(last time, on Ranma 1/2...)

  The fridge was filled with Snapple and Jell-O.

  Genma burst through the window, a carp silently biting onto his leg,
and galloped over to the fridge, where he began to eat and drink.

  Nabiki, deciding that Thursday wasn't a good day for this, gratefully
passed out with a fever.


                        Chocolate Oranges II:
                          Peelings Reloaded
                        a Ranma 1/2 sequelfic


  On the third day, Nabiki awoke.

  Things being what they were, she happened to wake up in the same
place where she fell asleep. Not unusual, though she'd expected
something a little more interesting after learning that there was some
mysteriously vague problem with the world, or at the very least HER
world. It was hard to tell much anymore, really. Still, in order to
figure out what she COULD tell, she slowly got up and looked around.

  Genma was still what and where he was before, a large shaggy-looking
long-necked elk busily chomping down on apparently limitless bowls of
Jell-O being provided him from the refrigerator. The carp on his hind
leg, while seemingly quite annoyed at its host ignoring it, didn't do
much else other than clamp its little fishy jaws on and look around a
bit.

  Nabiki slowly got to her knees and carefully looked at Genma. His
face seemed...somehow different. Faint tinges of evil lurked in his
fur, but it didn't smell like his evil. She felt she would have known
if it was. Which could only mean one thing: something else had bought
Genma. She thought back over the last full day she had spent awake,
and slowly recognized this evil as something that had crept in and
hung around in reality's backstage while nobody seemed to have paid
it much attention.

  And now it's up to me to fix it, she realized.

  ...but first, that drink.

  "Um, excuse me, Genma? Can I have some of...?" she started to ask the
elk in between his chomping fits.

  Genma stopped eating, withdrew his head from the fridge, looked Nabiki
in the eyes, and paused. A couple seconds later, he sucked his tongue up
into his head and blew a raspberry at her out of both ears in stereo.

  "...well, that clears up that, I guess. Evil." she concluded. At this,
the carp dropped to the floor, flipped over to Nabiki, and spoke up.

  "IF YOU WANT to help us, hear the words. Check your room. One."

  It started to flop about to a more comfortable speaking position when,
all of a sudden, one of Genma's tongues shot out from his ear, grabbed
the fish, and pulled it inside his sizable head. The unexpected infusion
of piscatory matter seemed to muddle him somewhat, and he stumbled
forward into the open fridge, which closed its door on him and vibrated
loudly for a few seconds before shutting off completely.

  Nabiki blinked. She wanted to be a little unnerved, frightened, or at
least surprised, but strangely enough, the carp's words had left her
remarkably clear-headed and filled with a sense of purpose. She got to
her feet and headed for her room.

  As she went upstairs and passed the bath, she could hear her father
inside, still singing a loud bathing song. It didn't sound quite as evil
as Genma's fur had smelled, but it still didn't seem that he would be
much help in solving the dilemma that had chosen her.

  "Besides," she reasoned, "he'd be too wet."

  Nabiki went into her room and closed the door. She took a quick mental
inventory as she looked around, and concluded that most things that used
to be in it were still in it. In addition, some things that weren't in
it before were in it now, such as the large pomegranate tree growing out
of her bed. After thinking about it for a minute or two, she decided
that that definitely wasn't there the last time she checked.

  It looked healthy enough, and the fruit ripe enough to pick ("It's MY
bed, why wouldn't it be?" she later told Ranma in indignant explanation),
but there was something built into the side of it. She walked up for a
closer look and pried it loose. It was a rectangular panel with twelve
gemstones encrusted in it. The top row glowed with an apparently natural
light, curiously detached from any external energy source.

  "I'm not sure why, but I think this is the key." she wondered out
loud. "Wait...the key to what?" Not sure how to proceed with this
newfound knowledge, she looked expectantly towards the tree. It did
not disappoint her.

  With the sound of a hundred rams-horn trumpets blaring forth from
behind her closet door, and one linen-muffled quack, the tree shook to
the music, then slowly reached over until every branch, flower, fruit,
and leaf was pointed towards her window. She jogged over to it and
looked out, slightly surprised that her room was now at ground level
instead of being on the second floor, as she was quite sure it was
before.

