NOTICE: None of these characters belong to me and I haven't made a single
cent by writing this story! I have no money, don't sue me!
NOTICE II: If you're offended by sex, bondage, sadism, masochism, dominance, or submission, then you don't know what you're missing! You also shouldn't be reading this story!
________________________________________________________________________
All was quiet at the Tendo dojo as the sun broke out over the Nermia ward. This was not uncommon, as the louder residents of that household usually don't get out of bed until much later. Unfortunately for the tranquillity of the early morning, however, the normal routine of the household was not being followed today. Ranma, arguably one of the noisiest and most destructive individuals in all of Japan, was stalking quietly about the house this morning.
Why, you may ask, is this? The answer is simple. Just the previous night Happosai had unleashed a new and horrible technique into the unfortunately very large vocabulary of such techniques Ranma already possessed. Of course no great power comes without its price. The price in this case being a rather naughty underwear show conducted for one sex obsessed old master by one martial arts obsessed young aquatransexual. Unfortunately for the natural order of the universe, Ranma was both stubborn and proud.
This great technique, called the "War of Heaven", could defeat an army of masters if properly executed. Unfortunately Happosai couldn't properly execute it. If he could, Ranma would have seen it performed about a hundred times by now, and then both fools would be throwing the technique back and fourth by mid-day.
Now some people would be asking how this could be a bad thing. The answer to this question is a bit harder to perceive than the answer to the one previous. You see if Ranma had mastered the technique the hard way, then he wouldn't have gotten up at the crack of dawn to search the house for the ancient text that described its use. And if he hadn't gotten up so early to conduct his extensive search, then perhaps Kasumi would have arrived in the kitchen to begin breakfast before the questing boy could divert his attention to the pantry. And if Ranma had never made it to the pantry, then he wouldn't have discovered the strange text that he was currently lifting from its hiding place below the pantry floorboards. And so, if Happosai had remembered his stupid "War of Heaven" technique, perhaps Ranma's eyes would never have crossed the taboo book that he had discovered. A book entitled…
"THE SECRETS OF CONTROL – A GUIDE FOR MASTERS"
A Ranma ½ Fanfiction by GundamAce
Part I-A of the Lemon/Lime continuity
(Insert Theme Music of Choice Here)
Ranma held his breath as he lifted the script from its resting-place. He turned it over in his hands a few times after carefully reading the title. The book wasn't what he was expecting. It was old, but not ancient. It looked more like something he'd expect to uncover at a used bookstore than something from which powerful martial arts techniques were learned.
In Ranma's experience, techniques usually came written in the form of scrolls, not professionally published and western style bound books. The title, however, belied its innocent exterior. It was a guide for masters.
It was also hidden, which means that its contents must be important. 'Besides', Ranma figured, 'I've searched the rest of the bloody house already, and this is the closest thing I've found'.
A smile crossed Ranma's lips. Soon the old fart would learn the true power of the Anything Goes School of Martial Arts. "I got ya this time, you dried up old pervert! I'm gonna kick your butt with your own secret techniques!"
The smile faded into a look of ninja like readiness as Ranma scanned the room to ensure he had not been discovered. The book quickly disappeared into Ranma's shirt as he leapt outside and onto the roof to avoid being caught with his prize. It's a fortunate thing he did too; otherwise Kasumi would have surely spotted him as she came down to make breakfast.
As it was, all Kasumi discovered was the mess in the pantry. Her eyes instantly became glued to the pried open hatch that had once been securely hidden by a large bag of rice. The eldest Tendo daughter felt her heart sink into her stomach as she realized that the hole was now empty.
"…oh my…"
* * *
Once safely on the roof, Ranma sat down and joyfully pulled out his prize.
"I got it!" He whispered excitedly, "I finally got away with getting one of these stupid techniques without being hit by it!"
Ranma opened the book and began quickly thumbing through it. The first realization that he came to was that it was full of pictures. This wasn't particularly out of the ordinary because most instruction manuals do, in fact, possess illustrations to help teach more visually oriented students. What was unusual was the fact that these were photographs and not drawings. This is not something usually associated with a technique that hasn't been practiced in three hundred years.
