The pale, sickly woman lay silently on the bed in the observation ward. A week’s worth of tests had failed to determine exactly what it was that had caused her to slip into this comatose state, and all the while, the woman’s mutated body was steadily pumping massive quantities of hypnotic pheromones and infectious spores into the air. Like all hospitals, this one had an extensive series of air filters to slow and prevent the spread of airborne disease agents, but as good as those filters were, Proteus’s creation was better. The pheromones attacked the living beings, distracting and confusing them while the spores ate away at the filters and spread further. Here and there, fleshy sacs grown from the drifting spores hung in the dark corners and unseen spaces of the air ducts and pumped out more chemicals, spreading and speeding the takeover.

Proteus had reviewed its progress in the last week and been very pleased to note that its selection of captured humans had already doubled in size. True, the control over these new subjects was not yet total, and most of them were patients whose injury-taxed immune systems could not stand up under extended exposure to the spores, but even a healthy individual could be snared with time. As for the unhealthy, they might be too weak to be useful right now, but repairing their bodies would be no trouble at all once Proteus achieved the proper degree of control.

There was one thing the entity was puzzled about. This was the same hospital where its first experimental subject, Hiroshi, had been taken following his defeat, but there was no trace of the man in the building. Hospital records showed that he had been moved to a different facility, but Proteus had checked that and turned up nothing.

It wasn’t sure exactly why it wanted to know what had happened to Hiroshi’s body, but Proteus decided to keep looking. The next phase of its plan was not scheduled to begin for several days yet, so it had time to spare.

A meeting had been called in the Great Hall, but none of the Lords or Ladies were present, and even the guardsmen had been dismissed. Given the delicate nature of the discussion, Lord Draco had not been informed of the meeting either, which left Janus and Jenna alone with their three closest advisors and the silent, black-armored warrior.

Watching the replay of what had transpired barely a week ago, Cestus stood with his arms folded, his left hand raised to scratch idly at the lower end of the scar that ran across his face. Even with the surprise of seeing Senshi, his face remained expressionless until the point in the assault when the red blur of motion ascended the nexus and solidified into a young woman with a very, very familiar face. At that moment, Cestus glanced at the far side of the throne out of the corner of his eye, and grinned wickedly.

Lilith’s choice of attire today was a dress of pale green and gold ribbons over a lushly mature body with brilliant golden hair, but the sight of Athena alive and well so totally stunned her that a ripple of distortion passed through the entire facade.

“She...!” Whatever else Lilith had intended to say, she fell silent as Janus reached out and caught her wrist in a brief but firm grip. The eye of the Princess looked up to Cestus, but it was the Prince’s voice which spoke.

“You can appreciate now why we’ve chosen to keep this back from the Lords.”

“Yes, your Highness.” Cestus turned his attention back to the images, which had advanced to the collapse of the nexus. “It also explains why our operations in that city have been running into so much trouble. Do we know for certain how many Senshi are active?”

“Not precisely.” Archon paused. “As it happens, I’ve located an ally within the city, and I’ve been drawing on her knowledge of history to try and piece together what happened after the Fall.”

“Exactly what sort of ‘ally’ are we talking about here?” Jenna asked curiously.

“Rather a young one, Highness, but potentially extremely useful. She’s had possession of a functional memory crystal for several years now, and she managed to teach herself an impressive array of spells with it. I’ve since been giving her proper instruction, and I must say that her progress has been remarkable.”

“She’s right on top of the supernexus,” Cestus said. “Spellcasting in that kind of environment would be about as difficult as picking flowers in the middle of summer—hardly what I’d call an indication of talent.”

“Granted,” Janus said, raising a hand to forestall an argument, “but we will defer to Archon’s judgment in such a matter.” Cestus and the archmage both bowed. “Continue, Archon.”

“I mentioned the girl now, Highness, because she was aware of the Senshi long before our return. From her account, they have been active in that city for the past three years, and it seems that there are more of them than were present in our time.”

“’More?’” Cestus asked sharply.

“You don’t mean to say these savages have activated _Saturn,_ do you?” Lilith said, looking terribly nervous.

“No,” Archon replied, raising his hands in a gesture of reassurance, “not Saturn. But from what I have been told, as many as four Greater Senshi unknown in our age have been seen in this city. My apprentice also knew of the existence of Pluto, if only vaguely, and she had inferred the existence of a Senshi of Saturn, but she knew nothing about either of them, nor had she ever heard of an appearance by Saturn.”

“I see.” Janus and Jenna looked the archmage. “And you did not mention any of this before because...?”

“Until very recently, I had no direct proof. And _until_ I had seen the Senshi for myself, I must admit that I gave the girl’s story little to no credit.” The two similar but different eyes considered Archon in silence, and then the divided head nodded.

“Just as we would have given _your_ claim of Senshi no real weight without something to substantiate it. Very well. What remains now is to determine exactly how we will deal with the situation.”

“If I remember correctly,” Cestus said, “it takes a unit of at least the fourth generation to present any sort of serious threat to a well-trained Senshi. I don’t suppose our reserves are sufficient to produce the force we’d need for a direct engagement?”

Archon shook his head. “Assembling the new nexi has stretched our resources to the limit. I can’t produce advanced units without either canceling the production of nexi or going into our critical reserves. Either would hamper our efforts to complete the Rise.”

“_That_ must not happen,” Janus said.

Cestus bowed. “I understand, my Prince. Then it seems there’s no choice except for me to go to Tokyo myself and oversee the next operation.” The red- haired fighter looked at Archon. “Can I count on any support from your mysterious protegee?”

“Possibly. Her knowledge of battle magic is not up to the task of confronting Senshi, but she’s proved quite adept at summoning spells. A few well-placed daimons could be all the distraction we need for the nexi to reach normal operating levels. Even ten minutes of standard operation would yield a sizable boost to our reserves.”

Jenna made a face. “Daimons, Archon?”

“Given the peculiar nature of this situation, Highness, yes. If we wish to keep the existence and involvement of the Senshi a secret, we cannot use our own people, and our current force of units is simply unequal to the task. We’ve already seen that we cannot rely on elementals, and I know of no creatures in the upper planes who would consent to attack a Senshi and be strong enough to be effective. At least not without creating some serious complications. That leaves the lower-planar entities, of whom only daimons are powerful enough to do the job.” The archmage paused. “The other reason I recommend using daimons is that there’s been a recent power shift in their world—one of the old daimon lords and most of its minions were destroyed—and it has the rest of them scrambling for position. They’re all much too preoccupied with seizing whatever power they can to have any time to spare for plotting over how to invade our world again.”

“Just make sure your apprentice knows enough to keep the ones she summons on a short leash,” Jenna said. “At least until the Senshi find them and get rid of them.”

“Of course, Highness.”

Watching the images replay again, Cestus chuckled. “That might not take them very long. Athena seems to have trained this new generation pretty well.”

“We all knew there were undoubtedly reasons _other_ than the presence of the supernexus that led the Court to send Athena to Tokyo,” Janus said, “and a group of Senshi she’d trained herself are just the sort of allies the Court would have selected for her. Even with her memories gone, the rest wouldn’t hesitate to come to the aid of their leader.”

“Actually, your Highness... from what I’ve been told, Pluto is _not_ the leader of this particular group of Senshi.”

That set everyone except the black knight back a bit. “Then who is?” Cestus demanded.

“And that’s time,” Haruna announced. “Pencils down.”

There was the usual assortment of sounds from the students. Some let out quick breaths, relieved that—for better or worse—the nightmare was now over. Others sighed, thinking about the questions they weren’t completely sure they’d answered right; a few groaned, thinking of the questions that they KNEW they hadn’t answered right, if at all.

Then someone snored. Absolute silence fell as the entire class stopped and turned, and the hush continued for almost ten whole seconds before people started covering chuckles.

In the aisle seat of the third row from the back, over on the left side of the room, Usagi had fallen asleep. There was no mistaking it; she was slumped back in her chair, her hands were folded lightly over her belly, and her head was down. Minako, the nearest of the Senshi, leaned over and prodded Usagi in the shoulder, to no effect. She poked again and added a firm, “Usagi, wake up.” Nothing.

“Don’t tell me she slept through the entire test,” Haruna said, getting up from her desk and walking over.

“Actually,” Minako replied, looking down at Usagi’s exam, “I think she finished it.”

“You’re kidding.” Haruna was not the only one to say it, but the evidence was sitting on the desk in front of the softly-snoring blonde. The exam booklet was closed, the extra sheets for answering the multiple-choice questions were tucked neatly inside the front cover, and the little ‘Time Finished’ box had ’11:08’ penciled into it. Three pencils—one with a broken tip where the other two were merely worn down to nubs—and a much-used eraser completed the picture. To judge by the time in the box, Usagi had been done for a good twenty minutes, and probably sleeping for at least ten of those.

*Make that fifteen,* Haruna thought, hearing a louder snore as she collected the exam booklet and quickly flipped through it. There was certainly enough writing in the thing to suggest that Usagi had completed the short answer and essay questions, and the multiple choice sheets were all filled out as well.

“Uncanny,” Haruna murmured, shaking her head. “Well, I guess you girls can wake her up and take her home, then.”

They nodded and handed over their own exams. Ami’s included an entire extra booklet, and Haruna expected both it and the first one to be filled to capacity with answers that were neatly spaced, triple-checked, and error-free-if-not-better. Where Haruna figured that Usagi had been snoozing away the last quarter of an hour, she also estimated that Ami had been proofreading her answers for at least twice that long.

In point of fact, Ami had not been doing anything related to her exam for the better part of the last hour. The actual writing had only taken her about half of the three-hour exam period, and she’d rounded out the second hour with her usual checks and corrections. All the rest of the time had been spent talking to Calypso, who was again—as she had every day this week—tagging along disguised as part of her sister’s attire.

Monday morning had been a bit rough. It was the first time Ami had tried to write a test since her recovery, and she had been worried that her new compatibility with Mercury might have given her some sort of unfair advantage—or a severe distraction in the form of old memories. Fortunately, neither proved to be the case, but _un_fortunately, she had a curious Nereid to contend with. Caly wanted to know what all this exam business was about, so she was—figuratively if not physically—looking over Ami’s shoulder the entire time. Worse yet, after being asleep for all those centuries, Caly was seriously out of practice at dealing with being around large numbers of humans, so she kept picking stray thoughts out of the air without even meaning to.

Every little *Hmmm, I see,* or *They don’t REALLY believe that, do they?* or similar remark had been a distraction, and Ami was glad that her first exam had been Math, because it was much easier to go from question to question and deal with Caly’s running commentary as it came than it would have been to get interrupted while in the middle of writing an essay for History or English.

There was no help for it, though. Caly was starting to come to grips with the modern world, but she was still a _very_ long way from getting over the ordeal of her long sleep, and she needed periodic reassurances that all was well. That meant that she needed to be near Ami, and _that_ meant she had plenty of time in which to improve her impersonation of the top half of a Juuban girl’s uniform. Just for the sake of variety, the Nereid had tried mimicking the skirt on Thursday, but Ami—unable to get over the fact that she would have been sitting on her sister—had told Caly to go back to being a shirt.

If dealing with a sentient and psychic second set of clothes during finals had been Ami’s particular challenge for the week, the other girls had been enduring their own problems.

They had gone up to Hikawa Monday afternoon and found Rei setting ofudas up everywhere, with a particular emphasis on her room and the Book of Ages, the front cover of which had been plastered over with the paper wards. She explained about the bad dream she’d had the night before, and how her birds had been behaving oddly—and then she had Rooky tell them what he’d told her.

“Something not-here is here! Things move! Door closes by self! Rooky sees! Others see! The pretty Rei-dii has a bad dream, worms on Book glow, bad dream goes away and pretty Rei-dii sleeps! Rooky knows about the thing that is not-here, Rooky tells the pretty Rei-dii, pretty Rei-dii says Book moves by self! Awp!”

Minako and Artemis had not been thrilled to hear that the Book had moved again, and said so. Actually, it hadn’t; the movement Rei had admitted to Rooky and the other crows had been the same one she’d called Minako about, and she’d said so. Usagi, Luna, Makoto, and Ami had all demanded to know what the others were talking about, and while they argued about the foolishness of keeping important information like this back from the group, Calypso amused herself by taking the shape of a blue-tinted crow and perching alongside the others. Curiously, none of the birds made any objection to the shapeshifter’s presence, but then, they had no need to raise a ruckus for their own amusement when one was already well underway on the floor.

