All things considered, last night had been just about the strangest in recent memory—and Makoto could remember some very strange nights.

After Kima departed, Makoto had cleaned up the remnants of the tea and then spent a lot of time looking at the phone numbers the woman had left. As a rule, the only people Makoto generally took phone numbers from after one meeting were cute guys; as another rule, she nearly never called those numbers, and always wound up throwing them out. She also tended not to take psychiatrists very seriously in any sense, not because she had anything against them, but because the whole idea was for the patient to have someone to confide in—and Makoto had several people to talk to when she was feeling down. Even if two of them were cats.

Once she got started with that line of thought, Makoto amused herself for a while by imagining how her old counsellor would have responded if Makoto had come in one day, pulled up a couch, and said something along the lines of:

“I’m feeling much better now, Tsuta-san, and I think this’ll be our last session. I have a lot of friends now that I can talk to about anything, and they understand my situation very well because they’ve all got voices of dead girls living part-time in their heads as well, and that’s perfectly normal for people who are the reincarnations of a bunch of magical warriors and a Princess of the Moon who all died over a thousand years ago. Sure, we have to put our necks on the block every now and then in the name of love and justice because all these monsters just can’t get it through their heads to leave us alone, but everybody needs a little aggravation in their lives, and we’ve got a couple of cats who’ve been able to tell us all _sorts_ of useful things...”

Any normal person who heard a story like that would immediately send for a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist would probably call the asylum not long after.

When the dimension door screeched open a few minutes later and deposited Saturn, Ami, Ryo, Rei, Luna, and another Ami just inside the door of the apartment, Makoto thought perhaps she might need a trip to the asylum after all—but only for the few moments Amalthea needed to give her a psychic kick in the head, helping her reincarnated self identify Mercury’s little sister.

From there, the night had gone all over the place, starting with Ami and Luna explaining to Makoto how Calypso had survived, leading into a discussion of what the Senshi were going to do for the foreseeable future, and at some point making mention of the fact that Makoto now had two roommates, but it would be no trouble at all since Caly didn’t need a bed or food, just proximity to Ami, water, and a little electricity every now and then...

Luna had taken off for home almost immediately when Makoto explained in turn about her ‘guest’, and how Ikuko apparently now knew about Setsuna’s ability to predict the future. Knowing as she did how absolutely incapable Usagi was of holding things back from her mother when directly confronted, Makoto could fully understand Luna’s panicked rush, but she was too busy trying to wrap her mind around Calypso to do more than wonder briefly if Ikuko was going to greet her as Jupiter the next time they ran into each other at the grocery store.

Ryo had spent about ten minutes saying goodbye to Ami before Saturn whisked him off to a point not far from his home, and then gone home herself. Rei departed towards nine, leaving Makoto with her roommates, the necessity of washing out her tea set again, and a mind absolutely swimming in the emotional fallout being generated by the two reunited sisters. Makoto’s head hit the pillow at about quarter to ten, and she had some very bizarre dreams that night, including one about an underground city of marble and crystal with a nearly perpetual fog drifting about its streets and skyways.

Upon waking some nine hours later with a perfectly intact recollection of that dream, Makoto immediately suspected that it was really a memory; she didn’t remember her dreams _that_ completely, and she knew her own imagination wasn’t quite vivid enough to come up with something like that in such realistic detail.

Tugging on her green housecoat as she stepped out of her bedroom, Makoto covered a yawn, shuffled into the kitchen, and got to work with breakfast. She popped three slices of bread into her four-slice toaster, got out the butter and honey, and then paused to blink blearily at the glowing slots of the toaster as she realized she didn’t know how Calypso liked her morning toast.

Of course, the fact was that Calypso didn’t _eat_ toast—or anything else solid, for that matter—whether it was morning, noon, or night, but it would be another five or six minutes before Makoto’s brain got far enough into its start- up routine to be able to remember that, so she padded down the hall to Ami’s room and knocked softly on the door.

“Ami-chan? Caly-chan?” The only response was a funny chiming sound. Blinking slowly, Makoto opened the door and looked in.

Ami was laying on her left side, slightly curled up; Calypso was laying on her right side, but otherwise in the same fetal position, and facing Ami. Their foreheads were almost touching, and Ami’s right hand was loosely joined with Caly’s left. In that light, and seeing as how Calypso had changed her ‘clothing’ to match Ami’s favorite blue pajamas last night, the only things to distinguish between the pair were that Ami was sleeping beneath the covers, while Calypso was sleeping above them, and slightly off the edge of the mattress. It wasn’t that big a bed, after all, but even though Calypso’s body was more than halfway over the side, she hadn’t fallen to the floor; she wasn’t even bobbing up and down. There was also a lot of light blue mist floating around, its movements apparently the source of the chiming noise, and it clung so closely to the sleeping figures that it was impossible to tell which of them was responsible for it.

Even with the oddities of the floating girl and the glowing mist to contend with, the kawaii-ness of the moment made Makoto smile and hug herself as an almost ridiculously warm feeling welled up inside her. She also woke up rather quickly and tugged her housecoat more firmly closed as a bit of the cool, damp mist drifted past and brushed against her leg.

*Mako-chan?* It sounded like Calypso’s voice, and sure enough, her eyes opened a moment later as she glanced down towards the door and smiled. The mist began to disappear, as did the odd noise. “Good morning, Mako-chan. And please, keep your voice down; Ami’s still asleep.”

“She’s usually an early riser.”

“Not today.” Calypso leaned over and kissed Ami on the forehead, then floated over the side of the bed and onto her feet. The mist had completly faded by the time her toes touched the carpet. “You see, I don’t sleep the same way you do; I put certain parts of my energy into a low-activity state and become more or less physically dormant, but I can keep my mind relatively conscious at the same time. Ami can do it, too, so we talked for a lot of the night even after she fell asleep, but it seems that it isn’t quite as restful for a human body as ordinary sleep, so she needs some time to catch up.” The Nereid made a shooing motion with her hands and herded Makoto out of the room.

Once they were out in the hall and the door was closed, Calypso looked at Makoto, added a blue copy of the green housecoat over her pajamas, and then asked what had brought Makoto in.

“I wanted to know how you took your toast.”

Calypso smiled. “I don’t eat your kind of food, Mako-chan.”

“I know.”

If anything, the Nereid’s smile grew. “Then why did you come to ask me how I liked my toast?”

“Quit teasing me, Caly. I’m not a morning person.” Makoto rubbed at her eyes. “What was the deal with the mist and that ringing noise you were making, anyway?”

“It happens sometimes when we try to sleep in a solid shape; we shut down too much of our energy to keep holding the body we’ve chosen, and start to turn back to our normal form. It’s a simple miscalculation to make, and it’s been ten centuries since the last time I tried to sleep in human shape, so I’m a little out of practice. As for that noise you heard, it was sort of like how you humans sometimes snore or talk in your sleep.”

“Okay. As long as you’re not sick or... or...” Makoto yawned again and had a thought in the middle of it. “It won’t hurt you if I turn on the toaster or the stove, will it?”

“Not unless I do something as silly as actually touching a burner or putting my head in the oven.” Calypso looked around at the apartment. “You’ve got the temperature in here set to the point where I’ll have to take in a bit more water than I can naturally absorb from the air to keep my balance, but a glass of water every day ought to be more than plenty. At least until summer gets here. I’ll probably have to drink as much as one of you, then.”

“Water won’t be a problem,” Makoto said as they entered the kitchen, “but how often will you have to eat? We do get charged for the electricity we use in our homes, you know.” The toast popped, and she got to work on it.

“Ami and I discussed that for quite a while,” Calypso admitted, floating up and sitting on the edge of the counter. “Nereids originally fed by tracking down electrical buildups in cloud formations, entering the clouds, and drawing in the energy. One meal like that would keep me going for two or three weeks, but I’ve never fed in that manner, and I’m not completely sure where I’d begin. It’s like how your ancestors used to hunt wild animals for meat; just because _they_ were able to do it doesn’t automatically mean _you_ can, and if you don’t know what you’re doing you’ll go hungry and possibly get hurt in the process. After all, even a Nereid can only take in so much electricity at one time. I’d be better off with a more gradual method of feeding, but I’ve got to find a suitable source first; what I took in at Michiru’s last night is already running down.”

Makoto looked up from the toast. “If you really need to eat...”

“No, it’s alright. After being linked to the Blue Hall for so long, I’ve got quite a lot of extra energy stored up. I won’t be in any sort of danger for another three or four of your weeks, so that gives me plenty of time to experiment with the available sources. Ami suggested we look into modern batteries, and she’s going to check the Lunar archives to see if there’s anything useful on this subject that she doesn’t already know about.” Calypso smiled speculatively and propped her chin on one hand. “Of course, I’m still hoping you’ll learn enough in the next month or so to feed me yourself.”

A confused look settled onto Makoto’s face. “Say that again?”

“I can absorb electricity whether it’s naturally occuring or artificially created,” Calypso said. “The natural type is the most nourishing because it’s pure, but it’s also tricky to get, while most artificial forms of electricity are only good as a temporary food source—and they tend to have side-effects or drawbacks. From the Nereid perspective, the power of a Senshi of Jupiter was just about the best meal around because it combined the pure energy of natural lightning with the more measured and controllable rate of feeding permitted by artificial energy sources.” Calypso beamed at her. “And we’d get a lovely hostess to prepare the meal, too.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” Makoto replied, yawning again. “And I’m not too thrilled at the idea of throwing one of my attacks at a friend.”

“Neither am I, when you get down to it, but it’s not your attacks that I’m talking about. Just _being_ Jupiter causes a lot of electrical force to build up inside and around your body; if you were to stay transformed for two or three hours, I could make quite a good meal off of the normal discharge. Once you hit a certain point in your training, you’ll be able to manipulate electrical energy on a more precise level than the large amounts you use in your attacks; that’s what I’m hoping for.”

“I think you may have a bit of a wait, then. I don’t even get shocks from walking around on carpets that often, so I’m probably not going to be fixing you any high-voltage meals in the near future.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Calypso glanced at the nearest of Makoto’s many potted plants. “Do you have trouble growing plants?”