The pictures were made stranger still by the fact that they didn't seem to depict any type of martial arts at all. Some of the images contained images of strikes, weapons, and other such trademarks of the art, but none were related to a martial art practice. Of course Ranma was having trouble grasping that little piece of evidence because something of far greater importance had caught his eye. Ranma had noticed that there was an awful lot of exposed flesh in those pictures.
It took Ranma's brain a few minutes to start working again, but when it did he remembered that anything owned by Happosai had to be really perverted. The pictures, Ranma figured, must have been added later. Happosai probably used them to power up his ki while he was practicing the move or something. That had to be it. The secrets of the War of Heaven must be contained in the writing!
And so Ranma read…
"…before letting her orgasm…" Nope.
"…a good technique is to start from the top of the ass and work down…" Wrong technique I think.
"…blindfolds, restraints and riding crops…" Uh…
The book closed. Ranma turned about as red as his favorite shirt. Once again he had to spend a few moments re-establishing a hold on his thought processes.
"Oh man! What is this thing? I must have grabbed the wrong book. I gotta put this thing back before someone notices it's missing." Ranma cursed as he leapt off the roof and rushed back into the kitchen where he promptly realized that his intended path was impeded.
* * *
Kasumi was kneeling in the pantry by the hidden trap door as the skilled martial artist stumbled over his own feet in an effort to avoid colliding with her. She turned just in time to watch him expertly alter his course so that he instead decimated the island in the middle of the kitchen.
"Oh! H-hello Ranma. I… um… uh… Can I help you?" Kasumi fidgeted and tried to position herself between Ranma and the now empty hole.
"Huh? Oh! Sorry about that. I… uh… I just came in for some… um… some hot
water! Yeah! That's it!"
"Ah. It's on the… stove… Ranma, you're… um… not a… not a girl at the moment. What… uh… what's the water for? …if you don't mind me asking?"
For a moment Ramna froze like a deer caught in headlights. "For? Um… For later! I… I need it for later. …heh heh…" Okay, that was a weak lie. Any minute now the whole family's going to bust in here and start laughing at me. Akane's going to call me a pervert, and then I'm going to go cloud surfing again. I hate days like this.
"Oh. All right then."
"Well, um… thanks!" Thank God for small miracles. "I guess I'll just be going now then…" Ranma turned to rush out the back door.
"Ranma, wait!" Kasumi's voice caused Ranma to jump right out of his skin.
"Huh?"
"Um… That is… I seem to have misplaced a book of mine… a cookbook. I… I don't suppose you've seen it lying around anywhere? It was an old western style hardback?"
The gears began turning in Ranma's mind. "…Western style hardback? Um… no… I, er, um… haven't seen anything at all like that around here." He feebly stuttered out as he shifted the position of the book to conceal it better.
"Oh… okay then… I, um… should get back to looking then." Kasumi stammered.
The obvious embarrassment playing across the usually unshakable young woman's body wasn't lost on the heir to the school of anything goes.
"Riiiight… I'm just going to take my kettle and leave then. Good luck with that whole cookbook thing".
Ranma backed out of the door watching the eldest Tendo daughter squirm. Eventually he turned to leap over the compound wall and make his escape.
* * *
Ranma ended his Saotome secret technique under the water canal bridge where he began to pace at a feverish rate. Images of Kasumi in tight leather danced in his head as he tried to pull his mind back together.
"OhMyGodOhMyGodOhMyGodOhMyGodOhMyGod."
Eventually he stopped and pulled out the book. The realness of the item seemed to calm him a bit while strangely filling him with apprehension at the same time.
"It couldn't be," he said as he looked down at the offending piece of literature. "Not Kasumi! She's the only sane one in the house! I must have misread it. Yeah! That's it! I misread it! Of course!" he reasoned as he flipped open the book to confirm that it was in fact simply a harmless stack of paper.
The page that greeted him sported a picture of a naked woman tied to a pole while a man in a latex mask was slapping her inner thigh with a cat-o-nine tails. Ranma briefly shuddered at the instrument depicted.
"Nope. Didn't misread it. Damn! Now what do I do?"
Forlornly the boy plopped down under the bridge to have a good long think. He glanced once more back down at the picture only to have his face color yet again this morning. "Why couldn't you have been a cookie recipe or something?" he muttered as he thumbed his way through the text.
