Makoto and Kima were talking quietly in the living room when several familiar presences appeared very briefly at the outermost edge of Makoto’s empathic awareness. The feeling lasted only a moment before the emotional background noise of the city swallowed it up, but she knew it couldn’t have been a mistake; the sense of Ami had come through very strongly, almost as if there were two of her, with a slight muddling around the edges that must have had something to do with the excitement and triumphant joy that was pouring out of her.

*She must have found the Caduceus.*

“Mako-chan?”

Realizing her head had moved unconsciously to track the return of her friends, Makoto blinked and turned back to her guest. “Gomen, Kima-san. I thought I heard something.”

Both of them looked up then. Since she hadn’t originally been expecting company, Makoto had emptied her teapot just filling both their cups. She’d put the spare pot on the stove to boil, and it was just now starting to whistle.

“Good instincts,” Kima complimented her. “You do this a lot, I take it?”

“It’s usually tea for five,” Makoto replied, getting to her feet. “Or sometimes ten. But you’re right; I have had plenty of practice.”

“Do you need any help?”

“No, I can handle it.” She faked a growly look. “Besides, I’m the hostess, and you’re the guest. I made the tea and I’ll serve the tea; _you’ll_ sit there and drink the tea, and dammit, you’ll _like_ the tea—or else.” Then she smiled. “Did you want any more cream or sugar or anything?”

“No, that’s okay.” Kima smiled in a bright, starry-eyed manner that reminded Makoto of Minako, and which made the woman look a good ten years younger. “The floor show more than makes up for the bad refreshments.”

Makoto bowed. “We aim to serve, if not to please.” And she headed to the kitchen.

Considering that she had been about a finger’s breadth away from closing her door in the woman’s face less than half an hour ago, Makoto was astonished at how much she was enjoying Kima’s company—and at how much Kima was enjoying _her_ company. They had both been a bit defensive at the start, but then they’d slipped into some clumsy attempts at humor, and now it was like they’d been acquainted for years. The others wouldn’t have known what to say if they could see this.

In the middle of setting the teapot down on its tray, Makoto frowned. The others.

She got her communicator out, quickly checked to make sure Kima’s attention was elsewhere, then hit a switch and spoke into the device.

“I know Ami-chan and the others are back,” she said quietly, putting a seldom-used function of the communicators to work, “but I’ve got a guest right now, so unless it’s an emergency, call by phone if there’s something you need to tell me. Makoto out.”

There. If one of the others contacted her, they’d get that voice message first, and her own communicator would stay silent unless the person on the other end chose to push through. Flipping the communicator shut, Makoto busied herself with the tea before gathering up the tray and heading back to the living room.

When the travelers marched out of Saturn’s dimension door and into the foyer, Haruka spotted the Caduceus right away and concluded that the expedition had been a success. Then she saw that Luna was holding an icepack to her forehead while being helped along by Mars and ChibiMoon, and that there was a girl who looked almost exactly like Ami following closely behind Mercury.

“Who...”

“We’ll explain in a minute,” Mars interrupted. “Give us a hand here. Luna hit her head.”

Haruka nodded dumbly and assisted them into the living room. It was a perfect opportunity for her to crack wise about how cats were always supposed to land on their feet, but the only words she used were to ask where Luna had gotten the icepack—which was, she realized, sort of a silly question when you had Saturn around to fetch things from the far side of the solar system.

The other Senshi were reverting to normal and taking seats, and when Haruka looked up from helping Rei lay Luna down on the largest couch, the strange girl was sitting next to Ami, wearing an exact copy of her clothes. Skirt and blouse and vest; of the whole ensemble, the only difference between the two was the ribbon choker. Ami’s was black, while the one her doppelganger wore was blue, and only about half-formed out of a small ring of mist that was shrinking around her throat.

That was too much for Haruka, and she stared at the girl openly. The girl noticed and looked back at Haruka curiously.

“You’ve cut your hair,” she said, in a voice almost exactly like Ami’s, with a slightly higher pitch.

“Excuse me?”

“Your hair. It used to be much longer”—she pursed her lips thoughtfully, and then smiled—“but I like this style, too. How have you been, Ariel?”

“I’ve been... wait a minute...”

“Tennou Haruka,” Ami said, stressing the name with a sidelong look at the girl, “meet Calypso.”

“The Nereid, Calypso,” Ryo added dryly.

“Ami-chan’s sister,” Hotaru finished, smiling from where she sat next to the pair of look-alikes.

There was a dead silence as Haruka looked at all of them before covering her face with her hands and letting out a long sigh that sounded suspiciously like, “Shootmenow.” When that was done, she folded her arms, looked directly at Ami and her ‘twin’, and in a flat voice, said, “A Nereid...”

They nodded simultaneously, with the same solemn expression.

“...from the Silver Millennium...”

Another dual nod.

“...is your sister?”

“Yes,” Ami said simply. “Caly was Mercury’s little sister then, so she’s my little sister now, too.”

“You lost me with that line of reasoning, Ami.”

“I was afraid I might,” Ami murmured. “I was transformed when I picked up the Caduceus, Haruka, and the body of a Senshi is something that both Mizuno Ami and Mercury had to change their form to achieve. We weren’t able to safely coexist with active Nereid energy in a normal human body, but being Mercury was common ground, and as long as we didn’t deplete our power too much, it stabilized us a little.”

“Okay...”

“There’s a lot of energy that comes with the Caduceus,” Ami continued, “and the empty feeling I’ve had these past weeks was filled up by it. Our Senshi form was back to normal, and both minds were able to communicate safely. Mercury should have gone back to sleep when I reverted, but it’s like Luna’s been telling us all along; each time we change back from Senshi form, we change back a little less. When I changed back _this_ time, I changed back a lot less. My body is just enough like the Senshi Mercury’s now that it can accommodate Mercury’s Nereid life-force without any danger, and since a Nereid’s life-force is also the essence of her thoughts, that means I can actively remember everything that Mercury knew. It’s not _like_ I was there myself; I _was_ there, just as she’s here now, seeing my life through my eyes.”

“Okay,” Haruka repeated, even though she really didn’t look or sound like she meant it, “but even if you’re carrying around what’s left of a dead Nereid, I still don’t see how that makes _her_ your sister.”

“That’s just it, Haruka; our past lives aren’t really dead. Yes, their bodies are gone, but everything that they were or would have been is living on in us, even if we haven’t been fully aware of it or of them—of who we used to be. I _am_ aware of Mercury now, and I can recall every last detail about her, every thought and feeling she ever had, all of it from the inside. I know what she knew and feel what she felt. I’m still me, but in a certain sense, I’m also her—and that means I love Caly just as much as if she’d been born from my own mother’s womb.”

Calypso had leaned over and rested her head on Ami’s shoulder as she spoke, and Ami put one arm around her without even stopping to think about it. More than anything, the ease of that embrace convinced Haruka. There remained a degree of reserve in Ami’s character that even a few years around Usagi and Minako hadn’t yet been able to completely erode, certain barriers that didn’t typically come down except in private, if then—but with that one little gesture, all the walls had dropped. It was proof of a degree of affection, trust, and understanding that took years to develop, an emotional state even your best friends needed to work at achieving, but which someone as close as a sister had just from growing up with you.

*Like I used to have with Iki.* Haruka quickly banished the thought and looked away from Ami and the Nereid. It was hard to see the two of them together and not remember... things she’d rather forget.

“She started talking like that when she came back with the Caduceus in one hand and Calypso in the other,” Luna said, her head pillowed on Rei’s lap as she looked out from under the edge of the icepack at Haruka. “It scared me half to death when she teleported back to us and started calling Calypso her sister; I was sure it meant that Mercury had taken control of Ami’s body.”

“You know she wouldn’t do that,” Ami and Calypso said in unison. Not even Usagi and Minako—whose own ‘twin’ act was good enough to have earned them compliments from a few actual twins they’d met in the past—could have matched each other better.

“Don’t do that,” Haruka told them both.

“Spoilsport,” Calypso murmured. She looked past Haruka. “Is Larissa coming down to join us?”

“Her name is Michiru now,” Ami corrected. “And I think she’s still in the tub.”

Calypso brightened—literally. She began to glow blue, and the edges of her assumed form started to blur. “I’ll go surprise her,” the Nereid said, her smile and the rest of her face dissolving back into the rapidly-growing cloud of blue mist.

“Caly!” Ami said sharply. The metamorphic melting paused, and Calypso’s face resolidified about four feet off the ground, with a slightly puzzled look and no body beyond a sparkling blue-white cloud that was twice as large as the couch and hanging just over Hotaru’s head.

“What?”

“Just wait here. Haruka can go get her.”

“But I want to _see_ her,” Calypso objected, pouting as her substance gathered and reassumed human shape. It was VERY strange for all of them to see Ami’s face—almost—in that sort of expression and hear her voice—again, almost—using that particular tone.

“I know you miss her, Caly, but I also know that you used to sneak up and surprise Larissa when she was having a bath by fusing with the water and rising up from it right in front of her. I don’t think Michiru would appreciate someone interrupting her bath, especially since she might not recognize you right away.”

“Michiru-mama _does_ take her bath time very seriously,” Hotaru added in solemn agreement. “Of course, it’s a whole other story if Haruka-papa is in there with...”

“AHEM!” Haruka’s interrupting cough was positively explosive, and she was red right to the tips of her ears. Ami, ChibiUsa, and Rei weren’t far behind, and Ryo was looking off in another direction, blushing a bit himself but mostly trying not to laugh too loudly.

“Why don’t you just go get her?” Hotaru suggested over her shoulder. “That way I can talk, and you won’t have to listen to things you don’t want to hear.”

“I’ve got a better idea.” Haruka came over and picked Hotaru right up off the couch. Holding the girl up by the elbows, Haruka headed for the stairs. “You can come with me, and I won’t tell Michiru you’ve been spying and then carrying tales.”

“I did _not_ spy!” Hotaru protested, keeping her knees bent so that Haruka had to keep carrying her along.

Calypso frowned after them and then turned to Ami. “Sister... I may have missed this... but Hotaru _did_ just call them her parents, didn’t she?”

Ami nodded and took Calypso’s hand, explaining the situation in a quick telepathic burst. It occurred to Ami in that moment that she honestly had no idea what had ever become of Hotaru’s father, Tomoe Souichi, after Pluto had taken his reborn, ‘infant’ daughter to live with Haruka and Michiru. None of the Outer Senshi had ever volunteered anything, and it would have been rude to pry, but still...

“Ohhhh.” Calypso nodded slowly. “I see.” She cast another frowning glance in the direction of the stairs, but whatever she was thinking drifted away before Ami could read it, as the Nereid shook her head and snuggled in next to her sister again with a smile.

“She actually called her ‘sister’?” Michiru asked from in front of the dresser, where she was brushing her hair into some semblance of order.

Sitting cross-legged on the edge of the bed, Hotaru nodded. “It has to do with how Ami-chan can remember all of Mercury’s life now, but the explanation got a bit complicated. I think it gave Haruka-papa a headache. Then again, most things do.”

“Don’t push your luck,” Haruka advised. She was leaning against the wall, just inside the bedroom door. “Yeah, she called her sister, and they’re both acting like they believe it.” She hesitated. “She... Calypso, I mean... also seemed really eager to meet you.”

The hairbrush paused briefly as Michiru looked at Haruka’s reflection in the dresser mirror and smiled. “Are you jealous?”

“A little, I suppose.”

The brush stopped in midstroke as Michiru turned around on her seat with a startled and concerned expression. “Haruka?”

Smiling crookedly, Haruka walked over, took the brush, and turned Michiru back around, adding a few expertly practiced strokes to her hair. “Nothing that extreme. It’s just that from the way she was going on, you two were pretty close back then—and _she_ remembers it clearly. I don’t.” She lifted Michiru’s hair back from her face and put a hand on her shoulder. “And that makes me a little... uncertain.”

