Author's Afterword.

Female Voice:This chapter is almost entirely made up of notes and non-sense regarding the fanfic. It's here because, in the very rear-most part of his soul, Weebee refuses to be an analytical human being. In other words, he refuses to have a fanfic of his end on Chapter 13. Personally, I think the idiot should have PLANNED so that it didn't happen that way, but I'm just one of his muses, so what do I know?

Weebee: Misato, could you please shut up?

Female voice, now identified as Misato: Sure thing, boss.

Weebee: Ahem. As much as I hate to admit it, the annoying and half drunk voice in my head is correct. I know this thing is against FFN's rules in roughly 100 different ways, but I'll endeavor to put enough story related content in here to keep it at least related. Think of this as RDF-Life's 'Red Cross Book."

First, I guess, should be a history of this thing. This, actually, wasn't the first bit of fanfic I ever wrote. The first fanfic I ever wrote was a particularly bad Star Trek Voyager effort. Fortunately for me, it never got onto the internet and I killed it with fire relatively quickly.

This was my second effort, and it really showed, but it also held a point of pride with me that, I suppose, it still does. This point is that, originally, this fic was written in 37 days. Given its quality, that's strangely believable. It was done over the summer break of… hmm, I think it was 2005, while I was on vacation at my grand-mother's place in a different province, and was using a computer that could charitably be described as elderly. I had a copy of Corel business suite that was labeled 1996, which I can't for the life of me remember where it came from, and a staggering amount of free time with nothing else to do.

Oh, yeah. I also had a VERY small set of reading materials stored on my voice reader, consisting of girl days, Macross One Half and a few others. I think Ranmazoku was on there, as well. Two months of vacation with only this to read helped greatly in making me go insane enough to start authoring fanfic myself, and as Tail-Kinker once said to me in a moment of Private Messaged communication, the derivativeness from his work is rather evident. He doesn't seem to mind, though, so there it goes.

ANYWAYS, I'm rambling here. Suffice it to say, I wrote the whole thing in the second month of that summer's vacation, using Macross One Half and a set of episode guides and such that I'd found while digging around on Google. This, as can be imagined, lead to several glairing inaccuracies, but I'll get to them later.

After this fic was done, I turned to other projects, leaving it pretty much dead until early fall of 2006. It was then I tried to write 'Chapter 33,' which was the start of 'Book 2' of this fic. That, of course, lead me to have to re-read the whole bloody thing.

I never said I was a great author, and in fact I consider my current work as mediocre at best, but this… This SUCKED!

I Immediately pulled it down, for an eventual re-write. Anyone who knows me, or has even been following my writing for any length of time, will know that I tend to put things off. That re-write took until somewhere in May of this year, and it never really got off the ground. You can see its remnants in Chapter one of this posting.

Part of the reason I even remembered that this thing existed, was because people wouldn't leave me alone about it. I'd get a new message about it every two weeks or so, and obligingly send out a copy of the text files I keep in my archive. It was some time last month, when the seventeenth or so person contacted me for a copy, that I thought things were getting just a little stupid. I sent him a PM telling him to wait a few hours, and chapters 1-3 appeared within a couple hours.

Yeah, that's pretty well this fic's story in a nutshell.

Oh, an interesting anecdote about all the people contacting me is that this fic can be found on Google, and rather easily at that. I can't exactly remember when or even IF I did this, but there is a copy of the original, notes, spelling errors and minor plot holes in-tact, sitting at Ranchan and Co's. If you're morbidly curious, search Ranchan crossing bridges on Google and you'll find the site.

Just goes to show how many people will go ask an author for something rather than, y'know, searching for it for thirty seconds.

Anyhow, Moving on.

A few people have asked me, 'Why did you take this down?' or said 'This isn't that bad.' Well, I'm about to try and emulate a third-person reviewer to say precisely why I said it was so bad when I took it down.

Firstly, it's so obviously derivative that it isn't funny, though I mentioned that above. A lot of the events were particularly unskilled rewrites of the show itself or plots from other Robotech Fanfics, which is kind of understandable since I didn't really understand a lot about the characters in question to begin with.

Speaking of the characters… Although this was mitigated to some degree through small scale tweaks to the chapters, I originally proceeded to destroy every last one of them. It was, and still is, expected that I would butcher Robotech's cast. I mean, Robotech butchered them during the translation from Macross to begin with, and I hadn't even seen the butchered versions. Given that, plus my at the time hatred of Rick Hunter for no apparent reason, I'm going to skip over them.

Ranma 1/2's characters, THOSE I had no excuse for. I consider myself a bit of an encyclopedia on the series, or at least as much of one as my fractured memories can allow, and what I did in this thing makes me wanna bash my head off of the nearest wall.

Ranma: Ranma wasn't that bad. I over-used his pride somewhat, and he suffers from 'Perfect Character' syndrome, which I think I still mildly suffer from when dealing with him. Even so, it was passable.

Akane: Akane, and her relationship with Ranma, were pretty banged up over the course of this thing. Firstly, I made the relationship with them smooth out with almost no exposition of how it was supposed to happen. Secondly, when she re-appears in chapter 19 I made her far too accepting of her idiot father's arrangement with Kuno. Hell, about the only thing related to her that I did RIGHT was her death in chapter 31!

Ryoga: Although I admit that the idea of a Ryoga who acts the way he does for reasons other than blind hatred is interesting, I blew the execution straight to hell. It should have been looked into much more deeply, and more of the fic should have focused on the lost boy. The fact that the pairing I set up for him was out of absolutely NOWHERE since he barely ever interacted with Minmei beforehand is almost forgivable compared to that. Oh, wait. It's NOT!