"I guess it's not that bad. I could just tell her that I found it lying around and didn't read it or something," he lamented as he continued to browse the pages. After a few seconds he stopped his page flipping and once again attained a nice tomato red hue. "Oh my…"
* * *
It was already dark by the time our hero got back to the Tendo house. After an entire day of hard contemplation and frequent blushes, Ranma had finally decided that this coming confrontation was unavoidable. That's why he was now sitting in a tree branch just outside Kasumi's window.
"At least this is Kasumi," the boy told himself. "If it was Nabiki I could just kiss my freedom and dignity goodbye". And with that the boy hopped to the roof of the Tendo home and flipped himself over the edge so he could knock on the eldest Tendo's window.
* * *
Guests were a rare thing in Kasumi's room, but that didn't mean she wasn't familiar with the protocols and procedures associated with greeting guests. Thus she had no reservations about inviting in the nice boy who was polite enough to knock to gain entry, even if he was doing so upon her second story window while suspended upside down from the roof of her home.
Kasumi had a polite smile on as the boy came through the rather imaginative entry way. "Why hello Ranma. Can I help you with something?" she gretted.
"Um… yeah… uh… We, uh… we need to talk." Ranma stuttered as he tried to summon a bit more courage than he thought he'd need.
"Of course Ranma. Please, come in."
"Uh… thanks… Um… look… uh…" Ranma continued to stammer as he desperately tried to remember the nice speech he had planned out under the bridge only half an hour ago.
"Is everything all right? You look troubled? Why don't you come here and have a seat?" Kasumi asked as she had a seat on the bed and innocently patted the section next to her in invitation.
Upon noticing the seemingly innocent gesture giving by the seemingly innocent young and somewhat underdressed book owner, who was sitting on her seemingly innocent four poster queen sized bed, a look of utter terror spread across Ranma's face. "No! ...uh… I mean, that's all right Kasumi. I'm fine. Really," Ranma blurted out as he began to nervously scratch the base of his pigtail.
Kasumi noticed the distress in his voice, but couldn't fathom what had caused it. "What's the matter, Ranma? Is it Akane? Did you two have another fight?"
"A-Akane? Um… no. It's not like that. I uh,… that is to say… I…" The nervous scratching became more intense and the boy looked to the floor to hide the huge blush that was spreading across his face. "I found your book." With that Ranma reached into his shirt and removed the object in question. He quietly placed it on the foot of the girl's bed.
"Oh… Oh my… Oh Ranma, it's… Oh my…" Kasumi took her turn at stuttering as she too became a healthy shade of red. "Did you read any of it?" she finally asked.
With the confession out of the way, Ranma began to calm. He took the offered seat on the bed and began to try and explain things. "I'm sorry Kasumi. I thought it was that old pervert's secret technique. I didn't mean to…"
"It's okay Ranma. I'm not mad… Just please don't tell father. I don't think he'd understand." Kasumi sighed. This discovery wasn't nearly as frightening as some of the scenarios she had imagined in the past.
"He wouldn't be the only one," Ranma whispered under his breath without thinking. Kasumi seemed to hear him anyway.
"What?" she asked.
"Um, are… are you really like this?" was all the pigtailed youth could think to respond with.
"I… I do have a bit of a… curiosity," she confessed.
"Oh. So you've never, um, you know?"
"No! Not much really… Not today anyway." By this point it was Kasumi who was matching Ranma's shirt. She didn't really want to admit these things, but she just couldn't bring herself to lie to her future brother-in-law.
"Ah… Um… Do you know… that is… are people really? You know! Are there people that are really like this?" Ranma asked.
"Yes. I know several, in fact," the young woman answered. It clearly hadn't been the series of accusations she'd been expecting though. She was a little put off by the direction the conversation seemed to be headed. "Why do you ask?"
"It… it, uh… Man, this is hard…" Ranma replied while refreshing his blush.
At this Kasumi began to smile. "Oh, is that the problem! Well, I think you're in the wrong room for that. Akane is down the hall silly!" she joked as a series of mirthful giggles began to overtake her.
Ranma's flush deepened from further embarrassment and perhaps a bit of frustration. "No! Not that! Talking! Talking about this is hard!"
