Sailor Moon was created by Naoko Takeuchi, and the DARK.MATTER setting was written by Wolfgang Baur and Monte Cook. I own neither of these things, and expect that if either of those last two people Google their own names they are going to be incredibly confused. * * * * * As little as they may like it and as little sense as it makes, the Senshi have school today. Things are returning to normal in the Juuban district and while that doesn't mean there are no monsters attacking, it does mean everyone is ignoring them. Rei, Minako, Usagi, Ami, Mamoru, and Chibi-Usa all left the Hikawa Shrine operating on five hours or less of sleep. Haruka and Michiru, however, got to sleep in and meander on out to the bus stop after a full night's rest; having one's school explode three times in a 24-hour period has its perks. "I still don't trust her." Haruka played with her collar, trying to work out the crease she'd made when she slept on it last night. "You saw how easily she gave up the Chalice, and it's not like that was what caused Sailor Saturn to arrive, or the Pharaoh to be stopped. If it's taken control of Pluto the way it did the others, all it has to do is threaten to hurt her and Sailor Moon will open the gates of Hell herself." "She's still a kid," said Michiru. Her hair was matted and lopsided and she was trying not to notice it until she could get back home and in her own bathroom. "She doesn't want to acknowledge that she can't save everyone all the time. And we don't have to trust her fully, but there's no reason we can't make use of her as a resource." She stopped to roll her neck back and forth and hear the bones crackle. "As long as we don't give her the opportunity to do something idiotic like that again, anyway." Haruka sighed, shifted her weight from her tiptoes to her heels and back. "I know, I know. It's just something about her makes me want to punch her, you know? That way she acts like, like 'of course the easiest answer to arrive at is the correct one! I'd rather everyone on Earth be killed than me have to compromise my middle-school vision of morality!' And then we're the bad guys for not having our heads off in the clouds." "Wow, somebody's cranky this morning." Haruka rolled her eyes at Michiru and scoffed. "Besides, you can't really hold too much of that against her. She is the reincarnated princess of a beautiful magical kingdom on the moon, you'd expect a certain level of childish idealism from someone with that background." Haruka looked around the street for any sign of the bus they were waiting for. "Okay, this bus isn't going to come. After all we've done, I don't think a little walk is going to hurt us too much." "And I was just saying to myself that I needed more pointless, impatient exercise." The day was brisk but not cold, the winter air clean and crisp. The two lovers did not dawdle, but did not rush, there was not a whole lot they could hurry up and do. They continued their conversation, less to convey information and more to keep each other's mind off what was happening and they feared they couldn't stop. "Yeah, well, for the whole 'beautiful moon kingdom' thing, I wouldn't say the ref's made his call on that one just yet. Setsuna still hasn't explained to me how they have a Sailor Pluto when Pluto wasn't discovered until, what, 1920? Or how they knew that Uranus and Neptune would be the Roman gods of the sea and sky before Rome existed to come up with those myths. Or how you and me were even supposed to have kingdoms on planets made out of gas." "You haven't guessed?" Michiru half-smiled. "The answers are time travel, time travel, and..." she spread her fingers out and waved them back and forth, "...maaagic!" Haruka chuckled in spite of herself. "Well, now we know why they never made a 'Trivial Pursuit: Silver Millennium Edition', there were only the three possible answers to everything." "What's the third?" Haruka stopped dead in her tracks. "Is that..." She squinted, then broke into a sprint. "It IS! It's my CAR!" In front of them, parallel-parked between a Hyundai and a Volvo, its left front wheel riding over the curb, was the canary-yellow 1967 Toyota 2000GT open-top. "Haruka! WAIT!" called Michiru, and she jumped after her lover to stop her before she reached the car. She caught Haruka by the neck and didn't take her to the ground, but stopped her advance. "Cars aren't dogs that find their way home. Someone left this here. It could have a tracking device... or a bomb." "I know, I know that!" said Haruka, shrugging off Michiru's hold. "Did you think I was going to just jump in and do donuts in the middle of the street?" She paused and couldn't suppress a smile. "I'm just happy to know that, whatever else, whoever took it at least didn't wreck it up." "Because that would be like defacing a national treasure." "Exactly." Haruka leaned over the door and inspected the car's interior. "Okay, someone left some plastic shrinkwrap, a sock, and... a rifle bullet on the floor in the backseat... but everything on the dashboard and steering column are intact, so if they put anything in, it wasn't through there..." She paused, hand on her chin, then pulled the hood release lever. The hood opened up, nothing exploded. Haruka walked around the car to inspect its open front end. "Okay, I don't see any foreign objects attached to anything... let me get a closer look. She leaned in over the engine block, examined it a few moments, then inhaled deeply through her nose, visibly relishing the scent of oil and gasoline. "You know, Haruka, if you aren't careful I might get the idea you love that car more than me." Haruka patted the radiator like it was an infant to be consoled. "There there, baby. Don't listen to her. She's just jealous." * * * SAILOR.MOON: DOUBLE EXPOSURE CHAPTER 6: DOUBLE TAKE * * * HIKAWA SHRINE GUEST ROOM TOKYO, JAPAN MONDAY FEBRUARY 21, 1995 9:58 AM Nadine pulled the pillow out from underneath her head and threw it at Itohiro Nakami's head, he swatted it away easily. "Good freaking morning to you too, Nakami!" Phil raised his head and looked around, despite the fact he was blindfolded. "Buh? Nakami here?" Nadine saw Nakami put his hands on his hips and roll his eyes, but the Nakami Hotaru saw didn't have the visible pupils required for such a gesture. "Yeah, he's here, and he's brought all his people skills with him." "Good. Tell 'im I hate him." With that, Phil's face fell back down into the pillow like a twenty-pound ball of lead. "Nakami, Phil says he hates you." Nakami let out an exasperated sigh. "Yeah, I heard him! What the Hell have you people been doing down here, people are saying there's attacks going on, some kind of sickness that makes people crazy, terrorists or monsters or terrorist monsters, they almost diverted my flight to Okinawa! And what is up with all these lights?" Nadine looked at the lamp behind her and winced at the bright light. "Tomoe Hotaru collects antique lamps, we don't have the money for floodlights," she yawned so wide she thought she would unhinge her jaw, "and there may be people around here who can walk through shadows. I'd love to see your better plan." Nakami looked to Nadine like he was going to say something else, but thought better of it. Hotaru doesn't know how to read alien body language. "Tomoe Hotaru, the girl... is she safe?" "No, she's with us." Nadine pointed behind her. "That's Sailor Saturn right over there." Nakami paused. "Who's... Sailor Saturn?" Nadine cocked an eyebrow. "Tomoe Hotaru is. The girl? You know, the thirteen-year-old you wanted us to recruit because she can heal with a touch and do, like, badass kung-fu flips with a magic scythe?" Hotaru was still too surprised at the alien in the room to be surprised by the fact Nadine used the word 'recruit' and not 'dissect'. Nakami blinked several times and put on an expression of supreme disbelief. "Donna told me that the girl encountered a demon named Isci ba Fan and that she was able to shake off his control. Where is this magic scythe stuff coming from?" "From Saturn? I guess?" Now Nadine was confused too. "Wait, you're telling me you didn't know about this?" "How could I possibly know about this? All I knew was that she resisted the attacks of the most powerful psionic entity on the planet, nobody ever told me about anything else!" "We all figured that that was some clue to tell you that she was a magical space warrior!" She sat up now, waving her hands for emphasis. "It makes sense to tell us to recruit a magical space warrior! You seriously were going to tell us to hire a thirteen-year-old girl that you DIDN'T know came with magic powers?" "She fought off Isci ba Fan's mental assault! That's more than enough to say she's exemplary!" "Who in the hell is Isci ba Fan? And how did you know she..." Here Donna turned around to point at Hotaru for emphasis, and saw her eyes were open. "Oh. You're awake. Tomoe Hotaru, this is Itohiro Nakami, Director of the Hoffmann Institute. Itohiro Nakami, this is Tomoe Hotaru, Sailor of the, uh, Saturn." "That isn't his name," said Hotaru. "He's trying to fool you. He's an alien." Nakami looked shocked and took a step back. "Why did you --" He cut himself off, then started again in a more even tone. "Is there anywhere I could speak to Tomoe-san in private?" "Oh come off it, Nakami, everyone at the Institute knows you're an alien already." Nadine rolled her eyes. "You don't need to keep pretending when we're around." Nakami blinked and was, for several seconds, at a loss for words. Finally he stepped into the room and slid the door closed behind him, as if that would insulate the noise. "How did you know?" he whispered. "Let's see. You've got the patents to, what, five different technologies used in every American home and yet we're always broke because you have absolutely no idea what they are worth when you sell the licenses off?" Phil spoke, his voice half-muffled by the pillow. "You say you're from Japan and yet the only way you can get us a safe house is to call ahead and tell some old man we're shooting a TV special here?" Bill rose his finger in the air but didn't get up. "You listen to nothing but Vivaldi and yet you've never insulted another person's taste in music." He let his hand drop to his chest. "Human beings don't act like that." "Nobody ever sees you eat, you wear the same clothes every day and yet you never can have anything in your pockets, your sweat smells like magnesium and peaches..." Nadine had six fingers extended, counting the items of the list. "Oh! And as we can smell here, you can cannonball entire bottles of Smirnoff without flinching and you do it often enough that you must think it impresses us instead of making people think you're a drunkard. Should we go on?" "Okay, okay, I get it, keep your voices down!" Nakami hissed. "The illusion was good enough to get me on a plane over here so let's not all go ruining it now!" Hotaru couldn't believe nobody mentioned the obvious, that he was a little grey man with a big oblong head and huge black oval eyes. Nakami paused and rubbed his temples, then looked at Hotaru. "Okay. I am an alien. And apparently not as good at hiding as a human as I thought. But I'm the good kind of alien, the kind of alien that helps people who are being hurt by the bad kinds of aliens, and who teaches the Raytheon corporation how to make a microwave oven. And I need to talk to you because I think we need your help, okay?" Hotaru almost asked 'What do you need