Late that night, Circe cursed up a storm – figuratively at least – as she spied upon the future Sailor Saturn Hotaru Tomoe. She had planned on simply exorcizing the entity known as Mistress 9 from the poor girl, and then rejoining her compatriots.
Things weren't going to be that simple.
The problem wasn't Mistress 9; that pathetic entity wouldn't have been able to possess anyone stronger than a frail and isolated child – which was precisely what Hotaru was. Removing her would be child's play for a sorceress of her talents.
It was the dreams Mistress 9 was currently blocking from Hotaru's subconscious that was the problem. Dreams that involved the newly empowered Sailor Titan. Dreams that implied Ranma would have similar dreams about Hotaru.
"Prometheus? Gaea?" she called out, "Did either of you realized they'd be dreaming about each other?"
Gaea and Prometheus promptly popped in next to the ancient sorceress. "What?" Gaea asked, before spying on Hotaru herself. "Oh dear."
"To be fair," Prometheus stated, "the only others in a remotely similar situation are the senshi of Earth & Moon, and it was only the latest generation that had anything similar to this. Diemos and Phobos are too small to support proper senshi."
"We have to do something," Gaea asserted. "Doing nothing would make us no better than them."
Prometheus nodded. "There's nothing we can really do about Saturn's situation. She doesn't even realize she is Sailor Saturn yet, so any warning we give her would be meaningless. I'll head over and chat with Titan and explain things to him."
Circe and Gaea nodded. Gaea and Prometheus disappeared a moment latter, and Circe exorcized the foreign presence in Hotaru.
Ranma blinked, wondering what was going on. He'd just been in some palace watching as some girl with short black hair and fear-filled violet eyes was being restrained. He'd had been about to step in and demonstrate several of his more painful techniques on the jerks when suddenly he was here in this black room.
"Greetings, Sailor Titan," a voice announced behind him, causing him to fall into a defensive stance as he spun around.
There was some strange man, some three to four meters tall. He had golden-hued skin and golden hair with blazing amber eyes, and was dressed in shades of yellow. He was standing before a mountain that had several thick but broken chains embedded in the rock.
"Who are you?" Ranma asked.
The man smirked slightly as though laughing at his own private joke, and responded, "A messenger of sorts. Tell me, Ranma. As good as you are, do you think you could reach out across space to find where Jupiter or Mars are in the sky?"
Ranma opened his mouth to respond with his usual cocky bravado, but paused. He remembered now; he was dreaming. He'd gotten home late enough that he'd managed to avoid any confrontations over his newly-controlled curse, and had gone to bed.
Besides, it was a good question. He could still sense the planets in the system, now that he thought about it, but they were faint signals, thousands upon thousands of kilometers away and almost completely drowned out against the background ki of the life on Earth. "I had help."
"Indeed," the strange man responded. "There is a war coming, one that will decide the fate of all life on Earth. Without you the Earth would freeze in another ice age the likes of which haven't been seen since the most advanced lifeforms on earth were single cell organisms. Those who did survive would up stripped of anything resembling Free Will. I and my compatriots are hoping that with your help alongside the senshi, they will be able to save more and prevent the loss of Free Will."
Ranma's eyes narrowed. He was too used to things biting him in the ass to believe this was a simple as that. "You wouldn't have come here if that was all there was; I certainly don't need my arm twisted to get involved in a fight. What's the down side?"
The man gave Ranma a rueful smile. "A fair question. When you forged your link to Titan, you also forged a link to Saturn – not the same kind of link, mind you, but a link all the same."
Ranma may not be the brightest bulb in the bin, but he wasn't completely stupid either and knew how his luck ran. "Tell me I didn't just give myself another fiancée," he pleaded with a groan.
"She may not be another fiancée. The two of you could decide that you just wish to be friends or that you think of each other as brother and sister."
Ranma shot the yellow-shaded man a glare. "And how likely is that?"
The man seemed to sigh. "Alright. Saturn is a sixteen-year-old girl with health problems, parents that were neglectful before her mother died in an experiment and her father became corrupted by forces that want to destroy the world, and no friends thanks to a combination of her parents isolating her and a natural gift at healing that's left her ostracized with her peers. The chances she won't see you as a knight in silk armor come to sweep her off her feet are so small as to be completely negligible."
Ranma just nodded at the confirmation that he was right. "Not a martial artist," he asked with a slight frown. He didn't really have a problem if she wasn't, but it would mean that he'd have to protect her from the others when he met her.
"Nope. Which may be a good reason to consider a relationship with her; you haven't exactly had much luck getting martial artist types to listen to you, have you?"
Ranma had nothing to say to that.
"Well," the man said after a moment. "I've given you fair warning about the consequences of your actions. Do you want me to undo your link to Titan?"
Ranma blinked and then shook his head. "Not a chance. Lots of people are gonna die if I do that, right? A martial artist duty is to protect the weak. Another fiancée is just par for the course."
"Fair enough. In that case, I'll leave you to your dreams."
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(Posted Mon, 19 Nov 2007 20:42)
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