Desperately Seeking Ranma

Desperately Seeking Ranma is a Ranma ½ Alternate Universe/Continuation Fic by PixelWriter1. It is the epic-length sequel to an earlier short story by the same author, called Aftermath, in which the outcome of the failed wedding at the end of the Ranma ½ manga results in Ranma and Kasumi leaving Nerima together and disappearing utterly.

Desperately Seeking Ranma picks up the storyline several years later, when an older and wiser Nabiki takes up the search once more... and finds a possible clue to Ranma and Kasumi's whereabouts. Following up on that clue leads her to Tokyo's Minato ward, where she finds her sister and Ranma are medical students. And married. And waist-deep in the paranormal activities which flood that neighborhood. They are in fact known there as "Chou" and "Yori", a pair of frighteningly powerful Magical Girls who in the past few years have managed to ride herd on the dozens of other Magical Girls with whom Minato is rife, imposing standards of behavior and responsibility upon the often chaotic and destructive girls.

Along the way they've befriended a team of four magical girls -- Aiko, Tamiko, Fumiko and Misaki -- with versatile powers and embarrassing costumes, and have begun training them in martial arts to supplement their magical powers. Welcomed into their circle by Ranma and Kasumi, Nabiki eventually joins the training as well, and discovers that she has a greater potential than she'd ever believed.

Meanwhile, things start getting complicated. A group of magical terrorists have planted devices around the world that open portals to a realm of ravenous monsters. One of the groups of magical girls in Minato is starting to go off the deep end. And back in Nerima, Akane seems to be caught in an endless spiral of escalating rage and destruction. Problems both small and large, both intimate and universe-spanning -- and they all demand the attention of the band of girls surrounding Ranma and Kasumi. And some seem to hint at a larger, darker picture in the background...

Desperately Seeking Ranma can be found here or here. Sadly, after several years of updates with a clock-like regularity, the story screeched to a halt in May 2016, and many readers feared it had become a Dead Fic. In May 2017, PixelWriter1 updated the author bio on their Fanfiction.net page and announced that it hadn't been abandoned, and they in fact had several "nearly finished" chapters almost ready to post. PixelWriter1 then disappeared for another two years, but in September 2019 resurfaced and explained that now that various health, financial and family issues have been resolved, they will be returning to writing -- especially to finishing this story.

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""Aha. The classic abandoned warehouse. How cliché.""
 * A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The time machine.
 * Averted with the SIs, who are designed to be -- and gladly embrace the role of -- assistants and helpers to their owners.
 * Played with in the apartment building "security system", which wasn't supposed to be sentient at all, and strictly speaking may not be, but still behaves... unexpectedly in the pursuit of its primary purpose.
 * Abandoned Warehouse: In chapter 36, when a portal bomb is found in L.A., the location is one such, prompting "Yori" to discuss the trope:

""You know, most people I've met would find that attitude very strange," she remarked, making both Nodoka and Nabiki smile. "But to you this is basically just another morning, isn't it?""
 * Aliens Speaking English: Averted realistically.  The demons/aliens have their own languages, but some eventually come to learn at least a little Japanese.  And inverted, in that they have a trade language which some humans -- including, of course, Ranma and Kasumi -- come to learn.
 * Inverted when the "Sisterhood" and several of their friends benefit from a military-grade (and top secret) "universal translator" spell.
 * Alternate Universe: Of both Ranma ½ and Sailor Moon.
 * Always a Bigger Fish: The lesson learned by Robert Davenport, one-time British Minister for Magic who believes being a mage makes him naturally superior to people without magic, upon encountering Chou and Yori -- who are so powerful that he looks powerless next to them.
 * Amazon Brigade: The core cast, AKA the "Sisterhood of Doom".
 * Ancient Artifact: The time machine.  How ancient?  The war it was built for took place 35,000 years before the start of the story, predating all current (surviving) civilizations in all known universes.  But thanks to multiple loops through time and existing in its own pocket universe, though, its subjective age is around two million years.
 * The magic items which provide Aiko, Tamiko, Fumiko and Misaki with much of their power are so ancient that no one recognizes what civilization might have created them; the spells underlying them are sophisticated, extremely efficient, and completely unknown to modern mages.
 * Ami's computer is 4000 years old, but comes from the future of a different timeline entirely.
 * The Silence Glaive is at least half a million years old, and comes from a civilization that were Precursors to the current Precursors.
 * Arbitrarily-Large Bank Account: Ranma and Kasumi appear to have one (or more), thanks to Happosai.  And just like their personal power levels, it just keeps getting bigger.
 * Then there's what happens to their financial status when the dinosaur-killer asteroid weapon they defeat turns out to be worth enough money to destabilize a multi-world economy...
 * Artifact Title: Past the first few chapters no one is "desperate" to find Ranma and Kasumi.  Wistful and hopeful, yes, but far from desperate.
 * Artistic License Gun Safety: Thoroughly and completely averted with Akane and Shampoo's on-screen gun safety training, and their later adherence to all safety procedures.
 * Asskicking Equals Authority: Ranma, Kasumi and the other girls eventually become recognized -- in some cases officially -- as The Experts in solving magical and paranormal problems, primarily because they're so very good at doing so.
 * Asteroid Miners: S'th'kx and his crew.
 * Aura Vision: Nabiki eventually develops the ability to detect ki and see magic.  Which puts her on a par with everyone else in the core cast in that regard.
 * Ax Crazy: Usagi, by the time they manage to destroy the time machine.  Some of the other Senshi were heading in that direction, too.  All of it was thanks to the time machine messing with their minds and memories.
 * Badass: Just about everyone from Ranma ½, of course, plus Aiko, Tamiko, Fumiko and Misaki.  And Hotaru.
 * Badass Adorable: Hotaru.
