Perhaps it was just that the events of the last few days had been so dark and depressing, but Hotaru thought that this morning’s sunrise looked particularly pretty.

The little Senshi was sitting in what she half-humorously referred to as her ‘tanning chair,’ a plush, comfortable seat placed in front of her bedroom window. She set her alarm so she could get up every morning, pull back the dark violet drapes, and then sit and watch for half an hour or so as the sun came up. She even did it on cloudy days, letting her vision slip into the life-detecting sight Saturn afforded her; the sun might not be a living thing in the flesh and blood sense of the word, but Hotaru could pick out its energy no matter how overcast the sky. Maybe it had something to do with how the sun was creative and destructive at the same time, an endless series of devastating thermonuclear explosions that, incidentally, was also the ultimate source of energy for the life dwelling on the third planet.

Such thoughts were not unusual for Hotaru during these morning vigils.

After a time, when the dawning star had risen high enough over the horizon to start stinging her eyes, Hotaru reached out and closed the drapes. That was the only window in her room, and the curtains were thick enough and dark enough that they completely cut off the sunlight, causing the room to revert to its customary level of almost-darkness. It was a near-recreation of her room at her father’s house, with the same dark blue and violet colors dominating, except where her treasured lamps sat atop dressers and tables or hung from the walls, glowing softly and steadily. The main difference was to be found in the flecks of glitter in the otherwise dark paint on the walls and ceiling, which caught the light of those lamps and flickered like tiny, distant stars.

Despite the small size of its occupant and the presence of the stuffed animals on some of the furniture, it was clear that this strange and beautiful chamber was not a little girl’s bedroom. It was too eerie for that—too otherworldly.

Back when Hotaru had first grown into her child’s body and asked to redecorate her room like this, Michiru and Haruka had objected strongly to the whole idea. Hotaru understood why, because it was nearly impossible to describe this room without using the word ‘dark’, and darkness, in any form, was something her foster parents were determined to keep her away from. Setsuna had helped her convince them, by the simple expedient of waiting until Haruka and Michiru had gone out for an afternoon and then having the furniture moved and canvassed and one wall partly painted by the time they returned for supper. Hotaru had lain awake in Haruka’s bed that night and listened to the muted argument going on between her three foster-parents in the kitchen, then fallen asleep and woken the next day to find Haruka, in a pair of overalls stained by ancient grease and more recent spots of violet-blue paint, grumbling as she worked a roller across the ceiling in the other room.

Hotaru had been and still was uncertain what Setsuna must have said or done to get Haruka and Michiru to agree, but she’d been much too busy being happy with the results to think about asking—and then, as the work neared completion, she’d been too worried about the question of the lamps. She wanted her old ones, but they were long gone, lost when her father had abandoned their old house to go into hiding. Or so she had believed, until Setsuna came to the rescue once again, and took her to a storage locker a few blocks from what had been the site of Mugen Gauken. Inside, padded with foam chips in neatly stacked plastic crates, Hotaru had found not only her beloved lamps, but many other items from her father’s house. Going through them with help from Setsuna, Hotaru had decided what she wanted to bring to her new home, and what could stay where it was, safe, and wait for another day.

As with the lamps, most of her choices for what was to go into her room had been bright and cheerful, almost startlingly so until one considered that the intention of this room was not to display darkness; it was to reflect twilight, those in-between times where light and darkness were even in the sky, and strange and wonderful things could happen in the shadows. Hotaru had always been most comfortable during periods of twilight, and her room had been remade to match her tastes long before Mistress Nine entered her life and made her afraid of the dark. Her bedroom had been a testament to twilight for as far back as she had been able to remember—and then in later years, it had become a memorial to the person who had created it.

As she always did at this time of the day, Hotaru touched the picture sitting on her bedside table, under the glow of the oldest of her lamps. This was one of the items that, like the lamps, had been put into storage. She was in it, younger—much younger—than she was now, just a tiny toddler, held between two people while they all smiled for the camera. On the right was her father, pale from a lifetime of working indoors, but healthy regardless of that, and with both his eyes bright and alert behind his glasses; on the left was her mother, Keiko, as dark-haired and dark-eyed as the little girl she and her husband were holding between them.

Hotaru had trouble remembering her mother. Although this picture allowed her to see what Keiko had looked like, in her mind’s eye, Hotaru could never quite form a complete image. She recalled soft and gentle hands that were neither Michiru’s nor Setsuna’s, and she could remember the sound of a quiet voice, but not the words it had spoken. There was also a particular scent, something that was unlike any flower, soap, or perfume that Hotaru knew, but which had always made her feel safe and happy. Clearest of all, she remembered being out in a field on a summer night, watching as what looked like thousands of fireflies rose from the grass to dance beneath the stars and the crescent moon, listening as that soft voice explained how her parents had first met in this place, long ago—how in years to come, they had chosen to name their precious daughter after the little creatures that still dwelt there.

As always, Hotaru took just a few minutes at the start of her day to think about her mother, to miss her and love her. And, as always, she felt a pang of shame and regret as she thought about the moment when she had lifted the picture out of the closely-packed foam protecting it.

Hotaru had known from the start that her father could not have been the one to pack the crates. He had been immaculate in his lab, but his skill at any kind of housekeeping was rudimentary at best, and even if his mind had been completely his own at the time, he would never have been able to get all of these items put away so neatly. As it was, Hotaru had resigned herself to the certainty that the thing that had been controlling her poor papa had destroyed all of her lamps, savoring the act itself as much as the knowledge that she would be hurt by their loss—by the loss of all the little treasures that someone had so carefully put away. Even as she opened the first crate, the neatness of it, the precision, and the stubborn refusal of the thing to open had given Hotaru all the clues as to who had packed it.

She had never liked Kaolinite. Not once, not even when the woman had first come to work as their housekeeper, when she had been young, sweet, and eager to please, as different from the cold and hateful witch the Senshi had fought as it was possible to get. Even then, Hotaru had disliked her, simply because Kaolinite came when Keiko had been sick. This strange woman had come into the house and started doing everything Hotaru’s mother normally did, cooking and cleaning and on occasion reminding Souichi to leave his experiments long enough to at least eat something. Even worse, even after all the doctors had said that Keiko needed to rest, this *intruder* had gone up to the master bedroom with tea and then stayed there for long periods. Hiding in the hall, Hotaru had heard the two women talking and frequently quietly laughing together, and resented that while she wasn’t allowed to spend much time with her mother, this *person* could apparently go in whenever she wished.

Hotaru had hated how easily Kaolinite seemed to get along with her parents, and how easy it would have been for the two of them to get along as well, how insidiously simple it would have been for her to give in to the smiles and gentle words and actually *like* this awful woman. Refusing to surrender, Hotaru had stubbornly maintained her outward dislike and waited for her mother to get better, so that Kaolinite would finally have to leave.

And then, so painfully slowly and yet all too quickly, Keiko was gone, and Hotaru and her father were both broken apart—and Kaolinite never went away. Worse, she kept trying to be Hotaru’s friend, only to be rejected again and again. Certainly, however much she must have understood how and why Hotaru disliked her, Kaolinite must have been hurt by the little girl’s resentment, perhaps even embittered by it. Then Kaolinite had been caught up in the nightmare that hid in that house, twisted by it like everyone else, all her dark qualities brought out and enhanced until she was the witch Hotaru had hated so much. Unlike Hotaru and her father, Kaolinite had not made it out of the nightmare, and Hotaru had never questioned that it was what the woman had deserved—and then she found all the crates, all the things from the house put so neatly away.

It could have just been Kaolinite’s obsession with neatness that made her put everything into storage rather than simply getting rid of it all. Certainly, the thing she had become would have had no trouble doing so, and probably would have enjoyed destroying Hotaru’s things as much as any daimon. But as she held the picture in her hand a year and a lifetime later, Hotaru knew it was more than that. She thought about all the things she had most disliked about Kaolinite. She thought about the woman’s long-lost friendliness, and the laughs shared with Keiko before she died. Hotaru thought about the looks Kaolinite so often gave to Souichi, the looks a child could resent but not make sense of, and that a teenager resented all the more as she began to understand their meaning. She thought about those accursedly watchful eyes and that disgustingly silky voice telling her what she must or must not do, about those unnaturally strong arms and cold, hard hands picking her up when her illness overpowered her, carrying her to bed and frequently changing her clothes as though she were an utter invalid. She even remembered the day of her mother’s funeral, when she had cried herself to exhaustion and been put to bed in much the same fashion as in the years to come, but with a soft hand wiping away the teary mess on her face, and something that might have even been a kiss following her into sleep.

All the things that Hotaru had disliked the most, all of them done out of care, perhaps even affection. Kaolinite had cared for a dying woman, grown to love a man she would never have, and felt sorry for the little daughter who was left behind—the girl who she herself would help to raise. The influence of the daimons could not take those feelings away, only corrupt or bury them; Hotaru knew that, just as Mistress Nine had briefly taken over her body and pushed her consciousness down into a tiny corner of her mind, so too must the real Kaolinite have been trapped within the dark shell built out of her own worst traits. Putting all of these precious possessions into storage might have been that trapped and doomed woman’s one last attempt to do something right, to be a friend to a girl who had mistrusted her, despised her, and never really understood her until it was too late for either of them.

Hotaru’s room was therefore doubly a memorial, dedicated to the mother she had lost, and then to the friend that could have been. Just as she thought about her mother every morning, Hotaru also thought about Kaolinite, about her own childish stupidity, and how she must never let herself treat someone like that again.

Sighing, Hotaru kissed her fingertips and touched them to the picture. Right then, a curious thought struck her. Picking up the photo, Hotaru walked over to her dresser, looked briefly at her image in the mirror, and then willed herself to change. It took only a moment for the power of Saturn to sweep through her tiny body and make it grow up again. Watching her reflection, Hotaru saw herself age five years... ten years... fifteen...

When the transformation stopped, a woman who appeared to be about Setsuna’s age was standing in front of the mirror, wearing pale purple pajamas which had increased in size right along with her body. She didn’t look quite the same as the woman in the photo; they had the same hair and were of roughly the same height and build, but the woman standing in the room had finer features, and her eyes were much darker. Hotaru studied her reflection closely, and was forced to conclude with another regretful sigh that she did not really look all that much like her mother. On the other hand, aside from being dark-haired, dark-eyed, and beautiful, she didn’t resemble Mistress Nine’s chosen form either. That was something, at least. This wasn’t anybody else’s face but her own; it was the familiar face she wore as Saturn, made just a few years older than it usually was.

*Maybe a few years too many,* she thought a moment later, glancing at the lock of white that had appeared in her hair. Since she hadn’t tried to put it there, Hotaru suspected that she could look forward to seeing that begin to appear naturally as she got older. It was rather striking, actually, but it also added about ten years to the appearance of this body, and she wasn’t ready to grow up *that* far just yet. Hotaru caught the white lock with one hand and pulled her fingers along from the base to the tip, changing white hair back to black with a simple gesture. *There. Much better.* She struck a vaguely glamorous pose, blew a kiss at the mirror, and then giggled at herself before resuming her child form.

Living with a teenager’s mind inside a child’s body definitely had its problems, but there were plenty of good things about it as well, not the least of which was that Hotaru got to participate in the holidays and festivals as a kid again. Japan had quite a list of holidays and festivals, and one of Hotaru’s favorites was today: Hinamatsuri, the Doll’s Festival. Even if it wasn’t a full-fledged holiday, there was still a lot to be said for a celebration in honor of girls, particularly when you were one.

The tradition was for a family with a young daughter to put up a small set of dolls representing the old imperial court; emperor and empress, ministers, servants, and musicians, all arranged in rows on a tiered stage. Hotaru had no idea why that was, exactly, but the dolls were very lovely, particularly the set that Michiru had brought out the year before. Each figurine was made from china, and their little kimonos looked like real silk, although Hotaru hadn’t dared to touch them to find out for certain. Simply from the way Michiru had handled them as she set them up, Hotaru had guessed that the dolls were old, precious in a way that had nothing to do with age or money.

This was only Hotaru’s second year celebrating the Festival with Haruka and Michiru, and she hoped that it was as much fun as the last. She smiled and rolled her eyes at that, recalling how Haruka had joked about using the dolls to keep score of the number of kisses she could charm out of pretty girls, and how Michiru had decked her with a pillow. It would be hard to top that act, but there was a fair being held in the park this year that promised to be interesting—and of course, she still had to go wake her foster parents up.

