Fanfic / Love Opens Many Doors

Love Opens Many Doors is a Ranma ½ and Planescape crossover fanfic written by Rewind Gone Nuts.

On the first day after Nabiki is given Akane's former status as Ranma's fiancee, she is approached by first Ukyo and then Shampoo. Being Nabiki Tendo, Nabiki naturally offers to sell her engagement to her two "rivals". Unfortunately, by doing so, she inadvertently presses one of Shampoo's Berserk Buttons and the Chinese Amazon attacks her in a rage, forcing Ranma to grab her and flee to safety, with Ukyo trying to help subdue the crazed Chinese berserker. In their headlong flight, they unwittingly stumble through a mystical portal and find themselves on the streets of a strange, alien city, populated by monstrous humanoid beings. This, they learn, is Sigil, the City of Doors; easy to enter, but hard to leave. Cut off from their friends and family and with nothing to their names but the clothes on their backs, the four teenagers are forced to make a pact of cooperation if they're going to have a hope to make it home alive.

This work includes examples of:

• Adaptational Species Change:
  • Nabiki Tendo gets turned into a half-dragon during the events of chapter seven.
  • Kasumi Tendo shows up, having been transformed into a silver-furred, two-tailed fox, in chapter eight.
• All Trolls Are Different: Chapter eight involves an appearance by fensir, an obscure species of troll native to the plane of Ysgard in the Great Wheel cosmology, but here presented as residents of the Feywild. They're described as smaller, more intelligent and more human-like than regular-trolls, with a matriarchal society where women are warriors or hunters and men are mages or artisans, who risk being turned to stone by exposure to sunlight. The chapter's climax has Ranma fighting — and killing — a rakka, a fensir woman who went insane and grew into a cannibalistic giant after giving birth to her first litter.
• Alternate Universe:
  • The story is set in the version of Sigil seen in Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, using the World Axis cosmology instead of the traditional Great Wheel seen in the original Planescape. There are also tweaks beyond that, such as the Ooze Portals of the Hive leading to portions of the Abyss rather than to the Paraelemental Plane of Ooze.
  • Some of the details of the Ranmaverse are also completely unique to this story. For example, Shampoo reveals that she lost her mother to slavers, when in canon her mother never appears and her father only appears in a handful of panels. Ukyo, on the other hand, used to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition.
• Always a Bigger Fish: Whilst Ranma is strong, it's made clear early on that he's not the strongest thing in Sigil. A single glabrezu nearly beats Ranma in his first encounter with one.
• Bad Guy Bar: The Bottle & Jug, a particularly infamous tavern in the Hive run by fensir that has a shady reputation even for the Hive Ward; the primary attraction is a "boxing arena" implied to frequently see matchups so unfair that they result in mutilation and death. And if any newcomer does beat the house's resident champions, the management dispose of them by throwing them through one of five secret portals in a back room.
• Black Magician Girl: Elizabeth, the juvenile blight dragon, has an innate affinity for necromancy and evocation, the most offense-orientated schools of arcane magic in D&D. Due to their Fusion Dance, Nabiki gains this same affinity and becomes a sorcerer.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: One of the first things that Ranma does upon arriving in Sigil is step up to thwart a random mugging, with Ukyo and Shampoo jumping in to assist (and, it's implied, show off for him). In the third chapter, he impulsively tries to save a deserter from the Blood War from being dragged back by a glabrezu, which nearly goes horribly wrong... but it does get him and the girls a job.
• The City Narrows: The Hive Ward, as in Planescape canon, is a squalid, dark, filthy, dangerous district of crumbling tenement houses inhabited only by the poorest, meanest, most criminal or demented of Sigil's denizens.
• Covered in Gunge: In one early chapter, Shampoo stabs a vaporighu, resulting in it exploding and drenching her and the other teens from Nerima in... ichor, let's say. It's greasy, slimy, and it stinks, to the point that their bosses send the teens home from work early to wash off, whilst they scour the substance from their bar clean with flamethrowers.
• Culture Clash: At one point, Ranma asks an eladrin priest help in order to finally lift his sex-shifting curse because he saw the priest swapping genders. However, the eladrin asked for it as a boon from their patron deity in order to fully experience the wonder of existence and instead suggests Ranma should learn to appreciate the "gift" bestowed on him. The martial artist doesn't heed the advice.
