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{{work}}{{MIA}}
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{{quote|''"I have need of... a Warrior ... a Guardian if you will. The position is permanent and long-term, and will provide both difficult challenges and potentially vast rewards. The tasks involved follow your basic martial artist’s credo quite nicely; defending and protecting those less powerful than yourself. I would also hope that we could eventually become ... friends."''
|The Gate of Eternity}}
''[[Relatively Absent]]'' is a long-lost (and [[Dead Fic|incomplete]]) ''[[Ranma ½]]/[[Sailor Moon]]'' [[Crossover Fic]] written by Mark "Togashi Gaijin" Shurtleff between 2002 and 2009, and suddenly yanked from the net with a surprising thoroughness when Shurtleff abruptly abandoned fan fiction.
When Sailor Pluto kills herself with a timestop at Mugen Gakuen, the Gate of <s>Time</s> Eternity decides it wants a ''different'' guardian, one who will not impose her own agenda on the Gate's ancient mission and on the course of the future. The only candidate it can find within 500 parsecs, though, is a critically-injured Ranma, locked in female form and [[Buried Alive|buried deep under a landslide]] in the aftermath of a failed confrontation with Prince Herb over the Chisuiton.
Partly healed and thoroughly turbocharged by the Gate's limitless ki, Ranma digs her way out of the rockfall into the middle of the camp of four girls -- Tsuya, Kioko, Midori and Harukichi -- who have been surveilling her for a year. To her astonishment, they turn out to be her cousins. They bring Ranma home to her grandmother Aiko Yamada, matriarch of the powerful and influential Yamada clan -- the family who disowned his mother Nodoka when she married Genma Saotome. Through them Ranma discovers a heritage of wealth ''and'' martial arts beyond her experience. With the cousins' help she finally makes her way to the Gate to complete the bonding process. In the process she makes an enemy of the [[Back from the Dead|resurrected]] Sailor Pluto, who wants the guardianship back but can't understand why the Gate won't accept her.
Bonding with Ranma not only gives the Gate its new guardian, it also wakes up the controlling intelligences of the <s>Silence Glaive</s> Glaive of Space and the <s>Silver Imperium Crystal</s> Crystal of Life -- which suggest that whatever Queen Serenity intended for their use, it wasn't their ''original'' purpose.
Complicating matters beyond [[Magical Girl]] politics, Ranma's apparent death in the avalanche on Mount Horai sets in motion events involving the powerful and influential Yamada clan -- the family who disowned his mother Nodoka when she married Genma Saotome -- and the Japanese government all the way up to the Emperor. And why has the Japanese National Intelligence Directorate been watching Nerima and its martial artists? What is Project Chameleon? And why is the US Navy involved?▼
▲Complicating matters beyond [[Magical Girl]] politics, Ranma's apparent death in the avalanche on Mount Horai sets in motion events
And unknown to the Sailor Senshi, they are ''far'' from the only people with paranormal powers in the world...
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Before he abandoned it, Shurtleff wrote a prologue, eleven chapters and an untitled side story. Two more side stories were written by authors other than Shurtleff. One, ''Illusions of Honor'', was written by Andrew Norris in 2004 and was considered "official" enough that Shurtleff included it with the story on his website; Norris apparently yielded copyright on the story to Shurtleff as it too has been subject to take-down requests. The other, called ''Dust'', was written by an author called only "K.C."; no online copes of it are known to exist as of 2020, and virtually nothing is known about it.
While ''Relatively Absent'' is no longer hosted anywhere online, if you're lucky you can find a complete off-line archive maintained by [[User:Looney Toons|a fan]] who is willing to share. <!-- Strictly speaking, this is not true; links to copies on a dozen different file hosting sites could be found at https://jusenkyo.fandom.com/wiki/Relatively_Absent#Other_External_Links as of April 2020. Just how complete these archives are is unknown, though -- the authorized offline archive shared person-to-person contains the prologue, 11 chapters and the side story ''Illusions of Honor''; some of the archives appear to stop at chapter 9, and may not have the side story. -->
{{tropelist}}
* [[A.I. Is a Crapshoot]]: Edges sideway into this trope. The magical A.I.s in the Ginzuishou, the Gate of Time and the Silence Glaive have their own purposes and priorities that didn't align with those of their Silver Millennium owners, which is why they were "reprogrammed" and (mostly) driven into a state of "hibernation". Once they awaken again, the actions the Gate and the Glaive take to pursue those imperatives makes them ''appear'' to be going rogue. (The Crystal seems to be less inclined to buck her altered programming, but it's hard to be sure with the extant material.)