 * Badass Longcoat: Tamiko suggests Nabiki would look intimidating in one.  It later becomes part of her look as Azumi Ito.
 * Baleful Polymorph: Before Ranma and Kasumi figure out how to turn it off, every time Aiko, Tamiko, Fumiko and Misaki transformed, it would permanently change whatever they were wearing into another instance of their Stripperiffic costumes.
 * Beam Spam: Basically Chiyoko's combat style.  Accurate aiming is not really a priority (or, apparently, a possibility) with her.
 * Becoming the Mask: Nabiki invented the Ms. Aoyama persona just to scare Ryoga, Akane and Shampoo into behaving after a destructive fight -- but she's come to enjoy trotting Ms. Aoyama out when needed, and with Jun's help she has slowly become almost as scary and near-omniscient as she pretended to be, to the point that about the only thing Ms. Aoyama appears to have that Nabiki doesn't are the mysterious superiors/employers.  (And as someone suggests later, Ranma and Kasumi might occupy that role.)
 * About the time the portal-bomb arc kicks into gear, Ranma notes that his "Yori" persona was originally intended simply as a disguise for taking care of the occasional high-powered task he couldn't do either as himself or one of his non-martial identities; but being Yori has become a large part of his life -- he's come to enjoy being her, and wouldn't give it up even if told he had to.
 * Bee People: Averted by the Kennsh, who while they resemble two-meter beetles appear to have a social and cultural structure not unlike humanity's.   Their biology, however, never gets mentioned.
 * The Berserker: Akane, before "Chou" and "Yori" cure her toxoplasmosis and fix the damage it caused.
 * Big Eater: Misaki.  She has her Hammerspace storage filled with food and drink.
 * Boom Stick: Chiyoko's staff is essentially a magical particle beam weapon with no power settings between "off" and "vaporize".
 * Brain-Computer Interface: The connections the SIs make with their users are not the usual implementation of this trope -- there are no wires or jacks, just direct insertion of signals into the user's sensory paths.  But it's very much a solid connection between the two.
 * Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: In a Shout-Out to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Nabiki muses on "the things, the people, and the things that are also people" she's seen during her vacation off Earth.
 * Brick Joke: Early in the story, Soun calls Nabiki and asks where he can find certain photo albums.  Nabiki tells him where in the attic they are and (in an apparent joke) warns him about the attic spiders "that'll take your arm off!"  Several chapters later, Akane goes into the attic to return the albums to their place, comes back down, and phones an exterminator, saying "Bring poison.  No, that would take too long.  Bring fire."
 * And a few hundred thousand words later, it comes back again when Ryoga finds himself in the Tendo attic...
 * Bring My Brown Pants: Both of Nabiki's alter egos, Azumi Ito and Ms. Aoyama (especially Ms. Aoyama), produce this effect in people who meet them.
 * But for Me It Was Tuesday: An observation made by a "normal" friend of Nabiki's in chapter 98 about the Tendo and Saotome attitude toward the previous chapter's demon attack:

""It's been fun and everything but we really need to get to work. We're already nearly two hours late because of you guys and I'm losing patience. Give me the gun or I'll punch you through the face." "You... How..." He looked wildly around, sweating even more, then focussed on her. A puzzled expression appeared past the horror. "...through the face?" Without changing her mildly irritated expression, Akane lashed out with a fist moving far too fast for him to follow, sinking it wrist deep into the marble-faced wall beside his head and spraying him with little chips of stone. He went very, very still for a long moment as every eye in the bank fixed on her fist, then slowly rolled his head to the left and watched wide-eyed as she pulled it out and held it up in front of him, dust and gravel falling from it. "Through the face, yes," she replied cheerfully."
 * Call to Adventure: Once she reaches a certain level of skill, Nabiki discovers that she can’t avoid things like petty crimes that she could stop.  And she doesn’t want to.  She also finds herself detecting crimes almost subliminally using just her own senses, unaugmented by Jun.
 * Canada, Eh?: Halleckton.
 * Casual Danger Dialogue: Pretty much anything Nabiki says or does in her "Ms. Aoyama" guise. Bonus Points when she breaks out the folder.
 * Most everyone at the party in chapter 97 as the "demonic duck" approaches.
 * Casual Interdimensional Travel: Ranma and Kasumi get so good at it that they shock even seasoned mages with how simply and easily they open portals between worlds and universes.
 * Casual Interplanetary Travel: Thanks to the ultratech demon worlds that Ranma and Kasumi can reach.  At one point they even borrow a spaceship to investigate the Moon for the Senshi.
 * Catch Phrase: "That information is unavailable" for Ms. Aoyama.
 * Character Development: Some happens before the story proper -- Nabiki has grown beyond her High School Hustler days and continues to grow and mature through the story.  Ranma and Kasumi are both medical students, and Kasumi additionally has become a magical and martial arts powerhouse.
 * Initially Akane seems to have gotten worse, drifting from her canon portrayal to a fanfic-standard "psychobitch", until it's revealed that a brain parasite is responsible for a lot of her unstable and erratic behavior. When she's cured, she undergoes a remarkable change in both temperament and her ability to progress in the Art.
 * CIA Evil, FBI Good: Definitely in play in the aftermath of the Halleckton affair, although totally off-screen.  We hear second-hand about the CIA's interest in having their own portal bombs, and the threat made by the Japanese ambassador should the CIA try to "enlist" any Japanese magical girls against their wills to help get or make them.  Meanwhile, the FBI's been shown to be stalwart and honest and on the side of the good guys (with the exception of a couple agents corrupted by Anthony Murray).  We also see that the diplomats involved feel this trope is an accurate assessment of the two organizations.
 * Clark Kenting: The magical disguises and personality shifts undergone to differentiate Ranma, Kasumi and Nabiki from their various alternate personas, to the point that Nabiki can talk to her own younger sister as Ms. Aoyama and never be suspected.