Michiru smiled and patted Haruka’s hand. “You’ll recover.” She stood up then, smoothing out the front of her blue nightgown before fetching a robe. “Not my first choice for meeting a guest,” she fretted absently.

“Yeah, well, as to that”—Haruka tossed the brush back down onto the dresser—“from what Hotaru-chan was saying before I managed to drag her out of range of their hearing, the others probably think we both lounge around naked between baths and sexual escapades...”

“I did NOT say that!” Hotaru objected, sitting bolt upright and driving her fists into the mattress.

“...so I don’t think the sight of you in a damp towel would have startled them much.”

“I wonder if Calypso or Ami can tell me whether or not your sense of humor was this warped when you were another person,” Michiru remarked casually as she moved past Haruka.

Haruka gave her a flat look.

When the sound of footsteps echoed in from the front room, Ami felt a mental jolt from Calypso which prompted her to get a good solid grip—mental even more so than physical—on her sister as she sat up. It was mostly a feeling of enthusiasm, but there was some anxiety, too. Calypso and Larissa had been very close for almost their entire lives, but that was a thousand years in the past. Michiru wasn’t the same person now as Larissa had been then, nor did she have complete access to her memories; she might not remember.

Michiru stepped through the door and stopped short, blinking, when she saw Ami and Calypso sitting side-by-side and looking back at her. Their resemblance to one another was not only uncanny, but uncannily familiar. She _knew_ she’d seen those two almost-identical faces looking at her before, and the magnitude of that certainty left barely enough space for her mind to acknowledge that Luna was holding an icepack to her head.

Something from that recognition made her raise her left hand with her first and last fingers both pointing up, her other two fingers waving while her thumb pressed up in front of the first. Calypso and Ami both blinked and returned the gesture, and it occurred to Michiru that with those two fingers raised, the shape of their hands suggested the sign of Mercury to some degree.

“Larissa?” the nearest of the pair said uncertainly, in a voice Michiru’s ears and musical training informed her was just a little too high to be Ami’s.

“*Aren’t you going to give me a hello kiss, you silly water nymph?*” There was something about her own voice besides the choice of words that Michiru found odd, and from the way Luna sat up straight to join everyone else in staring at her, the odd thing had been noticed by the full room, but the Nereid’s reaction took center stage.

“You _remember_!” Calypso squealed in delight. One second the girl was sitting beside Ami, and the next she was a cloud of sparkling blue mist, billowing across the room from the couch with a sound that was liquid laughter. Then the cloud became a girl again, a girl who put her arms around Michiru and gave her the requested kiss before spinning both of them around, laughing happily.

The corner of Haruka’s mouth twitched once, but she was the only one who noticed it.

Calypso finally calmed down and backed off enough to look Michiru over. “*You’ve grown up, Lari.*” She smiled. “*It looks good on you.*”

“*Thank you. And you’re still copying your sister, I see.*”

“*Bah. I can change that in a Saturnian second, and you know it.*”

The body that was almost Ami rippled, expanded, and became a precise copy of Michiru herself, right down to the small pattern stitched into the edge of the robe and the fall of her hair. Then that shape shrank down to the form of a girl in a blue robe, who looked like a chibi version of Michiru at the age Hotaru now appeared to be. And while that image was still going *click* in the memories of the gathered Senshi, the Nereid expanded once more, taller than the previous shapes. Eyebrows went up around the room as the onlookers realized the new shape was that of a boy, a lean youth whose facial features and short blue hair made him look like Ami’s brother. Then he/she/it dwindled back down to almost-Ami and smiled.

“*You haven’t lost your touch,*” Michiru said.

Calypso beamed, but her smile shrank to a pensive line. “*How much do you remember, really?*”

“*Less than all of it,*” Michiru admitted. “*But a lot more than I’d expected to—a lot more than I _could_ before I saw you. Mostly it’s about you and Mercury, but there are some things about myself—my old self—that I didn’t know before.*” The visual perspective in those memories was different. Lower. “*I was... shorter... then?*”

“*You were,*” Ami agreed from over on the couch. “*Larissa wasn’t any taller on her fifteenth birthday than Hotaru-chan is now, but Ariel said she liked her that way, since it made her easier to pick up and hug.*” Ami frowned, sure that there was something more to that thought that she was missing, but she didn’t get a chance to pursue it.

“Will you three cut that out and talk so that the rest of us can understand you?” Haruka demanded.

Michiru blinked and realized what it was about her words that had been bothering her—the language had changed, to what she suspected must have been the speech of the Moon Kingdom.

“Oops,” Ami murmured, blushing. “Sorry.”

“It was my fault,” Michiru apologized. “I didn’t realize until just now that I’d switched languages like that.” She smiled at Calypso. “I guess that’s another thing seeing you again shook loose.”

“Glad I could help.”

Luna let out a weary sigh and leaned heavily against the back of the couch, pressing the icepack more firmly to her head. Michiru stared at her in surprise; usually Usagi was the only thing which could inspire such a noise.

“Luna’s been having a rough evening,” Ryo explained, catching Michiru’s startled look. “She passed out and hit her head when Ami-chan brought Calypso out to meet us.”

“Why?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Luna replied. She sighed again and sat up. “I don’t know very much about the effects of this degree of past- life awareness; nobody in the Silver Millennium really did, because it just didn’t happen that often.”

“Philosophers of the age believed that the soul was a pure essence,” Ami said, “something that existed without a physical form or a conscious awareness. It was the containment and direction of the soul within a body that created awareness and personality, and the idea of past-life awareness was explained by strong similarities between a modern body and a past one that the soul had formerly inhabited. It was something that _could_ happen in nature, but only did so very rarely. _We_ remember our former selves because Queen Serenity interfered with the normal process of rebirth and made sure our modern bodies would be as physically similar to our old ones as possible, but we are ourselves and not merely copies of who we used to be because our bodies aren’t identical to what theirs were, and our souls have grown and changed since then.”

It had been quite some time since her friends had stared at Ami with that blank-eyed expression of zero comphrension, mostly because she’d learned over the years to cut back on her use of complex words, and because they’d all picked up enough of her advanced vocabulary to get the gist of the rest. Luna and Michiru had _never_ looked at her like that, and she was fairly sure Haruka hadn’t, either, but all three of them were doing so now. And none of them were staring because they didn’t understand the words.

“I told you,” she mumbled, blushing anew, “I can remember whatever Mercury knew.” Ami’s blush faded as she frowned in sudden worry. “And it’s going to make writing the exams next week awfully tricky...”

“Exams?” Calypso asked curiously.

“We’ll explain later,” Michiru assured the Nereid, leading her back to the couch. Ami scooted aside so they could sit down, but Michiru had no sooner settled on the cushion than Hotaru appeared and scrambled up on her lap. The girl was _really_ getting too big for this, but Michiru chose not to make an issue of it—to some extent because she wasn’t quite ready to give up this part of being a mother, foster or otherwise, and also partly because Calypso took an interest in tickling Hotaru’s feet. “Go on, Ami. You sounded like you were leading up to something with that.”

Ami glanced quickly at Luna, who gestured for her to go ahead. “Since total recall of former lives didn’t occur very often, nobody was completely clear about how it worked, or what should be done when it was confirmed to be happening. A theory was eventually put forward that this sort of thing didn’t happen often because it wasn’t _supposed_ to happen, and over time the notion became set that past-life awareness was dangerous. ‘The body contains the soul and gives it form and direction, but the power of the soul can change the body.’” She said that part with her eyes briefly closed, quoting. “Basically, they came to believe that while a slow and gradual pace of recall was relatively safe, too sudden and strong a recollection would actually recreate the previous persona in its entirety, and that it would conflict with the existing one, to the point of taking over the body or killing both awarenesses.”

“Lucky for you, they got it wrong.” ChibiUsa paused. “They _did_ get it wrong, didn’t they?”

“It’s hard to say, exactly. The only thing different about me now is that I have Mercury’s memories in addition to my own, but my situation has too many unique elements involved to be any good as a template: first there’s the fact that Mercury was a Nereid and not a human; then there’s the influence of the mana nexus to consider; and then you have to take into account the fact that I only fully remembered her when I was transformed, with the Caduceus and a lot of extra energy that might have protected me.”

“Usagi turns into Serenity practically at the drop of a hat,” Rei pointed out.

“She has the ginzuishou to protect her,” Luna replied. “There really wasn’t any way for me to be sure of whether there was any danger to you or not, and when Ami came back talking like she was Mercury...” Luna shivered.

Calypso looked up from tickling Hotaru’s feet. “You worry too much, Luna.” She turned to Ami. “Are Serenity and Amma and Ishtar as much like they used to be as the rest of you are?”

“Very much so. Although,” Ami added, “Ish... _Minako_ has a slightly different... er”—she blushed again—“focus... than she used to.”

“Then I personally don’t think there’s going to be a problem,” Calypso declared confidently. “You didn’t have any trouble because there wasn’t really anything different enough between your _then_ and _now_ to cause a conflict, and I think the exact same thing will happen for the others. It’ll just be like rain falling over a lake; it causes a few ripples on the surface, but all that really happens is that the lake gets a little deeper.”

“Lakes flood over their shores sometimes,” Ami reminded her.

“That’s why humans build dams,” Calypso countered. “Or floodbreaks. Whatever you call them. My point is, the Caduceus and the energy boost it gave you would have protected you if anything had gone wrong, so Vestia should just go ahead and use the Book to track down more Weapons. And if anybody does start to have trouble in the meantime, get them transformed and as powered-up as you can. You get all kinds of automatic defenses just by being Senshi, and the more energy you’re actually holding on to, the stronger they get.”

Rei glanced at Luna. “Is she right?”

“Of course I’m right,” Calypso said, snuggling back down beside Ami. “We Nereids are always right. It’s a well-known fact.”

“I seem to remember you saying that on a number of occasions,” Michiru said dryly. “It was usually right before we got into trouble because you’d made a mistake.”

“My plans were always perfect,” Calypso replied. “_You_ were the one who made the mistakes.”

“_Really_? What about that time we tried to put a fountain in the garden and ended up turning the place into a swamp because _you_ miscalculated the water pressure in the sprinklers?”

“It _would_ have worked if you hadn’t snapped the pipe right in half,” Calypso retorted.

“I did exactly what you said to!”

“That was NOT what I told you to do!” Calypso shot back, sitting up. “I distinctly remember telling you to make a small hole in the top of the pipe, NOT to shear it in two!”

Hotaru nearly lost her seat as Michiru sat up as well and leaned towards Calypso. “I DID make a small hole! The force of the water coming OUT of it was what snapped the pipe!”

“YOU said you could keep something like that from happening!”

“YOU said the water pressure wouldn’t be that high!”

“TIME OUT!” Haruka shouted.

Calypso and Michiru both glared at her for a moment before they blushed and looked down at the floor like a pair of children expecting a scolding. Hotaru took one look at the two of them and immediately started giggling helplessly, and ChibiUsa joined in a moment later, falling over on the floor and laughing into the carpet.

“Honestly,” Ami said, her tone fitting her rediscovered role as an older sister to the hilt, “after ten centuries, I would have expected at least ONE of you to have outgrown this foolishness.”

“I’m sorry,” Michiru said contritely, looking absolutely amazed at her own behavior. “I don’t quite know where that came from. I think the last time I shouted at someone like that was when I was five, but it felt so _natural_...” She glanced up at Calypso. “I take it we did that quite a lot?”

The Nereid nodded.

“About once a week,” Ami added, “just on general principle. And again whenever you got into trouble for something. It didn’t improve as you got older, either. Ariel and I ended up having to separate you nearly every time.”

“Could you all please stop using antiquated names?” Ryo asked plaintively. “It makes keeping track VERY hard for some of us, and it’s going to cause nothing but trouble if anybody else hears it.”

