It’s amazing how the sight of a naked girl can shift one’s priorities. Well perhaps not quite all that amazing if you put it in a certain way, but in this particular case it’s not quite what you were thinking. Ranma was not following Akane to her room in the pursuit of nooky, but rather because he was beginning to get a little bit desperate to get rid of this damned earring before something else happened that he’d have to deal with and regret when it inevitably wore off. Besides which, Kasumi was taking a bath right now and with the way things were going she would’ve just stripped right down only giving him the briefest of her saintly smiles and then just get right on to not caring he was even there. If anyone were to find a way to manifest a guilt trip into physical form, it would take the appearance of someone trying to take advantage of Kasumi Tendo as she wore an expression that made the word innocent look bad.
“Hello Ranma,” Akane said, seated on the side of her bed. There was an odd gleam in her eyes that he’d never noticed before. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“Yeah maybe,” he replied and was it just his imagination or did her smile broaden quite considerably just now? “Listen, about just now in the bathroom. Didn’t that seem weird to you?”
“Not at all,” she replied with a shrug. “We walk in on each other in the bathroom all the time. I just don’t mind it anymore.”
That had to be the earring at work, and my goodness what powerful work it did. Well, this presented a pretty good opportunity. They were all alone. Nobody to interfere. He could maybe figure out just what this earring did to people’s minds, and maybe learn to control its effect somehow.
“When did you stop minding it?” he asked.
“Oh, just this morning!” she replied, tapping her lips with her finger. “It was like I suddenly realised that you weren’t reacting to - oh, what was it Kasumi called it again? Oh yes! - negative reinforcement!” Akane smiled brightly and leaned forward in a manner that Ranma tried desperately not to notice was giving him a clear eyeful down her blouse. No sir, he was not noticing that at all. “So I decided to just let you be a pervert all you wanted. Sooner or later you’ll get bored of it, and behave normally. Right?”
If not for the earring and the knowledge of what it did to people, he’d be asking just who the hell this was and where they were keeping his fiancee hostage so he could go rescue her. As it was, it did tell him something else. It wasn’t that the earring was making them merely ignore whatever he did and shrug it off as just a normal everyday occurrence, but instead made them internally rationalise it based on what they already thought and felt. At least, that was the hypothesis he was going with. It wasn’t a working theory quite yet, he only had one set of facts to back it up and hadn’t tried to drive it to the very edges of its conclusions. If he intended to figure this out he needed to test its limits, just like he’d test every martial arts style or trick he ever learned. You don’t test something by trying to make it work: You test it by trying your absolute damndest to make it fail.
So. A new line of questioning was in order. Though the incident in the bathroom was fresh in his mind (and likely would be for a few months yet), that hadn’t been his only interaction with the tomboy this morning. Alright. Let’s see what she says to this.
“You didn’t rise to my insults this morning, either. Remember? I called you an uncute sexless tomboy that will never ever get a husband. Why didn’t you rise to that?”
“Same reason, I guess?” Akane shrugged again. “I don’t know, it just didn’t annoy me so much as it used to. Though come to think, I’m not entirely sure why it ever did. I mean let’s face it,” she leaned back, away from Ranma and stretched her hands out behind her laying her palms face down upon the bed. She thrust out her chest and crossed one leg atop the other, all the while staring Ranma right in the eyes before saying “None of it is remotely true. If I’m so uncute and sexless, why did so many boys fight over me in the morning? It seems to me that if I applied myself, I could get any. Husband. I. Wanted. Even you. Especially you.”
Hard to argue with that given the way he had to adjust the way he’d been seated. That look in her eye was enough, more than enough. But that pose for that body not five minutes after being able to revel in every square naked inch of it was more than more than enough. Maybe even more than that. The only reason that he wasn’t jumping onto that bed right this instant was the nagging feeling that her behaviour was just plain wrong, and it was because of this damned earring!
“Akane, are you... Are you saying you want me to - Uh...”
“What, Ranma? Ravish me? Make love to me? Pin me to the bed and make me howl into the night? Oh, make that morning. Then afternoon. Then night. Or maybe you have something else in mind?”