At Ranma's outburst Kasumi lost control of herself and her soft giggles became full blown laughter. It took her a few moments to calm herself before she noticed the hurt look on her guests face. "I'm sorry Ranma. I'll take this more seriously if you want me to."
"Thanks." Ranma replied as most of his anger and embarrassment left him.
"You're interested, aren't you?" Kasumi asked as she took the book from it's resting place and examined the cover.
"Well… It's just that I've had so little control over… you know… I'd like to be on top of things for once," Ranma revealed in what he obviously felt was a heartfelt confession. Judging by the extreme difficulty Kasumi was having with trying to hold in another fit of laughter, he assumed it wasn't as well worded as it probably should have been.
"What?" he asked somewhat angrily.
"Sorry. Sorry. It's just that you're making this really difficult for me." Kasumi responded while she tried vainly to keep from laughing at the boy's unintentional pun.
"Sheesh! I might as well be talkin' to Pops' about this!" the boy lamented as Kasumi ran through another round of hard laughter. The reference to Ranma's father seemed to sober her up quickly though.
"No. I… I don't think that would be a good idea," she said finally as the last bits of mirth vanished from her.
Ranma smiled at the thought of the panda hearing about this. "You're probably right. He'd probably try to turn it into a weird training exercise or something," he admitted with a few chuckles of his own.
"Why don't you borrow the book? That way you'll have a better idea what questions you want to ask," Kasumi recommended as she passed the book over to the younger boy.
"Um, thanks. Thanks for…" Ranma stammered as embarrassment crept upon him once again. He was saved from further speech though as Kasumi cut him off.
"It's okay Ranma. Just try not to let anyone know what it is your reading." Ranma nodded his head in understanding and quietly left the way he had come in. Kasumi watched him vanish into the shadows before climbing back into her bed with a smile on her face.
* * *
Well, that's it for Part I-A. The rest of part one is sitting on my hard drive in script format and I'll probably be getting to it in the near future. So far I have six parts planned and I'll probably break each of those into four sections so I can get updates out a little quicker. I hope you enjoy the lemon/lime series. Please feel free to leave criticism comments, and praise, lots of praise.
GundamAce
NOTICE II: If you're offended by sex, bondage, sadism, masochism, dominance, or submission, then you don't know what you're missing! You also shouldn't be reading this story!
________________________________________________________________________
All was quiet at the Tendo dojo as the sun broke out over the Nermia ward. This was not uncommon, as the louder residents of that household usually don't get out of bed until much later. Unfortunately for the tranquillity of the early morning, however, the normal routine of the household was not being followed today. Ranma, arguably one of the noisiest and most destructive individuals in all of Japan, was stalking quietly about the house this morning.
Why, you may ask, is this? The answer is simple. Just the previous night Happosai had unleashed a new and horrible technique into the unfortunately very large vocabulary of such techniques Ranma already possessed. Of course no great power comes without its price. The price in this case being a rather naughty underwear show conducted for one sex obsessed old master by one martial arts obsessed young aquatransexual. Unfortunately for the natural order of the universe, Ranma was both stubborn and proud.
This great technique, called the "War of Heaven", could defeat an army of masters if properly executed. Unfortunately Happosai couldn't properly execute it. If he could, Ranma would have seen it performed about a hundred times by now, and then both fools would be throwing the technique back and fourth by mid-day.
Now some people would be asking how this could be a bad thing. The answer to this question is a bit harder to perceive than the answer to the one previous. You see if Ranma had mastered the technique the hard way, then he wouldn't have gotten up at the crack of dawn to search the house for the ancient text that described its use. And if he hadn't gotten up so early to conduct his extensive search, then perhaps Kasumi would have arrived in the kitchen to begin breakfast before the questing boy could divert his attention to the pantry. And if Ranma had never made it to the pantry, then he wouldn't have discovered the strange text that he was currently lifting from its hiding place below the pantry floorboards. And so, if Happosai had remembered his stupid "War of Heaven" technique, perhaps Ranma's eyes would never have crossed the taboo book that he had discovered. A book entitled…
"THE SECRETS OF CONTROL – A GUIDE FOR MASTERS"
A Ranma ½ Fanfiction by GundamAce
Part I-A of the Lemon/Lime continuity
(Insert Theme Music of Choice Here)
Ranma held his breath as he lifted the script from its resting-place. He turned it over in his hands a few times after carefully reading the title. The book wasn't what he was expecting. It was old, but not ancient. It looked more like something he'd expect to uncover at a used bookstore than something from which powerful martial arts techniques were learned.