“Speaking of other people,” Rei said, “how exactly _were_ you planning to hide your new sister, Ami-chan? She can’t just move into Mako-chan’s apartment with you.”

“Actually, she can, and nobody’ll think twice about it. Show them, Caly.”

Smiling, Calypso became mist again, dwindled, contracted, and reformed as a pretty little cat with ice-green eyes and white fur that had just the faintest tint of blue to it. She meowed with a kittenishly cute squeak.

“Don’t push it,” Luna warned her.

“What about food?” Rei pressed. “Don’t you eat electricity or something?”

“Essentially, yes.” As weird as it was hearing a near-perfect copy of Ami’s voice coming from a near-perfect replica of her body, hearing the voice coming from a small cat was even more bizarre. “If worst came to worst, Amma...”

“Makoto,” Ami corrected. “Or Mako-chan.”

“Mako-chan, then. If worst came to worst, she could always keep me fed with Jupiter’s electric powers. However...” Calypso’s slit-eyed feline gaze fell upon a short lamp standing on a table beyond Hotaru and Michiru. “Would you mind, La... I mean, Michiru?”

Following the Nereid’s gaze to the lamp, Michiru blinked and looked back. “You mean...?” She pointed at the lamp, and Calypso nodded. “You can do that?”

“Artificial energy was never as good for us as a pure source, but some kinds were enough for us to live off of. We won’t know if this’ll do unless I try.”

“Be my guest,” Michiru replied, gesturing towards the lamp.

“Wait a minute,” Haruka said, her eyes blinking around the light of dawning comprehension. “She’s not going to...”

The little cat scattered into a smoky mist, and Calypso drifted up above their heads, sparkling and shifting. Hotaru looked up at the cloud and raised one curious hand to poke at it, her fingers passing into the lower part of the mist with no sensation of resistance, just the cool dampness of the water and a tickling tingle.

“Stop that,” Michiru said, pulling Hotaru’s hand out of the mist.

A little bit of blue came down along with Hotaru’s fingers, a nebulous tendril which quickly worked its way up her arm, leapt left at her elbow, and landed on her belly. Sparkling points of light began to appear fast and furious along the end of the mist, and Hotaru started squirming and laughing.

“C-c-cut—hah!—that—mmph!—out!”

“Caly,” Ami said, admonishing her misty sister through a smile.

*She started it,* Calypso declared defensively, her voice a disembodied whisper in all of their minds as the glimmer ceased, the tendril drawing away from Hotaru to inspect the lamp instead.

“You... er... you may want to try the wall,” ChibiUsa suggested.

*The wall?* The length of mist found the cord at the base of the lamp and followed it back to the outlet. *Oh, I see. A general power-distribution network rather than independently-operated devices. What do you do if the source goes down, though?*

“We wait,” Haruka replied.

*I see. Well, let’s find out if this is of any use to me. Hmmm...* There was a noticeable *ZAP* as an arc of energy jumped from the wall socket to the shimmering end of Calypso’s flowing tendril. Anything human or animal would have jumped back instantly, assuming the shock hadn’t fried it, but the Nereid stayed where she was, and the electric discharge continued for all of three seconds before the tendril pulled away. The only obvious change to Calypso was that the glow illuminating her gaseous body became brighter, and the sparkles scattered throughout grew more numerous. Her inner light also took on a distinct shade of pink.

*My goodness.* Calypso’s voice seemed a bit different, and it was accompanied by the sound of mental giggles.

“What’s _that_ about?” ChibiUsa said, watching the light show.

“It means she likes it,” Ami said quickly, shooting a warning glance at Luna. There wasn’t really any need for them to get into a discussion about the electricity-based link between the feeding and reproductive habits of Nereids just now.

While they all waited for Calypso to come down, it occurred to Ryo that from the proper angle, his girlfriend’s peculiar new sister bore a striking resemblance to deep-space images of other galaxies.

Calypso hovered there for a few moments after withdrawing her ‘arm’ from the outlet, and when she moved again, it was not towards the couch. Reassuming human form so that she seemed to drift down to a soft landing, she stood in front of Ryo and smiled.

“And you,” she said, putting her arms around his neck, “have pretty eyes.” She kissed him lightly, and Ryo’s face went red.

“Caly.” Ami was smiling again, but her voice had the sound of clenched teeth in it.

“He started it,” Calypso replied.

“I did NOT!” Ryo blurted.

“Yes, you did. You said I looked like a galaxy.”

“I did not... oh. That’s right, you’re telepathic. Look, just because I was thinking it doesn’t mean I was thinking of _saying_ it, and even if I _was_ thinking of saying it, I don’t think I would have said it.” He blinked and immediately discarded the idea of trying to make sense of what he’d just said. “Could you let go of me now?”

She did that, and then folded her arms and looked at him thoughtfully. “Interesting. I can’t say that you remind me of anyone in particular, but there’s something in there that seems... hmmm...” Ryo felt a faint pushing sensation inside his head.

“Caly!” Ami snapped. “You stop that this instant!”

“I was just...”

“NOW!” Ami’s expression softened along with her tone as she stood up and walked over. “Caly, we already discussed this. I know it’ll be hard for you, but you agreed you wouldn’t go digging into people’s thoughts.”

“But I could _help_ you,” Calypso protested. “I can go anywhere without anyone noticing me, and I could find things out...”

“You could do that,” Ami agreed, “but ignoring for the moment the fact that it wouldn’t be right to go spying on the private thoughts of half the people in the city, what would happen if something found _you_ out? I know you still have most of strength and all of the knowledge of the others, and I know that it makes you ten times stronger than you would be otherwise, but that’s still not enough for you to stand up to the kind of creatures we have to deal with.”

“I kept Hotaru-chan out of the cave, didn’t I?”

“You know as well as I do that it wasn’t just you doing that.”

“What _was_?” Hotaru asked.

“That cave was more than just a storeroom for the Caduceus,” Ami replied. “It was also the resting place of the Senshi of Mercury.”

Hotaru frowned. “Luna said Nereids either evaporated or froze when they died. How could they have gotten something like mist back there to be buried?”

“It wasn’t a graveyard, Hotaru. It was where the Senshi of Mercury went to die.”

The little Senshi of Saturn blinked. “I don’t understand. Why?”

Ami sighed. “Hotaru, Nereids didn’t measure their lifespan in decades; they measured it in centuries, and they didn’t suffer from injury, illness, or the effects of aging during all that. Quite the opposite; they generally got _stronger_ as they got older. But even at the peak of the Silver Millennium, the average life expectancy of a normal person was only about seventy years. It was bad enough for a normal Nereid who made friends or fell in love with an ordinary person, but Mercury always had it worse. She’d grow up with and train alongside the other Senshi, just like we do, and she’d be as close to them as I am to all of you—and then they’d begin to die on her, some in battle, others from illness, and the rest from inevitable old age. One hundred years was considered the age of maturity among Nereids, but by the time Mercury reached that age, most of the closest friends of her youth would already be dead.”

“The cave was originally built merely to house the Caduceus,” Calypso said, “but the Mercury at the time of its construction went in one day after the last of her Senshi friends had passed away, and never came out again. She was just a little more than seventy-three. It was a sad day, but after a while, it became an unspoken tradition among us that when Mercury felt it was her time, she’d go to the cave. It was the only thing to do to stop her from hurting so much after her friends were gone. Some lasted longer than others, but in the end, all those who weren’t killed in action would come home to die.”

It was impossible not to notice her take Ami’s hand as she spoke.

“We always suspected something like that must be happening,” Luna said quietly. “It was really the only explanation for why all the old Mercuries kept disappearing. But I have to admit, I don’t understand how it could have stopped Saturn from getting in.”

“By itself, it wouldn’t have,” Ami admitted. “But each time one Mercury died in that cave, her energy didn’t dissipate in quite the same way that it would have for a normal Nereid. It was absorbed by the rocks and the water and the structure of the Blue Hall, and it stayed there, in a form that didn’t have consciousness anymore. The Hall and the cave became so strongly oriented to the power of Mercury that that was where each new Mercury was born, using some of the energy of her predecessors to insure the birth was successful.” Ami’s eyes closed, and she smiled. “I remember waking up for the first time in that place. I could hear Mother’s voice, and the voices of the other elders, and all the whispers of the inhabitants of the city who attended... and I heard something... hundreds of quiet voices nobody else seemed to know were there, all of them welcoming me...”

“Ami,” Luna said, “for the sake of what’s left of my nerves, please stop doing that.”

Ami opened her eyes. “Sorry, Luna. It’s just that the Blue Hall was kind of central to Mercury, and thinking about it brought back some strong memories. As I was going to say, the Hall was very important to all the Nereids; it was holy ground.”

Rei nodded silently. There had been a feeling in the old building not all that different from the peaceful warmth she felt at Hikawa.

“After Beryl destroyed the planet,” Ami continued, “there were some survivors, Nereids who had been inside the transit system and just far enough out of phase with reality to escape the main force of the attack. They realized that they were dying from the aftereffects of the bomb, so they gathered at the Blue Hall and did something similar to what all those generations of Mercuries had done, sacrificing themselves to increase the strength of the energy that was protecting the Caduceus. The defense they had in mind needed _a_ mind to guide it, and Caly was the youngest—and she was my sister—so the others gave their energies up into her. They knew I’d come for her, so they saved her life, but they also made her... more.”

“More what?” ChibiUsa asked.

“It’s hard to explain,” Calypso said. “I still have much of the energy of my elders, and all of their knowledge, and it’s made me able to do things no Nereid short of Mercury should be able to do. I almost _am_ another Mercury myself, and while I was in the cave, I could feel the lives and strength of all those who came before my sister.”

“The energy in the cave is aligned to Nereids in general and Mercury in particular,” Ami said, taking up the story again, “and it amplified Caly’s abilities even further.” She looked at Hotaru. “When you tried to open a dimension door into the cave, Caly was able to disperse the energy on her side before it fully formed. The door didn’t open because she simply didn’t want it to.”

“There wasn’t anything ‘simple’ about it,” Calypso said, turning to Ami. “It took every bit of information crammed into my mind and all the energy the cave could give me to take those things apart without blowing up half the city in the process.”

“Good.” The sisters looked down past Michiru at Hotaru. “Don’t give me that look, Ami-chan. I don’t like it any better than you when my powers get messed with.”

“Well, it won’t happen again. Since she’s a Nereid and I’m not, Caly’s abilities now are a little different from what mine were when Luna first activated Mercury, but they’re about the same strength. And that,” Ami said, fixing a firm look on Calypso, “is why I’m not going to let you wander around looking for trouble. I know exactly what I was capable of right at first, and I know it wouldn’t be enough to stand up to what we’ve been seeing recently.”

“But...”

“NO, Caly. I lost you once, and I’m not going to take the chance of it happening again.” Calypso stopped pouting immediately, smiled, and gave Ami a hug, which she returned. “Now, do you promise me you won’t go off by yourself?”

“I promise.”

“Good. And keep your hands off Ryo,” Ami added. “He’s mine.”

“Okay. But he _does_ have pretty eyes.”

They both turned and looked speculatively at Ryo. “Yes,” Ami agreed, with only a faint blush, “he does.”

“Quit that,” Ryo said to both of them, reddening slightly himself.

“Quit what?” they said back. Ryo stared at them, then closed his pretty eyes and let out a slow breath.

“I’m seeing a lot of headaches for Mako-chan in the near future,” he predicted gloomily. “I...” He stopped with a faint grunt and a sudden expression of mild pain. It set off a sympathetic twinge in Ami’s mind.

“What did you see?”

“Jupiter. The planet,” he added quickly. “From one of the moons, I think.”

“You’re sure?” Haruka asked.