Smiling mischievously, Hotaru crept down the hall, leaving the picture and all her sombre reflections in the shadows of her bedroom.

Hotaru was far from the only person thinking about the fair that morning, but there was one girl whose interest in it took a decidedly different turn from everyone else’s.

Sitting in her room, Archon’s apprentice watched through a scrying spell as workers finished setting up the stands and booths. At times, she would look away from the image and study the open pages of one of her grandmother’s translated books, and the glowing words of the memory crystal that floated in the air above it. Both described the same spell, a fairly complicated magic that she had been working on for the last few days. If cast successfully, the spell empowered an object—any object—with the capacity to absorb energy from its environment, in some respects making it into a minor mana nexus. The difference was that once the mini-nexus had fully charged itself, it spent all of its energy in a single task, which was usually a large magical explosion.

That part was no problem; the young apprentice had already cast a few low-power versions of the spell at home and found it to work quite well. What she was trying to do now was work out how to fix additional spells in place to take advantage of the power produced by the first. The technique was calling slaving or splicing, and if she could just get a spell of summoning and a spell of control fixed to the power-spell, she might have a way to safely summon the sort of daimonic force that was needed to hold off the Senshi.

She could summon individual daimons powerful enough to fight one Senshi— maybe two or three, depending on the Senshi and the daimon—but to handle the whole group of sailor-suited warriors at once might end up requiring close to an equal number of daimons. There was simply no way the apprentice could call and control that many of the evil entities at one time, and if a daimon with that level of brains and brawn got free, there’d literally be hell to pay. A free daimon could call up others, quickly creating a self-perpetuating nightmare, but this spell splicing might just be the solution.

The girl knew that she could cast the spells involved. She knew that they’d work. And the fair was the ideal place for the test; after all the speeches about love and justice and all the rest of it, a fair during the Doll’s Festival looked like just the sort of juvenile silliness that the Senshi would go for, insuring both a battle-testing of the magic and that the daimon wouldn’t have a chance to get too far.

Even so, the apprentice was reluctant to turn loose a monster with this level of power in the middle of a crowd of uninvolved innocents. The massive army had been a different story; those things had been so weak that even with their sheer numbers, ordinary people could have—and had—beaten the extradimensional stuffings out of them. This daimon could very well be more powerful on its own than half of the horde combined, and any ordinary person that got near it would be lucky to survive, even if she kept as tight a rein on it as...

The girl made a noise of disgust and mentally smacked herself. Idiot! She could MAKE the daimon NOT try to kill anybody other than the Senshi simply by altering the command spell a little.

That problem solved, the apprentice gathered up her things and summoned her magic. Moments later, masked and cloaked and hidden beneath a spell of invisibility for good measure, she materialized in the back of a booth at the fair. Taking a moment to confirm her unseeable status by waving her hands in the faces of a couple of workers who were putting the finishing touches on the front of the stall, the apprentice then turned to business. There were human-sized versions of the emperor and empress dolls standing at opposite ends of the booth as part of its decor, and since these weren’t as likely to go somewhere as one of the smaller dolls scattered all over, she began casting the series of spells over the empress, keeping her voice low to avoid notice.

One by one, the spells seeped into the material of the doll-statue, the lines of magical energy curving into new shapes and patterns. With a final twist, the young wizardess sealed the splicing spell and then touched the empress with one hand and her sense of magic, trying to determine if it had worked.

There. The spells were intact, and the power was already beginning to build. It would take several hours to reach its peak and trigger the summoning, but that was just fine. This was one time when she wanted the Senshi to show up quickly, and a monster in a large crowd would draw plenty of attention even if it didn’t seriously hurt anyone.

Her conscience soothed and her plan set in motion, the apprentice departed from the fairgrounds. One of the workers glanced at the back of the booth with a frown, fairly certain that he’d heard a whisper of a sound, but then shook his head and got back to work.

Setsuna was sitting up in the bedroom again today, although this time she was dressed, alert, and reading a fairly hefty book rather than staring blankly off into space.

Her retreat into the quiet isolation of the bedroom was not a relapse into depression, but a necessity in light of the way that everybody kept looking at her out of the corners of their concerned eyes. Setsuna knew that they were just trying to look out for her, and she was genuinely touched by it, but a girl could only stand being looked at like a volcano about to explode for so long, and she’d had to deal with the strain since Ikuko got downstairs that morning. After four hours, Setsuna felt that she’d hit her limit.

She could have asked them to stop; she could have insisted on it. But that would have resulted in hurt feelings, probably the suspicion that she would go and do something the second they stopped watching her, and therefore a redoubled vigil. Much better for everyone if she took a little alone time. Leaving the door open had been a sort of compromise, so that they could look in on her without disturbing her.

Setsuna had counted ten separate look-ins by various members of the family in the last hour alone.

*Make that eleven,* she thought, glancing down at a small shadow that had appeared outside the door. “Et tu, Luna?” There was a pause before Luna entered the room and hopped up onto the corner of the bed.

“Am I *that* obvious?” she asked with a crestfallen look.

“Only to my supremely-honed senses,” Setsuna replied, turning a page. “I wouldn’t be too worried about it if I were you.”

Luna gave her an odd look. “Aren’t you going to ask me to go away?”

“Would you like me to?”

“Not really.” Luna frowned. “Are you sure you’re okay, Setsuna?”

Setsuna sighed and put her book down. “Luna, let me ask you something. I understand that you aren’t from this star system. Am I correct in assuming that you had family at home before you were put into cold sleep by Serenity?”

“Yes...”

“And are *you* okay with having lost them to a thousand years of waiting around in stasis, just for the chance to wake up and risk your life against a succession of monsters?”

“What sort of a question is that?” Luna snapped.

“The same kind you all keep asking me,” Setsuna replied. “Of *course* I’m not okay, Luna. I’ve lost two separate families in two different times, I have no way of getting back to either of them, and I don’t even have the comfort of being able to remember anything about them. I’m no more okay with any of that than you are with losing *your* family—but I’m dealing with it. I’m also getting just the slightest bit annoyed at having to repeat this to everyone who asks that question, so please, don’t do it again.”

Luna opened her mouth, but no sound came out for a moment. Then she sighed. “You’re right, of course. I’m sorry. I’ll try not to ask again.”

“Thank you. Now tell me, what’s the mood like downstairs?”

“Hushed conversation, quite a lot of concerned glances in the direction of this room, and some emotional wrestling on ChibiUsa’s part.”

The last detail made Setsuna frown. “Oh yes. She was planning to go to a fair with Hotaru today, only now she’s worried that going out to have a good time might send me off the deep end again.” She looked down at Luna and got a nod of confirmation. “Well, we can’t have that. I’ll just... mmmm...” In the middle of pushing herself up from the bed, Setsuna stopped, winced, and sat back down with one hand against her ribs. “They didn’t do that yesterday,” she noted with a pained breath.

“I think it’s a built-in precaution,” Luna said, the mattress shifting and settling as she went human and helped Setsuna lean back. “Injuries hurt when they happen, and then when the business of healing gets underway, they *really* hurt to keep you from doing anything to interfere with the process.”

“Could be,” Setsuna agreed, letting out a sigh as the sharp throbbing lessened to a dull ache. “Out of curiosity,” she said, “if I were to transform right now, would I be all healed up when I turned back to normal? I’m quite sure I can fake being injured.”

“Sorry,” Luna replied, “but it doesn’t work like that. Any injuries you sustain as a Senshi are reduced when you turn back, but when you’re hurt as yourself, it remains until you’ve healed normally. And in your case...”

“Yes?”

“You’re much further along as a Senshi than the others are,” Luna said. “Leaving aside the eons of non-time you spent as Pluto, you’re quite close to the point where you won’t need to transform anymore. One of the downsides of that advancement is that you lose the ability to heal just by transforming back to normal; the closer you are to the permanent change, the less you recover each time you revert.”

“Wonderful,” Setsuna groaned. “Help me up?” Luna did that, and then shrank back into a cat to accompany Setsuna downstairs. Ikuko and the girls were in the kitchen; Kenji was at work; and it seemed that Shingo was also out somewhere.

“...starts next week,” Usagi was saying. “She said it was for two weeks, which means she’ll be finished in plenty of time for our usual spring trip.”

“Ami never ceases to surprise me these days,” Ikuko said. From the sound of things, she was shaking her head and smiling. “If someone had told me two years ago that she’d have a steady boyfriend or take a part-time job rather than spend her spring break with her nose in the books, I don’t think I would have believed it.”

“She probably would have had trouble believing it herself,” ChibiUsa said.

“So what about the other girls?” Ikuko asked. “I know that Rei will be as busy as ever with her chores at the shrine, but are Makoto or Minako looking into anything?”

“They haven’t mentioned anything,” Usagi replied. “Of course, Mina-chan’s going to be busy showing Arthur-kun around town and all, and I’m fairly certain she’ll put in some time practicing at the track so she can beat Hime-chan, but... oh. Hi, Setsuna.”

“Usagi-chan,” Setsuna returned, nodding. “Don’t let me interrupt. You were saying?”

“Huh? Oh, uh... I was saying that... aside from playing tour guide and getting in top shape for the track and field season, I don’t think Mina-chan’s going to be up to much this month. And I think Mako-chan’s going to give the rest of us a break and relax, like we’ve been telling her to.”

“She *has* seemed a bit listless the last few times I’ve seen her,” Ikuko admitted, biting her lower lip. “Did she catch whatever it was that Ami had last month? Or is it something else?”

“It’s something else,” ChibiUsa said.

“Not another bad break-up, I hope.”

“No, it’s not like that.” Usagi privately wished that it could be that simple. “Mostly, she’s just tired, but that’s nothing that a couple of weeks of kicking back and doing nothing won’t fix.” She made a face. “Of course, knowing Mako-chan, she’s probably already made reservations at that mountain retreat again without telling the rest of us.”

“She’d have to get by Ami first,” Setsuna said. “And even if the opportunity presented itself, I somehow doubt that Mako-chan would run off and leave Ami in the apartment by herself for a week.”

“I didn’t think of that,” Usagi admitted.

“I expected as much. No offense, Usagi-chan, but I think being pregnant is making you paranoid, too.”

“Hey! Who asked you...” Usagi stopped and turned around to glare at ChibiUsa, who was trying without success to smother her laughter. “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” she asked in acidic tones.

Instantly, ChibiUsa stopped laughing. “Oh... no... not really...”

“You can stop looking at me like that,” Setsuna said bluntly. “You and Hotaru have been planning to attend this fair for the past week, and I won’t fall apart just because you go out and have fun for a few hours.”

“Well, I... I just... I mean...” ChibiUsa fumbled with it for a minute and then just asked, “You’re sure?” with a hopeful expression.

“*Yes.*” Setsuna made the word as emphatic as she could. “I’m sure. Go. Have fun. I’ll still be here when you get back.”

“Promise?”

“Do I have to read your palm to convince you?”

ChibiUsa seemed to consider that option, but she shook her head and bounded forward to give Setsuna a hug. Setsuna straightened right up and backed away with her hands raised to defend her injured ribs; ChibiUsa paused in mid-bound and blushed. Moving more slowly, she walked up and gave Setsuna a very light hug about the shoulders, then grinned and raced upstairs, the words, “I have to go get ready!” hanging in the air behind her.

After ChibiUsa was gone, Setsuna and Usagi looked at each other. “I’m not going anywhere any more than you are,” Usagi said defiantly.

“The thought never entered my mind,” Setsuna replied smoothly. “I was actually wondering if you’d give me a hand with my hair again.”

“Aren’t we getting just a bit old for this?” Ami asked.

“You’re never too old for a party, Ami-chan,” Makoto replied sagely. “And you’re seldom too old to lend a hand at one.”

“I can remember something close to forty years of life, now,” Ami returned, “and besides, this isn’t a party.”

“Same difference.”

Makoto was in her room, going over her best—and only—kimono for signs of wear and tear. Ami was out in the living room, and they were arguing back and forth about the festival in the park. The woman running one of the booths was the mother of a friend of a girl they both knew from school; it was a simple, complicated little story that involved cooking, and so naturally, Makoto had volunteered to help out. Ami was going to assist as well, which had come as news to her when Makoto mentioned it in passing earlier in the morning.

