Disclaimer: I don't own Sailor Moon, Slayers or Ranma ½. It would be really neat if I did but I don't. Oh well perhaps someday I will write something really cool and fanfic writers will be putting up their own disclaimers like this about something I make.
Anyways...
Summary: This is an AU where the girls have been awakened later and the group dynamics are totally different inside the inners. Rei has managed to rest almost total control of the group from Usagi and Usagi has almost no confidence in herself as a result. Also, Rei took Mamoru away and pretty much crushed her during the process. Needless to say things aren't going very good for the girl but one bright point is Pluto quickly befriended her. Also, I'm going to alter and adjust the costumes immensely and fine tune the attitudes of the girls. We are going to be joining them as they work on the Pharaoh 90 and Mistress 9 problems but little do they know that they will get a very big surprise in the form of Xellos being released into the world. Not to mention the chaos that Ranma and company will bring into their lives as well. Xellos is a real villain and unlike the other morons the girls have always faced before them but is he really a villain? You will have to read and find out! As for Ranma he runs into them a year after the failed wedding attempt totally frustrated and annoyed with his life. Will they be able to help each other or will the chaos Ranma creates be too much trouble?
Important note: Also, it has been so many years since I watched the shows and my memory is tad weak in areas so I'm going to adjust what happens for two reasons. The first is that I don't remember what exactly happened and the Internet isn't giving me any quick answer. Secondly, I thought several areas were rather dumb even when I was a young girl in the 90s. So, things are going to be really adjusted in many ways and I just please ask for people to keep an open mind here! Also, to all those nifty artists on deviantart I really find it wonderful to be able to find some great pictures for new customs and ideas that are very different from canon, so THANKS! Like Omen-of-SilverWing was a great idea of how I wanted to redo Pluto.
Xellos opened his eyes and inhaled a deep breath of air. A few coughs later he figured it best not to do that again with all the dust in the air floating around him currently. The last thing he remembered was Zelas telling him to remember his duty and then she had used a massive amount of her power to put him into some sort of protective sleep. He had no idea how much time must have passed but he would get it all worked out soon enough.
Their new project had been a complete success and now Xellos could sustain himself on any strong emotion, not just negative ones. They sought out this new power to finally become complete and remove their last real weakness. There were now able to do as their namesake suggested and challenge the Gods or more accurately the Nightmare Lords but apparently someone or something learned of things too soon and they sought to destroy what Zelas and him had accomplished.
Xellos tried to get an idea of where he was but everything felt off and quite different. It was as if the world's magic flows had all disappeared and the air tasted rather weird and it felt stale and empty. Well, if there was no natural magic flows then how in the heck was he pulled out of his sleep since Zelas has used some rather strong magic and it would take something rather strong to break the seals.
Xellos' eyes opened in surprised as a wave of fire washed across the area just in front of him towards some blond girl in some very odd looking clothes. The fire was composed of some rather strange form of magical energy and it was launched from some odd looking staff wielded by another girl, redhead this time, in another odd set of clothes. Xellos frowned a bit since he could tell there was a lot of magic being wielding by the blond and the redhead with the fire weapon but the source of the energy sure wasn't coming from where it should have been.
He was about to speak when the blond girl who had just dogged the attack yelled out.
"Eudial give it up! I'm not going to ever let you win!"
"We'll see about that Sailor Moon, or should I say Usagi!" Eudial let a happy sneer appear on her face as the meaning behind her words was realized by Sailor Moon. Apparently, such information really upset the blond and Xellos found the terror and worry that was rolling off of her to be quite tasty and the girl named Eudial began to speak again, " Yes I know your name and you can bet that I will have quite a bit of fun pretending to be you once you are dead and buried. The other Senshi aren't going to even know what him them before they are all dead alongside you."
Xellos watched as the blond, named Usagi apparently, got visibly upset and the hate that was rolling off of her as loud thunderclaps was surprisingly strong and directed right at Eudial. Usagi had an interesting magical pattern and it was building up for some sort of attack he was sure. He looked around the room and then noticed the two other girls on the far side of the building they were in. Neither of them was moving but he could tell they were still alive but something had happened to them and their life force was loosing its connection to their bodies. He took a deeper look into their nature and it revealed that the magic inside of them was very similar to Usagi's. However, they were both quite ruffed up and covered in all sort of dust and grim and the one with the short blond hair looked much worse their the one with the long aqua marrine hair. Xellos suspected those two had been fighting Eudial before Usagi had soon up.
