This is going to be my last post for a 
while. Going to Tokyo for vacation!
^_^ Yay! Yay!

Everything except the idea belongs to 
someone else. This story was created 
for amusement, so don't sue me. C&C 
welcome. Replies comes to this 
address. 
*******************************

Ryuromonogatari part 1b
(Setting the Timebomb)
A Ranma/Ryuroden crossover
by SeventhOne

***
Space
a point in the past

Two spaceships flew through the endless
night. For a slight moment, the one in 
front split into two copies of itself, and 
one of those copies promptly vanished. 
The chase continued, the event 
unnoticed. 

The consequences of this event are, 
however, great. As to how great, suffice 
to say that the event caused the path of 
the two ships to change by 1 second on a 
three dimensional scale. The two ships 
ended up in a slightly different place 
than that was originally intended. 
Different by almost a thousand miles. 

What would have been a pair of large 
craters in a place eventually acquiring 
the name of "western Honshu," never 
came into existence. They were replaced 
by a lake about five miles from a valley 
called Jusenkyo.

And at Jusenkyo, a final blow was made, 
and the "corpse" (if it was indeed dead) 
discarded. Not carelessly, though, as one 
would expect, but, meticulously, if 
slightly improvisational. Both body and 
soul were sealed away in the magical 
pools native to the area, and done in a 
manner that only the sealer and his 
offspring could unseal.. 

And then the one who made the seal 
made his way east . . .

***

Shaolin Temple
Fall, 1195

There are monks, and there are monks. 
This specific monk used the Buddhist 
name Kong Hai, and he was presently 
looking over the Shaolin Temple from 
its uppermost balcony.

Why was he special? Well, had the 
Shaolin Temple been the Vatican, and he 
a Christian, he would technically be the 
Pope. Since the temple wasn't the 
Vatican, lesser monks called him the 
Administrator and treated him with the 
reverence normally given to wise old 
men with mysterious powers. Of which 
he was one. And since he was the 
Administrator of Shaolin Temple, his 
"mysterious powers" were the deadly 
arts of the Shaolin school martial arts. 

Presently, his bushy eyebrows furled up 
into a worried look that only wise old 
men seem to be able to make. And him 
being who he was, this was saying quite 
a lot.

Rumors. Disturbing rumors that he 
didn't want to believe. These were the 
cause of his worries, and if he was 
worried, the rest of the martial arts 
world had something to worry about too. 
Why? Because he was among the top ten 
strongest. 

It appeared that two new faces had 
appeared. Both were extremely strong 
martial artists, and both were making 
themselves a name.

One was a boy, no older than seventeen. 
He called himself Anonymous, and was 
destroying schools and dojos all across 
the country. What was disturbing about 
him wasn't the fact that he destroyed. It 
was the school the boy claimed to be a 
heir of: Unease. 

This wasn't a well known technique, as 
it was forbidden, but mostly because the 
last user had died in a fight more than 
sixty years ago, and nobody had seen it 
since. 

Kong Hai remembered, though. He'd 
fought the man. What was scary was 
that the man had eluded his every attack 
like a ghost. Or a demon. 

The old monk looked at his amputated 
left arm. The man had taken the arm in 
that fight. The weapon was a paper fan, 
and Kong Hai hadn't even noticed the 
man cutting it off. Then the arm had 
floated off the fan by itself. And 
attacked him. With his techniques.

It'd been a nightmare.When he woke, 
he'd almost believed it had truly been 
just a nightmare, up until the moment he 
realized that his arm was gone. And then 
he'd screamed for two hours straight.

Now there was another user, and by the 
rate at which the schools were being 
destroyed, the boy was just as good a 
user as the man who'd taken Kong Hai's 
arm.

He shuddered. Unease was back. The 
horrible forbidden technique, the evil . . . 

Kong Hai looked down as the new 
students went about their daily training. 
The other rumor was far more mundane 
than the one of Unease. It appeared that 
there was a child going by the name of 
Ranma in the northern country. He or 
she -- he couldn't tell from the rumor -- 
had apparently learned a technique 
called the Body of Wind and Cloud. 

Kong Hai had heard of it before. The 
technique had supposedly originated in 
the mystic realms, and was the art of the 
Gods. Kong Hai refused to believe that 
the mystic realms existed, but he knew 
the technique to be real. Which wasn't 
actually contradictory. The peasants up 
north had a habit of idolizing martial 
artists into gods. What could just be a 
specialized punching technique could be 
transformed by rumor into the 
equivalent of a demon-god waging battle 
with the forces of good. This rumor 
didn't surprise him. What did surprise 
him was the fact that it'd reached him. 
The fact that it did meant that there was 
some merit in the story. 

Oh, if the Unease story could be just as 
bogus . . .

***
Somewhere in Siberia
October 20, 1995

<"Can you tell me where Nerima is?">

"What'd you say?"

<"I said, 'Can you tell me where 
Nerima is?'">

"I can't understand Chinese. You know 
Russian?"

<"I don't either. I'm speaking 
Japanese.">

"Japanese? I can't understand Japanese 
either."

<"Where am I?">

"This is Siberia."

<"So . . . where's Nerima?">

"You're looking for a place in Japan?"

<"Japan? Yeah.">

"You're about a thousand miles 
northwest."