Minako’s problem for the week was Artemis—or rather, Arthur. Although as far as Ami could see, it was very much the other way around. Half the girls in school had descended by the end of the second day to ask about the mystery man, and Minako was absolutely loving every second of it. She was inventing new twists and turns in Arthur’s sterling character every five minutes, making him out to be only a few steps short of divinity-made-flesh. Fortunately for Artemis, he wouldn’t have to be anything but his usual cheerful self if anyone happened to meet him, since everyone was already well-acquainted with Minako’s tendency to exaggerate favorably whenever she described someone she liked. Not that she lied, of course; she just sort of... pushed the limits of the truth. So Artemis didn’t _exactly_ have hair like the moonlight; it was white, right? What was the harm in taking a little poetic license?

But even setting aside Minako’s indulging her inner poet-lariat, Artemis was clearly not looking forward to the spring break. Minako had cut him some slack by saying that “Arthur-kun said didn’t want to distract me from my tests, so he’s been spending the week seeing some of the sights on his own. Isn’t that sweet?” But with the History exam now over and done, that particular grace period was just about up, and Artemis had been looking more and more frantic with each passing day because of it.

Under other circumstances, Ami would have enjoyed seeing Artemis at his wits’ end, but she was becoming increasingly concerned about Makoto. Before their jaunt back in Time, Makoto had probably slept an average of seven hours a night, but her average for the last couple of weeks since their return was closer to nine hours a night than to eight. Factor in the catnaps she’d been taking in the afternoons all this week, and the average bumped up towards ten hours of sleep a day. That just wasn’t normal for Makoto.

The problem was, Ami had begun to suspect that it wasn’t empathic strain that was wearing Makoto down. Mercury had known a few human empaths in her day, and none of them had ever experienced anything like this increasing drowsiness, not even if they were living in one of the big Martian cities, any one of which had been about as heavily populated as Tokyo. But then what was the problem?

Ami briefly forgot about that and smiled when she looked at Makoto now; she was wide awake and helping Minako try to wake Usagi up. Usagi’s particular trial for the week was no big challenge to figure out, and now that it was over, she appeared to be ready to start her vacation, regardless of what anyone else said.

*We’ll see about that,* Calypso said. *Put your hand on her.*

Ami did that, walking over and touching Usagi’s elbow to hide the fact that part of the sleeve of her shirt—her second, self-aware, shapeshifting shirt—was flowing down her arm to touch Usagi’s. There was a pause, the mental equivalent of drawing a deep breath before shouting...

...and Usagi’s eyes flew open, her next snore coming out in a strangled mess ahead of the words, “I’m awake! I didn’t mean to fall asleep!”

“Take it easy, girl.” Minako caught her by the shoulders before she could stand up. “It’s over.”

“OVER?!” Usagi gasped, beginning to struggle fiercely. “It can’t be over! I’m not finished! I...”

“It’s okay!” Makoto said, trying to sound reassuring—not an easy task when you’re holding somebody down. “We all saw Haruna-sensei look through the exam book. You finished the test before you fell asleep! It’s done!”

“It’s... done?” Usagi paused. “Oh. Oh, right. Yeah, I remember now.” The tension went right out of her. “Sorry. It’s just that when I woke up, for a second I thought I was back in one of those bad dreams where you always have to give a report in front of the class...”

“...but you can’t remember what you want to say...” Makoto said.

“...and you can’t seem to find your way to the right classroom,” Minako added, nodding.

“...and you always stop and realize you’re only wearing your underwear,” Ami finished. The other three girls looked up at her, wide-eyed and blinking. “What?”

“I’ve never had a dream like _that,_” Usagi said slowly, while Minako and Makoto made sounds of agreement.

*What are you blushing about _this_ time, sister?*

Rei did not meet them at the usual place, but that wasn’t surprising. Like Ami, she had a tendency to finish her exams well ahead of the buzzer, but she also preferred to leave as soon as the teacher would allow, and she wasn’t about to wait an hour or more for the rest of them to arrive.

Their plan for this afternoon was to cruise around the mall and do as little as possible, unless it was shopping. Naru and Umino headed off together after promising to meet up with the rest of them, and Minako left not long after that, marching home with the air of an invading army to see if she could wrangle Artemis into making his next official public appearance as Arthur. That was going to take some serious wrangling, but they all had their money on Minako.

This left Ami, Makoto, Usagi, and Ryo walking along, with Calypso riding in tow. Usagi and Makoto quickly dropped back, taking a new, blue-tinted scarf along with them around Usagi’s neck and watching with happy smiles—and, Makoto noted, a definite sense of happiness from the scarf—as Ami and Ryo inevitably drifted towards each other. It didn’t take long at all for the two of them to start holding hands.

“It’s really nice to see them like this, isn’t it?” Usagi sighed.

*Yes it is,* Calypso agreed, with something that sounded like a sigh of her own. *This never could have happened for her before.*

“Why not? Don’t Nereids fall in love?”

*Oh, we do, but...* Calypso hesitated. *Humans don’t generally start getting romantic until they reach a certain age—usually somewhere in the teens, right?*

“Right...”

*Well, that ‘certain age’ normally comes a lot later in life for Nereids than for humans. Usually somewhere in our fifth or sixth decade.*

“Do you mean you’d be _fifty_ before you even went out on a date?” Makoto asked in shock.

*Well... we didn’t court in quite the same fashion that you do, but yes, I guess you could put it that way.*

“Don’t tell Mina-chan,” Makoto said. “She’d have a heart attack.”

Usagi was frowning. “Caly, back on the Moon... well... I’m sure I remember seeing Mercury with one or two men...”

*My sister grew up much faster than other Nereids. All the Mercuries did, and it made it almost impossible for them to really form strong ties with others of our kind. They tried not to let themselves fall in love with humans, either, partly because they knew how much it would hurt to outlive their mates and children and maybe even grandchildren, and partly because... um...*

“Because why?” Usagi asked.

*Er... let’s just say that the... mechanics... of interspecies romance are a bit complicated. Particularly later on, when things get... um... physical. Do you understand?*

“Uh, yeah.” Usagi was blushing, and she thought Makoto was too.

*It’s no small trick to be able to hold a solid form under emotional stress,* Calypso noted, *but _that_ sort of stress is REALLY distracting. It took Mercury nearly two years to figure it out, and she needed a _lot_ of help from Ishtar before...*

“Caly,” Usagi said, her cheeks flaming, “we really don’t need to know.”

*Oh. Right. Sorry.* If Calypso had been in human form just then, she probably would have blushed in turn and coughed. *But as I was saying, those relationships my sister had back then weren’t terribly serious. She was just a little lonely, that’s all. It wasn’t anything she would have mindlinked over.*

“How serious _is_ that, anyway?” Makoto asked. “Luna told us a little bit about it that first night, but I think she might have been leaving a few things out.”

*‘Serious’ may be an understatement for it, Mako-chan. The mindlink was the only form of mental contact we had that allowed us to exchange strong emotional imagery with each other, and it was used as part of our version of a wedding.*

Usagi came to a complete stop. “Did you say ‘wedding?’”

*Yes, I did, and no, it doesn’t mean that they’re married.* Calypso paused. *Not exactly.*

“‘Not exactly?’”

*Ami and I talked about this for quite a while that first night. _Nereids_ mindlinked to their mates, but _human_ telepaths often linked to other people they cared about; regardless of what she used to be, my sister is human _now,_ and she’s linked to a human, so we decided it doesn’t count. Not yet, anyway.*

“‘NOT YET?!’”

*Yes, not yet. And keep your voice down before they hear you.* Once again, Calypso seemed to sigh in some manner. *There’s no way to remove the mindlink short of a degree of psychic surgery that no one alive could possibly pull off, but it’ll only grow as far as they’re both willing to let it. That was a trick human telepaths had that we could never manage. I guess it’s because empathy comes more easily to you, so you can project, receive, or block out emotions better than we can. The point is, a mindlink between close friends is different from a link between lovers. They’ll always be in each other’s thoughts now, but it’s up to the two of them to decide just how far they want to take the relationship.*

They were all silent for a while after that. Makoto and Usagi picked up their pace a bit as the Tsukino house drew near, and inside the gate, Usagi unwound the scarf and looped it about Ami’s shoulders, startling her. While Calypso slid under Ami’s coat and went back to imitating her shirt, Usagi opened the door.

“I’m home, Mom.”

“Hello, dear,” Ikuko’s voice said from the kitchen. “How’d it go?”

“I think I left half my brain cells behind,” Usagi groaned, “and my stomach’s completely empty.”

“I was just about to put some chicken and noodles on. You can have a salad while you wait for that—and would the rest of you like anything while she’s stuffing herself?” Ikuko still hadn’t come out of the kitchen when she asked that, but seeing as how Usagi hadn’t been alone for more than ten minutes at a time in the last six months, it was a well-educated assumption that she had company now.

“Just something to drink will be fine, Ikuko-san,” Ami replied with a nod to Luna, who had just come down the stairs.

“Is ChibiUsa home?” Usagi asked, hanging up her coat.

“Not yet. Why?”

“Well, they’re having a big re-opening sale at the mall today for all the stores that had to be closed the other week. We were planning to head out to take advantage of that as soon as Rei gets here, and I thought ChibiUsa might like to come along.”

“I see.” Ikuko came out of the kitchen with one eyebrow raised. “And this is the part where I say ‘that was very thoughtful of you, Usagi-chan,’ and then you agree that it was and try to filch some extra money out of me, right?”

“Uh...” There was a knock at the door. “I’ll get it!” Usagi said brightly, and hurried to the door. Rei and ChibiUsa were out front, neither of them looking particularly happy; the reason for that was standing between them.

Shingo looked like he’d been through a riot. His school uniform was wet and streaked with mud, rumpled all over, and one sleeve was hanging from a tear. His left eye was black to the point where it had swollen shut, his lower lip was split and bleeding, and the only reason his nose wasn’t bleeding as well seemed to be because his nostrils were already clotted up. There was also a nasty bruise forming up on his forehead, just above the hairline.

Usagi suddenly became very aware of her mother’s presence looming up behind her. Thanks to the usual teenage growth spurts, Ikuko wasn’t that much taller than either of her children anymore, but right now Usagi would not have been surprised to turn around and see her mother standing some twenty feet tall.

“Inside, Shingo.” The voice was the sort that could give monsters lessons on how to scare people. Ami, Ryo, Luna, and Makoto looked in from the living room and collectively paled. Ikuko watched Shingo and his escorts enter the house, and when Rei closed the door, Ikuko said, “Talk.”

“I got in a fight,” Shingo said shortly.

“_Don’t_ take that tone with me, young man. I want to know who, and why, and you are going to _tell_ me. Then you are going to go get cleaned up while I call your principal and arrange for you to apologize to-”

“No.”

Ikuko blinked, and everybody else in the room winced. “Excuse me?”

“I’m not going to apologize to them, mother. They deserved it.”

“’They,’” Ikuko repeated, glancing past Shingo.

“I passed one who was running in the other direction,” ChibiUsa said quickly, “and I saw two more heading off down another street. Rei-chan was with Shingo when I got there, so I guess she broke it up.”

“I didn’t break up anything,” Rei said, shaking her head. “I was on my way here when I heard a lot of shouting, and I saw what was left of the fight when I went around a corner. One of the other boys was already running away at that point, the second was holding his nose, and Shingo was wrestling with the third until he slipped on the snow and lost his hold. The last two took off in a hurry then. He won’t say why,” Rei added, folding her arms and looking firmly at Shingo, “but while they were running, he shouted at them to take something back.”

“You should be old enough by now not to pick a fight just because someone says something about you,” Ikuko said.

“It wasn’t...” Shingo began.

“It wasn’t what?”

“Never mind,” he mumbled, glancing around quickly and then looking at the floor. It wasn’t Shingo’s usual guilty face; he looked more like he was trying to hide something than trying to squeeze some sympathy out of the crowd, and when Usagi noticed that Shingo was being very careful not to look at her, it all clicked.

“What did they say about me, Shingo?” Everyone looked at her in surprise, then slowly turned their attentions back to Shingo, who had a rather embarrassed expression on his face. It had only been a guess, but the blush told Usagi she’d guessed correctly. “Well?”

