Ranma… no… BAKA!” The last word was capped by a vicious uppercut that lifted Ranma several feet into the air and sent him flying across the street to land unceremoniously in the Nekohanten’s trash pile. Akane Tendou gave herself a small, self-satisfied smile and walked on, the air around her crackling with battle aura.
Once she rounded the corner, the blue flames subsided a bit. She began massaging her right hand. Oww, his chin’s hard. Feels like I tried to smash through a concrete wall.
“Looks like you need something better than your fist to hit him with,” said a brassy, feminine voice.
Akane looked around, startled, and saw a strange girl who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. She looked to be about twelve years old. Her flame-red hair framed her face in tendrils that looked like the legs of a crab, and fell in a long tail down her back, nearly to her knees. Her eyes were hard and green as emeralds, and much, much older than any junior-high kid should have. Under their knowing gaze she faltered. “I know I shouldn’t hit him… but he can be such a jerk sometimes!”
“Yeah, guys can be a real pain. That’s why I like science.”
“Do you go to school around here?” Akane asked. She didn’t recognize the elaborate uniform the girl wore… but somehow she was sure it was a uniform.
“School? Hah!” the girl scoffed, then raised a lecturing finger. “Listen. I like ya, so I’m gonna help ya.” She raised her hands and suddenly she was typing on a translucent keyboard that appeared in front of her. It looked a lot like Nabiki’s new laptop computer… but it didn’t seem to be completely there. Akane blinked. The girl’s fingers flew over the keys, even faster than Nabiki. “How’s this?” She reached into the air and pulled out a short-handled wooden mallet, which she tossed to Akane.
Akane caught it, hefted it experimentally. Just at that moment there was a sound of rushing feet. Coming up the street was a handsome young man wearing the traditional garb of a kendoka. He held a bokken in one hand and a bouquet of red roses in the other, and shouted “Akane Tendou, at last I find you free of the foul company of that evil Saotome! Come, you shall date with me!”
Reflexively, Akane flattened Kunou with the mallet. She looked at it and grinned. “I like this, but I can’t exactly carry it around with me all the time.”
“That’s the beauty of pseudospace,” the strange girl enthused. “Ya don’t hafta! All ya gotta do is reach out, think of a hammer, and there it is! And when you’re done,” she took the mallet from Akane, “just toss it back!” She tossed the mallet into the air; it vanished. “You try it!”
This was getting really weird, but… Akane thought back to the comments that Ranma had been making about her cooking and her martial arts ability, reached out, and…
There in her hand was another mallet! “Sugoi,” she breathed. “How’d you do that?”
“Piece of cake,” the girl bragged. ”Way too easy for a genius like me! I just gave you a personal link to pseudospace, so any time you need something to hit jerks with, you’ve got a hammer!”
This was all way too much for Akane. Science wasn’t her best subject to begin with, but she had a feeling sensei would find this strange girl just as baffling as she did. “Uh, thank you, umm…”
“Just call me…” the girl assumed an exaggeratedly kawaii pose… “Washuu-chan!”
Just then Ranma came up, rubbing his chin. “Hey, whaddya do that for?”
Blue flames rose around Akane again. “Do. You. Really. Have. To. ASK?” She raised her mallet.
He backed swiftly, straight into a splash of water from a little old lady who was out dampening her sidewalk.
Washuu blinked. That had been a young man a second ago, tallish, well-muscled, with black hair. Now it was a redhaired girl about her own height, but much more amply upholstered. She was wearing the same clothes as the guy, and had the same eyes… Washuu stepped forward and circled the redhead slowly, looking her up and down. “You’re interesting,” she said. “You’re really interesting.”
The redhead, however, wasn’t paying any attention to her. “KAWAIIKUNEE!” she screeched and took off in Akane’s direction. The two continued their running battle down the street. Washuu gazed after them, wondering…
A round-topped door appeared in front of her. She went through it and the door disappeared.
Back in her lab, her fingers danced restlessly over computer keys, then stopped. She leaned back in her backless chair, hands behind her head, hair sweeping the floor. Now what could trigger a transformation like that…
NOTES, EXPLANATIONS ETC.
I hadn’t really paid much attention to mallets. They aren’t that big a deal in the manga, they don’t show up that often in the anime, and Akane is certainly not the only person who uses them. (Actually, I think she usually uses a shinai to pound Ranma.) However, when I started reading fanfic online, I kept running into references to hammerspace. And who knows more about extradimensional spaces than the Greatest Genius in the Universe?