Herein lies backstory to the Chocolate Oranges saga. If this makes
very little sense to you, point your favourite webbrowser over towards
http://www.rakhal.com/florestica/rylan-hilman/, put on a Paul Harvey
broadcast, and read......the REST of the story.
Good day!
-----
______________________________________________
/ Chocolate Oranges Zero: \
|==============================================|
\ Young Pereshte Cracks a Safe /
A Ranma 1/2 prequelfic
by DannyCat (sabremau@yahoo.com)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
A small leaf flitted silently through the skies over Nerima, drifting
lower and lower. Shoppers in the crowded streets below paid it little
heed; leaves falling through the air were perfectly natural for Tuesday
afternoons. There was no wind to speak of, and the leaf was flitting
in a particularly horizontal direction at rather unnaturally high and
un-leaflike speeds, but these facts escaped them utterly, as they were
meant to.
The occupants of the leaf waited patiently as their pilot, a young
gerbil who was a middle-ranked lieutenant of the Order of Order, brought
them in towards their headquarters in this reality; the one nexus point
where they could safeguard the very lynchpin of all sense and logic for
the world they alone were charged with keeping.
In order to keep prying eyes away from this closely guarded secret, it
was located within the Tendo Dojo, where few would think to look for it.
"Is that where the control panel is?" asked the younger of the two
passengers. His companion nodded, garbed in the same brown robes, yet
with extra decorations to signify his experience and authority.
"Indeed, apprentice Pereshte. That is where your training with the
Order of Order shall begin. Now hang on, the landing could get a little
bumpy."
"'Tis fine, 'tis fine," Pereshte chuckled, grinning cryptically, "I
rather like...bumpiness." He looked out the window, away from his
teacher, who merely nodded again, cheerfully enthusiastic to begin
teaching his new apprentice the ways of their order. It was unfortunate
for the world at large that he was never awarded a decoration for great
foresight.
The leaf, or, more appropriately, the interdimensional transport for
transporting gerbil-sized passengers that was disguised to appear as a
leaf, slowed its approach, and began to idly swing from side to side,
lining up with the small hangar opening which appeared below Nabiki's
window. With a final puff of wind, it shot inside and the hangar closed
up behind it, leaving no trace of anything unusual.
----
Timelines are fascinating things. Even beyond the fact that, since they
usually possess both beginning and ending points, they should be more
accurately referred to as time line segments, the real interesting part
occurs when time travellers alter them.
When one sits in front of a timestream, watching the twin flashes of
a group of matter particles bursting out of the continuity then crashing
back in at a different point, two things spring to mind. First, they can
watch a propagation wave forming, rearranging spacetime for each instant
in reality from that time on forward.
For common inhabitants, such forced alterations wash right through them
and they, offering no resistance, have no idea that anything strange has
happened.
However, for those beings quite a bit more anchored to reality, being
smashed through by a wall of moving time is a particularly unpleasant
experience.
In fact, the entire purpose of the establishment of the Order of Order
was to attempt to prevent such temporal tsunamis from wrecking the lunch
breaks of visiting dignitaries to this particular dimension. By putting
a lockdown on the coating of reality and keeping all attributes of
physics under careful control, they could (in theory) prevent temporal
incursions even before they happened, and therefore allow a strong sense
or normalcy to prevail unchallenged.
The second thing one notices, as long as one has not been drinking too
heavily, is that actually sitting outside of a timestream, as well as
having a propagation wave travelling through it at neither a zero or
infinite speed, implies the existance of metatime, but this fact can be
safely forgotten for the moment.
----
Beneath the floorboards of Nabiki's bedroom, a modestly-sized chamber
of meeting began to fill up with several very anxious-looking gerbils.
With the announcement of the arrival of a new apprentice of the Order,
Pereshte, it began to dawn on most of the elders that something new and
momentous was upon them. They felt that one day soon, with his powers
and abilities added to their ranks, they would be able to not only keep
normalcy normal, but also, for the first time, make sense of the entire
Ranma situation they had been living next to for several weeks now. Oddly
enough, however, Pereshte himself was not in attendance.