my help for?' even though she was fully aware of the answer, old habits die hard. * * * Mizuno Ami is the first one to extoll the virtues of school attendance but even she wonders if this is a little much. They'd skipped school on Thursday, because if they didn't the Silence would have come and killed them all. And now as far as they were aware it was still coming, and here she was sitting in science class. There wasn't a whole lot they could do today -- their only lead was in the subway tunnels and that had to wait until late at night when less trains were running so they could explore them. Nobody knew where to find fake FBI agents, and the two previous sites of Death Buster activity were as picked over as a skeleton in the desert. Still, even if they couldn't actively do anything today, maybe they should have been getting some sleep so they could do something tonight. Too late to change their minds now, though. Ami stifled a yawn, tried to keep it so her classmates couldn't detect it, and failed. She tried not to think about the Pharaoh lest she drive herself mad by going in circles in her head over and over again. She struggled to keep her eyes open, to get them to focus on the blackboard. She tried to concentrate on the lesson, on what the teacher was saying, but soon the words were washing around her like a river around a pebble. "Saturn is composed primarily of hydrogen gas, though its core is solid material. The rings, made of fine particles of ice and rock, were discovered in the 1600 by astronomer Galileo Galilei but were thought to be solid sheets of material until 1859, when James Clerk Maxwell mathematically proved that solid rings that size would tear themselves apart..." Saturn's rings can tear you apart, too, in fact they can tear the entire Earth apart if they have to, but they only will if the Earth goes bad. Saturn's core is a tiny thirteen-year-old rock now, but its core used to be a nasty little ball of what those in the know call 'ankoku busshitsu' named the Mistress Nine, which is appropriate because the next place it took over was Pluto, the ninth planet in the solar system. Johannes Kepler was the first to observe the girl in the castle on Saturn who's all alone because everyone's afraid of her, which he named with some German word that probably has forty syllables like 'Das Gleckenshurg... eimen... effenfraumenlibzit... wersterschaur... aurutauru... hotaru... hotaru- hotaru-bo-baru-banana-fanna-fo-faru-me-mi-mo-maru'... "Mizuno-san, might you be able to help the class out?" Ami's head snapped upward, her eyes went wide, and she half-shouted "Nine point five-eight astronomical units!" Everyone in the classroom stared at her. Everyone except Minako and Usagi, who were asleep as well and had the good fortune not to be called on yet. A few people giggled. "Okay, that's..." the teacher paused, looking off to the side as he tried to recall a fact from the depths of his memory, "...the orbital length of... Saturn, I think? But the question was 'who succeeded Leonid Brezhnev for control of the USSR?'" "Oh." Ami's face turned beet red and she tried to shrink into her chair. This wasn't science class any more, this was World History. She'd been asleep for a half hour, maybe forty-five minutes. Why didn't someone wake her up between classes? "Oh. Uh... Nikita Khrushchev?" "Close! Khrushchev came before Brezhnev. It was Yuri Andropov, actually, that I was looking for. Mizuno-san, will you step outside with me?" For the briefest, most fleeting moment, Ami wished the Silence would come and she would not have to face her teacher's admonishment. When it didn't, she walked out into the hallway to face her punishment. "I'm so sorry, Yoshi-sensei," she began as soon as the door closed, hoping that maybe a visible display of contrition would net her a lighter sentence. "That was very disrespectful of me, and I can't tell you how much I regret it..." The teacher sighed. "Mizuno-san, you know you're my star pupil. You're always the brightest, most dedicated student in there and I can see how much your commitment to your schooling rubs off on your friends." Ami winced. "Yes, I know, and I know how much it must have disappointed you and I promise that in the future I will work harder to live up to that standard..." "You can calm down, you know, I'm not going to make you stand out here with the buckets of water or anything like that." He reached for his pocket to get a cigarette then remembered his wife threw them all out. "I wanted to tell you that it's okay for you to miss school once in a while if you're not well enough to learn. Toudai isn't going to reject a student with your credentials because she called in sick one day. Your friend Kino-san called in sick today and the school didn't send the jack-booted thugs to break down her door. I'd rather you be at home getting some rest than here not learning anything anyway. That sound reasonable?" Ami nodded. "I guess... I guess I have been under a lot of stress lately." Boy, if that wasn't the Understatement Of The Silver Millennium. "I figured. Look, why don't I just send you down to the clinic for a little while, have the nurse check you out, maybe just lay down for a bit. If after a while you're feeling better, come back to class. If not, call your mother and ask for a ride home." Ami nodded and started to go back inside to get her things, but the teacher stopped her. "Oh, and one more thing. Don't wake up Tsukino- san and Aino-san while you're in there, because as soon as they wake up on their own I am going to send them out here to carry buckets full of water." * When Ami arrived at the school nurse's station, the lights were dimmed and the room nearly empty. A kindergartener was asleep on one of the cots, but the high-backed swivel chair behind the nurse's desk was empty and there was nobody else to be seen. A yellow Post-It note on the desk read "Back in 3 min! -K" and Ami placed her teacher's note next to it, then fell onto the nearest bed as if it had its own gravity well. Yoshi-sensei was such a great teacher, Ami thought, one that cared so much more for actual learning and knowledge than rote adherence to method. She would have felt guilty about leaving Usagi and Minako twisting in the wind like that, but right now she didn't think her brain had the energy to adequately process guilt. Sleep was swiftly falling over her like a warm blanket when she heard the nurse's swivel chair turn around. "So... you must be... Mizuno Ami, it says on this note. Hello, Ami-chan." The voice was low, confident, a bit snide. Ami rolled onto her back to see who it was and she hated the fact he was not letting her sleep more than anything else about his actions. He was, of course, a man in a black overcoat and black pants, wearing a black fedora hat inside and black sunglasses in a darkened room. He was sitting in the nurse's chair, leaning as far back as he could with his feet up on the nurse's desk. In one hand he held the note Ami's teacher had written, in the other he had a lollipop he'd taken from the jar on the nurse's desk. The hands that held these items had two thumbs each. He moved his head slightly to indicate he was looking her over. "You look like Hell, Ami-chan. Late night, I take it?" Ami wanted to say something defiant, something snappy to come back with, but all she had was "...Yeah." "You girls up late talking about dolls and boys and glitter and unicorns and all that other bullshit you girls are supposed to be talking about? Or were you up late talking to your new friends at the Hoffmann Institute?" Ami's head started to list downwards, she snapped it back up. "What do you care? Is the FBI coming to Japan as truant officers?" The man in black laughed. "Oh, Ami-chan. Ami-chan, Ami-chan, Ami- chan. We here at the 'FBI' don't care whether or not you're going to school. We care when you start hanging around with people like miss Donna... KIMberly... Truitt... that you have no business hanging around with. Those Hoffmann Institute people are bad news and if you don't think we know something about bad news you're going to be sorely, sorely mistaken." Ami shook her head a bit and wondered if she was dreaming. "What? I don't know who the Hoffmann Institute or what 'Donna KIMberly Truitt' is. Are you menacing the right person?" He smiled and in the faint light Ami could see his mouth had too many teeth. "You don't, do you? Oh, this is a lot better than we expected. I thought I was going to have to wash a pack of lies out of your head." He steepled his fingers. "Well, I have to anyway, it's just a smaller pack." From the side of the room the kindergartener's voice came up. "Where's Keiko-san? Where'd Nurse Keiko-san go?" The man in black let out a noise that was half sigh, half growl. "Somebody locked her keys in her car along with her lunch. What the hell do you want?" "My tummy hurts! I want Nurse Keiko-San to give me some medicine!" Ami slipped her hand into her pocket and wrapped it around her transformation pen. She wondered how fast she could become Sailor Mercury if the man made a threatening move on her or the kid. The man in black opened up some drawers in the desk and didn't look inside them. "Oh no, it looks like we're all out of tummy medicine! Why don't you just lay down and be very very quiet and then wish your tummyache away." The kid sniffled as if he was about to cry, and the man in black growled his frustration and hastily followed it up with, "Or, how about I have some lollipops here, would six or seven of those quiet you up?" The kid momentarily considered that and decided they would. After he'd picked out seven yellow (the best flavor) sugar-free store-brand lollipops, he went happily back over to his bed to wait for his mother to pick him up. "Kids," said the man in black with gesture in the child's direction. "You've got to love them, right? I suppose YOU would, anyway. Oh, and good call on not bringing out the power pen, I could have taken you down well before you were done." "Who are you and what do you want with me?" Ami wished this was a dream, not so much so that it wouldn't be real as so she could be asleep right now. "Isn't it obvious? I'm one of those Men in Black you hear so much about." He smiled, wide, insincere. "And after I told you to stay away from the Hoffmann Institute, there's just one other thing I wanted to ask you for now. Do you think the planet Mercury ever had an atmosphere that could support life?" Behind him, the doorknob turned and the door opened, revealing a woman in a white nurse's uniform holding a set of keys, a bento box, and a twisted-out coat hanger. "Pleasant dreams," whispered the man in black to Ami, and he kicked the desk to spin himself in the chair; after it came around to face Ami again he was gone. * * * The questioning didn't start right away. They'd eaten some breakfast, Phil made excuses about why they had no cameras or microphones. Hotaru took some painkillers for the soreness, and they helped, but not enough. Bill and Donna were sent out to 'do recon' which they all understood to mean 'get out of our hair for a while'. They inspected the grounds to make sure nobody could listen in on them, and then Hotaru began her interview. She left nothing out this time, as the embarrassing parts they already knew and the unlikely parts were being told to an alien and a person who was punched in the face by Bigfoot. The lab accident that killed her mother and would have