  Sliding down the street was a colossal black cube, polished and shiny,
plowing up the ground as it went. Curious at the sight of this new and
unexpected one-shape procession, she climbed out the window, bringing
her panel with her, and walked to the edge of the road just as the cube
started to pass by her house.

  With a burst of static, two holes opened up on the front of the cube,
and Ranma and Shampoo stuck their heads out to see what there was to be
seen. Nabiki hurried over to the front and started to walk backwards
while talking so as to keep up with the two.

  "Ranma? Shampoo? What are you two doing here?" She couldn't smell any
evil on either of them, so she felt a lot more comfortable in engaging
them in conversation.

  Shampoo looked Nabiki in the eyes, her expression one of enthusiastic,
if slightly blank, joy and excitement, and declared, "It's Airen! He THE
REAL THING! Shampoo travel for weeks! Two!"

  Ranma quickly glanced over at Nabiki, nodded twice in a knowing way,
then withdrew back into the cube, taking Shampoo with him. The holes
irised shut, and the cube came to a sudden stop. With an eerie silence,
it slowly started to rise into the air, got about ten meters above the
ground, then audibly muttered, "Eh, why bother?" and burst into flames,
jumping across the sky and disappearing over the horizon.

  "...okay, that was a LITTLE unsettling," Nabiki decided. A small part
of her was slightly relieved that her detachment from her environment
seemed to be wearing off, but she was distracted by a slight buzzing in
her hand. She looked down and noticed that the second row of gemstones
on the panel had started glowing.

  Next, Nabiki felt a slight buzzing from her feet. She looked down and,
not seeing anything out of the ordinary down there, realized that there
was a slight buzzing from the ground, which soon shifted over to a
slight vibration, then a slight trembling, and finally a full-fledged
minor earthquake. As she looked around for cover, it dawned on her that,
aside from the recently departed Ranma and Shampoo, she hadn't seen a
single person since venturing outside. That, as evidenced by the
colossal figure of Happosai rising over the horizon, was about to
change.

  He noisily stomped across the city, flattening entire houses with each
step, and bellowed a masculine screech of defiance. He wore a blindingly
fresh aura of evil that Nabiki could see from across Nerima, but it
wasn't his own. She had experienced his original one before, and this it
definitely wasn't. She quickly consulted her gemstone panel once more to
see if anything else had been unlocked with his screech, but it remained
only half-lit.

  "I hope I don't have to fight that..." she bemoaned as the giant
pervert turned and started to bound in her direction.

  "Young woman! Do not fear him!"

  Nabiki looked around in confusion to see where that last line had come
from, and saw a unfamiliar figure standing upon her house. He wore a
judo gi, and as soon as she recognized him, his heroic theme song
started.

 
"DON'T GIVE UP! Your quest        | Asobi no michi ni  tamashii kometa
shall not be hindered by this     | Hitori no otoko ga  kyou mo yuku
monster! I shall personally see   | Majime ni asobanu  yatsura ni wa
to his glorious defeat, for       | Karada de oboesaseru zo!
great justice! Three!" With       |
that, he leapt at Happosai and    | SEGATA SANSHIRO! SEGATA SANSHIRO!
kicked him in the head.           | SEGA SATURN, SHIRO!

  His fearsome kick knocked Happosai off-balance, and the ancient master
went flying across the country, finally tumbling into the Tokyo Tower,
which promptly collapsed. Sanshiro, not one to leave a task half-done,
raced towards his fallen foe and proceeded to toss him headlong into the
sea, where Happosai exploded. His victory nearly complete, Sanshiro
picked up the crumpled remains of the Tokyo Tower and flung it at the
defeated creature, who obligingly exploded once more.

  Segata Sanshiro, having saved Nabiki and assisted wholeheartedly in
the agreed-upon scheme to restore love and order to the land, walked off
towards the setting sun, where he met Shinguuji Sakura, played a short
game of hide-and-seek with her, and founded a dynasty of warriors for
truth, justice, and quality dramatic adventure sagas to spread around
the world.

