The Inners had managed to stagger to their feet by the time the two Outers had arrived and were listening to Mercury.
“Her wall isn’t going to hold up for much longer against that much power,” Mercury muttered, desperately scanning for some way of helping her young friend.
“What, but I thought the Silence Wall was indestructible?” Moon worried.
“Normally I’d say it was, but she’s dealing with concentrated life energy and the Silence is diametrically opposed to that.”
“Huh?” Several of the Inners questioned.
“It’s the opposite of what she has, like fire and water.”
“But she heals people,” Moon protested.
“Yes, and she heals by using the Silence to draw out all the entropic energy from a person and injects her own life energy to heal the damage. That’s why she’s so effective against youma created injuries and why healing drains her so much.”
“What’s going on?” Uranus interrupted, concerned about her missing daughter.
Rei spoke up, overriding the Inners’ various explanations. “We were doing a little advanced scouting in the park, which turned out to be an old trap and the trap activated itself. Venus had a breakdown and Saturn found her knight. He took point to disarm the trap and was at ground zero when it went off. The explosion knocked us all back here except for Saturn. She used her wall to shield herself from the blast and is struggling to reach the center, where her knight was when things went boom, but is losing energy rapidly. We have no idea what to do next.”
“Or why the explosion seems to be limited to the park. It should have destroyed several city blocks,” the bluette commented, her eyes never leaving her computer screen.
The Outers squinted at the incandescent fury of the leashed energy, as it screamed for release from the park’s confines and decided that asking about the knight wasn’t as important as helping their daughter at the moment.
Neptune and Uranus stared into each other’s eyes for a moment, communicating something, before Neptune ventured a suggestion, “Wake?”
Uranus nodded. “She won’t give up, so I guess we’ll have to give her a hand, but we need targeting data or we’ll do more harm than good.”
“She gets that from you, you know. Once she’s set on a course of action she won’t budge.”
“Yeah, and normally I’d be proud of that, but not when she gets into situations like this.”
Pluto stepped forward from the shadows, followed by the two mooncats. “I have visors for Neptune and Uranus. They’ll give you all the targeting data you need, but I need to borrow Mars for a minute. I’d use Neptune's Aqua mirror, but she’ll need the boost of her talisman to cut through the energy field.”
The two quickly grabbed and donned the simple silver visors that Pluto offered, each shivering as their power surged through their new wrap around shades and altered them to fit their planetary powers. Without a word the two quickly ran to opposite sides of the park and carefully fired into the park in turn.
“Wait! What do we do?” Moon asked, before Pluto could vanish with Mars, worrying about Saturn and wondering if Saturn’s knight had survived.
“I’m having a hard time seeing anything clearly in the timegates. The best advice I can give you is to wait and see. Chi bursts usually just knock us down, rather than doing any real damage, as our senshi forms were designed to handle massive amounts of planetary chi and transform it into mana, so Saturn should be just fine. Now if you’ll excuse me.” Pluto and Mars vanished in a flash of light leaving the senshi to stand around and worry, despite Pluto’s comments.
The Silent Knight?” Artemis cocked his head to the side. “I remember something about that.”
Listening to Artemis was a welcome distraction from standing around doing nothing, so everyone turned to the white furred feline and listened to him try and recall things he hadn’t thought of in eons.
“He was completely devoted to Saturn, wouldn’t even speak to anyone but her, that’s why they called him, The Silent Knight. Truthfully, no one ever heard him speak to her either, he’d just smile and look at her and she seemed to know whatever he wanted to say just by looking in his eyes.” Artemis grinned as he recalled one of his favorite Silver Millennium TV shows, mistaking it for his own memories.
“His greatest skill was stealth. They say he was so skilled that he could be standing right behind you and unless he wanted you to, you’d never know he was there. However his habit of appearing around The Queen without any warning or sound upset her a bit, as she’d turn and find herself walking face first into his chest and had bruised her nose on more than one occasion. Pluto was ordered to warn The Queen about when he was going to appear, but they discovered that the timegates couldn’t track him at all.” The mooncat chuckled.
“I thought the gates tracked everyone,” Moon interjected.
“Nah, they track most people, but they don’t track gods, demons, people under certain concealment spells, chaos nexus, little white mice, crows, and a couple of other things I’ve forgotten. The timegates are powerful, but they aren’t all knowing or Pluto could control the future, rather than just guide events. But, back to the story.” Artemis cleared his throat and started speaking once more.
“So, The Queen had a small bell, shaped like Saturn, made and asked Saturn to get him to wear it. He was reluctant to wear anything that would interfere with his fighting capabilities, but Saturn smiled at him and he melted. The bell didn’t help a whole lot, as he still seemed to popup anywhere he felt like without a sound, but he’d jingle the bell a little, so Serenity wouldn’t turn and walk into him anymore.” He snickered for a moment.