“Um... no. But what does that have to do with...”

“Plants tend to respond well when they’re regularly exposed to mild electrical fields,” Calypso said. “We used to have all kinds of interesting fungus and flowers adapted to the low light growing in the tunnels back home, and I always thought that half the reason the Venusian jungles were so overgrown was that the metal deposits in the mountains threw electromagnetic energy all over the place. And you wouldn’t _believe_ the size of the crops they could grow on the Jovian moons in a good season.”

“I might,” Makoto said faintly, briefly remembering taking walks through a field of something that looked like wheat but was about four meters tall... and she dimly recalled playing _inside_ some sort of enormous gourd as a very young child... she shook her head. “What does growing plants have to do with feeding you?”

“Well,” Calypso said, hopping down from her perch on the counter, “it’s pretty much a given that you’ve used your abilities to help these flowers in some fashion, even if you weren’t consciously aware of it. Senshi powers work on a more instinctive level than just about any other form of magic, so simple forms of them tend to manifest pretty early on in the girl’s life. If...”

Less than three steps away from the counter, Calypso was jerked to a halt by the metal handles of several drawers and cupboards that had become magnetically attached to the back of her housecoat. Makoto had to smile around a piece of toast as the Nereid turned and glared over her shoulder at the offending devices, then took hold of her housecoat and yanked it free with an annoyed huff that was both very Ami-like and yet very unlike Ami.

“Don’t laugh,” Calypso said warningly. “It can happen to you, too, eventually.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Makoto promised. “You were going to say something about the flowers?”

“I was going to suggest that since it’s extremely likely that you’ve already used your powers on plants in the past, learning to _consciously_ help them grow shouldn’t be too hard for you, so you should get some seeds and give it a try. If it works, you’ll be that much closer to really mastering your abilities—not to mention feeding me.”

At Calypso’s mention of seeds, Makoto immediately thought of the strange silver acorn she had received from Sasanna and her brother. They’d asked her to plant it, but she’d been so busy this past week with trying to get accustomed to going about her life while feeling other people’s emotions that she just hadn’t found the time to get around to fulfilling that request. And somehow she knew that she wouldn’t have any better luck this week, what with the exams and all. But next week was the beginning of spring break...

“I’ll be sure to give that a try,” Makoto said.

“We’re going to get in trouble.”

“No we’re not.”

“You’re a terrible liar, Caly, you know that?”

Michiru was quite certain that this was both a dream and a memory. She felt extremely light, almost as if she were floating, but without water, and she was moving through a fairy-tale landscape where many of the trees had silver leaves and the Earth hung, huge and blue and white, in the starry sky above. She was moving through this no-longer existent forest inside a remembered body which was quite a bit smaller than her current one, following a girl who looked like Ami might have at age ten.

“It wasn’t a lie,” Calypso replied confidently. “You’re supposed to be training, right? Well, we’re going to work on your swimming. You’ll get plenty of exercise, _and_ you’ll be working closely with water. Doesn’t your mother always say training goes better when you Senshi have access to a ready supply of your specific element?”

“My mother _also_ says training alone isn’t any good, because you don’t have anybody to compare yourself to and see how much you still need to shape up.”

“That’s why _I’m_ here, silly.” Calypso shook her head. “You know, Lari, for a genius, you can be awfully slow-witted sometimes. But then again, I guess I can’t expect that heavy, solid brain of yours to let your thoughts run as smoothly as mine do.”

“At least _I_ can keep my mind on something,” Larissa said, hopping up on top of and then down from a low rock. “All it takes to change _your_ mind is a gust of wind. Not even Auntie Ishtar gets distracted as easily as you do.”

*’Auntie’ Ishtar?* Michiru thought.

“Oh yes she does! Even a hint of a handsome face is all it takes to make her completely forget about whatever she was doing!”

“Yes, but at least she’s consistent; _you_ get distracted by anything and everything that comes along.”

“I do not! And what’s that?” Calypso said, looking and pointing at something in the distance. Michiru turned to look at whatever the Nereid was indicating, no faster and no slower than her dreamed body, and she felt a blush that wasn’t precisely her own warming her cheeks.

“That was an evil thing to do, Caly.”

“Yes, it was, but you earned it. Ah, here we are.”

They had stopped at the edge of a water-filled crater perhaps three times the size of most swimming pools Michiru had ever seen, and somewhat deeper. While she—Larissa—set down the basket she had been carrying, Calypso went ahead and entered the water. It was a very peculiar but utterly fascinating sort of thing to watch, as the Nereid didn’t jump in or wade in, but instead propelled herself out over the surface and sank down slowly, just sort of melding with the pool as the illusion of the blue dress she had been ‘wearing’ flowed off of her equally illusory skin and left behind a pale blue sheen that covered the Nereid’s little-girl body like a wetsuit. Even if one looked very closely—which Michiru did—it was hard to tell where the water ended and the Nereid began.

Floating on her back, Calypso turned around and looked at Larissa. “The water’s fine. Are you coming in, or do I have to drag you?”

“Your definition of ‘fine’ nearly gave me a cold the last time,” Larissa replied, holding up the hem of her own dress as she tested the water with her toes. Michiru could feel the water herself, and even for something in a dream, it felt unearthly; she also caught a glimpse of Larissa’s reflection in the rippling surface of the pond, and was stunned by just how young the face she could see there really was. She was even more surprised when, after nodding in satisfaction, Larissa produced a transformation pen and assumed the form of a ChibiNeptune.

*She’s just a child.* The unreality of the dream-memory seemed to distort and waver at that thought, but Michiru didn’t stop thinking it. *She was so young... _I_ was so young... and they were already training me...?*

Larissa looked down at herself and furrowed her forehead in concentration, causing the skirt and shoes of her uniform to vanish, and the dream-world blurred again as Michiru tried to blink in astonishment at the child-Senshi’s demonstration of an ability she herself hadn’t ever stopped to think might exist—and then, with a loud yell and a louder splash, they were in the water.

If the touch of the water on her remembered toes had been unearthly, the feel of it all around her was indescribable. It was warm and cool at the same time, crystal clear and sparkling and just _light_, almost as light as air...

The dream blurred again, sharper than ever, as something about that memory of swimming struck Michiru as incredibly wrong. It wasn’t the pool or Calypso or her, it was... it was...

“YEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHOOOOOOOO!!!”

The dream flew apart as a familiar dark-haired cannonball splashed down in the middle of the waterbed and woke Michiru up all the way. There seemed to be a new element involved in the routine now, because in addition to the sloshing tossing and rippling of the waterbed, Hotaru’s enthusiastic hugs and kisses and shouting, and Haruka’s bellyaching grumbles and feeble threats, Michiru could hear someone laughing hysterically. She glanced at the bedroom door and saw that ChibiUsa was leaning against the doorframe for support, doubled over while all the little pink bunny rabbits on her pajamas came close to hopping away as she giggled and spluttered.

“What is _this_?” Haruka demanded, glaring at Hotaru and gesturing at ChibiUsa with a note of exasperation. “Are we a public spectacle, now?”

“Don’t be such a grouch,” Hotaru retorted, poking Haruka repeatedly in the stomach. “And just count your blessings that she turned down the offer to help me wake you two up.”

“Thank you for that,” Michiru said, nodding at ChibiUsa, who nodded back, her lips pressed into a thin line.

“It wasn’t that I think you two don’t love me,” she said after a few moments, in a voice that was getting out through a smile. “It’s just that I _know_ you don’t love me _enough_ to let me get away with that like you do Hotaru-chan.”

“Very true,” Michiru agreed. “Especially since we don’t even let _her_ get away with it.”

That was all the warning Hotaru got before Michiru grabbed her from behind and started tickling her in the ribs. Hotaru squirmed like crazy and laughed continuously as she tried to get away or tickle back.

“Alright,” Haruka muttered, “that’s all the manic cuteness I can stand at this hour.” She got out of bed, shrugging her housecoat on over her nightshirt on the way to the door—it took another effort for ChibiUsa not to laugh when she saw the yellow smiley face located dead center on the shirt—and waved dismissively back at Michiru and Hotaru. “Come on, kid. I’ll make you breakfast or something.”

ChibiUsa blinked as Haruka half-led, half-dragged her away. “You can cook?” she blurted.

“It depends on what you consider the definition of ‘cooking’ to be. If it can be popped in a toaster or nuked in a microwave or just torn from the wrapper and eaten, I can handle it, but that’s about as far as I’ve ever pushed my culinary abilities. I do make a killer coffee,” Haruka added, “but you’re too young for that, and you’re much too short to be able to afford having your growth stunted.”

“This from the woman who drinks coffee like a fish drinks water and still manages to push the six-foot-corner of the envelope.”

“I grew early. By the time I was your age, I...” Haruka paused mid-way down the stairs and frowned. “Refresh my memory; how old are you, again?”

“I’ll be thirteen this summer.”

“Right. Thirteen. Thanks.” Haruka shook her head. “It’s a wonder that I even bother to count birthdays anymore. I mean, on the one hand we’ve got you and Setsuna hopping around through Time, and on the other we’ve got Hotaru’s whole situation—_and_ we’ve got Luna, Artemis, and now Calypso to add to the mix. Not to mention the fact that except for you and Setsuna, we’re all the reincarnations of a bunch of dead women who’ve managed to get ourselves killed at least twice in the line of duty.”

“I can see where that might be confusing,” ChibiUsa agreed. She was quite familiar with ‘Hotaru’s whole situation’; in the several future birthday parties for Saturn that she’d attended, there was always just one candle on the cake. After being possessed by Mistress Nine, reborn as an infant, accelerated to childhood, and then getting killed and brought back _again_—and adding the stretch of time from modern Tokyo to Crystal Tokyo on top of that—not even Saturn was really sure how old she was anymore. “But just think about what a recommendation like ‘Killed in the line of duty—twice’ will do for your resume.”

At that, Haruka started laughing. It wasn’t really that funny, but she’d just gotten out of bed, so the chemical balance of her brain was still a bit off.