One of Shingo’s feet took a dig at the floor. “I’m not going to repeat it, Usagi.”

“It can’t have been very important, then. Mom’s right; you ought to know better than to get into a fight for no better reason than what someone says.”

“They were asking for it!” Shingo half-shouted, looking up at her. “They’ve been making up stories about you for months and saying... and saying... they’re lying about you, I’m sick of putting up with it, and if they won’t shut up on their own, I’ll make them!”

That was probably the closest Shingo had ever come to saying ‘I love you’ to his sister, and from the way pride, embarrassment, and sheer stubbornness were chasing each other across his face, he was getting ready for Usagi to tease him about it.

Instead, Usagi’s face lit up with a warm, slow smile. She walked up to Shingo, hugged him with no regard at all for the mud, and whispered, “Thank you,” before giving him a sisterly kiss on the cheek.

The other girls gave the scene a collective “Awww.” Shingo’s face turned redder than a tomato.

There was nobody in the house when Minako got home—or so it appeared. She smiled, thinking of the two cans’ worth of tuna fish she’d left on a plate in the kitchen last night, a plate which had literally been licked clean by the time she came downstairs this morning, leaving an absolutely stuffed cat snoozing on her bed. Artemis simply could not resist tuna, and a big meal always left him drowsier than usual. If her calculations were correct, he would still have been snoring when her parents went off to work, locking the doors behind them.

So in other words, Artemis was trapped in the house.

Minako frowned. *Of course, he _could_ have changed shape and just let himself out... but is he smart enough to have thought of that after having a panic attack from realizing I’d set him up? More importantly, has he even woken up yet?*

Being very careful to make as little sound as possible, Minako crept up the stairs, and about halfway to the top, she stopped and smiled anew at the sound of slow, soft breathing. It was a promising development, and sure enough, when she got to her room, Artemis was still asleep on the bed—if not in quite the same place he’d been earlier—curled up on one side with his left front paw on top of his head.

Still making no noise, Minako gathered up a change of clothes and a few other items, then tiptoed down the hallway to the bathroom, for a quick shower that wouldn’t wake Artemis up ahead of schedule.

“You fell ASLEEP during an EXAM?!”

“It was just at the end,” Usagi snapped back at Rei. “I was already finished, and I didn’t even snore until _after_ Haruna called for the tests, so nyah!”

“Now come on,” Makoto said, hoping to stop the tongue war right then and there. “The idea of this afternoon is to relax, remember?”

Usagi and Rei both gave her grim looks, then muttered noises of truce and looked away from each other.

“Good.” Makoto’s satisfied nod turned into a prodigious yawn. “Whoa. Excuse me.”

“And are you also suffering from post-traumatic exhaustion?” ChibiUsa asked with a small smile.

“Maybe,” Makoto admitted. “But I’m sure I’ll feel _much_ better once we hit the mall.”

“I should warn you about that,” Ami said quietly to Ryo. “They’re very likely to try and use you as a walking luggage rack.”

“I didn’t need psychic powers to see _that_ one coming,” Ryo said with a roll of his eyes, “but as it happens, I have a foolproof plan to prevent just such a terrible fate. Of course,” he added, looking at her hopefully, “it hinges entirely upon your willingness to join me in vanishing into the crowd and then go enjoy lunch.”

“An intriguing proposal,” Ami replied in her most scientific tone of voice. “But how do you intend to get away without the others spotting us?”

“I’m still working on that part.”

*I could help with that,* Calypso offered. Then there was a long pause. *Er... that is... if you two don’t mind me tagging along with you when you go...*

Ami and Ryo exchanged a look, and—through the mindlink—a bit of a thought as well. “Go on,” Ryo said.

*Well, as long as you two stay close together like this, I can surround both of you and make you look like two totally different people—_and_ I can disguise your mental signatures as well, so even Mako-chan and Luna won’t notice it when you leave. As long as you don’t say anything, of course.*

Again, Ami and Ryo looked at each other. “I _suppose_ we can make room for one more,” Ryo said slowly, “but only if you make Ami-chan a redhead.”

There was a _very_ peculiar sound as Ami stopped and rounded on her boyfriend. Right after the sound, the word *RED?!* shot out of her mind, crossed space, and lodged in his head with a solid, psychic thunk.

“Would you rather I asked for purple?” Ryo asked innocently. The impression left by the thought-word barely fazed him; it had already happened three times in the last week, quiet proof that their mental bond was getting stronger.

“And I suppose you’ll want my eyes to be _green,_ too?”

“Redheads _are_ supposed to have green eyes, aren’t they?” He was teasing her, of course. He happened to like Ami’s hair just the way it was, and he was very fond of her blue eyes, but he also knew that while she might not show it, Ami was _also_ very partial to her own hair and eye color.

*You mean like this?*

“CALY!”

Too late—and Ami’s shout turned everybody else around just in time to see a blue haze sweep up around her head, leaving behind eyes every bit as green as Makoto’s, and fiery red hair to boot.

“What the...” Makoto began.

Ami gave them all a fierce look that would have done any redhead proud, and then she held out her right hand and said, “Mirror,” in a sharp tone. More mist coiled down her arm and gathered in her palm, forming a small mirror. Ami regarded her reflection for a few moments, brushing her hair back from her face at one point and giving a grudging nod to acknowledge that it wasn’t a _complete_ disaster.

Then she turned to Ryo, smiled a scary little smile, and thought something to Calypso. The mirror and makeover disintegrated at once, and the resulting mist flowed over to Ryo before he had a chance to say anything; when it faded away, _his_ eyes were now blue. He also had a lot more hair than before, all of it a brilliant yellow that almost seemed to glow, and every last strand sticking up from his head in a wild, spiky do.

Makoto, Rei, and Usagi all bit their lower lips to keep from laughing; ChibiUsa just blinked. Ryo looked at them all and then sighed and tried to get a look at his hair, but the style was well out of his field of view, despite all its frills, and finally he sighed a second time.

“All right, Ami-chan, I give up. What have you had your sister do to me?”

Blue mist drifted down to the ground and moved a short distance behind Ryo before piling up into the shape of a tall mirror. He didn’t notice it until Ami told him to turn around—and when he saw his reflection, he jumped. Usagi couldn’t stop herself from laughing this time, and the glare Ryo sent at her was so perfectly in-character for that look that Makoto started laughing, too. Ryo watched them for a moment and then shook his head and turned back to Ami.

“You don’t actually _watch_ this...?”

“_I_ don’t, but Mako-chan has most of the episodes on tape.”

Ryo glanced at Makoto—who shrugged—and he sighed. “Why am I not surprised? Okay, Ami-chan, you win. Now call her off before someone sees me—or that mirror.”

“Oh,” Usagi said, “I don’t know. I mean, yes, there’s no question that the _mirror_ has to go, but I think you look good as a blond. Rei?”

“Well...” Rei made a show of considering Ryo as the mirror behind him dissolved. “It _is_ very striking. Mako-chan?”

“_I_ like it, but maybe we ought to wait and get Mina-chan’s opinion.”

“Come on.” Ryo wasn’t _quite_ begging, but he was close. “This qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment.”

“Caly,” Ami said, “you can stop now. I think Ryo-kun’s learned his lesson.” Calypso waited a moment longer and then ended the illusion. Ryo watched the mist flow back to Ami and then patted his hair a couple of times just to make sure it was back to normal.

“I don’t get it,” ChibiUsa admitted.

*Neither do I,* Calypso said.

“Mako-chan can tell both of you all about Super Saiya-jins,” Ami replied. “Apparently, they all look like her senpai.”

“Ohhh,” ChibiUsa said, turning to smile at Makoto, who was giving Ami a flat look.

*Her what?* Calypso asked, now even more confused.

They hooked up with Naru and Umino at Osa-P. Minako was supposed to meet them here as well, but Artemis was apparently being difficult, because there was no sign of either of them. This was not a problem at all; the girls were more than willing to kill some time checking out the store’s latest goods, and Ryo and Umino were more than willing to let them, since every minute spent browsing here was one less minute that could be spent roaming the mall, using the guys as pack mules.

“And is there anything I could interest either of you gentlemen in?” Mrs. Osaka asked with a faint smile.

“You haven’t sold the one we talked about, have you?” Umino countered immediately.

“No, it’s still here. He’s saving up for a very particular present for Naru-chan’s next birthday,” she explained to Ryo. “As her mother, I’m very pleased with his taste and financial good sense, but as a saleswoman, I’m _extremely_ put out that he won’t buy anything else from me.”

Ryo nodded. Both Naru’s mother and Umino waited for him to speak, and were a bit surprised when he blinked and shook his head instead, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Have you ever seen a doctor about that?” Umino asked. It had been quite impossible to hide all the symptoms of Ryo’s visions at school, and his come-and-go headaches had been common knowledge by the end of the first week.

“A few times,” Ryo admitted, “when I was little. They didn’t find anything wrong, and even at the worst, an aspirin is all the medication I need, so...” He shrugged and then smiled at Mrs. Osaka. “Too bad that you don’t sell any of those little meditation crystals.”

“Too bad,” she agreed. “I guess that’s one of the drawbacks of specialization.”

*Ryo-kun? Ami would like to know what you saw.*

*Artemis, getting attacked by some big rats. There were quite a few of them, and they were out on a street, so I’m guessing they’re not your average sewer rat.* The glass door slid open then, and Ryo looked up. *Speaking of Artemis...*

The first image that popped into Ryo’s mind when he saw Minako and Artemis walk through the front door was that of a sheriff escorting a condemned man to the gallows. Minako had obviously taken a few minutes to get cleaned up and changed, and even though she was all but hanging off of Artemis’s left arm, there was a purposeful air about her that lent an almost royal air to her attire. Artemis, his Silver Millennium-make clothes being much too conspicuous for everyday wear, had most definitely dressed down for the occasion. He was wearing a slightly creased, low-collar white shirt, faded blue jeans and a matching jean jacket, what looked like a pair of last year’s bestselling sneakers, and the furtive, desperate air of a man at the end of his rope, ready to run even though he knows it’s almost certainly hopeless.

The words, “Look what the cat dragged in,” were out of Ryo’s mouth, loud enough for everyone to hear, before he had a chance to think about it. Artemis shot him a venomous look that disappeared without a trace the instant other people started to look at him, and Minako just beamed like the sun at noon as she started making the introductions.

Although he was perfectly fluent in Japanese, ‘Arthur’ now spoke with an accent that was just slightly slow and decorated here and there with hints of English. He was unfailingly polite and absolutely charming as Minako introduced him to Naru, her mother, and Umino, and when Mrs. Osaka asked how the two knew each other—as they had known she almost certainly would—he repeated the cover story of having met Minako during her time in England with no indication at all that it was anything but the truth.

“And what brings you to Tokyo?” Mrs. Osaka asked, once again not unexpectedly.

“Some well-timed mail and a large plane. Mina-chan and I have been writing back and forth to one another since she left England, and her last letter got to me right when I was finishing up the winter term at college. To tell the truth, I’d been getting kind of bored with the campus at home, and it occurred to me that if I could sell my father on the idea of transferring to a foreign university, I could score myself a plane trip and the chance to visit an old friend all at once.” He raised his arms. “And here I am.”

“Big as life and twice as loud,” Minako said.

“That’s ‘twice as ugly,’” Artemis and Umino said automatically, at the same time, and with a sidelong glance at one another.

“Whatever.” Taking a look around, Minako nodded. “So now that everybody’s here and acquainted, shall we hit the mall, or what?”

“Out of curiosity,” Ryo asked casually, looking up from a study of something in one of the display cases, “what happens if we say ‘no?’”

Every female head in the room—even Naru’s and her mother’s—turned toward him. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see Caly create a pair of eyes for herself somewhere on Ami’s coat so she could join in.

“Do you _really_ want an answer to that?” Makoto asked pleasantly.

“Just making sure.”

They all said goodbye to Osaka-san and then left Osa-P with Usagi and Rei leading. Naru, Umino, Artemis, and Minako were next—Umino asking Artemis about his major at college—while Makoto and ChibiUsa followed. Ami, Ryo, and Calypso brought up the rear, and Ryo had to fight down a laugh when he heard Artemis say he was majoring in business and economics, with some math, computer sciences, and cultural classes on the side.