It must be said that Calypso was finding no end of entertainment value in watching them debate.

“Mako-chan,” Ami tried again, ignoring the open smile on her hovering sister’s face, “you’re in no shape to go out and help someone cook. You can’t even walk across the apartment without tripping over your own feet.”

“There’s not going to be that much walking involved.”

“You’ll ruin your kimono if you spill anything on it.”

“I haven’t spilled a thing since this balance problem started, and you know it.” Ami had to concede that for the truth, which meant that she was quickly running out of options. Finally, she sighed and played her trump card:

“I don’t have a kimono.”

Makoto appeared in the bedroom door, frowning. “What do you mean? What about that blue one you’ve always worn before?”

“I didn’t think I’d need it, so I put it with everything else that mother placed in storage after New YearÆs.”

“Oh, that’s not a problem,” Calypso said. “If you need a kimono, just turn into Mercury and give yourself one.”

Ami and Makoto both blinked at the Nereid. “Can you actually do that?” Makoto asked, turning back to Ami.

“I... *used* to be able to,” Ami replied slowly. “But... I was a Nereid then, and...”

“You don’t know any more than I do just what the limits of a human Mercury’s powers really are,” Calypso said relentlessly, “and you’ll never find out for certain what you can and cannot do unless you try. Now go on. Transform, and give it a shot.”

Looking back and forth between her sister and her roommate, Ami finally sighed and transformed. Then Mercury stood there for several long moments, concentrating on changing.

“Nothing’s happening,” she said at last.

“We can see that, silly,” Calypso replied. “You’re trying to do it the Nereid way, Mercury, and that just isn’t going to work. You’re human, and if you’re able to do this at all, it’ll be in the human way.”

Mercury stared at her sister. “I suppose you want me to say something, then?”

“That *does* seem to be the standard procedure for activating most of your powers,” Calypso agreed calmly.

“Any helpful suggestions?”

“None whatsoever,” the Nereid replied cheerfully, “except that you should probably have an image like *this* in your mind.” With no more than a thought and a shimmer, Calypso gave herself a pale blue kimono with white snowflake patterns. Mercury glared at her this time, then closed her eyes and held her arms out to her sides.

“Mercury...” she began. “Mercury...” She made a disgusted sound and opened her eyes. “This is ridiculous. I don’t even want to go!”

“Just do it,” Calypso insisted. She got another glare, but Mercury went back into a ready stance.

“I feel like an idiot,” she complained. Then she raised her arms again, concentrated on the energy that was waiting inside her, and forced out the first words that came to mind: “Mercury... Mist Metamorphosis!”

They waited for three whole seconds, but nothing happened, and the triumphant look that Mercury gave Calypso could only be described as a smirk. “There. It didn’t work. Are you happy?”

“Try harder.” Calypso’s voice was perfectly calm and reasonable. “You have to give a firm command, not a suggestion—and try not to stammer this time.”

THAT was going a little too far—she had not stammered, and just who did Calypso think she was, ordering her around like this?—and when Mercury called out, “MERCURY MIST METAMORPHOSIS!” the second time, she sounded seriously annoyed.

*WHOOSH*

Sparkling blue vapor erupted from the folds of Mercury’s uniform and the backs of her gloves, racing along her arms in both directions to create a wide plume that appeared to rest across her shoulders. The mist began to rise about her neck and head, and at the same time it fell below the level of her arms, descending to join the pale white tendrils of fog billowing out of the tops of her boots. Mercury’s startled eyes were the last things to disappear as the flowing fog enveloped her entire body, and then a soft blue light shone forth from the stone in her tiara. The entire miniature cloud glowed the same shade of blue and collapsed in on itself.

Calypso and Makoto blinked. Mercury looked at the pair of them. “What? What happened? Did it work? Did something go wrong? Something went wrong, didn’t it?”

Calypso was already turning into a mirror as tall as Makoto. The glass remained cloudy for an instant after the rest of the body had formed, and then it cleared up all at once.

Mercury could hardly believe her appearance. Unless one counted the single pair of earring studs, her Senshi fuku—even the tiara—was completely gone, and in its place was a pale blue kimono so fresh and clean that it shone. As with Calypso’s version, this one had a pattern of white snowflakes, but there were dark blue wavelets along the hem and the ends of the sleeve. A blue ribbon every bit as complex and graceful as the one on the back of her battle costume floated at the back of the belt, and a smaller matching bow had appeared in her hair, the ends hanging down just past her shoulders. Where the gold tiara had been, there was instead a length of small silver-colored stones holding the familiar blue sapphire over her forehead. The ends of the string disappeared seamlessly into her hair, apparently meeting up with the ribbon.

“Oh... my,” she managed to say, raising one hand towards the soft touches of makeup that had appeared on her face, only to stop and look at the pale blue fingernail polish that she hadn’t been wearing a minute before.

“I’d say it works,” Makoto announced after a critical examination. “It might be a bit much for the Doll’s Festival, but then again, it might not. What do you think, Caly?”

*I suppose it’ll do,* the mirror replied. Mercury’s head shot up, her expression indignant at the indifference in her sister’s tone. *Oh, be still, Mercury; I’m only teasing. You look wonderful. See?* The single mirror expanded into three.

Mercury gave Calypso another hard look, but surrendered to a moment of vanity and mischievous speculation over what Ryo’s reaction to this outfit would be. If seeing her in that turtleneck had rendered him nearly speechless, well...

“Caly,” she asked, frowning as something occurred to her. “Why did you just call me Mercury?”

*Well you are, aren’t you?* Mercury started to reply that since she wasn’t wearing the fuku, she couldn’t be in Senshi form right now, but something made her bite her tongue. She didn’t feel exactly like she normally did as Mercury, but she didn’t feel like everyday Ami, either.

“Mako-chan, give me your hand for a minute. I want to test something.” Eying her friend cautiously, Makoto reached out and took her hand. “Okay, now pull. As hard as you can.”

“Are you sure about that?” Makoto asked. “I can pull awfully hard...”

“I know. Just try it.”

“All right...” Without any warning, Makoto’s shoulders shifted, and Mercury lurched forward for all of two inches. Then she set her feet—or rather, the sandals that her boots had turned into—and didn’t move any further. Makoto blinked in astonishment and got dragged forward a short distance when Mercury started pulling back, and then they looked at each other, slowly relaxing and letting go.

“I guess that proves it,” Makoto said, flexing her fingers. “Not to sound conceited or anything, but you wouldn’t have been able to stay on your feet against that if you were still Ami.”

“I’d have to agree,” Mercury said, shaking her own hand with a bit of a wince. Makoto had a very strong grip when she cared to use it, whether she was Jupiter or not. Looking at her hand, Mercury reached out and plucked the Caduceus from its other-dimensional space. It didn’t quite match the rest of her appearance, but everything about it still worked; her visor even materialized at the press of an earring, and when she called for the Frost Lancet, the Caduceus transformed without a hitch. Holding the slightly glowing weapon, Mercury looked up at Makoto, who sighed and nodded.

The Shabon Spray worked as well, filling up the entire apartment until Mercury made her way over to the balcony and opened the door, allowing the vapor to flow out. When it had thinned enough to allow them to see, they discovered that Mercury had switched back to her normal Senshi guise.

“I take it that means that you can’t use your regular attacks while you’re disguised,” Makoto guessed, waving a hand in front of her face to sweep away the last of the mist. “Not without losing the disguise, anyway—but then why did the Frost Lancet work?”

“The Caduceus regulates its own powers,” Mercury replied as she turned into Ami again. “I don’t have to maintain anything it does, just command it to start or stop.” She looked at her regular clothes and then nodded. “Well, that could be a useful trick.”

“You’re welcome,” Calypso said, smiling from where she stood next to Makoto. Ami gave her sister a dry look, but the Nereid had already turned to Makoto. “What time are you supposed to be there?”

“Ten o’clock.” Makoto glanced at the VCR clock. “Which gives us about twenty minutes to get to the park.” She disappeared back into her room, returning a moment later with her kimono tucked safely away inside a large sleeve of white cloth, which she carried folded over her arm. Calypso immediately turned into something similar and floated herself over to Ami, who made no move to pick her up.

*Come on, Ami,* Calypso chided her. *It’s not like you to back out of helping someone, and you might even have fun. Besides, you’ve run out of reasonable excuses.*

*Makoto’s going to get in trouble, Caly. I don’t know how, but I know it’s the truth. She shouldn’t be going out in public until she’s improved her control of the Aegis.*

*Should or shouldn’t, she’s going, and there’s nothing either of us can do to stop her, short of knocking her out until this evening.* Calypso gauged Ami’s reaction to that alternative. *That’s what I thought you’d say. So the best thing you can do is to go and keep an eye on her, right? Help cover for any mistakes she makes?*

*It’s a little hard to hide a smoking crater large enough to swallow a city block, Calypso.*

*_Now_ you’re overreacting.*

“You know,” Artemis said as he reluctantly followed Minako around the second corner in as many minutes, “the last time I checked, the park was in the other direction.”

“Yep,” Minako agreed cheerfully. “It still is.”

“And you *did* say that you were going to the fair, right?”

“Right again,” Minako said, turning left and steering ‘Arthur’ with her. “We just have to make one little stop to pick up a friend.”

“None of the girls live around here,” Artemis said. “In fact”—he stopped and looked around at the houses—“unless it was on a monster chase, I can’t think of the last time I went this way.”

“Well, that’s not why we’re here. Although it is kind of a Senshi-related deal.” Minako led him up to a modest, relatively unremarkable home that Artemis was immediately certain he’d never been inside. Even as Minako knocked on the door, Artemis racked his brain, but came up with nothing.

“Okay, Minako, I give up. Why have you brought...”

The door opened, and a young girl of about seven or eight jumped out with a happy cry of, “Oneechan!” There was a similar sound of delight from Minako as she released Artemis’s arm to catch the little girl. Stepping clear as he watched the pair spin each other around in the doorway, Artemis dimly recognized the girl as Mie, the onetime kindergartner and Sailor Moon fan that Minako had befriended.

*Minako’s talked about her once or twice, but I don’t remember that they got along quite this well... better act like I’ve never seen the kid bef-* Artemis’s train of thought got derailed by a suddenly renewed grip and tug on his arm, which dragged him inside.

“And this,” Minako said, as the door closed softly behind them, “is Arthur. Arthur-kun, say hello to Mie-chan.”

“Hello to Mie-chan,” Artemis replied automatically, unable to think of anything more clever. Minako gave him a shove in the ribs, but Mie giggled.

“I like him, Mina-chan. He’s silly.” A cunning sort of look entered the young girl’s eyes as she asked, in that drawn-out, teasing manner that only a child can master, “Is he your boyfriend?”

“Him?” Minako asked, raising one eyebrow and indicating Artemis with a stuck-out thumb. “Oh, no. He’s just a friend. But don’t tell anybody that I said so,” she said slyly, laying a finger beside her nose and winking conspiratorially. “Wondering about it drives the other girls I know absolutely *nuts.*”

Mie returned the wink.

“So,” Minako said, straightening up. “Is your mother home?”

“She’s sleeping,” Mie said with a nod, which was followed by a glance towards the back of the house. “But I talked to her, and she said I could go to the festival with you as long as I’m home by supper. She even made lunch for us, although”—Mie paused and looked up at Artemis—“I don’t think there’s enough for three...”

“Don’t worry about him,” Minako said with a dismissive wave. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of food at the fair. Why don’t you go get your things, so we can get going?”

“Okay!” Mie darted off.

“’Oneechan?’” Artemis repeated quietly. “Did I miss something?”

“There are days when I’m surprised that you don’t miss the sun, Artemis.” Minako’s attention was fixed in the direction Mie had gone as she explained. “Mie’s mother has a heart condition. It’s not too serious as long as she takes her medication, but she tires out really easily, and that makes it almost impossible for her to keep up with Mie. Since we’re practically neighbors, I started stopping by to see how they were getting along, and lending a hand every now and then—mostly by taking Mie out when her mother couldn’t and her father was at work. Trips to the park or the mall, that sort of thing. And birthday parties, of course. And once or twice as a sitter.”

Artemis couldn’t help it; he winced. Minako noticed, but she just grinned ruefully.

