http://clampfix.fanworks.net/x-overs/turnabou.txt </head><body><pre> A young man, battered and weary, forced his way through a thick forest somewhere in the wilds of Hokkaido. His yellow shirt was torn from thorns and bare tree branches. He carried a large backpack surmounted by a paper umbrella, but it was less the weight of the pack that seemed to have tired him than the fact that he was wading through knee-deep snow. He leaned against a tree and looked around, taking in his surroundings. The forest seemed never to end. He had the vague sense that he had been climbing, but from this point it was impossible to tell how far he was from the summit of the mountain. "Damn!" he muttered. "Where the hell am I now?" Turnabout by Sionna Klassen Chapter 1 Imagine, if you will, an Earth slightly different from all the Earths you know. On this Earth, the normal laws of separation of powers do not apply, and thus the world is populated with such an incredible array of anime characters, science-fiction cliches, robots, superheroes, poltergeists and other weird phenomena that ordinarily there would be no room at all for normal people, and the resulting chaos would be something like the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" on speed. However, this Earth was ruled for most of its existence by a capricious but generally benevolent god, who had a tendency of retroactively rewriting creation whenever he felt that things were getting too boring, and thus every once in a while some characters would never have existed, or simply wouldn't be used in the current run of events, and the status quo would be maintained. The god had his run of the planet for a while (a "while" in cosmic terms being approximately a few hundred million years), and then something unexpected happened that rather ruined his day - namely, some aliens arrived bent on taking over the Earth, and to prevent their plan from being foiled, they shut the god up in a box and sealed it with sufficient arcane force to turn the landscape around them polka-dotted for quite a few miles around. Then they buried it in a tremendous earthquake, polka-dots and all, and left to conquer the Earth. As no one on the planet had been even the slightest bit aware that there had been a god of such a rather insignificant caliber running the planet to begin with, the inhabitants of Earth decided to welcome the aliens with open arms. The aliens were so pleased by the effusive welcome that they readily accepted the invitation to a really great party thrown for them, which proved to be a mistake as the aliens' physionomy had no mechanism to cope with the astounding effects of sugar. They died in a happy drunken donut orgy, which was a shame really, since the party only got better from there. Without the hand of the benevolent god guiding the planet, however, things started gradually to go wrong, subtly enough that most people didn't notice until quite a bit later that most of the people around them seemed to be unhappy most of the time, which hadn't really been the case a few short years before. Senate committees were formed to attack the problem, with the result that after a few more years and several square miles worth of paperwork, it was discovered that the cause of everybody's problems lay in the fact that daffodils were yellow as opposed to blue. The god, meanwhile, slept unawares in his box, buried in a polka-dotted cave somewhere in the middle of Hokkaido. And so the world spun on, and people continued to take themselves seriously. The young man who was introduced in the teaser, whose name happened to be Ryoga Hibiki, continued to stagger through the snow. It was getting dark, and he wanted to find shelter. He was fairly sure that he wasn't anywhere near Tokyo, which was technically all right, since every time he went there he was tormented by the close presence of the girl of his dreams. Who was, to put the crowning glory on his miserable existence, engaged to the man he hated most on the face of the planet. Brooding was second on the list of activities that Ryoga spent all his time doing, right underneath wandering around looking for his rival so he could kill him. However, due to a basic unfairness in the universe, every time Ryoga *did* manage to catch up to Ranma, the latter would inexplicably defeat him. Ryoga chose to ignore these losses, as only the truly short-sighted can do, obliterating them totally from his mind with thoughts of his eventual revenge. He realized that he'd forgotten completely that he was supposed to be looking for shelter, simultaneously with the action of walking straight into a rather large rock wall. "Ow!" Ryoga rubbed his sore nose and eyed the cliff in front of him, absently wondering where it had come from. He looked to the left and saw a hole in the cliff, with a red gate in front of it. It