Relatively Absent

by Togashi Gaijin

Ehime, Shikoku - Sunday, March 6th 1994

Dust.

Above all else, what the woman saw was dust.

Well, dust and old men.

Just a few old men. And a few monkeys. More than a few monkeys, really. Many more monkeys than old men, in fact, but that wasn’t relevant. She rather doubted she could get any useful information from the monkeys, but old men she certainly could rely on.

She removed a photograph of a girl from her robes. A startlingly attractive member of the group in question, rivaled only (in her opinion) by her skilled, talented, and at times idiotic great great-daughter. The last was due to the simple fact that in hindsight, her great granddaughter had gone about the supposedly simple matter of catching her groom in entirely the wrong manner.

Of course, at the time, it had seemed like the right manner … and were it any other prospective groom, it probably would have been. But the groom has been a young, cursed, and incredibly hard to seduce youth named Ranma Saotome, and his reactions flew in the face of Amazon wisdom where it applied to young males.

Then again, she thought wryly to herself, he had also pretty much put Chinese wisdom down for the count in general, hadn’t done a great deal for Japanese wisdom’s hopes of supremacy, and had he had another suitor – say, from France, or Spain, would have crippled European wisdom severely. Ranma just plain did NOT play by any rational rules.

Ranma, also, was most probably dead.

She personally was fairly convinced of it. Certainly Mu Se was, and for once she had no reason to doubt him. Mu Se might well be a half-blind, foolish and vain transduck – but he was not a liar. He wasn’t smart enough to be one, in her opinion – at least not one of any ability, and all she’d been able to detect was complete sincerity.

And, somewhat to her surprise, something other than glee. Apparently Ranma had gone out of his way to make certain that Mu Se and Ryōga had been unlocked (after they had quite inanely managed to lock THEMSELVES) from their cursed form … and then the battle had begin in earnest.

The details of the battle, now … those Mu Se was quite indistinct about. He had only the vaguest memories of it, he admitted, after a severe blow to the head. What he DID remember was the final moments of the fight …

A titanic explosion.

A fortuitous, for once, fall into a stream.

A disparate flight for his own survival.

And a total and absolute conviction that Ranma, Ryōga, and Herb were all dead.

Dead and dust.

Somehow, her thoughts kept coming back to dust.

Well, enough of that. There were old men here. A small village apparently composed entirely of about four old men and fifty times as many monkeys.

She’d seen stranger things in Japan … but not by much.

The monkeys didn’t matter. Japanese were, by her standards, eccentric. Apparently this village made its living raising free-range monkeys. No, the strange part was that there were apparently no humans but four old men and a boy leaning against a post. This made it difficult, in a way. It would be a serious insult, after all, to approach the wrong man as the elder of this strange little village.

Well, the boy would know who the elder was, so ask him first.

She coughed, a small cough. No need for alarm at that … she was old, but not THAT old … not by the standards of those who were adepts as she was. It wasn’t age, or ill health.

It was just all the dust.


Dust

by Kenjiro Cross

A sidestory to “Relatively Absent” by Togashi Gaijin


“Boy.”

Perhaps a bit rude, that, but Ku Lon was a bit tired, and hot, and there was all this damn dust. It was getting up her nose, and in her hair, and her eyes, and … well, damn it, at her age she had every right to be a bit irritable and curt.

The boy looked up at her, his face at first expressionless, which shifted to near incredulity. “Wow. How did you get here from Dagobah?”

“From – all right, boy, two points for an original insult. I’ll let that slide. Just tell me which of these men is in charge of this village.”

“Which of them is in … Well, I can’t rightly say any of them is, really.”

“No?” Odd, she thought. Even the tiniest village, be it in China or Japan, usually had some elder in charge.

“Nope. You see …”

Ku Lon just waved the boy off. “I’ll just ask the man gardening, then.” Doubtless a farmer would remember strangers passing through so recently.

“Well … if that’s what you wanna do, lady,” replied the boy, with a hint of a frown.

Ku Lon walked – or rather, semi-pogoed toward the gardener. It was, in fact, quite a garden, with a very large greenhouse, and more than the number of expected modern amenities. “Excuse me, my man. I’m looking for a girl, or possibly a boy. About this high, if a girl, this high if a boy. Black hair and blue eyes, wears a pig-tail usually. Have you seen him or her?”

“Annnnhh?”

Ku Lon blinked. “Pardon?”

“Eehhhhhhh?”

“Let me guess. You’re hard of hearing, as would be typical of a Japanese Male at your age.”

“More like deaf, really. The others are merely hard of hearing, so you can try speaking up just a bit,” interjected the boy.

“I see. I shall try the man sharpening knives, then.”

“Knock yourself out.”

There was a certain tone in the boy’s voice that suggested that this was a bad idea. “You say he can hear, though?”

“Oh, sure, he can HEAR you. LISTEN, that’s another thing entirely.”

Ku Lon sniffed. Of course the elder didn’t listen to the boy. What could a youth like that have in common with his respected elders? “I think you’ll find yourself mistaken, boy.”

A few minutes later, Ku Lon returned from the knife-sharpener, a bit frazzled. “He … seems to have problems with his memory.”

“Yup. Sure does.”

“As in … he hasn’t got any. None that I would call reliable, that is.”

“Coulda told you that, lady.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

The boy almost but not quite smirked. “I tried, but someone didn’t want to listen.”