“The red spot is pretty distinctive,” Ryo replied, “and my point of view was close enough to get a good look at it.” He frowned. “I saw a shadow on the ground, but I’m not sure who it...” He blinked suddenly and grunted again. “What the...”

“Again?” Ami asked in surprise.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you have two visions right on top of each other like this,” Rei said. “I know _I_ certainly don’t.”

“Neither do I,” Ryo replied. “Or maybe I should say I _didn’t_. It was some guy I’ve never seen before, this time—a _big_ guy. He was standing next to Chiba-san, and he was just a bit shorter, but nearly twice as wide. He...” Ryo stopped and shook his head, and so did Rei.

“_Another_ one?” Ami sounded worried now. “_Both_ of you?”

“A moonlit beach?” Ryo asked hopefully, looking at Rei with a pained expression.

Rei shook her head. “A snowy park somewhere in town. At night. With another nexus.”

“Terrific.” They both winced again. “This is really getting tiresome,” Ryo grumbled, sitting down and putting his hands over his face. “And it looks like we’re going to get a fairly strong earthquake this summer.”

Rei was frowning. “I saw that park again. Hold on a moment; I want to try something.”

She raised her hands, closed her eyes, and focused intently as her hands began to move through the familiar series of motions, accompanied by the faintest whisper of her chanting. Rei hadn’t actually tried calling a vision without some sort of fire as a focus before, but if—as she suspected—some outside force was triggering these flashes in her mind and in Ryo’s, then she might be able to...

Rei’s eyes snapped open—and Calypso’s went wide—as she brought her hands together and felt a soft burst of heat. No fire, but heat nonetheless. That had never happened before. More than that, the image had formed clearly in her mind again, and it was holding steady, along with a familiar directional tug.

“It’s happening right now,” she said. “There’s a mana nexus in the park, and it’s sending out some kind of pulse...”

“Then could one or all of you kindly do something about it?” Ryo asked, gritting his teeth. “This is starting to get”—he actually shook a bit as the next vision hit him—“bad.”

“I can help with that,” Calypso said brightly.

“Caly...”

“I won’t hurt him, sister. I’ll just put him to sleep so that he can’t be consciously aware of things.”

“You can do that?” Haruka asked in surprise.

Calypso nodded, looked quickly at Ami and Ryo—both of whom nodded—and then put her hands to the sides of Ryo’s head. Her entire body flickered with lines of blue energy, and Ryo slumped immediately; Calypso caught him with surprising ease, showing a great deal more strength than her slender frame should have possessed as she picked Ryo up and carried him over to the couch Hotaru and Michiru were in the process of vacating.

“Is he okay?” Hotaru asked.

“He’s very deeply asleep,” Calypso replied, setting Ryo down. “Too deep to dream or feel the pain. I can keep him like this for five or six hours before I’ll have to wake him up. Are you okay?” she said, looking at Rei. “I can put you to sleep as well if you need help.”

“Thanks, but I’m okay. I’ve got a better handle on these visions than Ryo does—and besides, somebody has to point the way.”

“I’ve got it,” Ami said, looking at her computer and waiting for it to analyze the disturbance. When it returned an answer, she blinked. “The energy signature reads as... temporal...”

ChibiUsa looked up. “Pu.”

The movie had just progressed to a point where the female lead was on the verge of being forced to marry an older man whose main interest was in her family’s lands—although he wasn’t averse to some of the benefits of a lovely young wife—while her one true love got shipped off to fight in a war in lieu of serving time or being executed for a theft and murder he hadn’t committed.

Setsuna had been watching the entire movie with a focused intensity that had even Minako a little worried—it wasn’t THAT good a movie, after all—but when the scene of the lovers’ last moonlit tryst came up, her gaze faltered, and she shook from head to toe as a wave of invisible iciness washed over her. It set off a feeling in her head that she couldn’t remember experiencing before and certainly hadn’t expected to encounter now, but which she somehow knew instantly to be a warning from the Garnet Orb that something was interfering with the energy of Time on a major scale.

In that same moment, Usagi looked down at her brooch as she felt the ginzuishou give a solid *whump* of energy in response to something she herself hadn’t sensed in any way.

“Usagi,” Setsuna said quietly.

“I know.” Another chilling ripple; another *whump* of force. Minako’s eyes broke off watching the screen as she looked around curiously.

“Usagi,” Artemis said in a voice even lower than a whisper. “Was that the ginzuishou?”

Usagi touched his arm and “Mmm-hmm”-ed softly, right before the crystal jolted her again. Setsuna had a deathgrip on the armrests of her seat and was struggling to keep her breathing under control; a moment later, three communicators beeped softly.

“Perfect timing,” Usagi murmured, almost relieved. All four of them stood and hurried out of the theater. The girl at the snack bar blinked in surprise as they came out, but Usagi was already pointing down the hall.

“The phones are that way, right?”

There was a quick look at Setsuna, who was pale and visibly shaking, an expression of comprehension, and a nod from the girl; Usagi nodded back and led the way out of sight. She took a quick look around to make sure nobody else was nearby, unhooked a phone receiver just in case someone did come along, and flipped open her communicator.

“We’re here.”

“We’ve got a problem,” Rei’s voice said. “There’s another nexus in the park, and it’s playing with Time. Luna says we’ll need Pluto to stop it.”

Usagi glanced at Setsuna, who returned a look that said it was going to take a lot more than just her, Minako, and Artemis to _stop_ her from going.

“She’ll be there.” Usagi closed her communicator and hung up the phone, and they headed for the exits.

“Can you find your way?” Minako asked.

“Easily,” Setsuna replied, transformation pen in hand even before they got outside. The exit they had taken came out in a short alley between the theater and the mall to which the multiplex was attached; the place was deserted except for a scruffy brown cat which popped out from behind the dumpster at the end of the alley and padded over to wrap itself around Artemis’ legs, purring noisily.

Minako glanced down at the cat while Setsuna transformed, smiled, and then looked up at Pluto. “Maybe you’d better take Artemis with you so we can be sure he isn’t getting into trouble.”

Artemis cleared his throat and tried—unsuccessfully—to shoo the cat away, while Pluto shook her head. “He’d just slow me down.” She raised her staff, and crimson energy gathered around it, spreading rapidly to her body. “MARCH OF TIME: QUICKEN!”

The red light flared, and Pluto jumped. Any of the Senshi could have cleared the level of the theater roof without any real trouble, but Pluto did it in the blink of an eye and left a blurred arc of red in her wake.

Usagi opened her communicator again. “Pluto?”

“Go.” The word came out short and fast.

“I don’t want to worry Mom, so come back to the mall after you’re done so we can link up before we go home. We’ll be in the food court.”

“GotitI’llseeyouthere.” Usagi blinked as her mind worked to interpret the hasty jumble of words, and then nodded and closed her communicator again.

“It’s a different type of energy this time,” Sciences reported into the phone, “but we still can’t get a precise reading on the source. Whatever’s going on seems to be affecting the entire city, and maybe even further than that.”

“But it doesn’t seem to be doing anything harmful?” Political asked quickly.

“Not that we’ve been able to determine so far, but it’s playing havoc with any chronometers that are hooked into the sensor network. Some have stopped, others are running ahead at about one day every ten seconds, and a few are going backwards just as quickly. We’re trying to see if the different effects on the clocks might have something to do with the position of the scanners they’re linked to. If it works, we may be able to triangulate the center of the disturbance.”

“I’ve got people working the streets to see if they can spot anything,” Information added. “Nothing’s turned up so far.”

“Keep at it.”

“I don’t see anything,” Uranus said, scanning around from the rooftop where she, Neptune, Mars, and Mercury were standing. The park before them and the city skyline all around seemed perfectly normal for a night in late February; cold but not utterly freezing, snow-covered and ice-rimmed but not buried entirely. The full moon was really spectacular, and Uranus smiled faintly at the similarity it currently bore to Usagi.

“It’s around here somewhere,” Mars insisted. “My head’s starting to feel like the inside of a drum with all this pounding.”

“I see it,” Neptune said. She was facing away from them and looking into her Mirror, turning it to catch the image of something over her shoulder. “They don’t appear to have upgraded their design yet,” she reported. “The nexus is still made entirely of that green material. I don’t see any units.”

Mercury glanced into the Aqua Mirror and then called both her computer and the Caduceus. A small slot in the base of the Caduceus’s handle whisked open, and Mercury inserted the computer into the hole, getting a definite ‘click’ as the device slid home and was locked into place. Mercury tugged at the earring which triggered her visor, and as it glowed into existence this time, a small blue disc materialized over her left ear, extending a slender microphone.

“Vocal command interface,” she explained quickly, tapping the side of the disc to trigger the uplink to the Caduceus. “Engage scan mode. Target forward, one hundred and thirty-five degree scanning area, all parameters; identify and display any life-signs currently present.”

The blue jewel atop the Caduceus glowed for a moment, and a grid pattern appeared on Mercury’s visor, overlaying everything she saw and adding a few things she couldn’t see, such as the outline of the mana nexus. Several indicators appeared as well, pointing out presences within or near the structure.

“Halt scan and standby.” Mercury turned to her friends. “It looks like there are eleven units in there, one of them a second-generation type. The barrier that’s keeping the nexus invisible reaches to the edge of the park, and so does a lot of the bioweave.”

“Their security cameras, then,” Neptune said. “It seems they haven’t quite given up on their attempts to get us on tape.”

Something red streaked down from the roof behind them and became Pluto as it slowed to a halt.

“You made good time,” Uranus noted lightly, moving away before Neptune had a chance to reach out and punch her in the arm again.

“Congratulations,” Pluto said, nodding at Mercury with a small smile. “Now, aren’t we a few heads short?”

“Hotaru has to keep clear of this one,” Mercury replied. “Her powers are dangerous enough already without adding in her trying to use them in an area of distorted space-time. ChibiUsa stayed behind to keep her company, and Luna’s keeping an eye on things. We called Mako-chan, but she’s got company of some sort and has her communicator switched to playback mode, so it looks like it’s just the five of us.”

Pluto nodded as she took that in. “So... did Luna happen to mention exactly how I’m supposed to stop this thing alone when it took the three of you to disable that first one?”

“As a matter of fact, she did. But first, we have to get that shield down.” Mercury glanced at Neptune.

“You’re _sure_ this is going to work?” Uranus asked.

“The Aqua Mirror can reveal illusions, and it also has the power to break them from a distance.” Mercury looked at Neptune. “Taking down an image that large is going to be hard, though, so be careful. Caly’ll be furious with me if you get hurt.”

Neptune smiled and then stepped to one side to give herself some room, looking at the area of the nexus with firm resolve as she gathered her strength. She wasn’t sure at first how to begin, so she looked into the Mirror... and images formed.

Neptune turned the Mirror towards the nexus and held it up in front of her face with both hands as she bowed her head. In her mind’s eye, two great waves were crashing together behind her, one swirling high over the other, which was itself twisting up into the first. She could hear the roar, smell the water, feel the spray...

“SUBMARINE...” Neptune turned through a slow circle as she raised the Mirror above her head, eyes still closed and thus unable to see the vaporous energy that trailed from the front of her Talisman and swirled around her; it brushed her face, and she felt it as an errant wavelet shattering on the rocks and splashing playfully against her cheeks, lifting her head back with a smile.

“...REFLECTION...” The trailing energy swirled into the glass, briefly creating the image of a whirlpool before it was absorbed, and the front of the Mirror shone a brighter and brighter blue; Neptune’s smile settled into a serene determination as she brought her arms forward sharply. In the same moment that the Mirror was again pointed at the nexus, Neptune opened her eyes and called out the final word:

“REVELATION!”

The energy-whirlpool reappeared in reverse as the forefront of a pillar of watery energy, spiraling out from the Mirror with explosive force and flashing through empty air. Out over the park, the blue energy smashed into part of a dome of crackling green force which hadn’t been there a second ago, and it spread out along the edge of the barrier, moving faster and further as Neptune kept up the attack.

