Things in Nerima are exactly what they seem... right?

Read The Whole Thing

There's a class of fanfic I like to call "Everything you know is wrong" stories. These are ones in which we learn that one or more characters have been fooling everybody all along, that the way they act in the original series is in fact an act and they have relationships or other hidden secrets that the original author didn't tell us about. An early example of this was The Masks We Must Wear by Bob Barnes.

With this story, I set out to write the ultimate "Everything you know is wrong" story, one in which all or nearly all of the Ranma regulars are involved in hidden relationships. I ended up surprising myself by coming up with ideas that not only approached plausibility but could be explored in scenes that weren't just exposition but actually had some conflict going.

Akane's scene, by the way, was lifted from She Knows. Hey, it's not plagiarism if I wrote it. Some said that a secret Akane/Ryoga relationship wasn't radical enough compared to the other stuff in the story. Maybe so, but nothing else really worked logistically; if she knew about P-chan she'd get rid of him, and if she didn't then he'd find out about whoever else she was carrying on with.