For a moment, Ku Lon was tempted to chastise the boy, severely … but he had a point. “I … see. Well, has THAT one a memory?”

The boy followed Ku Lon’s pointing staff, to where it indicated a man who was carefully carving an intricate model of what seemed to be the Tokyo Tower. “Oh, yeah. He’s definitely got a good memory. But …”

“As long as he can answer questions about the son-in-law, that’s good enough for me.” Ku Lon left.

After a while, she returned.

“Well … he certainly has a memory.”

“Yes, he does, lady.”

“And he’s quite good at relating it.”

“He sure is, lady.”

“But he’s not good at anything else, is he?”

“Well, he whittles pretty decent, lady.”

“What I mean to say is he reminisces. I asked him about son-in-law. That reminded him of HIS son-in-law who was an officer in the JSDF and who had problems with his kidneys when he was stationed in Okinawa.”

“Sounds about right.”

“And I showed him this photo – and got a long and highly detailed recount of his young adventures with an exotic dancer. Highly edifying, I suppose, but not very informative for my purposes.”

The boy shrugged. “Personally, that’s one of my favorites.”

With every fiber of her being, Ku Lon restrained herself from beating the boy into a thin red paste. He hadn’t actually been insolent except for the first quip – merely incredibly aggravating in a fashion she couldn’t justify as insolent. “Dare I hope that the other is still capable?”

“Oh, Misha-san? Reading the newspaper?”

“Exactly. Has HE, at least, not degraded significantly from his youth?”

The boy paused. “Well, yeah, he’s as good as he ever was, but …”

“Excellent. Finally, I shall find information on my son-in-law.”

Five minutes passed, and Ku Lon returned, shaken. “So … he was always a howling loony who is convinced that evil American pixies have subverted the Japanese government and that Nao Yazawa’s manga is based on historical events?”

“Nao … that’s a new one, but yeah. Grandpa says he’s been a total loon from day one.”

Ku Lon found herself grinding her teeth with extreme force. “Then, tell me, boy, with four such incredible incompetents as I have seen here, who DOES run this village?”

Finally, the boy allowed himself a full fledged smirk – worthy of the son-in-law himself. “I do, lady. And I tried to tell you, but you were so damn convinced that there had to be an Elder, you wouldn’t listen.”

And Ku Lon slowly toppled off of her staff.


Perhaps she had deserved that piece of minor humiliation, she mused, as the boy set about making tea for his guests. Japan, as little as she cared to admit it, wasn’t China.

Which, come to think of it, was the core of the problem, from day one.

The Law – the only Law that mattered … didn’t matter.

That was it, really. She had grown up KNOWING that the Law was the Law. EVERYONE she had ever met knew the Law was the Law. Everyone she had ever CONCEIVED of existing accepted the Law AS Law.

Except Happosai, who was from … far away.

Since arriving in Tokyo, Ku Lon had had to face something that her heart didn’t wish to admit, but logic and the evidence of the world as a whole proved obvious.

The Law was NOT the law … as far as anyone outside of a roughly eighty-seven kilometer radius of the Village was concerned.

Happosai had felt that way. She had written him off as unsuitable.

Ranma felt that way … but he was eminently suitable, and so the Law must be upheld.

And so she followed her great-granddaughter to Tokyo...and discovered that the Law was nothing but words from a small, insignificant village, in the eyes of a greater world.

Or so her subconscious would try to tell her, anyway. But a lifetime of indoctrination and faith forced her to believe otherwise … and to tell herself that the Law WAS the Law...the rest of the planet notwithstanding.

It took a mighty effort.

And she had a bad habit of backsliding. Seeing the things that Ranma, that Genma (hard to admit), that Ryōga and Mu Se could do …

Especially Mu Se. HOW had she missed the boy’s prowess? But he HAD pressed Ranma to the edge...

It all came back to Ranma.

Ranma HAD to return to China with her and Xian Pu. That was the Law.

Nothing Else Mattered.

Ranma didn’t agree...and there was no way she could force him without breaking him, and a broken Ranma was worse than no Ranma at all.

She thought back to a man she had met when the Japanese and the Americans had been fighting. Half-crazed, delirious, he’d died in the Village, having somehow made it there from Europe. He spoke of a situation where you could only get out of it by not getting out of it – an inescapable loop of causality, a bind of Paradox.

What was his name again? Yoshi… yosari… She didn’t remember. But she did remember what he had been speaking of.

We called it, as best as she could remember, Catch Twenty-something. It basically meant that you HAD to do something that you could NOT do, because if you did it, you didn’t do it.

To succeed in her quest, she would have to bring Ranma Back, willingly. As he was, whole, capable, able to teach and learn and propagate.

Ranma would never go back willingly.

The Law said that to bring Ranma back, Any And All means available could and must be used.

The only means that would work would leave Ranma … not Ranma. Unable to teach, unable to learn, unable to propagate.

Thus she both was REQUIRED to use the darker, more devastating methods she knew of – and at the same time dared not use them.

Twenty-two … that was it. Catch Twenty-two.

The American’s dying words had been right…

“Someday you’ll come up against it. Your laws are going to make it inevitable, old lady. You guys probably invented Cat…”

And he’d died.

DAMN, she wished to hell he could remember his name. Such a person should either be enshrined as a sage in the Amazon annals … or enshrined as a demon.

“Tea’s ready,” the boy said, bringing over a kettle and mugs. “So … what exactly are you looking for?”


to be continued …