Something gave, and the two conflicting energies both disappeared with a flash, a shattering chime, and a spray-like discharge of many hundreds of fast- fading motes of green and blue light. The mana nexus stood revealed, and Neptune lowered her Mirror.

“Are you okay?” Uranus asked quietly. “You look a little flushed.”

“I’m fine,” Neptune said, letting out a breath. “That was just... a bit rough at the end.”

After looking quickly to Neptune and then the park and the nexus, Pluto turned to Mercury. “And now that we’ve given away our location, the next part of this plan is...?”

“To start running.”

“We’ve got a sighting! Something that looks like a tower of fungus just showed up in the park!”

The Information Director gestured for his excited subordinate to hand over the printout, calm down, and keep quiet, before he picked up the phone and dialed.

“Information here. There’s been a positive sighting.” He relayed the coordinates on the report and then listened. “You picked up a power spike in that region. Time?” There was a pause, and he nodded. “Just before the place appeared. Yes, I’d tend to agree. Yes. I’ll do that. Right.”

He hung up the phone and turned back to the other man. “Get in touch with our people in that sector and have them converge. I want to get as much information out of this incident as possible.”

“Yessir!” Watching the younger man race out of the office, the Director made a note to himself to speak to Resources about switching to a less caffeine-rich brand of coffee.

Following the destruction of the invisibility shield, the units jumped out of their hiding places. Obeying the plan programmed into them by their creator, six of the first-generation units took up defensive positions around the nexus, while their four brethren accompanied the more powerful second-generation unit out in the direction from which the attack had come.

This unit, while primarily human in shape and size, currently looked more like a lump of dough than a human being. Its skin had taken on an unhealthy shade of grey as it hardened into a more damage-resistant configuration, and short spikes of bone jutted from its knees, elbows, and forearms.

“That’s a rather ugly piece of work.”

“Indeed.” Archon’s attention did not waver from the images held within the spherical construct of the scrying spell as he answered his apprentice’s remark. “Our early unit generations were designed for functionality rather than form; it was only later, as we developed the technology and tested its limits, that we became able to craft more... aesthetically pleasing shapes. The major advantage of these cruder designs is that their construction is quicker and less costly—and for battlefield applications, cost-effectiveness is really all that counts.”

The girl made a faint sound of agreement. “Why Time? I understand that you need energy, but everything in my grandmother’s books said that Time is harder to harness and less flexible in application than the other elements, and nothing you’ve taught me suggests otherwise.”

“Correct on all points. There was an unforeseen complication last week in the form of a temporal disturbance, and due to a lack of power for specialized devices in the Imperial City, I was not able to properly track down and identify the source of that disturbance. This nexus is helping to compensate for that incident by charging the equipment so that any further such disturbances can be isolated and neutralized.”

“The idea of playing around with Time like this makes my skin crawl,” the apprentice said with a shiver.

“You are not the only one who dislikes interfering with Time. I am not fully comfortable with it myself, and their Imperial Highnesses were both extremely reluctant to sanction this operation.”

“They’ve had a bad experience with Time, I take it.”

“To put it mildly.” The black eyes of Archon’s projected image narrowed as the scrying globe hummed softly.

“What was that?”

“The perimeter is under attack. There.” The scene in the globe showed rings of fire cutting through treelike stands of bioweave, slicing off and charring to uselessness several dozen of the eye-like red growths in a matter of seconds. A gesture from Archon’s hands caused the invisible, immaterial ‘sensor’ of the spell to begin searching for the cause of the damage, but the globe hummed a second time and instead showed a small forest of stalks and scanners, frozen under an inch of solid ice on the opposite side of the perimeter from the burned-out area.

“And now the advance group of units is under attack,” Archon noted, as the globe hummed again, at a slightly different pitch.

“You actually sound approving.”

“Professionalism, my dear. Respect your enemy’s skills, study his strengths so that you may learn from him, study his weakness so that you may defeat him, and remember him well when he is gone.”

“Or she,” the girl said, pointing at the globe. “Look.”

Archon had already seen the image, a tall woman with short blonde hair, curious attire, and a whistling sword that the archmage recognized even as it cut off the head of the unit that had been sending the image.

“Or she,” Archon admitted. “And so it seems that your assumption was correct after all—in which case the units and the nexus are quite certainly doomed.”

The girl looked at him blankly. “And you’re not upset about this?”

Archon looked up and smiled. “As I told you some weeks ago, I am not unfamiliar with Senshi. There are only two of them whose powers could affect a quick deactivation of a mana nexus set to draw on Time, and neither of those two is a factor here. I suspect a Senshi of Mars is there to take advantage of the bioweave’s vulnerability to flame, but by the time she is successful in disabling the nexus, we will have gained an optimum amount of energy.”

The globe hummed again. It was showing a point-of-view image from one of the many sensor nodes built into the nexus itself, a node trying to track the movement of a blindingly fast crimson streak that came racing in from the scorched area of the perimeter and almost literally flew up the side of the nexus, springing from ledge to outcropping to slightly-less-than-vertical-face at an impossible speed.

The blur came to a halt at the top of the nexus, on the edge of the platform between the spires, and the red energy bled away, some of it fading into the air and more being drawn up into the heart of the shifting mass of power contained by the spires. What was left behind was a tall, dark-haired young woman with an expressionless look on her face and eyes that were reflecting the eerie red light of the power crackling all around her.

Archon’s black eyes had narrowed; now they widened in a moment of shock that his apprentice could not fail to notice.

A shape leapt up from the other side of the nexus. It was a heavily-modified first-generation unit intended as a last line of defense, its shoulders and torso bristling with glowing red ‘eyes’ that could unleash enough firepower to knock down a respectable-sized house. The apprentice watched in amazement as the Senshi raised her staff, whispered something inaudible, and unleashed a blast of dark energy which—in virtually every sense of the word—blew the unit away. The attack struck the automaton’s elastic body in the midsection and threw it backwards some four meters; seconds later, the array of ‘eyes’ exploded en masse, incinerating the unit long before whatever was ultimately left of it hit the ground.

With one shot—ONE!—that Senshi had done with ease something the girl knew she would have had to use several of her own most powerful abilities to pull off—and she wasn’t done yet.

With the unit neutralized, the Senshi now turned her attention to the nexus. She gazed up at the center of the huge device’s power with an expression that clearly asked: Can I do this?

There was absolutely no trace of uncertainty or fear in that questioning look. It was more like the woman had just discovered that yes, she _could_ do this, and was asking the question out of wonder. She raised her staff, and the great jewel on the end erupted with crimson light, innumerable lines of energy which streaked all over, touching things that had been invisible and remained tantalizingly half-seen. She opened her mouth...

The spell-globe trembled violently as words of incredible volume left the Senshi’s lips. Archon’s image wavered along with the globe, while his apprentice clapped her hands to her ears and turned away.

The deafening noise continued for several long seconds, and when it stopped, the two words which followed were incredibly clear: “MOBIUS SPIN.”

Turning back to the image in surprise at the return of normal volume, the girl saw the Senshi’s staff—floating in the air before her and directly under the energy of the nexus—begin to spin. Whatever was happening there was too much for the scrying spell, and the globe imploded on itself; scant seconds later, there was a ripple of energy which both mages knew meant that the nexus had been destroyed.

Archon’s ghostly reflection stared down at the empty space where the globe had been for a long time, and then he vanished without a word to his apprentice. Somehow, that failed to surprise her. This little turn of events had to have been a big upset for her teacher, and it certainly hadn’t been much fun for her, either.

With that thought in mind, she headed for the bathroom to try and find some aspirin, and to make sure the unnatural silence filling her room wasn’t because her eardrums had burst. She knew they must be working because she’d heard those last two words, but she just wanted to make sure.

To Uranus’s mind, it was even money as to which had actually kickstarted the mana nexus into coming apart at the seams: the sudden removal of its central energy, or the fact that it had taken the full force of Pluto’s volume-enhanced voice at the same time. Regardless, the thing was well and truly going down in flames. Explosions running along the sides blew off large sections of green debris, most of which disintegrated long before they hit the ground, while plumes of green-grey smoke erupted from the cracks left behind by those fallen bits and pieces, sweeping the trees on all sides with a rain of dust.

Whatever that green stuff really was, it didn’t hold together very long or very well without its energy. Uranus saw a hefty slab somewhat larger than her car split away from one of the decaying spires and go crashing down on a nearby tree. When the huge dust cloud cleared, the car-sized mass was completely gone and the tree remained standing, undamaged as far as Uranus could see. A similar sort of decay was overtaking the ‘welcome mat,’ with whatever green stalks and red clusters Mars and Mercury hadn’t already fried or frozen now tumbling in on themselves or falling into each other like a field of dominoes.

The units weren’t being quite so accommodating, but even better than two-to-one odds and the presence of the second-generation unit weren’t helping the automatons very much. They did not like Mars’s fire-based attacks at _all_; a couple of Fire Souls turned one of the things into a torch, and a Burning Mandala had left two more struggling to slap out the fiery gashes on their extremities. Neptune and Mercury had systematically corralled four of the things with soaking blasts before Mercury unleashed a Shabon Spray Freezing and turned the lot of them into popsicles. They were finishing that job with a combination Deep Submerge and Aqua Illusion, creating a pillar-sized jet of water which ploughed right through the line of flash-frozen freaks and reduced them to ice cubes, and from the smell of things, Mars had been successful in igniting those last two fungus-men.

*Which leaves me the no-man, here,* Uranus thought, blasting the more advanced unit with a World Shaking and then racing after the attack to start working on the unit with her sword while it was still too stunned to defend itself.

The thing’s mutated flesh was more resistant to her weapon’s edge than the stringy substance of its predecessors, and when Uranus struck, there was no blood. This was both a comfort and a bit disturbing; Uranus had no particular desire to get splashed by the contents of this or any other creature’s body—the way her luck ran, a typical monster’s blood was probably deadly poisonous, acidic, and riddled with disease, if not all three at once—but this unit still _looked_ human to some extent, and when the human body got cut with a sword, it was _supposed_ to bleed. The unit didn’t bleed or even bruise, and the way its body reacted to her blows, rippling away from blunt impacts and flying off in gooey chunks when slashed, made Uranus feel like she was fighting some kind of insidious Pillsbury Doughboy. And when you poked _this_ thing in the belly, it poked back, with digits that were more like knives than fingers.

Uranus swung down, the unit raised its left arm to block the falling Space Sword, and there was a crunch as the blade sank into the gooey flesh and struck the bone beneath. Uranus tugged, but bone spikes shot from the unit’s gashed palm, locking around the back of her sword and holding it fast as the creature drew back its free arm, long bone spikes telescoping out of its knuckles.

“SPACE SWORD BLASTER!”

This was probably the closest Uranus had ever been to her target when trying to use that attack, and the result of the force being unleashed almost before it had a chance to go anywhere was impressive. Bone splinters and globs of false flesh exploded away from her sword in every direction as the unit’s arm was disassembled from the elbow down. Still leaning down to add weight to a hold that no longer existed, the unit staggered to the left, and Uranus slid to the right, narrowly avoiding the bony claws that slashed past her face.

“That’s enough of this,” she muttered, taking her sword in both hands and raising it over her head.

She hesitated for a split second as a scene from her past burst into her mind. She was standing in a room aboard a ship... somewhere... on Earth? No, not on Earth... but not on the Moon, either, or Venus... Mercury didn’t have water oceans, Mars barely had _any_ water... it was somewhere else... and _not_ a ship in water... a ship in air...

The skyship rocked disturbingly as another explosion went off along the lower hull. People shouted and grabbed whatever was handy to keep on their feet; someone’s hand locked around her arm and pulled back, hard, but she hardly budged. She’d been riding these ships for fifteen years, on and off, almost since infancy—since before learning to walk, even—and it would take a lot more to shake her than this.

