Ranma 1/2 Fan Fiction ❯ Memoirs of being in the Saddle ❯ The Tent and the Mirror ( Chapter 6 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

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Two weeks later Ranma was camping in the lot in a small tent in the rain next to my house. And due to the way things lined up I had no prior notice. 

 

I was hurrying home in the rainy evening from a two-day gig in Shinjuku, an envelope full of cash from a job well done, when I passed the lot by my house. Technically it was part of my property, but since I had no desire to build anything on it, it lay unused.

 

Now there was a tent in it.

 

At first I thought it was the Hibiki kid again, it'd be the fourth or fifth time he'd camped here despite being twenty minutes from his destination.

And yes, I could tell it was him without seeing him, when he packed up and moved on he'd leave instant ramen wrappers and empty trail-mix bags with labels from Hateruma to Wakkanai and everywhere in-between.

Kind of a hint.

 

Since I was already fairly soggy, I decided to head towards the tent to tell the boy to clean up the grounds before he left this time, when I heard a feminine sneeze.

 

Definitely not Ryoga.

 

I had a brief suspicion that it was another fiancée making her way towards the boy, but that was shattered when she spoke.

 

"Oyaji, 'zat you?"

 

"Ranma?" I couldn't hide the surprise in my voice.

 

Why the hell was she here?

I hadn't listened to any tapes for the past two days.

What the hell happened?

 

Yeah, I'm terrible with surprises.

 

Now, the tent was missing its rain cover, and while it was water resistant it wasn't that waterproof in this downpour, so no doubt it was a pretty miserable experience inside there.

Her sleeping bag was at the very least damp, probably worse. The zipper opened slightly and sure enough, a bit of damp red hair and an eye peeked out to look at me, before it opened enough for me to see her face. 

 

And the roll of toilet paper still in its plastic.

 

In a cheesy Light Novel, I'd sweep her up in my arms, carry her inside, and she'd melt in my embrace for some stupid reason.

But this was before Light Novels had really exploded, and it wasn't like I would read them, give me manga any day. 

And she'd break my everything if I tried.

 

So I fell back to brutal bluntness instead.

 

"Come inside, I don't need you shitting in my lot like the Hibiki kid."

 

Hey, you may laugh, but it worked.

 

=-=-=-=

 

Now, this wasn't the first time -nor the last- that Ranma would be, shall we say, away from the Tendo home for reasons not his own. Nor was this the only time this lot was used. It wasn't the only one, there were several around the area due to the housing market still being on its upswing. 

 

And I won't say exactly why in particular Ranma was now out like this. People tended to visit him often, and it'd be trivial to narrow me down that way. 

 

Suffice to say, the reason was what I soon coined as a 'Saotome Special'. It goes like this:

- 80% of the time Genma did something stupid in the past. Not always a fiancée, but it was something. And since Ranma was often the promised item…

- 20% The situation is tense, tempers on the fray, and then Ranma opens his goddamn mouth and says something stupid.

 

This was one of those.

 

=-=-=-=

 

She brought her sleeping bag in as well at my order, and hung it up to dry by the little heater I had by the entrance.

I had a fair amount of special leather shoes you see, and too much moisture can cause all sorts of problems. 

 

It was hard not to stare at how the wet clothes clung to her, but I managed.

She fared far poorer when I popped my second shoe off, and the foot it was attached to.

A fresh prosthetic with a built-in slipper was as always waiting for me, next to the matching slipper for my meat foot.

 

Once that was done, I marched into the bathroom and grabbed two towels; One for myself and one for her. 

 

"Toss your clothes in the dryer, do what you need to do, and have a bath." I pointed to the correct door.

 

"I'll change and bring something that should fit you. I'll leave it outside the door."

 

She nodded and walked in with the subtle trepidation that comes from an unfamiliar house.

 

In my room, I changed from my damp suit into some jeans and a loose long sleeve shirt. Ranma would be getting my gray sweatpants and matching t-shirt.

 

I didn't try to peek. 

 

Oh, I wanted to, a lovely vision in a long lens zoom is not the same as one five feet away, but I was in this for the long game, and I had to stay strong.

 

Damn tempting though.

 

I came down the stairs and made sure to walk a little louder than I normally did and knocked on the bathroom door. No doubt Ranma was quite good at hearing people try to sneak up on him.

