Sailor Moon Fan Fiction / Ranma 1/2 Fan Fiction ❯ Crossing the Streams ❯ The Best Laid Plans ( Chapter 1 )

Crossing the Streams

by P.H. Wise

A Sailor Moon, Ranma 1/2, Doctor Who crossover

 

Prologue: The Best Laid Plans

 

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This is a story about a girl. Well, actually, she's a girl who is sometimes a boy. She was a boy originally, you see, but then he was cursed to turn into a girl whenever he's splashed with cold water. Except he was actually a girl originally, but then the whole bothersome reincarnation thing happened, and... have you heard this one before? Sorry. But it still holds true. It's a story about a girl, and a story about time.

 

Time is a funny thing. We experience it moment by moment, here and then gone, the future becomes the present becomes the past, and nobody can go backwards or forwards: we get what we get when we get it. That's the way it is, that's the way it's always been, and that's the way it always will be. But suppose there were people who weren't like that. People who didn't lose yesterday, but could travel there like it was the house across the street, loiter about in the living room, maybe make a mess of it, maybe clean things up a bit, and then come back home in time for supper. Suppose there were people who could explore tomorrow like it was Africa, wandering about like tourists through its deepest, darkest jungles, its vast plains, its vast cities. Up to the heights, down to the depths, and back again to today. Maybe they'll skip tomorrow and head clear into next week. Maybe yesterday was boring, and they'd much rather see ten years ago. It isn't like that for us, but for the Timelords, that's the way it's always been.

 

A long time ago, over a hundred years from now, Susan Foreman and David Campbell walked together through the mist-shrouded pools of a far distant part of the planet Earth. They had won. The Dalek invasion of the Earth had been thwarted. Susan had been left behind in the 22nd Century by her Grandfather, the Doctor, and she was determined to make a life with her love, her David. It should have been a happy time for them, and it was, for a while. Her dark hair gleamed in the fitful sunlight, peeking here and there through the misty valley. Grass grew thick all around her, as green as the deep, shining green of the English countryside. Within each pool, bamboo poles stood tall, swaying in the slight breeze. It seemed an enchanted place.

 

Why did she feel such a sense of trepidation here? It was lovely, and David was with her, as he had been with her every day in the two months since the Daleks had been defeated. She would never bear his children, of course, though not for lack of effort. It was impossible. They weren't the same species. But Susan Foreman didn't need to have children to be happy: she needed David... and she needed her Grandfather. He was her only family, and now he was gone.

 

That's funny. Was someone calling her name?

 

There it was again, faint, ghostlike on the wind. `Susan...'

 

“Susan, look out!” David yelled even as a man came barreling out of the mist. His face was lined with care, and his hair was more gray than black, but he was healthy, fit, and strong, clad in yellow shirt with black pants with a yellow and black spotted headband on his forehead.

 

“Out of the way!” the man yelled.

 

Susan gave a surprised yell, lost her balance, and plummeted into a nearby pool.

 

The man almost stopped, then. Almost went back to help her. But then the cry of a dozen angry Amazons sounded behind him, and a group of young women bearing medieval weaponry came racing out of the mist after the man. He dashed away in a panic.

 

“Susan!” David yelled. “Susan!” He couldn't see her. Where was she? He jumped into the pool after her, but it was deeper than it had first appeared. He found her resting on the bottom, eyes open, not moving. Even as he reached out for her, her eyes widened ever so slightly, and then... the light faded from them.

 

David felt a strange, tingling sensation as he pulled Susan out of the water. There, on the shores of the spring, unmindful of the changes that had occurred in his own body, he shouted her name. “SUSAN!” He tried to revive her, but to no avail. The spring had taken her.

 

A few moments later, the changes to his own body registered with his mind: in the 22nd Century, Nyannichuan had claimed its first victim.

 

The Guide found them like that half an hour later, David, now a she, weeping over the body of her dead lover. The Guide took off his hat and held it over his heart. His grandfather had often told him the tragic stories of the Pools of Sorrow. He'd never thought to see one take place before his eyes.