“Where’s the hit?” the captain’s voice roared over the din as he fought with the helm to hold the ship steady. Atmospheric navigation was tricky even under ideal conditions, and it was a testament to the man’s experience that they hadn’t listed to one side from this or any of the previous blasts.

“Portside, sir! Looks like the fo’c’s’le!”

“Can’t be pirates, then,” the captain grated. “They’d’a gone for the sails first...” There was another thunderous explosion, and the ship rocked again. “Bloody blazing hells! Dakkun! Give me a hand with this thing before she rolls on us!” A burly crewman scrambled along the ladder-like row of handholds set into the floor until he reached his captain, then stood and set himself to helping right the ship again.

“S’got to be tempests, captain!” The young fellow who had spoken was pale, his eyes wide with near-panic as he braced himself against the deck for the next impact.

“D’you think I don’t know that after sixteen years in these skies, lad?!” The captain turned to the only passenger on the shielded storm deck—and one of the few people still standing—and shrugged. “Good lad there, but it’s his first voyage in your old lady’s skies. Probably didn’t believe in tempests any more than he did in daimons until about two minutes ago.”

Ariel smiled. “We’ll find him a daimon some other time, captain. For now, would you object if my friend and I chased off our uninvited guests?”

“By all means, lass. We’ve got some skyrigs in the...”

“We don’t need them,” Ariel said lightly, turning and sliding along the deck.

“You’re going out there like that?!” one of the crew demanded after her. “Naked against the storms?!”

Ariel looked back at him and grinned. “Only in your dreams, skyboy.” She continued on, and found Mercury waiting for her at the amidships atmospheric hatch. “I take it you heard?”

Mercury nodded. “You really _should_ take a skyrig, Ariel. I’ll float no matter what, but if you get knocked out... well, it’s a long way down, and I may not be able to catch up to you in time.”

“And spoil the fun?” Ariel opened the hatch, transforming with an exuberant yell as she jumped out into the open, yellow-tinted skies of Uranus. She plunged down for six or seven seconds, found a current, and rode it back up towards the ship.

As the crewman had said, that rattling blow had been to the ship’s port side, and Ariel could clearly make out the tempests now. They were storm-spirits, somewhat similar to Nereids in that their ‘bodies’ consisted of vapors and energy rather than solid matter, but tempests were about fifty times bigger than any Nereid and totally lacking in the shapeshifting powers, intellect, and gentleness which characterized the people of the innermost world. Tempests were dumb, strong, and violent things, dwelling in the ceaseless storm wind atmospheres of Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune, generally unseen but every so often rising up from the lower levels to torment passing ships and their crews.

Tempests looked like roiling black thunderheads even when they weren’t angry, and this bunch stood out particularly clearly against the mostly white and yellow clouds as they hurled another lightning bolt against the ship—aimed at the hull, thankfully. The reinforced plating on a skyship could withstand quite a number of lightning strikes, but a hit to the delicate sails would be another matter entirely, and could easily strand the ship for hours or even days before repairs were affected or help arrived.

Mercury was already doing something about that. With her personal magnetic field interfacing with the planet’s as a means of propulsion, she didn’t need to rely on wind currents, and she had circled wide to get behind the tempests before unleashing a Shabon Spray at them. The next lightning bolt hit the mist and went off right in its creators’ metaphorical faces, startling them and alerting them to the possibility that they might not be alone out here.

Ariel adjusted her course and shot up above the level of ship, tempests, and Mercury, drew her sword, and slipped sideways out of the current. She fell like a stone, right into the middle of the tempest pack, the inherent magic of her sword doing far more damage to the cloudy beasts than the simple force of her passage. Less than a heartbeat after it started, the plunging attack was complete, a wide hole ringed by spitting arcs of electrical energy punched clean through the pack’s center.

Mercury flew into that hole next and resumed her natural form, expanding out to fill the void, and when her own complex energy fields came into contact with the cruder ones of the tempests, the brutes let out a howl as their power was sapped away. The pack divided and pulled away in all directions, turning as they did to glare at the blue mist with flashing red lightning-slits of eyes. For obvious enough reasons, tempests hated Nereids even more than humans, and these ones flashed and rumbled in the manner that betrayed a buildup towards more lightning bolts. Mercury might feed on electricity, but the levels these things could produce would hurt even her.

Below them, Ariel grinned and let fly with a World Shaking at the nearest tempest. The hurricane-force energy slammed into the cloudy entity and tore it apart, causing its allies to turn in stupefied astonishment and forget about their attack long enough for Mercury to climb out of range. That done, Ariel sought out the nearest thermal and began climbing again, before she dropped too far.

There was only a certain level in the Uranian atmosphere—or on Jupiter or Neptune—where the temperature, air pressure, and gaseous components were benign enough for a normal human to tolerate. Go too high, and you froze, suffocated, or suffered what skymen called the bursts, blood vessels near the surface of the skin rupturing in the critically low pressure; go too low, and you’d best start praying for the increased toxicity of the atmosphere to kill you before the rising atmospheric pressure imploded your body. And then there were the winds to consider. A Senshi had far superior tolerances for such things and could withstand the void of space itself if she had to, but a fall into the center of one of the gas giants would kill even a Senshi, even if it was _her_ planet. Well, except for Saturn—but then, a plunge into the center of Saturn was an even stupider idea, if for very different reasons.

So Ariel caught the thermal, turned on her back, and spread her arms and legs, catching the maximum force of the wind and beginning a rapid ascent towards the tempests, which were clustering together again. Not a bad idea; it made sure one of them was looking in each direction, making it impossible to sneak up on the pack as a whole from behind, but in their eagerness to get the Nereid they saw above them, the tempests had forgotten about the thing that had shot through them before.

The updraft carried her just a bit wide of the group—Ariel caught a glimpse of two sparking red eyes that seemed VERY surprised to see her—spoiling her initial plan of attack, so Ariel twisted in the wind and used her command of the air to affect a maneuver nobody else could have managed, creating a stable platform of air for herself. She felt it take shape beneath her feet and guided it out of the force of the thermal so that she was facing the tempest-pack. The nearest creature saw her, and she smiled at it and waved.

“’Bye.” Ariel took the Space Sword in both hands, held it high, and brought it down in a powerful arc, calling out...

“SKY RENDER!”

The downward cut of the Space Sword left a wide wave of yellow energy in its wake, and that force expanded forward at terrific speed, creating a golden wall as thin as a hair which split the air with an ear-piercing shriek and seemed to drag the empty space along with it as it moved. The attack struck the second-generation unit, passed through it, and fizzled out a short distance beyond, the wide band of power thinning and tearing as if the drag of space was taking its toll, until it was no more.

For a moment, nothing else happened, and Uranus blinked, wondering if she’d done something wrong.

Then the unit fell apart, the left and right sides of its body peeling away from a hair-thin line running straight down its middle. The grey flesh began to crumble, as did the featurelessly simplistic bone beneath, and there was a sighing sort of sound as the whole thing became a pile of inert dust.

Uranus looked at the dust, then at her sword, but the motions were automatic, almost unconscious; her mind was busy with another startling revelation that had come out of that flash of memory.

*I was flying. I flew. No plane, no parachute, no ground... nothing but me and the wind...* She let out a long breath and shivered all over. *My god, what a rush... I wish Michi could have felt that...*

“Uranus?”

She looked up. Mercury. “Yeah?”

“Do you feel okay?”

“I feel fine.” That was a major understatement. “Just a helping hand from a flashback.” She cleared her throat. “So, are we done here?”

“Almost.” Mercury looked back to what was left of the mana nexus. It wasn’t so much ‘intact’ as it was ‘holding together,’ and as they watched, the last of its structural integrity failed, sending up a muted rumble and a broad cloud of dust and smoke as the thing caved in on itself.

Pluto wasn’t back with them, but Uranus didn’t have to ask where the older Senshi was; a crimson blur was jumping around inside the collapsing nexus, bouncing from compromised ledge to free-falling platform to the crumbling side of the structure with no apparent concern for the rain of debris all around or the rate at which the ground was getting closer.

The streak was swallowed up as the dust cloud rose higher, and then it burst back into view, cutting through the dust and across the ground. The red glow decelerated and faded away, leaving Pluto to walk out of it and the devastation beyond as casually as if... well, as if she were talking a stroll through the park.

“Okay,” Uranus admitted. “I’m impressed. Not a bad night’s work, Pluto.”

Pluto looked back over her shoulder at the sinking pile that had been the nexus, and which would soon crumble into nothing, and nodded in satisfaction, smiling a familiar smile which was, for once, not that much of a mystery.

“Not a bad night’s work at all,” she agreed.

Perhaps it was the emotional feedback that came with viewing the world through a rat’s limited perspective, but Proteus felt a sudden urge to move as far away from these Senshi as it could get, as fast as it could go. It was a simple equation: power plus destruction equals danger, danger to the power of proximity equals fear, and fear plus danger equals run, run, run.

Proteus shook off the feeling and regretted that the eyes and ears of its rodent scouts in the park could only be enhanced so far. At the base of its personality remained the simplistic programming of the watcher unit, which had been ordered to locate and identify a vague threat to Atlantean interests and then gather all possible information on that threat for later use, but there was another reason for its desire to study the Senshi.

Proteus sought to recreate itself into something better than it was. It aspired to something along the lines of the human form in part because humans were the dominant species on this planet, and taking their form would enable the entity to blend in and disappear, but also because the basic strengths of the species—agility, higher brain functions, manual dexterity, environmental adaptability, and a long potential lifespan—were attractive. All it had to do was test the bodies it now controlled and develop the means to enhance their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses.

The Senshi appeared human, but were superior in several ways, and Proteus knew that discovering exactly how that had been done could prove very useful in its own efforts.

Still, the entity admitted that it might be better off discarding the whole idea. Nothing it had access to at the moment could guarantee success in an attempt to capture and study a Senshi, and it had no reliable means of calculating just what _would_ be needed to achieve such a task. And there was still the matter of the unknown force that had wiped out its entire network in a few short hours; Proteus had no desire to encounter _that_ again, which it feared would be a strong possibility if it had any future dealings with the Senshi. It was ludicrous to think something with such destructive power had escaped their notice—or they its—which meant it was extremely likely to be allied to them in some way.

The rats in the park crept closer to what was left of the second- generation unit after the Senshi departed. One reached out with a tail that was no longer just a tail and scooped up some of the decaying biomatter. Proteus analyzed the sample, understood immediately how to counter the decay, and did so, preserving that and a few more scoops of the stuff for more detailed study. Then, with nothing else of use left, it recalled its scouts.

“You say _Pluto_ was responsible for that light show?”

“All I know for sure is that it wasn’t Saturn,” Information replied. “This Senshi was tall, dark-haired, and carrying a staff of some kind; our records show Saturn to be quite a bit shorter, with a different hairstyle, and an unmistakably different weapon. Since the description of this new Senshi doesn’t match any image in our files, it’s either Pluto or one we’ve never heard of before.”

“And your people couldn’t get an image of her?” Sciences asked, sounding exasperated.

“The only ones close enough got their video recorders shattered by all the racket that went up when that tower went down.”

“There’s going to be a lot of people shopping for new windowpanes in the morning, too,” Media added.

“Shut up!” Sciences barked.

A hush fell over the room. Personnel turned to her colleague and said, “Not feeling well, dear?”

“If you must know, no, I’m not. All our mythology-based assumptions about Pluto and Saturn just went out the window. That tower was affecting _Time,_ and if Pluto was the one who shut it down, then that means her powers must be based on Time—which leaves us with no idea as to what kind of force Saturn’s abilities are meant to represent, let alone how to deal with it.”

“On the subject of ‘dealing with it’,” Political said, “how much progress has your division made?”

