Setsuna Meioh rubbed her forehead and groaned in frustration as she reviewed the events of the last 24 hours, trying to make some sort of sense out of what had happened.
It had started off well enough, nice and routine. While many would complain about boredom, after a few millenia Setsuna had mostly accepted her post and the endless repetition it entailed - not to mention the highly active periods were more than stressful enough to make her appreciate the calm.
The first sign that something was amiss was the summons. Her Queen hardly ever summoned her - contact between then was usually initiated by the Guardian, the Gates usually allowing her to anticipate any calls before they went out.
This one, however, had come straight out of the left field, so to speak, and had caught her completely by surprise. That had been the first warning sign, but she had pushed her unease aside and gone to meet her monarch.
The main downside to her position as Guardian of the Gates - not that she was aware of it - was a distinct lack of flexibility: being able to see the shape of events before they happened meant that she tended to be thrown off balance if something major popped up unexpectedly.
Of course, if it had been a threat, she might have reacted better; she was, after all, a soldier first and foremost. But being retroactively engaged had completely thrown her. By the time she'd recovered her composure, the spell to send her back was already being invoked.
And Setsuna was many things, but ignorant was not one of them. And as any half-competent magic user knows, interrupting a complex ritual, let alone a time travel spell, was a Very Bad Thing. And thus she'd been sent off, with a magically reinforced order from her Queen to "see if you can make a relationship work with your fiancee".
So here she was, back in the twenty first century, for two reasons. First, the only object she knew of that could have sent her back was the Ginzuishou, and there was no way her Queen was skilled enough to do so at present.
Of course, the second reason made this a moot point, as she discovered to her horror. She'd felt it as the spell sent her hurtling through the timestream, but had held out hope until she'd gotten to the Gates, and saw it. Or rather, had not seen.
Crystal Tokyo, the utopia she'd dedicated her life to building, was completely and utterly gone, and with it the usefulness of the Time Gates.
This was due to the fact that the Gates were not particularly well named; they acted more like a telescope than a gate, though pointed at the timestream instead of into space. Previously they had been fixed on the outcome of Crystal Tokyo - and from there she could backtrack along the path and find the source of any deviations.
Now, without its target, all she was getting was the equivalent of static. The Gates were all but useless now, only good for viewing the past or the immediate future.
She knew the cause, of course. Ranma Saotome. And as much as she wished otherwise, she couldn't even blame him (though she would be later amused to find that it actually had been his fault, albeit unintentionally).
In the original timeline, he had more or less vanished after a couple of years in Nerima, presumably living out his years somewhere far from civilization, presumably dying during the Great Freeze. She didn't know, as his departure from Japan had eliminated his potential to affect the future she wanted.
He had been a minor blip on her radar, something she only remembered because of the ludicrous chaos that his life had been. Now, he was the last link she had to a Kingdom that now would never be, and her last order from her vanished Queen.
Setsuna Meioh sighed, swallowed some headache reliever and...
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(Posted Wed, 29 Sep 2010 17:25)
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