greece had been a bad idea. Oh, sure, nature was pretty, and not paying taxes was quite nice, but all the isolationism was getting annoying. Nothing exciting ever happened. A few even suggested that perhaps beating up the men was a bad idea, but if they were male, they were beaten, and if they were female, they were burned at the stake as heretics.
And then, one Thursday nearly three thousand years after the founding of the village, a young man sitting alone under a tree realized exactly what all the other men were doing wrong, and his world could finally be a free and happy one. This time it was right, it would work, and he wouldn't get eaten by the local wildlife!
Sadly however, before he could dunk himself in the spring of drowned woman, and indeed, just as he arrived at Jusenkyo, he was knocked off a cliff by a girl chasing a panda, and ended up landing in the spring of drowned goat instead, and his wonderful plan failed spectacularly.
This is not his story(1).
Rather, it is the story of the girl who knocked him into the spring, and some of the odd consequences of her doing so.
It is also the story of how choking on a goat bone can radically alter the course of human events.
Most of the things that happened right after the girl knocked the boy into the spring are rather tedious and boring, and have little humorous value. As such, they will be referred to in annoying flashbacks, featuring running gags that will subsequently be beaten into the ground.
So the story of this girl, the goat, and lots of annoying flashbacks begins a year later, very simply.
It begins with rain.
(1) Which is a good thing, since he was caught, butchered, and prepared for a feast not twenty-four hours later, which would be a rather short and gruesome tale.
Author's note:
Obviously, I've been reading too much hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. Oh well, at least I wrote something.
-MrThou 12/22/2000
Comments welcome, flames ignored. If you're going to rip apart my story, at least be constructive.