• Dark Is Not Evil: A point is made that, as a melting pot of the multiverse, Sigil is home to many beings who do not fit the usual standards of their homes, which includes morality-based outcasts. Some of the first people that Ranma and the girls meet are the Ryntars; a drow and a duergar who are both honest, law-abiding folk who hold jobs in the Clerk's Ward.
• Dead Weight: Ranma has a brief duel with a bloated ghoul, a ghoul that has overfed until it weighs three or four times as much as a normal person, in chapter six. Its layers of necrotic lard make it all but impervious to Ranma's blows, forcing him to skewer it through the head with a convenient bit of sharp wooden detritus to finish it off.
• Drunken Master: Ranma's final opponent in chapter eight is a firbolg warrior named Vohiln who is absolutely blasted out of his mind on strong liquor, but who also gives Ranma the hardest fight of the chapter. Ranma even refers to Vohiln's fighting style as "True Drunken Fu", noting that it was the one style that Genma never wanted Ranma to try and learn.
• Elves Versus Dwarves: Invoked by Ukyo, who is familiar with the trope. Subverted with the Ryltars, who are a (dark) elf and (dark) dwarf couple.
• Everyone Has Standards: When Ranma has to deliver a letter to an eladrin priest and finds them officiating a mass, the martial artist waits for the praying to end because he's not rude enough to disturb an holy service.
• Fusion Dance: Nabiki is transformed into a half-dragon when a soul-merging spell goes wrong in chapter seven.
• Gaslamp Fantasy: Albion, the first realm that Ranma and the girls visit from Sigil in chapter seven, is set in a pseudo-British realm with cultural trappings drawn heavily from Victoriana, but is a Dungeons & Dragons world that industrialized its magic rather than an Alternate History of Victorian Britian where magic has become real.
• Garden of Evil: The garden of Castle Rose in chapter seven is filled with monstrous plants and tended to by undead gardeners. Appearing on-screen are a yellow musk creeper (a parasitic plant that animates its victims as zombies), a giant Venus fly-trap (probably a greenvise), what is clearly a triffid, and blood-sucking rose vines.
• Glasgow Grin: Ranma fights an orc called Lugbrash Jawbreaker in chapter eight who is described as having a permanent grin due to massive scars on his cheeks — scars that look like somebody once ripped his jaws apart.
• Groin Attack: Ukyo threatens a bariaur mugger that Shampoo will rip off his testicles with her bare hands if he doesn't tell them how to find the Bottle & Jug.
• Gold–Silver–Copper Standard: Because the City of Doors is a multiversal nexus with access to a lot of different currencies, it's easier to deal in gold, silver and copper coins for day-to-day living in Sigil. The majority of denizens specifically deal with copper or, at most, silver; only the wealthy use gold or rarer coinages such as electrum or astral diamonds.
• Hellgate: Ooze portals in this fic lead to regions of the Abyss that are associated with slime, decay, filth and squalor. Most lead to either Shedaklah, realm of the Demon Queen of Fungus, or Molor, one of the realms of the Demon Prince of Slime, but they have also been known to lead to places such as Slugbed (a dark, dank, misty realm inhabited solely by fiendish slugs and snails) and the realm of Oublivae, Demon Queen of Apocalypses.
• I Know Mortal Kombat: A variant; Ukyo's familiarity with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition gives her an edge in knowledge of Sigil and its denizens. Zigzagged in that not everything she knows is actually right, an homage to how lore has shifted between her first edition experience and the 4th edition-inspired world. In particular, the duergar Weltha is quite annoyed to hear her race described as being "skulking, slaving thieves" and having bearded women, which is how they were described in 1st edition.
• Interspecies Romance:
  • Baeloth and Welta Ryltar, a male drow and a female duergar, are a married and expectant couple who take the Nerimans in when they arrive in Sigil.
  • There are hints that Elizabeth, a blight dragon, may be somewhat smitten with Ranma Saotome, a human.
  • A female fensir brazenly offers to have sex with Ranma if he can beat all five of the Bottle and Jug's fighting champions.
• Love at First Punch: In chapter eight, one of the female fensir that Ranma fights is later shown offering him sexual favors.
• Mugging the Monster: In chapter eight, Ranma and his group are repeatedly mugged by Hiver thugs on their way to the Bottle & Jug. As their party consists of three powerful martial artists (and Nabiki Tendo), said muggings go very poorly for the thugs.
