Argh. I haven't written for so long that I've gone stale. Decided to start something just to get going, but I sense dryness in this particular pancake, and figured I'd put it up for a bit of C&C before I needed to get momentum going towards the rest of the piece.
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Inconveniently, Ranma awoke in the middle of English class.
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The Penguin Lords
one Ranma 1/2 fanfic
by DannyCat (sabremau@yahoo.com)
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A refreshing hail of short-grain rice pelted the street outside the gates of the home of one Ranma Saotome, who ran along, dexterously balancing six boxes of take-out borscht upon his shoulders. Ever since the torrent of rice started falling earlier that morning, the rest of the family had voted that Ranma, since he had a water-activated curse instead of a rice-activated one, was the logical choice to go on a lunch run errand.
"Yeah. And who can blame 'em..." Ranma groused, narrowly avoiding a rather nasty slip-and-tumble on a patch of particularly slippery rice. "Ricestorm like this'd have Akane slipping with our lunch all the way out to Osaka or somethin'." Stepping lively, he sprinted the last few meters to the front gate and turned to see....
A penguin.
Ranma blinked. "A penguin?"
A running penguin.
"RANMA!" Kasumi shouted, jogging behind the large bird with a heavy frying pan, trying frantically to chase it down without falling face-first into the ricebank accumulating in the front yard. "CATCH THAT PENGUIN!!"
The penguin, solemnly fixing its small beady eyes on the freedom behind Ranma, took two long waddling strides and leaped right over his head. Distracted by his longing for a complete and undamaged lunch, he had no time to do anything but look up, watch the penguin sail triumphantly over his head, and catch an errant frying pan right in the chin.
"AH!" Kasumi yelped, slipping on the ricey ground and letting the pan accidentally fly from her grip. It spun in a tight spiral through the air and bounced off Ranma's chin with a loud clang before falling to the ground, its impact there muffled by two inches of crunchy rice.
Ranma, through Herculean willpower, remained upright, and ignored the pain echoing throughout his head so as to do two things. First, keep the borscht upright and unspilled until he could deliver it safely to the kitchen. "Lunch is an absolute priority," his father had told him enough times for it to become an subconsciously observed dictum. Secondly...
He blinked again. "...why a penguin?"
"Ranma, are you okay?" Kasumi climbed to her feet, grains of rice pelting her long brown hair, still unmussed by the fall. Ranma finally looked down, still slightly dazed.
"Penguin. Penguin? Uhh...." He finally remembered his cargo and set it down in front of Kasumi. "Food's here. And, uh, by the way," he wondered, his face taking on an extremely puzzled expression, "...what's up with the penguin?" He glanced up at Kasumi's face, and was even more surprised at what he saw there: Sadness. Despair. Just a hint of fever.
"It's gone...oh, Ranma, why didn't you stop it?" Kasumi trailed off, looking out to the street where the newly freed penguin had escaped to. She climbed to her feet, helped up by Ranma, and straightened out her dress.
Ranma glanced back over his shoulder, the open gate still taunting him with it's complete lack of penguins in it, and then to Kasumi again. "Ooookay. Would it help if I knew what's going on?"
Kasumi sighed deeply, then looked back up at Ranma with her usual pleasant expression returned, completely intact. "Oh, nothing," she said without a trace of distress in her voice, "It was just an escaped penguin. Shall we have lunch?"
"Uhh...yeah, sounds great." He glanced up. "C'mon, let's get out of this rice." Ranma picked the borscht back up and followed Kasumi into the house, sparing time for one last look back out, towards the gate through which the penguin had temporarily vanished from his life.
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[Continuation Placeholder]
Well, grammatically I didn't notice anything though it was damned hard to get into at all. Too wacky an opener and too short. The descriptive tone is your usual good fare, but it's just well, it's a fragment and it feels like it.
Dracos
Quote from: "Dracos"Well, grammatically I didn't notice anything though it was damned hard to get into at all. Too wacky an opener and too short. The descriptive tone is your usual good fare, but it's just well, it's a fragment and it feels like it.
Dracos
Yeah, I figured there probably weren't any grammatical problems in it, but I kinda felt that this was too dry and uninteresting an opener. Gotta find a way to instill some comedic value or at least put
some measure of interest into it before I can get into the rest of the piece....
*reads on through* Well, given how apt you are at creating insanity on IRC, I'd say you're off to a good enough start here, DannyCat. Up to you if you want to continue it, though.
Despite its length, it was pretty surreal. *liked that* XD