“Of course that only worked half the time, as she was often distracted by important matters, so she’d walk right into him anyway. Saturn had spoken to him about hurting The Queen, so he’d step backwards real quick, which unfortunately would just make the queen trip as she’d try to stop real fast to avoid hitting something that wasn’t there anymore and the next thing you know, The Silent Knight would be on the floor with The Queen on top of him. It happened enough that rumors began to spread. Serenity was embarrassed, Saturn was amused and the knight was flustered, as the phrase ‘be there with bells on’ was coined for clandestine meetings between lovers.”
“My Mom was having an affair with Saturn’s knight?!” Moon yelped.
Artemis shrugged. “Not that I know of, but it’s possible and was the rumor of the time. The Queen finally ordered Pluto to stand behind her whenever possible, which resulted in the two of them getting tangled up half the time and on several notable occasion, all three of them! Saturn knew her knight was loyal, but found the whole thing hilarious, so she’d pretend that all of them were in a group relationship, which wasn’t that uncommon at the time, and scold them all on controlling their hormones in public or hop on the pile and see how long she could keep them all tangled up.”
“And The Queen didn’t have a problem with this?” Luna asked, scandalized.
“You have to remember that the Senshi of Saturn doesn’t appear like the rest of the Senshi. She shows up for maybe a decade and then vanishes again, only to appear when needed, centuries later. If not for the different names you’d assume she was the same girl as the time before. The Senshi of Silence is the only Senshi that doesn’t travel in family lines, which makes it really strange that they always look and act the same. At any rate, whenever one appears, Pluto and The Queen simply dote on her, she can do no wrong and is always loyal, and they cry when she vanishes, taking years to recover. So, to answer your question, no, The Queen didn’t mind at all.”
“He’s not my dad, is he?” Moon asked cautiously, as no one had ever mentioned her father from back then to her.
Artemis looked thoughtful for a moment. “I’m not sure, but probably not. Luna?”
Luna shrugged. “I vaguely recall your father as being a knight, but he specialized in chain weapons and doesn’t sound like The Silent Knight at all.”
“I think you’re right. I seem to recall getting thrown out of a few bars with him and he was older than Saturn’s knight.”
“I don’t know whether to feel relieved that Saturn isn’t dating my father or disappointed that I won’t get to meet him.” Usagi finished, scratching her head.
Saturn struggled forward, gaining another foot as her wall shrank by inches. ‘At this rate I’ll never reach him!’ she worried as she forced her way onwards, when a familiar looking ball of yellow energy tore through the air a foot in front of her, disrupting the storm for a moment and letting her move forward a lot easier, before the chi-storm filled in the hole again.
The scene was repeated, over and over again with alternating shots from Uranus and Neptune tearing through the storm in front of Saturn and she quickly moving forward into the breach, as her once powerful wall shrunk smaller and smaller, draining even more energy from the panting senshi.
Each step she took made the next step even harder to take, but she wasn’t about to quit, her date was in the center of this mess and she was going to watch Naruto with him, no matter what forces were aligned against her.
Ranma would have screamed, but he was far too confused to bother. So what, if his veins felt like they had been replaced with live wires and his skin was currently encircling the park. He was also rather sure that his body wasn’t supposed to feel like liquid magma, but needs must as Kasumi drives.
‘Or something like that,’ he thought to himself with the small portion of his brain that wasn’t concentrating on whether he was suppose to be a particle or a wave.
He could feel a foreign body inside himself, but it wasn’t as annoying as the two twigs that kept poking him in the side.
Mars stared around herself curiously. If she didn’t know any better she would swear she was at her shrine, but her shrine was never this quiet and there were no windows, the fact that the sacred flame flickered between green and silver wasn’t worth a mention compared to that.
“I made it look like your shrine so there’d be fewer distractions from trying to scry in an unfamiliar place,” Pluto announced as she knelt down next to the sacred flame and stared at them intently.
Mars nodded and knelt by her side, staring into the flames.
5 minutes later...
“It’s like trying to watch scrambled porn,” Mars complained.
Pluto looked at her quizzically.”Of course it is. Looking into the future is always like that. Why do you think your grandfather had you train the way he did. It’s standard training for any seer.”
“What?! You mean he was serious about that? I thought he was just being a pervert old man.”
“He is a pervert, but he’s also quite a talented seer among other things. I met him while he was in his prime back in ‘32 and he was quite a hunk.”
“You didn’t... I mean you wouldn’t... Please tell me you didn’t...” Mars stuttered nervously.
“Yes, Rei, I am your grandmother!” Pluto intoned, the shadows dancing as the sacred flame became the only light source in the room, shadowing Pluto’s eyes and making her look demonic.
“No, you can’t be! Grandfather told me you were dead!”
“It was a joke,” Pluto deadpanned as the omnipresent lighting came on again. “I thought you were a bit too tense to get a decent reading, so I wanted to shock you into relaxing a bit. While we are in no rush, we are at the timegates after all, I figured it’d help speed things up.”
“Thank god!” Mars muttered as she relaxed and stared at the flames once more.
‘So much for a happy family reunion,’ Pluto mentally grumbled before doing the same.
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(Posted Sat, 25 Oct 2008 05:47)
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