* [[Abhorrent Admirer]]: Cousin Taro, to Midori. In fact, ''all'' of his cousins find him creepy, but his obvious interest in Midori disturbs her.
* [[Aborted Arc]]: ''All'' of them.
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* [[The Ageless]]: This is an immediate benefit of being an artifact's Guardian. (It's later implied that if a Guardian finds a soulmate, they ''too'' get this benefit.)
* [[Altar the Speed]]: The wedding in chapter 10 was in some
* [[Alternate Universe]]: One key divergence is that Ranma does not escape the battle with Herb at Mount Horai unscathed, but instead was buried alive in the avalanche it caused.
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* [[Animal Eye Spy]]: Probably the closest trope to the way the Gate can ''only'' perceive things beyond its immediate physical location through its Guardian's senses.
* [[Anime Hair]]: Generally averted except where imposed by the source material, with one odd exception: in chapter 8, an American Naval officer who meets with Aiko Yamada is a ''Nisei'', an American of Japanese descent, and he is described as being platinum blond. The description comes from a third-person narrative view of Aiko's thoughts, and
* [[Arbitrary Skepticism]]: Averted (as is common in fanfic) for Ranma, who has seen ''so'' many weird things just in the last few years of her life that she has absolutely no problems accepting the mysterious voice in her head that claims it's feeding her ki to keep her alive.
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** The Saotome clan had a long history of arranged marriages leading to combining different families' martial arts schools. The current ... problems ... stem from a marriage arranged between Aiko's brother Naosuke and Ranma's paternal grandmother Yasuko.
** In chapter 10, the Emperor of Japan arranges a marriage between Ranma and her cousin Midori (wearing a male form thanks to instant Jusenkyo powder) on ''very'' short notice, as a ploy to keep the Yamada ninja clan alive and to preserve their ninjustu ryu. Not the purest example of the trope, as both Ranma and Midori are given the opportunity to object and back out -- but the ''dire'' political and social consequences of doing so are impressed upon both of them, and neither feels they can decline honorably. (And Midori has a crush on Ranma -- to which she admits -- which makes her decision to go along with it much easier.)
** Midori also notes during chaper 10 that if she doesn't marry Ranma it is likely that she will end up in an arranged marriage with her other cousin Daichi should their aunt [[Gold Digger|Tomoko]] try to marry her daughter Hiroko to him in a ploy to gain control of the Yamada estate.
* [[Australia]]: The Gate directs Ranma to the Southesk Tablelands in Western Australia -- a remote bit of the Outback -- when she wants to try out some of her more destructive guardian powers for the first time.
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* [[Bond Creatures]]: This is perhaps the closest trope to the relationship between Ranma and the Gate, although which one counts as the human partner and which is the bond creature is a bit hard to determine.
* [[Bi the Way]]: Chapter 3 makes it clear that
* [[Big Brother Is Watching]]:
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* [[Big "What?"]]: From Aiko upon being informed in chapter 3 that Ranma is alive.
* [[Blonde, Brunette, Redhead]]: The four cousins: Tsuya is blonde, Kioko and Midori are brunettes, and Harukichi is a redhead.
* [[Body Language]]: Control of one's body language is an important part of the Yamada martial art, and leads directly to the complex and detailed communication possible with their [[Signed Language]]. Aiko notes upon first meeting her that, in contrast, Ranma has been deliberately taught to essentially broadcast all her thoughts through her body language.