"You believe that this young recruit is THAT reasonable?" the oldest
gerbil of them all, Yanne, questioned of the young captain who stood
before him in the middle of the chamber.
Captain Moba, who had flown in with Pereshte just a few scant minutes
earlier, drew up to his full height and proudly declared, "I am certain
of it. I even ran the spectrum of tests proscribed in Order rulebooks."
Yanne's aged ears perked up, as if hearing something off in the far
distance but not quite ascertaining what it could be. "And which tests
might those be?"
"Apprentice Pereshte possesses great mental power, surpassing even
myself. On the GRP exams, he scored a full 87.5%." This statement
provoked excited muttering among the council members. Yanne, however,
merely looked around, twitching his ears to get a better lock on that
rhythmic pounding sound he heard faintly coming from far below them.
"Indeed impressive...however, for the Order of Order, that's hardly an
extreme--"
"And, if you'll forgive the interruption, his energy level for that
mind of his IS extreme; I ran the QQM test on his bloodstream, and it
came back reading 67,000!"
This caused stunned gasps throughout the room. Two or three gerbils
fainted, slumping onto the table in front of them, letting the hoods
of their robes fall forward to cover their heads. Yanne froze, both
in horror at the danger they were all in as well as at the colossal
ignorance of pretty much everybody else in the hall.
"All that means," he spoke in a trembling voice, "is that he drinks
at least FIVE cans of Jolt a day! Where IS he, anyway? Clerk! Where is
Pereshte?!"
The clerk of the Order, bowing in respect of Yanne's authority,
approached the council timidly. "Well, it's hard to say, exactly, but I
DID see him heading off towards the basement with a pickaxe in his--"
Yanne did not wait to hear any more. With a sudden burst of speed that
belied his centuries of age, he picked up his nearby walking stick and
leaped for the doorway, racing headlong towards the computer that was
their whole reason for existing in this dimension.
----
Kasumi walked by Nabiki's room, carrying a basket of laundry from the
bathroom. A faint reverberation from a distant future, triggered by
both the smell of the clothes and the power of the ancient gerbil racing
through the floor beneath her, triggered for an instant an absolutely
clear picture of what was eventually to be. She saw, with photographic
clarity, her great-granddaughter, saving not only the entire physical
cosmos, but preserving the lives of an almost infinite number of people
throughout every possible reality in existance itself.
Before she could remember any of it, the moment passed, and she stood
still, merely confused and a little woozy. She blinked twice, then smiled
in realization.
"Oh! Oh, well, that's all right, then," she said to herself cheerfully,
continuing onwards to the laundry area.
----
Yanne passed through the unguarded entrance to the subterranean
computer complex built into the ground beneath the dojo, which was
unguarded only for the fact that the dozen or so sentries that were
supposed to be denying access to anyone and everyone were strewn all
over the corridors, so thoroughly confused by Pereshte's own unique
sense of sense that their minds felt it would be simpler to just nod
off and take a short break to recover.
The ancient gerbil steeled his mind and walked in.
Pereshte stood in front of the massive device, which was easily ten
feet high and ten feet wide, and furiously hammered away at the keyboard
panel with his paws, making hundreds of incorrect attempts per second on
the security system. His pickaxe, dented and bent pickaxe after serving
its purpose of getting him through the proper doors, lay on the floor
behind him, and his pace slowed only slightly as he glanced over his
shoulder at the silhouette of Yanne in the doorway.
"You've come to stop me, haven't you?" he asked in that bored sort of
voice one uses when one doesn't care who comes to stop them or not.
"If you would kindly step away from that computer and stop trying to
smash space and time with your bare paws, I'm sure we could work out a
deal."
"Do you have ANY idea what it's like, watching the people in this town,
day in and day out, but not being able to do a single significant thing
about it all account of the fact you gerbils say that it's SUPPOSED to be
that way?"
"Apprentice, I'm afraid that what you have said is precisely the point.
What needs to be, needs to be. We cannot pick and choose the aspects of
the people and places here to suit our wishes; the timestream--"
Pereshte stopped, turned around in exasperation, and began tapping
keys with his tail at nearly the same rate as before. "You know, I've
gone right off this timestream."