“I know. Under different circumstances, even *I’d* think twice about leaving a kid with me, but Mie and I get along, so it’s never any trouble for either of us.” Minako’s smile was wistful. “She’s a sweet kid; almost makes me wish I actually had a little sister. Almost,” she added.

“And the fact that she all but worships the ground that the Senshi walk upon doesn’t hurt, right?”

“Okay,” Minako admitted, “so my ego gets a little attention in the bargain. Is that so wrong?” Mie returned with a backpack before Artemis could answer that.

“Ready to go?” Minako asked her young friend.

“All set,” Mie confirmed, plucking a light jacket from the closet. “The food’s in here”—she indicated the backpack—“I left a note for Mama, and I’ve got some money for games and snacks.” She tugged on her coat and the backpack, which between them made her look a bit more like the kindergartner Artemis remembered. The biggest difference was that there was no longer a cutesy superdeformed Sailor Moon gracing the lapel with her victory pose. She had migrated to the backpack instead, and she wasn’t alone.

A tiny Tuxedo Kamen holding a rose nearly as large as his head and top hat combined stood next to Sailor Moon in a pose that would have been dramatic had it not been so shrunken, and the four Inner Senshi formed a half-circle beneath the pair. SD Uranus and SD Neptune had been fixed to the right side of the pack, standing back to back, complete with tiny Space Sword and Aqua Mirror; Uranus was depicted with the back of the Sword resting cockily over one shoulder—with a wry, confident smile that Artemis had to admit was pretty typical of Haruka— while Neptune held the Mirror before herself with one hand balanced atop the glass as though she were calling on its power. On the opposite side of the pack, Artemis was startled to see tiny, disproportionate replicas of all three Sailor Starlights in their own battle-ready poses, but there were no images of Saturn, Pluto, or ChibiMoon, and no cats at all. Artemis wasn’t sure whether to take the latter as a testament to his and Luna’s ability to stay unnoticed, or just as a sign that they weren’t popular enough to rate their own decals.

“Nice backpack,” he said, speaking to Minako at least as much as to Mie. Minako just smiled, shrugged, and rolled her eyes, but Mie turned around and beamed up at Artemis.

“Thanks. I put a lot of work into it. Although it’s not quite finished,” she admitted, walking slowly backwards. “I’m still trying to find three more images.”

“Are there actually that many of them?” Artemis asked, playing dumb. Mie nodded seriously and reached back to the bag.

“All of these, plus Saturn, Pluto, and Sailor ChibiMoon—the little one with the pink hair. And I think there was another one who was really tiny, although almost nobody else seems to even know about her.” Artemis shot a quick glance at Minako, who shook her head ever so faintly to deny mentioning ChibiChibi. “My favorite’s still Sailor Moon, though,” Mie continued. “How about you?”

“Ah... I don’t really know that much about them,” Artemis began. “I’m more of a Sailor V fan.”

“Really?!” Mie exclaimed. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

“No, honest. She’s pretty popular back home in England.” At that, Mie stopped in her tracks and stared at him.

“You didn’t tell me he was from England!” she protested to Minako.

“You didn’t ask.”

“Minaaaaa!” Mie gave her friend a hurt look and then moved around to walk beside Artemis instead. “So if you’re a Sailor V fan,” she said immediately, “you must have heard the news by now. That she’s in town, and working with Sailor Moon and the others?”

“I did hear about that,” Artemis agreed. “You seem to be an expert on the subject, Mie-chan, so tell me: what do you think’s going on?”

“Well...” The little girl suddenly began to talk a mile a minute. “Sailor V showed up a long time ago, all by herself, and then she disappeared and Sailor Moon and all the other Senshi came along. Now, a girl I know named Ryoko thinks that Sailor V *is* Sailor Moon”—Minako’s eyes bugged out—“but I don’t think that’s right at all, because Sailor V was a good fighter, and anybody you ask will agree that Sailor Moon *wasn’t* when she first started out. She’s gotten better, of course, but if she really were Sailor V and had all that experience, she wouldn’t have had so much trouble in the beginning, would she?”

“Probably not,” Artemis said. “So, assuming for the moment that Sailor V *is* one of the Senshi, who do you think she’d be?”

“Sailor Venus,” Mie replied promptly, “and *not* just because Venus starts with a ‘V’ and they’re both blonde. Sailor Moon and Sailor Uranus both have blonde hair too, but Sailor Moon’s is in the wrong style, and Uranus’ is much, much too short, while Venus’ is almost the same as Sailor V’s. And if you look at how all the Senshi act, Sailor V and Venus are really similar; some of the others are serious all the time or get angry really easily, but Sailor V and Sailor Venus are both usually happy and tough, unless of course a fight starts going bad.”

“And you figured all this out on your own?” Artemis asked.

“Oh, Mina-chan helped,” Mie said. “She knows a lot more about Sailor V than I do.”

*That goes without saying,* Artemis thought, glancing at Minako again. Even the most rabid fan could only hope to match what Minako knew about Sailor V, at best; she had all the facts, and still kept up on all the fiction surrounding her original superheroic alterego. Even so, Artemis still had to admit that he was impressed by Mie’s deductive reasoning—impressed, and amused. At this very minute, half the news agencies in Japan were probably trying to puzzle out the connection between Sailor V and the Senshi, and this schoolgirl had found the answer almost single-handedly.

His humor was muted by the fact that Mie had gotten virtually all of her information secondhand—if not even more distantly removed from the source—and still managed to sift out the facts. If she could do that, others could as well, and the enchantments which prevented people who saw the Senshi from recognizing their real identities would do nothing to stop someone from puzzling out the truth, even from secondhand facts and rumors.

“Where *ARE* those people?” the Security Director demanded.

“So far as I can tell,” Information replied, “they’re out.”

“I can SEE that,” came the acid reply. It was followed by a grim silence as Security realized the bad joke the darkness of the meeting room made of his words.

“Are you always this disagreeable during holidays, or is it just this one that offends you?”

“I have nothing against festivals,” the militaristic Director growled, his tone saying otherwise. “I just don’t like the idea of having most of our section leaders out in the open at a time when there are higher than average odds of there being an incident. I can name at least a dozen major gatherings that have been hit by these things over the last two years, and that’s only from memory.”

“You *do* have people out there to handle things if a situation develops,” Information said, his words half question and half statement.

“Three teams deployed around the park, plus the normal patrols,” Security replied automatically, “but that’s not the point. This kind of frivolous indulgence is a major security risk, to say nothing of the time it wastes.”

“It’s not like we have a contractual obligation to spend every waking and sleeping moment in this place,” Information said. “We’re all entitled to a little time off every now and then, and if the others decided to take a break, there’s really nothing either of us can do about it. Particularly since Personnel reviewed and approved all the applications for leave. I have them all on file, in case you wanted to check them over for yourself.”

Security muttered something, then left the room. After the other man had departed, Information said aloud, “I don’t suppose there’s a loophole in the charter which would allow Personnel to force him to take a vacation? Even a short one?”

“She’s only permitted to relieve him if his behavior starts to impair his ability to do the job,” Sciences said from the corner behind Information’s place at the table. “He may be a cranky, disagreeable paranoid, but if anything, it’s only made him more effective. You’ve seen the tapes of how quickly his people brought down that creature in the tunnels.”

“Yes, about that... I noticed in your preliminary report that you’re discouraging the use of flamers in any future encounters with similar beings.”

“I am.”

“You have to know that Security isn’t going to like that.”

“Whether he likes it or not is beside the point,” Sciences said flatly as she took her usual seat. “That was the first creature we have on record that left behind genuine *organic* remains when it was killed, and the flamers all but turned it into charcoal. If my people are going to puzzle out the strengths and weaknesses of these creatures, they need something to work on.”

“What about those little beasts you have in the labs?”

“I’m afraid that we’re not going to get anything useful from them anytime soon,” Sciences predicted. “Their bodies give off a form of radiation that completely blocks every kind of scanning technique we’ve tried, and it’s quite impossible to dissect a body that disintegrates in the same instant that it dies. We considered vivisection, but their physiology doesn’t seem affected by any known sedative, and we’ll never be able to work on one if it’s conscious; they’re simply too vicious to handle with anything short of lethal force.”

“They have to sleep sometime, don’t they?”

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” Sciences disagreed with a faint shake of her head. “Not one of them has shown any signs of fatigue since they were put into containment. In fact, nothing about them corresponds to anything we know about biology, or most of the other sciences, for that matter. Did you know that they don’t smell?”

The look the seated man gave her was audible.

“I’m serious,” Sciences said. “We’ve seen a number of them producing acids, vapors, and assorted other substances, and all of those have a recognizable odor—usually a very foul one—but the creatures themselves normally don’t give off any scent. We haven’t observed any of them eating or drinking, and the atmospheric balance in their cells is remaining perfectly constant, which seems to suggest that they aren’t breathing, either. We managed to get one of them into a pressure chamber and expose it to everything from a vacuum up to twenty-five atmospheres, and it didn’t seem in the least bit uncomfortable.”

“And they’re *all* like that?”

“All the ones that we’ve tested thus far, yes—and as you’re aware, there’s little if any visible similarity between them all.” She sat back and folded her arms. “We don’t have enough data to say anything for certain, but I find it unlikely that nature could produce a group of species that could have such drastically different physiologies and still exhibit precisely the same resistance to external forces. It’s also rather surprising to think that these highly adaptable, physically resilient creatures are the same ones that Security’s teams were rounding up or wiping out so easily the other night.”

“’A paradox wrapped in an enigma’,” Information quoted. The sound of a smile entered his voice as he added, “You must be enjoying yourself immensely, trying to figure them out.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

“Do you mean to say you’re not?”

“There’s something... disturbing about those creatures,” Sciences said with a weary sigh and a small, unseen shiver. “It may be a side-effect of their natural radiation or just the fact that they’re hideous little monsters, but in either case, it’s difficult to keep a positive thought in your head around them. The scientific challenge of studying them is the only thing that’s kept me from borrowing one of Security’s rifles and dispensing with the lot of the little mutants.”

“Not a very scientific approach,” Information murmured.

“Maybe not—but it would certainly make me feel better.”

*You’re having a good time,* Calypso teased.

*I am not,* Mercury replied.

*Oh no? Then why are you keeping track of all the little girls who stop to tell you that they want to be as beautiful as you are when they grow up? Hmmm?*

*Be quiet, Caly,* Mercury ordered, blushing faintly.

*And how about all the older brothers and younger uncles who’ve been drafted into taking their little relations to the fair, and who keep walking past looking as though you’ve made their day?*

*Quit it, Calypso.*

“Are you two arguing again?” Makoto murmured as she passed behind the transformed Mercury and the telepathic arrangement of silver hairpins and low-hanging blue ribbons that was Calypso.

“No,” Mercury said immediately.

*Yes,* Calypso said at the same time. *My stubborn sister refuses to admit that she’s enjoying herself, let alone that she’s been checking out the cute guys who pass...*

*I AM DOING NO SUCH THING!* It was an effort for Mercury to think her indignation at Calypso rather than shout it out loud, but she managed. The blush, on the other hand, could not be held back, which was exactly Calypso’s plan, because it inevitably made someone come up to Mercury and tell her how wonderful she looked.

They had been at the fair for about two hours now. Upon arriving, Makoto had very carefully set her kimono aside and plunged into helping with the cooking, mentioning to the lady in charge that Ami would be *much* more helpful by drawing customers out front than by lending a hand in the outdoor kitchen that was supplying most of the food stalls in this part of the park. Herded along by her friend and her unseen sister, Ami had reluctantly gone into the back, quietly changed form, and reemerged. She’d opted to tone down her assumed form a little bit when she transformed again, but Mercury was aware that even with a simpler kimono, she still looked very, very good. It had been an ongoing stream of ‘how lovely’ and ‘so wonderful’ ever since she stepped outside, and double that when, after the first half hour or so, Makoto cleaned up, changed, and came out front to join her.

Whatever the Aegis had done to Makoto’s sense of balance, they didn’t detract from her appearance in the least, and she was always stunning in green to begin with. Mercury didn’t begrudge Makoto some admiration of her own, and she certainly had no complaint with being complimented herself, but Calypso’s insistence on keeping score and then playing tricks to get her sister extra points was driving Mercury crazy. Fortunately, their lunch break was coming up, which would give her a chance to talk to Caly about...