 * Classified Information: There is no such thing to Ms. Aoyama; uncovering such information, especially when it inconveniences the bad guys, is her stock-in-trade.
 * Comes Great Responsibility: Nabiki initially worries about “going crazy with power” once her training starts giving her superhuman abilities, but Ranma and Kasumi -- and later Uthryyl -- reassure her that the very fact that she’s worried about it means that it's unlikely.
 * Comically Missing the Point: The guy in L.A. who can't seem to grasp that the magic and martial arts he's seeing are real and not a spectacular but badly-managed promotion for an upcoming movie.
 * The Conspiracy: A small international conspiracy is uncovered in the wake of the Halleckton incident.  By chapter 93, though, it begins to appear that it was just a small part of a much larger conspiracy, which includes the magical terrorists from earlier in the story and at least one military contractor.
 * Continuation Fic: For Ranma ½.
 * Cool Gate: Portal travel becomes a prominent part of the plot once Ranma and Kasumi figure out how to open portals in their personal magic system.  And then they start opening big ones... like, a kilometer across...
 * Cool Shades: Ms. Aoyama wears a pair of wraparound sunglasses which hide her blue cat-like eyes.
 * Agent Naito wears a pair (along with a sharp suit) on the Moon.
 * Corrupt Corporate Executive: Anthony Murray.
 * Crazy Prepared: At Jun's urging, Nabiki begins acquiring (and keeping in a subspace pocket) just about any kind of gadget or supply that the SI thinks could be useful -- including things like Force Field-based space suits and Surveillance Drones.
 * Creepy Good/Creepy Awesome: Ms. Aoyama.
 * Crossover: With a very divergent version of Sailor Moon.
 * In the aftermath of the time machine's destruction, a "knot" in spacetime briefly allows Rincewind, a Troll and the Luggage from Discworld to run through Minato for a couple blocks. (The passage was written shortly after the death of Terry Pratchett, as a tribute.)
 * Curb Stomp Battle: What Ranma and Kasumi -- and eventually Nabiki, Aiko, Tamiko, Fumiko and Misaki -- are able to do to even the best-trained normal human troops.
 * Defrosting Ice Queen: Nabiki starts out as this, as a result of the events of the prequel story, and completely defrosts before very long.  She keeps up a bit of a facade of her old self with her family.
 * Doomy Dooms of Doom: The core cast jokingly refer to themselves as "The Sisterhood of Doom", which has become the semi-official name of the setting as a whole.
 * Doorstopper: 98 chapters and almost a million and a half words as of May 2016, and it appears that the main plot arc is only now kicking into gear.
 * The Dreaded: Ms. Aoyama, to just about anyone who's ever met her.  And a few who haven't.  Yet.
 * Dyson Sphere: Given to the survivors of the ancient war which created the time machine, by the descendants of the side which created the machine, in reparations.
 * Earthshattering Kaboom: The asteroid rigged by the time machine to smack into Earth when Nabiki accidentally derails the environmental catastrophe that it had been originally planning on.
 * Eldritch Abomination: At least one person who's met Ms. Aoyama speculates that she may be one of these wearing a humanoid mask.  Another thinks she's the kind of thing that Eldritch Abominations are afraid of.
 * The End of the World as We Know It: Nabiki, it turns out, accidentally averts an environmental catastrophe simply by deciding to import alien fusion reactors, forcing the time machine to switch to Plan B, an asteroid with engines on it.  Then Plan B gets averted by the entire team...
 * And if they don't find and destroy the time machine, it just may do something that at the very least will reset the timeline, wiping out at a minimum the previous 20 years or so (which it had already done at least once prior to the start of the story), and at worst will trigger a complete deletion of the universe from the greater multiverse.
 * Everything Is Online: Averted.  In chapter 95, Jun is frustrated in some of his investigations because at many of the institutions he would like to hack, the information he wants is still primarily stored on paper.
 * Exact Words: Nabiki grows quite adept at technically true but thoroughly misleading explanations for the more unusual things in her life.
 * Extreme Omnivore: The small, furry demons that Chiyoko chases about Minato.
 * Faking the Dead: The bank robbers and the team dispatched to extract them from arrest were all former soldiers, government agents or criminals believed dead but whose bodies were never found.
 * Famed in Story: Ms. Aoyama's reputation is constantly spreading and growing -- to the point that halfway through the extant story it extends off Earth and into other universes.
 * Fanon: Implies the "ki manifestation" explanation for Akane's Hyperspace Mallet; plays with the fanon "psychobitch" characterization for Akane by embracing it wholeheartedly, then giving it a cause that can be (and is) cured.
 * Fantastic Racism: In addition to the various Magical Girl groups who have an automatic "Not human, kill!" reaction to all demons, there's Robert Davenport, one-time British Minister for Magic, who clearly regards anyone who isn't a mage as some kind of subhuman creature.
 * Foreshadowing: "We’ll never go to the Moon."
 * The security system's "emergent behavior", and Ranma's comment, "I almost wish something big would attack [Nabiki]" so he could see what the system would do.
 * Freak-Out: One police officer present during the bank robbery is so badly affected by Ms. Aoyama's presence that he almost berserks, nearly attacking her in a panic even though his superiors were talking to her at the time.
 * Freudian Excuse: A brain parasite was responsible for much of Akane's instability and bad temper.
 * Fuku Fic: Very much averted despite the presence of the Sailor Moon cast.
 * Gas Leak Coverup: The demon rampage in London is explained as a combination of a bomb and hallucinogenic gas.
 * Averted somewhat with Halleckton. The authorities do not lie about what happened there so much as simply refuse to explain anything more than what is obvious (and impossible to hide).
 * Japanese authorities explain the flash of light caused by destroying the demon duck in chapter 97 as a small meteorite breaking up over Tokyo, Chelyabinsk-style.
