I guess I should explain before I start this.
Charles Schulz had once had Lucy refer to her younger brother Rerun as
"uncute" a couple of years ago. From this, a discussion took place on
Fidonet's ANIME echo,
alluding to the fact that just maybe Sparky had seen a bit of Ranma, or
had otherwise been exposed to this thing called anime.
In any case, I couldn't think of how to do this with the Ranma universe,
but I always kinda figured that Skuld wanted a pet dog.
I write with regret and a few tears that a truly great man has passed
away but a few hours ago. Most, if not all of us grew up reading of the
mishaps of Charlie
Brown and his friends. I guess I knew this was coming since he
announced his retirement back in early December, but I guess that deep
down we didn't want to accept the fact that such a brilliant man could
possibly die.
Or maybe the timing is right - by the time most of us read this, the
last panel that Schulz wrote will be published in your morning paper.
With this, however, there will be no more Peanuts paraphernalia.
-Dennis Carr
---
*All things considered,* he thought, *I'm pretty old for a dog.*
Snoopy looked again at his home for the past fifty some odd years, this
dog house he'd lived at since being adopted from the Daisy Hill Puppy
Farm. *Then again,* he thought to himself, *I'm not your average dog,
either.*
It was kind of funny, actually - ever since dialing that wrong number
and having that strange looking girl jump out of his water dish, things
had been a little strange. It's not fun living for fifty years,
especially if you're a dog, and you can only think that your house is a
sopwith camel so many times.
But life goes on, one figures.
Since he made the wish that things went well for that round headed kid,
though, it was kind of strange. He finally met the little red haired
girl from down the street that he spoke so highly of.
And things changed from there too. Some were interesting - the really
crabby girl that always said something bad about his writing had left,
going for law school, ironically enough. The kid with the piano was
suddenly a session musician. And the crabby girl's brothers - well,
nobody really knew what happened to them.
And it was kind of funny, too, that the girl who always saw him as the
funny kid with the round nose went on and did her own thing. He heard a
rumor two days ago that she had taken up the guitar, and was playing a
country music circuit. And the one with the glasses since became a
computer nerd.
And all this, in only a couple of weeks.
So, he really had nowhere to go - his work here was done. There was
some opportunity, however - that girl seemed to like him. *I think she
said her name was...Skuld, was it?* He recalled her saying that she
wanted to keep him.
He could live with that, he had told her, as long as he wasn't used as a
dressing dummy, like that psychotic girl did when he went to visit a
friend in the hospital.
He watched as Woodstock flew down, taking his usual erratic flight path
to his usual perch atop his head, and smiled a bit. The bird said
nothing, seemingly understanding as to what was about to happen.
With the usual grace, he packed up a few belongings, kicked his supper
dish atop his head (which the bird jumped up to avoid, re-perching atop
this), and went downstairs into the basement of his home, looking at a
mirror placed on a wall on the other side of the billiard table.
He watched this as the mirror took on a slightly fluid state, glowing a
bit as a woman came out of it, smiling as to accept him.
Belldandy stepped down, drew a glass of water from the bar sink, from which
Skuld jumped out. He wasn't sure how this all happened, but he assumed
that this would work itself out.
Without a word, Skuld reached a hand out to Snoopy, and he, in turn,
placed his paw in this. Together, as Belldandy phased back through the
mirror, her own work done, they jumped in towards the glass.
As he did this, he decided that maybe the road to Tipperary wasn't all
that long.
---
Charles M. "Sparky" Schulz
Nov 25, 1922 - Feb 12, 2000
http://cnn.com/2000/US/02/13/obit.schulz.ap/index.html