A flyer for “Queen’s Day Celebrations” got her attention, but in the end it was a history book that finally provided the answer. Setsuna was stuck in the present, but the boy she’d been trying to eliminate had somehow been sent into the distant past.
He’d been found in the Imbrium Rain Forest with memories swiss cheesed by the paradox storm. He’d arrived out of seeming nowhere radiating chaotic magic and had been raised under the Queen’s watchful eye to see what would develop. Suspicions had softened over time, and he’d eventually been adopted as a ward. He’d been ten years old while Princess Serenity II was the same, and a friendship of sorts had fast developed between the pair. Time passed and friendship became something else.
The changes in history had pretty much cascaded from there. No romance between the Princess of Moon and a prince of Earth, no jealous Baroness contracting with a Thing from Beyond, no destruction of the Silver Millenium, no reincarnation of magic warrior princesses, and no star crystal or senshi powers for Setsuna. Well, not beyond the anachronistic fragment left over from the paradox storm.
Instead, what happened was…. Well, best to start over from the beginning.
Earth’s Moon, Lacuna, was a paradise of blue forests, broad, shallow lakes, and tall gray mountains. It hadn’t always been so. The refugees had mean their stay on the barren planetoid to be but a hiatus in their trek, until they repaired the damage, but the last space tree had faded completely and they had no choice but to make themselves at home. Thus blue vegetation had spread across the surface of the globe, giving birth to the wind swept plains of Crisium, the misty vales of Humerium, the snowy, blue-iced hills of Frigoris, the flowery orchards of Nectaris, the fertile farmlands of Serenity, and even the dark forests of Nubrium.
Well, to call it a paradise was slightly misleading. It was beautiful and vibrant, but not always safe. Some of that was by design, as a working ecology needed predators and parasites. But in the early days of lunaforming, the atmosphere had been too thin to filter out all the cosmic radiation. There had been mutations among the introduced lifeforms. It was unavoidable; they had to produce a biosystem in order to produce and sustain the atmosphere to support a biosystem. Pulling down comets into the newly created Farside Ocean could only do so much.
In short, the rain forest of Imbrium was much as you would expect a magical rainforest. Very wet, very beautiful, and very, very dangerous. Full of life and death; not to mention the oriads and orochi. It was not the sort of place one entered willingly, except, perhaps, to collect the medicinal plants while under heavy guard. Certainly not the sort of place one expected to find a little boy, but there he was and surviving quite happily. Well, surviving, anyway.
No memories, strange clothes, radiating chronal mana patterns, and apparently living off the land instead of the other way around. There were those in the court who expressed suspicions and doubts about the jungle boy. He couldn’t be from Earth and he certainly wasn’t one of them. The mutterings continued after the Queen announced that she was taking the foundling under her wing as a ward of the state. Subdued though, not where she could hear, or under ears that could carry word back to her.
Uncouth. Unnatural. Unfit company for a princess. Just look at the trouble he gets her into. Mutter, mutter, mutter.
The crown princess was named Serenity, after the peaceful farmlands and her mother both, and it was generally viewed as a quite suitable name for such a sweet–natured girl child. The adopted barbarian ‘prince’, was eventually dubbed Crisis, after the wild, windswept plains. This was also, it was widely agreed, a most fitting appellation.
(Posted Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:40)
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