 * Genki Girl: Hotaru, once she shakes off her depression, always seems to be dashing about, giggling and laughing.
 * Giving Radio to the Romans: Nabiki's plan to introduce alien technologies to Earth -- starting with portable fusion reactors.
 * God is a Prick: Central tenet of a series of books by a non-human philosopher, who believed that if God actually exists, he's a practical joker who likes jerking mortals around.
 * Goggles Do Nothing: When Aiko first teleports from the Moon to Earth, it gives off a flash so bright it even overwhelms the flash protection of the ultratech spacesuits everyone is wearing at the time.  Hotaru, in what is almost certainly a call-out to this meme, cries out, "The spacesuit, it does nothing!"
 * Good Is Not Nice: Ranma cites the trope almost word-for-word when explaining why he and Kasumi chose to trust Nabiki after she found them.
 * Later, Nabiki dumps a metric ton of this trope into the personality of Ms. Aoyama.
 * Government Conspiracy: In an atypical well-intentioned example, the PSIA decides to sit on everything it learned from Yori about the time machine (and how close the universe came to ending), and to share only the barest minimum information on the "Great Twitch" with the Japanese and other governments.
 * Hammerspace: All of the core cast have this.  Nabiki keeps Ms. Aoyama's folder and what seems like the entire Batcave's worth of gear there.  Misaki keeps a small grocery store's worth of food.
 * According to Jun, the vast majority of its actual structure and mechanisms are stored in a subspace pocket, and the cell-phone-sized device that Nabiki thinks of as Jun is really something more akin to a remote control/access node. Nabiki learns that she can also put the remote itself into the SI's hammerspace and not even have to have it physically on her person.
 * Hard Work Hardly Works: Averted.  While we don't get page on page of endless training scenes, we do see that everyone, including Ranma and Kasumi, are constantly training and improving their skills, or refining their spell designs.  While some benefits are spontaneous side effects of the training, the training itself is neither easy nor glossed over -- and the difficulty of its later stages becomes a bit of a running gag.
 * Have You Tried Not Being a Magical Girl?: Asked of Minako by Usagi's parents when she, Chou and Yori first explain about the secret life of their daughter and her friends.
 * Heads-Up Display: Once Nabiki really starts making use of Jun's capabilities, it seems like she always has some kind of Augmented Reality overlay on her vision, including picture-in-picture subscreens, targeting wireframes and more.
 * Healing Hands: Very much a part of Ranma and Kasumi's style of healing magic.  Likewise Hotaru's.
 * Hero Insurance: "Chou" and "Yori" have set up a fund to reimburse anyone suffering property damage due to Magical Girl activities. Originally intended for the Minato area, but by the end of the portal bomb arc, it's paying out to the occasional international location.
 * Hidden in Plain Sight: Ranma and Kasumi once they start visiting the Tendo home as "Yori" and "Chou".
 * Hollywood Hacking: What Jun is capable of in the Real World, basically because he's a Magitek AI millennia more advanced than anything on Earth and capable of remotely accessing pretty much anything electronic.
 * Humanoid Aliens/Intelligent Gerbil: Discussed.  Nabiki notes that the D'sage, for all that they look very different, think and act very much the same as humans and wonders openly at it.  She learns that the majority of the sapient races who meet using portals tend to all have very much the same kind of psychology and cultures, regardless of whether they're primates or insects or something else entirely.  Those races who have developed Faster-Than-Light Travel do run into Starfish Aliens, but it's theorized that something about the portal magic tends to connect races to other races who would understand them easily.
 * Hyperspace Mallet: Akane manifests them as a symptom of her parasite-caused rage.  After she is cured, they go away, with one exception -- during her "job interview" in Hollywood for a stuntwoman position, she manifests one while enjoying herself immensely in a fight scene.
 * I Am Not Left-Handed: Akane -- who has already proved herself bullet-proof -- informs the leader of a bank robbery just how screwed he is:

"[Nabiki] shook her head slowly, still staring at them. "When did I fall into some sort of manga or anime series?" Ranma laughed, getting up to refill the coffee-pot. "Quite a while ago, I think. Years, at least.""
 * Ice Queen: Nabiki, herself a Defrosted Ice Queen, channels her old self for her alternate personas Azumi Ito and Ms. Aoyama.  For the latter she turns it up to eleven. And a half.
 * Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Chiyoko, who basically never hits what she's aiming at.
 * Imported Alien Phlebotinum: Pretty much the basis for trade between the worlds.
 * On a tighter focus, how Nabiki intends to both improve the world and make money.
 * In Space Everyone Can See Your Face: Justified by force-field space suits that let you bounce around on the moon in jeans and a T-shirt -- or a snappy suit with Cool Shades.
 * In the Blood: Ranma claims that this is the case for the Tendo family with regard to ki mastery and possibly martial arts in general.
 * Insistent Terminology: "We're not magical girls, we're martial artists."
 * "Don't call me Nabs."
 * Instant AI, Just Add Water: The security spell on the apartment building.  It wasn't intended to be sapient, and arguably it may not be -- but it certainly can take the initiative and look for loopholes in its restrictions when it decides the people it's supposed to protect need its help.
 * Averted by the SIs, which are designed to boot up just below the threshold of sapience, then slowly cross it in the process of and guided by working and interacting with their owners. (To the partial surprise of their designers, though, they do this incredibly well and incredibly quickly -- months instead of years -- when paired with humans.)
 * Just in Time: Chou and Yori disable the portal bomb at the British Ministry of Magic seconds before it would have gone off.  Seemingly subverted moments later when after the Minister for Magic objects to their high-handed methods, they trap him inside a powerful ward with it, and start it back up again.
 * Just Toying with Them: Shampoo and Akane during the bank robbery, initially as a ploy to distract the robbers from harming the other hostages.  Once the hostages are protected, though, they take a few minutes to let the robbers understand just how outmatched they are.