Someone’s hands closed on Mercury’s shoulders, and a quiet voice breathed, “You look good enough to eat,” right in her ear.

Mercury’s recognition of that voice as Haruka’s helped her to override her immediate instinct to transform to full battle mode, but it did not stop her from jumping and yelling—loudly—in surprise.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Haruka said quickly, backing up and pulling her hands away as heads began to turn towards them on all sides. “Take it easy, Ami! It’s just me!” She waited until Mercury had visibly calmed down before breaking into a grin and adding, “Jeez, girl; I’m almost afraid to ask what you would have done if I’d pinched you...”

“You just never mind!” Mercury snapped, another blush rising in her cheeks. “And don’t sneak up on me like that!”

Haruka gave her an odd look. “You *really* didn’t know I was there, did you? Not even...” She tapped her own forehead, and Mercury blinked. She hadn’t sensed Haruka’s approach at all, which could only mean... that... Mercury sighed and rubbed at her eyes as Michiru, Hotaru, and ChibiUsa came up to join them.

“How many points, Caly?”

*I think that was worth at least five.*

“Fine. Five. Now stop blocking me, all right?”

*Spoilsport.*

“We’re missing a large part of this conversation, aren’t we?” ChibiUsa guessed. The older girls were dressed fairly normally, but ChibiUsa and Hotaru had gone to some pains to look a bit better than usual in honor of the Festival. Hotaru had on a pale violet dress, ChibiUsa wore a soft rosy one, and even combined, they weren’t more than half of the way to being as dressed-up as Mercury.

“We’re having a little contest,” Makoto said as she moved over to join them. “To see which of the two of us can get more compliments. Caly’s keeping score, and cheating outrageously to make sure that I lose. Anyone for a rice ball?” she offered, holding up a half-wrapped example. ChibiUsa and Hotaru both raised their hands, and Michiru smiled.

“Well, regardless of who Calypso says wins, you both look beautiful. And if it’s a question of points,” she added, looking at Makoto, “I think *you* ought to get extra for going to the effort to look as good as a Nereid can make herself—or her sister—look with just a thought.”

“Actually, Mercury did that herself. Except for the hair, anyway.”

“You said what?” Haruka asked with a blink.

“It *is* Mercury, isn’t it?” Michiru asked in a tone of mild surprise as she studied the young lady in blue. “I knew there was something different about your face, but... the kimono. Did you put it on over your fuku, or...?”

“Calypso... encouraged me... to develop a new power,” Mercury admitted. “Or maybe to recreate an old one. As far as I can tell, it’s still the fuku, only transformed into another shape.”

“May I?” Michiru asked, waiting for Ami’s—for *Mercury’s* nod before lightly taking a fold of the kimono between her fingers. It felt like silk, but there was something else that Michiru could feel, something like flowing water, but in a solid shape. Just like a Nereid disguise. She let go of the fabric, looked up at Mercury, and asked, “How far?”

“How far *what*?” Haruka asked.

“We haven’t had a chance to test it yet,” Mercury replied, intuitively understanding Michiru’s unspoken question, “but the human body simply can’t be as flexible as the Nereid form, so Caly and I both expect that a change of appearance will be about the limit of what I can do.”

“Does this mean that you’re a shapeshifter again?” Hotaru asked, looking up with flecks of rice sticking around her mouth.

*Yes,* Calypso replied.

“No,” Mercury said firmly, overriding her sister. “I can change my *appearance* in the same manner that the Disguise Pen would allow, but my *body* won’t change.”

*Actually...* Mercury sent Calypso a short, sharp telepathic signal to be quiet, and there was a sudden mental hush as the Nereid complied. Makoto looked over at them and frowned at the slightly harsh sensation that had buzzed out from Mercury just then—and the matching sense of hurt and surprise coming from Calypso—but she didn’t get an opportunity to inquire about it, because some other familiar presences were just coming into focus.

“Heads up,” Makoto warned the others, a moment before Minako, Artemis, and a younger girl she didn’t recognize walked up and joined the group in front of the stand.

“Good morning, all!” Minako said cheerfully. Across the way, a fatherly-looking man looked down as his watch beeped that it was now twelve o’clock; there were a few similar declarations from other watches in the area, and Minako glanced around suspiciously.

“Everybody,” Artemis said, “this is Mie-chan. Mie-chan, this is everybody. Well, almost everybody.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Mie replied with a small bow for Makoto, Mercury, ChibiUsa, and Hotaru. “Mina-chan’s told me all about you.” Then she looked up at Michiru and Haruka, smiling. “Michiru-san, Haruka-san, it’s nice to see you again.” Haruka nodded in return, and Michiru smiled warmly at the little girl.

“Hello again, Mie-chan. Are you still trying to capture all the Senshi on paper?”

“Of course.”

“Eh?” Minako asked, turning back. “You three... know each other?”

“Michiru-san was a guest teacher at the art course I took two years ago, oneechan,” Mie informed Minako. “And Haruka-san showed us some magic tricks a few times when he was there.”

“Oh *really*?” Minako said, looking suspiciously at Haruka. “What *sort* of magic, exactly?”

“Nothing fancy,” Haruka replied modestly, as she reached out and snatched a coin from the vicinity of Minako’s left ear. Minako blinked and tried to take the coin, only to feel her fingers close on a small, smooth grey stone—and while she was looking at the rock in confusion, Haruka held out her other arm and handed a fresh rice ball to Mie. At that point, Makoto and Mercury looked down at the counter in front of them, to find the coin sitting where one of the rice balls had been a second ago.

“How did...” Minako blurted, as Mie thanked Haruka and accepted the snack.

“Haruka has many talents,” Michiru noted, “and very smooth hands.” Her voice and smile were both totally innocent, which of course didn’t stop Haruka from blushing. She muttered something inaudible, then hid her embarrassment by taking the stone back from Minako and making it disappear with a flick of her wrist.

“Interesting backpack you’ve got there, kiddo,” Haruka said aloud to Mie.

“Thanks,” Mie said, smiling. “Do you like it?” She turned around so that everybody could see her handiwork, and Artemis flinched inwardly, dreading what the girls’ assorted responses might turn out to be. Michiru, Makoto, and Mercury all smiled with various degrees of tolerant amusement for their warped images, and Haruka had something of that in her expression as well, but coupled with a twitch at the sight of SD Starfighter. Hotaru and ChibiUsa both started out with very suitable expressions of admiration and envy, then suddenly switched into incomprehension, and from there sank into righteous indignation as they realized that their representations were missing.

“Well,” Haruka said casually, “it’s not something *I* could wear, but it seems to suit you. And anything with Uranus on it just rocks, on general principle.”

*Here we go,* Artemis thought, rolling his eyes towards the few, far-flung clouds drifting high overhead.

“Are you a Uranus fan, Haruka-san?” Mie asked curiously.

“Yeah, pretty much. I mean, she kicks butt in a major way; what’s not to like about that? But I’d have to say that Neptune’s my favorite,” Haruka added.

“Mine too,” Michiru murmured, at which point Haruka gave her a hurt look; clearly, that was not what Michiru had been supposed to say.

“What about you, Hotaru-san?”

“I’m definitely a Saturn fan,” Hotaru replied, “but I couldn’t help but notice...”

“Uh-huh.” Mie made a disappointed face. “Like I was telling Mina-chan earlier, it is *really* hard to find anything to do with Saturn, Pluto, or ChibiMoon.”

“I can’t understand why that would be,” ChibiUsa said. “They’re the best three members of the team.” She received the evil eye in spades for that one, but the girls managed to keep from getting into one of those interminable arguments over who was the better Senshi. Artemis had just barely survived the last time that the five Inner Senshi had debated that point, and he had no desire at all to see what brand of disaster might bubble to the surface if ChibiUsa and most of the Outer Senshi were added into the mix.

*Haruka and Makoto would probably end up armwrestling or something,* Artemis thought, smiling as the image of that particular contest popped into his mind. A familiar scent reached his nose then, and after a quick sniff at the air confirmed both the trace and the sheer inferiority of the human olfactory sense, Artemis began turning his head in a slow arc.

“Looking for something in particular, Arthur-kun?” Makoto asked, glancing up.

“I know I can smell fish around here somewhere,” he said, a decidedly catlike twitch going off in his ears.

“Three places to your left.” Artemis followed the line of Mercury’s finger, saw the steam rising from the booth in question, and smiled as he set his shoulders and marched forward—only to be jerked to a halt by Minako’s grip on his arm.

“Going somewhere?” she asked.

“I was just... you know, lunch.” His stomach made a sound not unlike a mildly annoyed tiger. “See?”

“I suppose it *is* about time to stop and have a bite,” Minako admitted reluctantly, after giving both Artemis and his stomach dubious looks. “And we really should all get out of Ami-chan’s and Mako-chan’s way, and let them get back to business.”

“Actually, we’re about due for a break ourselves,” Mercury said. “Mako-chan, why don’t you go ask Mikomi-san to take over here for a while?”

“That’s a good idea,” Makoto agreed. “I was beginning to get hungry myself.” She slipped around the side of the stall, sparing a sympathetic glance for Minako. “And don’t worry, Mina-chan; there’s plenty to eat besides just fish.”

“Good. I can accept fish breath in a cat, but I refuse to tolerate it from anyone else.” She dragged Artemis away.

“Hotaru-chan,” Michiru said then, “why don’t you, ChibiUsa, and Mie-chan go with them? You should have something besides a rice ball for lunch. And speaking of which...” She took out a simple blue handkerchief and wiped the spots of rice off of Hotaru’s face.

“Ack! Hey!” Hotaru protested, as she wriggled away. “Michiru! I was going to take care of that...”

“And now you don’t have to,” Michiru said calmly, making the cloth disappear in much the same manner that Haruka had gotten rid of the stone. Hotaru gave her a face-scrunched look of insult, then took ChibiUsa and Mie by the elbows.

“Come on,” she said, steering them both away. “Before she tries to get you two, as well.” ChibiUsa murmured something around the hand that was hastily scrubbing rice away from around her own mouth.

“And before we go, did either of you want a rice ball?” Mercury asked the two remaining Senshi with a faint smile.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Haruka said, reaching for one and flipping another coin towards Mercury, who caught it easily.

“Have either of you noticed it, then?” Michiru asked, suddenly looking intently at Mercury. Mercury blinked, and Calypso gave off a brief feeling of surprise as she realized that she’d been included in the question as well.

*Noticed what?*

“There’s something up,” Haruka said, taking a bite from the rice ball. “We’ve both been feeling it since early this morning.”

“When I realized you were transformed,” Michiru continued, “I thought you or Calypso might have sensed it as well.”

*We haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary,* the Nereid said, sounding abashed. *But then again, just because either of you feels something doesn’t automatically mean that we should as well; telepathy doesn’t work the same way that your psychic sensitivities do. There’d have to be something here for us to notice it, and the same goes for Mako-chan.*

“But you have other senses that we don’t, Caly,” Michiru pressed. “Are any of *them* picking up anything?”

There was a pause, and then Mercury became aware of her sister’s mind, expanding outwards. Almost instinctively, she pushed out with her own awareness, and their thoughts brushed against each other, blurring together slightly at the edges as Mercury took over certain tasks to allow Calypso to redirect her energy more fully into the search.

*There _is_ something here,* Calypso reported a moment later. *It feels like a distortion in the local energy fields, but the source is... hard to find... I...*

Mercury shuddered as Calypso’s mind suddenly became awash with raw pain, and Haruka and Michiru both backed up with wide eyes as the two sisters shone blue.

At Hikawa, Rei’s head rose sharply away from the pages of the Book, a clear sense of danger flashing through her mind.

Away from the fair, Archon’s apprentice was monitoring the progress of her experiment with eager anticipation.

The energy within her web of spells had increased slowly at first, adding just a little bit of power at a time, but it seemed as though the energy-collecting magic had reached some form of critical mass within the past few minutes, because the levels were increasing exponentially. Forget minutes; it was not just a matter of seconds before the spells were triggered.

Although she hadn’t noticed it earlier, the booth where the apprentice had cast her spells was an information kiosk, and at the moment, since no one appeared to be in need of information, the young lady staffing the place was reading, pausing only now and then to dig into a lunch bag stashed beneath the counter. Like most of the other workers at the fair, the woman was dressed in traditional fashion, and so between her reading, snacking, and the large, heavy braids hanging down beside her face and blocking her peripheral vision, she didn’t notice when the hollow figure of the empress behind her began to emanate a darkish glow.