killed her. Her father's Faustian deal with the Pharaoh 90 and the malignant being that had lived within her ever since. The Messiah of Silence, the Talismans, Mistress Nine, Sailor Moon, Chibi-Usa, Pure Heart Crystals, the Witches' betrayals and decreasing numbers, the thralls at the Mugen school, the daimon eggs, the Holy Grail, her realization as Sailor Saturn, her power to end the world, her attempt at noble sacrifice, all of it. When she was done, 'Nakami' the alien looked at her for a few moments with an expression she couldn't read. Eventually he said, "I know you're telling me the truth, because my people have seen these daimons and the heart crystals and you becoming a sailor-suited warrior maiden and all that. But I feel like I'm hearing a sequel to a movie when I never saw the first one." "What do you mean?" Phil spoke up from behind him. "Okay, so, you're 'Sailor Saturn'. And that makes you the 'Soldier of Ruin and Birth' and all that, but, why does it? Did someone give you your powers and decide you looked like a 'ruin and birth' kind of person, or is it genetic, or what?" Hotaru stopped and thought, and felt a bit embarrassed. She'd already known about this stuff, somewhat, without anyone having to tell her and for a moment she'd assumed everyone else would too. She wondered if she was going crazy, the answer was probably yes. "I inherited them... but it isn't genetic, I don't think. There used to be a kingdom called the Silver Millennium, long long ago, and it spanned all across the solar system." She didn't know why she paused and gave them an opening to say 'that's stupid!' or 'no there wasn't!' but she did anyway. "And the capital of the kingdom was on the Moon, and it was ruled by Queen Serenity." She paused, an image of Serenity's face flashed into her mind unbidden even though she had never seen it. "She was... beautiful and wise. And she loved everyone." She shook the image off. "And every planet had a princess on it, who was also its guardian. They were the Sailor Senshi, and they were the ones that the Queen trusted enough to give her power. They were all wise and graceful and," and she nearly choked on the last word, "perfect. The Princesses of each planet had a job to do that the Queen trusted them with. I think that Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter were the bodyguards of the Princess of the Moon, Sailor Moon. Neptune and Uranus guarded the kingdom from threats from outside the solar system. Pluto guarded the gates of time. And Princess Saturn didn't guard anything." Her eyes started to water. "Saturn's job was to kill planets that she thought had become corrupt. All she had to do was drop her scythe and everyone would die. Men, women, children, animals, plants, everything had to die if she thought the planet would breed more evil." Nadine wanted to say something consoling but couldn't really think of how. "That... that sounds like an awful responsibility for someone to have." Hotaru's eyes were red and tears ran down her cheeks but she wasn't going to start sobbing, at least until she finished. "And that's who I am now. Usagi's the reincarnation of the perfect and beautiful and loving Princess of the Moon. And I'm Sailor Saturn. I'm the one whose job it is to murder everyone on Earth. Not someone else in my body. That's who I'm reincarnated from. That's what my soul is." Her shoulders shook and her chin quivered; this was depressing to think about in the abstract but to actually assemble it all together and say it out loud it struck her again with full force how horrible and repugnant she really was. "It's who I am." * * * Usagi and Minako stood side-by side in the hallway with wooden poles across their shoulders that each had a bucket of water at both ends. Minako grumbled and shifted her stance around to try and keep her balance, but Usagi had discovered quite a few tardy entrances ago that if she twisted her arms and locked her spine in just the right position, she could sleep standing up and still keep her balance. And Ami said that she didn't take learning seriously! Usagi's wrist started beeping an approximation of a telephone ring. "Usagi-chan." Minako whispered, trying to get her attention. "Usagi!" "Yeah, Finna-chan," Usagi half-mumbled, half-slurred. "I know the rhodium thingy's out of the whatsit. It's beeping at me. Me 'n Mamoru are busy kissing, you go fix it?" "No, Usagi-chan, your watch. Your communicator watch is beeping at you!" "Well then just tell Chris Hale I'll call him back! Lighthouse in't going anywhere for 'nother... two days, I got his nummer..." Minako growled in frustration and edged over to Usagi, then very carefully hiked up her arms so she could reach Usagi's watch without tipping her wooden beam too far to the side. She tapped the 'Respond' button on the side; she couldn't see the screen but she heard Chibi- Usa's voice. "Hey! Dumpling-head, where are you! This is important!" "Usagi-chan can't come to the watch right now," said Minako, carefully turning around so she could look into the screen. "What do you need, Chibi-Usa-chan?" "Minako, is that you? Listen, I found Luna! Artemis, too!" Minako edged sideways until at last she was looking into Usagi's watch and could see Chibi-Usa's face. "Artemis? Where have they been this whole time?" Artemis's white head poked into the frame and covered Chibi-Usa's face, she squealed when the tip of his tail tickled her nose. "We don't know," he said, "We lost a period of like three days there. You were going off to the Mugen school and then the next thing I know it's Sunday and Luna and I are in animal shelter, reeking of garbage!" Minako looked left and right down the hallway, hoping there was nobody watching; she honestly didn't know what this would look like to an outside observer. "Our powers didn't work for about the same amount of time... maybe you stopped being a magic cat and became a regular cat for a while?" "That's not important right now!" said Luna's voice, and she jumped on Chibi-Usa'a arm to put her face in front of Artemis's, the image of her was so close-up her nose must have been a millimeter from the camera. "Chibi-Usa-chan told us about the daimon attacks yesterday and we think there may be another wave starting! We can't tell how many for certain, there's some kind of interference, but we know there's a concentration of energy near the Crown game center, and it may not have attacked yet. If you and Sailor Moon get down there quickly, you may be able to track it back to where the daimons are coming from. You go now -- we'll call up Ami-san and Rei-san to meet you over there!" "Roger that, we are on our way!" Chibi-Usa sneezed, the cats fell out of the image, and the transmission ended. After a moment's deliberation, Minako jumped upward with her bucket next to Usagi's face, when she landed the water splashed upward right into her nose. She sputtered and staggered backwards a few steps, but came to a rest against the wall before she fell all the way. "Time to get up, odango, there's daimons afoot!" Usagi shook off the last of her dream, then laid the buckets on the ground. "Wow... I was really out of it, wasn't I?" "You're telling me. Were you and Mamoru sexy physicists again?" "No, no, sexy spaceship captain this time." * * * Donna felt remarkably good considering the fact she got shot last night. Better than before she got shot, really. Sure, she was sore, she couldn't bend over and she had to bite her lip to keep herself from yelping if someone poked her in the stomach, but that wasn't too bad considering. Hotaru's magic healing hands didn't bring her back to full health but they'd certainly put her well on her way towards it. And the pain left over was more than cancelled out by the fact she'd actually taken a shower and shaved her legs today and wasn't wearing clothes she'd had on since Wednesday. She was wearing some of Bill's clothes, some faded and torn blue jeans and black T-shirt with an angry eagle and the phrase "DON'T TREAD ON ME" silkscreened on the front of it, both of which were too big for her, but at least these clothes were clean. Phil and Nakami had told them to go "do some recon" and not said where or how they were supposed to do it when neither one of them spoke Japanese. It was obvious they meant "We want you two to go away because we want to talk to Hotaru without you bickering with each other", but as long as they didn't actually say it, Donna could pretend they didn't mean it and keep her dignity intact. Bill and her wandered around on foot for a little while until they found the arcade, which seemed a good a place as any to do fake recon. "Sonic BOOM! Sonic BOOM! Sonic BOOM! Sonic BOOM!" Bill tapped the buttons and wiggled the control stick as if his input was doing something. "Yeah, that's right. You just keep doing that gay-ass move over and over again. No, really, go ahead." "Sonic BOOM! Sonic BOOM! Sonic BOOM!" "Oh, you want a little cheese with that whine? The game's called 'Street Fighter', not 'Street Let's-All-Be-Pals-And-Go-Easy-On-Each- Other.' You shouldn't bring the ball if you can't... bring... the game!" Donna grinned at how easy it was to rile him up. "Sonic BOOM! Sonic BOOM!" "I'd bring the game, if the stupid game would... rrrgh... let me get up... or do SOMETHING!" "Sonic BOOM! Player 2 wins! PERFECT!" Bill slapped at the buttons in frustration. "Bah, this game is bullshit. Let's play something that the game will actually let me play." "Oh, I'd love to, Bill, but shouldn't we start walking back? Nadine had to go and lose our car and now it'll take us forever to get around." Bill scoffed. "Okay, one, that's bullshit, we're not supposed to back for hours, you just don't want to play something you can't cheese through. And second, she did not 'lose our car'. It was an open top with a push-button ignition and we had to park it on the curb. Somebody stole it from us and there's not a whole lot we could do about that." Donna shook her head. "Bill, don't you get it? This is Tokyo. People don't just 'steal' cars in Tokyo." "You just 'steal' cars in Tokyo." Donna rolled her eyes and privately wondered where the hell she was even going with that line of conversation. "Anyway, we already bought a bunch of tokens, no use letting them go to waste. You wanna try beating 'Virtua Cop' on one quarter again?" Since that was a game where Bill couldn't directly beat her, she nodded. "Okay, okay, baby wants his Virtua Cop. Gimme a second though, this place is making my asthma act up." The fact she would make him wait on her and thus establish she was the one who decided how things got done was an added perk. She stepped outside for a bit of fresh air. It was a nice day, crisp, cloudless. People walked past her in both directions on the sidewalk, none of them in any great rush. If she was the kind of person into picnics, this would be good weather for one. She started to reach for her pocket and then paused. She'd never see any of these people again and her respiratory problems weren't exactly a CIA-protected state secret, but for some reason she didn't feel like she should pull out an inhaler and start puffing away while total strangers were watching. That was something fat kids did in gym class. With a few surreptitious glances around, and walked her way over to an alley by the arcade and ducked into it. That's be better. Not that she had anything to be ashamed of, of course, but, you know... people watching... better to