“It _is_ just a little hard to believe if you know him, isn’t it?” Ami murmured.

“Just a little,” Ryo agreed. “So... are we...”

“Caly’s making minor adjustments to our appearances already,” Ami said. “This way, nobody who looks at us will see two totally different people suddenly appear where we’re standing. Just keep going on like normal until you hear her signal.”

Ryo looked at Ami, noticing that she did indeed look a bit different in some very minor ways. She was also smiling, on the inside as well as on the outside. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

It was impossible to deny that she was taking a certain degree of pleasure from the idea of essentially disappearing in plain view of her friends, so Ami didn’t bother to. “Nereids loved to play hide and seek, Ryo-kun, and I was probably the best that there was. I went to Serenity’s thirteenth birthday as the wrapping of one of her presents, and I attended her seventeenth as Ishtar’s dress.” Although at Ishtar’s request, she’d stopped being the dress after about the first half hour, at which point the sunny-haired Venusian’s real ‘dress’ had been revealed—along with a lot of other things—but Ryo didn’t need to know that.

“As long as you don’t go trying to hide from _me_...”

“I won’t.” Ami smiled and walked a little closer to him. “No more than you deserve it, anyway.”

He chose not to answer that. Over the next several minutes, the two of them slowed their pace, gradually falling back from the others, and each time Ryo took a quick glance, Ami looked just a bit more different than the last time. By the time they neared mall, the girl next to him looked like Ami in much the same way that a porpoise looks like a dolphin—which is to say, similar in some very general respects, but really entirely different.

Calypso’s choice of disguise for her sister included much longer hair—which was still blue—and an entirely different set of clothes. The face was a few years older, and Ryo had to look very closely at to see any traces of Ami in it—except in her eyes, which were unchanged.

An image popped into his mind then, of what he assumed must be his ‘new look.’ If it was, Caly had done about the same degree of alteration for him as for Ami: the hair was the same length, but with a blue tint that closely matched Ami’s; the face was older; the clothes were all completely new; and the eyes were again unchanged.

*What do you think?*

“It’s very nice, Caly,” Ami reassured her. “The blue in Ryo-kun’s hair is an interesting choice, and I like that you didn’t change our eyes.”

“I’m rather glad for that too,” Ryo agreed. “It makes it easier to remind myself that it’s you in there. Good job, Caly.”

There was a moment in which Ryo felt a funny tingling and a very light pressure all over. *Thank you. Now, shall we go?*

When the others reached the mall and went one way, heading for a door, Ami and Ryo changed course and literally walked right past them.

“You realize, of course,” Ami said lightly, “that they’re going to be _very_ cross with us later.”

“Only if they find us. Caly, how long can you keep this up?”

*Indefinitely, as long as you two don’t move too fast or too far apart. Keep this pace and distance and we’ll be fine.*

“That shouldn’t be too difficult,” Ryo said confidently.

Several meters away, the others had reached the door and were going in. Artemis, pressed into service as the doorman, blinked as Umino and the girls moved past him and he realized that the group was two bodies smaller than it had been when they left Osa-P.

“Something wrong, Arthur-kun?” Minako asked.

“Uh, yeah... where are Mizuno-san and Urawa-san?”

Everyone blinked and looked around. “They were right behind us when we left Osa-P,” Makoto objected.

“Yes,” ChibiUsa agreed, “but they’re gone now.” Everyone looked around a second time, but Ami and Ryo were most definitely gone.

“I don’t believe it.” Usagi’s voice was flat and low, and then it climbed into a screech. “They _DITCHED_ us! The two of them!”

“You know,” Minako said thoughtfully, “I think they did at that.” She mulled it over and then smiled. “Outstanding. Just out-STAND-ing.” She raised her voice and yelled out into the parking lot, “WAY TO GO, AMI-CHAN!”

A couple of passing shoppers turned around and blinked at her; Minako waved at them, smiling hugely as she took one last look around at the outside world and nodded with satisfaction that everything about it seemed to be just right. Then she turned around, dropping the huge smile in favor of a totally different sort of smile.

“Right,” she said, catching Artemis by the arm. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but _I’m_ still here to shop.”

Hotaru was in a pouty mood when Haruka arrived to pick her up from her last day of class—alone. She had really been hoping ChibiUsa would be there to meet her as well, but now it was evident that her best friend felt she had better things to do with her time.

The bad mood did not go unnoticed. “Something wrong, pint-sized?”

“Yes,” Hotaru replied shortly, as she climbed into the car.

“Want to talk about it?”

“No.”

Haruka shrugged and gunned the engine. She drove a little slower than usual, expecting that she’d need to focus some of her attention on Hotaru before they got very far; being a parent was much easier at fifty kilometers an hour than at a hundred, and if it turned into one of those Senshi talks, she might have to stop the car entirely to deal with it.

They were about three blocks from the elementary school when Hotaru started talking.

“What’s a tempest?”

“A big storm. Lots of wind, usually with rain, snow, or hail.”

“I _know_ that. I meant, what are ‘the’ tempests? The ones you and Michiru-mama were talking about the other day.”

Haruka slowed down and thought back. Michiru had been harassing her into posing for paintings all this week, two or three hours every day, and they spent most of that time talking about whatever came to mind. The last three days or so, the topic had been their memories of their past lives. Calypso’s return had started all the Senshi remembering things about their former selves, and Michiru’s theory was that if they talked to each other, they could draw the memories out more easily. She had reasoned that a slow and steady recollection in a safe and comfortable environment would be much less likely to cause them problems than the sudden battle-triggered flashbacks, and every memory they talked to the surface was one less to jump out of nowhere at them during a fight.

So far, Haruka didn’t see any particular signs of remembrance, either in herself or in Michiru, but she humored her. Talking kept her own mind occupied and stopped her from dwelling on the fact that after a couple of hours of sitting on a flat block, her ass hurt like hell.

Two days ago, they had been discussing the details of what had drifted through Haruka’s memory during the fight with the last batch of units. Ships sailing the skies of the gas giants... storm-spirits dwelling within the endless clouds... Uranus, flying... working with Mercury... and with no sign, not even the slightest thought, of Neptune.

Haruka was beginning to wonder about that. Mercury’s presence, she was quite certain, had not been a typical thing. It didn’t have the feel of the other details in that memory, the sense of Ariel’s perceptions which told Haruka that this thing was normal, and this other thing might be familiar, but Mercury was not either. She was an Inner Senshi, and the inner system was where her duty was supposed to be. More than that, she was a Nereid, and not a very old one at that. However advanced her telepathic mind might have been, her nebulous body was not quite so far along, and there would have been a limit as to just how long she could have tolerated the climates in the outer system, so very different from the ones she was used to. Her presence on the skyship that day suggested something along the lines of a training mission, or possibly just a visit with a friend. There were echoes in Ariel’s memory that said she had liked Mercury, for many of the same reasons that Haruka liked Ami.

And there was another factor to it, a thing that was distinctly Ariel’s: she had been the first Senshi of her generation. The only one, until the Nereids convened and produced Mercury. The thing hanging around Mercury in Ariel’s memories was a blend of loneliness and the feeling which took it away, the feeling of belonging.

Neptune’s—Larrisa’s—absence, now, an absence as much in Ariel’s memories at the time as in Haruka’s memory of the physical fact _of_ that time... well, she was still trying to figure that one out. And hoping like mad that her old life wouldn’t turn out to have been some sort of pedophile. She was used to being the older of the two of them, but there was a limit as to how MUCH older...

None of which was what Hotaru had asked. Haruka put her thoughts aside and explained what she could recall about the tempests as she navigated the streets. They weren’t like daimons or youma or any of the other unnatural creatures that the Senshi had run into in the modern world, but in their own way, they could be just as much trouble.

Hotaru listened quietly. “If they were so dangerous, why didn’t we do something about them?”

“Well, for one thing, nobody was completely sure where they lived, or how they reproduced, or anything much like that. There was no guarantee that wiping out every tempest in existence would stop more of them from showing up later. Besides, Hotaru... they really just weren’t worth the trouble. Sure, they’d kill if they could, but they couldn’t leave the planets, and they didn’t come up into the higher atmospheres very often. They were more like a force of nature than an enemy, just another sort of storm for the ships to roll with. We had bigger problems to worry about.”

The little Senshi fell silent. “What if there was a way to deal with all of them at once? Daimons, youma, tempests—all the things that like to hurt and destroy. What if there was a way to make them all go away and keep them out forever? Like a huge shield. Do you think that would be a good idea?”

Haruka blinked and then almost took her attention off the road to look at Hotaru. “What are you up to?” she demanded.

“I’m not up to anything. Honest. I just... I just want to know what you think about the idea, that’s all. If it was your choice, if you could put up a big shield around the whole planet—the whole system, even—that would keep all the monsters out, would you do it?”

Haruka gave her a suspicious glance but thought it over. Finally, she said, “No. I wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t like hiding, for starters, and because I _like_ a good fight every now and then... but mostly, I just think it’s a bad idea. Staying cooped up in one safe place all the time, never getting hurt, never getting put in danger, never getting scared... that’s just not _life,_ Hotaru. Individual people who try to shut out the world end up in a bad way, and large groups who try the same thing end up even worse. Places that try to isolate themselves from everything else end up either feared or ignored; if people are afraid of you, they’ll find a way to come after you sooner or later, and if they ignore you, you get left further and further behind while the rest of the world goes on. They advance while you stagnate, and eventually you die. I’d rather see an endangered world that was really alive than a totally protected world that was dying like that.”

“Oh.”

“Now what brought this up?”

“Nothing... I was just... it’s nothing. Never mind.” They drove on in silence for another two blocks, and were pulling into the driveway at home before Hotaru spoke again. “I talked to Balance and Time at school the other day.”

Upstairs in her studio, Michiru frowned as she looked up from the nearly-complete painting of a woman whose shoulder-length blonde hair and flowing white wings trailed behind her as she soared through a sky of blue and gold. The noise that had disturbed her was familiar; she had known Haruka too long to not recognize the sound of tires squealing against tar as a vehicle screeched to a stop.

Still disguised beneath Calypso’s shrouding body, Ami and Ryo sat at ease together in the mall’s central court. Ami had set up a program in her computer to block any attempts to use the communicators’ tracers to find her, insuring secrecy, and they had made the most of it over the last three hours.

They had eaten lunch in one of the places in the food court, where Calypso had tried a glass of cherry soda and almost lost control of her illusion because of some bizarre color-shifting chemical reaction between her body and the sugary carbonated beverage. Nearly every part of her created disguises had briefly flipped to another color—Ami’s hair becoming red again in the process, Ryo’s turning a sort of grey—and then flickered through a rainbow strobe effect before Caly managed to expel all of the soda from her body and back into its cup. They’d been sitting in the back, fortunately, and the only person nearby had been a twenty-something janitor who was too caught up in his work and the tunes of his Discman to notice them.

After that, they had checked out the usual places—bookstores and computer stores, of course, but also a novelty gift shop where Ami almost had to physically threaten Ryo before he agreed not to buy her a coffee mug with something as tacky as “World’s Smartest Girlfriend” emblazoned across the side. Then it was the charm shop, where she and Calypso held a ‘loud’ telepathic conversation about the possible merits of buying Ryo his own crystal ball.

They had started running across the other Senshi at the second bookstore. Rei seemed to have been giving some serious thought to actually buying something, but Usagi was moving up and down the aisles and examining each and every customer, not even stopping to look at the section with the manga. Well, not for more than a minute or two. Ami and Ryo had been careful to stay out of both girls’ ways and to not say anything until the pair had walked out, Usagi looking rather miffed about not having found them.

Minako, Artemis, Naru, and Umino had all been at the computer shop, and then they’d passed ChibiUsa and Makoto at one of the food stands. Every time they saw the others, there seemed to be just one or two more bags, half of which Artemis was stuck with. To his credit, he didn’t seem to be tiring under the load, or even complaining about it. Not verbally, anyway.

By contrast, as the three of them sat near a quietly splashing fountain, Ami yawned. Ryo looked at her in amazement.

“You’re actually tired after a mere three-hour shopping spree?”

“Sort of. Usagi-chan and Mina-chan may have been born to shop, but my talents lie in other directions—and it’s been a long week.”

