Chapter One

Ranma was aware of two things, hunger and a weight on this chest. He slowly opened his eyes and frowned at the large, black cat sitting on his chest, looking at him expectantly. "Mrrooowr?" the cat inquired, tilting his head to the side.

"So, you’re hungry too, huh Kuso?" Ranma asked the cat. He looked over to his bedside clock. "Do you know what time it is?" He sat up, the cat moving to his lap and butting his head against his owner’s chin, purring loudly. "It’s 8:30 in the morning, on a Saturday." Kuso merely purred, thoroughly enjoying the absent-minded scratching he was receiving.

"Well, no time like the present," the young man said, pushing the cat off of his lap and getting out of bed. He switched on the CD player on the dresser and started his morning workout to the tunes of U2’s "Achtung Baby". Kuso obligingly helped out his pushup regimen by sitting on Ranma’s back, for which he was oh so grateful.

Workout done, he ambled into the kitchen, fed the cat and poured himself a cup of coffee. He was drinking said coffee and reading the paper when the telephone rang. "Hello?"

"Ranma! You’re awake!" said the other voice.

Akane. "Well, duh I’m awake," Ranma responded with a chuckle. They constantly baited each other and were the comedy relief of the department. "I don’t sleep the day away like you do."

"Hmph, I know perfectly well the only reason why you’re up this early is because of your hungry cat! Besides, I’ve been up since six-thirty! However, I did not call to lecture you on your lazy habits, awful as those are, I need you to get down here as soon as you can! I’ve had a breakthrough!"

"A breakthrough, huh? You mean a break through a window, right?"

"No, you idiot! A break through in the project! You know, the one you’re supposedly a lead on?" was Akane’s caustic reply. "Get your ass down here now, Saotome!"

"Okay, okay, let me get a shower first, okay? Sheesh!"

"All right, see you soon!" Akane abruptly hung up on her end, leaving a somewhat bemused Ranma staring at the handset he was holding. He slowly hung it up, turned around and leapt straight up into the air.

"Yahooo!" he shouted with abandon, downstairs neighbors be damned. Bending over, he swept up the unsuspecting cat at his food dish. "A breakthrough! Akane’s had a breakthrough! Do you know what this means? Of course you don’t, you’re a cat!" He put the now thoroughly confused cat down next to his dish and skipped to the shower, hunger completely forgotten. Fifteen minutes later, he was showered, shaved, dressed and heading out the door, waving cheerily to Mr. Soames next door who was coming in with his paper.

A few minutes later, he was standing next to Akane in the university research lab, peering into a microscope. "Do you see?" she asked anxiously.

"I do. Akane, I think you’ve done it," he said excitedly, turning to look at her. "What did you do that was different?"

"Well, I thought about how all of the other experiments were failing, and what types of failures they were having. I noticed we were not really taking that into account and were heading in the same basic direction. I decided that wasn’t working and did this instead." She showed Ranma a piece of paper with various formulae written on it in her neat hand. He took a pair of glasses out of his pocket and studied them, nodding as he did so.

"So, I added the compound to one of our samples and, well, you saw the result," she finished proudly.

"I sure did. Excellent work, Akane," Ranma said approvingly. They had been struggling with this project for 6 months and now that he looked over her formulae and notes, it all made perfect sense and he mentally slapped himself upside the head for not seeing it sooner. He had been hesitant to accept Akane as a replacement for one of his other researchers who’d been transferred to another project at the university, she had a reputation for defying authority and going full steam ahead for what she thought was right, but she’d behaved herself relatively well and he had newfound respect for her sometimes unconventional ways. "Let’s go into the office and you show me how you came to this conclusion on the whiteboard and we’ll start trying to duplicate this."

"Oh, I’ve already duplicated it," she asserted, leading the way to the office. "I’ve duplicated it about 4 times now. I told you, I’ve been here since six-thirty. I thought of the new formulas last night in bed."

"Hmm, must have been a boring date," Ranma snorted, noticing the way her ponytail swished back and forth between her shoulder blades.

Akane whirled to face him, the long ponytail almost hitting him in the face. "I was not on a date last night, Ranma!" she exclaimed with an icy glare.

"Okay, whatever, just show me the formula!" Ranma raised his hands in a supplicating gesture and Akane turned her back on him, allowing Ranma to continue his admiration. In the office, Ranma sat at his desk and listed on Akane’s explanations, taking copious notes and asking a lot of questions, all of which were patiently answered. After a couple of hours, he became aware of a feeling in his stomach that could only be described as starvation.

"Akane, listen, I’m famished. Let’s take this to a coffee shop, kay?"

"But there’s no whiteboards in a coffee shop."