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* [[Broken Masquerade]]: In the final paragraphs of chapter 6, a panic-striken Luna rushes in and reports the theft of the Time Key to Usagi and the other Senshi, only to realize that Usagi's mother Ikuko is present and heard every word she said, and is apparently furious at the revelation. {{spoiler|It's actually a subversion. Ikuko and members of the other Senshi's families ''already knew'' they were the Senshi, and Ikuko was annoyed because she'd just lost the standing bet between them all over who would blow the secret first. (She'd bet on Minako.) At the same time, this ''is'' a proper example, as the Masquerade ''had'' been broken for them -- just not on-screen during the events of the story.}}
** The Japanese government -- and presumably the other governments of the world -- are aware of at least some paranormal phenomena, given that in chapter 9 we see that the Imperial Palace has a telepathic security guard whose tasking includes confirming that all visitors are ''human'', and that his organization has rules and regulations for the use of powers like his.
** Ranma's aunt Suzu has the Masquerade broken for her in chapter 10 when in a private audience Japanese Empress Chikako casually mentions Ranma's curse;
* [[Bureaucratically Arranged Marriage]]: Very strictly speaking, this is the case for Ranma and Midori.
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* [[The Chosen One]]: When Ranma, faced by the magnitude of some of the tasks facing her as the Gate's guardian, has a crisis of confidence in chapter 5, the Gate blandly informs her that because of her talents and skills she is literally the only person on Earth capable of being its guardian and handling the challenges that the role will throw at her.
* [[The Clan]]: The Yamada. While for the most part we see only Aiko Yamada and Ranma's four female cousins (and a couple servants/family friends), Ranma has several uncles and aunts and numerous ''other'' cousins, none of whom are involved with the family's ninja tradition (and a few of whom are would love to see it die). Most of them show up on-screen during the wedding.
** Several other ninja clans are mentioned, but none appeared "on-screen" before the story was abandoned.
** The recent history of the Saotome clan is also explored in an early chapter.
* [[Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends]]: And other kinds of loose ends, as well -- throughout chapters 9 through 11, the JNID or its proxies are seen dealing with virtually everyone in Ranma's life known to still be alive except for Happosai, Genma and Nodoka. Soun, Nabiki and Akane are arrested; Ukyo is paid off; ''some'' kind of investigation is going on about the Amazons, who are at Mount Horai and not easily rounded up; and the Kunos, including the principal, are taken in. The Throne is apparently acting to make sure nothing and no one can threaten Ranma and Midori's marriage. Nodoka is excluded because she has been repatriated with the Yamada clan; Genma is on the run and/or in hiding; and Happosai was literally in Limbo when last seen.
* [[Cloudcuckoolander]]: "Misha-san", from Shurtleff's side story. While he says nothing "on-screen", Cologne's short conversation with him is enough that she calls him a "howling loony" afterwards.
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** The Gate also suggests to the Crystal that she engage Sailor Moon to help her deprogram herself from whatever blocks and reprogramming Serenity imposed on her.
* [[Despair Event Horizon]]: Kasumi reaches this in chapter 11 after a [[Trauma Conga Line]] that starts with her entire family getting arrested and culminates when she realizes from the Chrysanthemum seal on the orders to arrest her sisters that the Yamada family -- to whom she had planned to go for help -- had to know about their arrests and either would not or could not help her.
* [[Disney Death]]: Twice [[In-Universe]]: First, the misapprehension that Ranma died at Mt. Horai, which is corrected (for the Yamada, at least) by chapter 3. Also, Aiko believes that her youngest granddaughter -- who by all appearances is Hotaru "Sailor Saturn" Tomoe -- died in an explosion with her father. She is, of course, not dead, but is currently in infant form after the events of Mugen Gakuen.
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* [[Gone Horribly Wrong]]: The Japanese National Intelligence Directive's plan for the arrest of the Tendo sisters in chapter 9. It was apparently supposed to be handled with delicacy and class -- and instead ended up being performed by a set of [[Dirty Cop]]s with a grudge against the girls and no compunctions about applying as much [[Police Brutality]] as they felt they could get away with. When the JNID finds out, they stage a jailbreak to get them out of the cops' clutches.
* [[Government Agency of Fiction]]: The Japanese National Intelligence Directorate appears to be a fictional counterpart to the [[w:Public Security Intelligence Agency|Public Security Intelligence Agency]]; they both handle internal security and operate out of a headquarters in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo.