“You seemed to do well enough for yourself,” he said, glancing down at three bags.

Ami smiled. “I’ve had good teachers. Mina-chan swears she won’t rest until I can cruise a mall for a minimum of four hours, and that spending no more than half an hour in bookstores.”

“Remind me to be conveniently elsewhere on the day of _that_ particular exam.” Ryo shifted as Ami poked him in the ribs. “So where to next?”

“Actually, I was thinking that maybe we ought to stop by and visit Setsuna. That boutique that hired her is here somewhere, and I’m curious to see how she does in a real-world situation. After that, we should probably find the others, confess to our vile treachery, and then go home. Does that sound okay, Caly?”

*Very. I think I’ve pushed my limits far enough for one day—and I would like a chance to read those books you bought. There’s very little left in Mako-chan’s apartment that I haven’t read yet, and she wasn’t entirely thrilled when she found me going through her cookbooks the other day.*

“What was that?” Ryo asked as they set out.

“The cookbooks? Well, Caly’s curious, you see, and...”

“No, I got that part, but what was she saying about ‘limits?’ We haven’t been hurting her by making her create this illusion, have we?”

Warmth flowed across the mindlink in synch with Ami’s smile. “That’s very thoughtful of you to be concerned about her, Ryo-kun, but it’s not maintaining the illusion that’s wearing Caly out; it’s being around all these minds and not being able to reach out to them.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” he admitted.

*Imagine for a moment that you’ve been asked to keep your eyes closed all the time,* Calypso said into Ryo’s mind. *There’s absolutely nothing _wrong_ with your eyes, you’re just not allowed to use them. You try to keep them shut, but every time your other senses inform you of something nearby, your automatic instinct is to try and see what it is. That’s very much the sort of situation I’m in, but I don’t have eyes or ears or any of the other specialized sensory organs that you do. My _entire_ being detects these things, so when I try to block something out, it puts a drain on my whole self. It’s fairly small, and it’s been growing less and less with each day of practice I get, but it still wears me out after a while.*

“Oh.” Ryo paused. “I take it that it wasn’t like this for you during the Silver Millennium?”

*No, it wasn’t. Everyone at home was either a Nereid or fully aware of us and our capabilities, and nobody came to Mercury if they couldn’t accept and deal with us on our own terms. My visits to the Moon weren’t very difficult either, because I spent most of my time in the palace, and a lot of the people there either had the mental training to shield their own thoughts or magic that would do the job for them. And I had my sister to help me; she always knows how to deal with this sort of situation better than I do.*

“It comes of having lived nearly a quarter century among humans,” Ami said, “and then living another sixteen and a half years _as_ one.”

“And our lowly species has been brightened on both occasions by your deigning to grace us with your divine presence,” Ryo said.

*OH, HUSH.* That came through very clearly, in two separate voices which both failed to hide their amusement. Ryo hushed.

They found the store in relatively short order. There were four or five customers wandering about and checking out the selection, with some assistance from two store employees who were not Setsuna. Ami, Ryo, and Calypso could all faintly hear the sound of two women shouting at each other in the back room, but neither of those muffled voices sounded as if they belonged to Setsuna.

“Do you suppose she’s on a break?” Ryo asked.

“Maybe, but she might be working in the back. We’ll mingle and wait to see if she comes out. Besides, I’d like to take a look at some of the dresses.”

“Now how did I know you were going to say that?”

They spent almost fifteen minutes looking at the selection, and Ryo found it oddly amusing how Ami and Calypso argued back and forth over the different styles the whole time. A shapeshifter whose natural form didn’t even wear clothes might not have been Ryo’s first choice for a fashion consultant, but Caly had some very definite opinions about style, which she backed up with extremely convincing arguments.

The more he thought about it, the more sense it made to Ryo for Nereids to have such a pronounced interest in fashion. Granted, they wouldn’t have needed to buy clothes, since they could instantly create anything they wanted their human forms to wear, but if they were going to mingle with humans, then they’d have to be up-to-date on the latest trends. And even if Calypso had started out with a fashion sense one thousand years behind the times, she’d been hanging around with her sister’s modern memories—and Minako—for the last week. ‘Nuff said.

It was also worth a few smiles to note that, without exception, every single dress the two sisters looked at was either blue, blue-green, or white— all the colors of water. Ryo toyed with the notion of suggesting a red dress, just to see their reactions, but he couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

*It’ll hang off your shoulders all wrong,* Calypso insisted.

“Fine,” Ami said. “What about this one?” She indicated a blue dress.

*No good. The top’s too short and the skirt’s too long for it to fit right on you. Try the green one next to... no, forget it. The skirt on that one’s much too wide.*

“Glad you caught that. Now, _this_ one...”

“The color’s perfect for you, Ami-chan,” Setsuna’s voice said from right behind them, “but it’d be too loose across the shoulders.”

“Do you really thi-YIIII!” Ami jumped and spun in the same movement. “You...! How did...” She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, then let it go, reopened her eyes, and very clearly and calmly, said, “Setsuna. Hello. Would you mind telling us how you saw through Caly’s illusion?”

“Is _that_ how you’re doing this?” Setsuna asked, looking at the two of them closely. “I honestly couldn’t think of how you’d managed it. You’re very good, Calypso.”

*Thank you, Setsuna. But how did you know it was Ami?*

“I didn’t. I knew it was _Ryo_. The Garnet Orb reacts to his presence every time we move within about ten meters of each other, and it gave a tug just a minute ago.” She squinted at Ryo. “If I ask, the Orb lets me see Time-energy, and you’ve got a rather dignified sort of halo of it. So does Rei-chan, but nobody else that I’ve met so far seems to. Not anyone in this time, anyway.”

“Lucky us.”

“Once I knew it was Ryo,” Setsuna continued, turning back to Ami, “it was reasonable to assume that it was you with him—and I heard you talking when I got close.”

“Caly did warn us that she couldn’t do anything to disguise our voices,” Ami admitted.

“Which I can take to mean that you were both being very quiet when you snuck away from Usagi-chan and the others. Yes,” Setsuna said, smiling at their expressions, “I already knew. ChibiUsa and Mako-chan stopped by two hours and fifty-one minutes ago to tell me that you’d pulled a disappearing act of some sort, and Usagi-chan and Rei-chan came along forty-three minutes after that. I have to say, Usagi-chan seemed to be _very_ irritated with both of you.”

“Do you suppose she’ll get over it after she’s forced us to apologize and we’ve told her that we were going to say ‘sorry’ anyway?” Ryo asked. He looked at Ami and Setsuna; they looked back at him, and he sighed. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. So, Setsuna. How’s life treating you these days?”

“Nice try,” Setsuna said, raising her communicator. “Usagi-chan?”

“Setsuna? Is something wrong? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I’ve found Ami-chan and Ryo-kun.” The silence which followed this announcement was more frightening than a lot of the other reactions Ami and Ryo could think of. “Usagi-chan?”

“Are you still at work, Setsuna?” Now it was the tone of barely-restrained eagerness which was disturbing.

“Not for much longer. Round up the others and meet us at the south door in about ten minutes, okay? Hanna and Annah make enough noise for any one place to deal with without us adding to it.”

“Okay.”

Ryo looked at Setsuna’s wrist with a neutral expression as she closed her communicator. “If I tried to run right now,” he said, “you’d catch me, break my kneecaps, and drag me back to her, wouldn’t you?”

“Something like that,” Setsuna said, smiling as she went into the back room again. The muted sounds of shouting ended abruptly, and there were several moments of peace before Setsuna came out with her purse under one arm and a briefcase in her other hand. “Let’s go.”

They were just stepping out of the store when the shouting started up again. “Are they always like that?” Ami asked, looking back over her shoulder.

“Not always. They don’t usually yell at each other for more than an hour each day, and seldom for more than ten minutes at a stretch. There are plenty of snappish remarks and hard looks to fill in the spaces, of course. It’s rather like being around Usagi-chan and ChibiUsa—or Usagi-chan and Rei-chan—for several hours each day.”

Ryo chuckled. “And that, in and of itself, _hasn’t_ driven you completely insane?”

“I learned how to tune it out at the Tsukino house—and Hanna and Annah are really very good at their work. I have all the technical skill and inspired vision, but they’re just as good, and you should see how well they can handle the customers. I can learn a lot from them, and I think that and the fact that they hired me without any references beyond Ikuko-chan’s good word entitles them to a little leeway. Besides, great artists are supposed to be eccentric, aren’t they?”

“Michiru might want to argue with you about that point,” Ami said, “and Haruka would probably agree with you just out of habit, but I suppose you’re right. Most of the Nereid race were artists of one sort or another, and even I have to admit we were a little weird sometimes.”

*Hey.*

“Well, we were...”

“Speaking of weird,” Ryo interrupted, “are you reversing this disguise at all, Caly? Not that I haven’t been enjoying myself, it’s just that if Umino-san and Naru-san see us while we’re _not_ us...”

*I’m taking care of it. You’ll have to deal with Usagi-chan on your own, though.*

“Don’t remind me.”

“This _was_ your idea,” Ami pointed out to him.

“Okay, but then doesn’t that make it _your_ responsibility to come up with a way to get us out of it?”

Ami gave him a long, chilly look. “You owe me for this, Ryo-kun.”

Usagi and the others were waiting outside. ‘Arthur’ was still with them, shackled to Minako and loaded up with bags, but Naru and Umino seemed to have pulled a disappearing act of their own. Ryo recalled a snatch of conversation overheard earlier at Osa-P, something about Osaka-san needing an extra pair of hands for the afternoon, and guessed Naru had left to go help her mother out.

“Heads up,” Minako said, smiling as she turned around and spotted them. “Escaped bandits at three o’clock.”

“Actually,” Artemis said, “if they’re coming at us from behind and on a level plane, then it ought to be nine o’clock...”

“You need to get your watch fixed,” Minako replied cheerfully. “Nice job, Setsuna. How did you catch them?”

“Actually, they walked into the store and waited for me to see them.”

“Oh, so it was a _voluntary_ surrender... well, if you two would like to confess to anything, Rei-chan’s right here.”

Usagi had her arms folded in an ominous fashion. “Did you two have a good time?”

“Yes,” Ami replied, “we did. And no, I’ve decided that I’m not going to apologize. You’ve blown the rest of us off without warning a hundred times to spend time with Mamoru-san, so you’ve got absolutely no cause to complain when one of us does the same.”

Usagi opened her mouth, closed it, and then said, “That’s not the point.”

“Oh? Then what is?”

“The point... the point is... it’s...” Usagi floundered for the point for several seconds. Then their communicators beeped. Rei was the first to answer.

“Are the others with you, Rei?” The voice was Michiru’s.

“Yes, and Setsuna is, too. We’re at the mall. Is something wrong?”

“Hotaru has something you need to hear. Is it safe for her to open a door to your location?”

“Can’t she just say it over the communicator?” Usagi asked.

“Trust me, this is something you’ll want to be sitting down for.”

Usagi let out a long, slow breath. “Michiru, please don’t take this too personally, but your timing stinks.”

“Pay no attention to her,” Minako said. “She’s just enduring a fit of jealousy because Ami-chan got to spend some quality time with Ryo-kun this afternoon, while _her_ boyfriend is clear around the planet.”

The other end of the signal was momentarily silent. “What have you girls been up to?” Michiru asked curiously.

“Never mind,” Usagi said flatly.

“Tell Hotaru to be ready to open a door at the same place that she dropped me off the other night,” Setsuna said. “We’ll signal when it’s clear on this end.”

“Consider it done.”

“They didn’t say all that much, really.” Hotaru was sitting on the couch with ChibiUsa and Setsuna to either side and every eye in the room fixed on her. “Balance did most of the talking, and the three Times threw comments in every now and then. There were a couple of times there that I would have said they were more interested in playing on the monkey bars than talking to me.”

“Godlike beings... who enjoy playing on monkey bars.” Ryo said the words slowly. “Okay, on some level I find that very disturbing.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Haruka shrugged. “It sort of appeals to me.”

“We can have a theological debate later,” Ami said. “Go on, Hotaru-chan. What did Balance say?”

“Well, for one thing, he showed me how to fine-tune the dimension door. Apparently, there was some sort of inter-dimensional rule that I was getting close to breaking from using the doors too often and with too much energy. From the way he was acting, I think I’m going to be using that trick pretty often in the near future—which probably means we have a few more interplanetary road trips ahead of us.”