 * Ki Attacks: Ranma and Kasumi have continued exploring mastery of ki far beyond anything seen in canon.
 * They also manage to train up Nabiki, Aiko, Tamiko, Fumiko and Misaki to the point that they can all use ki attacks.
 * Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: The time machine's "dinosaur-killer" asteroid weapon.  Averted in that it was the machine's second choice for bringing about The End of the World as We Know It.
 * Leaning on the Fourth Wall: This moment from Chapter 22:

""They're practically unkillable. The military in London apparently shot one point blank with a 40mm grenade launcher half a dozen times and only pissed it off. Automatic gunfire it barely noticed.""
 * Little Miss Badass: Hotaru -- nowhere more so than during the destruction of the time machine.
 * Magic A Is Magic A: While it has many flavors, there is a standard magic system used by mages throughout the inhabited worlds.  Others exist, but are mainly known as niche systems or are "lost" or "forgotten" and represented only by ancient artifacts that use them.  And then there's the system Ranma and Kasumi came up with for themselves.
 * Magic From Technology/Clarke's Third Law: The really technologically-advanced civilizations, when they don't actually employ literal Magitek.
 * Magical Girls: Ranma and Kasumi end up living in Minato Ward, Tokyo, which is Magical Girl Ground Zero.  And because of their power levels and their insistence that the other girls in Minato behave responsibly, they effectively end up the Queens of All Magical Girls.
 * Magical Girl Fanfics Don't Use Codenames: Pixelwriter1 goes out of his/her way to never refer to any magical girl -- especially the Sailor Senshi -- by anything but their proper names, or aliases that could be normal names.  In the one case where it ever comes close, Minako's powered form is only referred to generically as "Magical Girl Minako" instead of "Sailor Venus".  And the Senshi as a whole are only referred to with terms like "that other group".  Initially this was because Pixelwriter1 didn't intend a full-blown Crossover and was using them as Easter Eggs/Cameos, but after that subplot took off, it seems to have migrated to an In-Universe practice.
 * Magitek: Most worlds seem to run on some degree of this; others are all-magic or all-technology, but they appear to be relatively uncommon compared to the mixed worlds.
 * Masquerade: Expressed, Averted, Discussed, Subverted and more, depending on what country you're in.  The general acknowledgement of magic's reality varies from nation to nation.  European nations, particularly Great Britain, know magic exists, but it's not really visible to the general public and they have self-segregated magical communities.  Japan mentions magical events in the news, and magical girls are explicitly protected by imperial fiat.  And the United States -- people and government -- seems to have convinced itself that magic doesn't exist.
 * The Medic/Combat Medic: Both Ranma and Kasumi, who have combined actual medical school training with martial arts and magic to develop healing talents beyond anything anyone from any world has seen before.  Better yet, they hope to be able to teach their healing skills someday.
 * Mistaken for Badass: Played with when Nabiki, using disguise magic and a couple ki tricks, takes on the role of "Ms. Aoyama", an apparent alien who works for a very powerful, very secretive organization.  (She does this mostly for good reasons rather than just kicks, having grown since the end of the manga.)  The effect she has on people in this role is so profound that eventually she has entire governments wary of upsetting her or her "employers".
 * Morally-Ambiguous Ducktorate: The giant demonic duck accidentally summoned by Gosunkugi in chapter 96.
 * Mugging the Monster: The muggers in L.A. who attempt to rob Akane, Shampoo and Aiko while the girls are having a night on the town make the mistake of clarifying the "terms of engagement" and end up giving the girls everything they own when they find themselves seriously outgunned.  (And then dumped in a car trunk for an entire night, and then given to the police.)
 * When the bank robbers finally try to take down Shampoo and Akane, they find they have a lot more trouble with it than four guys with automatic weapons ought to have against two unarmed girls.
 * Multiverse: There are many universes and many worlds in those universes; a large number of them connect to each other and trade all manner of goods and services.
 * Mundane Utility: Nabiki discovers military functions that Jun possesses and repurposes them for things like finding library books and playing paintball.
 * Nabiki also imagines using the illusion spell for cosplay.
 * My God, What Have I Done?: Václav Sklár after the Halleckton incident.
 * Mysterious Employer: Ms. Aoyama makes occasional references to the organization that employs her, about which no details are available.   Various government officials suspect (or fear) that they are an extraterrestrial intelligence agency.  (Originally, they didn't exist, being nothing more than part of Nabiki's "Ms. Aoyama" schtick.  Misaki later suggests that, along with how real Ms. Aoyama's resources and abilities have actually become, Ranma and Kasumi are now the Mysterious Employers.)
 * Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The dinosaur-killer asteroid weapon that the time machine cobbles together employed an asteroid that turns out to be rich in valuable heavy elements including stable transuranics, worth many times Earth's collective GDP.  And once it's disabled and towed away by their asteroid miner friend, it essentially gives Chou, Yori and the rest Arbitrarily-Large Bank Accounts even by the standards of Arbitrarily-Large Bank Accounts.
 * Nigh Invulnerability: Not only Ranma, Kasumi, and the rest of the magical girl contingent, but also Shampoo and Akane, as demonstrated during both their firearms training and the bank robbery they get caught up in.
 * Even more so, the demons summoned by the "portal bombs".

""How are you doing all this?" he asked, taking a step back as she took one towards him. "A lot of hard work and training, mostly," she replied happily. "It's a family thing. You know, it's good for you that some friends fixed my anger issues, if it was a year ago you'd probably all be in intensive care by now if you were lucky." She giggled as he stared, paling at the sound. "I used to be really dangerous.""
 * The Omniscient: Part of what makes Ms. Aoyama incredibly scary, especially to government types.  She seems to know everything -- especially things it should be impossible for her to know.