• Nonhuman Humanoid Hybrid: Baeloth and Welta's daughter, born in chapter five, is half (dark) elf and half (dark) dwarf, or a "dwelf".
• Noodle Incident: How the hell did Kasumi end up in the same world as everyone else, especially turned into a two-tailed pocket-sized fox.
• Only Known By His Nickname: The blight dragon noblewoman's daughter that Ranma and co meet in chapter seven prefers to go by "Elizabeth Witherbloom", as her full name in Draconic is the far less pronounceable "Daerevthot'thalunabal Durglothtor", which literally means "Grub-that-was-lucky-to-be-born rot-breeder".
• Our Dragons Are Different: Albion is populated by Arcane Dragons, a family that appeared in Dragon for Dungeons And Dragons3rd Edition, characterized by being physically weaker but far more magically adept, to the point that each species instinctively knows all spells from two of the eight schools of magic. The canon Arcane Dragons only consist of two species; Hex Dragons (Necromancy/Enchantment) and Tome Dragons (Conjuration/Divination), but Albion is home to other varieties, such as the Blight Dragon (Necromancy/Evocation).
• Our Goblins Are Different: A thoul, a hybrid of hobgoblin, troll and ghoul, appears in chapter eight.
• Our Orcs Are Different: An ogrillon, a race of orc/ogre crossbreeds characterized as being hugely strong but incredibly stupid and covered in boney spikes and plates, appears in chapter eight.
• Pervert Revenge Mode: Ukyo beats the snot out of a drunken orc that gropes her rear in chapter eight.
• I Resemble That Remark!: In chapter eight, after hearing two female fensir bouncers admit to finding Ranma sexually attractive, an incredulous Ukyo asks Shampoo if she thinks Ranma has some kind of curse on him that makes him attract crazy women. Shampoo declares it wouldn't be impossible, knowing Ranma's father... and then angrily asks if Ukyo is calling Shampoo crazy. Ironically, Ukyo could have been inadvertently dissing herself as well, given her own back story.
• The Scottish Trope: The Lady of Pain is so much The Dreaded that Sigil's inhabitants are afraid to even refer to her as "The Lady of Pain", instead referring to her by honorifics such as "Her Bladed Serenity".
• Shout-Out:
  • Ukyo's reaction to encountering a halfling wererat being to scream how she hates werebeasts and attack it was inspired by a similar sequence involving Lina Inverse and a werewolf in the Slayers OAV "Mirror, Mirror".
  • Ranma, Nabiki, Ukyo and Shampoo find themselves gaining employment at a tavern called the Chattering Mimir, which is run by Morte and Nordom, from Planescape: Torment.
  • At one point, our heroes go to bathe at "The Other Place", a public bathhouse from the Planescape sourcebook Faces of Sigil.
  • In the sewers, our heroes encounter a gulguthydra singing a song clearly based on Hexxus and his Villain Song "Toxic Love" from Ferngully The Last Rainforest.
  • The wizard's lab in Ranma & the girls' new home contains a "snoring fire", which the author has stated is an homage to Calcifer from Howl's Moving Castle.
  • A triffid appears in the Garden of Evil that Ranma has to fight his way through in chapter seven, along with a "viper-tree" that could be an homage to either a classic Planescape monster, a similar "tree of snakes" that appeared in the Conan the Adventurer episode "Master Thief of Shadizar", or both.
  • The person that Ranma delivers the necklace that he and the girls risked traveling to Albion to find to is a gnome named "Clauvius Rothbart", after the villains of the first two The Swan Princess films.
• Take That!: Ranma's final official opponent in chapter eight is a firbolg warrior named "Voghiln the Vast", clearly based on the character of the same name from Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, and clearly the author isn't a fan of his namesake. Voghiln the firbolg is characterized as a literal stinking drunkard, so sozzled on alcohol that he's lost all sense of personal hygiene — the stink of him precedes his actual entrance into the arena and makes Ranma gag in disgust, and he's described as a repellant mass of dirt, sweat, and a crusting of old vomit and dried alcohol. He's also a self-important pervert, who gets angry when one of the women watching the fight offers Ranma sex if she can beat Vohiln — and she turns out to be Vohiln's daughter, but he's so drunk he can't recognize her.
• Technicolor Fire: The Breath Weapon of blight dragons is described as a dark purple flame that creates darkness by absorbing light rather than emitting light.
• Wretched Hive: The aptly named Hive Ward; a stinking, filthy maze of decrepit buildings, garbage-strewn streets, and sewage-choked gutters. The inhabitants tend to be any combination of desperate, deranged, diseased or damned, gangs prowl the streets, and random puddles can be hellgates known as Ooze Portals.

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