just avoid it. She pulled the inhaler out of her pocket and heard something else fall to the floor, almost inaudible. She patted her pocket, realized what it was , and turned to grab it but it had bounced into a pile of trash. She muttered and crouched downward to look for it, wincing. Ordinarily she wouldn't, but it was her magnetic card scrambler, the one from the CIA that opened any electronic lock with a keycard reader. Not only was it an invaluable asset she couldn't replace, but it was the single most badass super-spy leather catsuit blow- cigarette-smoke-on-the-laser-tripwires femme fatale 'steal the McGuffin from the two male leads right under their noses at the end of the movie' piece of equipment she had. She loved that damn thing, more than several members of her family. * Sailor Moon, Mercury, Mars, and Venus walked two by two down the sidewalk, alternating between 'combat ready stance' and 'walking in a way that passersby don't think we are totally crazy stance'. People were milling about in their cars and on the sidewalks as usual, and if there was a youma in the area they at least would have left and started milling around somewhere else. "It looks close by," said Sailor Mercury with her hand once again on that invaluable visor, "but the energy signature isn't weak, it's... indistinct. And there's some other stuff I can't quite pinpoint in the area, I don't know if it's caused by the dark matter or not." "If it's indistinct, maybe it hasn't found an object to merge with," said Mars. "Maybe there's nothing sharp or pointy or hazardous enough around here." "That's a possibility, although I don't know why... oh, there it goes, I think it just locked in." They heard a scream from a nearby alleyway, but not even those of them who are learning English were taught enough to understand the foul expletives used. A woman came flying out of the alleyway as if she'd been thrown, her too-large T-shirt and jeans flapping in the air, her long dark hair splayed out behind her. She hit the sidewalk with a loud, dull THUD and grimaced, clutching her stomach with both arms. A second later, her assailant emerged. She was the same body type as the woman on the sidewalk, and had the same long black hair, but her skin was pink instead of white, her ears pointed, her mouth fanged, and of course on her left shoulder there was a black five- pointed star. She wore tight black leather pants and a skintight black tank top that showed off her sculpted-but-not-chiseled abs. Wrapped around her shoulder was a length of rope and a grappling hook, and from her right fingertips up to her neck there stretched a thick, featureless black line. On her forehead was a pair of what appeared to be night-vision goggles. She was looking at the woman on the floor, shaking her head, circling around her. It was clearly a daimon, but one of the older models, made out of a target's treasured possession instead of something that was dangerous, only five or so feet tall and walking like it wasn't running a bad program. Already people started fleeing from the sight of her. Venus and Moon both raised their hands and pointed at the daimon, but Usagi opened her mouth just a half-second faster. "Halt, evildoer! I am the beautiful warrior of love and justice, Sailor Moon! And in the name of the Moon, I will punish you!" The daimon's head snapped to face them and she snarled, her expression angry and also afraid. "What, so you think you can just JUDGE me now?" she said with the hint of an English-speaker's accent, "All of a sudden you're freaking BETTER than me? Who the Hell are you? You're nobody, that's who!" * * * Nadine knew it was inappropriate and they didn't know each other that well but God damn after Hotaru had said her inescapable purpose was mass murder Nadine thought she needed a hug. She kneeled down to where Hotaru was sitting, hesitated a moment, then wrapped her arms around the young girl's shoulders. Hotaru didn't push her away but she didn't return the embrace either, just waited for her to let go. After a few moments of clutching her and gently patting her on the back, she did. "I'm not going to tell you you're wrong," said 'Nakami' the thin grey alien, "Because by this point I know there's more strange stuff out in the world than I'll ever be able to fully grasp. I don't know anything about a Silver Millennium, but I can tell you what I do know. "My people call themselves the 'Fraal'." That visibly caught Hotaru's interest, but she didn't speak. "And a few thousand years ago, my ancestors left their home planet to colonize another one. But something went wrong, their wormhole drive malfunctioned and they wound up in your... well, our solar system. And to fix it they needed a very rare element that did not exist here." A pause. "I don't think they recorded anything about the planets other than Earth being occupied. Maybe they came afterward. As they approached the only habitable planet, they found something waiting for them in space. A demon that they named Isci ba Fan, which means 'The Silent One' in our language. He had almost no physical form, and from what little information they could gather from him he was apparently in that state because he had tried hundreds of years before to teleport himself across the galaxy, but when he arrived he found that only a small part of his intelligence made it to his destination, and the rest of his mind and body were trapped in an empty plane of existence parallel to this one. And he was still a threat to us because he is the most powerful psionic entity the Fraal have ever encountered. My species are telepaths, you see, and we know a lot about the powers of the mind. That's how I can walk down the street without people seeing what I am, I put up a telepathic illusion." "It's an illusion?" asked Phil. "We all thought you were some kind of shapeshifter." "And everyone else at the Institute can go on thinking that, okay?" He turned back to Hotaru. "Skilled Fraal mindwalkers can lift things with their minds, they can read thoughts, they can assault a person's psyche directly and they can turn away the attacks of other mindwalkers. And when they met Isci ba Fan, his psionic power was so great it made theirs seem like tennis balls and tissue paper. He could possess people, control their minds directly and make them carry out his will. The only way to tell was if someone tried to read his thoughts, they would be utterly silent. That's how he got his name." At least how THEY arrived at his name, Hotaru thought. "He immediately attacked the crew of the Fraal motherships and set about using them to see if he could find a way to get all the way back in our reality. The Fraal couldn't stop him. He had no physical form to damage or restrain. He swatted aside the mental attacks of every single Fraal telepath on the ship with ease. Destroy his host, and he moved to another one. He could only directly posess one at a time, but some people think he may have been able to shear off tiny pieces of himself to act as independent, though far less powerful, entities. It still took many of us to destroy each one of these shards, but he didn't seem to make too many. Eventually they thought he was so dangerous and so resilient that the only way to kill him was to overload the dark fusion reactor on the ship he was occupying. It exploded with hundreds of gigatons of force, it killed everyone on board..." "But you couldn't kill him. He survived." "But he survived. And when the remaining Fraal mothership landed on the moon, he followed them. He didn't attack as openly because he had decided the Fraal didn't have the means to free him, and he enjoyed lurking in the shadows, preying on them, sampling their fear. And when the Fraal sent their scout ships out to Earth to explore the life there, Isci ba Fan followed them. Every single Fraal knows the story of Isci ba Fan, and almost all of them tell themselves it's a myth to frighten children into obeying their authority figures, but we all know better. He is real, and he is powerful, and there is nothing we can do to stop him. We're like ants to him. "He's..." said Hotaru but she couldn't find a word in English or Japanese to encompass the extent of his power, his malice, and his loathing. "Our only solace is how little he likes to actually posess the minds of living things -- we are so far beneath him he thinks it defiles him. That's why we think he uses others, has them work to bring him into the world. He appears to be immortal and would rather spend centuries waiting than touch our minds any more than he has to." Phil spoke up. "It would make sense, then. Dr. Tomoe was working to summon Isci ba Fan, and maybe the Fader we found came in by mistake, or coincidence. He was trying to bring something great and terrible into the world, he needed a lot of power to do it. He said there was a great mass of evil material underneath the city, which is why he chose to work here..." Nakami turned back to him. "Evil material? Does that mean there's a dark matter gateway under the city?" "What? Oh, no no no," said Phil as he shook his head, then switched to English to explain. "I mean, the phrase 'ankoku busshistu' can literally mean 'dark matter', but it's really more like 'material of darkness' or 'evil material'. If it was the scientific term, it would be in katakana and pronounced 'daaku materu'. If there was an actual dark matter gateway underneath Tokyo, I think we'd see a lot more evidence of supernatural phenomena than even this." Hotaru had only heard the phrase 'ankoku busshistu' when her father and Kaolinite were talking about it, so she had no reason to correct him. Nakami shook his head. "I suppose if I say I'm Japanese I should learn more about the language than I do." He sighed, though Hotaru couldn't see where his nostrils were. "Anyway. From his notes it looked like he needed, in addition to a power source, an anchor point. A living locus that would serve as a beacon and that the 'Pharaoh', as he called it, could pull itself towards because it had an existing sympathy . A piece of itself that had grown and matured in this world." Phil looked down and off to the side. "We... think that was you." "But what is most important here is that you fought it off. A piece of Isci ba Fan was possessing you, a powerful and mature one, and you threw off its control yourself. The most powerful Fraal mindwalkers couldn't free themselves without three or four others helping. The only explanation I can give is... it must have been possessing you so long, from such a young age, but not trying to actively take control until the end... that as you grew up your mind was able to adapt to it and build up an immunity. You can see right through the illusion I'm putting out; Phil can't do that and he's been trained in how to see through illusions. If I tried to read your mind right now I imagine I'd find it silent too, and not because you're being possessed, but because you've built up an immunity to it." She looked away from him. "Or it's because that's one of Sailor Saturn's powers, not something I have." "Maybe." He nodded. "I don't know what a Sailor Saturn can and can't do. What I do know is that you're one of, probably the most psi- resistant person on Earth. And that means you can go places and do things others can't. I started the Hoffmann Institute to help understand and protect people from things like aliens, psychics, demons, wizards, and stranger things