It’s the earring. The earring is making her think this way. If you climb on to that bed and even remotely touch her in any sexual way, then it would make you completely unworthy of spending the rest of your life with her. How does that sound? Worth it? Not remotely. Just keep repeating that to yourself and it’ll all be okay. You’ll be fine. Even though she’s licking her lips and making bedroom eyes while reclining on her bed in her very own bedroom, even though he’s not entirely sure just how the earrings made her think anything he did made it okay for her to behave this way, so it might not even be the earrings at all...
“No, I can’t. Akane, listen to me! You’re not yourself right now! You’re not thinking clearly! I’m under some weird spell that makes everybody think everything I do is ordinary!”
Akane stared at him, and Ranma could swear that he could see the wheels turning in her head. “Oh...” she trailed off. “I suppose that makes sense. I only realised that it was okay for you to see me naked when I noticed you were seeing me naked. Right down to the second. I didn’t even think anything of that at all. How did you get this spell put on you?”
“This earring,” Ranma said, pointing to the accursed thing. “Happosai heated it up, pinned it on me and cooled it right down again. I can’t take it off without tearing my earlobe off with it, and I’m not sure it’d be safe to let Tofu try with the weird way the spell works.”
“I wouldn’t think it would be a good idea to try, either!” Akane nodded. “After all, cutting into a magical item like that could have any kind of consequence.”
“... I hadn’t thought of that...” Ranma mumbled. Well, great. What the hell was he to do now? “Any other weird thoughts you’ve been having today?”
“Well, if what you say is true then I’m hardly much of a judge of what’s normal anymore, am I?” she blushed, beginning to behave a little bit more like herself! Thank goodness! “ I- I guess I did entertain one idea that I don’t think I had yesterday. I thought it was completely normal for me to walk about completely naked.”
Okay. Ranma wasn’t entirely sure where that glass of water had materialised from. He wasn’t sure why he’d decided to pick it up and try to drink it at that precise moment. The only thing he did know was that he delivered a massive spit take on hearing that last part. “Normal for you to walk about completely naked!” he said incredulous. “The hell did you get that idea?”
“What? There’s nothing wrong with being naked!” Akane insisted, pulling the buttons off her blouse before Ranma’s disbelieving eyes. Whatever else Ranma had been expecting of this conversation, the words “impromptu stripping” hadn’t been expected to make an appearance, but here they were nonetheless. Right now he was completely baffled about why she would suddenly decide to take all of her clothes off.
“H-hey, put those back on!” he insisted, trying to pass back her blouse and - and her bra! Ohgod, she really was going to kill him for that one!
“Hmph! You wish, you pervert!” she harrumphed, managing to create some very fascinating jiggling sensations in the process. “You got lucky there, catching me with my clothes on. Well, it won’t happen again!”
Okay. So. Somehow she’d gotten it stuck in her head that it was normal to go around butt naked, and - Ranma tugged on his shirt and stared at the second earring, right where he’d left it. No... It couldn’t be that, could it? The second earring, with its ability to alter whatever people thought of as normal by simply applying the word normal to it? But he wasn’t wearing it! Ah! Ah! He was! He was wearing it! On his shirt! Did that actually count? Who the hell made these things?!
“It’s normal for you to wear clothes. Ow! Dammit!” Ranma yelped as a searing burning sensation spontaneously erupted on his chest, right about where the earring was positioned. There wasn’t much else for it but to check the book again, and he was glad to have kept it with him. Now let’s see here...
“A person using the second earring cannot undo a previous alteration. It may be modified, but never entirely reversed.”
Again. Who the hell made this? Some practical joker? An arbitrary wizard high on the fumes of his potions? Why would a magical item be designed not to have an undo? There had to be some way to get Akane to want to wear clothes again! She couldn’t walk around like that!
Unless... “Um, Akane? There’s this second earring. It changes what people think is normal whenever the wearer uses the word normal to apply to something. So, when I said that it was normal for you to go naked -”
“It became normal for me to be naked,” Akane finished. “But that doesn’t make any sense! I’ve been a practising nudist since before you ever got here!”
“No, you’ve not. But I can’t change it back... You, on the other hand, you can change it back.”
He unpinned the earring and held it out towards Akane. “All you have to do is put it on, and say that it’s normal for you to wear clothes. Then we can get this whole mess sorted out!”
Akane took the earring and pinned it to her ear. After a deep, deep breath, she softly said the words “It is normal for -”
Thu Jun 21 18:57:22 2012
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4 comments Last updated: Sun Jun 24 09:13:01 2012