Information flooded her mind. Her title was one granted to the families of the lesser nobility of Mercury. She remembered performing those tasks too politically or spiritually delicate to merit or survive the raw power of a Planetary. She was the precision unit, the scalpel rather than the broadsword. And she was back.
She opened her eyes, and spoke with a voice that spanned the eons. “Whenever evil slips through the cracks, it will find itself in my domain. I am Sailor Virgo, the Senshi of Innocence, and in the name of Virgo, you shall fall this day.”
“Um, Sailor Virgo? That’s nice an’ all, but the bad guy ain’t payin’ attention to ya.” Ranma brought the newly awakened warrior back to reality.
“Eh?” Virgo then noticed that, indeed, Sailor Eris was in the midst of using her cannon as a large club and smashing Sailor Mars into Venus and Jupiter in a painful looking planetary conjunction. “Oh. Better get in there.”
She dashed in as Sailors Moon and Eris faced off in a dramatic clash of order vs. chaos.
“MOON SPIRAL HEART ATTACK!”
“DISCORD DRIVE!”
Normally, the sheer brute force of Sailor Moon’s attack would have easily disrupted and overwhelmed the weaker blast. However, Sailor Eris had done something totally unexpected.
She’d aimed at the ground.
Flying upward from the Discord Drive-assisted jump, Eris moved in a high, narrow arc that ended with her landing atop the briefly immobile princess.
This was when Virgo entered the fray. “This…may be difficult,” she said uneasily.
Eris looked up from her seat atop the twitching, achy heap that was Sailor Moon. “Aw, how cute. The little girl thinks she can face the big baddie all by herself.” She brought her cannon to bear. “Do yourself a favor, kid. Give up the Amulet and no one gets hurt any worse.”
Virgo shook, partly in fear, partly in fury. She glared at the black-garbed Senshi. “I swore by the stars to defeat you, and I will not back down.”
“Hmph. Your loss, kid. DISCORD—”
“MAIDEN’S PURITY!”
A spark of luminescent energy shot up from Sailor Virgo and flashed outward like a low-flying firework. The resulting wave of energy shoved Eris back several yards. As it washed over the other Senshi, it left an aura of energy that seeped into them like a medicinal ointment. They rose stiffly, in some cases disentangling themselves from one another.
Venus shook her head. “Wow. That was weird.”
Jupiter flexed several joints experimentally and found them to be in minimal pain, if any. “Feels like the aftermath of one of Usagi’s big windups.”
Mars was by her princess’s side, attempting to get her back up. “Come on! We need you up and about, not squashed.”
“Have the bad guy sit on you. Then we’ll see how combat-ready you are,” groused said royalty.
“I don’t mean to interrupt anything,” Virgo said calmly, “but the bad guy is just about—” She was interrupted by a hastily dodged blast of chaotic energy. She finished her sentence lamely, “recovered.”
On the sidelines, Keitaro was fuming. “Look at what that madwoman has done! It’s going to take me weeks, no, months to repair all of this!”
“Y’know, there is a fight goin’ on,” pointed out Ranma, who was mystified at someone who could worry about collateral damage mid-battle. This was definitely not Nerima.
“I’m used to fights. Fights I can handle,” Keitaro said distractedly. “Vaporized floorboards? There we have a problem.”
Su stirred. She’d been dragged off when the battle had moved away from her, so she’d been outside of the healing spell’s effect. She’d been savoring the irony of the situation. “Pretty sure I’ve pulled a few vaporizations here and there, Keitaro.”
“That doesn’t make them any less expensive or frustrating,” the landlord harrumphed.
“Grandson,” said Hinata, “I appreciate your dedication to the welfare of the building, but this young man has a point. A melee is being fought. Now is not the time for concerns of domestic maintenance.”
“Thank you for your concern, everyone, but there comes a time when you have to put your foot down and say ‘Enough.’”
“Who are you, and what have you done with Keitaro?” Su asked, bemused.
“I have my moments, Su,” replied the ex-ronin. “And this is one of them.” Against all odds and common sense, Keitaro marched towards the befuku’d brouhaha, his face a mask of grim determination.
“DISCORD DRIVE!”
Keitaro’s smoking body rolled end over end back to the dorm’s doorstop. “Maybe I can wait after all,” said the charred but otherwise uninjured man. He coughed up a small cloud of smoke, feathers, and glitter.