besides. When me or one of my agents finds someone that can fight the supernatural, we ask them if they want to join us. And we don't have a lot of money and our equipment is either secondhand or stolen and we don't always win but if nobody else is willing to do this, we're going to because someone needs to do it. "There are things that prey on people that you can stop. Tomoe- san... People, more than you think, can read minds or lift objects telekinetically or alter people's memories or control their behavior, and not all of them are responsible with it. They hurt people, and I think you'd be able to save people from them. There's a demon older than the Pyramids here on Earth and you can resist his attacks. That's all I knew about you when I decided I had to come out here and meet you in person. I don't know anything about a Sailor Saturn or Sailor Moon or Holy Grails or Silver Millennia or anything like that and as far as I am concerned anything more you can do is just an added bonus that doesn't factor into my decision. "I want you to come back to America with us and join my organization. I want to make you an agent of the Hoffmann Institute, like Philip and Nadine are. You could even be on the same team as them, if you'd like. And I know that you just met me and I know you're young but still I think that you can do a lot of good for a lot of people. Maybe you don't know it yet, or you don't believe it, but I do: You are exactly who the Hoffmann Institute needs." Hotaru chewed on her lip. It was a patently stupid proposal, she only wondered how she should turn it down. She was 13 years old, for God's sake. And she didn't want to see 14 no matter how often she was told the capacity to kill everyone on Earth didn't make her evil. And she didn't know, wasn't friends with these people, she'd only been following along as the path of least resistance. And the alien, who she didn't know, thought she could do great things and he would only be disappointed when he put his trust into her and inevitably she failed it. And her only friend in the world lived here in Tokyo and couldn't follow her. And his Hoffmann Institute weren't the only people willing to defend the innocent from strange horrors because that's what the Sailor Senshi did, and they were far more noble, far more pure, far more loving, and far better at it. If she was to be a part of any team, it would be Sailor Moon's. Wouldn't she? * * * The pink-skinned daimon rolled her head from side to side, cracking her neck. She had her legs spread, one in front of the other, and hopped lightly from foot to foot like a boxer preparing for the bell. "So how about if you think you're such hot shit you put your magic where your mouth is, huh? Any of you still wanna prove you're better than U-Kigumoko?" Only Mercury got that reference, and she didn't get it until later. Mercury and Venus broke formation and spread out to the street and opposite sidewalk; the people around them were running off and screaming until they got about three blocks away and then acting as if nothing was out of the ordinary, cars were diverting out of their paths before they passed in front of the Crown arcade. Mercury might be able to see how far they went, if everyone was out of danger, but her visor was now showing nothing but static. She knew there were at least two people still here -- the dark-haired woman was trying to bring her ankle to her hand without leaning forward or sitting up, but making no effort to run, and for a moment she saw a red-haired man with an unkempt beard and a dark green Army surplus jacked duck his head out of the Crown, curse, and duck back in. He matched the description they had of one of the 'FBI' agents who had Hotaru, this could be no coincidence. Mars swung her hand in a wide circle, her fingertip tracing out a ring of fire. When U-Kigumoko saw this she grinned and hopped upward, though less than a foot. "Burning MANDALA!" shouted Mars, and pointed her outstretched finger at the daimon; the ring of fire broke into several burning projectiles that streaked toward their target leaving zig-zagging afterimages in Mercury's eyes. The daimon, before she landed, rotated her body and kicked the wall with both feet, sending her flying into the street and out of the path of the flaming projectiles. They continued down the sidewalk, streaking right over the dark-haired woman's face, but collided with a wall before they could hit another target. U-kigumoko hit the asphalt with her shoulder and rolled, coming to a stop with her feet and fingertips touching the ground. "Holy crap," she said in a voice equal measures disbelief and desperation, "You've got multiple-shot fire balls and you STILL managed to miss me? You're horrible at this, absolutely horrible!" Sailor Moon went for the Moon Rod, and U-Kigumoko's eyes went for Sailor Moon's hand, and she took off in a sprint to stop Moon's attack. Venus's Crescent Beam crackled right behind the daimon, an attack apparently slower than light that needed to be led against a moving target. Mercury aimed ahead of the daimon to fire the Shine Aqua Illusion, but the moment she was halfway through the word "Illusion" -- and Sailor Moon was on the word "Spiral" -- it dropped to the asphalt feet outward and went into a full-on baseball slide. Mercury's attack went clear over it's head and before Sailor Moon could get her attack off the daimon was kicking the legs out from under her and then batting her away as she fell. The daimon rolled back to her feet in that same fingers-on-the-street pose as before, Sailor Moon hit the asphalt with a yelp and her arms flailing. "So who wants to say they're going to punish me now, huh?" said the daimon, her eyes wide. "Since none of you can FIGHT, does anyone still want to tell me how they're BETTER than me? Maybe next you can tell me how your fashion sense is bet--" "Sic semper TYRANNIS!" came a voice from behind them, there was a gunshot, and the daimon's head snapped back as if someone had yanked an invisible string on her scalp. It was the fake FBI agent, the red- headed man, holding a silver-plated revolver and leaning around the doorway of the Crown arcade for cover. The daimon pulled her head back down, face twisted by hate. The left lens of the 'night vision goggles' she wore on her forehead was deformed and bruised a yellow color. "What the hell do you think, you think you're proving something by ambushing me? You think that means you can beat me? You think you gang up on me eight or nine to one and then you get to, what, dance around about how great you are for being better than U-Kigumoko?" "I am starting to miss being called a 'Sailor Brat,'" Venus muttered. The man with the revolver fired three more times in quick succession but the best he did was to graze the daimon's thigh. The dark-haired woman laying on the sidewalk had pulled her leg up to reach her arms and had pulled up her pants leg to reveal an ankle holster, from which she pulled out a pistol of her own, a bulky silver semi-automatic. Mars took a step back and started to move her hands to invoke another attack, but she couldn't even get a syllable of the invocation out before U-Kigumoko jumped at her, arm outstretched, and slammed her palm into Mars's face. The daimon tried to push Mars downward and pie-face her into the asphalt but Mars regained her senses too quickly, grabbing the daimon's arm and yanking it towards her to fling her out of the daimon's grip. She hit the street facedown, Mars stumbled and broke a heel when her feet hit the ground but after a few steps she managed to hold her footing. The daimon was starting to roll to her feet before she even finished falling, getting ready to kick herself back off the street, shouting "You must think you're some pretty hot shit, huh? You keep laughing, because I'm going to stuff you in a mailbox!" "Donna! Kneecap it!" shouted the red-haired man in English, "Don't let it get back up!" The four Senshi were going to blast the daimon to pieces as it got up anyway, but when they heard someone start talking they all hesitated for a split-second before they determined if what was being said should change their course of action. Gunshots rang out on the empty street in stereo and the daimon flinched, but didn't lose its balance; and when the first of the Senshi's attacks went off, she was already in a crouched position that let her roll forward to dodge the Crescent Beam by a nanometer, kick herself to the left to evade a Shine Aqua Illusion that froze off about six inches of her hair, break into a zig-zagging run to avoid a storm of Burning Mandala fireballs that singed the hairs off her arm, then run at the brick wall with a Moon Spiral Heart Attack trailing right behind her, do no less than a damn Wuxia wall-jump to backflip over most of the storm of magic energy, and then stick the landing as she came down. She was screaming in pain and her left arm and leg were smoking in several places where the attack collided with her, but she did stick the landing, and even though she was a crazy and evil (and unstable) daimon that still was worth a fair amount of points. She made a motion like she was actually biting the scream in half as it came out of her throat and swallowed. "Are you... you always this pathetic or are you putting... on a show for me? You've got... got all that firepower and still none of you can connect with anything!" The daimon crouched and looked to be making a run for Mercury, but she grabbed a broken chunk of brick blasted free by Sailor Moon's attack and after two steps she rolled to the side and flung the brick at Moon's head, it caught her in the shoulder and she accidentally let go of the Moon Rod. She looked downward to grab it with her other hand before it touched the ground, and that's why she didn't see the daimon's foot before it connected with her right temple. Moon staggered to the left, clutching where she'd been kicked, U-Kigumoko followed up with a few punches to the stomach and then a snap kick to the chest. She seemed surprised and displeased when the attack just caused Moon to fall backwards a few steps instead of, presumably, flying back a few blocks and tearing out a furrow in the street. Not wanting to stand there and get shot, the daimon stepped forward to grab Moon's wrist and twist it behind her back in a hammerlock. She probably would have started mocking them again too, now that she had a human shield in front of her, but as she opened her mouth she was cut off by the distinctive noise of a long-stemmed rose becoming embedded in concrete. Everyone present traced the flower's path back to its point of origin and saw Tuxedo Kamen standing atop a building, cape billowing in the wind, looking incredibly heroic and majestic. Tuxedo Kamen wasn't really sure what this creature was made out of or what specific type of activity it was corrupting, so he decided to go with one of his 'generic' speeches that could apply to any of the daimons. "One who would damage the pure heart of a young girl, you cannot be forgiven!" "What the hell makes you think you're in any position to be offering me forgiveness?" Venus sighed and covered her face with her palm, and Moon visibly rolled her eyes. "Hey, uh, I can't understand what the guy in the hat is saying," said the dark-haired woman, in English, while still lying on her back on the sidewalk. "Is he with you or it?" She tried to train her weapon on him, but it was a real funny