“I call shotgun for the next one,” Minako said immediately.

“You may want to rethink that,” Hotaru told her. “Balance said that one of the problems with the way I was using the dimension door was that it was doing something to Saturn—the planet, I mean. That got me thinking about everything I’ve learned about it recently, and, well... with the dimensional warp and all... I kind of have this nasty feeling that the outer solar system may not be as empty as it ought to be.”

“Things did tend to come out of the warp on a fairly regular basis back in our day,” Artemis admitted with a sour look. “Not even Beryl’s stunt with the mana bombs would have changed that for more than a century or two, and since there hasn’t been anyone out there to greet the new arrivals...” He shook his head.

Haruka looked at Hotaru. “This is what prompted those suggestions in the car, isn’t it?”

“What suggestions?” Michiru asked.

“Our curious little firefly here wanted to know why the Moon Kingdom never made any effort to get rid of the tempests and the other native menaces we had to deal with. And then she proposed that we stick the entire solar system into a giant, monster-proof snowglobe.”

“That’d be one _big_ snowglobe,” Ryo noted.

“Could we even do something like that?” Setsuna asked curiously.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Artemis said. “Most of the planets in the Silver Millennium had planetary shields and defense networks of one sort or another— Mars was an absolute fortress—but they were all based on technological or magical devices. The only trick in the Senshi arsenal that comes close to that would be a group shield, and I’d be really surprised if even all nine of you working together could cover Tokyo with any sort of effectiveness. Still,” he added, “we might want to do some research and see what we find before we go zipping around the rest of the system.”

“You think Hotaru-chan might be right about us not being the only things out there?” Minako asked.

“Best case scenario is that we go out there and either find nothing alive, or at least nothing that’s hostile and capable of following us back home. Worst case scenario is that we find a thriving society of flesh-rending horrors that make daimons look like playful kittens, whose only reasons for _not_ having invaded Earth already are that they don’t see it or us as being worth the time and effort. That might change if we start poking around in their backyard and have to fight our way out at some point. Let’s face it; this is a pretty big planet, and we don’t exactly have a lot of resources on hand to protect it. A planet-wide shield to keep any unwanted visitors out would be great, but I’d settle for an early warning system so we’d at least know what was coming down, and where.”

Usagi frowned. “I don’t remember ever hearing about anything like that, Artemis... Ami? Caly?” The two sisters shook their heads.

“It’s called the Silent Shield,” Hotaru said, looking at her feet.

Once again, all eyes settled on her. “Did Balance tell you about this, too?” Haruka demanded.

“Sort of,” Hotaru admitted, still looking down. “I have some memories of Pandora using it, but Balance told me the details of how it works. I think he has the same worries Artemis does about something following us home.”

“How exactly does this Shield work?” Ami said. “What does it do?”

“Um... it can do a lot of things, actually.” Hotaru was still looking at her feet for some reason. “The basic form is a sphere of energy that radiates out from the Senshi of Saturn and works pretty much like the Silent Wall, but the energy involved can be changed to create different effects. One version makes things inside the Shield invisible, and that’s what I’ve been using when I hide our training sessions. Another version...”

“Hotaru,” Michiru interrupted, “look at me.” Hotaru did that, eventually. “You’re trying to hide something about this Shield from us,” Michiru said, “and frankly, you’re not doing a very good job of it.”

“I can... I can make the Shield large enough to cover the Earth,” Hotaru blurted, “and I can set it up so that it’ll run without me having to hold it in place all the time, but... the Senshi is always inside the Shield when it’s first created, and if she makes it beyond a certain size, she has to stay inside to keep it together. If I Shield the whole planet, I won’t be able to leave without bringing the Shield down. And even if I’m not actively guiding it, the energy for a self-sustaining Shield will still come from my powers as Saturn. As long as a Shield is in place, everything else I can do will be weakened. I’m not sure by how much, but for a planet-sized Shield...”

“So then we won’t ask you to make a Shield to keep things out,” ChibiUsa said, taking her hand. “Just one that’ll warn you if something does happen to come along, so you’ll know where we’ll have to go to deal with it. That’ll take less energy, right? And it’s not like you have to make it right this second; after all, we’re not going anywhere until Rei-chan pulls something out of the Book, are we?”

“No,” Hotaru agreed, smiling and squeezing ChibiUsa’s hand. “But... there’s one other thing about the Shield you ought to know. It lets me do—this.”

Hotaru turned into Saturn. She didn’t use her transformation pen or even move from where she was sitting; she just sort of grew up on the spot, her clothes changing into Saturn’s uniform. She didn’t even let go of ChibiUsa’s hand; her own hand simply expanded in size, the glove appearing around it. There was no light show, and even though she was touching her friend the entire time, ChibiUsa felt absolutely nothing except how her hand went from touching flesh to touching whatever soft, semi-indestructible fabric the Senshi gloves were made from.

“And,” Saturn said, “it also lets me do this.”

She changed again, this time into the form of the Tomoe Hotaru that they’d first met all those months ago. She was not as slenderly fragile or as pale as she had been back then, and on the whole she looked much healthier, but everything else was the same, right down to the black leotard and violet skirt ensemble she had favored.

“Saturn is the power of change,” she said. “Sometimes it’s the chaotic, uncontrolled change that causes destruction, but I can even it out to heal—or do this, at least to myself. Physically, I can be as old or as young as I want.” She looked at Haruka and Michiru, who both seemed a bit stunned, and she tried to smile. It came out rather shaky. “I... I’ll have to be little sometimes to keep anyone from asking questions... and I don’t really think I’m ready to grow up for good yet, but... it’s very hard to be little when I’m really not... up here”—she touched her forehead—“so would you two... would you mind if... at home, sometimes... I wasn’t?”

Michiru gave her a sympathetic look and a gentle smile, nodding ever so slightly.

“If you jump on us like that even _once,_” Haruka warned, pointing at Hotaru.

Hotaru laughed—sort of. It was just as shaky as her smile, and for a moment it seemed as though she might start crying. ChibiUsa gave her hand a return squeeze, and Setsuna put an arm around her slender shoulders. Hotaru smiled at both of them.

“What do you suppose this little age-defying trick does to your prediction, Setsuna?” Ryo seemed faintly amused. “The one about Hotaru-chan having a baby, I mean.”

Now it was _his_ turn to get stared at by everyone in the room. Hotaru blushed and made a squeaky, hiccupping sound.

“Uh-uh,” Minako objected, shaking her head. “Not gonna happen. Not for years yet.”

“What makes you such an expert?” Ryo asked.

“Speaking as the duly anointed Goddess of Love, I am NOT going to take on the task of finding a boyfriend and potential future husband for ANOTHER one of these maniacs until I’ve gotten Mako-chan and Rei-chan fixed up properly—and after I do _that,_ I’m going to find a guy for myself. I’m sorry, Hotaru-chan, but you’re just going to have to wait your turn, and that’s that.”

Makoto and Rei both started giving Minako the classic narrowed-eyes gaze, but Haruka glanced at Artemis. “And what would you call him, then?”

“That would be ‘showpiece,’” Artemis said. “Rei, if I can drag you away from plotting accidents for Mina-chan for just a second, could you tell us whether or not you’ve made any progress with the Book recently?”

“Some.” Reluctantly, Rei pulled her eyes away from Minako. “So far, I’ve been able to confirm that twenty-six of the Weapons in that list you gave me have been destroyed, all of them things you’d labeled as minor devices. Nothing good or bad has turned up on any of the major ones yet, but I’ve been having Rooky search for information about the royal armory. If I can find out what was in it when Beryl attacked, I might be able to trim the list down a bit more.”

“How long _is_ this mysterious inventory?” Ami asked.

“The list Artemis gave me included seventy-nine items,” Rei said, “and maybe half of those were general headings for things that we either all had one of—like our communicators—or there were several laying around waiting to be used. I think it worked out to about two hundred in total.”

There was a silence. “That’s a lot of Weapons,” Haruka finally said. “And you say that you’ve managed to take twenty-six things off the list...?”

“Twenty-six that were destroyed, yes. Four of those items were groups of identical equipment, which add another ten or fifteen pieces to the list. And when you include the things we already have—our communicators, all of Ami-chan’s gear, the four Talismans—the total number is around sixty or so—which still leaves about three-quarters of the list to sort through.” Rei made a face. “I’m starting to feel like an accountant or something...”

“Don’t worry,” Minako said. “If we notice you leaning towards tweed jackets and bow ties, we’ll interfere.”

“That’s ‘intervene,’” Artemis corrected.

“Same difference. So,” she continued, looking around at everyone and marking items off on her fingers, “Hotaru-chan can create an early morning system just in case we rustle any interplanetary featherheads who might come looking for some back pay, and Rei-chan’s steadily illuminating false leads so we can keep our trips to a minimum. Does that cover all the new Senshi business?”

Artemis let out a long-suffering sigh and shook his head in defeat at the multiple manglings of the spoken word. “Yes, Mina-chan,” he said wearily, “I think that covers everything for today. That and a reminder that since the exams are now officially over, you’ve all got another training session tonight.”

“Which makes it my turn to babysit Full Moon there for the evening,” Haruka noted, casually shrugging off Usagi’s flat look.

“But that’s everything?” Minako repeated. The others nodded, and then so did she. “Good. Now for the important stuff—namely,” and here she turned to smile at Ami and Ryo, “a detailed explanation of how you two spent this entire afternoon.”

“That’s going to have to wait,” Ami said. “Caly needs a rest after spending a whole day out in public”—she shot a mental warning to Calypso to keep her mouth shut—“and Ryo-kun should really be headed home by now anyway.”

“Hotaru-chan can drop him at home later,” Minako countered.

“Actually,” Ryo said, taking a quick look at his watch, “my folks ought to be getting home from work right about now, so I can’t very well just appear in my room from out of nowhere.”

“She can drop you _near_ your place, then.”

“Well,” Hotaru said, “I _could_ do that, but I think this afternoon sort of proved how tricky it is to use the dimension door. I can’t really put the opening in a public place with any degree of safety or secrecy unless someone’s there to coordinate, so it’s probably better if Ryo-kun catches the bus.”

“Now just a minute,” Minako said, turning to argue with Hotaru. “Are you telling me that you can open a hole that leads to the other side of the solar system, but you can’t open one that leads just a few blocks away?”

“It’s not that simple,” Hotaru said. She started to explain what she knew about the mechanics and dangers of inter-dimensional travel, and then began to argue with Minako over them—and while they were doing that, Ami and Ryo snuck out of the living room.

“Mina-chan’s train of thought never gets very far off that track, does it?” Ryo said quietly.

“Not really, no. I’m not sure if she’s like that because she’s Venus or if she’s Venus because she’s like that, but Ishtar was the same way. She soaked up palace gossip so fast I used to think she must have a telepathic bead on it, and if there was even the _slightest_ hint that somebody was having love trouble...”

“Venus to the rescue?” Ryo guessed, taking his coat out of the closet.

“Exactly.”

“Then I suppose the best thing we can do is to never let her get the mistaken impression that there’s any trouble between us, right?”

“Right,” Ami agreed.

“We have to make sure that she doesn’t perceive any reason to give us her special attention. We have to seem like we’re completely happy.”

“Precisely.”

“Then in that case, are you doing anything tomorrow night?”

“That’s... what? Well, no, I wasn’t really...” Ami stopped and looked at Ryo, the first hints of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

“We _do_ still have that tentatively rescheduled dinner date to take care of,” Ryo pointed out. He considered something that came across the mindbond then. “Is that a yes?”

“That depends; were you asking?”

“Well... yeah.” Ryo suddenly became unsure of himself. “I mean... that is, if you don’t want to leave Calypso by herself just yet, I underst-”

Ami put her finger over Ryo’s lips, silencing him. “I’d love to have dinner with you, Ryo-kun. Meet me at Mako-chan’s at about six, okay?” She smiled, and it seemed to dazzle Ryo completely, because it took him five whole seconds to blink, blush, and nod.

“Got it. Mako-chan’s at six. Um... okay. See you then.”

Ami watched him leave, even going so far as to peer out the window and then wave back when he turned and saw her and waved. Then she turned around, her smile decreasing somewhat as she fixed a firm gaze on the wall between her and the living room and said, “You can all come out now.”