“Come on,” she chuckled, slapping ChibiUsa on the shoulder and nearly knocking her off her feet. “Let’s see if we can feed ourselves without incinerating the kitchen. I’m thinking you’ll want to get home early today so you can see Usagi-chan’s reaction when she meets Calypso face-to-face.”

“Usagi-chan?”

“Goway.”

“Usagi-chan.”

“Leemelone.”

Setsuna sighed, moved around to one side of the bed, and lightly shook the halfway-sleeping girl’s shoulder. “Usagi,” she said firmly, “it’s time to get up. We have guests.”

“Mmmnphnm,” Usagi replied, inching away from Setsuna’s hand and burying her face in her pillow.

Sitting over on ChibiUsa’s unused bed, Luna shook her head. “You’re going about it the wrong way, Setsuna.”

“Oh?”

“You have to be direct. _Very_ direct,” Luna added, extending her claws for emphasis.

Setsuna thought about that, then reached out, yanked the covers away, and shouted “WAKE UP!” at Usagi from almost point-blank range.

“YIIIIIIAAAAAAAH!” Usagi jumped awake so fast that she very nearly hit the ceiling, and Luna toppled over sideways, overcome with laughter. She’d woken Usagi up by main force more times than she cared to recall, but she’d never had the opportunity to get such a perfect view of the entire wake-up process as this one, so she hadn’t realized until now just how funny it was to watch the whole thing play out.

“Don’t DO that!” Usagi demanded.

“Would you rather I had Luna stick you?”

Usagi glanced over at Luna, who was still laughing, rolling around on ChibiUsa’s bed and waving her paws in the air, and sighed. She pitched a pillow at her furry friend and then sat up, rubbing at her tired eyes.

“Please tell me last night was just a bad dream.”

“Last night was just a bad dream,” Setsuna said obediently, earning a bleary-eyed glare.

Ikuko had taken the news that Setsuna was prophetic entirely too calmly for Usagi’s peace of mind; the thing that had really upset her was that she had learned about it from someone other than her daughter. Ikuko did not like being lied to, particularly by the members of her family, but she wasn’t really angry. She had understood, even before she asked Usagi, why no one had told her about Setsuna’s ability—which was to say, she understood that it wasn’t the sort of thing most people could know about without making a major spectacle of, and that such behavior was something a woman trying to cope with a massive case of amnesia really didn’t need to deal with.

So no, Ikuko wasn’t angry that she hadn’t been told. What she was, was hurt—and disappointed. First that Usagi hadn’t trusted her enough to say something at the beginning, and then that nearly two months had failed to make Usagi or Setsuna talk to her about it.

All in all, Usagi thought she would have rather dealt with an angry mom than an injured one. When she got angry, Ikuko was terrifying in a way no monster could ever match, but Usagi had learned to deal with those fits of righteous indignation. After years of slacking off, fighting with her brother, and getting grades that were average at best, even after getting _pregnant_, this was the first indication Ikuko had _ever_ shown which suggested she was genuinely disappointed in her daughter, and Usagi had been at an almost total loss for how to handle it.

She had finally retreated to her room when Kima left—Setsuna hadn’t said exactly what she and the older woman had talked about for that whole hour, except that Kima had _not_ asked for anything remotely like a fortune-telling— only to get cornered by Luna and interrogated for another hour. Luna had been stuck outside during the entire first hour because she couldn’t very well transform in plain sight and let herself in, and nobody had opened the door until Kima left; Ikuko had banished Shingo to his room after catching him trying to boobytrap the other bedroom, and Kenji—catching wind of the fact that his wife wanted the first floor clear for a few hours that evening—had taken off to spend those few hours running some errands.

This left a rather irritated cat to sit out in the snow for the better part of an hour and freeze her whiskers off, so Luna was not in the best of moods when she started questioning Usagi. Their combined bad moods meant that they had come close to shouting at each other several times before Luna finally acknowledged that Usagi had done okay and admitted no Senshi secrets had been compromised, at which point Usagi went straight to bed and fell asleep, emotionally exhausted by the events of the night.

Now Setsuna was waking her up—Usagi glanced quickly at the clock and blinked when she saw 9:37 glowing back at her—and saying they had guests. Given what she’d been told about last night’s other events, Usagi guessed this meant that Ami had come to reintroduce her sister.

She must have said that part out loud, because Setsuna nodded and said, “And also to make sure you get to Hikawa on time.”

Usagi blinked. “Huh?”

“For the big day-long pre-exam study session?” Luna reminded her. “The one that’s only been in the works for the last month or so? The one Rei said you were going to attend even if she had to personally tie you up with your own hair and then drag you up to her place?”

A whining, whimpering noise crawled out of Usagi’s throat, but Setsuna dragged her out of bed nonetheless and steered her in the general direction of the bathroom. Usagi woke up a few more notches and became a great deal less pouty when her nose picked up on some of the tempting fragrances drifting up the stairs. Knowing that the smell of food would make sure Usagi didn’t try to go back to bed, Luna and Setsuna headed down to the kitchen.

Makoto had of course come with Ami, and she was helping Ikuko whip up brunch now. It was eerie to watch the two of them go at it, chatting, passing ingredients and implements back and forth, and barely looking at each other so they could pay attention to whatever they were doing. At the same time, they were giving Ami an impromptu cooking lesson, something which came as a bit of a surprise to Luna, who thought it must be the first time she’d ever seen Ami try her hand at cooking. She didn’t have the practiced skill of either Makoto or Ikuko, but neither had she burned anything so far.

After a moment, Luna’s eyes narrowed. There was something... odd... about Ami’s shirt. She realized the problem and suppressed an urge to groan in anticipation of a major disaster.

Ami was wearing two blouses. One of them was Calypso.

It wouldn’t be immediately obvious to most people, particularly not to those who weren’t acquainted with Nereid shapeshifting, but Luna was familiar with the species’ tricks, and moreover, she had received a great deal of training to help her spot things that weren’t what they appeared to be—even if it HAD all been more than a thousand years ago.

The signs were little things, but they were there. Because Calypso naturally and constantly produced her own internal light source, the facade of the shirt was exactly the same color all over, without any of the differences in shading that it should have had. The Nereid could have created believable shading with a little more effort, but then she might have had trouble keeping her assumed form in place to hide Ami’s real blouse. There was also a definite water-smell hanging around Ami, though Luna suspected she was the only non-Nereid in the room who could actually detect it.

On the plus side, Calypso didn’t seem to be having any trouble matching her movements to Ami’s; it was a common problem with Nereid disguises, but the fake fabric moved as realistically as anything anyone else in the room was wearing. Luna suspected that Calypso was managing that by keeping in close mental contact with Ami, thereby knowing exactly when and how she was about to move. There were also no traces of anti-gravity behavior in the folds of the blouse, and none of the many metal cooking utensils were getting up and throwing themselves at Ami because of a strongly localized electromagnetic field.

*Give me a little more credit than that, Luna.*

Recognizing the mental voice, Luna focused her thoughts. *Why in the names of the nine planets are you masquerading as a shirt, Calypso? I thought you’d decided to be a cat.*

*I did, but that was before I saw just how many people there were out there. I don’t think I’m quite up to facing that many psychic impressions at one time on my own just yet. I’m really rather surprised that Mako-chan, Rei, and my sister haven’t all gone crazy from dealing with it.*

*It depends on what you’re used to,* Ami put in silently. *And I warned you last night that this was a big city.* She frowned down at whatever mixture she was stirring around in the bowl.

*There’s a difference between knowing about something and actually experiencing it for yourself,* Calypso replied. *Speaking of which... tell her, Ami.*

*Tell me what?*

*Caly thinks the Phoenix Egg is alive,* Ami said simply.

Luna blinked. *Based on what?*

*We can all feel a presence of some kind in this house,* Calypso said. *Ami’s telepathic powers aren’t developed enough yet to pick it up unless I’m pointing it out to her, and even I can barely tell it’s there, but Makoto noticed it nearly half a block away. If telepathy can barely spot this thing while empathy picks it up right away, then its mind is operating below the level of conscious thought, either because it isn’t sentient or because it’s in a state of dormancy.*

*I suppose being cooped up inside an egg would certainly qualify as a state of dormancy,* Luna admitted, *and it’s not as if we know enough about that thing to dismiss the possibility that it might be a living being—but are you sure, Calypso?*

*Yes. The sense is coming from the room you and Setsuna and Usagi were in just a moment ago, so unless there’s _another_ mysterious object of unknown origin and purpose up there...*

*That’ll do, Caly.* “I think this is about as mixed as it’s going to get,” Ami said aloud.

“Then just pour some into the pan, dear.” Without looking away from the counter, Ikuko reached out and slapped Shingo’s hand away as he tried to filch a cherry from the fruit salad she was just about to add some apple slices to. Shingo shifted away from his mother and tried his luck at swiping a piece of bacon instead—and his other hand got lightly rapped on by the spatula Makoto was using to clear an earlier round of pancakes off the pan. Now affecting an injured expression as he nursed his wounded hand, Shingo headed for a stack of toast—and injury became despairing shock as Ami, encouraged by her mischievous sister, pushed the plate of toast back along the counter until it was well out of Shingo’s reach.

Shingo folded his arms and glared at the three cooks, then glanced briefly at the fridge before looking at Setsuna for a very long time. She looked back, folding her own arms and raising a quizzical eyebrow, and finally Shingo muttered something about starvation before tromping sulkily out of the kitchen.

“Nicely done, ladies,” Ikuko murmured. “But now,” she added, at the sound of footsteps on the stairs, “comes the real challenge.” She wiped her hands on her apron, then took it off and left the kitchen, intercepting Usagi at the bottom of the stairs.

They stood there, looking at each other in silence, and as she watched them from just inside the kitchen, it struck Luna that the only real physical resemblance between mother and daughter was in their eyes. It was one of the results of the somewhat unusual reincarnation the Senshi had been put through; just as no one on either side of Usagi’s family had ever had blonde hair, no one in Makoto’s family had ever grown quite so tall so quickly. These and other traits, both physical and mental, were important parts of who and what the Senshi had been, things that Serenity’s influence in the process of rebirth had ensured would remain intact; the Queen’s primary criteria in selecting the parents of each Senshi had been traits of similar character, not appearance.

