Author's Notes:


   This is a crossover between Sailor Moon and the DARK.MATTER 
campaign setting for the Alternity science-fiction roleplaying game. 
If you don't know what that is, and I know you don't, I will explain
it in the proverbial nutshell.


   The world of DARK.MATTER resembles our own superficially, but only
because shadowy powers are working to hide everything that would make
it seem unusual. A world where aliens secretly influence human
society, mysterious cyborgs plot to infect and replace humanity in
secret, people born with strange psychic powers are whisked away to
clandestine government labs under cover of darkness never to be seen
again, demons walk the shadows sowing fear and unrest, the Freemasons
and the UN plot to institute a New World Order, and Lee Harvey Oswald
most certainly did not act alone. It's a world of paranoia and
conspiracy straight out of the dreams of the most fevered Usenet kook.


   The incidences of strange, unexplainable phenomena such as
telepathy, magic, extra-dimensional visitors, and Chupacabras are tied
to a phenomenon known as the "Dark Tide", or the density of dark
matter in the galaxy. A rising Dark Tide, as there is currently,
results in an increase in the strange and unexplainable all over the
world, but especially around mysterious subterranean phenomena known
as "dark matter gateways", things that, when the Dark Tide is high
enough to activate them, are the nexus for all kinds of strange
phenomena.


   The player characters in the setting are assumed to be members of
the Hoffmann Institute, a private agency run by a man named Itohiro
Nakami and tasked with researching, understanding, and combating
threats to humankind caused by the rising Dark Tide. Think of them as
being kind of like the "X-Files", but not working for the government,
and with nowhere near the budget. The four Hoffmann Institute agents
seen here are four of the six sample characters provided for the
introductory adventure at the front of the book, "Exit 23", in which a
random group of people are trapped at an Idaho truck stop in the midst
of a hellish snowstorm and are besieged by a mysterious ice-demon.
They are not technically original characters, but seeing as you never
heard of them, and I had to expand and in some cases alter their
backstories and motivations, nobody will fault you if you think of
them as original characters.


   I wrote this fic based on a challenge I saw about a year ago on the
Fan Fiction Mailing List. The challenge was "What if someone other
than Haruka and Michiru got Hotaru after the fight with Pharaoh 90?"
Since I am an unapologetic Alternity fanboy, I immediately thought
"Hoffmann Institute! Hotaru gets found by the Hoffmann Institute!" The
original challenge actually said she had to get de-aged to an infant
and then grow up with someone, but you know, screw the wording of the
challenge. De-aging her was cheating anyway. Yeah, I said it,
cheating. Hotaru was a very traumatized and messed-up little girl and
Usagi gets to call a do-over? Nobody else gets do-overs. Hoffmann
Institute sure don't get do-overs. And if you erase all of her life,
is the person you're holding really Tomoe Hotaru, or did you just kill
Hotaru in a way that didn't leave a corpse so you can still claim a
perfect no-kills record? Cheater.


   Also, at no additional cost to you, each chapter now contains bonus
content! Nothing cool like the deleted scenes on a DVD that always end
up being cooler than the scenes in the actual movie (does anyone know
why this is?), though, these are RPG rules supplements for things in
the fic -- character sheets, skill sets, stats for monsters,
locations, items, etc. They're using the Alternity ruleset, so the
chances you will find them of any use is approximately nothing, but
they contain useful information aside from stats and numbers. And I
can use this as a way to explain or introduce things that are too
tangential to events in the story to warrant a mention. Plus I like
making them.