Myrriden,
     This may be sounding a little harsh, but please don't take it the wrong 
way.  This fic looks as if it could be promising, but it needs some help to 
send it on its path.
     To begin with, it's hard to see where the fic is going.  You've not 
given us enough to more than guess at the nature of the story as a whole.  
I'd tag this a [Teaser] perhaps, rather than a [Draft].
     Next we have the problem of voice.  This Ranma sounds more like a 
member of the Kunou family.  Were this an alternaverse, say a "Ranma the 
Mage" story, this might make a little more sense, but you've given us no 
reason to believe it here.  Magical studies or no, Ranma shouldn't sound 
this formal without a very good reason for it.
     Second, there's the matter of his education.  Ranma has picked up 
multiple languages, many of them obscure, studied arcane magical texts, and 
learned to decipher something of which Cologne (who is at a bare _minimum_ 
ninety years his senior and, depending on your sources, may be as much as 
two hundred and ninety years older) cannot make hide nor hair?  All of this 
in two or three years?  I don't think so.
     Canonical Ranma is linguistically inept and academically challenged.  
How many languages have you learned in your life?  How long did it take you 
to become competent enough to read a reasonably sophisticated novel, much 
less archaic magical texts and inscriptions? In a language not even remotely 
related to your native tongue, and only distantly related to anything with 
which you had previous acquaintance?
     Have you ever dealt with magical inscriptions or texts, particularly 
pre-Renaissance ones?  Most of them are deliberately obscure, and hard to 
make sense of even when someone else has gone through and done the gruntwork 
of separating them out into words (spacing and punctuation are a relatively 
recent idea) and putting them into a clear typeface instead of the usual 
irregular scribing.  The words used are often completely different to those 
used in the literary language (and even farther removed from the spoken 
form), and may have multiple uncertain meanings, depending on a context 
which is mostly lost to us.  Ranma would need more than three years to 
simply acquire the necessary background to begin working with this type of 
material.

eventually discovering that the talisman held what were called >runes from 
a mixture of Norse and anceint Celtic languages.  This >

     Sorry, but there's no such thing as "Celtic runes."  The idea was 
invented by Newagers who thought it would be neat to run together two 
popular occult buzzwords (the same sort of thinking that led to "Zen Runes," 
"Voudou Runes," and, for all I know, "Pickled Runes on Rice.").  No Celtic 
language has ever been written in runes (not even Scots Gaelic, which 
assimilated large numbers of Norse-speakers in the early Middle Ages).  
Runes as we know them are exclusive to the Germanic languages, being derived 
from Italic scripts (Greek-derived) sometime in the first millennium AD.  A 
script of similar appearance (but only distantly  related) was used to write 
an ancestor of Turkish--if you really want to use something obscure for this 
talisman, "Runic Turkish" might be an excellent choice.
     To whom is Ranma telling this?  Is he speaking or writing?  Is it a 
diary, a letter, or something else entirely?  I can't tell if you're trying 
to cover this material quickly so that you can get on with your real story, 
or if this is supposed to be a more important part of the fic.  If you want 
to _tell_ this part so you can get on with the story you really want to 
write about, make it clear that this is a prologue, then move on as quickly 
as possible.  Perhaps you could tag it as coming from Ranma's memoirs, then 
switch into the story that it sets up.  For an example of this, see S.M. 
Stirling's _Against the Tide of Years_ (the sequel to _Island in the Sea of 
Time_), which opens with a quote from the supposed journal of one of the 
major characters.  This quote neatly summarises the major events of the 
previous book in less than a page, giving the reader enough information to 
understand the "current events" of the novel without forcing them to sit 
through a ponderous "What has gone before" introduction.
     If, on the other hand, you want the events described in this draft to 
be a more important part of the story, you'll have to do more than make a 
few cosmetic fixes.  Stretch it out--describe Ranma finding this talisman 
(where and how?), bringing it to Cologne, finding that she is unable to read 
it.  Show him realising that this is a different kind of fight, turning 
seriously to academics, becoming an obsessive scholar, focusing all his 
energies on learning languages, epigraphy, cryptanalysis, whatever it takes. 
  Show him taking it round to every academic, sorceror, magus, and minor 
deity he can find, searching for clues.  Show him studying Old Norse, Old 
English, Old Friesian, the half-dozen different runic scripts, realising 
time and time again that he's gone down another blind alley.  Stretch it out 
over time, perhaps writing only a few scenes per year, each showing how 
Ranma is gradually growing from an indifferent student to a dedicated 
specialist in an obscure field.
     All that said, this looks as if it could be the beginning to a 
promising storyline, and I hope you continue with it.  All you have to do is 
decide where you're going with this and work on how you're going to get 
there.  Good luck with it.
                        Regards,
                        Andrew


Andrew Carey -- ap_carey3@hotmail.com
"Mirie it is, while sumer ilast,
With fugheles song..."


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