angle to aim at if she couldn't move her torso. "That's Tuxedo Kamen, he's with us," replied Venus, her accent British by way of Japan. "Are you two with the FBI?" "Not any more," said a voice from right behind Venus's ear. She yelped, stepped forward, spun around and saw the red-headed man loading the last bullet into his revolver as if nothing was unusual. "We're going to say NSA from now on, because apparently FBI is taken." He nodded his head toward Moon and the others. "So you're all Sailor Something-or-others, I take it?" "Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars." Venus sounded like she was going to add something, but stopped, and they watched the daimon for several more seconds. She was still talking, really unloading on Tuxedo Kamen, and still using Moon as a human shield. Moon was looking less like someone in fear of her own life and more like someone who is getting bored and her arm is getting tired. "Bill," said 'Donna,' "Why did you shout 'Sic Semper Tyrannis' when you shot that thing? Did you think it's some kind of pink chick Abe Lincoln?" "It's Latin," said 'Bill,' as he spun the cylinder and snapped it back into place. "it means 'Thus Always To Tyrants.' I think it's a good slogan to have. And, you know, everyone's yelling out some phrase before their attacks, and... I thought it looked fun, I wanted to try it out." "Actually," corrected Venus, "The phrase is 'Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus.'" * * * Hotaru swirled the tip of her transformation pen around in the koi pond, watching the ripples distort her reflection. Beneath the surface she saw four of the koi, congregated around her hand, staring at it. Their fishy eyes were wide and unblinking, their mouths hanging open and closing as if the water was something to be chewed, and Hotaru thought for a moment that the fish were gazing in terror. Their eyes were wide, locked on the pen she was swirling in the water, and their mouths were agape in shock. 'What is this horrible thing reaching down from the heavens,' they were saying in fish-language, 'and what horrible doom shall it bring to our pond?' She pulled the pen out of the water and wiped it off on the leg of her pants. The fish watched the space it had been in for a couple seconds, then resumed attending to fish business. In seconds they'd forgotten about the threat she posed to them, but at least for a while they were afraid. So that established they were smarter than most people around here. She'd tried telling them why they wanted nothing to do with her and they didn't care. They obviously didn't believe her, as if a magic kingdom on the moon reincarnating its princesses as magical warriors in modern-day Tokyo was totally plausible but one of them having the power to destroy the world was just impossible. They never came out and said it, but it was obvious. They told her they didn't care about that, and they meant for her to take it as "We accept you for who you are, now please say yes so we can leave," but in truth it was just more "This thing would make me uncomfortable, so I pretend it doesn't exist." They didn't understand. How could they? Creatures like her were so horrible as to be totally outside the realm of anyone's experience, even people who work for aliens and get punched by Bigfoot. And the alien didn't know anything about the Silver Millennium, even though his mothership had been parked on the Moon. He'd been closer than Hotaru could ever be and he'd no idea what kind of heart-rending beauty had been upon that spot. It was gone and dead, everything, and now she was in a world that had no place for her twice over. They told her to go out and get some air, see what Hino-san was making for lunch, get some time to think. She heard them arguing with each other in the distance. Of course they didn't actually leave her, Hotaru could still see Nadine out of the corner of her eye, peeking her head around a corner. Every time Hotaru turned around, Nadine ducked back out of sight. She knew why she was being watched, of course. They thought that if she was left alone for two minutes she'd transform into Sailor Saturn and slice her own head off with the Silence Glaive. And the thought was tempting -- Hotaru doubted anyone could stop her if she tried -- but she knew she couldn't. If she killed herself out of the blue, then her only friend in the world would be devastated, consumed with thoughts of what more she could have done to save her, unable to see the catastrophe she would avert with her suicide. If she got another opportunity to sacrifice herself, Chibi-Usa would still be sad, but she'd see it as something noble, the ultimate proof of the good in Hotaru's heart, and then she'd be able to feel happy when she thought of her friend. Chibi-Usa was young, loving, naive to think that any good lived in her, and Hotaru couldn't bear to crush her spirit by taking that away. No, better to die later, ribbons of pure elemental death slicing through her body as they destroyed the Pharaoh who would end the world. Or be impaled and flayed alive by the Pharaoh in order to give the others enough time to seal and destroy him. Or leap in front of a bullet meant for someone else, someone with a heart and a future, someone who deserved to live. She'd caused enough suffering, and the point of her death would be to prevent more of it, not cause it. And the Pharaoh was her responsibility, a beast summoned by and for her own malevolence, unable to come to the world without her body to serve as its beacon. And it had said it was ancient when the Fraal fostered the lunar kingdom from which she drew her power. And the Fraal were the big-headed grey aliens. And the big-headed grey alien said that Saturn had never been inhabited by any kind of life. The Pharaoh was probably lying, though. The hair on the back of Hotaru's neck stood up about half a second before she saw a man's face reflected in the water, standing behind her. He was a middle-aged man, the hair on his temples greying, the skin of his cheeks craggy and pockmarked. He was wearing a blue policeman's cap, and when he put his hand on Hotaru's shoulder she had to bite her tongue to keep herself from screaming. "Tomoe Hotaru-san?" he asked, his voice low and regretful. Hotaru nodded without turning around. "Miss, could you please come with me? Don't make a scene like your friends are." Hotaru turned and with horror realized that Nadine was no longer watching her, and the noises she heard had gone from 'having an argument' to 'resisting arrest'. Nakami, Philip, and Nadine were all being pushed toward the entrance of the shrine, wrists bound behind them -- Nakami's were bound with a plastic zip-tie, his wrists were probably too small for handcuffs. They were demanding to be taken to the American embassy, demanding to know what the charges were, even as behind them a pair of crime-scene technicians were carrying an M16, a Mosin-Nagant, and two Ziploc bags full of ammo. Four cop cars were parked at the entrance. When did they arrive? How long were they here, while Hotaru was too lost in thought to hear them? She was so stupid to have let this happen... "Yeah, Hotaru-chan. Wouldn't want to go making a scene like your friends at the Institute, would we?" The voice came from behind her, and when she turned around she saw exactly what she thought she would see: a man in all-black with sunglasses and too many thumbs... only it wasn't the one from before. His voice was off slightly, his nose broader, his lips slightly more pale. He was holding an orange and once Hotaru had turned to face him, he took a loud bite of it without bothering to take off the peel. "Agent Statler!" said the policeman with a yelp. "I'm, I'm sorry sir, you startled me." "Her too, by the looks of it," he said around half-chewed chunks of orange. "Or perhaps she's upset by the fact she couldn't hide from us forever." He swallowed noiselessly. "I hear she can be very coy with her emotions like that." "Sir?" asked the middle-aged cop, but he didn't let go of her shoulder, not yet. "Just keep her away from... sharp objects and you should be fine, Tadaka-san." He took another bite from the orange, on the opposite side of the first. "Now if the two of you would excuse me, I have another arrest to make uptown." He glanced at the ground by where Hotaru was sitting. "Oh, and don't forget your pen, Hotaru-chan. You're soon going to have a great deal of time to catch up on your correspondence." He chuckled and walked away, after a few steps casually flinging the rest of his orange at Nakami's head as he got into the car. Hotaru's and the cop's eyes both followed the orange as it flew toward its target, and when their eyes flicked back to 'Agent Statler' he was gone. Hotaru heard a car start. Hotaru slowly, carefully reached for her transformation pen, waiting for the cop to tell her to stop. He didn't. Why would 'Statler' have her arrested and then tell her to take her magic pen? He could just be mocking her, or... Or he doesn't know what the pen does. Because he can't read her thoughts like he could the others. Because she's Sailor Saturn, or because her brain's been sparring with the Mistress Nine for years for practice, but for some reason he didn't know exactly what she could do. And if he was giving the police orders, they didn't know what she could do. The policeman apologized as he locked a handcuff onto her left wrist, and it slid easily off of her before he could place the other side. "Hold on," he said, "I have some of those plastic zip-things in my pocket..." and Hotaru had already come up with a plan. Later on she'd be able to come up with the reasoning behind the plan, that Nadine could not recognize Sailor Saturn as Hotaru without being told, that Usagi and Sailor Moon looked identical but nobody ever seemed to notice. She would come up with that well after she actually did it. At that point all she knew was that the cop expected her to be cooperative, and he'd let go of her shoulder to look for the zip-ties in his pocket, and she was running like a bat out of Hell with her hand closed in a white-knuckle grip around the pen. She hated running track in school because, among other things, she was always embarrassed to be the last one still on the track, slowly plodding around the oval and stopping to catch her breath when everyone else had finished their run three minutes ago. Ironically, this was the time her classmates tolerated her the most, as when the class was waiting on her to finish all of the other students got to goof off in the bleachers. She was young, light, and not strong but certainly lithe, her problem had always been one of endurance. She couldn't run the entire fifty-meter dash without stopping to breathe, and that was the shortest one they had. Hotaru always thought that maybe, if they had a twenty-five meter dash, she might just be able to reach the goal in the same time as everyone else and then collapse at the finish line. She's not too good at eyeballing distances, but she figured that tool shed she spotted, nestled in the trees out behind the shrine, was about thirty meters from her starting point. There's no way she'd get there with enough of a lead, no way she could get there at all. She didn't dare look behind her, because she knew if she did she would see the policeman running at her, less than a meter away. Or training his gun on her head. Her breath was already labored, her footfalls heavy, each step felt like it added another iron weight to her chest, and it hurt to inhale, much less to speak. But speak she did, one word for each breath. "Saturn... Planet... Po.... Power... Make..." She said 'Make' about five steps too early, and she wondered how far apart the magic words could be. Without daring to look behind her she reached the open door of the tool shed and the inviting darkness inside. She took one step inside and tripped over a non-functioning leafblower left on the ground, as she fell the last word of the incantation escaped her lips as a hoarse whisper, "...up..." Grumbling to himself about the horrible state of today's youth, Officer Tadaka jogged down the path he'd seen the fleeing girl take. Why couldn't she have just cooperated? The police had all the exits covered, she had to know that, resisting arrest just makes it worse on her. He ducked his head into the tool shed as he passed it and saw a girl, perhaps 14 or 15, with violet hair and eyes and wearing an ornate school uniform. It had to be the grand-daughter of the shrinekeeper, Agent Statler had mentioned something about how he had a granddaughter with dark purple hair who went to a private school with its own hours and thus may or may not be at the shrine even on a school day. Rei, that's what her name was. 