Sexy Satire: Well, someone has to be sexy; why not the protagonist?

     Contrary to Akane's pronouncement, Ranma was not fine.

     As the day had progressed, he had gradually begun to feel worse. The first new symptom had been muscle soreness. The next, a headache. By the time his joints had gone the way of his muscles, he had become so hot that he could set some things on fire (or melt them), depending on what they were. And when he had become light-headed and disoriented, the muscle soreness had developed into painful cramps.

     He'd tried his best to hide his condition until then, out of stubborness, but the last two symptoms combined had made it impossible for him to navigate where he wanted to go, much less move to do anything. It wasn't long after collapsing that someone — he didn't know who — found him, and Akane had to drag him into a room while wearing oven mitts. There she left him, probably assuming that he had the same kind of fever that he'd had before (thanks to Happosai). Thankfully, his mother had joined his side and offered him some medicine, which was about all that she could do considering his body temperature.

     However, the medicine didn't help one iota. It wasn't long until the smell of burning tatami reached Nodoka's nose, who had run out of the room in a panic to get some help. By then his skin had turned red, like a bad sunburn, and the pain in his muscles and head had become unbearable. He would have screamed instead of groan if he could, or tried to articulate how he felt, but his muscle cramps had become so severe that he found it hard to breathe. Had he been able to think through the pain, he would have taken note of the building pressure within his body and assumed that he was going to explode.

     He didn't remember much after that. He was told later that they had moved him out into the garden, and had called both Tofu and Cologne for help. They discovered — easily enough — that his energy level was growing off the scale, beyond the human norm, and that his body simply wasn't made to handle so much of it. But none of the shiatsu techniques that they had tried worked, nor had any of the exotic concoctions.

     It wasn't until they had returned to probing at his energy with a greater attention to detail, hoping to find an answer beyond the problem of there being too much of it, that they noticed the change in its nature. With that discovery, they deduced that it might help to activate his curse. The problem with that, of course, was that his body had become hot enough to boil away a bucket's worth of cold water in seconds. So Cologne had to go and retrieve a trinket that, when placed in water, would maintain whatever temperature it was at at the time of its introduction.

     And that's how she found herself in the koi pond, feeling as if she'd never had a problem in the first place as she stared up at everyone through her bangs. Well, if she had bangs, because what she swept aside a second later seemed more like a curtain than just a fringe. And, for some reason, a lot of those among her audience gasped, and/or looked surprised, among other related things.

     There was only one response that she could make for that. "What?"


     (Author's note: I don't think you wanted the harem genre, Lumitiel, but I was inspired to take that sort of direction with this. Not just for satire, but for comedy in general. Mostly because I have a bunch more problems with harems, even though the harem genre itself isn't much better (in my opinion). That, and I wasn't sure if there was going to be more meaningless sex made possible by contrivance, character death (via a significant change to their mind) and/or the characters being OOC. The harem genre is more focused on multiple unresolved love interests toward a single person, with that person often never choosing one and/or being able to express how they feel (for one reason or another). This commonly places the person of interest into sexy and usually humorous situations. But if anyone doesn't care for this idea, just ignore this episode. Or use the last option, if you need it.

     Anyway, the idea I had for this is somewhere opposite of creating a harem, in that those (girls and guys alike) around Ranma begin to desire her enough to want to claim her forcibly (and I'm sure there are a lot of ways of doing that, including the sort that could be compared to Wile E. Coyote's efforts), yet they have to fight with the others because they don't want to share. Ranma doesn't like this treatment at all, and always manages to escape at some point (through her own effort or because of someone else wanting her for themselves), whenever she actually gets caught. I figure that this kind of set up would provide a fertile ground for satire and comedy alike. I could do without the sex, but I guess I can't outright deny it. Mainly because I was toying with one of the meanings of harem when I thought of this, thinking that Ranma alone was the harem, and thus too sacred/forbidden to be entered. The idea is to keep the "game" alive, and if no one wins her cherry then the journey becomes the destination.