Orion's progress was actually pretty swift, all things considered.
He detested the idea of going around the city handing out power-ups to civilians at random (or by whatever ridiculous mechanism cumulated in Luna choosing Usagi). It was unethical, not to mention stupid, to pressure people into fighting a shadow war when they had little to no combat experience themselves. Still, he had waited to see the results of the absurd experiment, and left feeling vindicated. Sailor Moon was a disaster waiting to happen. He didn't pin much hope on her survival, but if she DID live while he was busy securing help, it was probably going to be thanks to that masked sniper. He had no clue who the fellow was or what his motivations were, but someone who tossed out one attack and then vanished was not one to be counted on in his book.
When he had left Luna, she had let him go under the assumption that the foolish tomcat was going to go seek out the rest of the Senshi on the flimsy hope that they had fighting experience. That Orion had no mechanism for detecting or activating them, Luna didn't consider. If he had told her up-front that he was going to get help that wasn't necessarily derived from the reincarnated souls from a dead kingdom, she would have scoffed. Honestly, the idea of mundane soldiers fighting a battle meant for a SENSHI?
Actually, Orion disdained the idea of the Senshi about as much as Luna disdained ordinary soldiers.
It wasn't necessarily that the position of Senshi had absolutely no prerequisite for combat prowess or experience. It wasn't that even after being selected, the Senshi didn't have to go through especially strenuous training, like the any other special forces group did. It wasn't that the Senshi were all from royal families and some of them whined incessantly under actual warzone conditions. It wasn't even that the Senshi commanded the love and respect of the people and were the highest level of the Moon Kingdom military juggernaut, despite having the combined tactical expertise of Beetle Bailey.
No, what bothered him the most about the whole deal was the seemingly arbitrary method under which these people were chosen. He had been told it was necessary and written in stone, so he could hardly oppose the institution, but the fact remained that in his mind, if one didn't CHOOSE to be a soldier, then that person shouldn't BE a soldier. He could vaguely recall memories of hearing about planetary Senshi that had tried to lead normal lives doing the things they had loved doing, only to be constantly shipped out to the next interplanetary emergency to do battle.
Now that it was all happening over again, the military advisor could only let his frustrations simmer; whatever his opinion on the matter, Luna was convinced that the Senshi, and eventually the Moon Princess, were vital to the destruction of the Negaverse and the survival of the planet, and Orion couldn't dredge up enough scorn to turn down free firepower. But he was determined to make HIS selection of warriors more carefully.
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Orion mumbled to himself in the dim light from the small survival lantern that glowed in the midst of the dark libarary (hey, cats can technically see in the dark, but reading in the dark was still hard on the eyes). Unlike Luna's subspace pocket, which had been filled with questionably designed magical doodads (really, who made all the magic items so damn girly, anyway?), his had been filled with USEFUL things. Survival lamps, med kits, rations, flares, and a few grenades that would emerge from the pocket without pins and ready to blow. Pity he couldn't have taken a full armory with him, but they HAD been in a hurry when they were sent forward.
Doing research as a cat had been hard, but being a trooper in every sense of the word was part of his nature. He had managed to sneak into public libraries after hours and pick out books, knocking them out of shelves and then flipping through them best he could. In the morning the staff would inevitably find an inexplicable mess of war and weapon-related books on the floor, but it was the small burden that they'd have to pay for the possible survival of the planet.
So far, he'd ascertained that humanity had just reached an age of great technological advancement that had been steadily quickening over the course of the last century. Unfortunately (at least to him), weapons development hadn't quite taken quite the same interest in the public eye as computers and fibre optics. For example, Earth had inexplicably decided not to seek further advancement in destructive potential of explosives after creating the thermonuclear bomb. Apparently it hadn't occurred to the people of Earth that they might want to rain hot, blistering destruction upon somebody else's planet rather than their own. Stupid hippies.
The other weaponry was interesting, but wouldn't be that helpful. Most of humanity's current weapons technology was invested in ballistic firearms that propelled metallic projectiles using chemical reactions in rifled chambers. Ironically, the small-scale versions of these weapons would be almost useless against youma, but very effective against the Senshi; the Silver Millennium had seen the production mainly of energy weapons, and the Senshi's magic fields had been constructed with that in mind. Where a lightning bolt would leave a Senshi singed and a bit dazed, a bullet would pierce skin, penetrate muscle, and remain there, inhibiting movement and healing. A simple handgun could expend an entire magazine in the time it took for most of the Senshi's spells to go off, as well. Orion shook his head and hoped that the enemy didn't manage to get a human army on their side.
The larger ballistic weapons and missile weapons, those that tended to fire warheads that were themselves explosive, would be as effective against youma as pretty much anything else. The problem being, of course, that it would be extremely difficult to acquire any. From what he had gathered, such things were only available in the upper echelon of the international black market, and even if he had the funding, he doubted many would be interested in doing business with a talking cat, or say, the right-hand man of a talking cat (he idly wondered which would be more ridiculous).
Magic was a much tougher subject. From what he could gather, it was largely dismissed as myth and legend, although with so many thousands of "fictional" accounts, he assumed that many could have a grain of truth in it. Unfortunately, unless he was going to spend the entire Negaverse invasion chasing down vague and unlikely leads trying to find a combat mage, that angle would have to wait.
One thing he was happy with was the progress that humanity had made in hand-to-hand combat. Like in the Silver Millennium, the majority of the world was advanced enough that melee fighting was considered a primitive and barbaric form of warfare, but the evolution of war had not advanced so far that the most powerful and most dedicated styles of martial arts had died off. While great warriors who could smash aside monsters with their bare hands were doubtlessly very rare, he was confident they still existed.
Orion yawned and turned away from his book, doing a somersaulting leap over his survival lantern and stashing it away in his personal stuff-space. That was enough research. It was time to begin the hunt. Nerima was a place famous for martial arts of such power that it occasionally left the district in ruins. On the other side of Tokyo there was supposed to be a school that had suffered a string of bombings and repeated reports of gunfire that all seemed to center around a single overzealous student. Then again, there was a mansion belonging to someone named Konoe that was rumored to have a reputation for dubious examples of sorcery and unexplained phenomena of that nature.
First, a nice long nap. But after that, it was straight to...
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(Posted Tue, 07 Nov 2006 07:48)
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