TA'AVEREN 1/2: TALES OF THE RONIN
---
by John Walter Biles (rhea@maison-otaku.net)
 and Jeremy Blackman (loki@maison-otaku.net)
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***

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
    The Story of the 'Fic So Far

***

Ok, ok.  I ripped off our chapter-heading format from the actual fic,
because this particular post is intended to get stuck on the beginning of
the fic itself in archives, eventually.  ^_^;

Well, some people on this list may be familiar with Ta'averen 1/2...  but
for those who aren't, here's the history of one of the most heavily
procrastinated fanfics in existance. :) 

Several years back, John Biles and myself were chatting, sleep-deprived,
online at around 2:00am.  (This was so long ago, John was still at UMD
instead of UKansas, and I was still in high school.)  We we discussing
Robert Jordan's fantasy epic, _The Wheel of Time_.  John was tired, and
typoed 'Rand al'Thor' as 'Ranma al'Thor'. 

A lightbulb went off over our joint consciousness, dimly flickering though
it was.  (Hey, it was 2:00am.)  We began to come up with conceivable
character casting:  Ukyou as Min, Ranma as Rand, Cologne as Moraine Sedai,
etc.  We began to pull from other anime as well, though the core always
remained Ranma 1/2.  By the time we'd finished our casting, we had a basic
concept of the story through the entire first book (although it only
followed the original storyline in a rough way) and possibly beyond, and
so we decided to sit down and write it.

It was a horribly spoofy fanfic; many tongue-in-cheek references, odd
little asides, or sarcastic tones, and was written when and where we could
snatch the time. 

And when we posted the first chapter, we were completely unprepared for
the reaction we got.  We were flooded with commentary; several other
people wrote WoT/Ranma crossovers (I think it's become a small sub-genre
in the three or so years since T1/2 was originally posted).  In fact, as I
understand, our own White Wolf got hooked on anime as a result of trying
to figure out what the Ranma 1/2 part of T1/2 was, after someone posted it
to a Robert Jordan newsgroup.  Heck, John took 'Ranma al'Thor' as his nom
de plume.

We got through the first three chapters... and then I dropped the ball on
John. 

I was supposed to write the next chapter, but my job went through
restructuring.  I was retrained, instead of a multimedia engineer, as a
database engineer.  When that was finally done, I didn't have the time for
writing for a while.  By the time I -did- have time again, I only had time
to do the very beginnings of a draft before the place I worked laid off
some of the interns, including me.  I found another job which I nearly
burned out at (100 hours a week while still in school will do that), quit
6 months later, and came to work at the video game company I've been at
for almost a year and a half now.  (And I ain't leaving!) 

Somewhere in all that, T1/2 got lost and I never really found the
motivation to restart it.  Every few months, someone would send me a note
asking if it would ever get done (usually White Wolf) and I'd give them
some sort of brush-off.  I got a bit creative at the brush-offs.  (White
Wolf also got creative with some of his threats, as I recall.)

I promised John and White Wolf that I'd restart my end of things, but then
my life got eaten by a deadline at work (working on Blood 2: The Chosen,
for those who care).  So I made a deal; when Blood 2 was done and went
gold, I'd trash my old chapter 4, start from scratch, and have a new
chapter 4 done within two weeks. 

So, here, for the first time since it was originally written in 1995 (as
far as I know) are the original three chapters of Ta'averen 1/2, the
long-awaited fourth chapter, and the never-before-seen (except by a select
few) fifth chapter.

I figure if Kimagure Orange College can lurch back to life after
God-knows-how-long between episodes (wasn't that originally considered one
of the signs of the apocalypse?), I might as well *finally* get the next
part of Ta'averen 1/2 out.  (Stop gloating, you two.  And you know who you
are.)

So what the heck.  After all, sooner or later, the story of the Ronin
Reborn must be continued, and it might as well be the original minstrels
that tell it. 

  --Jeremy 'Loki' Blackman