The next bad thing about this fanfic was the author's notes. Oh god, the author's notes. To put it in perspective, The new FFN word count system, which tends to round up for some inexplicable reason, registered the fic at around 85K words before this appendix. The original word counter, which was a lot more accurate, listed it as 89K. For those keeping score, that's at least 3.5 K words of notes on top of what I have in this version, and most of them were incredibly stupid. As an example, I spent three chapters worth of notes arguing flawed science with a group of reviewers. The killer was, I was wrong.

Also, how the hell did I forget Claudia grant? She's Roy's Love interest, and a rather important character in the show. Yes, in this fanfic she apparently doesn't exist.

Couple with this the spelling errors, which I still make from time to time, the NIGHTMARISH formatting of the first ten chapters, and the series-based plot holes, you can see why I consider this fic an 'old shame.' Still, I guess some people liked it, so I hope you enjoy the marginally improved rewrite.

The Chapter titles.

You may have noticed that when your author or story alerts notified you of this story's updates, they provided some... odd... chapter titles. These were mostly to entertain me. Still, I feel that I need to explain the jokes, even if I'm the only one who'll find them funny.

Chapter 1, It came from Weebee's Archive.
If I recall, this was a take-off of an old movie title, as well as the title of a Goosebumps book I read once.

Chapter 2, Chapter titles are fun!
Just a random comment, and when I decided to give all the other chapters odd titles.

Chapter 3, The Fanfic that wouldn't die.
This one's a take-off of the MST3K episode/bad movie, 'The thing that wouldn't die,' and is a rather accurate comment on what I think of this fic in general.

Chapter 4, Ze Goggles, Zey do Noting!
This is a quote from the Arnold Schwarzenegger parody from the simpsons, during the radioactive man episode.

Chapter 5, SPOON!
This is the battle cry of my favorite super-hero, the tick!

Chapter 6, Im in ur fic, stelin ur plot.
This is a mutation of a common meme, usually used on LOLCatz pictures.

Chapter 7, I herd u liek Mudkipz?
Yet another meme, this time completely intact. Don't say this on a forum.

Chapter 8, Warp 9 sir? Too slow!
A shortening of the chorus of a queen parody that involved Star Trek TOS, and involved an operatic spock. It was epic.

Chapter 9, Lolcatz iz cute.
I was running out of ideas, and it is!

Chapter 10, My Hometown's a crater.
Well, it is. I used to live in Hamilton, which is just a short drive from Toronto. The explosion in Chapter 10 probably torched it.

Chapter 11, IT'S OVER 9000!!!
A rather notorious example of over-dramatic dubbing.

Chapter 12, Planet of the Apes Reject.
This one needs some explaining. In the original version of this set of chapters, the ending went a little differently. I had Lisa, Ranma and Rick re-enact the ending to planet of the apes. Needless to say, the idea was stupid, and hence rejected.

Final Chapter, The day the Fanfic died.
This chapter's a reference to a pretty neat song. If you don't recognize it, think "Byebye Miss American Pie."

Next up, "BAD SEQUEL SCIENCE THEATER 2032!

No, this isn't a MST3K rip-off, just a set of sequel ideas I had for this when I'd first finished it. The list is in chronological order, by the way.

1. The Nerima short. This was going to be written to explain precisely WHY Tendo decided to engage his daughter to Tatewaki Kuno, and keep people from wanting to kill me for what I did to Akane by explaining why she couldn't stop it. Nothing really wrong with it, but it just never happened.

2. The alternate universe fic. I always think up ideas that would allow me to re-introduce characters I've modified to the Canon universe. In this one, Ranma's space-fold attempt in chapter 10 goes south, and he ends up popping out of a dimensional rift in space around earth, with Ben's damaged Veritech in toe. Unfortunately, he'd managed to jump dimensions rather than distance, and it was a universe in which Ranma'd stayed on earth and the Robotech wars hadn't happened. Unfortunately, I had NO idea where to go from there, so it died horribly.

3. The Future fic. Basically, RDF Life:The Next Generation. This is what Chapter 33 was starting, though I don't have the chapter anymore, so I can't show it to you. Earth's been at piece for about twenty years, and they've successfully repaired the SDF-1. Lisa's her captain, and Ranma's been assigned as the leader of one of the ship's fighter squadrons in order to baby-sit Admiral Sterling's daughter. I had a plot for this, but the plot docs got wiped with the chapter and I can't remember it.

4. The Gundam Crossover. A plot-derailment of the last idea, in which the newly-repaired SDF-1's fold system does something similar to idea 2, only this time it dumps everyone into the Gundam Wing timeline… right in front of barge's main cannon. Again, don't know why, but I wanna do a gundam wing Xover. Perhaps it's because almost all the series has for fan work right now is poorly written slashfic. Oh crap, I'm gunna get flamed for that.

Well, there they are, folks. Enjoy!

Misato: His mind's a scary place, readers.

Weebee: Yeah… uhuh. Moving on.

Well, I think that's everything for now. If you'll excuse me…
(Weebee reaches off screen and returns with a BFG.) Get back here, you!

Misato: Ack!

(Shinji pokes his head on screen as the fanfic author runs after the dark haired woman.)

Shinji:Thank you for sticking around. (Winces as he hears Misato's side-arm going off.) I've got to go!

THE END.