She definitely noticed the weird flash when the spell peaked a moment later, as everything in the area was suddenly the opposite color of what it had been before. The photo-negative effect lasted just an instant, but there was no question that it was an attention-getter, and the information woman wasn’t the only person in the area who started looking around in surprise. She was, however, the first person—at least at the fair—to see the cause of the flash, and her eyes went wide with shock. Even the apprentice, watching from her room through a scrying spell, was startled by the creature now standing in the back of the booth.

In form, she—and there could be no question that it was female, at least in appearance—resembled the image of the empress upon which the apprentice had cast the spells, right down to the kimono, hairstyle, and crown. But the crown was a crest of seven slender horns, ringed with gold and silver and jewels, some of which hung down to frame the creature’s face, and her garment was a venomous shade of green, open so that most of her rather impressive front was exposed, except for where the links of a heavy, low-hanging gold necklace intruded. The creature’s shining black hair hung from the back of her crest in eight long tails, kept separate by the horns and reaching to her waist, and her fingers ended in long, sharp-looking nails of a blood-red hue. The face was coldly beautiful, with bright green eyes shaded at the edges by curved streaks of red, and dark red lips that parted in a smile to reveal rows of fangs as the daimon reached out and seized the startled woman in front of her, one long-taloned hand closing around her throat in a strangling grip.

The figurine had completely vanished. In fact, the apprentice realized that this *was* the figurine, taken over and transformed by the spirit of the summoned daimon into some twisted version of what it had been. That much was obvious, but what she couldn’t figure out was *how* it had happened. That was one of the joys of experimenting with magic; it tended to do things you didn’t expect and could never fully explain.

The young wizardess watched as the daimon’s hand unleashed a crackling surge of black energy into her victim, causing the woman’s body to spasm violently before she lapsed into unconsciousness. In that choking, electrified grip, the woman’s skin took on an unhealthy greyish cast; and while her victim grew weak, the daimon grew stronger, her skin becoming less pale, her eyes clearer and more focused than before. The flow of energy ceased, and the daimon dropped the drained woman with utter indifference, a vicious, hungry smile on her face as she turned to the small crowd of shocked onlookers that had come to investigate the strange lights. Wood splintered and flew apart as the creature burst out of its birthplace and charged, capturing a second victim before he or most of the other people even had time to turn. Draining the man, the daimon began to laugh; as if that was a cue, everyone in the area turned and ran off, twenty people fleeing in as many directions.

So far, the experiment had been successful.

“Don’t tell me,” Security said, his voice half-triumphant and half-disgusted, “let me guess. It’s in the park.” In spite of his use of the word ‘guess’, that wasn’t a question.

“Yes sir,” the technician on the other end of the intercom replied, while the alarms droned on in the background. “Sensors show one hostile, energy reading... class six, maybe class seven.”

Class seven. The little beasts Sciences was working on rated class three, at best—and the scale increased exponentially, not additively.

“Naturally,” the Director muttered, switching over to the channel for his people in the field. “All teams, all units, we have confirmation of a class seven hostile. Coordinates are in transit. Team one, assist with civilian evacuation; teams two and three, contain the target. Use of lethal force is both authorized and strongly advised.”

Haruka and Michiru both looked around quickly to see if anyone had noticed the sudden appearance of Mercury’s blue aura, and they breathed a shared sigh of relief when they found no sign of anyone staring at their friend. The light wasn’t as large or as intense as it had been on other occasions; mostly, it was just a narrow outline around Mercury’s body, and a brilliance in her eyes, and it only lasted for a moment. Still, that had been too close for comfort.

“Mercury?” Michiru asked urgently, as the light faded. “What...?” Mercury held up a hand, the look in her eyes indicating that a conversation was already in progress.

*That’s the second time now,* Calypso was saying in weary tones. *I really wish that whoever’s out there would stop doing this.*

*You and I both,* Mercury replied. *But we’ll work on that. Now, are you sure you’re okay?* The Nereid gave the psychic equivalent of a tired smile and nod.

*How could I be anything other than fine with my big strong sister here to protect me?*

*You’re okay,* Mercury concluded, smiling and embracing her sister’s mind before turning her attention to Michiru and Haruka. “It’s another daimon,” she said.

“I think we sort of guessed that,” Haruka said. “Never mind. I’ll go make sure that Hotaru doesn’t fly apart at the seams, and I’ll see if I can get Minako to take Mie for a walk in the other direction.”

“Do what you can to keep Makoto with them,” Mercury said. “Her control over the Aegis still has a long way to go before we can let her use them in a fight.” Haruka nodded and walked off, and Michiru and Mercury headed the other way.

“Are you sure it’s just the one?” Michiru asked, taking out her transformation pen. Their pace was an odd, slow-seeming one which actually ate up distance very quickly; all of the Senshi had mastered this fast walk, since it allowed them to go somewhere in a hurry without attracting attention by appearing to be in a rush.

“Caly only picked up a sense of one mind,” Mercury replied. “And the energy wave was much smaller than the one that was produced when they unleashed that army.”

“Makoto told us what happened to Caly when that other wave hit her,” Michiru noted, glancing at the two of them with concern. “Is she all right? And what was the flash about?”

“We linked while she was scanning. I... it’s faster if I explain the other way.” So saying, Mercury reached out and lightly touched Michiru’s shoulder as if to direct her attention to something or someone in the bright crowd around them. The quick gesture allowed her to telepathically impart a large mass of information, the sudden appearance of which in her mind made Michiru blink and momentarily slow her pace.

In order to scan an area as large as the park as quickly as she had, Calypso needed to lower certain mental defenses, opening her mind to the world around her and leaving herself vulnerable to a variety of energies. So, just as if she’d still been a Nereid, Mercury had linked her mind to her sister’s and taken over the task of shielding her thoughts for the duration of the scan. There wasn’t anything either of their mental abilities could do about the pulse of otherworldly energy the daimon’s appearance had sent out, but because that energy was opposed to Mercury’s, and because Mercury was aware of the energy through Calypso, her powers had reacted to block the worst of the relatively minor exposure. The small, short-lived shield had extended around Calypso as well, in part because of the mental link and her inclusion as part of Mercury’s costume, but also due to her natural affinity for the energy.

And Mercury had explained all of that with one touch, one burst of thought. Michiru turned to her and again asked, “How far?”

“Far enough.” It was neither an enlightening response nor an especially happy one, but Michiru didn’t have a chance to pursue it, since that was when they started encountering people running in the other direction. Using another long-practiced Senshi tactic, Michiru and Mercury both stepped to one side to avoid the rush, hiding as best they could behind one of the festively-decorated booths and then wincing as, from up ahead, they heard the all-too familiar sound of some unfortunate person screaming in pain.

“Far enough,” Mercury repeated, this time in a note of grim anger. She stood up as the last of the fleeing crowd passed. “Come on.”

The appearance of a large number of frightened people running in one direction tends to inspire certain collective responses in any others who see them. Most people first look to see what is inspiring the rapid flight, spot it, and then join the retreat to safety. A few run without bothering to look first, while others fall back more slowly. And then of course, there are those who go in the other direction, drawn by some perverse if not fatal instinct to get closer to whatever has everyone else fleeing from it. Even if it was not entirely by choice, the Senshi tended to fall into this last group, but at least they had the excuse of saving the world to explain away their dangerous behavior; most of the others were just being reckless, if not stupid, putting themselves in needless danger for no good reason at all.

Haruka was not particularly surprised to learn that Mie suffered from this condition. Initially startled by the rush, the small girl’s eyes had lit up at the first positive mention of the word ‘monster’, because in her mind it meant that the Senshi were about to arrive, and she would have raced off if Minako hadn’t taken and maintained a very firm grip on her hand. Haruka wasn’t sure whether Minako was just operating on a hunch or if she had past experience dealing with Mie over this matter, but she was grateful for the assist, because she had her own hands busy reining in Hotaru and Makoto.

“But we have to...” Makoto said.

“I’m not going to just...” Hotaru said, right on top of that.

“Hsst!” Haruka made a quick slashing motion across her throat, nodding sharply in Mie’s direction. “You can stop panicking, Hotaru; Mercury and Neptune can deal with it until we get there. And you,” she added to Makoto, “can just sit tight, because you’re not going out there.”

“Excuse me?” Makoto demanded in a whisper.

“You heard me. Mercury told me to keep you away from the fight, and if I have to tie you down and sit on you to manage that, I will.”

“That girl is really starting to annoy me,” Makoto muttered, “and she’s overreacting again anyway. With this many of us against one daimon, I shouldn’t have to use my powers at all.”

“Sounds nice in theory,” Haruka replied, “but you can test it some other time. You’re staying put, and that’s that.”

“So since when do you do whatever Ami says?” Makoto asked, a biting edge in her voice.

“Since I saw that monster thunderstorm raging where we found you on Ganymede,” Haruka snapped back. She regretted having to say that, because it implied that Makoto had made zero progress with the Aegis, which wasn’t true at all. She *had* gotten better with the strange weapon, but not nearly to the point of battle-readiness, and she had to be reminded of that in the most obvious manner available. It seemed to work, because although Makoto’s face became set, she nodded.

“Now,” Haruka said, “you and ChibiUsa are going to go that way with the others”—she pointed off to the right of the direction in which most of the crowd was going—“and Hotaru and I will go help Mercury and Neptune deal with the daimon. If Mie asks, Hotaru ran back to find Michiru and I, and we went another way. Got it?”

“I’ve got it,” Makoto said sourly. Haruka nodded and then led Hotaru—who was nearly dancing with impatience—away. Muttering something under her breath, Makoto joined the others as they fell in with the rest of the crowd.

“That will be quite enough of that!”

Startled by the voice, the daimon looked up from the stand she had just sliced to pieces with a casual slash of her six-inch fingernails. A hasty glance showed no one in sight who could have been the source of the firm, angry words, but a moment later, a spray of bubbles turned the clear afternoon air into an impenetrable bank of cold, damp fog. Despite her state of half-dress, the daimon did not so much as shiver, but her eyes couldn’t penetrate the blue-white murk.

“You’ve threatened innocent lives and destroyed the happiness of a special day,” that same voice said, eerily disembodied by the fog, “but the pain and nightmares you seek to inspire will be swallowed in mist and taken from memory.”

“Your mere presence disturbs and befouls this world,” a different voice added with the same eerie echoes, “but just as the waves carry away the detritus of the world, so too will they sweep you away forever.”

It was impossible to tell if the sources were near to one another or far apart, or even what direction they were in. Teeth bared in a silent, unlovely snarl, the daimon flung out one hand at what she thought was a movement, sending her fingernails shooting forth as projectile spikes. There was a series of wooden thunks after the shots vanished into the mist, an obvious miss, and the daimon turned in another direction, snapping a dull red jewel from the necklace hanging low on her chest. When thrown away, the stone glowed with sudden red energy and became a fireball, hissing through the vapor.

“DEEP SUBMERGE!”

The daimon’s flaming gem was engulfed and extinguished by a rather larger orb of blue energy, which surged forward, expanding visibly with each instant before it slammed into the daimon and threw her to the ground. Stunned for only a moment, the creature pushed herself up and was on her feet in a flash, bruised and singed but fully alert as the fog thinned away and revealed two similar figures standing on opposite ends of the path, one to her right, armed with a winged rod, the other to her left, in the direction from which the counterattack had come.

“You girls should know that it’s impolite to throw things,” the daimon said in a soft, mocking voice as she looked carefully from one to the other.

“You’re in no position to lecture anyone on proper behavior,” Mercury said coldly. “Your own is unforgivable. In the name of Mercury...”

“...and in the name of Neptune...”

“...you will answer for it!” they finished together.

“Not today, ladies,” the daimon replied, smiling first at Mercury and then at Neptune, before her hands came up in a blur and launched fingernail darts at both of them. Neptune dodged the red-lacquered bolts fired in her direction, while Mercury cast a Shine Aqua illusion at the rest, easily executing the move even with the Caduceus hanging heavy in one hand. The attack swept the projectiles out of the air and struck the daimon herself, staggering her and encasing her left arm in a thick crust of ice; the creature just looked down at her arm and flexed it once, shattering the ice with almost contemptuous ease.