 * The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Something like this seems to be in play when Kodachi actually appears to be regretful that Akane and Shampoo are moving to the United States.
 * Open Secret: Chiyoko's Magical Girl identity and mission.  Even though she thinks she's been keeping it all secret, everyone else in her neighborhood -- including her mother -- knows that she's the magical girl in pink with the staff-weapon.  They just don't let on that they know.
 * Our Mermaids Are Different: For one, they're shapeshifted alternate forms of the main characters, employed mainly for having fun.
 * Partial Transformation: The "mermaid" and "flyer" forms acquired with the so-called "illusion" spell.
 * Person of Mass Destruction: Ranma.  Full stop.  During the Halleckton event, about a third of the way through the extant material, he makes a crater big enough to become a lake -- with a single attack.  Kasumi is not far behind him.  And they keep getting more powerful through the course of the story.
 * Pillar of Light: Those residents of Tokyo who can remember what happened during "The Great Twitch" usually recall a pillar of light that appeared to be in the Minato area.
 * Police Are Useless: Almost completely averted.  The main characters end up developing contacts in several different police forces or similar organizations, including a Japanese intelligence agency, the Los Angeles PD, the FBI, and the Canadian Mounties.  Although initially out of their depth when faced with paranormal crimes and criminals, they rapidly adapt.  While they may defer to the heroes on issues of magic and fighting monsters, they all prove to be good and useful allies.
 * Precursors: It's somewhat hard to define true Precursors in this setting given all the interdimensional travel between universes with different time flows, not to mention the shenanigans the time machine got up to, but the long-gone civilizations engaged in the war which produced the time machine are close enough as to make no difference, and even they had Precursors of their own, who were responsible for the creation of the Silence Glaive.
 * The mysterious benefactors of what became the Kw'lyn Corporation, who appear to have been descended from forces sent into the past with the time machine, and who gave them a Dyson Sphere as reparations for their side of the ancient war creating the device in the first place, basically played this role for a very brief time.
 * Punctuation Shaker: Most of the alien languages we see seem to indulge in this.
 * The Quiet One/The Silent Bob: Misaki, mainly because most of the time she has food in her mouth.  Her first few "lines" are inarticulate grunts.
 * Recurring Extra: Daniel Goodner, the teen in L.A. who's convinced someone is making an absolutely amazing film but is bungling the promotion. He eventually graduates to a full named character by chapter 95 or so.  (And finally learns he's wrong.)
 * Reverse Polarity: How Nabiki pulls off a lot of Ms. Aoyama's creepiness/alien-ness -- the disguise/illusion includes something that inverts her chi in such a way that it makes her feel completely unnatural even to those that aren't chi adepts.
 * Roof Hopping: Nabiki gets extensive (and extreme) training in roof-hopping from Ranma and Kasumi.  The other girls are already adept at it.
 * Running Gag: Referring to Ranma/Yori's high-powered attacks as "making duck ponds", after the first such one seen in the story -- it left behind a glass-lined crater in a park, and the authorities just filled it with water and put benches around it as soon as it had cooled down.
 * "Wait 'til you reach stage four," in regards to training.
 * Sanity Slippage: Akane -- who is perfectly fine now, thank you -- clearly gives this impression to the leader of a band of bank robbers:

"The youngest Sano looked at Nabiki with a small smile of her own. "She writes magical girl fan fiction, you know," she confided, making Hana go bright red and lunge for her. Evading the older sister Kimiko laughed. "Some of it is almost good. You should see the thing she wrote about that Yori girl the other week. It was hysterical..." Hana managed to grab her and push her to the carpet, her hand over her sister's mouth, looking horribly embarrassed. "Shut up!" she hissed into her sister's ear. Kimiko didn't stop grinning. Miki was heaving with laughter while their parents were looking like this was a rather regular occurrence, sighing a little but otherwise ignoring the minor tussle on the floor. "Fan fiction?" Nabiki repeated with a grin. Kimiko nodded, unable to speak, while Miki followed suit. "I know. It's ridiculous. What adult would waste their time with that sort of idiocy?" she asked, still giggling. "She's always coming up with all these overblown fantasies with extremely unlikely love stories worked in. I think she needs a boyfriend or something." Hana glared at her other sister while sitting on the youngest one, then grumbled under her breath when both her parents began laughing as well. "It's a perfectly respectable hobby and hones my writing skills," she muttered."
 * Saving the World: Standard duty of both the Sailor Senshi and the group that's formed around Chou and Yori.  Taken Up to Eleven when the time machine is defeated, which literally saves the entire universe.
 * Scare'Em Straight: Ms. Aoyama has this effect on some people just by talking to them -- and when she intends to intimidate...  well, just ask Akane and Ryoga.
 * An operation orchestrated to frighten Gosunkugi out of further boneheaded attempts at magic caps chapter 98. Naturally it involves Ms. Aoyama.
 * "Yori" does this to Anthony Murray in the wake of Halleckton.
 * And Aiko and the other girls do this to gangs and petty criminals whenever they're in L.A.
 * Screw Destiny: Defying the time machine's plans and, ironically, the time machine's plans in the first place.
 * Screw the Rules, I Have Money: Anthony Murray, to almost sociopathic levels.
 * Secret Identity: Kasumi, Ranma and Nabiki all have multiple personas that hide their true identities.
 * Nabiki decides that she will keep her identity as Ms. Aoyama a secret even after the day comes that she reveals her other secrets to her family.
 * Averted with Chiyoko. Her mother knows she's a magical girl -- and doesn't approve of her "hobby".  Also, apparently everyone else in her neighborhood also knows that she's the magical girl in pink with the staff-weapon.  They just don't let on that they know.
 * Secret Keeper: Nabiki, for Ranma and Kasumi, even after she gains her own secrets to keep.
