Ranma the Rock

A oneshot fanfiction by Zorknot.

Ranma sat in the grass in the park. He was quite happy there and had been for more than a thousand years. Children played games around him, Adults sat to watch, or walked their animals, or busied themselves running away from nothing in particular.

This day was much like the previous five hundred thousand. Sure there had been the occasional war (there was a spot on his underside where he had hit the head of an esteemed general while the overly armored man was attempting to relieve himself near a small stream.) And there were storms and climactic world changing events which could be a tad vexing at times, but aside from that brief period airborne amidst a dark spray of red liquid, he was pretty much undisturbed.

And then one day a fat little boy with glasses named Genma picked him up and tried to swing at him with a stick. Ranma really didn't understand this. The stick and he were perfectly okay where they were, why did the boy have to mess with them? In fact why did the boy have to move at all? But move he did and with a small, pudgy hand he lifted Ranma up and dropped him to the ground whilst the stick, by virtue of Genma's other hand, waved ineffectually above him.

The little boy could not let well enough alone and proceeded in repeating the action. This time, for a change, the stick waved below Ranma as he fell to the ground. Why was the boy doing this? What did Ranma ever do to Genma to deserve such treatment? The boy with glasses picked Ranma up again and inspected him, as if it might be Ranma who was to blame for the stick's incapacity for violence. "You're weak, Ranma. Take your hit like a man you sissy. Stop acting like a girl."

In Psychology we call this transference. Genma, picked on all his young life by his father and classmates, decided to create an imaginary friend on which to unleash all his pent up feelings of inadequacy. Of course it wouldn't do to not have anything to hit, so he found a rock and named it after his father.

Ranma of course had no comprehension of this. All he knew was that he was forcibly kidnapped from his home and then summarily tortured with an equally innocent stick.

Genma swung and missed again. "You're nothing but a pansy coward, Ranma. Nothing but a stupid pansy-assed coward. You'll never amount to anything!" With these words, Genma swung and slammed the stick into Ranma sending him high in the air.

A small, wrinkled old man, a good foot shorter than Genma (and Genma was only twelve), blew smoke out of his mouth around his pipe. He cleared his throat to get Genma's attention and said, "You have determination, whelp. How would you like me to train you in the martial arts? My name is Happosai, and I am the Grand Master of Indiscriminate Grappling."

Meanwhile Ranma hung in the air for a bit, passing over a bench, a fence, a side walk, a street filled with several cars... This all would have been fine. The various air particles and dust motes weren't particularly unpleasant to interact with, and if Ranma were honest with himself he'd have to admit that he found hurtling through the atmospheric mélange rather exhilarating. However he did take issue with the sudden stop to come.

Ranma was not a very vain rock, but he considered himself fairly decent looking, and wasn't too keen on the possibility of getting chipped. He was, unfortunately a victim of circumstances and so he found himself crashing unchecked through a window and into a vial of some sweet-smelling liquid.

"Shit!" an attractive young woman in a lab coat exclaimed, startled. She rushed to the black, wall mounted telephone to call for a janitor. She had been working on a new age defying face cream that could dramatically decrease the number of fine lines and wrinkles. It worked by completely absorbing the skin of the victim. Or it would have worked if Ranma hadn't, through no fault of his own, fallen into the cursed pool.

The girl's name was Tomie Kawasaki. She was 19, and had long, silken black hair that fell to her shoulders like the night in spring. Her eyes were silver blue, her lips red and full as the fruit of paradise. She was a full figured woman and not afraid to show cleavage. Really she wouldn't have had any trouble at all in finding a date except for just one thing: she was psychotic.

The janitor arrived in his blue jumpsuit equipped with a spray bottle, a roll of paper towels and a smile. He had a stock build and a pleasant demeanor. He was 16, working as a janitor so he could get money for college.

"It's right over there." She advised. pointing at the steaming mess with a very red fingernail, "Clean it, slave."

"Yes, mistress," the janitor said and began using a large rag to coax the chemicals, pieces of glass and Ranma into a pail. The fumes found their way into the janitors nostrils and he couldn't help breathing them in. He began to feel light headed. Then he felt an incredible pressure, as if something was pushing through his skull.

When Tomie next spoke to him her words were, "Get that ridiculous palm tree off of your head."

"I can't," Janitor Kuno said after trying to remove his newfound foliage, "It's stuck."

"Interesting," Tomie noted. "I can't let you leave now of course. Someone might see that palm tree and wonder how it got there, and then they'll come here and find out all my secrets. No, you cannot leave without some sort of hat. But first…" Tomie got a glint in her eye which bordered on an animal attraction, "we need to perform some experiments."

"But, what about the pail?" Janitor Kuno who would one day change his name to Principal Kuno asked.

Tomie, who was already envisioning a decade's worth of torture for the janitor, torture which would eventually include ravishing the man violently while he was upside down, or underwater, or covered in jam, took the pail and poured its contents out through the hole in the glass.

Ranma fell out and tumbled serenely for a moment before hitting someone in the head, bouncing off and falling to the ground.

The someone whose head he bounced off of was another child, who started bawling rivers of tears immediately afterward. This was a boy about Genma's age, named Tendo Soun. A group of street toughs, witnessing the event, came by to mock the little boy.

"Aw did the little baby get a boo boo?" the largest one jeered. The next largest agreed and repeated the question.

"Leave me alone." Soun said, sniffing.

"I don't think we will. I think we need to teach you what a real boo boo is." The largest one said. The second largest agreed, and the third largest, who bore an unfortunate resemblance to an inebriated Chihuahua agreed three times, in loud percussive yelps. "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!"

Seeing the situation for what it was, Soun backed up, and shouted loudly, "LEAVE ME ALONE!" This normally wouldn't have deterred the would be bullies, but the words were accompanied by the image of a gigantic demon's head and the voice sounded like what a vacuum cleaner might sound like, if it were being raped by a heavy metal guitar solo.

"Okay." The leader held up his hands. "Sorry there, ah, little buddy. We were just, ah, practicing, that's it, right?" The others agreed. "Yeah, um. We were like acting or something. We'll just leave now okay? Please don't eat us!"With that the three of them scampered off to change their pants.

"Impressive," the same, short older gentleman named Happosai from before declared. "But what if they saw behind the illusion?"

"What?" Soun asked in surprise. He had heard what the old man had said, but he had never seen someone so small and no one had ever known that what he did was an illusion before.

"You'd be in trouble, wouldn't you?" Happosai guessed.

Soun nodded.

"I can teach you how to defend yourself for real."

"You're just an old man what could you teach me?" Soun asked.

In response, Happosai picked Ranma up, held him in one hand, and in a flash of power, pulverized him into a billion bits.

Ranma had only a moment to think of how unfair his life as a rock was, before he was no longer a rock at all. He wondered if there was an afterlife for rocks. If maybe he would be reincarnated or something. He had been a good rock. Maybe in his next incarnation, he could be more in control, more in charge of his destiny…

Then again, maybe not.