  As for the other events of Segata Sanshiro's reign, all he did, and
his military achievements, are they not written in the book of the
annals of the kings of Sega? Sanshiro rested with his fathers, the kings
of Sega. And Gorokuro his son succeeded him as king.

  And lo, Nabiki looked, and there was the Neko Hanten, which had
approached near during the chaotic period surrounding the War of
Happosai, and now stood boldly before her. She debated for a moment
or two whether or not to go inside, until a grand celestial event made
up her mind for her. With a majestic and rather unexpected "whop", a
rapidly approaching wall, spanning the heavens, materialized and began
to draw ever closer to the unassuming Earth.

  It was an infinitely wide wall of boiling fire.

  It was the End of the World.

  It smelled almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a large wet dog.

  Having this new apparition to help focus her resolve, Nabiki hurriedly
entered the Neko Hanten. The restaurant, save for the wizened old form
of Cologne slowly rotating on a bar stool, was deserted, and many a bowl
of gomoku ramen lay uneaten as mute witness to the approaching disaster.

  "Yo, little sister," Cologne greeted Nabiki, remaining on her stool
with eyes closed and hands folded, "Perhaps you should go and consult
YOUR FACULTY ADVISOR and learn about the matrix." She stopped spinning,
opened her brownish-green eyes calmly, and started to stand up.

  Nabiki waved her hands and frantically shouted, "No, wait!! Don't go!
Don't go and leave me! Wait!!"

  Cologne paused for a moment, then grinned and replied, "Fear not, I
can dig it."

  Nabiki took a deep breath, walked over to the window to verify that
the fiery stellar wall of doom was still on its scheduled approach, and
returned to the counter of the restaurant to ask, "What exactly did you
mean, the Matrix?"

  "No!!!" Cologne leaped onto the countertop, visibly indignant. "Not
the Matrix! Listen to me!"
 
                        "No,      no,      no, 
                         No,      no,      no,
                         No,      no,      no..."

  She stopped yelling for a moment, reached down to detach her left leg,
and began to slam it on the counter in time to the final stanza.

                        "No,      no,      no!!!

  "Do not you understand the mathematical properties here?! Not a
Matrix! Just remember to speak the words! matrix!! Honestly, little
sisters these days...feh!" She sighed deeply, then sat down and looked
sadly at the empty restaurant.

  "I don't get it, Cologne...why do you call me sister?" Nabiki asked
skeptically. In her mind, it wasn't that such oddities appearing on
this Saturday weren't wholly unexpected, but it was just she didn't
feel...right...having this particular oddity present itself all of a
sudden. "You mean, are you...?"

  Cologne said nothing for several moments. The wall of fire outside the
restaurant marched steadily on, beginning to absorb some of the higher-
orbiting artificial satellites surrounding the planet, and making the
weather outdoors a tad bit unpleasant. The stock market, showing a
remarkable amount of optimism, rose 43.62% and bought a great many
shares in Nabiki Tendo. On Wall Street, a good time was had by all.

  Back at the Neko Hanten, Cologne finally looked straight at Nabiki,
then reached her hand up to her neck and pinched hard. A musical popping
sound emanated from her throat as she pulled up and over her head,
revealing her skin to be enclosing a giant zipper, and the withered
visage of the Chinese matriarch gave way to the noticeably smoother and
gentle face of Kasumi Tendo, age 19.

  "Ka..Kasumi?!" Nabiki was taken aback, not only by the fact that her
sister stood before her, but more for the fact that, possessing the rest
of Cologne's body other than her head, she was a fair sight SHORTER than
she used to be.

  "Help us, Nabiki. You're our only hope." With that, she pointed to the
ground, and a manhole cover which had previously laid there unnoticed
suddenly sunk away, revealing a dark and deep tunnel leading out of the
restaurant. Kasumi hopped over next to it and beckoned Nabiki to follow.
"Down here is where your quest ends, and you alone hold the key to
halting Pereshte and returning all."

  "Huh?" Nabiki commented.

  Kasumi smiled pleasantly. "Don't worry, you have all you need. We'll
see you on the other side." She gently picked up Nabiki's fully-glowing
gemstone panel, gave it back to her, then forcefully grabbed her by the
arm and flung her headfirst down the hole, cheerfully shouting out,
"FOUR!" right before the tunnel entrance sealed itself.