 * Nabiki's friend Kimiko, as of chapter 95, appears to know or suspect that Nabiki is Azumi Ito.
 * After Ami shifts allegiance to the Sisterhood (and after she brings home a synthetic diamond statue and a moon rock), her mother clearly begins to suspect that she's a magical girl, although she doesn't know which one.
 * Self-Deprecation: The sister of one of Nabiki's friends writes magical girl fanfiction In-Universe, making her the target of gentle ribbing from Nabiki and her family.

""Ms Aoyama could terrify even the voices in the head of a mad person into doing what she wanted, just with a look," Misaki agreed soberly. "Ms Aoyama doesn't sleep, she waits. In the dark. When you turn out the light, she's there," Aiko added, a small smile on her face. Yrenti and Savrk exchanged a look. Inwardly, 'Azumi' was giggling insanely. "I heard that a ghost tried to scare Ms Aoyama to death," Rei put in, looking like she was trying not to laugh. "She just raised an eyebrow at it and no one has seen it since.""
 * She's Got Legs: Tamiko, as she never hesitates to remind everyone.
 * Shell-Shocked Veteran: All the main characters for some weeks after Halleckton.
 * Sherlock Scan: During their audition week in Los Angeles, Akane and Shampoo are in a bank and notice little details that warn them a robbery is about to take place, allowing them to thwart it.
 * Shipper on Deck: Tamiko ships Akane/Shampoo.
 * Shrouded in Myth: What Ms. Aoyama is rapidly coming to be among the governments of the world -- and several alien governments as well.
 * The girls -- including members of the Sailor Senshi -- start making up outrageous "Ms. Aoyama" stories for the sole purpose building up her legend.


 * Sir Swearsalot: Almost all of the Sailor Senshi, including Ami of all people (but not Hotaru).
 * Small Girl, Big Gun: Chiyoko is the magical equivalent.  Hotaru, even more so.
 * Sock Puppet: When Nabiki catches up to them, she learns that Ranma and Kasumi both have a large number of alternate identities (which all have unique and distinctive appearances thanks to the disguise spell).  These they use for a wide variety of purposes -- some broad, some amusingly specific.
 * Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Ranma discusses the concept, and averting the trope by skipping directly to the final boss should he see it in play.
 * Split Personality: What Luna and Artemis really are, for Usagi and Minako respectively.
 * Spock Speak: One of Ms. Aoyama's distinctive character traits.
 * Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: All the craft seen at the port at K'nn Four.
 * Staring Down Cthulhu: Several of the people Ms. Aoyama has dealt with afterwards are convinced she is the kind of creature that Eldritch Abominations fear and hide from.
 * Stealth Hi Bye: "Chou" and "Yori" like doing this (playfully) to their police and government contacts, literally fading to invisibility in front of them.
 * Ms. Aoyama does this as well, but it ends up being terrifying and creepy instead of playful.
 * Aiko (and anyone with her) can (and does!) do the "hi" part thanks to her teleportation (which apparently makes no sound); "bye" doesn't work as well because of the flash it gives off but she still manages it for people who don't know what to expect or aren't paying attention.
 * The Stoic: Both Azumi Ito and Ms. Aoyama, the latter in spades.  At one point she doesn't even flinch when an alien crime boss fires an energy weapon into her face at point-blank range.
 * Stripperiffic: Aiko, Tamiko, Fumiko and Misaki's original Magical Girl outfits.  When Ranma and Kasumi figure out how to tweak their transformation magic to get rid of them, they're all incredibly grateful.
 * Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: Acknowledged to exist out in the multiverse, confirmed not to be gods, and also confirmed to mostly be Jerkasses.
 * Summon Magic: Gosunkugi accidentally gets a summoning circle right in chapter 96, initially calling forth dozens of tiny voracious demons, and just before it expires, something far more dangerous.
 * Ms. Aoyama then recruits Cologne to summon Gosunkugi (to a barren patch of the Australian outback) to teach him to stop messing with magic he doesn't understand.
 * Super Senses: Nabiki discovers that her ki training with Ranma and Kasumi has given her heightened senses as a side effect.  She also learns that Jun can further enhance her hearing and sight, giving her low-light and telescopic vision and to a lesser degree "telescopic hearing" with filtering and direction detection.  (And when the Kw'lyn Corporation gives them upgrades to the SIs, she gets X-Ray Vision and all manner of other new super senses.)
 * Super Speed: Similarly, Nabiki's ki training has boosted her foot speed and reflexes well into the superhuman range.
 * Super Strength: While the other girls have it from the start, Nabiki is surprised to find that she's accidentally acquired the ability to lift nearly half a ton.  And she gets stronger once she starts proper training.
 * Surveillance Drone: While on vacation, Nabiki buys a half-dozen or so ultratech cameras which fly, go invisible, and can be remote-controlled by Jun, who relays what they see to picture-in-picture windows overlaid on Nabiki's visual field.  (A little later, they splurge and buy the other girls a couple of cameras each.)  And while she uses them for taking photos and video while on vacation, once she gets home...
 * Take Our Word for It: Aiko, Tamiko, Fumiko and Misaki's original Magical Girl outfits are frequently described as being embarrassingly Stripperiffic -- but we never find out exactly how, or even get any hint of what they actually look like.  All we learn is that they are/were dark blue with gold trim, and and showed at least as much skin as a revealing swimsuit (possibly a bikini).
 * Talkative Loon: Setsuna shows signs of this right before they stun her and take her to a professional to treat the damage caused by the time machine.
 * Technically a Smile: Ms. Aoyama.  Descriptions of her smile always indicate that it is anything but pleasant and reassuring; at least one character thinks of it solely as "that terrifying thing she did with her mouth".  It frequently has an effect equal to or beyond that of a Slasher Smile without looking anything like one.
 * Technopath: What the SIs can make their users, for all practical purposes, when used against less advanced technology.