In Ranma's experience, techniques usually came written in the form of scrolls, not professionally published and western style bound books. The title, however, belied its innocent exterior. It was a guide for masters.
It was also hidden, which means that its contents must be important. 'Besides', Ranma figured, 'I've searched the rest of the bloody house already, and this is the closest thing I've found'.
A smile crossed Ranma's lips. Soon the old fart would learn the true power of the Anything Goes School of Martial Arts. "I got ya this time, you dried up old pervert! I'm gonna kick your butt with your own secret techniques!"
The smile faded into a look of ninja like readiness as Ranma scanned the room to ensure he had not been discovered. The book quickly disappeared into Ranma's shirt as he leapt outside and onto the roof to avoid being caught with his prize. It's a fortunate thing he did too; otherwise Kasumi would have surely spotted him as she came down to make breakfast.
As it was, all Kasumi discovered was the mess in the pantry. Her eyes instantly became glued to the pried open hatch that had once been securely hidden by a large bag of rice. The eldest Tendo daughter felt her heart sink into her stomach as she realized that the hole was now empty.
"…oh my…"
* * *
Once safely on the roof, Ranma sat down and joyfully pulled out his prize.
"I got it!" He whispered excitedly, "I finally got away with getting one of these stupid techniques without being hit by it!"
Ranma opened the book and began quickly thumbing through it. The first realization that he came to was that it was full of pictures. This wasn't particularly out of the ordinary because most instruction manuals do, in fact, possess illustrations to help teach more visually oriented students. What was unusual was the fact that these were photographs and not drawings. This is not something usually associated with a technique that hasn't been practiced in three hundred years.
The pictures were made stranger still by the fact that they didn't seem to depict any type of martial arts at all. Some of the images contained images of strikes, weapons, and other such trademarks of the art, but none were related to a martial art practice. Of course Ranma was having trouble grasping that little piece of evidence because something of far greater importance had caught his eye. Ranma had noticed that there was an awful lot of exposed flesh in those pictures.
It took Ranma's brain a few minutes to start working again, but when it did he remembered that anything owned by Happosai had to be really perverted. The pictures, Ranma figured, must have been added later. Happosai probably used them to power up his ki while he was practicing the move or something. That had to be it. The secrets of the War of Heaven must be contained in the writing!
And so Ranma read…
"…before letting her orgasm…" Nope.
"…a good technique is to start from the top of the ass and work down…" Wrong technique I think.
"…blindfolds, restraints and riding crops…" Uh…
The book closed. Ranma turned about as red as his favorite shirt. Once again he had to spend a few moments re-establishing a hold on his thought processes.
"Oh man! What is this thing? I must have grabbed the wrong book. I gotta put this thing back before someone notices it's missing." Ranma cursed as he leapt off the roof and rushed back into the kitchen where he promptly realized that his intended path was impeded.
* * *
Kasumi was kneeling in the pantry by the hidden trap door as the skilled martial artist stumbled over his own feet in an effort to avoid colliding with her. She turned just in time to watch him expertly alter his course so that he instead decimated the island in the middle of the kitchen.
"Oh! H-hello Ranma. I… um… uh… Can I help you?" Kasumi fidgeted and tried to position herself between Ranma and the now empty hole.
"Huh? Oh! Sorry about that. I… uh… I just came in for some… um… some hot
water! Yeah! That's it!"
"Ah. It's on the… stove… Ranma, you're… um… not a… not a girl at the moment. What… uh… what's the water for? …if you don't mind me asking?"
For a moment Ramna froze like a deer caught in headlights. "For? Um… For later! I… I need it for later. …heh heh…" Okay, that was a weak lie. Any minute now the whole family's going to bust in here and start laughing at me. Akane's going to call me a pervert, and then I'm going to go cloud surfing again. I hate days like this.
"Oh. All right then."
