"Well, alright, then. It's our turn to ask questions, correct?"
Pluto asked. Saturn nodded too, curiosity alight in her eyes.
Uranus and Neptune on the other hand were behind some trees somewhere to there right, from what they could hear of Uranus trying to talk to Neptune. Neptune was not answering a word, and her silently fuming aura could be felt from quite a distance.
Ryouga sighed. "Well, I suppose so."
"Uranus. A*0-1. Explain." Pluto's question was short and to the point.
Ryouga scratched his head. "Um, uh, alright... You want the long version or the short version? Because the long version is pretty damn long, if I say so myself..."
"The short version first, and annotate later, maybe?"
Saturn said, and Pluto nodded to that.
"Very well, the short version first, then. Once upon a time, there was this Senshi who was happened to be Linked to a bloody massive Black Hole around the center of the Galaxy. And several other Beings, Senshi and otherwise, who gradually ended up being all karmatically entangled with her, him or it. Oh, they weren't all reborn in a matched set, each time, like some Beings seem to try to do, but more often then not, they were born around the same time and the same places, and they'd get to know each other, and well, you know the drill, I suppose."
Ryouga sighed, again, as Saturn and Pluto both nodded.
"Alright, here goes - I don't remember everything, not even close to everything, so keep that in mind, 'kay? I mean, I can barely remember being this 'Sia' she was talking about - though I can see why she'd want to remember that life, now that I'm remembering at least a little. "
Ryouga sighed, remembering a chipper girl, a bit on the short side, with bright scarlet hair, eating - icecream? Shaved ice? Well, something like that, anyway...
"She was this chipper bright thing with a long pigtail down to her knees, then, if I'm not mixing her up with her other incarnations, and she even had this loving if not very conventional family, and was even fairly popular. Though the main attraction of that particular lifetime was that it was one of those lives in which she could say It wasn't my fault without having to bury certain memories six feet under, in my opinion..."
Ryouga ran his hands though his hair.
"Because, you see, when A*0-1 fucks up, she - or he, or it - fucks up bad."
"Hey, c'mon, Neptune... Don't be mad at me...."
Neptune stopped at long last, leaning against a tree. Ah, a glimmer of hope at last! Uranus grinned at her back, trying to turn on the old charm as much as it'll go.
"You can wack me if you want, too - Pluto and Saturn already had their turn, it's only fair that you have yours, too."
"Wack you with what?" Neptune muttered.
Uranus smiled to see Neptune unbend at long last.
"Errr... I think it was a transformed Staff and Glaive, actually..."
Neptune blinked, sighed, materialized the Mirror, and carefully transforming it into something that looked very much like rolled-up newspapers, wacked Uranus on the head. Just once.
"You idiot. A Barrett Trap."
Uranus grinned hugely. Success!
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry! But it wasn't even a real Barrett Trap, I'd de-coupled the Sacrifice Cannons a while back anyway -"
Neptune sighed, burying her face in her hands. Uranus sat next to her, staggering a bit.
"I didn't mean to - I mean, I wasn't planning anything like that. But then I actually saw her and felt her aura and all those memories came pouring back and - "
Neptune sighed, faceplaming. "You're drunk, Uranus."
Uranus blinked. "I am? I didn't think one could get drunk in senshi-form!"
"...Alright, you're groggy, then. And now I'm wondering just what kind of memories are sitting around in my subconscious, just waiting to go off like gigantic fire rockets."
"...Eh." Uranus patted her shoulder, gently.
"Alright, then... sit, sit..." Neptune murmured, sitting down under a tree and gesturing for Uranus to sit next to her.
"'kay." Uranus sat, sagging a little to the side. "- Hey, you know - I won. I really did. Yeaaaah!"
Neptune sighed, then. The night wind was cool but not cold... just the night to sit out in a park, now that she thought about it.
"Aww, I missed drum practice. Mr Kariya's probably awfully disappointed..."
"There're going to be 3 more rehearsals if I recall correctly, Uranus. It'll be alright if as long as you don't miss all of them, I think."
Neptune sighed, then. "Uranus?"
"Yeah?"
"What was she to you?"
"...'Overkill'?" Uranus sighed, looking up at the starry skies.
"- Yes."
"I..." Saturn murmured, quietly. "I have plenty of memories I routinely give the 'six feet under' treatment, too, I believe..."
"Oh, so do I." Ryouga snorted. "The more you remember, the more you don't wanna."
Pluto groaned at that. "Oh, yes. Or rather - 'The more you remember, the more memories you want to rebury.', in my case, anyway - In a 'How could any incarnation of mine have been so stupid, or insane, or -'"
"Or just plain unlucky, yeah..."
Saturn, Pluto and Ryouga looked at each other, sighing.