There was a pause, and then Minako came out of the living room, alone. Ami was surprised at that—the only ones she _hadn’t_ expected to see were Artemis, Michiru, and Setsuna—and her amazement must have shown on her face.

“Your sister has excellent hearing and a _very_ handy talent for illusions,” Minako explained. Her face took on a critical expression. “You passed up a perfectly good opportunity to kiss him, you know.”

“I know.” Ami couldn’t help it as the smile grew on her face, and she had to work to keep from giggling. Part of her mind was in full enthusiastic/overjoyed/silly mode; the other part was taking note of it, remembering how the same thing had happened when she talked to her mother about a date with Ryo the previous week, and wondering if this was going to be a permanent condition. “I have a date.”

“That you do,” Minako agreed, smiling back and then giving Ami a hug. “And if you’ll pardon my English, it’s about bloody time.” Ami gave the self-appointed Love Goddess a poke in the ribs; Minako seemed to ignore it as she led Ami back to the living room. “The question now,” she added, “is ‘do you have anything to wear?’”

The bottom suddenly fell out of Ami’s stomach.

All in all, it was a quiet evening at the Tsukino household.

Usagi had called home at about four to inform her mother that she, ChibiUsa, and Setsuna were over at Makoto’s apartment and wouldn’t be back until later. Even over the phone, Ikuko had clearly heard Makoto driving Usagi away from one kind of food or another, and she had also been able to catch the noise of a heated argument in progress somewhere in the background. When Ikuko commented on it, Usagi told her it was just the rest of the girls helping Ami with a little problem.

Aside from a shower and a hasty supper, Shingo spent most of the night in his room. Just because he wasn’t in trouble for sticking up for his sister didn’t mean he was excused for fighting—one of several things Ikuko made sure to have Kenji go upstairs and tell the boy when he came home from work. After talking with their son for half an hour, Kenji came back downstairs with a look of pride that made Ikuko smile and roll her eyes. Yes, she admitted to herself that she was proud of Shingo, too; he had done the right thing by standing up for his sister, and he was accepting the consequences for his actions without any of the usual squirming or excuses.

That said, Ikuko suspected that Kenji’s smile had more than a little to do with the fact that his son had faced down three-to-one odds and won.

With half of the hungry mouths out of the way, Ikuko was finished with the dishes in record time, which left her in a rare moment when she honestly didn’t have anything to do. She decided to spend that time reading, and for the better part of three hours, that was what she did. She did get up once when she noticed that Luna wanted to go out, but the next time Ikuko looked up from the pages of her book, the clock had advanced to just short of ten, and Usagi was coming through the front door with Luna in her arms and ChibiUsa and Setsuna behind, both of them bogged down with shopping bags from that afternoon.

“Welcome home, girls.”

“Hi, Mom,” the trio said in unison. Ikuko sighed and glanced heavenwards, and therefore missed seeing Luna do the same.

*I had a feeling that tonight was going too smoothly,* Ikuko said to herself, closing her book and getting up from the couch. “So what was this mysterious problem of Ami-chan’s that took all of you a good six hours to solve and still left you three in such a good mood?”

“Fashion crisis,” Usagi replied. “She let it slip that she has a date tomorrow night, and Mina-chan decided to ‘help’ by finding the perfect outfit for the occasion.” She shook her head. At Minako’s insistence, Hotaru had opened up a dimension door to Makoto’s apartment, and Minako and Calypso—her designated Special Assistant Junior Goddess of Love for the afternoon—had herded Ami along, bringing her back several times so the others could comment on this or that outfit. Everyone else had their own ideas, of course, and things had rapidly gone out of control. “It snowballed from there.”

“Despite all your best efforts to the contrary, I’m sure.”

“Yes,” ChibiUsa agreed. “Poor youuuu...” The word turned into a massive yawn, after which she stood there blinking. “Okay, I think I’ll go to bed now.” She gave Ikuko a hug, yawned again, and then made her way up the stairs, dragging a couple of bags’ worth of purchases lazily along behind her.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Usagi said, covering a smaller yawn and then slowly shifting her back. It had been a long day; first the exam, then the shopping and all the walking that went with it, and then the fashion crusade. She’d followed the others through another dimension door—placed snugly against the back wall of Hikawa to avoid notice or accidents—and spent a certain amount of time being slightly cold but very much amused as she watched the training session unfold. That was before they stuck her in Rei’s room, surrounded by a miniature version of the Silent Shield that would keep her there and unnoticed by Yuuichirou or Grandpa. She’d passed the time then by showing some of her favorite titles in Rei’s manga collection to Calypso, and also by casually leafing through the Book of Ages and trying to make sense of the garbled symbols inside.

It occurred to Usagi that she didn’t know for certain if she’d closed the Book or not after her unproductive study session, but she shook her head. Rei would notice it for sure, and besides, it was still just a book. Leaving it open wouldn’t be the end of the world.

Even with the post-training shower, Rei barely managed to stay awake long enough to put on her nightgown and collapse into bed. The four crows looked at her curiously from their perches for a time before—with a casual glance at his companions—Thrax hopped down from his place and ghosted across the room to the bed. He reached down and caught the sheets in his strong beak, gradually pulling them up to cover Rei’s shoulders, then took wing once more and returning to his perch. The big raven looked at the other birds a second time; Phobos and Deimos affected an air of suspicion-tinged indifference, and Rooky just croaked a soft, jealous note. Eventually, they all fell asleep as well.

Over on the table, the Book of Ages lay open, the symbols on its two exposed pages continuing their slow but ceaseless dance of appearances, disappearances, and reappearances.

Towards midnight, when Rei and her feathered friends were all far into sleep, the pages of the open Book and a number of the ofudas still hanging about the room wavered as if touched by a light, passing breeze. Rei reacted immediately, shifting in her sleep with a tiny sound of concern as a sense of _unnatural_ penetrated into her dreams, but then the pages of the Book glowed, and the symbols on them swirled around into a whirlpool of words, sinking back into the blank paper. With great speed and utter silence, the pages of the Book flipped back to the beginning, and then the front cover flipped up, closing the ancient volume once more. The glow ceased abruptly, the wards lay still against the walls, and Rei relaxed, drifting into another dream.

For the third time, Ryo reached up to knock on the door, then suddenly withdrew his hand, turned, and began pacing back and forth along the walkway, muttering to himself and occasionally gesturing. This _was_ his first official DATE-date with Ami, after all, and he wanted everything to go just right—and was scared halfway out of his mind that it would go the other way entirely.

“What _is_ that boy waiting for?” Venus asked of no one in particular. She was lurking atop a nearby roof, looking down at Makoto’s apartment door and tapping her foot in annoyance at the delay. She knew Ami and Ryo had some problems in the romance department, but Ryo’s sudden door-dysfunction made Venus worry for the future; if he couldn’t even muster the will to knock on a door and get the fall going...

*Making sure these two work out may take all of my powers as the Ai no Megami,* Venus thought, *but I won’t give up until I’m certain... and whoa to any monster that raises so much as an antenna within ten blocks of them tonight... ah, here we go.*

Ryo was finally knocking on the door. At first, nothing happened, and Venus had a momentary flash of panic that Ami might be going through her own start/stop hesitation sequence on the other side of the door. *Mako-chan, don’t fail me now...*

Down below, Ryo was thinking along similar lines as an upsurge of irrational nervous-boyfriend panic seized him. The words “What if...” rolled through his mind like a hundred of his worst visions combined. Then the door opened—and revealed Makoto.

Up above, Venus winced. *I was afraid of that. Well, at least now he’ll actually be _inside_...*

Down below, Ryo covered a dual flash of relief and disappointment with a polite nod. “Good evening, Mako-chan. Can I come in?”

“I don’t know; let’s see... no box of chocolates, no flowers, no...” She paused as Ryo moved his right hand around from behind his back to reveal a small bouquet of bluish-white lilies with a single red rose in the middle. “Okay, that’s a little better—but _I’m_ not the one you’re supposed to give them to.”

Ryo gave her a look that said ‘Do tell.’ Up on the roof, Venus silently shouted at Makoto to get on with it and go get Ami or let Ryo in or to do SOMETHING besides just standing there.

Makoto stepped back and let Ryo in, then closed the door. “Wait here for a second,” she said. “I’ll go see if she’s ready or not. And just in case, hide those flowers.”

She disappeared down the hall, then came back a moment later with Calypso right behind her. They both nodded at him gravely, and Ryo took a deep breath before heading down to the door to Ami’s room. Standing in front of it, he hesitated again for just a moment—by all rights he should have triggered a vision from the sheer mental stress he was putting himself under—then squared his shoulders and knocked.

“Come in.”

Ryo opened the door, and stopped short. “Er... Ami-chan...”

“Yes?”

“You... you look great.”

Ami smiled at Ryo’s tone, and even more so at the expression on his face. She had gone with a turtleneck white blouse and a knee-length blue skirt. She’d had some doubts about the blouse, which—to her mind at least—seemed a close enough fit to be considered a second skin, but seeing what it was doing to Ryo made her glad she’d listened to the others. As for the makeup, well... it was one of Ami’s not-so-private embarrassments that she was severely impaired when it came to cosmetics, but Minako and Michiru had no such difficulties, and they had come up with a combination yesterday afternoon that used next to nothing to do some amazing things with her eyes and cheeks. Calypso had helped Ami to reapply that same mix tonight with mirror-image precision, and when it was done, Ami had looked into that mirror and been stunned by her reflection.

It reminded her of her father and his art, all the long hours he’d spent sketching this or painting that, and now and then trying his hand at sculpture. He had said to her once that anything you put your heart into and strove to make perfect was an art. Ami had always applied that to her studies, doing her best to create murals out of mathematics and sonnets out of science, but now, thanks to her friends, _she_ was the work of art. It was an interesting feeling, to say the least.

Ami let none of her own amazement at her new ‘transformation’ show on her face, and she was reasonably certain Ryo was too busy being dazzled to correctly interpret anything that might get across the mindbond.

“What have you got behind your back?”

“H-huh?” Ryo blinked and shook his head. “Oh.” He smiled and presented the bouquet with a flourish that was only a little shaky. Ami took the flowers with another smile and closed her eyes as she breathed in their scent.

“Thank you, Ryo-kun. They’re beautiful.” That was the cue for an obvious reply, and Ryo didn’t disappoint.

“Not as beautiful as you are.” He even managed to say it sincerely enough that it didn’t sound clich . Ami left smiling behind in favor of positively glowing, and then she took a step forward and kissed him on the cheek.

“That was for being sweet.” She quickly walked around him and out the door to hide the blush rising in her cheeks, but then stopped in the hall and looked back into the room. Ryo seemed to have been left paralyzed by that kiss. “Ryo- kun? Are you coming?”

“Wha... oh, yeah. After you.”

Ami gave the flowers to Makoto, hugged Calypso, then got her coat, shoes, and purse. She and Ryo had walked down from the apartment and along the sidewalk side-by-side for several minutes before Ami asked where this restaurant Ryo had talked about was located.

“It’s not too far,” he said. “We could catch a bus ride, if...”

“No, that’s okay.” Recalling memories of seeing Usagi and Mamoru together, Ami appropriated Ryo’s right arm.

Up above, unnoticed by either half of the happy couple, Venus pumped one fist in the air with a soft, “Yes!” Then she hurried to keep up with the lovebirds before they got out of her sight.

Back in the apartment, Makoto paused in the middle of placing the flowers into a spare glass vase and looked around. “Caly, did you feel that?”

The Nereid was sitting upside-down on the ceiling, reading one of the books Ami had bought yesterday, and she looked up—or down—with a curious expression. “Feel what, Mako-chan?”

Makoto started to reply, then shook her head. “Nothing.” *Why did I suddenly have the feeling that Minako was here?* “Just my imagination playing tricks on me, I guess.”

“Ami and I have told you not to dismiss your strange feelings too quickly just because we don’t notice them,” Calypso warned, drifting down to the floor and turning herself right side up. “_Feeling_ is the whole point of empathy, and if you’re going to master that ability, you have to pay attention to what it tells you.”

“I... thought I felt Mina-chan nearby.”

Calypso frowned and closed her eyes briefly, sweeping the area around them with her mind. She detected those of Makoto’s neighbors who were home tonight and a few people walking or driving past, but no Minako. Ami and Ryo had already moved out of her immediate range, which made Caly happy for them and a little nervous for herself.