* [[Gratuitous English|Gratuitous Australian]]: Walkabout, one member of the Australian superteam that shows up in chapter 9, very deliberately embraces the stereotype to the point that his speech is all but unintelligible to other English speakers, including his own teammates. Oddly, he also uses Cockney Rhyming Slang, just to add another layer of impenetrability to his speech.
* [[Gratuitous Japanese]]:
* [[Grey and Gray Morality]]: Appears to be the ethos of the Gate. When describing the events Sailor Pluto was facilitating to bring about Crystal Tokyo, particularly the canonical [[Apocalypse How|Class 3 Planetary]] disaster that ushers it in, the Gate responds to Ranma's horror by blandly noting that there was nothing inherently ''wrong'' with Pluto's plan and that many of its guardians had chosen to prioritize the survival of their own species over others. It does admit, however, that the plan is draconian and that there are less extreme alternatives that would still guarantee the survival of humanity, in larger numbers than Pluto's plan would have.
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** Apparently the Senshi do ''not'' have this storage area, as Setsuna laments its loss after Ranma becomes Guardian Khronos.
* [[Happily Adopted]]:
* [[Healing Factor]]: Ranma's canonical healing speed (a consequence of the manga/anime's slapstick violence) is turned into an actual ki skill for enhanced healing in the story, which then gets supercharged by the Gate's endless supply of pure ki.
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* [[Necromancer]]: Happosai performs a [[Ritual Magic|ritual]] in chapter 8 to allow him to communicate with his dead daughter/lover regarding the fate of Ranma.
* [[Nepotism]]: An [[Obstructive Bureaucrat]] in the NID who has a history of impeding active ops for trivial reasons can't be fired because he's the brother-in-law of the agency comptroller.
* [[Never Mess with Granny]]: Aiko Yamada, as the matriarch of a ninja clan, is no less skilled than any of her descendants still pursing the art, is very politically savvy, and has the ear of the emperor.
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* [[Nosebleed]]: Midori gets one in chapter 4 when a braless Ranma stretches after a nap.
* [[Not Listening to Me, Are You?]]: Ranma is so sure upon meeting them that the cousins are new fiancees that while ranting about what Genma might have sold her off for ''this'' time, she misses the first few attempts Midori makes to tell her they're family. Midori finally has to resort to yelling at her to get Ranma to listen.
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* [[Obfuscating Insanity]]: Tatewaki Kuno ''and'' Kodachi Kuno are both faking their apparent mental issues, apparently to give them excuses for running off in the middle of the day to deal with supernatural theats.
* [[Obfuscating Stupidity]]: Ditto for Tatewaki Kuno and this trope. He's much smarter than he lets on.
* [[Obstructive Bureaucrat]]: Someone named Ito in the NID impeded the mysterious Chameleon project by preventing payments to informants and contacts for over two months, apparently for a petty reason related to a [[Noodle Incident]] that reflected badly on him. Ito apparently has a history of getting in the way of active operations for stupid reasons, but he can't be gotten rid of because [[Nepotism|he's the brother-in-law of the agency comptroller]].
* [[Oh Crap]]: Aiko gets two in rapid succession in chapter 8.
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* [[Original Character]]: The entire Yamada clan, but especially Aiko, the cousins, and the servants.
* [[Out-of-Character is Serious Business]]: The moment in chapter 11 when ever-serene, ever-oblivious Kasumi shouts at a pair of Akane's friends for bad-mouthing Ranma, who is, as far as anyone other than the Yamada and the government is concerned, dead. It's just the latest moment in a [[Trauma Conga Line]] that will ultimately push her over the [[Despair Event Horizon]].
* [[Overprotective Dad|Overprotective Mom]]: Strongly implied of Minako's mother Akiko, who is ''not'' the parent who knows she's Sailor Venus; her father Hiroshi has apparently been running interference for her in this regard.
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* [[Psychic Link]]: One exists between Ranma and the Gate; establishing this was the first step in the bonding process, and required the injured, semi-conscious Ranma's agreement in chapter one.
* [[Punch Clock Hero|Punch Clock Spy]]: In chapter 11, NID agent Hiroyoshi picks up data disks from a contact -- a hot dog vendor -- who complains that his invoices haven't been paid.