"Clothes are just outside."

Not wanting to be even suspected of trying to peek at the peaks I marched off to the kitchen. Some hot barley tea and cookies should be good for warding off the chill.

 

And so I boiled some water, made some tea, sipped, and waited. 

 

And frantically adjusted my plans to find something I could accomplish in a day.

Squandering chances like this has to be a sin in some religion somewhere.

 

=-=-=-=

 

Twenty minutes later, Ranma came out, dressed in the dry clothes I provided.

 

And still female.

 

I had picked those clothes assuming the hot water would leave him male, so they were both overly large and loose. Except in some spots…

 

Had that been locked again? Magic was weird enough when it was consistent, never mind when you added more on top of it.

 

At my puzzled look, she shrugged, which did interesting things to her shirt. 

 

"Gonna have to head back out and get wet anyway, so why bother."

 

But he'd had to have turned back by going into the bath and -ah, I see.

Ranma wanted to talk about something.

Something emotional and thus girly.

 

She did. 

 

As it turns out, I was right, A 'Saotome Special', but one even leaner on Ranma than I expected. She'd literally just been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had taken the blame for things.

 

And she was feeling pretty put out by the sounds of it.

 

So I listened and nodded when I was supposed to, sipped at my hot tea and tried to look both stern and wise. 

 

"Now, from what I have heard, I'm inclined to agree with you," I said. "I'd want to get confirmation from an outside source for bias but..." and I had to stop there.

 

The look she was giving me, just because I said I believed her. Now, I know from some of my recordings of the Tendo household that things weren't the best for Ranma there, but for it to be this bad?

 

It'd make things even easier for me.

 

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He, yes he, ended up sleeping on the floor of the living room in his sleeping bag that night. It took a bit of finagling to do so, as I said prior, Ranma hated charity in pretty much any form, but I managed to once again use brutal bluntness to make her see reason.

 

"Don't be a damn fool, plenty of time to be miserable in the rain later. Like tomorrow after you get yourself a new rain cover for your tent."

 

In the morning I found myself up earlier than usual just to make sure I could see Ranma off. I didn't need him skulking off before I had a chat.

 

"Look, you have school for half a day, so use what you can while you're there." I started. "The problem comes with after."

Ranma nodded, having already been thinking of it. On Saturdays, Japanese kids had a half day of classes, and Furinkan would be closed up by two at the latest.

 

"Now I do a lot of my work on the weekends, so I probably won't be here for most of it," And it was true, my Sunday was booked pretty solid, and I wouldn't be home Saturday until the late hours. "So here's what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna take a chance with you."

 

That earned his attention, he was looking at me seriously now.

 

"I'll lock my doors, but, I'll leave the bathroom window open a bit. You can come in that way."

 

Now, my bathroom -and I mean the room with the bath, not the Western term for the water closet- was pretty old school when I got the place, and while the size of it was good, I liked to stretch my leg out, heating the damn thing the old fashioned way with the outside wood burning furnace sucked balls, so I had hooked up a big ass modern water heater to my home less than a month after I moved in. The window was facing away from the street around the back, so as long as he wasn't stupid no one should see him go in. The window was high up, but there was no way that'd be a problem for someone I've seen leap onto rooftops.

 

Despite being male, Ranma's face lit up at the thought, before clouding with a subtle wariness. He was looking for the catch, in his life there always was one.

 

Best to ease his worries. "I'm taking a chance with you, you got that?" My serious face was quite good I've been told. "Anything goes missing while I'm gone, anyone kicks a hole in my house chasing you and that's it. No one gets to know you come here."

 

He looked mollified, but not enough, I needed a bit more. "And, when this is over, you help me clean up the lot and my yard. Sound fair?" 

 

And I offered my hand to shake.

 

He looked at me for a moment, searching for something in my face.

He must have found it because he nodded, and shook my hand.

And then he was off.

 

I gave him five minutes to make sure before I got on the phone. It took a bit for it to be answered, the man I was calling wasn't a morning person by any stretch.

 

"Kimura? Yeah, it's me. Look, you still looking to offload that last panel?" I grimaced at the loud yawn, followed by less than muffled swearing. "Wake your ass up, I got a proposition for you."