The evil creature raised her head to get in a moment of gloating at Mercury’s expense, but had to take a hasty step backwards as the icy edge of the Frost Lancet cut a line through the air at the level of her questionable heart. When the blade came back, it met the claws of the daimon’s upraised left hand with an ear-jarring squeal, a sound cut thankfully short as the creature stabbed at Mercury with the lengthening nails on her other hand, forcing the Senshi to get clear. The daimon lunged after her, swinging both arms forward in wide arcs, fingernails leading, but Mercury escaped by jumping straight up and planting her boots on the monster’s back, using the creature as an awkward springboard. Mercury’s landing staggered the daimon, but she managed to stay standing, and whirled to confront both of her enemies.

And therefore took Neptune’s next Deep Submerge in the chest instead of the back. The daimon was hurled backwards with a howl of rage and pain as the energy blast detonated a number of the explosive jewels in her necklace, but she managed to launch another barrage from her fingers, and this time both Senshi dodged, a move which unfortunately gave the daimon a chance to hit the ground, slide to a halt, and regain her footing.

“This is no way to treat a queen,” the daimon growled. “Servants! Take them!”

A sudden bad feeling made Mercury and Neptune turn and look behind themselves, and sure enough, the people the daimon had attacked and drained a few moments before were getting to their feet and advancing towards the two Senshi, their eyes blank and their faces dull.

“I hate when they do this,” Mercury murmured angrily. Neptune glanced back to give her a commiserating look, then noticed something beyond Mercury and the daimon which made her smile.

“Fortunately, you’re not the only one.” Mercury was about to ask what she meant by that when the light of the noon sun was suddenly dimmed by the appearance of a large hemisphere of dark violet energy, which encompassed the entire battlefield.

The apprentice cursed softly as, without any warning, her scrying spell ceased. It should have been good for at least another ten minutes. After watching the empty space where the globe of images had been, the girl shook her head and turned back to her books. She hadn’t bothered to memorize a second scrying spell this morning, and although she could have cast one directly from the book—or the memory crystal—she was willing to bet that whatever had nullified the first one would just pop the replacement magic out of existence as well.

Besides, the experiment was over. The spell-slaving process worked, better than she’d anticipated, if not in precisely the same fashion, and it had also proved that it would take a lot more than just one daimon to handle the Senshi. Mercury was accounted to be one of the weakest in a direct fight, but she had been doing just fine by everything the apprentice had seen, and not simply because of Neptune’s presence.

*That device she was carrying seems to be a fairly strong weapon,* the girl thought. *I don’t remember ever hearing about it before, though... I’ll have to mention it to Archon and see if he knows what it is.*

The Director swore as snow and hissing static flooded the audio/video channels to the teams in the park. He was about to dial up a repair crew when everything suddenly went back to normal, but that hardly improved his mood, because now several of the monitors had images of young women in miniskirts on them.

“Orders, sir?” the voice of a lieutenant asked quietly.

The daimon was still staring up in shock at the barrier when a World Shaking hit her from behind, hammering her from head to toe and then dropping her to her hands and knees. In that same moment, the huge half-globe shrank down to form a series of elliptical shells around each of the controlled humans, sealing them safely away and halting their advance.

“Sorry about the delay,” Uranus called in apology. “We had a couple of objections to the battle plan.”

“As long as it’s been taken care of,” Mercury said. “Saturn, since Sailor Moon isn’t here, I think you’re up.” The little Senshi looked away from the last of the imprisoning ovals and nodded to Mercury, then turned her full attention to the daimon, who had raised her head at the mention of Saturn and now met her gaze with wide, frightened eyes. It was a very human expression, and it made Saturn set her own in determination. Discounting the people trapped within the Silent Shield and ignoring the dark energy that Saturn could almost smell coming off of the thing, the horns alone were proof that this was *not* a human, but a monster, the very worst kind. Saturn raised the Silence Glaive to get rid of it.

*Hmmm,* Calypso said curiously. *It’s gone.*

“What?” Mercury asked aloud, drawing the startled attention of the other Senshi. “What’s gone?”

*There was something else here,* the Nereid reported, speaking to all four of them. *I couldn’t get a clear sense of it because of the daimon’s presence, but there was definitely another mind in the area. When Saturn raised the Shield, the presence vanished, and it hasn’t come back now that the Shield’s been... hello, what was that?*

“What was what?” Uranus asked, looking around.

*Someone else is here.* Calypso paused. *Several someones, I should say. They... LOOK OUT!*

The warning came too late. Although confused by the sudden strange behavior of her enemies, the daimon had seized on their distraction to grab her necklace, tear it away with one link-splitting wrench, and then hurl the entire mass at the ground near Saturn. The explosion set off by the remaining fire-gems was by no means the largest one the Senshi had ever been subjected to, but it caught Saturn by surprise and blew her into—and through—a stall on the other side of the path.

“Saturn!” Neptune’s outcry and frantic dash to the wreckage were both automatic, as was Uranus’ drawing the Space Sword and turning back towards the daimon, who had already taken the opening to run for her misbegotten life. Uranus was after her in a heartbeat, which was just about the amount of time it took for the two of them to go over a small hill, circle around a few booths, and disappear.

“I’m all right, I’m all right,” Saturn was saying, as she sat up amidst the splinters of her landing and waved Neptune back with one hand. “She only got my pride.”

*Sorry,* Calypso apologized meekly, as Mercury walked over.

“It wasn’t your fault, Calypso,” Saturn said. “I ought to know better than to turn my back on a daimon.”

*But if I hadn’t interrupted you like that...*

“You warned us that someone had been watching the fight,” Mercury said. “It was the right thing to do. Are those other ones you noticed still here?”

*They’re moving off,* Calypso said, following a quick sweep of the area. *There’s too much conflicting energy around here for me to be entirely certain, but I think they’re humans. Five, maybe six in all, but I can’t tell more than that. None of them are projecting very much.*

“Never mind them.” Saturn’s voice was worried, and she was looking around with open concern. “Which way did Uranus and that daimon go?”

“That way.” Mercury pointed, and Saturn’s expression got worse. “What’s wrong?”

The daimon was fast, but Uranus was faster. As Haruka, she could run a sprint or a marathon with equal ease, but transformed, she could have run an entire marathon at sprinting speed, something physically impossible for any normal human—and therefore well within the realm of possibility for the Senshi of the Wind and Sky. Had the situation been different, and her opponent not a life-sucking, otherworldly monster, Uranus would have enjoyed this impromptu race; as it was, though, she just wanted to catch the daimon and pound it into the dust.

Unfortunately, the daimon seemed to have recognized Uranus’ intentions, because she was putting on every ounce of speed she could to get away. It wasn’t enough for the creature to make its escape, but it was keeping her just far enough ahead to give Uranus problems. The daimon was out of physical reach, even if she tried to jump, and there was no way for Uranus to call on any of her attacks without stopping, and thereby losing her target.

*Or is there?* Uranus thought, narrowing her gaze as an idea came to her. *Yeah, that might work... if it doesn’t, she’ll get away from me for sure... but I have to do something before we reach a crowd...*

Between one stride and the next, Uranus made up her mind, drew the Space Sword, and then jumped, going for vertical distance even more than horizontal. Her momentum carried her along through the air, a little less than a meter above the surface, for nearly two full seconds, and near the peak of her jump, she swung her weapon around and unleashed its power at the daimon.

The Space Sword Blaster shot through the air even faster than the two runners, streaking across the back of the daimon’s legs and crashing into the ground in front of her with an explosive report. Between the wound and the blast, the daimon lost her footing and went into a rough, head-over-heels rolling slide. Uranus tucked herself into a more controlled somersault as she landed, and came out of it to see the daimon raising herself once more, dirtied, disheveled, and with the tips of two of her fanciful horns chipped off. Her legs seemed unsteady, and the left one, exposed through the divided skirt, bore a trickle of greenish blood below the knee.

“That’s the last bit of disrespect I’m going to take from you girls,” the daimon hissed, her fingernails extending into six-inch claws.

“Oh, there’s plenty more where that came from.” Uranus grinned and raised her Sword. Snarling, the daimon reached up and ripped away the assortment of jewelry around her head, flinging the mass at Uranus, who leapt backwards and unleashed World Shaking to sweep the following series of explosions back at their creator. The daimon dodged the blast and whipped her right hand in Uranus’ direction, firing off a wild burst from her fingers; the razor-edged nails went wide as Uranus cut left and leapt forward a second time, coming down with her Sword leading, aimed right at the daimon. The harlot queen parried the blade of the Talisman with one handful of nails and tried to drive the other hand into Uranus’ neck, only to be stopped short as the Senshi seized her wrist, halted the blow a breath short of her own skin, and then twisted the arm away so that the telescoping nails couldn’t lengthen again to cut her throat. And there they stopped, straining, each trying to push her attack forward while holding the other’s at bay, and neither gaining nor losing so much as a hair’s breadth.

“No more stones to throw?” Uranus taunted. “No more... helpless victims... to do your dirty work for you?”

“I don’t need them... to deal with the likes... of you,” the daimon said gratingly. Uranus responded to that with a grin that said ‘Oh really?’, which seemed to anger her enemy even more. They both knew that all Uranus had to do to win this was to hold the daimon until the other Senshi caught up, and since they appeared to be evenly matched in terms of physical strength, that outcome was looking more and more likely with each passing second.

Flicker.

Somewhere off to her left, just out of the corner of her eye, Uranus caught a brief glimpse of light reflecting off of metal. The flash was bright enough to make her blink and flinch, and that simple, automatic movement spelled instant disaster. The set of her shoulders changed, and the daimon was suddenly able to push her off-balance, leaning in to smash her horn-rimmed head against Uranus’ more ordinary one. The blow hardly fazed the daimon, but Uranus went down in a heap, seeing only a blur and hearing little more than a rush of white noise. She had the presence of mind to slash a wide arc through the air with the Space Sword, but when the blade failed to connect, she knew that the daimon was running again.

Sure enough, as Uranus shook away the groggy sensation and looked up, she could make out her enemy, standing well out of reach and smiling viciously before she turned away. With the pounding ache in her head, Uranus was in no shape to run after the creature—but as it turned out, she didn’t have to. The daimon had taken all of one step and just begun to pass a sturdy tree when another white-gloved fist shot out from behind the trunk and dug into her exposed stomach.

As the daimon doubled over and toppled sideways to the ground, Uranus wasn’t really surprised to see Jupiter step out from behind the tree. Granted, after telling the girl in no uncertain terms to stay out of this one, Uranus wasn’t overly *happy* to see Jupiter, either, but as long as the daimon wasn’t getting away, Uranus figured they could save the argument for later.

She started having second thoughts about that decision when the winking orbs of the Aegis drifted into view, hovering in a loose, irregular formation around Jupiter as she moved towards the daimon. Had it been one of the other Senshi, Uranus would have shouted a warning about the creature’s dangerous claws and had them keep clear, but Jupiter knew just as much about hand-to-hand fighting as Uranus did, and could more than take care of herself.

Sure enough, when the daimon—recovering from the crippling blow to the stomach much faster than a human could have—swung her right hand around to slash at the newest threat, Jupiter caught her arm at the wrist and stopped the attack easily. Maintaining the hold with both hands, Jupiter stepped in, turned so that she and the daimon were back-to-back, and pulled hard, yanking the creature up off the ground and into an arm-wrenching flip. On her way back to the ground, the daimon passed through the general space that the Aegis occupied and was treated to a sudden, shocking blast of energy, which left her laying dazed and twitching on the stones of the path.

“Get up.” The daimon struggled to raise her head, and when it became obvious that this was the best she could manage, Jupiter reached down, hauled the startled monster up by her insufficient kimono, and shoved her backwards. Still sparking around the edges, the daimon stumbled to the far side of the path before she was able to catch hold of a booth and steady herself. Her eyes fixed on the daimon, Jupiter reached out and closed her fingers around one of the four largest segments of the Aegis; the entire Weapon flashed bright green, and Jupiter’s left arm appeared to twitch for a moment, but her expression didn’t change.

“Run.” The daimon blinked, and she wasn’t the only one.

“Jupiter,” Uranus said, taking a step forward, “what do you think...” There was an electric crackle from the Aegis, not unlike a thunderclap in miniature, and Uranus stopped.