Though Keitaro’s bravado had been blasted out of him, Ranma’s had yet to be damped. “You had the right idea, Keitaro-san,” Ranma said, brow furrowed. “I ain’t quite sure how, but I know I’m responsible fer Shinobu-chan’s safety. ‘S time I stepped up.” He turned to Su, concern in his eyes. “Y’ sure yer OK, Su-chan?”
“I’ll be fine,” said the Molmolian princess dismissively. “I’ve done worse to myself during weapon testing.” She tried to demonstrate her fitness by jumping to her feet, but just twitched a little. “OK, maybe not quite as bad as this, but a few bananas and I’ll be fine.” She flashed her trademark grin. “Bananas cure everything!”
Ranma chuckled a little at the girl’s antics. Then he faced forward, his face a mask of concentration and his mind a finely honed analytical device. He was dealing with both enemies and allies who he knew were incredibly strong and fast. His associates, unfortunately, appeared to rely almost entirely on throwing those flashy attacks, while the enemy balanced hers with some decent hand-to-hand and cannon-to-head moves. Worse, one of his compatriots was in her first battle with wholly unfamiliar powers. Still, his side had the advantage of sheer numbers, even with Shinobu’s inexperience, and could defeat this Kodachi reject with a careful strate—
“DISCORD DRIVE!”
Huh. Or that.
“What the—?”
“How did—?”
“Did he just—?”
Eris gave no cut off exclamation of disbelief. She just stood there, agog.
Ranma gave a cocky grin. “Heh. That’s interesting.”
Venus managed to get out a few complete sentences. “Her blast curved! Into him! And he didn’t even flinch! What the crap!?” Well, relatively complete.
Mars gave a grin not unlike Ranma’s. “You know what this means.”
Jupiter cracked her knuckles. “We can pummel her with impunity.”
Eris glowered. “Enjoy this minor victory. It will be—”
“Moko Takibisha!”
“Whoa!” The rogue Senshi frantically teleported back to her hidey-hole.
“We normally let the bad guys finish their rants, Ranma-san,” Sailor Jupiter admonished. “Sometimes they tell us name or motive.”
“And it’s proper superhero etiquette,” added Sailor Moon.
“Uh, sorry,” Ranma said nervously. “Well, we can always ask next time, right?”
Virgo sighed. “I’m just glad it’s over. My head feels weird. Like there’s someone else in there.”
The Planetaries looked at Mars nervously. She shrugged. “I don’t feel any evil presence around her. If anything, she may be a bit more spiritually pure than Usagi.”
Su called from the entrance. “Is it like an older sister who’s trying to tell you how to do everything?”
Virgo considered this. “Um, I guess so…”
The exotic girl managed to rise and walked to the Senshi. “I’ve got something like that too. It knows what it’s doing.”
“Could it be her previous life as a Senshi?” Venus pondered.
“Maybe. We can look into it later,” said Mars. “For now, we should worry about getting home.”
“But we teleported here!” cried Moon. “Can we make it back without Ami-chan?”
“It’s really not that far,” noted Jupiter.
“We can help!” offered an eager Su.
“T-teleport?” cried a nervous Virgo. “But what happens if—”
“It’s perfectly safe,” Mars said reassuringly.
“Sure!” Venus added brightly. “Just shunt every atom of your body a few kilometers in just the right direction and put ‘em back together! No sweat!” Virgo did not seemed soothed by this.
“Ooooor,” Su said playfully, “we could always pop over to America and see how the others are doing…”
“Wha! No no no! Just to Juuban! To Juuban!” Virgo realized what she’d just agreed to roughly three tenths of a second after the words left her lips. Unfortunately, by that point, a freshly retransformed Sailor Aquarius was herding her into the circle of joined hands.
“We’ll be back soon!” said the cheerful Senshi of Technology, just before the communal cry of “SAILOR TELEPORT!”
One spacetime distortion later, Ranma came to an important realization. “I probably should’ve gone with them…” Then he hiccuped, and became a she.
In the handy minidimension, Eris fumed and wished something here was more than semisolid, just so she could give it a satisfying kick. “Unbelievable! How did I miss him! The human chaos magnet, the lynchpin of my plans! And he’s on their side!” What followed was a tirade of profanity unprintable not only because of its vulgarity, but because of the limits of the English alphabet to represent sounds. That, and if written, some bits would infect the author’s computer with shoggoths, which are a real nuisance for antivirus programs.
After eldritchly venting her frustrations, Sailor Eris glumly moved to the scrying pool, and she saw something that made her move improve by a great deal. “Ho ho. Well now, looks like when the door closed, the window got thrown wide open.”
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(Posted Fri, 18 Jan 2008 23:13)
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