 

Time is a funny thing. We experience it moment by moment, here and then gone, the future becomes the present becomes the past, and nobody can go backwards or forwards: we get what we get when we get it. That's the way it is, that's the way it's always been, and that's the way it always will be. But for Susan Foreman, a member of the race that had mastered time and Granddaughter of the Doctor, time was a much more mutable thing. Here was one who had gone backwards and forwards in time again and again, and her body, her spirit, was charged with the power of the time vortex. That power, the power that suffused her spirit, flowed through into the Nyannichuan, bleeding backwards through time. David Campbell was the spring's first victim, but also the last. A year ago, two years ago, ten years ago, a hundred years ago, sixteen hundred years ago. It stopped there, its power petering out at last, ending over a millennia before it began, and the guide of that time saw a strange sight: a young girl in strange clothing knocked into the spring, drowning, her body fading into the mist and then gone. There, at the end, at the beginning, her spirit was released, and off it went, first to the place of waiting, and then, after many, many years - fourteen hundred and eighty four, to be exact, it was released back into the cycle of reincarnation where it belonged.

 

Such was the legacy of Nyannichuan.

 

Time is a funny, funny thing. A girl drowns in the 22nd Century, creating the Nyannichuan. The girl is reborn as a boy in the late 20th century. The boy falls into the Nyannichuan, and there, the heritage of his previous life is reawakened within him, and, thanks to the power of the cursed spring, in her as well. Elsewhere, another girl is reborn after an even longer wait between lifetimes. A whole bunch of girls, actually, heirs to the power of the Galaxy Cauldron itself. Over twenty thousand years earlier, a girl awakens to the power of Ruin, heralding the beginning of the end of the Silver Millennium. A thousand years in the future, nine girls forge the first Great and Bountiful Human Empire and its capital of Crystal Tokyo, and a few dozen years later, the forces of Nemesis lay siege to the city, sending ships back to the twentieth century to prevent it from ever being founded.

 

Time. People guard it, making sure that nasty things like paradoxes don't happen. Or they did, until the Time War wiped them all out. Well, almost all of them. There were some that still tried to keep things in order. One of them was even a Timelord. But not this particular one. At the Gates of Time, Sailor Pluto, one of the nine girls I mentioned earlier, guarded against the reopening of those gates, occasionally allowing what passage is necessary to prevent paradox, sometimes enjoying the paradise of Crystal Tokyo and the Great and Bountiful Human Empire, but mostly living in fear of the day when the old master of those Time Gates returns for them, and all the world comes tumbling down.

 

Our story begins in Nerima, where, as has often been said before, a girl and a panda were fighting in the rain. She had short dark hair that was tied back in a pigtail, and she looked more Saxon than Japanese, but she was wearing a red Chinese silk shirt with black pants and black slippers. The panda, on the other hand, was wearing a ratty old gi, which certainly isn't what you'd expect a panda to wear.

 

A few days later, a young doctor puzzled over the results of his examination of one Ranma Saotome. Her pressure points were all wrong. Her ki pathways didn't do what they're supposed to do, and were in different places within her body. And she had two hearts.

 

Now what did that remind him of?

 

Doctor Tofu's eyes widened. He dashed into his office and dug through his old things. He hadn't always been a chiropractor, after all. Doctor/Patient confidentiality was one thing, but this - this could be very, very important. He knew who to call about a thing like this.

 

A call was sent out, and the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce was very interested to learn what Tofu had discovered. Surveillance began two days later, made easier by the willingness of one Nabiki Tendo to sell photographs and video recordings of her sister's fiancé.

 

So it went for nearly six months, the presence of a Gallifreyan in one form or another drawing all sorts of chaos to Nerima. So begins our tale; a tale of `the best laid plans of mice and men,' and the way they `gang aft agley.' A tale of a boy who was also a girl, of a Doctor from Gallifrey without a name who was also a Grandfather, no matter how much or how often his face had changed since that time, and the tale of an ordinary girl from London. Together, their actions would shake the foundations of world. It all began, as many stories do these days, with a girl and a panda. The future, the past, the present, all united with a girl and a panda, fighting in the rain.

 

END PROLOGUE

 

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Author's notes: I'm still working on Reflections of Ruin, but this is an idea that's been kicking around in my head for a while, and I figured I may as well post the Prologue. I'll work on it whenever I have time, but I fully intend to finish Reflections of Ruin, so no worries about it going unattended.

 

As for the title, it's a very bad pun, I know. For the record, no, this is not a Ghostbusters crossover.