"Well anyway, when A*0-1 messes up, she tends to mess up bad, as you could probably guess. Kina - Kiri - Uranus - was talking about Lancran and Benare and -what was the other name, Ha'shel? Well, I don't remember Ha'shell but I do remember Lancran and Benare. - And Nike, of course. Well, at least a little..."
"Wait, those are all A*0-1's incarnations, correct?" Saturn asked.
"Um, yes." Ryouga closed his eyes a bit, remembering.
"Well, I might as well start with Nike, I suppose - from the little I remember, which isn't much, frankly - "
"Nike - yeah, it makes sense that 'Overkill' would remember being Nike, I suppose, now that I think about it. Nike was cute, and bright, and had this long braid. She also had this weird family that loved her very much regardless, and friends, sort of. Well, we - my former self and her friends, that is - didn't turn out to be very good friends, all things considered, but - " Uranus sighed.
"What happened?" Neptune asked.
"Well - we all met that time because we all had potential powers and their was a 'like gets drawn to like' thing going on, I suppose. I was called 'Kina', I think, and that boy was 'Sia', I think. - Not that that was the first time we'd met if you include past lives, not by a long shot if I remember correctly, but it wasn't like we remembered all that, not at that time, anyway, so - " Uranus looked up at the stars, sighing yet again.
"Hmmmmm?"
"Well, the Sailor Wars had at long last come to the little Star System in the boondocks we were living on then, and - "
"So Senshi were being activated right and left, including us - and then, there were the visions and dreams. Of the possible future, of danger - hey, you can guess, right?"
Pluto and Saturn nodded.
"Many Senshi have at least some kind of latent ability to 'feel' the future, and potential dangers, I know that, of course." Saturn said, looking ready to groan. "They're - quite hard to interpret, sometimes, though."
"Saturn here is trying to say they're actually as reliable as, well, taffy candy." Pluto sighed. Ryouga crossed his eyes - the images her words conjured up were strange indeed.
"Except that you can get away with ignoring taffy candy to your heart's content, but you don't dare ignore a real Warning Dream, because - "
"Yeah, yeah, you end up like Sailor Nido of the Torknuss System, who kept ignoring the Warning Dreams because they made no sense to her - and ended up with a half-dead planet. I know the drill, too." Ryouga sighed.
"Well, anyway, - they were all those Warning Dreams, and little by little, the ones that begun to dominate were the visions about a certain shadowy Senshi, and the destruction of the entire Star System..."
Pluto and Saturn groaned, yet again. They could both see were this was going...
"A witch hunt started, I take it?" Pluto asked.
"Well, yes, but no. Because even before any kind of witch hunt had time to get really get started - Nike started coming into her real powers."
Sagittarius A*0-1 Power, Make UP! And the power that had swirled around Nike, poor Nike, transforming, changing...
Oh, hell - Ryouga bit his lip. He remembered. Oh, he did, now...
"And so we -'Sia', 'Rain', 'Silver', and 'Kina', that's yours truly, or a past self of same, anyway - " Uranus whispered.
" The people who'd fought with her ate sweets with her and hung out with her and trained with her - Nike did at least go through the motions of training, as I recall, which is interesting because most of the other incarnations of her that I remember seemed to think that any kind of training was beneath them - tried to kill her..."
Uranus licked her lips, looking sad. Neptune just nodded.
"And so she tore off my - well, Kina's - arm and gave Sia this big burn on her face that just wouldn't heal for some reason and ran away crying, away from the entire Star System, that is, and that was the last I saw of her till a rather long time later, when she came drifting back under a disguise."
Neptune blinked. Uranus snickered, then.
"It was a rather good disguise, too - she was pretending to be a minor Senshi from a far-away Star System, acting as a minor trader and postal service of a sort. I personally think she just was curious about what had happened in her old haunts, but we were right in the middle of yet another crisis, so when Sia found her out - "
"I challenged her, she half killed me, and - " Ryouga paused. There was no need to talk of what happened after that, surely...
"And the next thing I remember is one of the Princess' of our System was 'rebodying' me, and - the scar was gone. It wouldn't go away even when I'd been killed and resurrected before, but then it was just - gone, you know?"
Ryouga whispered, wishing there was some water here. This talking was tiring work. Wasn't there a water fountain or something, near by?
Pluto and Saturn looked at each other.
"And that was Nike."
Read the comments on this episode
(Posted Wed, 06 Sep 2006 14:28)
Questions? Problems? Suggestions?
Send a mail to addventure@bast-enterprises.de
or use the contact form.
らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
All other series and their characters are © by their respective creators or owners. No claims of ownership of these characters are implied by the authors of this Addventure, or should be inferred.
The Anime Addventure is a non-profit site.