"Well," she reluctantly affirmed, "Now that I've isolated the signal we can try to track it..."
"Yes!!!" shouted Venus, already whipping her head about like a hyperactive puppy surrounded by squealing preschoolers. "Point the way and lets get moving."
"Unfortunately," Mercury qualified, deflating Minako's newborn excitement, "the residual energy is so faint that I can't scan for it beyond twenty meters. Furthermore, even that is fading rapidly. If we'd gotten here even five minutes later there wouldn't have been any trace at all."
"Damn! If we'd dusted this Youma fast enough I could have still hit the arcade before dinner."
"Wait a minute," Makoto interjected, having quickly regained her breath after her non-transformed sprint into the alleyway to join her friends. "There was a Youma here? When did this happen? I've been here for almost twenty minutes and I didn't hear anything!"
"Actually, there's no evidence that it is a Youma," Mercury stated. "I was meeting Usagi and Minako on my way home from juku when the Mercury Computer picked up an unusual signal at the edge of it's scanning range. We were too far away for a firm reading when we lost the signal, but the little information I could gather suggests some form of energy-harvesting capability."
"Yeah!" Usagi piped in, having followed maybe one word in five. "Since we couldn't track the Youma-or-whatever-it-was with Sailor Mercury's computer I thought we'd just look for screaming people and stuff but there weren't any and we were getting worried and then Mina saw you and Ami thought maybe you saw the Youma-like-thing but you didn't but Ami found it again so everything was alright except now Ami can't find it, or can she, 'cause I'm not really sure about that part?"
Several seconds of mental shuffling occurred as the three other senshi rearranged that mouthful into some semblance of order while mentally applying assorted punctuation marks. Ami, naturally, was the first to finish unraveling Usagi's linguistic jigsaw puzzle.
"The trail is so faint that we'd have to follow it at a slow walk to keep from losing it altogether," she said. "Its fading faster than we can track. We'd lose it entirely before going more than a block."
"That still doesn't tell us why nobody noticed it was here in the first place," Venus inserted. "Was it invisible? Did it travel by sewer? Did it do something to their minds?"
"There's too little information to draw any conclusions," Mercury answered, quietly impressed by her somewhat ditzy friend's moment of insight. This quickly turned to a quiet self-rebuke as she reminded herself that Minako had spent months in England fighting a Dark Kingdom incursion alone as the mysterious heroine Sailor V; Minako likely had more direct combat experience than the rest of the inner senshi combined.
"So what now," asked Makoto, adrenaline pumping from the run and increasingly anxious due to the nebulous situation.
(Posted Tue, 07 Jun 2005 02:19)
Questions? Problems? Suggestions?
Send a mail to addventure@bast-enterprises.de
or use the contact form.
らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
All other series and their characters are © by their respective creators or owners. No claims of ownership of these characters are implied by the authors of this Addventure, or should be inferred.
The Anime Addventure is a non-profit site.