Ikuko was perhaps the kindest woman Luna had met since Serenity herself, with the same strength of will hidden beneath the gentle exterior, and this had made her the ideal choice to be the mother of the reborn Moon Princess. It also meant that despite the many ways in which she and Usagi were different, they could still connect very strongly on an emotional level.

The simple proof of that was taking place right in front of Luna’s nose. Ikuko and Usagi were doing much more than just looking at each other; they were communicating on a level that was simpler and more powerful than words, exchanging in a single glance the same meaning of an entire conversation. With one look, they both apologized to each other for the actions that had led up to last night’s uncomfortable dialogue; in the same look, they forgave each other. Usagi came down the last few steps and gave her mother a heartfelt hug which was returned in full, and everything was alright again.

Out in the kitchen, Makoto’s soft sigh went unnoticed amidst the sizzle of pancake batter.

“Forget it, Minako.”

“But it’s a lovely morning for a walk,” Minako protested. “It’s a sunny day, cool enough to wake you up, but not so cold that it freezes your nose...”

“I said no.”

“You always say no when I suggest something.”

“That’s because I know exactly how your mind works—and I’m _not_ going out there as a human just so you can parade ‘Arthur Knight’ in front of every girl from here to Hikawa.”

Hands on her hips, Minako stared at him in amazement. “Do you honestly believe I’m that petty?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

Minako put on a pouty look. “Fine. Be that way.” She sat down on her bed with one of the largest of her collection of stuffed toys and turned around so that her back was to Artemis. He blinked.

“What are you doing?”

“You’ve hurt my feelings with your callous male behavior,” Minako said in sulkily injured tones, “so I’m not going anywhere until you apologize.”

“For the love of...” Artemis sighed. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. It was rude and unkind of me to suggest that you’re that mean. Alright?”

“Does that mean you’ll do it?” Minako asked, looking over her shoulder at him.

Artemis facefaulted. “No!”

Minako went back to studying the head of her bed.

A few minutes after the sound of the shower had stopped, Ami excused herself from the kitchen cleanup and headed up to do the formal introductions, with Luna following close behind her. It had taken quite a lot of arguing to stop Calypso from sneaking up to greet Usagi while she was in the shower, but Ami had managed to keep her shirt on—so to speak—until Usagi had a chance to get dressed herself.

“Usagi-chan?”

“Come in, Ami-chan.” Usagi was just stuffing her head through the neck of a sweater that would have been three or four sizes too large if she hadn’t been about six months along. Tugging her hair out, Usagi glanced at Ami and said, “Where is she?”

“Right here.” Ami indicated the second shirt with both hands, but there was a pause before it became mist and flowed to her right. When Calypso’s body soldified this time, she was wearing a much more formal version of the blue gown she had been mimicking when Ami first found her. The outfit now had wavelike swirls of white and silver running along the sides and sleeves, and it even included teardrop-shaped earrings, ocean-blue stones in icy silver settings.

“*Your Royal Highness,*” Calypso said, executing a smoothly flowing curtsey. Startled by the greeting, it took Usagi a moment to put together a reply.

“*Just ‘Usagi’ will do, Calypso.*” Her words started out a bit slow, but the pace picked up as Serenity’s childhood language lessons came back to her. “*We’re much less formal these days than we were on the Moon, and I’ve gotten used to the name over the last sixteen years.*”

“*I understand. Usagi.*” Calypso repeated the name with a very definite emphasis, and then she hesitated.

Serenity’s memories telling her what the Nereid was most likely thinking, Usagi smiled. “*Yes, Caly, you can give me a hug. Just because I’m pregnant doesn’t mean I’ll break if you touch me.*”

As Calypso smiled and literally flew across the short distance to Usagi, Ami couldn’t help but once again be surprised by her sister’s need for physical contact. Their shared emotional moment back on Mercury she could understand completely, and given just how close Calypso and Larissa had been, the exuberant greeting of Michiru also made perfect sense. What Ami had been having some trouble figuring out was why Caly was being so physically emotional with the other Senshi; the tickling of Hotaru came to mind, as did the hug she had greeted Makoto with back at the apartment. Yes, their former lives had been her friends too, but she had certainly not been as close to them as she was to her sister or Larissa.

From Mercury’s memories, Ami understood that Nereids, at least in their natural form, did not have the capability to physically feel much of anything besides heat and humidity. From the memories and her own experiences with Calypso last night, she also knew that the telepathic species was capable of a far deeper form of contact than simple touch could ever provide—and she was still trying to find the proper words to adequately describe the sensation of looking into a person’s mind, of registering the shift of their thoughts as they looked back into yours, of sharing in everything they knew and believed and had experienced, even if it was just a little bit, for just a little while.

And yet, for all the power and understanding in that moment, there was a distinct lack of emotional feeling. The Nereids were telepaths, not empaths, so their mental powers were attuned to fact and theory, not mood and motivation. While their minds were joined, Ami had known what Calypso’s own feelings to any given memory or thought were, but she had not actually _felt_ them. When they both focused on the same thoughts rather than viewing everything all at once, their emotional connection had grown somewhat stronger, but only to about the same level Ami would have felt from a hug.

There was a simple, deeply moving quality in being able to physically touch. It was something the purely mental connection—as strongly moving as it was—could not duplicate, and for that reason, Nereids had always taken a deep satisfaction from existing in their solid shapes. The fact that their natural forms could not physically feel made touch all the more important to them—and after ten centuries of formless slumber beneath the Blue Hall, Ami knew that Calypso’s own personal need to feel things again went well beyond mere satisfaction. Every time she touched someone, Calypso was able to reassure herself that she was free of the disturbing, endless dreams that had been her only reality for such a very long time.

This particular round of reassurance got a slight boost when the ginzuishou pulsed rather noticeably inside the brooch hanging off Usagi’s sweater. She and Calypso both pulled apart and looked down in surprise—tinged with no small amount of awe in the Nereid’s case—and then Usagi smiled.

“*As strange as it may sound, I think _it’s_ happy to see you, too.*” She paused and then forced herself to speak in Japanese again. “And from now on, let’s try not to use thousands-of-years-old languages when we talk. It’ll get us in trouble if anyone else hears it. Besides,” Usagi added, glancing down at Luna, “I understand it sends Luna into spastic fits.”

Luna gave her a flat look while Calypso giggled. “If you’re quite finished having fun at my expense,” Luna said, “there’s something you ought to know.”

She explained what Calypso and Ami had said about the Phoenix Egg. Usagi listened before turning around and looking up at the little crystal statuette on the counter above her bed, folding her arms and drumming the fingers of her right hand along her left arm.

“It’s alive?”

“Yes,” Calypso said, drifting up to Usagi’s right while Ami walked up to her left. “At this distance, there’s no way to mistake it. It’s unconscious...” She paused and looked down at Usagi’s belly. “Or maybe I should say, it’s unborn. It has the same sort of almost-thought as this little one here.” Calypso lightly touched Usagi’s stomach.

“I see. Can you tell anything else about it?”

Calypso frowned. “It... makes me a little nervous,” she admitted. “I’m not entirely sure why.”

“A phoenix is supposed to be a creature of fire,” Ami said. “Maybe that’s what you’re feeling.”

“Do _you_ notice anything like that?” Usagi asked.

“No, but Caly’s much more sensitive to energy than I am.” Ami looked closely at the Egg and then shook her head. “I don’t feel anything from it.”

“You could scan it,” Usagi suggested.

“Not in here,” Ami replied, shaking her head again. “We don’t know anything about how it came to be inside that Egg, so we have to be open to the possibility that it was _put_ there. If that’s the case, it can also be set free, and we have no idea exactly _what_ might do that; it could be my computer’s scanning frequencies, a simple musical note, or anything in between. I’d rather not experiment with the possibility of releasing a fire-based entity we know nothing about while it’s in your house.”

Usagi made a face. “Good point.” She looked at the Egg again, and finally shrugged. “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it for now. Although I have to imagine that if _that_”—she nodded towards the Egg—“were dangerous, _this_”— she indicated her brooch—“would have warned me by now.”

“The ginzuishou’s powerful,” Luna said, “not infallible.”

“True,” Usagi agreed, ignoring a faint pulse of what might have been protest from the crystal’s odd awareness, “but it’s had two months of close, daily contact with the Egg without any sort of bad reaction. That’ll do for me unless or until something else comes along to say otherwise.”

“You might want to ask Rei-chan if she’s noticed anything,” Calypso said. “Fire’s her element, after all, and she has much more experience at using and understanding her other abilities than Mako-chan does.”

“We’ll try that,” Usagi said. “Now, you’d better turn back into a shirt or something before Shingo comes along and hears us talking to you.”

Calypso nodded, swirled back towards Ami, and became a slightly off-color blouse again. Usagi watched the process curiously.

“Something wrong?” Ami asked.

“No, not _wrong_—but not all that long ago, the Mizuno Ami I’ve been hanging out with for the last three years would have squirmed just a little uncomfortably if somebody tried to get that close to her.”

Ami blushed. “This is different. Caly’s family.”

Being hugged by a shirt was a new experience for Ami—but not, she decided, an unpleasant one.

Yuuichirou glanced into the heart of the shrine, where Rei was once again sitting in the middle of a deep meditative trance. It was a sight he’d seen many, many times in the past, but the crows were a new addition. All four birds were in there with her, the big one and the scrawny one both being watched by the other two—and looking back at their observers in turn—while all four of them kept an eye on Rei.

Although he liked to think of himself as a reasonably perceptive guy, Yuuichirou had to admit it would take a better mind than his to explain the behaviour of those four birds. He’d asked Grandpa, but the old man had given that particular shrug which said he didn’t know and wasn’t especially worried about finding an answer—something, Yuuichirou had noticed, that he did that a lot where Rei was concerned.

It would be pretty obvious to anybody who spent even a little time in her company that Rei was a special sort of girl—although exactly how special you thought she was depended on how long you were around her, and what sort of mood she was in at the time—and Yuuichirou had been hanging around Hikawa long enough to see her in just about every mood imaginable. He could close his eyes and see her happy or pensive, amused or annoyed, dreamy or angry...