  After a bumpy yet mercifully short ride, Nabiki found herself sitting
awkwardly(which, in this context, is understood to mean, "upside-down")
in a dark and soggy antechamber, illuminated only by the twelve-gem
board that landed next to her.

  "Oww..." She got up gingerly, making sure that her panel, which was
apparently(judging from her sister's words) even more important than she
had thought, was undamaged. Upon closer inspection, and determining that
it indeed was, she finally noticed the fact that all twelve stones, in
four rows and three columns, were now glowing just as the first rows had
started to earlier. What that meant, exactly, remained just slightly
beyond her understanding, though she kept faith that she'd know when
the time was right.

  A muffled THUD shook the cavern from above, and she quickly realized
that the wall of fire must have impacted on the planet's surface, and
she so hoped that her father had gotten out of the bath and at least
gotten dressed, so as to stand a fighting chance. Still, if Kasumi was
right, she theorized, she would complete her task down here and it
wouldn't matter much at all in the end.

  "Wait...what task?"

  Shoving that thought aside for a moment, she got up and stepped
towards the only visible door out of the chamber. It had a standard
wooden doorknob, not at all the sort of thing you'd expect to find in an
cattle slaughterhouse, and she turned it quite easily. The door itself,
behaving as if weightless, silently swung inwards, and she stepped into
a very familiar room.

  "Hey, this is my classroom from school!" Indeed it was, every desk and
paper right where she remembered it being, all those many hours ago,
back when there WAS a school. "I guess this is where it ended up. But
who would...?"

  Nabiki didn't get to finish her train of thought, as a dozen vines
suddenly whipped out within from the desks, binding her arms and legs
and dragging her over to a spreadeagled position in front of the
blackboard. She struggled against the horde, but it easily overpowered
her and held her in place, suspended several inches off the floor.

  The lights turned on, and Nabiki winced, not having her arms free to
shield her eyes from the light. As they adjusted to the brightness, she
saw a dark-suited and helmet-clad figure standing on the far side of the
room, smoky fog billowing around it. With methodical, echoing steps, it
slowly crossed the room until it stood face-to-face with Nabiki.

  "What do you want?!" Nabiki angrily demanded, not able to move her
arms or legs, let alone sit down at her desk, which she suddenly thought
of as a very comforting idea, given the circumstances. Her panel had
landed facedown back by the main door, and she just now realized that
there was an inscription of some sort on the back, but she was in no
position to read it from where she was.

  The figure tilted its head slightly, in apparent puzzlement, then
slowly reached its hands up to remove its helmet, showing her captor to
be none other than Akane Tendo.

  "Hello, Nabiki. I'm your sister." she spoke in a reassuring monotone,
"Don't you like my world?"

  "You're not my real sister!" Nabiki responded forcefully, her eyes
beginning to moisten up with tears from the pain of having the vines
squeeze her ankles and wrists tightly.

  Akane tilted her head the other way, then reached down into the fog
surrounding her feet to unstrap and step out of her boots, looking back
p at Nabiki to continue her soothing monotone, though in a slightly
higher tone of voice this time, "I'm your sister. I made our world for
us."

  "No!! You're not my real sister!" Nabiki closed her eyes tightly, not
wanting to believe that her admittedly strange Saturday had come down to
this torment.

  Turning away with a sigh, Akane walked a few steps towards the middle
of the classroom, before stopping, forlornly turning her head back
towards Nabiki, and quietly whispering, "I'm your sister."

  "NO!!! You're NOT my real SISTER!!!" Nabiki all but screamed, wishing
everything would just go away and leave her be, having a nice comfortable
breakfast back home, with rice and miso soup, perhaps an orange or two,
and a relaxing cup of coffee, or possibly chocolate milk, depending on
her mood that morning and whether or not there was any in the house at
the time.

  "Okay, fine, I'm not your real sister." Akane looked away dejectedly,
before abruptly spinning back around to face Nabiki, eyes wide in shock
and hands reaching to grasp her throat, gagging at something climbing
up her windpipe. She staggered around, knocking over someone's chair
that had been sitting in front of their desk, and collapsed onto it,
heaving and twitching.