* [[Random Teleportation]]: During her first few tries at teleporting, Ranma discovers if she loses focus on her intended target, she may go somewhere else familiar which is similar to where she actually ''wanted'' to go, or where she subconsciously wishes she were (like the Tendo dojo).
* [[Ransacked Room]]: The police arresting Nabiki did this to the entire Tendo home, looking for any contraband or other evidence of her activites. Kasumi is grateful that they did not indulge in wanton destruction during the course of it; most of the family's breakables remained intact afterwards. But that is small comfort in the wake of a search which included torn-out walls.
* [[Rapunzel Hair]]: The guardian transformation, among other changes, gives Ranma a thick, curling mane of red hair down almost to her knees. As an unanticipated side effect (which even the Gate has no explanation for), it ''doesn't go away'' when she changes back.
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* [[Transformation Sequence]]: Ranma gets one as the Gate's guardian, and is somewhat less than happy about the [[Frills of Justice|outfit it puts her in]], not to mention the [[Rapunzel Hair|massive waterfall]] of red hair it gives her. (Although she doesn't mind the added height.) Ranma is even ''more'' unhappy with the "naked whirly light show" which accompanies the guardian transformation, until she learns it's an "incentive" built into the magic to encourage its users to master the transformation and not just rely on the "preprogrammed" change (and vows she'll master the magic faster than anyone else in the Gate's memory).
** She's even more upset when she discovers that -- for reasons even the Gate cannot determine -- the change in her hair color and style ''doesn't go away'' when she reverts to her "normal" form.
* [[Trauma Conga Line]]: Inflicted on Kasumi starting with the (seeming) death of Ranma and Nodoka declaring blood feud against the Tendos, escalates when ''her entire family'' is arrested and her house all but torn to shreds by police looking for evidence, and topped off with the discovery that those to whom she was going to go to for help were probably aware of, if not responsible for, the police raid. She crosses the [[Despair Event Horizon]], but how she comes back, if at all, is unknown because the extant story material ends shortly afterward.
* [[Turned Against Their Masters]]: Definitely how the Crystal perceives the actions of the Glaive when they both wake up after the Gate bonds Ranma. She has her doubts about the Gate, too, being the only one of the three artifacts which still seems inclined to follow the programming imposed on them by Queen Serenity during the Silver Millennium.
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* [[Lost Forever]]:
** First, the fic itself. It only exists in individual readers' offline archives, because even more than a decade after he yanked his fanwork from the Net, Shurtleff still responds ([[Kibo]]-like) to any attempt to repost it with take-down requests. <!-- This may no longer be true -- links to copies on a dozen different file hosting sites could be found at https://jusenkyo.fandom.com/wiki/Relatively_Absent#Other_External_Links as of April 2020, suggesting he's no longer policing the net for the story. (Just in case, though, this link is in a comment and not open text.) Just how complete these archives are is unknown, though -- the authorized offline archive shared person-to-person contains the prologue, 11 chapters, Shurtleff's untitled sidestory and the sidestory ''Illusions of Honor''; some of the archives appear to stop at chapter 9, and may not have the side stories. -->
** On a smaller level, the entire section where the police arrest Soun, Akane and Nabiki in chapter 9 -- and what subsequently happens to the girls at the police station -- was originally much more extreme. After complaints by some readers on the FFML (the anime Fan Fiction Mailing List, where Shurtleff was posting chapters), he reluctantly dialed back the [[Police Brutality]] in those scenes; the original version is just as lost as the rest of the fic. There remain, though, references to these events, so they weren't removed from the story outright, just pushed offscreen.
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Source page
* Leave a message on [[User talk:Looney Toons|Looney Toons' Talk page]]. <!-- Alternately, links to copies on a dozen different file hosting sites could be found at https://jusenkyo.fandom.com/wiki/Relatively_Absent#Other_External_Links as of April 2020. Just how complete these archives are is unknown, though -- the authorized offline archive shared person-to-person contains the prologue, 11 chapters and the side story ''Illusions of Honor''; some of the archives appear to stop at chapter 9, and may not have the side story. -->
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