 

=-=-=-=

 

Kimura Takashi was the man of a thousand schemes, with an odd success here and there.

Life had not been kind to the man, and he'd had to leave home without finishing High-school, and thus he found himself taking all sorts of odd jobs to survive.

In the end, he picked up quite the varied and diverse skill set along the way.

He and I ran in some of the same circles, and I'd been a cameraman for some of his... less legitimate entrepreneurship's.

Some of them even made money.

More importantly I liked him.

 

One of his ventures a couple of months ago had barely broken even and had left him with several hard to sell items. He'd gotten rid of most of them, but one still stuck in the corner of his apartment, too expensive to just toss, too unique to sell easily.

 

I mean, who would want to buy a large, six-foot by four-foot single piece one-way mirror?

 

It turns out I would.

If he'd bring it over and help me get it set up. The man was quite good at all sorts of labor.

 

Now, both he and I had a gentleman's agreement with each other:

We got into some pretty weird things at times -him far more than me until recently- so we would help each other out without asking questions unless the other actually volunteered the information. 

 

Why was I installing a large one-way mirror in my bathroom? He didn't ask.

Why do this when I lived alone? He didn't ask that either.

Why help me hook up a circuit to my bathroom window, run a thin wire, carefully glued under the windowsill and painted to match the tiled walls, one that leads to behind the mirror? Just you guess. 

 

A good man, which is why I worked with him fairly often.

 

And it wasn't like I was ripping a hole in a wall, no, I was taking advantage of an unused closet, one built before people in this neighborhood had modern washing machines and dryers in their homes. One that lacked proper heavy electrical wiring so I couldn't stuff my washer and dryer in there.

I had considered converting into a small sauna, before giving up on it and slapping a smaller mirror and a towel rack on it and ignoring it.

After whacking my hip against the obnoxious doorknob that stuck out, I had replaced that with a much smaller one covered by the towel hanging on the rack.

 

It was a closet Ranma didn't know existed.

 

We removed the towel rack and reinstalled it a few feet closer towards the entrance, took down the mirror and the door it was on and got busy. The one-way glass was carefully epoxied to a wooden frame Kimura put together with two-by-fours. Hinges were installed and a crude latch was made that would open the new "door" if one slid a thin wooden stick behind the one side of the mirror and pulled it upward. With access to the back of the wall outlet that the hallway had, I ran a wire over towards where I'd put my camera. 

 

Kimura, ever the professional, took a look at how I was setting up my camera and went back to his van. Returning with some black cloth he started gluing it along the edges of the frame and the floor, and cut a piece large enough to drape over the camera.

 

"Reflections are what gave my last project away," He explained to me as he cut and glued. "As long as the room is dark, the only way they'll be able to tell is if they smash the glass." 

 

We were done just before noon. The mirror fit so damn perfectly you'd think it had always been there. The paint smell would air out enough in an hour or two if I kept the window open.

 

He was curious, I could tell, but he also knew better than to ask what I was up to.

 

He did shake my hand though.

 

"Good luck."

 

=-=-=-=

 

Camera setup was easy, I'd done similar for wild animal footage for my regular work, though using a switch instead of a motion sensor took a little bit of trial and error, but I got it.

Now when the bathroom window was opened more than a foot, the camera would turn on, record for an hour, then shut off. With four hours of film ready, I could catch four occasions if I was lucky.

 

The camera itself had a good wide sweep, and I'd been careful to position it to cover as much of the room as I could.

There were blind spots, particularly along the wall by the bath was a big one, but moving the small table where I put my books and metal foot from one end of the bath to the other made it almost gone.

I'd endure the loss of my foot table for now.

 

A quick wash with a hose attached to the bathroom faucet and I had any sawdust and bits swept down the drain. A bit of a fancy spray on the glass would keep it from fogging up.

 

It was ready.

 

=-=-=-=

 

I came back late that night to see the tent now had a plastic tarp over it. Ranma was using the street light and the wall to do his homework.

 

I nodded towards my door and he followed me in. 

 

He did the rest of his homework on my kitchen table, used the bathroom, and went back to his tent to sleep. As he left I warned him I was going to be gone pretty much all of Sunday.

 

That night I could barely sleep due to my excitement.