  Nabiki looked away as best she could, not at all wanting to see her
sister, even one that admitted it WASN'T actually her sister, being in
this much pain. After a long silence, she cautiously looked back at the
prone form of the fake Akane, and the creature emerging from her
unconscious mouth. It shook itself free and began to float in the air
under some otherworldly form of propulsion. Its dark beady eyes seemed
to gaze right into Nabiki's soul, and it glistened with residue from
its recently departed host. It looked, smelled, and sounded as evil as
an entire warehouse devoted to rugs made from the fur of Genma the elk,
and had the sort of aura that would cause an ordinary person to collapse
in shock just from being in its presence.

  Nabiki held up decently enough under its onslaught, mainly owing to
the fact that it was, paranormal qualities aside, a common Mongolian
gerbil.

  "I am Pereshte." it stated matter-of-factly, still using the higher-
toned version of Akane's voice. "Perhaps you've heard of me?"

  "Oh yeah, I remember now. I think my other sister mentioned you..."
Nabiki said nonchalantly, trying to stall for time while she frantically
tried to figure out what it was she came down here for in the first
place.

  "It's a great pity you weren't included in my original plans. Quite
honestly, I completely forgot about you, which is why things had to come
to this. Greatly sorry, but you know how plans is plans. Now, shall we
get started?"

  "Wait, just a second...what HAVE you done, exactly?"

  "Oh, you know. This and that. Some of the other thing, but not TOO
much. I like to be tidy. Now, calm down, this will only pinch a bit."
Pereshte settled down on a nearby desk, reached back and snapped off his
tail, which quickly morphed into a bamboo drinking straw that he then
pointed at Nabiki. With a regally important "foop", it shot forward,
extending itself until the far end embedded itself just above the center
of Nabiki's chest.

  It only pinched a bit, just as Pereshte had claimed it would, but
Nabiki didn't mind that so much as what she knew, deep down, would
happen next, which so terrified her that she could hardly describe it,
yet quite effortlessly think of nothing else. This was very nearly a
great and tragic event, except that she DID manage to think of something
else. A few something elses, in fact.

  "One."

  "Two!"

  "Three!"

  "FOUR!"

  "Not the Matrix! Listen to me!"

  Ruby, topaz, beryl. Turquoise, sapphire, emerald. Jacinth, agate,
amethyst. Chrysolite, onyx, jasper.

  "Besides, he'd be too wet."

  Nabiki opened her eyes suddenly, seeing Pereshte about to drink
through his straw, which surprised him somewhat. "Is something the
matter?" he asked calmly.

  "...I know how. I don't know how, but I do." she whispered in awe.
A grin slowly spread across her face, and she shouted, "I know how to
solve the puzzle!"

  "What puzzle? What are you talking about?" he questioned, looking
confused, or at least as confused as a gerbil can look when he's
preparing to drain the soul from a teenage girl through a drinking
straw.

  Nabiki mentally ran over the day's events quickly a couple times,
just to be sure, then shut her eyes, took a deep breath and shouted
with all her strength:
 
                    [    IF       YOU       WANT     ]
                    [    THE      REAL     THING     ]
                    [   DON'T     GIVE       UP      ]
                    [   YOUR    FACULTY   ADVISOR!!! ]

  Exhausted, she slumped down in her restraints, then slowly looked up,
noticing, with no small amount of triumph, that the straw embedded in
her chest had vanished without so much as a small pinch. Pereshte stood
there, jaw hanging open in abject shock. He honestly hadn't expected
anyone to actually guess his system password, and here this mere child,
completely overlooked for days, had somehow, without any apparent
slicing skills, managed to crack his code down to the most secure
levels.

  "How....HOW DID YOU KNOW THAT?!?!" he all but exploded in
consternation. Leaping forward off his table, fully intending to
repeat his question from close range while floating before Nabiki's
face, he experienced a quite painful power drain mid-way through and
plopped to the floor. It felt quite a bit more intense than a small
pinch.