 * Thanks to Jun, this is one of Ms. Aoyama's trademark abilities -- she just has to glance at a nearby printer to make it start churning out pages of a report that doesn't exist anywhere on any system it's connected to.
 * Telepathy: A technological equivalent is provided to Ranma, Kasumi, Nabiki and the rest by their SIs.
 * Teleport Spam: Aiko.  She goes to New York for pizza, Australia for sushi, and gladly acts as chauffeur for Akane and Shampoo when they travel to and from L.A.
 * Teleportation: Aiko's favorite ability out of all her magical powers.  She uses it like other people use walking.
 * Teleportation Sickness: Happens to everyone the first time Aiko teleports them, then goes away and never bothers them again.
 * Tempting Fate: Happens twice in the vicinity of the party at the Tendo Dojo -- once when someone asks "what could possibly happen?" and again when someone asks "what more could happen?"  Both times Fate comes through.
 * Terrorists Without a Cause: The group responsible for the "portal bombs" -- or so it initially seems.
 * There Are No Therapists: Averted.  They certainly exist, Akane has one, and after Chou and Yori cure her, the therapy actually does her a world of good.
 * Thermal Dissonance: Both Azumi Ito and Ms. Aoyama radiate cold in their presence, but Ms. Aoyama can actively freeze things around her just by standing next to them.
 * Time Skip: The first few chapters incorporate several time skips.  After opening about six months after the events of Aftermath, subsequent scenes briefly show events and people a year, two and a half years, and three years after Ranma and Kasumi disappeared.  It then skips again after Nabiki finds Ranma and Kasumi, eventually taking us to four years later before the main action of the story starts kicking in.
 * Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe: Minato Ward is extraordinarily prone to interdimensional doorways.  This is commented on in-universe several times as being very unusual.
 * Tomboy: Akane, of course.  Yori radiates a kind of elegant tomboy vibe.
 * Later, Sophie.
 * Tomboy and Girly Girl: Yori and Chou, respectively.
 * Too Dumb to Live: Robert Davenport, one-time British Minister for Magic, who out of ignorance and arrogance almost sets off a portal bomb in a British Ministry of Defense building.  Then, after he was specifically instructed to stay away from them by his boss in the Ministry of Defense, Davenport misused a number of British government assets in an attempt to threaten and blackmail an Australian citizen into getting him another one.
 * Took a Level in Badass: Nabiki, very quickly after falling into her "crime-fighting magical girl" role.  Rei Hino even invokes this trope when hearing the story, saying Nabiki "leveled up" when the encounters grew fewer but more severe.
 * Transformation Sequence: Averted by almost the entire core cast, whose changes between personas and power levels are basically instant toggles.
 * Trapped in Another World: Nabiki (as "Ms. Aoyama") uses this as a threatened punishment for the former British Minister for Magic.
 * Václav Sklár (willingly) serves his jail time in a facility on a demon world that knows how to effectively detain mages.
 * When, the girls are forced to give them both a timeout on opposite sides of a dead world used as a proving ground and waste dump.
 * Undisclosed Funds: We don't find out how much Shampoo and Akane get for being Hollywood stunt women -- the offers are all written down and we only see their reactions to them.  But all the offers have "a lot of zeroes", and are their monthly pay.  Richard, an L.A. police officer, says the amount is twice what he makes in a year.  And all other discussion of their pay simply comments on just how large it is, not how much.
 * Universal Translator: The Kw'lyn Corporation gives the Sisterhood an artifact that can apply a magical one to a person.
 * The Unmasking: Several times Ranma must reveal his true identity and gender to friends who have previously known him as a woman and under other names.
 * Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Seen during Akane and Shampoo's stunt work "interview", where the planning and rehearsals are glossed over and then we leap right into the action.
 * Unstoppable Rage: Akane, before she is cured of her brain parasites.  To the point that her therapist had to use a tranquilizer gun designed for elephants on her in nearly every session.
 * Unusually Uninteresting Event: "The Great Twitch", which occurred when the team destroyed the time machine, is universally acknowledged as a thing that happened (literally -- beings 8 billion light years from Earth noticed it), but no one seems particularly bothered by or concerned about it, beyond generating a metric ton of Conspiracy Theories.  (Except those who knew enough to suspect or realize what it was.)
 * Utility Belt: Although it's not literally kept in a belt, Nabiki is starting to rival Batman for the sheer amount of useful stuff she's carrying around.  At Jun's urging, she's begun accumulating all manner of high- and ultra-tech equipment which she keeps in her personal Hammerspace "just in case" -- including a lot of emergency rations and water, several Surveillance Drones that Jun can interface with, and even a couple space suits.
 * Voluntary Shapeshifting: Although everyone repeatedly calls it an "illusion" spell, it's very clear that it's actually genuine shapeshifting.  Then again it started as a simple disguise spell before it contracted a serious case of Creeping Featurism.
 * Weirdness Magnet: Ranma uses the term several times, and claims it's an inevitable side effect of being as powerful as they are.
 * Winged Humanoid: The "flyer" forms Kasumi develops for the so-called "illusion" spell.
 * Wrench Wench: Misaki.
 * Wrong-Context Magic: The magic system that Ranma and Kasumi have developed is so different from the usual ones in use in the inhabited worlds that some mages insist it isn't actually magic, even though it runs on the same energy and does traditionally "magical" things -- including opening portals, which cannot be done with technology.  Their spell constructs give mages headaches to look at, as well, and anyone who is trained in the standard magics beyond a relatively early point simply can't learn their system.
 * Yakuza: Chou and Yori have major Yakuza contacts who owe them favors.  They draw on them to get a line on a Yakuza oyabun in the L.A. area during the portal bomb arc.
 * You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Those bank robbers which are considered expendable liabilities are killed in their jail cells.  (The rest teleport out with a one-shot spell.)