<"Thank you.">

Ryouga Hibiki proceeded northwest.

"Poor fool. He's going the opposite 
direction."

***
Capital, China
Fall, 1195

Wu Ming Tse sat at a table in a street-
side noodle stand. To say the least, he 
was bored. Very bored. So bored that he 
couldn't think of anything to do except 
to have lunch, and he'd already done that 
several hours ago. 

This was happening more frequently in 
the recent few years. 

"Seventeen years, and I'm already bored 
with life. God," he said in a rather loud 
voice.

The people sitting at the tables around 
him looked at him strangely then went 
back to eating and talking. Ming looked 
around. 

"What are they looking at?"

He turned his attention back to the bowl 
of noodles in front of him. Five dojos 
yesterday, and there weren't any more in 
the area. He'd have to move north. With 
both hands, he picked up the bowl and 
dumped the contents into his mouth. He 
put it back down on the table with a loud 
thump. 

"A tad bit rude, aren't you, Wu?" said a 
woman. 

Ming looked up. A green haired woman 
in strange garb had appeared in the chair 
across the table from him.

"Who the heck are you? Why do you 
know my name?" he asked.

"My name isn't important as of right 
now. As to how I know these things, all I 
can say is that I 'm the guardian of the 
earth star, the mistress of time. I have a 
job for you." The woman smiled a bit.

"I'm going north. I won't do any job that 
requires me to go anywhere else."

"Oh, don't worry. The job is 
conveniently at place along your path."

"How much money are you willing to 
pay me?" he asked.

"The payment to you will be far more 
valuable than any money. The payment 
is the guarantee that you'll never be 
bored."

"How can you do that?"

"I have my ways." Setsuna smiled. 
Soon. Soon.

***
Amazon Village
Winter, 1195

Kong Hai sat in front of the full council. 
He was sweating uncomfortably, not so 
much due to the heat of the room than 
the fact that he didn't like to talk to the 
dried up old matriarchs of the Amazons. 
The top ten strongest martial artists 
didn't include these old women, but had 
they, he wouldn't even be on the list. It 
was good that the Amazon society was 
so self-centered, closed to the outside 
world.

"What brings you here, Administrator?"

"Um, I came to ask your help, elders."

"I see. Why do you ask?"

"A user of the Unease technique has 
appeared. I ask you to help us defeat him 
before he destroys the six schools."

"What does he have against you?"

"As of now, nothing, but we suspect that 
he will take revenge for the previous 
user. As a user of unease, he will do 
anything to destroy us, and he might 
have help from the Sun-Moon Sect, as 
their goals are the same."

The elder appeared to give it some 
thought. 

"We ask you to stay at the village for the 
night. Our decision will be announced
tomorrow morning," she said.

Kong Hai sighed. It was going to be a 
long night.

***
Jusenkyo Range
Winter, 1195

Yosho felt a presence. That was one of 
the reasons why he was standing in these 
mountain freezing his skin off. The 
presence was disturbing, unlike anything 
he had felt for over a thousand years. He 
knew it though, and he knew it to be 
Ryouko. How had she woken up? There 
shouldn't have been anyone with 
Jurainian blood on the planet except for 
himself. Nobody could wake her. 
Unless . . . He didn't want to think about 
it. Especially since Ryouko now 
appeared to have integrated royal 
Jurainian DNA into her design. 

Not to mention that her design had 
become around ten times more efficient 
and powerful. Somebody had definitely 
modified her. As to who, he couldn't say.

He leaped from perch at the tip of the 
mountain and flew toward Jusenkyo at 
full speed.

Cut to part 1c

***
Someone asked what Ryuroden was. 
After a brief bit of pondering as to why 
this was asked, I realized it hasn't gotten 
to the US yet. Stupid me. Ryuroden is 
manga series. Specifically, it's your 
average self-insert-character-goes-back-
in-time-and-messes-up-history type 
manga series. The time period is the 
Chinese Sangokushi era, with super-
powered martial artists and lots of 
unneeded bloodshed. 

(Surprisingly, Ryuroden has quite a fan 
following in Japan. Hmmm . . . who said 
SI's were bad?)

Hopefully, Ryuromonogatari won't 
follow the same path. I originally 
intended for this series to be a Ranma 
crossover with the old Chinese martial 
arts novels, but seeing that the characters 
provided aren't all that interesting, this 
fanfic will be somewhat of an original 
series. Don't get me wrong though. 
There are going to be Ranma elements, 
and occasional guests from [the Bet].

The planned crossover characters as of 
this far:

Ryouga -
Yes, he's here, and yes, it's the one we 
know. He's gone and wandered off into 
some time portal. He always does.

Yosho -
He's always around. I figured sticking 
him in wouldn't be too bad. Builds 
character.

Dr. Who -
The one and only. Another day, another 
Dalek bomb. Of course, days don't really 
matter, just the bombs.

And a final note:
The power levels of the techniques used 
in the original Chinese martial arts 
novels vary from low (Gosunguki 
Hikaru) to exceedingly high (Son 
Goku). I had Ranma learn the mystic 
technique in order to get him to the 
power level I need. Of course,everything 
in between will be seen as well.

So, how'd you like it, folks? Good? 
Bad? Horrible? 

Happy Christmas and a Merry New Year