"Well, um… thanks!" Thank God for small miracles. "I guess I'll just be going now then…" Ranma turned to rush out the back door.
"Ranma, wait!" Kasumi's voice caused Ranma to jump right out of his skin.
"Huh?"
"Um… That is… I seem to have misplaced a book of mine… a cookbook. I… I don't suppose you've seen it lying around anywhere? It was an old western style hardback?"
The gears began turning in Ranma's mind. "…Western style hardback? Um… no… I, er, um… haven't seen anything at all like that around here." He feebly stuttered out as he shifted the position of the book to conceal it better.
"Oh… okay then… I, um… should get back to looking then." Kasumi stammered.
The obvious embarrassment playing across the usually unshakable young woman's body wasn't lost on the heir to the school of anything goes.
"Riiiight… I'm just going to take my kettle and leave then. Good luck with that whole cookbook thing".
Ranma backed out of the door watching the eldest Tendo daughter squirm. Eventually he turned to leap over the compound wall and make his escape.
* * *
Ranma ended his Saotome secret technique under the water canal bridge where he began to pace at a feverish rate. Images of Kasumi in tight leather danced in his head as he tried to pull his mind back together.
"OhMyGodOhMyGodOhMyGodOhMyGodOhMyGod."
Eventually he stopped and pulled out the book. The realness of the item seemed to calm him a bit while strangely filling him with apprehension at the same time.
"It couldn't be," he said as he looked down at the offending piece of literature. "Not Kasumi! She's the only sane one in the house! I must have misread it. Yeah! That's it! I misread it! Of course!" he reasoned as he flipped open the book to confirm that it was in fact simply a harmless stack of paper.
The page that greeted him sported a picture of a naked woman tied to a pole while a man in a latex mask was slapping her inner thigh with a cat-o-nine tails. Ranma briefly shuddered at the instrument depicted.
"Nope. Didn't misread it. Damn! Now what do I do?"
Forlornly the boy plopped down under the bridge to have a good long think. He glanced once more back down at the picture only to have his face color yet again this morning. "Why couldn't you have been a cookie recipe or something?" he muttered as he thumbed his way through the text.
"I guess it's not that bad. I could just tell her that I found it lying around and didn't read it or something," he lamented as he continued to browse the pages. After a few seconds he stopped his page flipping and once again attained a nice tomato red hue. "Oh my…"
* * *
It was already dark by the time our hero got back to the Tendo house. After an entire day of hard contemplation and frequent blushes, Ranma had finally decided that this coming confrontation was unavoidable. That's why he was now sitting in a tree branch just outside Kasumi's window.
"At least this is Kasumi," the boy told himself. "If it was Nabiki I could just kiss my freedom and dignity goodbye". And with that the boy hopped to the roof of the Tendo home and flipped himself over the edge so he could knock on the eldest Tendo's window.
* * *
Guests were a rare thing in Kasumi's room, but that didn't mean she wasn't familiar with the protocols and procedures associated with greeting guests. Thus she had no reservations about inviting in the nice boy who was polite enough to knock to gain entry, even if he was doing so upon her second story window while suspended upside down from the roof of her home.
Kasumi had a polite smile on as the boy came through the rather imaginative entry way. "Why hello Ranma. Can I help you with something?" she gretted.
"Um… yeah… uh… We, uh… we need to talk." Ranma stuttered as he tried to summon a bit more courage than he thought he'd need.
"Of course Ranma. Please, come in."
"Uh… thanks… Um… look… uh…" Ranma continued to stammer as he desperately tried to remember the nice speech he had planned out under the bridge only half an hour ago.
"Is everything all right? You look troubled? Why don't you come here and have a seat?" Kasumi asked as she had a seat on the bed and innocently patted the section next to her in invitation.
Upon noticing the seemingly innocent gesture giving by the seemingly innocent young and somewhat underdressed book owner, who was sitting on her seemingly innocent four poster queen sized bed, a look of utter terror spread across Ranma's face. "No! ...uh… I mean, that's all right Kasumi. I'm fine. Really," Ranma blurted out as he began to nervously scratch the base of his pigtail.
Kasumi noticed the distress in his voice, but couldn't fathom what had caused it. "What's the matter, Ranma? Is it Akane? Did you two have another fight?"
