COLD WATER, HOT WATER Ranma 1/2 fan fiction by Kevin Balderas · comedy first, rated G to PG

Hi, I'm Kevin. I'm 23 and I sell video games for a living in San Antonio, Texas, which means I spend all day telling people that no, the new Zelda is not coming out on PlayStation. I got into Ranma 1/2 in college, when my roommate came back from a convention in Dallas with the first couple of Viz tapes and we watched them four times in one weekend instead of studying for a geology midterm. (I passed. Barely.) Then I found the fan fiction lists and the newsgroups, and found out that hundreds of other people were writing their own Ranma stories, and some of them were really good, and some of them were a 40-part epic where Ranma gets a magic sword and turns evil. I figured I could at least do better than that one.

What I like about Ranma is that it's funny. Not "anime funny" where you have to know the jokes, just funny, like an old Looney Tunes cartoon where everybody is chasing everybody and somebody always ends up in the koi pond. So that's what I write. No dark fics, no "Ranma angsts on a rooftop for twelve pages." Somebody gets splashed, somebody gets kicked over the horizon, somebody's dad steals their lunch. That's the deal.

The short version: in the cursed training ground of Jusenkyo, in China, there are dozens of springs, and something drowned in every one of them a long time ago. Fall in, and from then on cold water turns you into whatever drowned there. Hot water turns you back, until the next time somebody throws a bucket. The series ran in the comics from 1987 until it ended in 1996, and the TV show ran from 1989 to 1992. Most of the action is in Nerima, a part of Tokyo, around the Tendo family's martial arts school.

Story	Rating	Status
Umbrella Weather It's the rainy season in Nerima, it's been raining nine days straight, and Ranma has a plan to stay a guy for one entire day. Genma has a plan to eat his lunch. About 1,700 words.	G [No spoilers]	One-shot, complete. Posted June 1999.
Lost Star Ryoga sets out to walk three blocks to the Tendo dojo and ends up in the brush country of South Texas, where it's 104 in the shade and there isn't any shade. Chapters 1 and 2 are up.	PG [P-chan spoiler]	In progress. Ch. 1 posted August 8, Ch. 2 posted September 19.

What happened to your older stuff? My first two fics, from 1997, are not on this page anymore, and that's on purpose. One of them had Ranma and Ryoga enter a ramen eating contest for eleven chapters. If you saved a copy off the list back then, please keep it to yourself.

Coming up: Lost Star Chapter 3, in which a 4-H show pig has to get through a county fair weigh-in without anyone splashing him. I'm aiming for October, but I'm also working Saturdays through Christmas, so no promises.

C&C means comments and criticism, and I want both. "Great story!!!" is nice and I'll take it, but what really helps is "the part where Kuno shows up dragged," or "Akane wouldn't say that," or "you used 'their' wrong three times in Chapter 2." I answer every e-mail, usually the same week. If you didn't like something, tell me why. I won't get mad. I work retail; I've been yelled at by experts.

Thanks to my pre-readers, who read everything before you do and tell me when it stinks:
  · Leaky Thermos, who catches every time I forget which characters are wet
  · Okonomiyaki Joe, who knows the tapes better than anybody alive
  · Moonsault, who makes my fight scenes make sense
  · tanuki_gal, who fixed my commas and told me Chapter 1 of Lost Star started too slow (it did)

Want to be a pre-reader? Write me and tell me what you've watched and read. You need to be able to stand my jokes.

You are splash number

since February 1998


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Last updated September 19, 1999