Disclaimer: Ranma ½ and its characters and settings belong to Rumiko Takahashi, Shogakukan, Kitty, and Viz Video. The Wheel of Time and its characters and settings belong to Robert Jordan.

Prologue

Ranma neared the gates of his new school. His forehead was creased in anger, and he wanted nothing more than to lash out at his simpleton of a father for enrolling him without even consulting his son first. Not that he was very happy about being home again, either, but an overbearing mother who seemed obsessed with her son losing his virginity was better than school. Anything was better than school. The places were full of teachers who thought they had the right to order him around, students who thought they were better because they were a little older, and there was the work. Boring, pointless busy work that would never aid him in life and did nothing more than waste a significant portion of a student's early life, a time when he should be out doing stupid crap that he could look back on one day and be embarrassed about.

Well, his mother had forced the issue, and Ranma meant to go through with this farce, though he intended to put not a single iota of effort into his education that he didn't absolutely have to, to just barely pass. At least there would be girls here— unless Genma Saotome wanted to be skinned alive, there had better damned well be a lot of girls here— pretty ones. Not that he was a lecher, not really, but a young man his age was at his sexual peak, and he did have all those nasty hormones racing through his blood. Heh. If only his mom knew the truth!

Ranma glanced down at his watch and noticed that he would likely be late if he didn't hurry. That would be great, spending his first day in a new school standing in the hallway holding buckets. The gates were just ahead, so Ranma picked up his pace some. He heard the commotion before he saw it, but from the sound of things, a lot of people were getting the shit beat out of them.

Rounding the corner and walking through the gates, Ranma was confronted with a semi-comical scene of boys being mown down like wheat before a scythe of a girl. She wielded her school bag with simple efficiency, braining anyone who came in range and using her free hand and feet every chance she got. Ranma felt sorry for the boys, he truly did, but they should know better than throwing themselves at someone who could so easily destroy them. With a sigh, Ranma seized saidin and wove a dome of air and fire around the black-haired girl. Boys that came in contact with the invisible shield convulsed in agony, before being thrown clear by a powerful discharge of electricity.

Ranma winced, realizing that he had put too much effort into the deteren. Oh well, no pain, no gain. Someone definitely needed to gain some brains, so there would be pain aplenty to be meted out.

After the first dozen or so boys went flying into the air, their forms wracked with tremors, the wild melee/slaughter came to a shaky halt. Boys still conscious eyed the girl with fear, something they should have felt earlier, and the girl herself didn't seem all that happy. She was staring at her fists as if they had grown into vipers, convinced that she had somehow been the cause of whatever had happened.

Ranma shrugged. Better for everyone to think the girl responsible and leave himself obscured. Hoping to avoid the overall stupidity that permeated the courtyard, Ranma slipped out of the gates momentarily and wove a light-bending shield of air around himself. A moment later, he stepped back through the gates and quickly walked into the school building, catching the first part of someone's loud exclamation as the door shut behind him.

The halls seemed strangely empty. Ranma contributed it to so many boys getting thrashed outside. He released saidin, sighing as he senses dulled and the sense of uncontainable life faded. A few seconds of digging through his school bag turned up the registration paper that had come in the mail the day before.

"Everyone, we have a new student joining the class today. Ranma has recently returned from China, and I hope you all do your best to make him feel welcome," the teacher announced to her students. She stood by Ranma in front of the class, her eyes daring anyone to speak. "Won't you introduce yourself, Ranma?"

"Hi," Ranma said simply. The teacher had already told them who he was, so there wasn't much point in elaborating. How she had known about the trip to China was a bit of a mystery. Of course one of his parents must have told, that was a given, but Ranma couldn't figure out why they had even mentioned the uneventful journey. Okay, not so uneventful, but it still shouldn't have been blabbed to his teachers.

"Find a free seat for today, and tomorrow I'll assign you a permanent place." The door swung open just as the teacher finished speaking and a somewhat dazed girl walked in. Ranma recognized the girl from the battle outside, and smirked to himself from his new seat as he saw the glazed appearance in her eyes. "So good of you to join us Ms. Tendo. Buckets. Hallway. Now." The girl nodded woodenly and stepped back into the hallway.

Some time later— an hour or so of utter boredom— Ranma managed to learn the girl's name from stray whispers he picked up from his new classmates. Akane. She was cute, kind of, but there were so many possibilities for entertainment that Ranma didn't even consider her as a possible exploit. Saidin raged within him, not even near his full potential, but enough to kick his senses into overdrive and make his nerves burn with the near ecstasy of power.

Channeling was easy, an almost instinctive response to his desires, but no matter how good he was at it, no matter how much practice he had, channeling where one couldn't actually see the weaves of power was almost impossible. Still, Akane was close enough and Ranma's senses sharp enough that he was able to locate the twin concentrations of water she held in the buckets. Fire woven into one and air and water into the other. As he withdrew the weaves, Ranma waited for the inevitable outcry. It wouldn't take Akane long to realize that one bucket was full of boiling water and the other a solid block of ice.

A yelp, not quite a screech, came from the hallway and Akane burst into the room, buckets held as far away as she could manage. In her haste, Akane's feet became tangled beneath her and she tripped, flinging a pail of bubbling water and a block of ice at the startled teacher. Ranma reacted in an instant, drawing the heat from the water and returning it to the ice. The teacher still got soaked to the bone, but she didn't get smashed or scalded.