"A-Akane? Um… no. It's not like that. I uh,… that is to say… I…" The nervous scratching became more intense and the boy looked to the floor to hide the huge blush that was spreading across his face. "I found your book." With that Ranma reached into his shirt and removed the object in question. He quietly placed it on the foot of the girl's bed.
"Oh… Oh my… Oh Ranma, it's… Oh my…" Kasumi took her turn at stuttering as she too became a healthy shade of red. "Did you read any of it?" she finally asked.
With the confession out of the way, Ranma began to calm. He took the offered seat on the bed and began to try and explain things. "I'm sorry Kasumi. I thought it was that old pervert's secret technique. I didn't mean to…"
"It's okay Ranma. I'm not mad… Just please don't tell father. I don't think he'd understand." Kasumi sighed. This discovery wasn't nearly as frightening as some of the scenarios she had imagined in the past.
"He wouldn't be the only one," Ranma whispered under his breath without thinking. Kasumi seemed to hear him anyway.
"What?" she asked.
"Um, are… are you really like this?" was all the pigtailed youth could think to respond with.
"I… I do have a bit of a… curiosity," she confessed.
"Oh. So you've never, um, you know?"
"No! Not much really… Not today anyway." By this point it was Kasumi who was matching Ranma's shirt. She didn't really want to admit these things, but she just couldn't bring herself to lie to her future brother-in-law.
"Ah… Um… Do you know… that is… are people really? You know! Are there people that are really like this?" Ranma asked.
"Yes. I know several, in fact," the young woman answered. It clearly hadn't been the series of accusations she'd been expecting though. She was a little put off by the direction the conversation seemed to be headed. "Why do you ask?"
"It… it, uh… Man, this is hard…" Ranma replied while refreshing his blush.
At this Kasumi began to smile. "Oh, is that the problem! Well, I think you're in the wrong room for that. Akane is down the hall silly!" she joked as a series of mirthful giggles began to overtake her.
Ranma's flush deepened from further embarrassment and perhaps a bit of frustration. "No! Not that! Talking! Talking about this is hard!"
At Ranma's outburst Kasumi lost control of herself and her soft giggles became full blown laughter. It took her a few moments to calm herself before she noticed the hurt look on her guests face. "I'm sorry Ranma. I'll take this more seriously if you want me to."
"Thanks." Ranma replied as most of his anger and embarrassment left him.
"You're interested, aren't you?" Kasumi asked as she took the book from it's resting place and examined the cover.
"Well… It's just that I've had so little control over… you know… I'd like to be on top of things for once," Ranma revealed in what he obviously felt was a heartfelt confession. Judging by the extreme difficulty Kasumi was having with trying to hold in another fit of laughter, he assumed it wasn't as well worded as it probably should have been.
"What?" he asked somewhat angrily.
"Sorry. Sorry. It's just that you're making this really difficult for me." Kasumi responded while she tried vainly to keep from laughing at the boy's unintentional pun.
"Sheesh! I might as well be talkin' to Pops' about this!" the boy lamented as Kasumi ran through another round of hard laughter. The reference to Ranma's father seemed to sober her up quickly though.
"No. I… I don't think that would be a good idea," she said finally as the last bits of mirth vanished from her.
Ranma smiled at the thought of the panda hearing about this. "You're probably right. He'd probably try to turn it into a weird training exercise or something," he admitted with a few chuckles of his own.
"Why don't you borrow the book? That way you'll have a better idea what questions you want to ask," Kasumi recommended as she passed the book over to the younger boy.
"Um, thanks. Thanks for…" Ranma stammered as embarrassment crept upon him once again. He was saved from further speech though as Kasumi cut him off.
"It's okay Ranma. Just try not to let anyone know what it is your reading." Ranma nodded his head in understanding and quietly left the way he had come in. Kasumi watched him vanish into the shadows before climbing back into her bed with a smile on her face.
* * *
Well, that's it for Part I-A. The rest of part one is sitting on my hard drive in script format and I'll probably be getting to it in the near future. So far I have six parts planned and I'll probably break each of those into four sections so I can get updates out a little quicker. I hope you enjoy the lemon/lime series. Please feel free to leave criticism comments, and praise, lots of praise.
GundamAce