Actually, he didn’t even have to close his eyes to see her angry. After all this time, Yuuichirou suspected that THAT particular image was burned into the back of his retinas or something—and _this_ was yet another thing he was trying to figure out, because it wasn’t like Rei was the first girl he’d ever been interested in. If you got right down to the numbers, Yuuichirou knew he’d dated several girls older than Rei was _now_ back before he’d even met her. All of them _combined_ had not given him even half the level of abuse Rei tended to unleash, and yet he found that he didn’t really mind. This, despite the fact that the most direct display of affection he’d gotten from her in three years were a few smiles and a friendly kiss on the cheek.

Or was it four years?

Yuuichirou shook his head as he turned and walked away. He’d occasionally lost track of the days back during those two years of college—the ones he was _still_ on hiatus from—but his brain must have a serious screw loose if he couldn’t remember what _year_ it was!

Yeah, an extra hole in the head would explain a lot of things. For one thing, there were Rei’s friends. At several points in his life, Yuuichirou would have given just about anything to have even _one_ pretty girl actually sit down and talk with him. Now, he kept running into a half-dozen extremely attractive young ladies day in and day out, and for some insane reason, he didn’t feel the slightest inclination to do anything about that.

Why was that? There was no question that, at least right at first, it had been the age issue. Yuuichirou hadn’t been anywhere near interested in a fourteen year-old girl since _he_ was fourteen—Rei had been fifteen for a few months the first time he laid eyes on her; to his mind, there were just some borders you did not go ANYWHERE near. All he had to do to reaffirm that was take a good look the mess Chiba-san had stumbled into with Usagi-chan. No matter how perfect the two of them seemed to be together, he wouldn’t want to be in Mamoru’s shoes when he finally got back from the States and had to answer to Usagi’s parents.

But now, three years later, what exactly was it that was holding him back from asking one of these girls out? Sure, Usagi-chan and Ami-chan were both spoken for, and there was something about Setsuna that told Yuuichirou she was seriously out of his league—not to mention something ELSE which told him that Tennou-san would quite cheerfully put him six feet under if he so much as looked at Michiru crosswise—but that still left Mina-chan and Mako-chan. Both of them were definitely not little girls anymore, and yet... nada. Why?

The ‘l’-word drifted out of the dark neural recess where it had been laying in wait for just such an opportunity to pounce, promptly getting pounced on by numerous defensive mechanisms and dragged to an even deeper, darker place than before. Scratching the back of his head, Yuuichirou wandered off to see to some of his chores, deciding along the way that he might as well make sure that the front steps were clear of snow.

Back in the shrine, Rei’s eyes opened wide. She turned around where she knelt and frowned in confusion when she didn’t see anyone at the door.

*I was sure...* Shaking her head, Rei rose, slowly stretching her legs and back. Unless she’d lost all track of time, she ought to have just enough of it left to have a shower and change before the others arrived. If they were going to spend the entire afternoon trying to cram several months’ worth of neglected learning into Usagi’s skull, she at least wanted to feel good before it started.

Shooing the crows away, Rei returned to her room, not completely closing the door to the fire room behind her as she went. But that was okay; a little draft wasn’t about to hurt the fire, and besides, the door slid shut by itself just as she was entering her room.

The four crows regarded this strange occurence before collectively ruffling their feathers and flying off. Rei looked back out of her room at them and frowned again, then went back inside muttering to herself.

Haruka dropped ChibiUsa and Hotaru off at about twenty after ten, which made them just a few minutes too late to see Usagi’s first meeting with Calypso. Although the two younger girls were both disappointed about that, the leftovers from an Ikuko-Makoto brunch helped make up for it—and just because they were too late to see Usagi meet Calypso didn’t mean they’d missed all the morning’s entertainment.

There was some definite entertainment value to be had in watching Haruka try to resist Ikuko’s all-powerful Mother Factor. Nearly every person below the age of twenty who passed through the front door of the Tsukino household immediately became a target for this unstoppable force, which manifested itself in such horrifying forms as warm smiles, offers of freshly-baked snacks and refreshments of varying temperatures, and—most insidious of all—genuinely concerned questions about family, friends, and life in general.

It drove Haruka crazy. She did not _want_ to be mothered; she was well out of the phase of life where it was required, and she had gone to considerable lengths to project an outward attitude which would not in any way suggest she needed to be coddled or looked after. She did not need to be fed pancakes, no matter how delicious they were; she was fully capable of looking after herself, thank you very much, and she would have liked nothing more than to stand up and make this particular arguement to Ikuko until it stuck and the woman left her alone.

Instead, Haruka sat quietly at the table and ate the pancakes, shooting glances at everyone else and daring them to crack even the tiniest of smiles. Hotaru took that dare and grinned from ear to ear the entire time, and Makoto finally had to leave the kitchen before she burst out with everyone else’s suppressed laughter.

The torment only lasted a short time, no more than fifteen minutes. Or maybe twenty. Twenty-five at the most, but certainly no more than thirty. Well...

Haruka finally managed to make her escape by driving Usagi, Makoto, Ami, Luna, and Calypso up to Hikawa. She was perfectly calm on the outside, but the zero-to-sixty racing start which launched her car betrayed her rush to get away.

“It’s not like she does it out of spite or anything,” Usagi said.

Haruka glanced at her for a moment, but said nothing.

“It’s just how she tries to be friendly. You don’t have to take it personally, because she does the same thing to everybody who comes by. Sometimes she’s even had hot chocolate waiting for the paperboy or the mailman.”

Still nothing.

“And you can’t tell me you didn’t like those pancakes,” Makoto added. “You ate nearly as many of them as Usagi-chan did.”

A faint cough and a bit of a blush. Progress.

“Don’t worry about it,” Ami said, reaching forward and patting Haruka on the shoulder. “We don’t think any less of you or your whole tough-guy act.”

“Just drop it, alright?”

They finished the drive to Hikawa in silence. Yuuichirou was about halfway down the stairs with a broom when they arrived, and he waved. “So you’re a taxi service now?” he said to Haruka.

“If you even _think_ about comparing my car to a taxicab,” she warned him.

“...I know, I know; they’ll never find my body. And just how many red lights did you run getting here?”

“As long as they don’t catch me, it doesn’t matter.”

Yuuichirou shook his head. “Watch the stairs on your way up,” he cautioned. “There’s ice along a lot of the left side this morning.”

“Thanks for the ride,” Makoto said as she helped Usagi out of the front seat. Haruka mumbled something along the lines of ‘have a nice day studying,’ and the other girls nodded.

“I’m sure we will,” Ami said.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay?” Usagi asked innocently. “You know, just in case any pancake-monsters show up?”

Haruka gave her a dark look and then drove off.

“’Pancake monsters’?” Yuuichirou repeated.

“You had to be there.” Makoto looked down the street. “Has Mina-chan shown up yet?”

“Nope. Here, let me help you with those.” He took the extra bag full of books—which were actually Usagi’s books—that Makoto had been carrying, and then the considerably larger extra bag that Ami had been carrying—which were _her_ books. The girls took pity on Yuuichirou when they noticed the definite stagger the second bag put into his step, and didn’t add anything more to the load he was already carrying.

If it hadn’t been for the ice, he might even have made it all the way up the steps without falling.

Something like one hundred and ten percent of the student population of Tokyo was engaged in study for this or that exam on this fine Sunday. One exception—and perhaps the ONLY exception—was up in her apartment, concentrating on something that no school had taught for the last three thousand years or so.

This wasn’t one of the detection spells she’d been using before. It was a more potent magic, refined and enhanced beyond the strength of the ones that had continuously been blocked by... by _something_ she still couldn’t identify, but which seemed to hang around THAT GIRL and her friends like an invisible, impenetrable shield.

At first, she’d thought it might have been some sort of reaction the magic was having to her own intensely negative feelings which was keeping her from observing them. But then she’d started running across other instances, other people and places that her spells either had trouble revealing or couldn’t locate at all, people and places she harbored no particular grudges against, and in some cases rather liked.

It reminded her of something Archon had said several times since their first meeting, that this entire area—all of Tokyo and perhaps even beyond—was the center of the single largest concentration of magical power on the face of the planet. There were certainly other areas where you could get an equally strong level of a specific sort of energy as here—fire energy was always very strong in active volcanoes, for instance—but there was no other place on Earth where ALL types of elemental power existed at such strong levels all at once. Or so Archon claimed, and she’d had no reason to doubt that he knew what he was talking about.

That much energy gathered in one spot had to be having some kind of effect on people, and she was forced to admit that this apparent anti-spell quality she kept running into might be one result of that sort of exposure.

This new spell ought to improve the situation, though. It was described in the memory crystal as ‘an infallible means to pierce the warding powers of an enemy and behold their secrets,’ and she’d already tested it on some of the other people and places that had resisted her spells, getting some promising results.

As she cast the spell, the image of a Shinto shrine began to take shape in the air before her. She recognized it; her other spells had shown her this place so many times over the last few months that she was surprised THEY weren’t all living there. The image began to draw in on part of the shrine, and she held her breath as it neared the point where all the other spells had fallen apart on her...

...and kept going, it was _working_, it was...

*WHAT WAS THAT?!*

The spell’s image flew apart in a shower of light as its creator lurched back, holding her head. There had been... the spell had come into contact with someTHING, a new force that wasn’t quite like anything she’d come across before, but which reminded her very strongly of the disembodied intellect she’d faced when summoning that ill-fated daimon a few weeks ago. She was sure that this new thing was alive, intelligent, and definitely not human—and she was also sure that it had felt her presence just as clearly as she’d registered its.

Could one—or all—of THEM be... be practicing magic? Was that new presence something THEY had summoned, just as she’d called the daimon?

“No,” the girl whispered, clutching the crystal which hung from her neck. “NO!”