seemed to be a Shinto temple. Ryoga looked around. He didn't see anywhere else to go. He made for the hole in the wall and peered through the gate. It looked like an ordinary cave. Ryoga shrugged to himself and walked through the gate into the cave. As he passed, slips of paper tied to the side posts of the gate, buried beneath the snow, trembled and quivered. Half a world away, in a small apartment in the depths of New York, a man sat at a desk gnawing on a pencil. He caught himself doing it and stared at the chewed wood in disgust. Bad habit. He must have caught it from the humans; he didn't remember himself doing that a couple of thousand years ago. He set to work on his equations again. Math wasn't really his strong suit, but he *had* studied with the best, after all, and he was pretty sure he'd gotten the sums right. Of course, if he was right, then he was also probably insane. Either that, or the whole world was. <Damn,> he thought, scratching his head. <Wish the Q-Man was here to tell me which it was...> He ran his hands through his red hair and stretched. <Now, Makky boy, the 64,000 dollar question is who are you going to tell about this, hmm?> He looked around his apartment, missing the presence of his sometimes moody but generally cool housemate. The Q-Man was the first human that Mak had really befriended. Figured that he'd run off just about immediately. As if it wasn't bad enough that humans grew old and died in an eyeblink. Mak sighed. <You're brooding! That's the Q-Man's job, guy, leave it to him.> He looked at his equations and grinned. <Well, since no one's going to believe me anyway, I think these can wait until morning...> He stood up and turned off the desk lamp. As Ryoga proceeded through the cave, his path lit by a makeshift lantern that he had fished out of his pack, he noticed that the cave did not seem to be as commonplace as he had first thought. As if the gate outside hadn't been enough to vouch for the fact that something was odd about it, it was rapidly becoming apparent that the walls of the cave were festooned with multicolored polka dots, for no reason that Ryoga could fathom. But as he had not yet seen anything inside the cave aside from the polka dots that struck him as strange, bearing in mind here that Ryoga's definition of strange was quite a bit different than that of most people, he decided to simply sleep where he was. He'd gone far enough into the cave that the cold wind outside had died to almost nothing. He pulled out his blankets and fell asleep on the cave floor, dreaming of his true love Akane. Then things got strange. "Akane," Ryoga sighed blissfully, holding her close in a way that, had he not been dreaming, would have caused him to be punched into next week by said female. But Ryoga's subconscious liked to ignore Akane's violent temper. "Ryoga," Akane said, turning her liquid brown eyes up to his face, adoration in her gaze. "Will you..." Just as Ryoga was about to ask the question, there was a yell and Ranma came hurtling toward him, clearly bent on murder, or at the very least considerable physical mayhem. Ryoga, having seen this particular sight many thousands of times in both waking life and dreams, should ordinarily have leaped with Akane out of the way and deposited her somewhere safe before dispensing with Ranma, as this was a dream and therefore he was able to win. Except that he didn't leap. In fact, the only movement he made was to take a scepter from inside his robe. For a moment he was confused. <What the heck is this thing?> But there was no time now to worry about it, or even to dodge. On instinct, Ryoga blindly pointed the scepter at Ranma and closed his eyes. The scepter blasted Ranma far enough away that it was unlikely he would return within the time afforded by the rest of the dream. "What the..." Ryoga stared at the scepter in his hand, almost forgetting about Akane in his astonishment. "It's a good thing you opened that box, isn't it?" Akane said, resting her head on his shoulder. "Now I never have to worry about that stupid pervert Ranma ever again." "Oh - right..." <Box?> Ryoga wondered, just as he woke up and looked sleepily to his right. And there, sitting in the midst of the polka-dotted glory of the walls, sat a wooden box rather liberally covered with alien writing. Ryoga, unfortunately, could not read alien writing, although in this case it would not have been helpful as a rough translation would be "Do not open until Xantharr," an alien holiday entirely unlike Christmas. Ryoga, although he was very bad at reading alien writing, was very good at leaping to the obvious conclusions. He stood up and walked to the box, staring at it. "If I open this box..." he murmured to himself, "I'll gain a weapon that'll let me beat Ranma! That must be it!" He grabbed up the box and pried at it for a