“Some.” Sciences regained some of her cool control as she spoke. “Since we don’t know the full extent or precise nature of their abilities, it’s simply not practical for us to try and design a single system capable of handling all the Senshi at once, so we’re focusing our efforts on ways to neutralize each Senshi on an individual level. The best capture plan we’ve come up with is a three- stage method: personal gear that resists or counters the powers of a single Senshi; short-term restraints uniquely designed to withstand her capabilities in the event of an escape attempt during transport; and a more powerful, long-term containment cell, built—like the restraints—for holding a specific Senshi.”

“I suppose it’d be too much to hope for that you have working prototypes of any of those yet,” Security rumbled.

“As a matter of fact, we do—but I seriously doubt they’ll be completely up to the task. It’s extremely likely that we’ll have to field test the equipment several times and modify it as we get a better idea of exactly what we’re up against.”

“I am _not_ sending people into a battle just to be your guinea pigs!”

“We already assess the performance of our equipment based on personnel reports,” Sciences replied sharply, “and we’ll continue to do so in any event— but as for the field testing I spoke of, I was thinking of a slightly more subtle approach. The moment we reveal our presence, the Senshi will have the opportunity to begin learning as much about _us_ as we do about _them,_ and I doubt it would take them long to realize the motivation behind wave after wave of ‘guinea pigs’ carrying devices which counter their powers.”

Security was silent, and Political spoke up. “What did you have in mind?”

“NO!”

There was a short but thunderous detonation as Janus slammed a fist into the wall of their private chambers, discharging a blast of striated blue and green energy and leaving a deep imprint in the stone.

Archon’s report, made in private to avoid worrying the Lords, confirmed things that should have been utterly impossible. SENSHI were in that city, Senshi who were—to judge from what little evidence Archon had been able to present—more than twice as powerful as any of their predecessors. Worse, Pluto was with them, hidden and protected and apparently not only remembering the use of her powers, but improving on them.

“She wasn’t supposed to remember!” Janus grated, turning around and bringing a fist down on a table, splintering it in half. “The Court said Athena couldn’t regain any of her memories until her twenty-fifth birthday! That’s still over two years away!”

“We don’t know that for certain,” the female voice, Jenna, replied softly, the arm under her control reaching across to restrain the one under her brother’s direction before he hit something else. “Athena wasn’t imprisoned outside of Time the way we were, brother. Even if she wasn’t yet twenty-three the last time we saw her, she had over two millennia in which to leave the Time Gate and age those extra years. But she obviously hadn’t aged all the way to twenty-five in that time, or she would have remembered everything and come after us that first night. And since we’re still here, it’s safe to say she _hasn’t_ remembered everything. All we can say for certain is that she’s recalled—or perhaps been retaught—the use of her powers.”

Janus shook off his sister’s grasp and took a deep breath to calm himself. “You’re right, you’re right. As usual. I have to stop and think this through. Their exact words were, ‘Athena is permitted to remember herself at the end of her twenty-fourth year of life, on the day of her birth.’ Correct?”

“That is what I remember.”

“Good. Now, we checked the astrological charts as soon as there was enough power to reactivate the Hall of Stars, and Athena’s next birthday isn’t for...”

“The day on the modern calendar which corresponds astrologically to the day of Athena’s birth in _our_ era is October 29th. That’s two hundred and fifty-three days from now.”

Janus nodded. “Then that’s the soonest she can remember herself. Very well, then. We have two-hundred and fifty-two days to capture Athena and make sure, one way or the other, that she doesn’t remember.”

“Brother...”

“I will not accept any dissent from you on this, Jenna. I’ve only agreed to give this plan of yours a chance because Archon seems to think it can work without interfering with the Rise. Frankly, after what Athena did to us, I’m surprised you even bothered to try and protect her. _I_ was the one who was going to marry her, and I don’t feel the slightest inclination to be charitable to her now.”

“She was my friend a lot longer than she was your future Empress, Janus—and unlike you, I’ve haven’t let the fact that I’m angry with her blind me to the fact that _this_”—the left hand rose to brush the female side of the divided face—“would never have happened if either of us had done something besides stand by when Father ordered Serenity and the Senshi murdered. Athena would never have betrayed us if we hadn’t betrayed her first. Never.”

“So you keep on saying,” Janus muttered, sighing. “In any event, Archon’s report changes things. There’ll be enough trouble when the Lords find out Athena is apparently alive and well, but if even the slightest rumor of Senshi who are stronger than they ought to be gets to them, they’ll will start wondering _where_ these women came from and _how_ they could possibly be this strong. We can’t afford for the Rise to be stalled because of a debate over Serenity’s arguments against the mana nexi; we _need_ the power that they and the reactors provide now more than ever. We don’t stand a chance without it.”

“I know. But brother, if she was right...”

“_If_ she was right,” Janus said firmly, “it still took thousands of nexi thousands of years to do any real damage; a few dozen of them running for a few months won’t destroy the planet or the Seals. Particularly not at the rate the things are being taken out of commission right now.” Janus shook their head as they walked over to a metallic grey sphere set into one wall. “Afterwards... well, if we’re still here afterwards, then we’ll worry about the nexi.”

The right hand passed over the front of the globe, and a circular hole opened in the substance of the grey sphere. Within the small, dim space of the globe sat a tiny sculpture of fiery red and orange crystal, a lifelike effigy of a creature part majestic bird and part mystical fire, a tiny phoenix that appeared ready to alight from its perch and soar on its delicate, impossibly perfect wings.

“Two months,” Janus murmured, the softer left hand gently brushing the tip of the sculpture’s wing to feel the uncanny warmth contained within. “Two months of searching, and we still don’t know where the others are. Or the Egg.”

“It wouldn’t be any good to us right now even if we had it,” Jenna said. “You know that we can’t even think of hatching the Phoenix Egg without the rest of them.”

“I know, but at the very least, we could keep it safe. If someone tampers with it just the wrong way—if it even gets _near_ fire—all of this could very well end up being for nothing.”

“The Court said that... no, _Balance_ said that he’d _personally_ selected the guardian, and anyone he’d think highly enough of to entrust the protection of the Egg to _will_ protect it, no matter what.” The left hand reached up across the body and gently patted the male side of the face. “Wherever the Egg is and whoever has it, it’ll be safe until we come for it, brother.”

The door to the three-bed-room slowly opened, and a dark shape slipped through the space between the door and the frame before softly pushing the door shut. There was a ‘click’ heralding the appearance of a flashlight beam, which cut through the darkness and began sweeping the room.

Getting a feel for the geography of the target site, Shingo grinned and set down the bag of stuff he’d carried in. This was it. He’d spent weeks planning the ultimate revenge on Setsuna, ever since she managed to beat him at his own game with the squirt gun in her purse. He still wasn’t sure just how she’d known to have one ready at the perfect moment like that, but it didn’t matter, because now she was going to PAY, big time.

He began emptying a complicated assortment of tools from his bag, among them springs, strings, weights, two of his best fully-loaded and fully-automatic squirt guns, and four water balloons, filled to just the right degree to guarantee a burst on impact, without making them too volatile to handle. He’d have to hurry, though; he still had to set up for the mass scatter-bombardment from his window.

Absently squishing one of the water balloons in his left hand—he found it helped him concentrate—Shingo took another look at the room to make sure he’d had it right. He hadn’t been able to step into this room since Usagi, ChibiUsa, and Setsuna had moved into it, and while he wasn’t overly concerned about a miscalculation hitting one of the other girls, he _was_ concerned about missing Setsuna. He’d been keeping a very close watch on her since that first day, noting that she reacted _very_ quickly to things, sometimes so fast it was like she knew they were coming before they’d even happened. A formidable opponent, but nothing he couldn’t handle with a little care.

She had really nice legs, too.

Shingo shook his head. *Focus! Keep your mind on the mission, and... hey, what’s that?*

The flashlight beam had passed something red and orange and sparkling up on the shelf over Usagi’s bed, and when he moved the light back for a second look, Shingo’s eyes widened. Not that he was an expert or anything, but that was hands-down _the_ most incredible piece of sculpture he’d ever seen. Usagi must have gotten it from that Mamoru person, and Shingo felt his personal approval rating of the guy go up a few grudging notches. Not that he forgave him; any jerk who went and got _his_ sister pregnant and then skipped town had better not expect to get away with it just with a rock on a ring and piece of glass. Although to be fair, the ‘rock’ was pretty sizable, and the ‘glass’ was nothing short of fantastic.

Shingo shook his head again and told himself that he obviously wasn’t thinking straight, and that he _really_ should get to work, but instead he stepped up onto the bed to get the extra altitude necessary for a good, long look at the fiery bird in its shattering crystal shell. The shimmering effect was even more amazing as the flashlight got closer, almost as if the bird were made of real fire rather than glass crystal, and the light and heat of the flashlight were getting that fire going again.

A sudden wish that Mika could see this was his first errant thought since entering the room that Shingo didn’t try to dismiss. Curious to see if the thing _felt_ as warm as it looked, he started to reach up.

The door opened suddenly, and Shingo blinked and tried to turn around when the lights flicked on. Unfortunately, his footing wasn’t the best; his legs got crossed, and he fell, twisting sideways and falling over the side of the bed. Shingo landed on the floor with no particular gentleness, and as the final insult, the water balloon he’d been holding burst, raining a brief but thorough soaking down on him.

A shadow appeared and looked down at him; Shingo looked up at his mother’s stern face and grinned weakly.

“Uh... hi, mom... I was... er... I was just...”

It was less than thirty seconds before Ikuko was hauling her son out of the room by one ear; Shingo cast a brief, accusatory glance at the crystal egg, which continued to shimmer alluringly up until the moment the lights went out again and the door closed.

Makoto set down her tea, apologized to Kima, and headed back to the kitchen as the phone rang again.

“Moshimoshi?”

“Mako-chan, it’s me.”

“Hi, Ami-chan. Is the date going well?”

“Yes. The trip went a lot better than expected, actually. Listen, Mako-chan, we tried to get in touch with you earlier, and we got the message. Is your guest still there?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Why?”

“Well, there was a bit of a problem in the park that we had to deal with. Setsuna dealt with it, actually. Saturn’s going to take her back to Usagi, Minako, and Artemis at the mall, and since there really isn’t anything else that needs doing tonight, she offered to drop the rest of us at home as well. I’m just making sure whether it’s safe for her to open a door into the apartment.”

“No,” Makoto replied, glancing quickly towards the living room, “that probably wouldn’t be a good idea. You said Setsuna’s there with you?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Well as it turns out, my guest was hoping to be able to talk to her about something. Could you put her on the line for a minute?”

“Uh... sure. Just a moment.” There was a faint thump as Ami put the phone down and went to get Setsuna. Makoto smiled—Ami just wasn’t the type to yell down the hall for someone—and leaned out of the kitchen.

“Kima-san? Could you come here a moment?”

“Hello?”

“Setsuna,” Makoto said, making sure to speak loudly and clearly enough for Kima to hear, “hi. Did you enjoy the movie?”

“I only got to see the first half, but yes, I rather liked it.”

“Good. We’ll get your social life shaped up yet. Look, the reason I wanted to talk to you is that I have a guest here right now who wants to speak with you. It’s kind of a personal matter, and talking over the phone wouldn’t really do it justice, so would you mind it if she went over to Usagi-chan’s to talk to you in person?”

“I... I suppose... do I know this friend of yours?”

“Her name’s Fuucho Kima, but don’t be surprised if you don’t recognize it; you only met her that one time, and she didn’t introduce herself.” Makoto glanced at Kima, blushed slightly, and coughed. “So it’s okay with you if she stops by?”

“Yes. It’s five after seven now, and Hotaru-chan is going to drop me at the mall in a few minutes, so Usagi-chan and I ought to get home by seven- thirty...”