Secure in the knowledge that anyone who was headed for Rei’s room would have to walk across the creaking wooden floorboards of the walkway to reach the door, Calypso had resumed human shape and begun drifting about the room, examining things that caught her interest. That didn’t include any of the crows, who Rei thought must have gotten spooked by something earlier; she hadn’t seen them since they’d all flown off earlier this morning, but she didn’t mind their absence. Phobos and Deimos tended not to react well to strange things, and a blue-tinted girl floating up near the ceiling was certainly strange enough to set them off.

Rei herself was having a little trouble ignoring Calypso’s activities, but she thought she coped quite well with having a girl floating around over her head. Then Calypso let out a short sound of surprise—and she must have been VERY surprised, because she stopped floating, fell, and dissolved back into mist just as she hit Rei and Makoto.

All four Senshi and Luna stared at the Nereid in astonishment. “Caly?” Ami asked. “Are you okay?”

*You didn’t feel it?* Calypso asked back.

“Feel what?” Rei demanded.

*There was another mind here,* Calypso said, collecting herself and retaking human form sitting to Ami’s left, one hand to her head. “Just for a moment, but that was long enough for me to tell it wasn’t anyone I know—and that it wasn’t friendly.”

“Are you okay?” Ami repeated.

“I’m not hurt, just a little shaken up. Even momentary contact with a hostile mind can be... sort of unsettling.” Calypso took the opportunity to rest her head on her sister’s shoulder, and Ami put an arm around her. Makoto hid a smile; the Nereid’s face displayed every bit of grateful reassurance a younger sister ought to show when being comforted by her older sister, but there was a hint of sneaky satisfaction in her overall manner.

Caly was obviously aware of Ami’s general emotional reserve—there was no way she couldn’t be, not after both of them had spent last night inside each other’s minds—and she was just as obviously prepared to use every excuse in the book to get around it whenever it suited her.

“Awww,” Usagi said, holding her hands to one side of her face and blinking her suddenly huge eyes. “How cuuuuute!”

Ami blinked and blushed just a little bit, and then did something none of the other girls quite expected—she pulled down her right eyelid and stuck her tongue out at Usagi. The real kick of the moment was that Caly did the exact same thing, except from the left side instead of the right. Usagi looked as shocked as if she’d stepped into the receiving end of a Supreme Thunder, and Luna only slightly less so; Rei and Makoto both fell over laughing.

And then, to the sound of a cheerful, “Hey there!” the door slid open.

Everyone in the room freaked. Luna let out a “MEEEEEAAAAAARRR!” as she jumped four feet in the air from a sitting start, her fur standing on end all over while the girls shrieked collectively. Calypso’s initial instinct was to either revert to mist or fly up to the ceiling, but Ami’s recognition of the cheery voice helped her keep from doing both.

Minako and Artemis stood in the doorway, arm-in-arm and more than a little startled by the reception.

“Okay,” Minako said slowly, “that’s not _quite_ the reaction I was going for...”

“WHAT are you DOING?” Luna interrupted, looking mostly at Artemis.

“Suffering the consequences of Usagi’s creative impulses,” Artemis replied with a sigh. “And of my own seeming inability to say ‘no’ and make it stick.” He ushered Minako into the room and stepped inside as well, sliding the door closed behind himself.

“What are you talking about?” Luna demanded.

“You didn’t tell her, did you?” Minako looked at Usagi and shook her head with a disappointed sigh. “Oh, Usagi-chan...”

As everyone else turned to her, Usagi gulped. In light of all the other trouble she’d already had to occupy her mind last night, she’d completely forgotten to mention her ‘creative impulse’ at the theatre to Luna.

“Um... I—that is, we—sort of got spotted by some of the kids from school when we were at the movie last night. Su-chan and Ken-kun and their friends. Su-chan followed me when I went to get a drink and told me Aneiko was there too”— there were grimaces from Ami and Makoto at this, and a resigned glance at the ceiling/shake of the head combo from Rei—“and she’d seen us as well. I realized that if I didn’t come up with a story to explain Artemis and get it spread around, Aneiko _would_, so I... um... in a way... IsortofsaidhewasMinachansboyfriend.”

In the kitchen, where he had been nursing the bruises from his crash landing on the stairs with some lunch, Yuuichirou looked up as the words, “YOU DID _WHAT_?!” rang out.

He didn’t quite recognize the voice, but it was coming from the direction of Rei’s room, and with Usagi here, a certain degree of shouting was only to be expected.

Yuuichirou put it out of his mind and turned back to his meal.

*One of the problems with living in a big house,* Haruka reflected as she glanced into the living room, *is that when it’s empty, it’s too damn quiet for comfort.*

Right now, the house was close enough to emptiness as to make no difference, and it was very, very quiet indeed. Haruka was engaged in a room-by- room search for Michiru, all the while trying to ignore the unsettling impression that she was violating a tomb or committing some similar sacrilege.

It was times like this that Haruka found she missed the apartment they’d moved into while investigating the Mugen Academy. She’d grown up in a house with five other people living in it, so she was used to and even comfortable with crowded living conditions—not that she ever felt crowded by Michiru. Sure, the apartment was smaller than this huge place, but it had a certain cozy charm to it, and Haruka had gotten used to being able to tell where Michiru was just by looking through a doorway. If Michiru hadn’t been in the apartment, odds were she was at the pool—and on the rare occasions she went somewhere by herself, she made it a point to always tell Haruka where she was going. She still did. Every time.

Of course, she expected the same consideration from Haruka, which had led to a few problems here and there since, whether by bike or by car, half the time Haruka didn’t know herself where she might end up when she went out for a drive. It was sort of a case of the destination not being as important as the journey.

Michiru let her get away with it without comment, but Haruka wondered now if the woman’s habit of disappearing into one room and then not answering when Haruka called her name, forcing her partner to hunt for her one room at a time, was some petty form of revenge.

This particular hunt finally ended on the second floor, in the wide-windowed room where Michiru did most of her painting.

“That took quite a while,” Michiru said, not looking up from the canvas in front of her. “Do I dare hope that you’ve finally learned how to drive at a normal pace?”

“Usagi-chan’s mother and Mako-chan were in full cooking mode when we got there, and Tsukino-san caught me before I had a chance to get away.”

“Poor girl. And I’ll bet you had to suffer through an entire gourmet breakfast, too.”

Haruka chose not to answer that as she walked over to get a look at the picture. There wasn’t all that much to look at just yet, of course—even Michiru could only paint so much in half an hour—but what there was showed a small pond or lake with the first beginnings of a forest on its shores and some tall, mist-shrouded towers in the far background.

“I see you’ve been dreaming again. The Moon Kingdom, right?”

Michiru nodded. “It’s always been a good source of inspiration. And after everything that happened last night, it only makes sense that some things about our past would come back to me.”

“What sort of... things?”

“Childhood memories. A day spent with a friend, talking and swimming.” Michiru looked away from her painting briefly, smiling. “It seems that Minako—or rather, Ishtar—may have been my aunt.”

“Ouch. Any other familial revelations?”

“No—although based on some parental wisdoms Caly and I were quoting back and forth in the dream, I suspect Larissa’s mother and Ariel must have gotten along rather well. She seems to have talked a great deal like you do.”

“Good for her.” Haruka paused. “You seem to have... accepted... Calypso pretty fast.”

“Now don’t be like that,” Michiru chided.

“I’m not. Really, I’m not. It’s just that it was weeks before you stopped calling _me_ ‘Tennou-san’, but here you’ve known Calypso less than a day, and you’re already on a first-name basis.” Haruka frowned. “Assuming she actually _has_ a family name, of course.”

“It’s one day going on thirteen years,” Michiru replied. “Caly was Larissa’s friend for her entire life, and if Ami is enough like Mercury to be Caly’s sister again, then I’m enough like Larissa to be her friend again.” She smiled. “And even if I didn’t have Larissa’s memories, I think I’d still like to be Calypso’s friend. She’s an interesting, intelligent person, very friendly and very sweet. And she helped me get back to my paintings.”

“Yeah, I sort of noticed you were having trouble with that.” Haruka glanced at a small group of pictures stacked neatly against one wall to dry. One showed a school of dolphins chasing each other across the waves; another showed a river, flowing _up_ into the sky as a shower of stars; three more were of the same mountain lake, painted each time from a different angle. They wasn’t anything wrong with any of them; the dolphins looked like dolphins and the lake looked like a lake, but that reminded Haruka of a line she’d read a couple of years back, something written by a critic who had been reviewing Michiru’s paintings:

*A remarkable display in which the subjects catch the eye and stir the heart. The execution and technique is such that these are not merely images recreated from the artist’s imagination, but a creation taking place. Rather than mimic reality, these paintings ARE reality.*

Haruka understood what the guy had meant. Looking at Michiru’s finer paintings always gave her the sense that she could just step through the picture and enter whichever strange and mysterious world existed on the other side. The five paintings off to the side were technically flawless, but the incomplete dreamscape was somehow more believable than all of them.

“It was the tour,” Michiru sighed. “Six months on the road, performances every other night at the least... there just wasn’t any time at all for me to paint. Going back to doing _anything_ after a long break is never easy, and this is hard enough even when you have the right feel for it going.”

“I’d say you’re getting back to it. Look on the bright side; if you start to slip again, you can always ask Ami if she’ll loan Calypso out to you for a few days so she can pose for you.” Headed for the door, Haruka spoke back over her shoulder. “Imagine the creative possibilities with a model who can read your mind and then change shape at will to match what you’re looking for.”

“That’s not an entirely bad idea,” Michiru admitted, for some reason suddenly smiling and getting up from her painting. “But something you have to keep in mind is that appearance is only part of it; Caly can make herself look like anything she wants, but I’d still know it was her, and my feelings about her wouldn’t change—and that would get carried over into whatever I painted. If I wanted to convey a different feeling, I’d need a different model.”

“Yeah, well, you’re the artist, so I suppose I’ll have to take your word on that.”

“Haruka?”

“Yeah?” Haruka asked, turning around. Michiru had taken a seat by a blank canvas, and she pointed now to a wide, rectangular block across the room that she used as a stand for objects in still-lifes.

“Pose for me?”

Haruka laughed—once—but when she realized Michiru’s request was actually serious, she fell silent and actually blushed. “Er... well, I was actually going to...”