'Rei' was lying on the ground, visibly dazed, in a heap of mulch and potting soil that spilled out from several ruptured bags stacked by the wall of the shed. Several on the bottom had been torn when someone ran into them, but two on the top appeared to have been neatly sliced open. 'Rei' was covering her mouth and holding her breath, trying not to inhale the dust swirling around. "Did a girl in a black outfit do this to you?" 'Rei' nodded and pointed off to her left, and the officer gave her a little salute. "Much obliged, Rei-san." "Don't mention it," Hotaru rasped. She held her breath until the policeman had enough time to get a few meters away, then lapsed into a coughing fit. --- * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * B O N U S C O N T E N T * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ARTIFACTS OF THE SAILOR SENSHI: SILENCE GLAIVE: The Silence Glaive is the weapon given to Sailor Saturn to symbolize and empower her duties to cleanse worlds. It is a polearm roughly five feet in length, with the head comprising about a foot of it. The blade has one large, crescent-shaped head, and one short, straight head, roughly forming the shape of a "G" together. The weapon is nearly weightless, its head nearly as sharp as a monofilament blade, and even if it is broken it returns to normal when Sailor Saturn next transforms. Likely due to the fear it would be stolen and abused, it vanishes when no part of Saturn's body or clothing is touching it. The weapon does d8w/3d4+1w/d4+3m Low Impact damage, using the Melee Weapons -- Blade skill, with a base accuracy of -2. > Finesse Weapon: The Glaive is so light that anyone can comfortably wield it, and its tip so sharp that the wielder need not place any substantial force behind a swing in order to deal damage. The wielder may choose to use his or her DEX as the base stat to add the Melee Weapons -- Blade skill to, rather than STR, and compute attacks based on that. The wielder suffers no penalties to melee damage for a low STR, nor receives any bonus for a high STR. > Star Cleaver: The Silence Glaive is so sharp, in fact, that it can cleave through dense, hardened material as easily as it can flesh. Though the weapon is not truly monomolecular and it can be slowed or stopped when chopping through an item, it is still mostly limited by the wielder's ability to swing it and the target's ability to dodge it. The damage from the Silence Glaive has no intensity and never upgrades or downgrades regardless of the toughness of the target. Sailor Saturn could, theoretically, destroy a Super-Heavy toughness warship by hacking at it with the Glaive, provided she had an environmental suit, some amphetamines to stay awake, around 3 or 4 days to kill, and none of the warship's weapons could aim low enough to hit her, and nobody else in an enviro-suit came out of the hole she was cutting to throw her off the hull, and nobody waited until she jumped in to saw through the interior decks and shot her with a mass rifle. > Infamous Artifact: The Glaive is said to have the power to scourge all life from the planet, at a cost of destroying its owner as well. Whether or not it does is unclear (and up to the Gamemaster's decision), it's irrelevant to its reputation -- it is a very distinctive weapon and it portends very bad things. Those well-versed in arcane lore, and there are more of those than you would think, would recognize the weapon and take the kind of measures to to destroy its owner that you might take if you saw someone who could end the world. THE STONEBURNERS' LEGACY: A mysterious artifact inherited by Sailor Yellow Sky, this device is believed to be proof that the mysterious chlorine-breathing race referred to as the "Stoneburners" by Yellow Sky's current colonists practiced Planetary Sorcery before, or perhaps in parallel to, the development of the nightmarish bio-engineering and dimensional-warping technologies that their ruins are now known for. The device is a sphere of a semi-porous greenish-black material about 10 cm in diameter that orbits around Sailor Yellow Sky's left arm with no visible means of propulsion or support. Unlike the other artifacts here, The Stoneburners' Legacy is a Flaw, rather than a Perk; Sailor Yellow Sky does not know how to turn it off or make it go away and it is active whether or not she is in Senshi form, though only visible when she is transformed. > Regenerator: The device is capable of regenerating wounds Sailor Yellow Sky has suffered in Senshi or normal form. Each round the regeneration is active, the user heals 1 stun, wound, and mortal durability. The regeneration activates the instant the user receives any damage, whether or not she wants it to, whether or not she's taken any wounds or mortal that need to be regenerated. The device has a total of 9 rounds of regeneration to be used per day. > Kinetic Dispersal: The device uses something akin to an ablative force field to defend its bearer against impact. Unlike most personal force fields, this field can protect from low-velocity damaging impacts as well as high-velocity ones. It doesn't prevent others from touching her, but it will prevent someone from slapping her, or poke her with a pencil -- anything that causes "damage", even if it would be 0 points, activates the shield. The shield stops up to 4 points of damage from any Low Impact or High Impact attack, to a total of 20 points per day. > Leech: The Stoneburners' Legacy device is powered by biological energy, not an internal power source. Of course, it can't take power from its wearer, that might impede the Senshi's function. Instead, it draws power from the people around it. Each time one of the device's powers is used -- each time the kinetic dispersal is activated, even for 0 damage, and each round regeneration is active -- someone in the area takes 3 Wound damage. The energy is taken from friendly targets over hostiles, close targets over far, and undamaged targets over wounded ones. It cannot drain energy from someone more than 10 meters away, or from someone who would be reduced to half or fewer Wounds by the drain. The user has no control over who this drains and it never, ever goes for who she'd want. If there are no drainable targets within 10 meters, the device fails to function. When the device activates while the user is in Senshi form, a bolt of purplish-black electricity arcs from the sphere to the person drained. When activated in civilian form, the drained target has no visual indication but still feels like he's been stabbed in the gut. > Decreased Ability: Of course, to power the hovering and orbiting, the device needs to drain power from something. It reduces its user's STR score by 1, because Senshi usually don't need to use physical strength. And if they do, well, that's too bad. GARNET ORB: The head of the Garnet Staff, weapon and Talisman of Sailor Pluto, Guardian of the Gates of Time. The Garnet Orb is an artifact that appears as a sphere of semi-opaque garnet roughly 15 centimeters in diameter. It is generally placed in a bowl-like setting atop a staff resembling a six-foot key , with a heart-shaped head holding the orb in place. It controls and channels the power of the Gates of Time, but the powers of the Gates usable only by the Garnet Orb are counted as being powers of the Orb. The staff into which it is set is often used as a focus for other magical attacks but has no particular application as a weapon on its own. > Time Travel: The main application of the Staff is its use as a key to unlock the Gates of Time. There is no limit on the length of time one may travel forwards and backwards, and it is not especially stressful or taxing -- Small Lady Serenity treats time travel as something mundane as a stroll in the park. However, there are some restrictions on travel that must be noted. First, travel between two points can only occur if the Dark Tide at the current time and intended destination are both high enough to support time travel -- there is no hard and fast measure for this, but it should be fairly high. And since the Gate is not a stable time gateway and must re-find destination points, there is a "recharge time" associated with its use. No individual or group can enter or leave through the Gate within 121 hours of any group entering or leaving the Gate. A group that leaves cannot immediately return and must wait 121 hours, and a group cannot return to any time within 121 hours, before or after, the time it left. A group can leave a time they are visiting early if the time gate was locked open for them, but as this requires large amounts of energy and theoretically allows > Temporal Freeze: Referred to as a Guardian of Time's "most forbidden ability", the Garnet Orb is capable of actually freezing the flow of time. This requires no roll, and the user as well as any targets within sensory range he or she designates are able to move and speak freely while time is frozen, and all other things are stopped between seconds and can perceive nothing of the characters moving and acting. Attacks can be made on frozen targets, but as they are slowed down and frozen before hitting the target they are no more effective than usual. The amount of strain this puts on the user's body is immense and the tidal forces of being stretched out between multiple points in time work to shred them apart. For every round this power is in use, the user receives 1 Mortal damage. As an average adult human has 5 Mortal durability and a round is 12 seconds, the limit on this is generally to keep it under 60 seconds. Once the time-freeze ends, either by the artifact's user willingly ending it or being torn to bloody shreds by paraspatial pressures, time resumes flowing as normal, and anything that moved around or was in some way changed during the freeze appears to onlookers as if it was changed in the blink of an eye. > Teleportation & Clairvoyance: Sailor Pluto is allegedly to never leave the Gates of Time, however she and Queen Serenity knew it would happen anyway. Regardless of the fact that Pluto left the Gate to help Small Lady, and to find Sailor Saturn and destroy Pharaoh 