good fifteen minutes, feverishly trying to break the seal and get it open. While Ryoga is fighting with the box, this humble storyteller would like to take the opportunity to say a few things on the nature of boxes sealed with demon-wards, whether they be written in alien or in Japanese (I leave it up to you to decide which of those is more difficult to deal with). If Ryoga had been the type to think things through, he might eventually have hit upon the idea that there is usually a reason why these boxes have been sealed and hidden away, and that it might be a good idea to leave such things alone. However, he was not, which is just as well in this case, since without this example of simply stunning dedication to his goal of defeating Ranma, to the exclusion of common sense, there would be no story. However, thick-headed as Ryoga may have been, it was starting to penetrate that all his efforts were not accomplishing much of anything. He regarded the box sourly for a moment, then grinned, exposing the sharp tip of a canine tooth. "Of course. Why didn't I think of it earlier?" He placed the box on the floor and backed away, then rushed at it, focusing all his power into the tip of a single finger that he drove at the wooden surface with a yell that echoed through the cavern. "BAKUSAITENKETSU!!" he shouted, just as his finger touched the top of the box. High above the Earth, a flash of light briefly flared like a star, fading an instant later to leave a very bewildered man in its place. "What the--?!" he stammered, looking around. The total absence of air in space seemed not to bother him in the slightest, nor any of the other factors that made space generally not the most comfortable of places to be. He scratched his head in confusion. "Earth?" he wondered aloud. "How did I get *here*?" He frowned in thought. If one looked closely at this man, they might notice that something was rather odd about his appearance, especially taking into account that he was dressed in a bright red-and-blue spandex costume with a cape that on the inside mimicked the field of stars behind him. He was clearly a superhero of some sort, but if so, he would have disappointed the typical audience member who expects a consistent display of steroid abuse among male superheroes. It wasn't that he was scrawny, but he was fairly short, and in fact almost dwarfed by some of the more ridiculously-sized examples of his species. Not to mention the fact that he was wearing heavy and rather silly-looking bracelets on his wrists. A true comic-book aficionado might recognize this character as Quasar, the current Protector of the Universe, but for all you good readers out there who did not read the short-lived adventures of this man before his comic book went under, you have now been introduced. "Can we get on with this?" Quasar asked. Ah... Yes. Sorry. Quasar swiftly scanned the planet below him, ignoring the presence of the narrator who had too much of a tendency to ramble. <Definitely Earth, all right, the radiation spectrum is dead on... but how did I get here?> "I brought you here," a childlike female voice said. Quasar looked down at his right wrist. The face of a baby appeared in one of the yellow gems, surrounded by a mass of vegetable matter and an extra large eye. "Why, Epoch?" "Something important is about to happen." "Can't be more specific?" "I am sorry, Quasar. Even to a Time being, the future is unclear." Quasar sighed. "Man, I hope it's not another Threat To The Universe. The last one was bad enough! Okay, I guess I'd better get down there and check it out." Quasar skimmed down toward the upper atmosphere of the blue-green planet below, steadfastly refusing to admit to himself that he might possibly be going down there because he felt a bit homesick. The box shattered under the impact of Ryoga's finger. An impressive cloud of purplish smoke exploded into the air, and Ryoga waved his hands to clear the smoke and enable him to see. As the smoke dissipated, Ryoga looked at the place where the box had been and stared. A creature that most resembled a white rabbit hovered three feet above the ground, fanning white wings slowly in the cold touch of breeze from the cave mouth. A jewel gleamed gold on its forehead. It regarded Ryoga impassively for a moment, then smiled and said, "Pu." Ryoga face-faulted. "A *rabbit*? What good is a winged rabbit going to do me? I'll never defeat Ranma!" :The name,: the god said acidly, :is Mokona.: In Tokyo, someone dropped a pencil and twisted to stare wildly out the window. "Oh no." In Ireland, someone who, rather remarkably, claimed the same name stood and shouted, "Call down your fury on the unbelievers, Divine One!" Then he grinned in a rather bloodthirsty fashion. In Fountain Valley, California, someone laughed and commented, "This is more evil than I thought." In