“Please?” There was a silence.

“Um... sure, Michi...” Halfway to the stand, Haruka gave Michiru a direct look with some of her usual attitude in it. “Just don’t expect me to turn myself into a human pretzel or anything weird like that for your amusement.”

“Of course not,” Michiru murmured, smiling as Haruka sat down on the block. “Sit back just a bit... there... turn to the left... hold it, that’s good... now just look forward...”

“Like this?” Haruka was leaning back on her hands as she sat, her body facing off to one side with her head turned at a small angle to regard Michiru.

“Perfect. Just like that.” Michiru nodded with a terrific smile. “Okay. Now take all your clothes off.”

The angle of her head changed as Haruka gave Michiru a flat look. Michiru chuckled softly to herself and began to paint.

The afternoon passed very slowly for some people.

By the end of the first half-hour, Minako and Calypso were getting along famously—which was not entirely reassuring as far as Ami was concerned. She was happy that the other Senshi were accepting Calypso so easily, but there was a streak of what could most politely be called ‘adventurousness’ in both Minako’s and Calypso’s characters; either of them was capable of getting into plenty of trouble on her own, but together...

Even thinking about the degree of trouble one reborn Venusian—and deep down inside, in every way that was important, Minako was just as much a Venusian as Ishtar had been, although thankfully with better self-restraint and modesty—and one prankish, shapeshifting telepath might be able to create together made Ami nervous.

On the other hand, by the end of the first half-hour, Luna was still looking at Artemis as though she wanted to skin him alive and roll him in salt. This didn’t do anything to help Ami’s mood. Granted, Luna considered Artemis with lethal intent on an average of once a week, but this time she looked like she might actually follow through on it.

Ami wasn’t clear on exactly how Luna felt about Artemis; not even Minako and Makoto were sure of that, since Luna’s own mental powers and training allowed her to block theirs rather easily. Ami also wasn’t exactly the best judge of romantic matters, but if she had to hazard a guess based on what she’d observed, she’d have said Luna’s feelings for Artemis were somewhat stronger than friendship. The eventual existence of Diana sort of proved that, and it would also explain why Luna wasn’t taking Usagi’s little design particularly well.

With the two cats at odds like that, it was really a wonder that they got any studying done.

Elsewhere, ChibiUsa and Hotaru had quite a lot of fun over the course of the afternoon. With her thirtieth-century education, ChibiUsa had no need to study for anything except modern history, which took no more than an hour or so. Hotaru didn’t have to study either, though for different reasons. She might physically be a child, but Hotaru still retained all the knowledge she’d had before her reversion to infancy. When her elementary school teachers commented on how hard she worked in class, they had no idea that she was actually working on homework assignments Ami had gathered from her own courses and then passed along to Michiru and Haruka. That sort of advanced education left Hotaru severely overqualified for a first-grade class, but she went anyway just so she could be around other children.

Setsuna had planned to spend most of the afternoon working on some projects she’d brought home from the store. She did eventually get around to her work, but only after first having a long talk with Ikuko about everything that had happened last night. Setsuna found it interesting that the older woman didn’t seem to be bothered by her guest’s unusual talent, and when she commented on it, Ikuko just smiled.

“It’s really not that bizarre, Setsuna. I had a friend in high school whose mother studied Tarot cards, and she used to do readings for a bunch of us when we stopped by to visit; she was almost always right. There are several astrologers in town who all have very credible reputations, and then there’s Usagi’s friend Rei.”

Setsuna blinked. “You know about her?”

“Yes, I do. People have been going to her for years when they need help to find something, and the ‘maiden of Hikawa’ has become something of a local legend as a result. Although I have to admit that I’d pictured her as being quite a bit older—by about fifty years—so it took a while for me to make the connection when Usagi introduced us and said Rei lived at Hikawa.”

“They... never mentioned that you knew,” Setsuna said. “About Rei, I mean.”

“That’s probably because I’ve never told them that I know,” Ikuko replied. “I don’t see any reason to make a fuss just because Rei can do something other people can’t—and the same goes for you. So you can see the future sometimes; it didn’t stop you from burning that soup last week.”

“It also might not have warned me about Shingo’s little surprise until it was too late,” Setsuna added. “How _did_ you know he was up there, anyway?”

“It’s a mother’s duty to know every last little devious twist of her children’s minds,” Ikuko said, “and there is _nothing_ that goes on in this house that I don’t know about. For example, I can tell you for a fact that ChibiUsa and Hotaru haven’t been studying anything other than Usagi’s manga collection for at least half an hour now.”

“Oh?”

“Do you notice how quiet they’re being? If they were actually studying something, they’d be making a little bit of noise every now and then, but they’re trying not to make any sound at all now, which means they’re up to something besides studying and don’t want to get caught.”

“I see.” Setsuna thought for a moment. “I take it that the next step is to go upstairs and put the fear of Mom back into them?”

“You _do_ catch on quickly.”

“It’s down here somewhere.”

“So’s half the electrical wiring in the city. Not to mention the dirt, the bugs, the rats...”

“You just be quiet about the rats. You know I can’t stand rats.”

The two city maintenance workers were walking through a dimly-lit access tunnel somewhere beneath the Juuban district, in search of the cause of intermittent brownouts which had been affecting several blocks on the surface for the last few hours. As of yet, they hadn’t found anything.

But something had found them.

Hidden in the shadows of the piping and electrical wiring running along the walls and ceiling, Proteus’ sensor nodes watched the progress of the two humans. Several tunnels over, the main bulk of the entity crawled slowly and steadily away from the relatively fast-moving humans, accompanied by the vast majority of its mutated rat drones and the clustered pods which held its human experiments.

One of these pods was shattered, its insides slick with the residues of the thing that had been housed inside but was now free, a thing that had been human not too long ago but was now something considerably more.

Proteus watched with satisfaction as the two workers found the charred bodies of several rats and the exposed electrical wiring the creatures had partially chewed through. It watched as a strange, dust-heavy mist floated towards the pair from further down the tunnel while they worked, and it watched as their motions became vague, confused, and slowed gradually towards sleep.

Out of the unlighted distance came the figure of an ordinary, if very sick-looking woman, who walked up to the two workers and began issuing orders, to which they nodded slowly. They attended to the damaged wires and then headed back the way they had come, the woman following close behind them.

*All in all,* Proteus thought, *a promising beginning.* The Nanako-unit’s unexpected developments—some very complex changes in the bodily systems which produced pheromones, among other things—seemed to be every bit as potent as expected. The two workers would escort the unit back to the surface and report that they’d found a sick and injured woman down in these tunnels. The woman would quickly be taken to a hospital, where the next phase of the plan could begin—and even if anything went wrong, by the time the unit reached the surface, Proteus would have two new test subjects to work with.

That was easily worth the price of a few rats.

Rei had an unpleasant dream that night.

She found herself standing in the shrine’s courtyard, dressed in the usual white and red garment that went with her duties—but it was the middle of the night, and the place appeared totally deserted. A heavy mist hung in the air, blotting out almost everything except for the nearest buildings, the arch at the entrance, and the sliver of the crescent moon far overhead.

There was something moving in the mist, something which left little swirling eddies in its wake but never truly seemed to appear no matter how closely she looked for it. Not even a vague blur took shape among the fog, but Rei was still absolutely certain that whatever it was, it was out there. Watching her.

Calypso’s mention of something unfriendly trying to spy on them that afternoon came back to Rei now with remarkable clarity, but it didn’t make whatever ought to be in the mist any easier to see.

In reality, while Rei lay asleep in bed, her face drawn into the beginnings of fear, anger, and the will to wake up from what she was realizing was a dream, mist was rising from the cold stones of the courtyard. Thin and pale, the mist glowed strangely in the light of the full moon.

In Rei’s room, the sleeping crows suddenly woke up and cawed in fright as the symbols on the cover of the Book of Ages shone with a bright white energy. Rei did not wake up; instead, she made a strange sound and then relaxed as the disturbing dream fell apart and faded away.

Outside, the mist dissolved.

Usagi yawned prodigiously as she and her friends walked to school.

“Didn’t get enough sleep last night?” Naru asked.

“There’s no...”—Usagi paused for another yawn—“...such thing as ‘enough sleep’, Naru-chan. Particularly not after being stuck in a room with Ami-chan and Mako-chan and Rei and this blonde crash-bomber for almost eight solid hours of study.”

Naru looked at Minako in amazement. “You mean you actually got her to sit still for eight hours?”

“It was more like six and a half hours,” Minako admitted. “We broke for a late lunch and had a few other interruptions here and there. After all, even Rome wasn’t burned in a day.”

“That’s ‘built’,” Umino corrected. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Minako thought about that. “Yeah, that works too—but I was thinking of that Nero guy who was supposed to have set fire to the city. Haruna-sensei said it burned for a day and a night and on into the next day, didn’t she?”

Umino blinked. “Um... actually, I think she did.” He suddenly looked very worried, as well he should; Minako making sense at any time was a cause for concern, but especially on the morning of a final exam.

“Never mind,” Naru said. “Would one of those ‘interruptions’ you mentioned happen to have a name, white hair, and be about this tall?” She indicated a point about six feet in the air.

“Where did _you_ hear about him?” Usagi asked. Umino cleared his throat, and Usagi rolled her eyes. “Silly me. Sorry; all of yesterday’s book-learning seems to have pushed out everything else I’m supposed to know.”

“We forgive you,” Naru said. Umino nodded at the same time; then Naru turned back to Minako. “So what’s he like?”

Minako shook her head. “Not before a test, Naru-chan. I’ll tell you all about Arthur-kun after school, but not until then.”

Usagi covered a doom-fearing sigh by pointing down the street. “There’re Ami-chan and Mako-chan—and Ryo-kun, too.”

“Good,” Minako said, smiling. “Now we can be sure you won’t get away.”

“If I survive this week,” Usagi said, “I’ll remember that you were making fun of me in my hour of need, Minako.”

“You said that last year.”

“And I meant it then, too.”

“Is she threatening vengeance upon anyone who teases her during exams again?” Ami asked as she, Ryo, and Makoto walked up.