"Ah, but that's the thing, isn't it? You haven't. You can't."
"Not yet, but I DO possess a sound strategy." He stuck in hands in the
pockets of his Order of Order robe and spoke in quite a different voice,
mimicking the weathered vocalizations of elder Yanne. "This computer is,
by definition, the most logical device in this dimension. It defines that
which is. Therefore, the password must be the most UN-logical combination
ever! And THAT...is precisely what I excel at."
"What? NEVER yet! That makes absolutely no sense! You cannot hope to
crack the fabric of space and time by--!"
The hammering of keys halted abruptly. "Just did."
Yanne's jaw dropped open in shock, and several critical instants passed
by before he recovered enough to shout, "...say WHAT?!"
"Bye-ie!" Pereshte grinned, and promptly vanished.
The older gerbil rushed in and tried to recall Pereshte to three-
dimensional space, but he was too late. The system had been relocked
with a completely different password, and the barriers safeguarding
reality systematically began to fall. Yanne shrugged in defeat and
trudged back to the council hall, trying his best to ignore the rumblings
beginning to resonate throughout the universe.
----
Even before Yanne had returned to the main hall, the Order of Order
had a very clear sense that something had gone very wrong. The spectrum
of visible light, for several seconds, had rapidly alternated between
inverse monochrome and a palette of exclusively bright pastels.
Occasionally, gravity seemed to be taking a holiday, leaving the
gerbils and a load of paperwork to go floating off towards whatever
direction they happened to want to go in. The most troubling occurance
of all was when Lieutenant Frungy, who had previously recieved the job
to ferry Pereshte and his intended master in on the leaf transport,
suddenly and inexplicably transformed into a large rabbit, shredding
his robe and causing no small deal of embarrasment when he suddenly
returned to his original form.
Yanne entered the hall, and the gerbils who were not still floating
around managed to stand at attention to hear what their respected elder
had to say regarding the Pereshte situation. He reached his chair,
sighed deeply and spoke, "My friends, I am afraid that our mission has
failed."
"WHAT?!" the crowd shouted back at him.
"Pereshte has cracked the computer's security, and he is now loose
within the system."
"WHAT?!"
"Our mission has failed, but let us not despair; we are all capable
and versatile gerbils, and I have a plan!"
"WHAT?!"
"The results here will now be the same no matter what we do, so I
propose we leave this dimension, and go our own ways...."
"WHAT?!"
He fixed them with an intensely inspiring and rodential glance. "I said
go our own ways!"
"WHAT?!"
"'Cause Yanne said so!" he concluded, triumphantly.
At that moment, as if Pereshte himself was personally spiting the
entire Order of Order (which he was), the ceiling exploded off of the
chamber and exposed the entire council to Nabiki Tendo, who was sitting
in her bed and most definately not expecting to see a group of robe-clad
gerbils standing or floating underneath her floor.
"WHAT?!" she screamed in complete surprise.
"WHAT?!" the gerbils chorused back at her.
Yanne's left lower eyelid began to twitch, so he waved a furry paw in
the air and muttered, "I think it's time we go."
With that, each of them flung off their now-obsolete Order of Order
garments, concentrated deep within themselves and, with one loud *pop*
per gerbil, vanished from Earth and scattered to various other worlds
throughout the multiverse.
Nabiki didn't get any time to think about what she was seeing before
the house lurched violently sideways, causing her to tumble out of bed
and hit her head quite hard on Yanne's desk. Luckily, he had already
placed his cloak on it, and that both cushioned the blow and protected
her slightly from what happened next.
Unfortunately, as she passed out, she happened to completely miss the
wave of timestream changes that washed over her.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Disclaimer:
The characters of Ranma 1/2 are owned are owned by Rumiko Takahashi
and those she licensed them to, including, but not limited to, Shogakukan
and Viz. Every single one of the gerbils in this fic, however, aren't.
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 will be greatly
appreciated, and are accepted at the email address: sabremau@yahoo.com
Keep circulating the fanfics...
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