“Okay, seven-thirty it is. I’ll tell her. And Setsuna,” Makoto added, smiling, “tell Ami-chan I’ll leave my bedroom door shut tonight, so if she wants to sneak anyone in later, she can.”

“I’ll... tell her that.”

“Thanks. ‘Bye, Setsuna.” Makoto hung up the phone and turned to Kima. “Well, that’s that. She said she’ll be home by seven-thirty, so if you want, you can head over there any time.”

“You’re awfully eager to throw me out all of a sudden.”

“As a friend of mine couldn’t say, there’s no sense putting off until tomorrow what you can do today. Besides, you’re drinking all my good tea!” They both laughed for a moment, then stood there a bit awkwardly. “But, um... seriously,” Makoto said, rubbing her arm, “if you want to stick around for a little bit longer, I don’t mind.”

“I wouldn’t mind either,” Kima replied, “but you’re right. It took me a week to get up the nerve to come this far, and if I back off now, I may lose my momentum.”

Makoto nodded and set about gathering up the teacups while Kima got her coat and purse and slipped her shoes back on.

“Thank you for the tea,” Kima said, buttoning up her coat. “And for your time.”

“And for not attacking you again?”

Kima chuckled. “Yes, that especially.” She turned to the door, then stopped and turned back. “Makoto... I know this may sound a little strange, but have you ever given any thought to what sort of career you might want to go into?”

“Well, yeah, actually I have. When I was little, I wanted to work in a flower shop... like my mother did... but after a while I realized that I liked the plants I was helping to raise too much to be any good at selling them.”

“And now?”

“Now... now, I’m hoping to be a chef and open a restaurant. A real gourmet place, not one of these fast-food joints that you see everywhere these days. I _like_ cheeseburgers, but there’s something about a well-cooked meal...” Makoto folded her arms and thought back. “There was one time when my mother got really sick and had to stay home in bed for three days. She always made me a bowl of chicken soup when I wasn’t feeling good, so I went into the kitchen and did the same thing for her, and when I took it up to her, she gave me a smile that made me feel warm all over—just for a bowl of soup. I knew right then and there that I wanted to be able to see people happy like that all the time, so I began cooking all the time.” She rolled her eyes. “I needed the practice, you see; that first bowl of soup was _really_ bad. Still, I kept on trying, and I got better. That was... almost nine years ago...”

Privately amazed at the time that had gone by, Makoto counted off on her fingers. *Nine years... has it really been that long?* She shook her head and looked up at Kima. “But you were going to ask me something, weren’t you?”

“I was. It’s... well, I was just going to suggest that maybe you might want to give some thought to looking into counseling.”

*Counseling?* Makoto blinked. “You mean like in... _psychiatric_ counseling? Therapy and all that? ME?”

Kima nodded. “Makoto, neither of us had any reason to be able to sit down and be civil with each other when I got here, but... it was just so _easy_ to talk to you. You listened to me. You listened better than a lot of people I know who are my age or older, and you got me to talk about a lot more than I ever intended to. You’re not that much older than my daughter, but I was absolutely comfortable talking to you. That’s... that’s really an extraordinary gift.”

“Um... yeah...” Makoto blushed and looked at the floor, but not entirely out of embarrassment. “Usagi-chan says sometimes it’s like I’m trying to be everyone’s big sister. But it’s just the way I am; it’s not that special.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that.” Kima opened up her purse and took out a small notepad and a pen, and quickly scribbled down a number and a name. “I have a friend who got into psychiatry when she was in college, and she works cases for the hospital, sometimes with staff, sometimes with patients. She’s also had a hand in a few of those peer counseling programs in the schools, and I think she’d like to meet you. Here.” Kima tore off the paper and handed it over. “Think it over for a few days and give her a call.”

Makoto took the paper and looked at it. “There’s two numbers here.”

“The one on the top is hers. Mine’s the other one.” Makoto glanced up, and Kima smiled somewhat uncertainly. “A woman with my attitude doesn’t exactly make a new friend every day.”

Makoto blinked and then slowly smiled back at her. “Neither do I.”

The new sisters were sitting together on the couch again, so Ami felt Calypso jump a little bit when Setsuna came back into the room. Amnesia or not, this was _Pluto_; she had been a legend in the Silver Millennium among anyone who really knew anything about the Senshi, and she intimidated the Nereid just by being in the same room.

Calypso didn’t have quite the same effect on Setsuna as Setsuna had on her. To put it simply, she was just the latest oddity in an ongoing cavalcade of oddities that Setsuna had been dealing with since waking up in Ami’s house two months before. She herself had been around for a good two or three thousand years, and she was living with a girl who was the conscious reincarnation of a Princess from a thousand years back, and another girl who was the thousand years’ hence version of the first one’s currently unborn daughter.

Once Setsuna had successfully dealt with issues like _that_ without going insane, little things like Ami having brought home a nonhuman, shapeshifting, telepathic sister from that same bygone era were pretty much robbed of any shock value.

“We’d better get going, Hotaru-chan.”

Hotaru nodded; while the younger girl was transforming, Setsuna turned to Ami. “And Mako-chan... asked me to tell you something. Um... her exact words were ‘tell Ami-chan I’ll leave my bedroom door shut tonight, so if she wants to sneak anyone in later, she can.’”

“That,” Ami said in a level voice, “means she’s getting her guest out right now.”

“Not a word from you,” Michiru said quietly, catching Haruka’s shoulder under her fingertips.

“I’m ready,” Saturn said. She headed out to the foyer and slashed open a dimension door, one which looked _down_ at the roof of the mall from a point somewhere far enough above it that the entire place was visible. “Wait here for a minute, Setsuna. I’ll find a clear place down there and open another door, okay?”

Saturn stepped—or perhaps jumped—through the door and began to float gently down towards the mall as the portal swirled shut behind her. A few moments passed, and another door opened; Saturn was standing in front of a parking lot.

“No security cameras out here,” she explained. “And the lot itself is empty. You’ll have a bit more of a walk than if I’d set you down inside the mall, but nobody’ll take any real notice of you this way.”

“Nicely planned,” Setsuna congratulated her, stepping through and looking around with a satisfied nod. “Thank you, Saturn.”

Saturn curtsied and then stepped back into the foyer, closing the door behind her. She leaned to one side to glance into the living room. “Did you want to go back to Mako-chan’s right now, Ami-chan, or would you rather wait a few minutes?”

“Let’s make sure she’s had time to get her guest safely out of the way first.” Ami looked at Ryo, who had borrowed Luna’s icepack to deal with his own headache. “Did you want Saturn to drop you off at home as well, Ryo-kun?”

“Would you mind?” Ryo said hopefully, looking at Saturn. “It would really help, because the sooner I get home, the sooner I can crash for the next twelve hours.”

“What did you see, exactly?” Haruka asked. “Calypso was in such a rush to play with your mind that you didn’t mention the last few visions all that clearly.”

Ryo held out a hand and started ticking the visions off on his fingers. “Somebody walking around on one of the moons of Jupiter. A scene of Chiba-san standing next to a guy who looks like he could bench a small car with one hand, but with no sense of danger involved. A moonlit beach during the summer, with a boat coming right up to the shore. The moon wasn’t large enough to show me any details about the boat or anybody who might have been on it, though. A daytime earthquake, definitely during the summer, and of moderately impressive magnitude. Something in a very dark and very cold place, breaking—I couldn’t see what, or where—and a building collapsing, but not because of the earthquake; this’ll happen at night, and the buildings nearby looked okay. I think it’s an apartment building under construction.”

“Well,” Haruka said, “that was about as clear as mud.”

“Now that Ami-chan’s got the Caduceus and her sister back,” Saturn said, leaning casually on the Silence Glaive, “what exactly do we do next?”

“We keep training,” Luna replied, “and we start doing some research. Calypso’s suggestion about finding more Weapons is a good one for several reasons, and now that we know Rooky can find specific words in the Book, I’ll have Artemis assemble an inventory of all the Weapons that were in the arsenal so Rei knows what to tell Rooky to look for. Ami, since you have access to Mercury’s memories, I want you to put together a complete list of the major cities on each planet, and all the lunar colonies, and then start searching the archive for a way to track down missing Weapons. Rei will probably find the list at least a little useful, and if you can find anything that’ll let us locate Weapons from a distance, we can broaden the search.”

Ami nodded and turned to Saturn. “I’ll check to see if there’s anything on the dimension doors you might be able to use.”

“I also want you to collect whatever information you can about the four Talismans—specifically, their powers and properties. Be sure to go into detail about the scrying powers of the Aqua Mirror and the Garnet Orb.” Luna thought for a moment. “You should probably go ahead and read up on Gladius and the Book as well, just to make sure there aren’t any more surprises coming our way from either of them. Can you handle all that?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll be joining the others in the training from now on,” Luna added. Ami gave her an amused look. “Sorry; force of habit.” Luna fell silent. “That’s just about all I can think of... there really isn’t that much we can do right now except wait for the other side to make their next move, and do our best to counter it. So unless anybody has any ideas...” She waited, looking around, but all Luna got were shrugs and headshakes. “Then I guess for now, that’s that.”

“Okay,” Saturn said. “I guess I’ll go see if Mako-chan’s place is clear.” She smiled. “After all, we don’t want to deprive her of meeting Caly again, do we?”

Usagi and Setsuna got off the bus less than a block from home. Minako and Artemis waved goodbye from the window as the vehicle moved off, and Usagi watched them go with a neutral expression.

“Concerned?” Setsuna asked.

“I don’t need to be psychic to know that I’m almost certainly going to regret _that_ at some point,” Usagi replied, indicating the departing bus—and two of its passengers—with a nod of her head. She sighed and started walking. “So. Ami-chan goes looking for a cure to her problem, and she comes back with it, a lifetime’s worth of Nereid memories crammed into her head, and a sister on one arm.”

“Yes. I believe they decided to drop by and visit you tomorrow.”

“Great.” Usagi looked at her older friend curiously. “And you? How do you feel now that you’ve graduated your first modern Senshi battle with flying colors?”

“Good,” Setsuna said, smiling. “I feel good.” They were silent after that until they reach the Tsukino house and saw an unfamiliar car parked out front. Usagi noted curiously that, while the lights were on, _their_ car was not in the driveway.

“Did Mako-chan mention anything about who this friend of hers was, or what she wanted to talk to you about?”

“Nothing specific beyond her name and the fact that I’ve met her before—recently, I’d guess, from the way Mako-chan was talking.”

“Well, let’s find out.”

They went inside. Usagi paused and looked back, calling for Luna but getting no response. After a moment, she shrugged and closed the door, knowing her mother would check a few more times later on.

“Mom?”

“In here, dear. We have a guest.”

“Yeah,” Usagi said, hanging up her coat and putting her shoes away, “Mako-chan mentioned we ought to expect...”

She stopped short as she came into the living room and saw Makoto’s ‘friend’ sitting on a chair. Usagi recognized her at once, and stood there, blinking and with her mouth hanging open. *The nurse?*

“I see you remember me,” Kima said. “Hello, Meiou-san.”

Setsuna nodded. “Fuucho-san.”

“Usagi-chan,” Ikuko said, “let’s leave them to talk in private. I want to speak to you in the kitchen for a moment.”

“Buh... whe... eh?” Ikuko turned Usagi around and gently directed her out into the kitchen, where—without the woman to stare at—she recovered from her surprise relatively quickly. “Mom, that was... Mako-chan actually _talked_ to her?”

“She did. Kima-san wanted to apologize to both Mako-chan and Setsuna for some of the things she said the last time you saw her. She came over here earlier and talked to me for a while, and I sent her over to see Mako-chan; she just got back a few minutes ago.” Ikuko crossed her arms. “Now, Usagi-chan... there’s something I’d like you to explain for me. How long have you known Setsuna could see the future?”

Usagi gaped at her mother and started making funny noises again.