  The vines holding Nabiki suspended quickly slacked off, and she
dropped to the floor. Unfortunately for her just-conceived plans to
interrogate the little gerbil, determine what exactly he had done, why
he had done it, how best to reverse the effects on reality, and whether
or not those really WERE real gemstones embedded in the panel that
she'd accidentally left facedown by the door to the classroom...she
happened to land directly on Pereshte, and he behaved quite like a
common Mongolian gerbil, one very much lacking in paranormal qualities.

  *sqloosh*

  Immediately following that sqloosh, several million other sounds of
various intensities, most of them leaning towards the loud end of the
spectrum, flooded into the classroom. Nabiki clapped her hands over
her ears, which proved to be a very poor defense against the audial
onslaught, and struggled to keep conscious. Glancing around the quickly
darkening room, she looked down at the broken body of Pereshte. It was
quite clear that he remained mortally wounded, but hadn't quite stopped
moving, giving a twitch now and then, as if his wounded mind was lashing
out randomly inside his cracked shell. Desperate to stop the wail which
felt was just about ready to liquefy her brain, Nabiki jumped into the
air as high as she could and landed with both feet stomping into the
rodent's back.

  Silence.

  Blackness.

  Carpeting?

  Nabiki groggily opened her eyes, and noticed that she seemed to be
laying on the floor next to her bed. Waking up a little bit more, she
deduced that she had apparently fallen asleep still wearing her clothes
from yesterday, a REAL yesterday, and that she was drenched with sweat.
She also noted, with no small amount of relief, that there was no tree
growing out of her bed, pomegranate or otherwise.

  She contentedly murmured, "There's no place like my floor..." Pausing
to collect her thoughts, she amended that with, "...but not right now."
She got up, checked her clock, and determined that today, if it was a
school day(which, things being what they used to be, she wasn't quite
sure if it was or not), she was up and awake in plenty of time to not
be late.

  Deliriously happy in the security of knowing she was home, in her own
reality, in the happy place where only standardly weird things happened
to her, she pirouetted daintily around in the center of her room a few
times. It was one of the happiest mornings she could think of in recent
or distant memory, save one or three nagging distractions. She
encountered the first such distraction midway through her fourth
pirouette, as she saw Akane standing in her open doorway.

  "Um, Nabiki? Is something wrong? You..."

  "HUH..?!" She froze in surprise, and stammered a bit. "Er, well...uh,
yeah, I MEAN, no! No, everything's fine! It's just, um...why do you
ask?"

  Akane looked around hesitantly, then softly said, "Well, I...I just
had a weird feeling, that's all. I thought maybe you knew something
about the...Nabiki? What happened to your shirt?"

  Nabiki frowned, and looked down at her sweater and her undershirt,
both with cleanly punched holes through to her unharmed chest, right
below her throat. She paled slightly, searching for a suitable answer,
but not having any come to mind.

  Akane, eyes wide in concern, silently excused herself and closed the
door. Nabiki, no longer feeling quite so overjoyed, wandered over and
sat down heavily on her bed, then quickly got up again after feeling
something in it. She pulled back the covers to reveal the same
rectangular gemstone panel she'd somehow brought with her. It wasn't
glowing anymore, but now seemed as perfect a time as any to read the
inscription she saw earlier, which she subconsciously knew was still
there, even an entire reality away from where it had been written. With
trembling hands, she tenderly picked it up, turned it over, and read
what was written there.

  "THE BEGINNING."

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  Disclaimer:

  The characters of Ranma 1/2(Nabiki, Ranma, Shampoo, Cologne, Akane,
Kasumi, Genma, Soun, Ryouga, and others I didn't use) are owned by
Rumiko Takahashi and those she licensed them to, including, but not
limited to, Shogakukan and Viz. The character of Segata Sanshiro is
owned by Sega Enterprises. The events and persons in this fanfic are
completely fictional and any resemblance to actual events or persons
is completely unintentional, and the author is not responsible for
any injury, trauma, or other detrimental condition resulting from
proper or improper use of this fan fiction. Comments, suggestions, and
other C&C are greatly appreciated, and will be accepted at the email
address of sabremau@yahoo.com. Keep circulating the fanfics...


  "Egnaro Eht Saw Okkay, Egnaro Eht T'nsaw Luap."


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