A thin ribbon of blue-grey smoke twined through the air, like a rivulet of water slithering across the smooth surface of the atmosphere. The ribbon broke and diffused as a wizened old man took a drag from the wood-and-brass pipe, savoring the bitter taste as the thick fumes washed over his tongue and coated the inside of his mouth like a viscid, aeriform elixir. The old man puckered his creased mouth and exhaled the smoke into a small grey cloud that hovered in front of his face before rising and dissipating as well.
The late afternoon sun kept him comfortably warm as he lounged on the roof, nursing his pipe to the soothing sounds of domestic life going through its paces beneath him. Kasumi was humming a ditty to herself while taking laundry off the line, Soun and Genma were playing some parlor game and the intermittent clicks of the tiles on the board drifted up to the roof and his ears, while the constant buzz of Tokyo in the distance seemed more muted today than other days. Happosai sighed in contentment.
The peace of the afternoon was soon shattered, however, by the shouts that commonly accompanied Ranma and Akane’s arrival home from school.
“Jerk!”
“Tomboy!”
“Pervert!”
“Uncute!”
Akane turned on him then, blocking the door to the house, ready to let him have it. She swung her bookbag at him, which he dodged easily.
“Ha! You’re gonna hafta do better than that!” he jibed.
“Ranma. . . !” she growled dangerously. With a screech, she flung her bookbag at him with all her might, but Ranma simply plucked the bag out of the air and smugly mocked her.
“Ha!” he shouted, only to be cut off when her trigonometry book successfully connected with his face. “Ow . . .” he whimpered, rubbing his cheek.
“Hmph!” Akane turned her nose up at him and went into the house. Ranma was about to follow with a few monosyllabic comments of his own, but his attention was wrested by the one voice that no human alive could deny.
“Ranma-kun?” came the dainty alto, and all Ranma’s anger was forgotten at her pleasant distraction.
“Yeah, Kasumi?” Ranma shoved his hands in his pockets and walked across the yard to the eldest Tendou daughter. Kasumi shifted the laundry basket to her other hip and smiled at Ranma.
“Would you do me a favor and buy some more sake vinegar before dinner?”
“Sure thing,” he responded with a shrug, turning and walking back out of the yard. Kasumi turned into the house and called out to Akane when Ranma had left, telling her to calm down and assuring her that whatever Ranma had done couldn’t really have been all that bad.
*
“Fine jewelry for sale! Gold! Silver! Low prices!”
Ranma lowered the shopping bag from its position slung over one shoulder and leaned down to inspect the wares the Chinese peddler had spread out on his table. Some of the pieces looked very nice, despite holding “stones” of colored glass, where as most of the gaudier (and in Ranma’s opinion, uglier) pieces were made of real, albeit semiprecious stones.
Ranma’s eyebrow twitched at the high-pitched squeal of the cluster of girls standing beside him as they tried on rings and necklaces.
He wasn’t quite sure why, but a little voice in the back of his head was telling him that he ought to buy Akane’s birthday present now, while he had cash. The voice made sense, of course – after all, buying it now would mean he wouldn’t have to run out at the last minute or owe Nabiki any money. But it still felt like an odd compulsion – after all, forethought had never been any Saotome’s strong suit.
The girls giggled loudly and shook Ranma’s train of thought. Suddenly, he was very glad Akane was the tomboy she was and didn’t giggle and squeal like the girls next to him.
Ranma gave the table another once-over and finally spotted something worth enduring the tittering bevy that crowded him. He reached across the table and picked up a pair of silver earrings with dark blue, dangling stones. He looked at the price tag and gulped. Yep, they were definitely real stones; what stones they were, he had no idea, but they must be fairly valuable.
Ranma glanced up and saw the peddler watching him intently, a vapid smile plastered on his face, and suddenly felt uneasy. The guy probably knew he didn’t have that much money and was watching him in case he tried to steal the earrings.
“You like earrings, Sir?” He asked in broken Japanese. “Shopping for girlfriend, Sir?”
“Y-yeah,” Ranma stammered, unsure of how to respond. “For my fiancée,” he continued, surprising himself; he had said the “f” word without a stutter or pause, referring to Akane solely. And he had done it without thinking.
“Oh! Lucky bride!” the peddler exclaimed. “Here! I cut you deal! You get earrings on soon-to-be-married discount of forty percent!”
Now Ranma was really surprised. He had never been very good at math, but even with his limited ability he knew that discount would actually put the earrings in his price range. He looked at he jewelry he held in his hand. They really would look nice on Akane. . . .
“Ok,” he said. “I’ll take ’em.”
“Very good!” the Chinaman exclaimed, clapping his hands together. “That make you Japanese customer number one thousand! You get pretty vase as free gift!”
Before Ranma could protest, the peddler had whipped out a small, lidded vase with Chinese ideograms written down the sides and was shoving it into his hands. He was smiling absurdly now, showing every oversized, crooked, yellow tooth in his mouth. Something about the desperate glee on the man’s face made Ranma’s skin crawl, but before he could turn the man down, he found himself accepting the vase.
“Cool. Lucky me.”
“Gee! Look at time! Must start on road to Kyoto before is too dark!”
“Huh?” While Ranma and the rest of the crowd looked on with wide eyes, the peddler quickly packed up all of the jewelry into his bag, his hands a flurry of motion and the epitome haste.
“Hey! What about . . .” Ranma started, but the Chinaman had already taken off, abandoning the bare table in the middle of the shopping center and leaving a trail of dust as he ran. “. . . Your money. . . ?”
The crowd soon dispersed, accustomed to such strange happenings as residents of Nerima, and Ranma found himself standing in the middle of the plaza with a beautiful pair of earrings in one hand and a strange vase in the other, staring off at the road in the distance.
First, Ranma looked down at the earrings, sparkling in the afternoon sun and felt kind of proud. Then he looked at the vase and a shudder ran up his spine. Then he remembered the money still safely in his pocket, unspent, and felt proud again.
Then again, the peddler running off like that without his money was probably a bad sign. . . .
~*~*~