“Run,” Jupiter repeated to the daimon. When the creature hesitated, there was another crackle from the Aegis, and this time the energy discharged in a bolt which left a scorch mark on the stone near the daimon’s feet and made her jump away. “I said run!” Jupiter snapped, to the accompaniment of another small-scale lightning bolt, and then a third. Before the fourth could fire, the daimon was off, not as quickly or as steadily as before, and this time with a backwards glance that turned frightened when she saw that Jupiter was following.

Uranus immediately moved to head the daimon off, but the Aegis left off trailing after Jupiter in favor of spreading themselves out and barricading the path with a wall of low-intensity electricity, which halted a startled Uranus in her tracks. After a moment, the energy turned off and the orbs spiraled away into the distance, but Uranus made no move to follow.

*What the hell is she doing?!*

Even through the glove, it was warm.

Jupiter had been in constant contact with the Aegis since coming home from Ganymede, and the orbs had always been cool to the touch, with just a bit of a tingle. When she had tapped into them and created that strange green radiance while tending her plants the other night, the Aegis had still been cool, and almost soft against her skin. Using them to create that shower of energy had drained her, true, but she hadn’t felt the slightest bit of pain in the process, just the effort of making it happen, and the unthinking pleasure of her plants as the enriching force was absorbed into their leaves.

The orb Jupiter now held in her hand was warm, though, and when she had first grabbed it and the entire extended Weapon had flashed, the shock had been so sudden and unexpectedly painful that she nearly hadn’t been able to keep hold of it. But she had held on, because she had to. Jupiter realized that she didn’t yet understand more than the barest fraction of the truth about the Aegis and what they could do, but she knew that her control of its powers would be greatest if she was in direct contact with at least one section. Without the added ability to precisely project the power of the sixteen spheres, she wouldn’t have been able to drive the daimon into a run, or to block Uranus when she tried to follow.

*I’m sorry about that, Haruka, I really am. But you don’t understand... you can’t feel what I feel...*

Throughout the morning, Makoto had been surrounded by the general feelings of happiness and delight brought on by the fair and its mix of contests, performances, and food. While she could not clearly sense a single person’s emotions from any great distance, the collective mood of the hundreds of people moving in and around the park had come through very nicely, giving Makoto a warm, reassuring feeling that began in her heart and went right down to her fingertips and toes.

That had all been ruined by the daimon. Makoto hadn’t felt the creature’s actual arrival, but the sudden sense of shock and fear it inspired read loud and clear in her mind, as did—at a closer range—the sheer evil presence of the thing itself. She could understand how Hotaru was able to track these things without even seeing them, and why their appearances sent Calypso into fits; the daimon’s psychic presence was cold, dark, and utterly foul, even worse than the twisted, sickening sense Makoto picked up from the bizarre mold-creatures. Those had been mindless things, emotionless in all respects, but the daimon had a soul full of hate and fury, and every other dark emotion Makoto could think of a name for. It enjoyed the fear and pain it caused, feeding on it as surely as any energy it sapped from its unlucky victims.

With that evil, alien presence pressing against her mind in all its hideous darkness, the choice had been clear. Makoto had slipped away from Minako and the others, transformed, and headed straight for the daimon, at the time only half-aware that the Aegis had become active during her metamorphosis into Jupiter. Any hesitation she felt due to the unpredictable nature of the Weapon was outweighed by her conviction that the daimon had to be destroyed—and more importantly, in a certain way.

Right at this moment, Jupiter could still feel the emotions of the scattered crowds. There were small points of real fear, which she guessed to be coming from the relative few who had actually seen the daimon and managed to get away from it. More widespread than fear were the confusion and concern of the masses of people who had run without knowing entirely what was going, and very faintly, from many places at once, Jupiter could detect the frustrated anger of people who knew or could guess what was happening and wanted to do something about it, but who knew also that there was nothing they could do. Over all the other emotions hung a pall of resignation, based largely on the fact that these attacks had happened before, and would no doubt happen again.

Out of it all, the frustration and the defeated acceptance were what Jupiter hated. The fear was unpleasant, but it had almost certainly helped a few people get away unharmed, and it would pass, as would the confusion. But the other two feelings would not pass; they would only get worse with time. People should not have to live with the feeling that bad things would just keep on happening no matter what anyone did. They should not have to feel... powerless...

*They want to see this. They _need_ to see this. They have to know for themselves that these monsters aren’t invincible.*

Up ahead, someone let out a startled shout, and Jupiter snapped out of her deepening litany. She wasn’t the runner Uranus was, and the daimon wasn’t in half the shape she’d been, but they’d covered a pretty respectable distance and caught up with part of the crowd. It was only now, as the daimon laughed and lunged towards a wide-eyed young girl, that Jupiter realized the critical error in her intention: it put people in harm’s way.

Energy surged, and the orb in Jupiter’s hand became hot and electrically alive as the fifteen free sections of the Aegis went shooting past her and the daimon in a sizzling blur. Coming to an instantaneous halt between the monster and her intended target, the orbs flashed, and a wall of sparkling green light was suddenly there, just in time to intercept the daimon’s reaching talons. The noise as the daimon’s claws connected with the barrier was an astonishingly solid-sounding one, as though the sharp nails were scraping across a wall of foot-thick steel instead of a field of energy no wider than a hair. The daimon howled—not in pain, but frustration—and whirled to confront Jupiter, lashing out with her claws one last time, only to meet another wall of flowing energy.

With incredible speed, the sections of the Aegis were spreading out to surround the daimon on all sides, becoming the corners of a large, many-sided shape formed entirely of that soft green energy which was somehow as hard as metal. The daimon shrieked again and unleashed a flurry of strikes, many of which cut across the orbs themselves, but it made no difference; the barrier did not react to the blows at all, regardless of where they landed.

The orb was painfully hot now, burning intensely green as it spat out a steady stream of electrical discharges, and Jupiter couldn’t stop her arm from shaking. *I can’t hold this. I’ve got to... get that thing away from these people... before I can attack it... but how do I get it to move...?*

The energy increased again, and Jupiter gasped as the pain in her hand lanced up her arm almost to her shoulder, muscles tightening of their own accord and joints bending until they creaked. At the same time as the one orb was inflicting this burning pain on Jupiter, the other fifteen went flying skywards, taking their energy-cell and the prisoner within along for the ride. The rapid ascent sent the daimon lurching wildly around within the uneven confines of her temporary cage, and the instantaneous halt which followed slammed her hard into one wall.

There was a good ten meters of empty space between the bottom of the hovering cell and the top of any of the few booths in the area, and the nearest trees were at least that far away in spite of their height.

*Plenty of room,* Jupiter thought, struggling to move her almost paralyzed left arm for the final blow. “SUPREME THUNDER!” The last syllable was nearly a scream; the influx of energy turned the orb’s glow briefly incandescent and sent waves of burning agony up Jupiter’s arm, even as the power of the lone section seemed to be carried away by the attack and hurled up into the matrix formed by the others. Fed by that rush of power, each corner of the cell shone like a tiny sun before fifteen separate bolts of green-white lightning discharged into the common center.

The flash was dazzlingly brilliant, and the accompanying explosion could only be described as thunderous. The daimon, the Aegis, and the faces of the cell all vanished as a sphere of raw force blossomed out from the intersection point of the many arcs of energy, expanding until it was a good five meters across and outshone the midday sun.

Static once again obliterated the signals on the Security Director’s screens, but after the sequence of events he’d pieced together by watching several of those screens, he had sort of been expecting it. Some of the screens quickly cleared up as their signals were restored and the people on the other side checked in after the loss of communications; other monitors, the ones corresponding to the half-dozen or so agents nearest to the epicenter of the blast, remained snowy for quite some time, and two of them did not return to normal at all.

For his part, the Director just sat back in his chair, an unaccustomed expression of bewildered surprise fixed firmly on his face.

The ball of thunder lasted for only a second, during which time the shockwave of its birth spread in all directions, blowing past everyone below with an electric tingle and the stink of hot ozone. Then, its force spent, the brilliant energy began to break up and fade away. Blinking up at the sight, Jupiter hastily stepped back as something about the same size as the daimon plummeted out of the bottom of the sphere, to burst into a thousand splinters when it hit the ground.

*A statue,* Jupiter thought, looking down at the burnt and broken face of the serene wooden empress as the Aegis descended and took up their positions around her again, dimmer but otherwise appearing undamaged by the explosion. *It was a prop from one of these displays, turned into a daimon... it’s just like... but how can that be?*

“It’s not quite the same,” Uranus said, her voice startling Jupiter by its unexpected presence.

“What do you mean?”

“All of the daimons that the Deathbusters used left behind the possessed item and a broken egg when we destroyed them,” the older Senshi said quietly as she walked over to stand a short distance from Jupiter, “but I don’t see any signs of a shell, do you?”

“You’ve got a point there,” Jupiter admitted. “And that empress was quite a bit bigger than most of the things that the other daimons used to leave.” She frowned at the debris, and three of the small spheres hovering near her floated forwards, stopping above the shattered pieces of wood. Each orb began to emit a beam of soft green light, which lifted a finger-sized splinter between them and bore it back over to Jupiter, who took it out of the air. Uranus watched the whole procedure askance.

“Souvenir?”

“For Mercury and Saturn. I think they’ll both want something to examine, after this.”

“Is it over?” a small voice asked from behind them. The two Senshi turned and looked down, at the young girl that had almost been clawed by the daimon. She was a few years younger than ChibiUsa, a few older than Hotaru usually appeared to be, and had very large brown eyes. In the face of the fearful uncertainty filling the girl’s mind, Jupiter thought of what her mistake had almost cost, and could not bring herself to speak.

“It’s okay,” Uranus said, kneeling down in front of the child and putting a comforting hand on her shoulder. “It’s over. Are you all right, koneko? No scrapes or bruises or anything?”

“No,” came the quiet reply. The girl was clearly overwhelmed, first by being (almost) attacked by a monster, and then by actually speaking to one of the Senshi. “My stomach hurts,” she added, her eyes still startled around the edges. “It’s all tight.”

“That’ll pass,” Uranus said, smiling. “You *do* know that your stomach probably wouldn’t hurt so much if you’d run away, right?”

“I tried to,” the girl said. “I really did, but... I couldn’t... my legs wouldn’t...”

“Hey, don’t worry about it. There’s nothing wrong with being scared.” Uranus chuckled. “You’re at least as brave as Sailor Moon; *she* usually runs around shrieking her head off whenever something like this happens to her. There you go,” she said, nodding in approval as the girl smiled timidly. “You’re a much prettier girl when you smile.”

“Thank you,” the girl murmured, blushing and looking down.

“Just remember,” Uranus added, “that smiling doesn’t always work. Sometimes you have to growl at people to get them to listen.” The girl nodded, and Uranus patted her on the shoulder again.

“We... have to get going,” Jupiter began awkwardly. “Are you going to be okay by yourself?”

“I came here with some friends,” the girl replied. “We got separated when everybody started running, but I think I know which way they went. And I can call my mom at work if I really have to.”

“Maybe you ought to go ahead and call her first,” Uranus suggested. “Word about these little messes tends to spread fast, and she’ll be worried unless she hears from you.”

“You might be right,” the girl admitted. She started to turn away, then stopped and looked up at Jupiter. “You must hear this all the time,” she said, blushing again, “but I just wanted to thank you for stopping that thing.”

“You’re welcome,” Jupiter said, managing a small smile.

“See you around, koneko,” Uranus added as she stood up. “And if you ever see a monster again...”

“I’ll run away,” the girl promised.

“Good girl.” The child hurried off in search of a phone, and Uranus turned her attention to Jupiter. “Come on. I have a feeling there are some people who’re going to want to give you a few pieces of their minds once they’ve heard about this.”

Jupiter sighed and followed after Uranus, the Aegis trailing swiftly in her wake—all except for the orb that remained in her hand, held fast by rigidly curled fingers.

In its hidden sanctuary, Proteus activated the first of its new visual sensors and looked around. Although it had originally been a sightless entity, after having gained that sense and then lost it, Proteus found it very reassuring to be able to see once more. Especially after the bursts of energy its other, more esoteric senses had detected earlier in the day.

*What happened up there today, I wonder?* Slowly, cautiously, Proteus extended part of its body and mind into