90, there's no bathroom and nothing to eat at the Gate. The next best thing is rapid recall to the Gates, which the Orb can provide. If the user is away from the Gates, she can be teleported back to them regardless of distance, but cannot bring any more than she has on her person. While away, the Orb also allows the user to mentally monitor the Gate as with ESP -- Clairvoyance, though there's no sound and the angle of the image cannot be changed. > Compulsory Behavior: Even though the Guardian of Time can leave the Gate if necessary, and in fact could probably leave it quite often and still have it totally guarded, she does not. Because it's her by god DUTY to remain at the Gate, watching, making sure no interlopers enter. The owner of the Orb is compelled to remain at the Gates at all times and may only leave them by passing a WIL feat check at a +1 penalty. Checks may also be called for for extended amounts of time away from the Gate, and cannot be rerolled if failed. SPACE SWORD: Though the Space Sword is one of the three Talismans, a magic item passed down to Sailor Uranus from the days of the Silver Millennium, it is quite explainable in scientific terms. It is the magical approximation of a Progress Level 8 star sword -- quite advanced even for the Silver Millennium, and it is unknown where they acquired the design. The Space Sword generates a complicated phased magnetic field, using magic instead of superconductors, and fills the magnetic area with white-hot plasma, a thin filament from the heart of a star. When the magnetic field is breached, as when touched, the heat and energy within cause great damage to anything it contacts. Though the plasma never actually touches the target, as it vanishes back to whence it was conjured from while the field is breached, the residue it leaves is still capable of inflicting great damage. The owner may also, at a command, summon a piece of metal instead of a plasma filament and use the object as a normal sword, this is usually done when there is a danger of someone else touching it. > Star-Fury Attack: The Space Sword does d6+1w/2d6w/d4+3m Energy damage of Good intensity using the Melee Weapons -- Powered skill. An enterprising and clever Adept with an applicable form of Matter or Energy Control may wish to fling some superheated air out of the magnetic field and into an opponent; resolve this as you would a thrown attack, using the applicable Matter/Energy Control skill in place of Athletics -- Throw and using WIL rather than STR to determine range. TOUCH OF THE STAR-MAKER: A rarity among Senshi artifacts, the Touch of the Star-Maker was created by its current wielder in a fusion of arcane Planetary Sorcery powers and contemporary Gravity Age technology. It appears as a black glove of unknown, nonreflective material, elbow-length, with brushed steel rings hovering around each knuckle with no visible means of support. Its wielder is the Senshi guardian of the planet Bazaar, capital of the Rigunmor Star Consortium, one of the thirteen stellar nations recognized by the 2472 Treaty of Concord. Though his title is technically "Sailor Bazaar", he prefers to go by the moniker "The Star-Maker". The form of this artifact has nothing to do with his function, it was made as a glove because "The Star-Maker" originally wanted to name the artifact "The Invisible Hand of the Market". The Executive Guilder said that was over the line, thankfully. Nobody could take "Sailor Invisible Hand" seriously. > Virtual Matter Creation: People get the Star Consortium all wrong. They're not about greed... well, okay, they're about greed. But they're not about taking things from others, they're about finding people the things they need. And, the Star-Maker figured, the Senshi guardian of the Star Consortium's capital should exemplify this: he'll find what's needed out of thin air. The Star-Maker can conjure up to 100kg of virtual material in any shape he so desires -- there is no restriction as to the shape or material they can be constructed from, but they cannot have electronic or mechanical components. Creating this matter takes 1 round per 20kg of material. Created material lasts a maximum of 1 hour per day, regardless of the quantity in use -- create 1kg of matter and it will disappear in one hour and no further summoning will be possible for the rest of the day. For every 10 minutes the virtual matter is in use, the user takes 1 stun point. This cannot be used to create food, water, or other consumables, as they vanish after an hour whether or not they've been eaten, but it can be used to provide a variety of useful tools. Bridge gaps, shield against attacks, seal hull breaches, climb a ladder out of a pit, pull a sword on a foe... all sorts of useful things. What the Star-Maker won't do, however, is trade away any of these things for actual money, as that is fraud and the Consortium does not support fraud. He has been known to rent them. > Star Transceiver: Of course, commerce is really about communication. What use is having what someone needs if you've no way to tell him about it? Even the faster than light communication of the drivewave places an 11-hour delay on any communication, making conversation impossible. The Star-Maker, however, can speak to any person he's met within a 50-light-year radius and conduct a normal conversation as if they were merely on another continent of the same planet. An Awareness -- Intuition check is required to get the psionic lock to the target, and conversation is limited to a total of 10 minutes per day, the device's user receiving 1 stun damage per minute. > Energy Cost: The device's powers take Stun points to use, as noted above. DEEP AQUA MIRROR: One of the three Talismans, this device passed down to Sailor Neptune allows the user to scry the truth in multiple ways. The device resembles a mundane hand mirror, 10cm x 15cm, of golden- yellow material with an aquamarine back etched with the symbol of Neptune. As the Outer Senshi were said to combat threats from outside the solar system, the ownership of the Space Sword and Deep Aqua Mirror suggests a dynamic wherein Sailor Uranus leads the conventional military in direct conflict, while Sailor Neptune's subordinates perform reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering, perhaps also serving as internal security or perhaps leaving this duty to Sailor Saturn. Like the Garnet Orb / Staff, it can be used as a focus for magical attacks but has no capability to attack on its own. > Find Weakness: The bearer of the Mirror is likely to find herself in combat fairly often, and the scrying power of the Mirror is just as useful here as it is in preparation before the fight. The user of the device may attempt an Awareness -- Intuition check while thinking of a specific enemy, this enemy may be anywhere, but if he's not within sensory range the check has a +2 penalty. An Ordinary success allows the user of the Mirror to be aware of any special weaknesses the target has, as well as his defensive capabilities, Durability, etc... Essentially, the character (and player) get any information on the opponent's character sheet that relates to his physical capabilities, and not mental state, motivation, knowledge etc. On a Good success, the user as well as anyone who can see into the mirror at the time it is used get a -1 step bonus on any skill checks made to directly attack the opponent within the next 24 hours. On an Amazing success, this bonus increases to -2. Use of this takes 1 action and after it is performed the user may act normally for the rest of the round. > Scrying: The Mirror can be used to gaze at distant locations, forewarning, and thus forearming, its wielder. The bearer of the Aqua Mirror can, once per hour, use the ESP -- Clairvoyance skill as if she had 1 rank in it by looking into the Mirror and clearly imagining the area she wishes to observe. Note that this doesn't have to be an area she has ever seen before, she merely has to imagine what she thinks it looks like -- and that usually looks nothing like the real thing, once she sees it. > Mental Instability: Unfortunately, the Mirror's scrying abilities come with side effects. The Mirror's holder does not become more perceptive... but she thinks she does, in and out of Senshi form, spotting subtle cues of derision and betrayal coming from the people around her. Most of the time they're minor and easily written off as being from other sources, but they do add up. Once per adventure or once per month, the Aqua Mirror's owner must make a Resolve -- Mental Resolve check to avoid a bout of paranoia. On a Good or Amazing success, the hero suffers no ill effects; on an Ordinary success, the hero becomes suspicious of everyone around her for d4 says, suffering a +1 penalty to the use of all INT, WIL and PER-based skills. On a Failure, the penalty is +2 and the duration is 2d4 days, and on a Critical Failure, the character is incapacitated by raging paranoia for d4 weeks. MERCURY COMPUTER: An advanced computer enhanced with divination and scrying magics of the Silver Millennium to make an approximation of a quantum computer, the Mercury Computer is used by Sailor Mercury to provide tactical and strategic information to the rest of the Sailor Senshi. The user-interface device resembles a palm-top computer, or one of those "Wizard" day-planners, with the modified symbol of the planet Mercury on the case. The display device is a translucent blue visor that extends over the eyes by tapping an earring, this allows full battlefield visibility while still conveying useful information. The user-interface device often thought of as the "Mercury Computer" is not the computer itself, however -- the Mercury Computer itself is buried underground in Argentina and communicates with the keyboard and visor via teleportation magics approximating a wireless connection. > Find Weakness: The Mercury Computer's visor has the same ability to Find Weakness as the Deep Aqua Mirror, as noted above, although the bonuses to attacks against a target can be conferred to another by relaying the information to them if they can't see the visor. The skill governing this ability is Knowledge -- Computer Operation instead of Awareness -- Intuition. > Analysis: The Visor's scanning equipment and the Computer's quantum computing power allow it to analyze, locate, and categorize energy signatures with near-perfect accuracy. Thermal, electric, bioelectric, sonic, psionic, and several types of magical energy can be analyzed, displayed, mapped, and collated. To increase the range of the scanning ability, some precision was sacrificed; a Knowledge -- Computer Operation check must be made to use this ability with a cumulative +1 penalty for every 50m of distance between the user and the target of the scan; failure indicates inaccurate or unusable results. SILVER CRYSTAL: The Silver Crystal or "Ginzuishou" is the heart of power held by Queen Serenity. It is said to have the power to raise the dead, reshape reality, cloud and control minds, stop warship- caliber attacks dead in their tracks, and perhaps other things as well. Its use for any purpose, peaceful or hostile, was declared a war crime in 2312 by the Treaty of Earth that ended the First Galactic War and created the Union of Sol. The Silver Crystal's massive scope of powers make it inappropriate for any player character in nearly any campaign, and are so great as to defy categorization in any rules system.