“You don’t have to be nervous, Caly. I’m right here.”

The Nereid smiled at Makoto. “I know. It’s just... as long as Ami’s around, I can look at her and remind myself that what I’m experiencing is real. It has to be, because her mind is there, Mercury in Ami, and I know I never would have imagined my sister existing as a real human. When she’s gone...” Calypso closed her eyes and shivered. “When she’s gone, it’s... it’s difficult.”

More than the vague fear, loneliness now emanated out from Calypso, reminding Makoto that regardless of what she looked like, this strange and sweet creature was the last of her kind, displaced a thousand years out of her time with only a tiny handful of friends who could understand her, and none at all who were _like_ her. The Nereid was unique, forced to adapt to an alien world and forever removed from whatever sort of existence her kind had once enjoyed, save only for those deeply personal moments of contact she could share with the reincarnation of her sister.

Makoto left the flowers and walked over to Calypso, putting her arms around the Nereid. There was a faint tingle as she touched her, a reaction of Jupiter’s electrical energy recognizing something similar to itself in Calypso’s being, and Makoto’s mind picked up very human responses to the hug. Reassurance. Security. Gratitude.

“Thank you,” Caly said, returning the embrace and then backing away with an apologetic smile. “I’ll try not to be so depressing in the future.”

“Trust me,” Makoto chuckled, “you’re not depressing. You haven’t met Chiba-san yet; he can get VERY depressing when he puts his mind to it. World-class dumpsville.”

“Endymion was always too serious for his own good,” Calypso replied.

“...and Serenity wasn’t serious enough for _her_ own good,” Makoto finished. “There are times when she still isn’t, but we’ve brought her around. Slowly,” she added, shaking her head.

“And with much food.”

“You read my mind.” Makoto had meant that as a joke, but Calypso’s reaction was one of shock.

“Oh, no! No, Mako-chan, I didn’t! I swear, I...”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Caly, I was kidding. It was a joke.”

“Oh.” Calypso laughed, feebly at first, then with traces of real humor and a growing blush—a blue one, a sign that she was so mentally preoccupied that she was losing some of her control over her assumed shape. “Oh, I must look awfully foolish right now.”

“Just a little,” Makoto agreed, hugging her again. “But it wasn’t altogether your fault; sometimes it’s really easy for me to put these big feet in my mouth. I’m sorry about that. I know you wouldn’t break your promise and go into my mind without...”

Click.

Calypso looked at Makoto curiously as her voice trailed off and she turned to look in the direction of her room. “Mako-chan? Is something wrong?”

“I almost forgot about...” She turned back to the Nereid. “Caly, do you... do you know anything about dryads?”

Calypso blinked. “Yes, I do. There were still quite a few of them living on Venus when...”

“There’s something I need to show you,” Makoto said, heading for her room and dragging the startled Nereid along behind.

When Archon appeared before his apprentice this time, he did not do so as some immaterial shape of light and shadow, but in his true body, materializing in a brief flicker of varicolored light. He also didn’t appear alone; Cestus stood next to him, his fiery eyes looking everywhere, analyzing everything in sight with a ferocious intensity.

Archon had warned the girl about this. As the Imperial Master of Assassins, Cestus’s existence revolved around three things: the killing of his Prince’s and Princess’s enemies; the prevention of similar acts against them; and the knowledge required to do so quickly, quietly, and efficiently. He was suspicious of everyone and everything, and he had honed that suspicion to the point where he could gather up more information about his surroundings in a single look than many could in an hour of close study. Every room was a potential trap, every person a potential enemy, and the only way to stay ahead of them was to have as much information as possible—and then to act on it.

So they were not meeting in the girl’s home, but on a rooftop that Archon had designated as the site for the next mission, and when Cestus looked at this half-taught, _self_-taught apprentice, he saw a figure in a dark grey cloak, the cowl pulled down over a smoky, reflective mask similar to the ones worn by the Imperial Guards. She could see through it and hear or be heard perfectly fine, but no one could see her face without penetrating both the mask and a respectable array of magical defenses. Archon was not yet ready for anyone in Atlantis to know the identity of his student, and she was just as happy not having a professional murderer know where she lived and what she looked like.

The all-concealing mask was abominably awkward to wear, though, and it had taken her several hours of practice to get to the point where she could enunciate without her chin banging against the lower edge of the thing. Where spellcasting was concerned, bad grammar was lethal.

“_This_ is the mysterious apprentice you spoke so highly of? A half-grown child so uncertain of her abilities that she hides her face?” Cestus snorted—and not for a single second did the girl believe that he had dismissed her. Something in his attitude—and eyes—said this man never dismissed anything so lightly, if ever.

“It has never been the custom of the Imperial Order of Mages to bring our recruits to the attention of those in power unless or until circumstances require otherwise,” Archon said calmly. “I see no reason to change this, particularly since this ‘half-grown and uncertain child’ must live in this city and risk detection by our opponents.”

Cestus grunted something and studied the skyline. Archon turned his back on the assassin—something VERY few people could or would dare, even among the Atlanteans—and faced his apprentice. “All is prepared?”

She nodded. “Yes, sir. The coordinates for the teleportation are set, and I have everything necessary for a mass summoning.” She paused. “Though if I’m going to summon daimons to defend the nexus, I think it might be better to raise one or two more powerful ones and keep them here instead of calling up a large number of lesser ones and scattering them across the city. The Senshi can go through even higher-level daimons and the like fairly fast; weaker types won’t hold them for long at all.”

“Defense is not their purpose,” Archon replied. “That will fall to Cestus, should it even become necessary. The daimons are merely to distract and delay the Senshi so that the nexus has a chance to function normally.”

She nodded again. “I understand.”

“Then see to your spells,” Archon ordered, “and depart when they are completed.” Although he couldn’t see it, the archmage sensed the cocky lift of the eyebrow behind the mask, expressing the unspoken sentiment that the girl had much better ways to spend her evening than on a cold roof with a cold-blooded killer for company. He had several such ‘better ways’ himself, some of which required immediate attention, and the archmage disappeared back to Atlantis. His student began setting up for the ritual, using the ‘pager’ he had given her to create the warding circle on the roof.

“You may want to stand back,” she advised Cestus politely. “With the number of daimons that’ll be coming through, there’ll be quite a lot of radiation from their home plane. Most people don’t care for the feel of that sort of thing.”

“What I care for or feel isn’t really any of your concern, apprentice.”

“Merely trying to be helpful.”

Usagi was sitting on the foot of her bed and looking up at the Phoenix Egg. She had turned off the overhead light and switched on a bedside lamp instead, because the Egg’s curious reflections of light actually seemed brighter this way.

“Maybe ‘reflections’ is the wrong word,” she murmured.

“What?” Luna asked, raising her head from the mattress.

“For the way it glows like that. If it’s alive, then maybe it lights up because it wants to instead of because of some laws of physics.”

“It’s a possibility. I’m not sure what sort of useful information it gives us, but...” Luna paused, one ear and then her entire head turning towards the balcony at the sound of a ‘tap-tap-tap’ on the glass door. Artemis was standing outside in human form, rapping one knuckle lightly on the glass, and he looked vaguely worried—and definitely irritated—about something.

Luna hopped down from the bed, morphed to human form, and unlocked and opened the door. “Something bothering you, Artemis?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.” He stepped inside quickly, closing the door behind him. “Do either of you know where Minako is? She gave me the slip about an hour ago.”

Something in the back of her mind told Usagi she knew where Minako had gone, but she glanced at the clock anyway just to be sure of the time. 6:37.

“She wouldn’t have,” Usagi said.

*She _would_,* Serenity replied, *and you know it. Once Ishtar got it into her head that she was on a mission of love, nothing stopped her.*

*Minako isn’t Ishtar.*

*Yes, she is. She just has a few more inhibitions, and keeping a moonlight vigil over a happy couple to make sure nothing goes wrong doesn’t come near any of those. It’s actually part of her job.*

*Don’t remind me.* Usagi was reaching for her communicator when it went off. “Hello?”

“Usagi,” Hotaru’s voice said urgently, “they’re raising daimons again. A LOT of them. And they’re on the move.”

“Take Haruka and Michiru and start dealing with them,” Usagi said immediately. “I’ll send ChibiUsa and Artemis to meet you and get in touch with the oth-”

“You’re NOT going to call Ami in the middle of her date,” Venus’ voice interrupted.

“Where are you?” Artemis demanded.

“Never mind that now,” Usagi said. “Venus, if they’re turning loose a lot of daimons, we need to be able to track-”

“Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, and Calypso can find these things as easily as Mercury’s computer,” Venus countered, “and they can do it from four directions at once.”

“But Mako-chan’s never-”

“Then she can stick with Caly and learn how. I’ve already got the nexus in my sights.”

“You _what_? How did-”

“Gotta go!”

“VENUS!”

“I think we need to work on that girl’s concept of the ‘chain of command’ a little more,” Haruka’s voice noted from the other side of the line.

Switching her communicator off, Venus took the next roof in a long, steady leap. It had been sheer dumb luck that she’d happened to look up right when the profile of the nexus appeared on a rooftop a few blocks from the restaurant Ami and Ryo had entered a quarter of an hour before. Venus had considered going in to keep a closer eye on things, but decided against it for a number of reasons. For one thing, she didn’t have an especially good track record with taking a direct hand in the romantic lives of her fellow Senshi, and for another, Ami and Ryo would have spotted her instantly if she’d gone in. She didn’t have any money on her anyway, so it all worked out.

She hadn’t noticed any daimons so far, and the nexus itself had disappeared behind one of those invisibility shields that seemed to be standard- issue for the things, but she had a good bead on where it had been, and since none of the previous ones had moved after appearing, she was willing to bet that this nexus was still there. She had been about to call in the others when she linked in to Usagi’s and Hotaru’s line.

*If they’re calling daimons,* she thought, *then odds are good that they’ve changed their plans. About time, too, considering how seriously we keep trashing their toys... let’s see... Hotaru-chan said the daimons were moving, and she’d be the one to know... but from everything _I_ know, the nexi _can’t_ move... so the daimons have to be a diversion... whoa!*

She stopped, crouched, and sprang to avoid a flying thing that looked like a mouth with two pairs of bat’s wings. A single Crescent Beam blew it out of the air.

*Well, that settles it. Saturn took apart that last daimon in record time, and this thing wasn’t even a patch on that. The only use for something so weak is to delay, delay, delay... which means they don’t want us getting to the nexus... which means I _have_ to get there, ASAP, so I can’t wait for the others...*

Suddenly, Venus smiled. “Ah, why not?”

Cestus stood atop a ledge on the side of the mana nexus, watching the streets below as the huge machine slowly warmed up towards full activation. People were leaving buildings and scattering in all directions, some of them running from the handful of daimons that were still in the area, others just putting as much distance between themselves and the looming presence of the nexus as they could. That was something he would have to pass along to Archon and the artificers; the cloaking shield for the nexi needed to be fitted more closely.

He didn’t understand what the occasional flashes of light down there might be, though, and that bothered him. They certainly weren’t any form of weapon or attack spell, or the defenses of the nexus would have reacted in an appropriate manner... and they seemed to be coming from little box-shaped devices several of the people below were holding up in front of...

Golden beams lanced down from the sky, blasting into the pack of daimons and reducing them to nothingness. Cestus traced the path of the sudden attack up and across the street—and blinked. Where the Senshi were concerned, gold meant either Venus or Uranus, and those symbols in the uniform of the woman now standing on the roof across the street from him included the sign of Venus, but the crescents... and a _mask_...?

“Who in the Abyss are YOU?”

“You must be new in town,” she replied, “so I guess a formal introduction is in order.” Maybe it was a trick of the light, but suddenly she seemed taller... or just more intimidating. “I am the soldier of justice, the sailor-suited beautiful soldier! I am Sailor Venus, Code Name: Sailor V! And if you don’t want another scar to mess up that pretty face of yours, I suggest you clear out right now!”

*_Pretty_?!* Cestus didn’t get a chance to speak, however, because there was a sudden commotion below that had nothing to do with the daimons or the nexus.

“Look!” someone shouted. “It’s Sailor V! It’s really her!”

There were suddenly about a hundred of those flashes.