“That’s what it sounded like to me,” Makoto said.

“That’s what it was,” Minako confirmed.

“Well,” Ami said, “then I guess she’s on schedule.”

“You have a schedule for her?” Ryo asked in surprise. Ami, Makoto, Minako, Naru, and Umino all nodded.

“Gripe and groan in the morning...” Minako began.

“...make feeble threats and gloomy proclamations on the way to school...” Naru continued.

“...try to run away at the front door...” Umino noted calmly.

“...stage a panic attack as a last resort once in class...” Makoto added.

“...and then write the exam,” Ami concluded. “We’ve been told that Usagi-chan’s pre-exam behavior pattern hasn’t changed noticeably since she was in the second grade—which is when Umino-san originally outlined the process.”

Usagi huffed and tried to storm off down the sidewalk, but the others kept pace with her quite easily.

“So,” Naru said, “are the rest of you having another long study session after this morning’s exam?”

Ami nodded. “That’s the plan for the week. You and Umino-san are more than welcome to join us, if you’d like.”

*Does that mean I’m going to have to stay as a shirt every day this week?* Calypso protested.

*Hush, Caly.*

Naru was shaking her head. “Thanks, but I did my share of trying to help Usagi-chan study, and I more than had my fill of it.”

“Traitor,” Usagi grumbled.

“And I love you, too,” Naru replied, smiling and patting Usagi on the shoulder.

“Careful,” Makoto commented. “She may bite.”

She didn’t, of course, but there was a definite growl in Usagi’s response.

Rei got off to a slow start that morning. While not one of her mind-punishing future-revealing prophetic visions, that dream still hadn’t been fun, and the feeling of being watched hadn’t entirely left her upon waking, which made the walk to school very uncomfortable.

She met up with Himeko, Keiko, and Anya quite by chance, and after the initial greeting, they all moved along in a silence that was just a bit on the sombre side.

“Just how hard do the teachers here mark the finals?” Anya finally asked, showing more nervousness than Rei could recall seeing in the short time she’d known the girl.

“No harder than they mark everything else,” Himeko assured her.

“Which is to say, the smallest mistake costs ten percent.” Keiko was nervous too, considerably more so than Anya; though usually calm and confident about everything—in her own quiet and bizarrely humorous way—when it came to her marks, Keiko absolutely flew to pieces with worry.

“Now don’t start thinking like that,” Himeko said. “You’ve got to be positive, Keiko. If you _think_ something bad’s going to happen, then it’s much more likely to—right, Rei-san?”

“Hmm? Oh, I’m sorry, Himeko-san; I wasn’t listening. What did you say?”

“I said...”

“Cawp!”

Himeko gave a start, Anya blinked in surprise, and Keiko actually squeaked at the coarse avian interruption. Rei recognized the sound and wasn’t particularly surprised to hear it; she’d been expecting something like this to happen sooner or later, and turning around, she could clearly see Rooky perched atop a nearby length of wall. She was a bit startled to see Phobos, Deimos, and even Thrax not too far behind the smaller crow.

“Er... Rei-san?” Himeko asked hesitantly. “Is it just my imagination, or are those birds looking at you?”

“It’s not your imagination,” Rei said absently, walking over until she was only a few feet from Rooky. She looked the little loudmouth straight in the eye and made sure he understood she wasn’t happy to see him here—and she didn’t spare the others, either. Phobos and Deimos had the grace to look a little ashamed of themselves—although other than a few zookeepers, Rei was probably the only person in Tokyo who could tell when a crow was feeling ashamed—while Rooky put on his best ‘Rooky’s very sorry’ expression. Thrax met the glare with his usual regal indifference.

“That has got to be the biggest crow I’ve ever seen,” Anya said.

“Awp!”

“And that has to be the scrawniest,” Keiko added, looking at Rooky. He looked back at her and ‘cawp’-ed again, then fluttered down to Rei and perched lightly on the arm she held out. He looked like he wanted very badly to say something, but mindful of Rei’s threat to never speak to him again if he talked in public, Rooky managed to stay nonverbal. In spite of the lack of words, there was an unmistakeable kind of affectionate worry about his manner, and Rei guessed that her feathered friends had picked up on her troubled mood.

“I’m fine,” she said quietly. “Go home.”

Rooky cawed long and low, but then did as he was told and flew off. The other three followed suit, Thrax last, and only after a look which Rei was absolutely certain meant the big raven wanted her to talk to Rooky soon.

“How... did you do that?” Himeko’s question sounded very much as though she were asking for confirmation that Rei _had_ done something in addition to asking how she’d done it.

“I take it you... know... those birds?” Anya asked, ignoring Himeko.

“They live with me,” Rei replied, frowning faintly. “I look after them, and they look after me, but they haven’t tried to follow me to school since...” She fell silent and shook her head. “Never mind. Let’s get going before we’re late.”

“Hush,” Keiko said softly, reaching out and putting a restraining hand on Himeko’s arm as Rei moved quickly out of earshot.

“But...”

“Just let it go, Hime-chan.”

Anya looked at the two of them. “You know something about this, don’t you, Keiko?”

“I do,” Keiko agreed, suddenly looking almost fierce and not at all humorous, “and if either of you repeat what I’m about to say to ANYONE, I swear I will make your lives a living hell for it.”

Himeko and Anya both blinked—Himeko actually backed up a step—but they agreed not to tell anyone whatever Keiko told them—and they meant it.

“’Mystic maiden’?” Anya said, frowning.

“It’s not a slogan,” Keiko said. “Rei can see things with her mind. She helped find a little boy one time, and you saw how she reacted when that... thing... ran past us a couple weeks ago. She knew it was coming even before it showed up.”

“I knew about _that_,” Himeko said. “Half the school knows about it by now -but how do the crows fit into it?”

“I don’t really know,” Keiko admitted, “and I’ve never seen those other two before today, but I’m not about to ask where they came from or why any of them listen to her like that. For whatever reason, those birds are important to Rei, and nobody else has any right to go poking their noses into why unless she wants them to. Right?” She all but bit that ‘t’ off, and Anya and Himeko both nodded quickly. “Good. Now let’s hurry up before we’re late.”

It was lunchtime, and Hotaru was sitting a bit glumly in one of the swings in her school’s snow-dusted playground. One of the drawbacks in her unique situation was that, since students at the elementary level didn’t write the kind of exams junior and senior high students endured at this time every year, they attended regular classes—with lesser tests—for the last week or so before the spring break. This meant that Hotaru was going to miss out on a whole week’s worth of afternoons in which she could be spending time with her friends.

Oh well. Most of them were probably going to be very busy studying anyway, and ChibiUsa was going to have to at least give the impression she was studying. Even more so after Ikuko and Setsuna had caught them in the middle of some of Usagi’s—or more likely Rei’s—manga. So on the whole, she probably wasn’t really missing anything. And if she’d been at home, Michiru would have been almost sure to pick up on the ‘educational trial by fire’ feeling that was filling most of the city, and take steps. Hotaru wanted more of her advanced homework about as much as she wanted to turn back into a baby again.

“Something wrong, Hotaru-chan?”

Hotaru looked up and saw a boy she didn’t recognize sitting on one of the nearby teeter-totters, his knees tucked up to his chin. She figured he must be from another class, although she thought it was odd she hadn’t noticed him before. With those grey eyes and that absolutely grey hair, he really ought to have stood out more...

*Wait a minute. Grey hair and eyes...* Hotaru took a closer look at the boy. “You need a better disguise.”

The ‘boy’ blinked in surprise and then sighed a very grown-up sigh when he realized she knew who—or rather, what—he was. “You’re always one of the hardest to fool, Saturn. Even more so than Pluto, sometimes.”

“I have a unique perspective,” Hotaru replied. “You’re Balance, right? What do you want?”

“We needed to talk to you and make sure of some things,” another voice said. Hotaru turned around and nearly fell off her swing when she saw three little girls who all looked like Setsuna sitting in various places on the jungle gym. She watched them for a moment and then glanced at Balance.

“The rest of you aren’t going to pop up, are they?”

“No. Only the four of us can exist in your world with any kind of normalcy—and _they_ have to be all together to do it,” he added with a nod towards the three faces of Time, one of whom had decided to hang upside-down from the jungle gym and seemed to be having fun in the process. Balance blinked at her and then shook his head. “The other six are too strongly polarized to manifest like this.”

“Chaos could do it,” the little girl in the center said.

Balance thought about that. “Granted—but not likely for long enough to get anything done.”

“No,” the little girl on the left said immediately, looking at Hotaru.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were thinking about it,” the one on the right said.

“We’re not going to tell you why we look like Setsuna,” the little girl in the center said. “Or why she’s in her current condition.”

“But you’ll find out eventually,” the one on the left added.

Hotaru looked at Balance. “Do they always talk like that?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“And why are you here, again?”

“Because you present us with a bit of a problem,” Balance said. “Not only are you one of the most powerful beings in the mortal world, but you also represent a force that is very powerful in _our_ world. As you’ve recently discovered, Saturn is not so much the Senshi of absolute destruction and death as she is the Senshi of movement and change. Your power is based on the replacement—whether steady or severe—of everything that is by everything that is yet to be, and that makes you hard to predict, even for us.”

“As long as you believed the power of Saturn was the power of death,” the central girl said, “you treated it in a specific way, and we could take that into account and plan for it. But now that you are beginning to accept your power for what it truly is and can fully be, equally creative and destructive, it makes calculating your actions much trickier. We are coming to a time when a number of critical events will take place, and there are certain events in which you will be present that your new attitude about Saturn could cause some problems, so we decided the best way to deal with the situation was to speak with you directly.”

“Just to speak with me?” Hotaru said cautiously.

“Evil’s first suggestion was to take the Silence Glaive away from you for a while,” Balance admitted. “In the long run, though, that would have caused more problems than it solved—so yes, we’re just here to speak with you. We’ll talk, you’ll listen, and hopefully we’ll agree on something by the end.”

“I think the word for it is ‘diplomacy’,” Hotaru said. “So what did you want me to do?”

“It’s more a question of what we want you _not_ to do.”

 

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