"AAAAAAGH!" Pluto helplessly yelled before she buried her head in the big pillow beside her watching position.
The scene she was watching froze when she stopped focusing her attention on it, as expected.
While the timelessness of her location had given her an enormous window to think things through, for some reason she felt as if her brain had run on empty all this time.
Due to the danger shutdown on the time-erased zone where Ranma had appeared, for most intents and purposes from nothingness, she couldn't rely on the Time Gates to show her past or future anymore.
When had Michiru and Haruka become active without her contact? Would she have to schedule that for 'later', when the Time Gates might be working correctly again, to allow her to appear at an earlier junction, possibly risking a minor paradox?
Was she possibly running around already in 'realtime', having done that already?
Had she actually forgotten the (mostly) western superheroes and their possible influences on promised Crystal Tokyo? How was that possible?
She remembered Ranma 'Mizuno's' origin, as far as she had puzzled it together - it was hazy but still there. Still, she had not enough data to decide whether he had been an innocent victim or a potentially dangerous thing that came from the deduced ritual, from beyond time.
She sighed. At least the latter was improbable. Or improbably subtle on the other hand. Ami's scans had sometimes picked up only a minor dark taint, which fit a victim of a dark ritual but seemed to her too subtle for a major dark power, even if hidden.
Subtlety had never been the hallmark of major dark powers, especially not those from beyond time. These tended to have no human empathy and thus no concept of subtlety at all. At least as far as she remembered the lore from before she had taken the post, for no major intrusion of these kind of powers had happened ever since. As far as she knew.
Ranma. Superheroes and -powers. This red metal girl she recognized as the Tendo girl. Gojira. Scientific worldwide secret organizations.
Time seemed to flip and wiggle around her. Her! Mistress and Guardian of the Gates of Time, the forbidden, infinitely powerful (supposedly) artifact whose core stemmed from even before the Silver Millenium, as she had once learned.
The facts and implications blurred into assumptions and theories shifting to faces and costumes orbiting about the timeline she had always worshipped as the last legacy of her beloved queen, making her head feel like a pulsating kooshball of whirling twine and whimsical twists and knots.
If she only could see again! Know whether the flow of time still ran towards holy Crystal Tokyo.
It felt like hours - days - months - even years to try to make sense of the maddening bundle of contradictions, to decide on any action, to get to the chewy center of her pillow she still was screaming into.
For the first time in her memory she felt as if the mists surrounding the Gates of Time were boiling and closing in on her, emanating a choking pressure, trying to force her into her own head and mind, next to push her out through her own navel wherever that would lead...
...
Finally, after several subjective, stressful years(!) lost in her own mind... Pluto snapped.
In a way, at least.
"... aaaAAAGH!" She yelled, ripping out the center of her pillow with her teeth and throwing the formerly comforting object away, trailing a stream of stuffing. She raised her face, marked by still running streams of angry tears, punched another pillow (which burst immediately in a cloud of more stuffing) and forcefully calmed down again.
"No... I am stronger than that. I will not break just because I don't understand what is happening," she spoke aloud, addressing her surroundings and the gates themselves.
Washing her face in a convenient bowl of refreshingly cool, clean water she felt herself calming down as she rejected the attack of insecurity and self-doubt.
She also transformed a few times to fix her outfit, hair and face, slowly but thoroughly fixing her current blood-shot eyes, too. Red-in-red definitely wasn't a look she wanted to cultivate more often.
"Now I know what I have to do. Doubt and fear are the worst enemy. I'll try to get rid of them, even if it costs me my life... no, even if it catapults me out of Time itself!" she disclaimed decisively, even as a hint of madness twinkled in her eyes.
Then, without hesitation, she wrote out a will, just in case. She decided to pass on the responsibility of guarding the gates to the only one she deemed remotely worthy and sufficiently responsible - Ami Mizuno aka Sailor Mercury, of course - while setting in motion the necessary subroutines to also select and train a proper successor on her disappearance or death, also just in case.
She also took care to set up the system to only activate these subroutines in case of their actual necessity - it wouldn't do to lock herself out of the Gates if she overdid her pessimistic worst-case assumptions - and added another backdoor password for the actual worst case.
Then she took a deep breath, readied her emergency measures, put a firmer grip on her Garnet Rod and took action.
Gojira raised his foot again and actually took a quarter step back to bend down to take a closer look at the stinging insect he had stepped on, taking a slight breath in to answer if it tried anything again. He could only focus one eye, but it was so small... smaller than anything that had caught his attention ever before. The Inner Senshi present tensed in fear and concern - they still weren't sure who these two were, but they did wear Senshi uniforms. And Gojira was an implacable force of nature - on the other hand, so was the Hulk if angered. And most of them were far too close to Ground Zero if anything happened...
Michiru moaned loud enough that the other Senshi could hear her (as often, they had few difficulties hearing and understanding each other even over notable distances and through many interferences), apparently still alive in spite of being trampled into the beach several meters (or yards) deep by a multi-kiloton foot. The ocean waves Gojira had agitated with his arrival flooded his footprint, forming a nice seawater pool. Fortunately for her, as the Senshi of the Sea, she wasn't in actual danger of drowning and soon followed a bunch of bubbles to the surface where she started to float with still twirling eyes. Gojira suspiciously focused his gaze on her but didn't attack, still puzzled that something that small had had the audacity to do what it had done. While the titanic King of the Monsters took a tentative sniff (softly enough not to risk getting the tiny thing up his nose)...
"Here, I guess you could use that," someone calmly said to Akane, who was still hiding between the scrapped food carts and covering her... wardrobe malfunction. Surprised, she looked up and saw a new swimsuit and a tank top dangling in front of her nose. Thankful, she accepted the clothes and tried to win the redressing race against the Hulk, who still tried to thread his huge feet in the correct pants legs, the tip of his tongue showing his concentration. She still tried to avoid looking at what she wouldn't be able to unsee, but since he didn't seem to start a violent flash attack, she tried to ignore the living high-tonnage potential explosive. As she admired the almost metallic glistening (and obviously very tough) cloth she tried to thank the green-haired elegant woman who had saved her dignity, and who just nodded at her in a relaxed and friendly manner, obviously enjoying her green and pink striped cotton candy and... calmly walking closer and taking in the view? Akane blinked at the tall woman in the dark green swimsuit. "Ano... that may be dangerous...?"
(Posted Wed, 03 Apr 2013 03:49)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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