"We’ll take lots of paper. Come on, my treat. Think of it as a celebration." Ranma rose and stretched, popping various joints and rubbing his left hand, sore from all the writing.

They gathered up paper, pencils and research data into Akane’s leather bag and walked out to his car, talking animatedly. "Where to?" he asked as he started the car.

"I want pancakes," Akane said, "that means Sally’s."

"Sally’s it is, then," Ranma said with a smile. Sally’s was a small eatery, well-known to the university staff as being liberal with it’s coffee refills and not prone to running diners out as soon as they were finished with their meals. Also, Akane adored their pancakes. She continued to talk during the drive and Ranma watched her out of the corner of his eye. Although it was no longer early morning, the eastern light caught her hair, making brown highlights in her dark hair and lent her skin a nice glow. For the first time, he noticed she was wearing jeans, sneakers and a T-shirt emblazoned with the university’s mascot, a rather shifty-looking pirate under a dark blue zip-up sweater. As he parked in Sally’s lot, he ruminated on the fact that he’d never seen her dressed so casually before, nodding automatically to whatever it was that she was saying.

Sally’s being a casual, seat-yourself place, they chose their regular booth by the window that faced the main street, not noticing the vigorously non-descript van across the street. Spreading the papers out on the table, they barely noticed as the waitress filled their coffee cups and absently gave her their orders: Steak (medium rare), eggs (over medium), and hashbrowns for Ranma, pancakes and hashbrowns for Akane. They talked and argued steadily until the waitress came with their orders and quickly cleared a place for the plates.

Ranma dug into his medium-rare steak, and slowly chewed, savoring the taste and noticed Akane looking at him in disgust. "What?" he asked after he swallowed.

"How can you eat that?"

"Eat what?"

"The steak. It’s all bloody and it’s meat for God’s sake," she frowned, cutting a small piece of pancake and chewing it delicately.

"Hey, I’ve seen you eat meat," Ranma protested.

"You have not, I don’t eat meat."

"Well, I’ve seen you eat eggs, anyway. Explain that away."

"Eggs don’t have eyes."

"Eyes? That’s why you don’t eat meat? Because animals have eyes?"

"Yes. Ever since I was a little girl and we went to the farm and I saw all of the cows and pigs and stuff, I’ve never been able to eat meat. It gives me a stomach ache." Akane forked up a helping of hashbrowns and saw Ranma wagging his finger at her. "What?"

"Better not eat that, potatoes have the most eyes of anything I’ve ever seen, you’ll get the worst stomachache of your life," he said mock seriously.

Akane shook her head and muttered, "Freak," and ate her potatoes, chewing ostentatiously for Ranma’s benefit.

They ate quietly, concentrating on filling their bellies and when they felt satisfied, returned to talking. "Well, all you need to do now is write up a report and present it to the board on Monday." Ranma said, sipping his coffee.

"Yeah, now the boring part." Akane pushed a piece of pancake around in the coagulating syrup on her plate.

"Hey, I’m more than willing to come over and liven it up for you, you know," he said, grinning wolfishly.

Akane rolled her eyes at him. "Yeah, that’s just what I need, you prancing around my place distracting me."

"’Kane, I’m hurt. I would never prance. Strut, yes, prance? Never." He wiped his hands on the paper napkin and flexed his hands, frowning slightly. "Excuse me a moment," he said, getting up from the booth and walked towards the bathrooms.

Akane watched him go, liking the way the jeans and polo shirt fit his athletic form and sighed. She’d long admired him, first for his physical presence, and once she’d worked with him for a while, his mental acuity. They had been in the same department for a while, but this was the first opportunity they’d had to work on the same project. She constantly needled him for fun and he gave back as good as he got. Too shy to approach him, she masked her shyness with a biting wit.

He came back from the bathroom, wiping his hands a little and saw Akane looking at him. "What?" he asked, eyeing her suspiciously.

Akane raised her eyebrows and shook her head. "Nothing. Why do you always braid your hair like that?"

His hand went to the pigtail he’d had ever since he could remember. "I dunno. Habit, I guess. My mom used to do it this way." He picked up the check from where it lay facedown on the table and left a $20 bill on the table, enough for the check and a healthy tip. Along with the good food and the tolerant help, they were cheap. "Come on, I’ll drive you back to the lab," Ranma offered, standing up.

"I hope so, you drove me here," Akane said, sliding out of the booth. "You can just drop me off at my car, I’m heading straight home for a nap, didn’t get much sleep last night."

"Oh, so maybe it was a good date after all," Ranma quipped, earning a whack on the head for his efforts. He left her at her car and made sure she got in and it started okay before driving off himself. Deciding to go to his regular comic shop, he did not see the van following him at a distance.