the cave in Hokkaido, Ryoga was not feeling overly reassured by these glimpses of various reactions to Mokona's arrival. He swallowed and turned back to the rabbit. Mokona was stretching its wings, commenting as if to itself, :It is such a relief to be out of that box. Three hundred years with nothing to do. I must make amends for all the time spent in remiss of my heavenly duties.: "Uh - I don't suppose there's any chance that I might be able to get a weapon that'll let me defeat Ranma?" Ryoga said, realizing as he spoke that he was probably being very, very foolish, but somehow unable to give up. Mokona looked at him. :Maybe,: the rabbit said. :If I feel like it.: "Oh," Ryoga said, glad that he hadn't been blasted into holy, or even unholy, cinders for asking. Mokona sighed hugely. :There is no need to fear. I am a *benevolent* God.: Ryoga felt a twinge of doubt. "If you say so." He decided to move onto a safer topic. "What exactly are your heavenly duties, then?" Mokona's smile returned and grew to truly frightening proportions. :Why... having fun.: Before Ryoga's brain could kick into gear and scream at him "RUN, YOU IDIOT!" (his sense of self-preservation being stunted from youth, which is the only explanation for why he keeps trying to fight Ranma), Mokona continued, :And I think to start...: The cavern filled with blinding light. The Onmyouji sorceror in Tokyo dropped all semblance of pride and hid under his desk. The Fire Master of the Divine Mokona eeped and hid under his computer terminal. The evil fanfiction writer in Fountain Valley decided that fun was fun, but things had gone a little too far now, and started making preparations for revenge. Ryoga was caught full in the blast. A wave of power burst from the planet's surface and enveloped the entire globe, radiating outwards into space. Quasar had barely reached the upper atmosphere when something like an atomic bomb on a cosmic scale went off and the Earth lit up to Quasar's senses like a small sun flaring suddenly into life. Before he could react in any fashion that might be helpful, other than to think a sudden panicked thought which is unprintable by the Comics Code, the wave of power hit him and he plummeted unconscious toward the planet's surface. When the light faded, purple rabbit-shaped blotches were still superimposed on Ryoga's vision. He shook his head, and as his vision cleared, he let out a cry of horror. "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?!" he screamed. *********************** End of Chapter 1 The author/narrator would now like to say a few words. Ryoga: I'm going to kill you. Quiet, Ryoga. You'll give away the plot. Ranma 1/2 and all related characters are owned by Rumiko Takahashi and Shogakukan Televison. The American versions are owned by Viz, even though no American voice actors will be used in this story. By the way, if you are expecting confusion between characters who don't speak each other's languages, you won't see it. I'm too lazy to deal with that problem in here. This is an alternate Earth; everyone there speaks the same language, which in this case is Japanese. I am merely translating. Kurama (amused): The Japanese have taken over the world? Talk to Mokona about it, not me. Anyway, Quasar is owned by Marvel Comics, as are several characters that will not be appearing until later chapters. The cliffhanger ending is entirely deliberate and will not be changed to protect the innocent. Alison: You're evil! I thought you knew that already. <smile> Cyndie: We did! But you're more evil! Thank you. Ranma: This chick's scarier than Kodachi... hope she doesn't get any weird ideas about me. Akane: You idiot, Ranma, you keep forgetting fanfic writers can hear your thoughts! That got you in trouble in "Lemonade" too, remember?! Ranma: eep If I may be allowed to finish...? Thank you. Effusive thanks go out to K-chan, my brother Dylan, John Biles for inspiration (although believe it or not, I did start this story *before* reading Lemonade... great story BTW John), and Kevin Luna for letting me borrow his Ranma tapes. This story is pure fiction. No infringements of the rights of the creators or distributors is intended. Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental... ok, with a couple of exceptions. But only a couple. No animals were harmed during the writing of this story. Oh, and one last note: This, as I mentioned before, is an alternate Earth. Therefore, any harrassment by the Mokona Protection Society is totally unwarranted, as this is not OUR wonderful and divine Mokona that I am writing about, but a completely different version. Mokona: Pu. </pre><p><a href="./">Back</a></p><p><a href=http://www.dreamhost.com/donate.cgi?id=216><img border=0 alt="Donate towards our web hosting bill!" src=https://secure.newdream.net/donate1.gif></a></p></body></html>