Akane tried to stammer out an explanation, but she repeatedly tripped over her own tongue as the dripping woman eyed her dangerously. The teacher's left eye was twitching noticeably and her fists were clenched at her sides. "Th— I mean— Really—," Akane continued to babble.

"Office. Now." And Akane fled from the room, looking almost ready to burst into tears, her cheeks flushed with either anger or mortified embarrassment. Ranma felt a little bad about getting her in so much trouble, he hadn't intended anything like that to happen. Akane really should learn to deal with surprises better than that, though.

"I'll be back in a moment class. Don't so much as breathe loud while I'm gone."

Ranma ate his bento in peace, smiling back at the girl who sat next to him beneath the tree every so often to let her know he was still interested. She was attractive, with long dark hair, a pale, unblemished complexion, and a rather full bosom. The old Saotome charm was a mockery of charisma, so Ranma didn't even attempt to use it. A smile, a few kind words, and he had her eating out of the palm of his hand, literally.

"What did you do in China?" Sara asked dreamily, her eyes full of little hearts that made Ranma wonder if he wouldn't be better off to just let the girl down gently and find someone less infatuated with him. Oh well, he'd take what he could get, for now.

"Nothing much. Saw the sites, visited a few old temples. It was really just a long vacation, I don't even know why my parents told the school." Ranma was eager to move off the subject of China, so he asked, "Do you know why that Akane girl was beating up all the guys this morning?"

Sara frowned at the mention of Akane, but she explained. By the time the girl finished, Ranma was shaking his head and trying not to laugh. This Kuno guy sounded like a true idiot, the kind that didn't know he was an idiot. "I don't know what they all see in her," he commented. "You're much prettier and seem a hell of a lot nicer."

If anything, the girl's radiant smile increased in intensity. Damn, Ranma was doing it without even realizing it. Despite the complete lack of finesse or tact on his part, Sara seemed to be almost drooling over him.

"Spill the beans, sis," Nabiki said lazily as she did some simple yoga exercises on Akane's bedroom. She was clad in a skintight, skin-toned spandex body suit; indecent in Akane's opinion, but since there were no perverts in the house, she didn't really care.

Akane knew what Nabiki was referring to, of course, but she didn't know how to explain it. Sure, she'd picked up her training a little lately, and even watched a few anime to see if they held any useful techniques. Could she have somehow performed a chi attack like her father had spoken of occasionally, or maybe it was magic? She glanced down at her hands worriedly before answering. "I don't know, Nabiki. The fight this morning, then there were the buckets in the hallway…" She flushed pink in remembrance of that debacle and the embarrassment it had caused her.

"Do you think you could do it again?" From there the conversation degenerated into Nabiki trying to exploit her sister and her newfound powers.

Ranma's grandfather was a relatively young man of two hundred and seven years old. At least he would be considered young in his own time, so far into the future that the man couldn't even guess how many Ages into the past his desperate escape had taken him. A skilled scientist and maker, one of the few wielders of the One Power able to create ter'angreal, angreal, and sa'angreal, he hadn't been chosen as one of the strike group led by Lews Therin Telamon that undertook the perilous mission to seal the bore. The rarity of his Talent only played a minor role in the decision, though. Moderately strong in the One Power, Aril just wasn't powerful enough to take along, something he was very, very grateful for.

When the bore was sealed, Arin, along with his team of assistants, had been monitoring the area around Shayol Gul, the once beautiful island where the Dark One made his home. The contamination of saidin was detected almost immediately, though it led to the overload of three rare and powerful ter'angreal. Arin had no idea what the contamination meant for users of saidin, and he didn't intend to find out. He bundled his wife and their young daughter up, grabbing only his most valuable creations, and escaped through the newest of the dimensional doorways. Un-keyed to any one plane of existence, he'd been able to bind it to one of the Portal Stones and use the combined power to break through the Wheel of Time itself, hurtling him and his small family through the Ages.

They had found a world much like the one they had left. Primitive in some ways, startlingly advanced in others, Earth, as it was called, proved easy to adapt to. Arin and Shora raised their daughter as a normal child of the twentieth century, unaware of her origins. Shora eventually died of old age, and Nokria joined her two decades later. Arin found himself with a granddaughter he didn't want to raise and a load of grief heavy enough to crush ten men. Nodoka, thankfully, showed no signs of being able to channel as she grew. If she had, Arin knew that his last living relative stood only a one in four chance of surviving without any female One Power users to instruct her.

Then came Ranma, Nodoka's son. Arin had very nearly hunted down Genma when he learned that the man had his five-year-old great-grandson in the wilderness training to fight. Fast-talking from Nodoka, who herself knew nothing of the One Power, prevented her husband's early demise, though Arin had more than one reason to wish the man dead. When Ranma turned nine, he first channeled. Years earlier than most boys, Ranma's young age nearly killed him, despite Arin's frantic tutoring. Even in his own time, such occurrences were rare, and living through them was rarer still.

Of course Genma grumbled and made threats, but nearly having his hide peeled with invisible strands of Air quieted him quickly enough. Reading through his newest manga, Arin regretted letting the insufferable man talk him and Nodoka into allowing Ranma to go with him to China. Even after teaching Ranma how to Travel, Genma had still managed to get him into trouble. Well, the man's day was coming…

To be continued.

Author's notes: Figured out how I can make a Ranma/WoT crossover without having Ranma be too powerful. Still gonna write WaW, but that one is gonna be completely different than this fic.

Webmaster: Larry F
Last revision: May 21, 2007