The magical engery building inside of Usagi was making Xellos a bit nervous and he quickly decided to take her side for the moment. Eudial's magic left her wide open for all sorts of attacks and while Usagi's wasn't much better he preferred the emotional energy inside of her better. With that in mind he quickly made his way over to Eudial and smirked as he tapped her head with the orb on his staff. A loud scream escaped her mouth and a look of pure horror spread across her face as she disappeared with a flash and a sparkle into the orb on his staff. Xellos smiled to himself and planned to have a very long talk with that one later but right now it appeared that the blond finally noticed him.
"Who the hell are you?!", she asked him with a look of pure surprise plastered on her face.
"I'm Xellos. The trickster priest.", he explained with his typical smile and grin.
"What?"
Her confusion was wonderful and he was very glad to see that her magical power had begun to relax back into its former shape. For some silly reason he found himself rather liking this girl. He just sat there smiling at her with his lidded eyes and after a little while she got the hint that he wasn't going to explain what he just told her any further so she sighed and asked her next question.
"What did you do with Eudial?"
"Well, I thought I would help you out since your other friends weren't having a very good day."
He spoke this as he indicated to the two other girls on the floor behind Usagi with a pointing of his staff. She narrowed her eyes as him and then looked at the two girls laying on the floor and then back at him.
"I wouldn't exactly call them my friends but thanks anyway."
"Of course!"
With that said Xellos teleported to a nearby alcove in the building he was in which appeared to be a shrine or temple of some sort since it had the usual amount of stone work and large columns he associated with such places. However the various scorch marks and cracks across a lot of the stone work gave ample evidence to the power behind the battle that had just taken place. He smiled to himself as he felt Usagi's, or Sailor Moon's, confusion appear again. Now he just needed to get an idea of what was going on and figure out what in the heck was the magic these girls were wielding and where it came from. It wasn't very powerful by his standards but it had a very interesting signature and flavor to it and none of the protections a real mage would be using upon their person, which was very strange indeed. He carefully wrapped himself in cloaking magic and waited to see what would turn up.
He looked over the blond carefully now and examined her appearance. There was some magic that tried to block his ability to see her face but for him it was an easy matter to circumvent the small amount of protection it offered. She had deep blue eyes and had two buns on either side of her head which then had two steamers of long blond hair tailing from them. Rather different in his opinion but her clothes were what really made him wonder what had gone on during his long sleep. She was wearing a silver tiara on her forehead with a large diamond looking crystal that was sclupted into the shape of a rose in the center but his senses told him that crystal contained a large amount of magical energy. On her hands were a pair of white gloves with a thin silver chain circling each wrist. She wore a pair of white sandals that had several small straps criss crossing over her toes and then another set of straps which buckled to secure her ankle to the top of the 3 inch heels present on them but she didn't seem to have any issues moving around wearing them. What really caught his eye was the dress she was wearing. It was sleeveless and had a rather low neckline and flared out into an a-line skirt that stopped just above her knees but it glowed and shimmer with a silver energy that slowly moved along it's white pearlescent surface. All in all she had a very striking appearance and looked more like some form of Royalty than a fighter.
The magics and energies inside of her were quite alien but also very close to raw Mazoku magics but just missing a few components. It was rather surprising to him and he found himself rather enthralled with the silly girl as she ran to the others like her, in the magical essence not in appearance, and began using a form of healing magic on them. Both of the unconscious girls began to stir and Usagi was beginning to yell at them when his sense alerted him to the present of a new magic entering the area which signaled the appearance of another person.
It was a form of temporal magic but incomplete and not entirely correct and he was rather amazed that the person using it wasn't ripped apart from the attempt but instead a new girl appeared at the source of the magic in the building. This one had very long dark green hair that reached down to just past her thighs and she held a long golden colored staff shaped almost like a key of some sort but it gave off the same temporal magic he had just felt. She wore a pair of long gloves that reached up to just below her shoulders and they were a dark gray color and she was wearing a long flowing dress of a burgundy color that had a long slit up to about mid thigh which showed off her very shapely legs quite well. She had a gold tiara on her forehead and she was wearing the almost exact same sandals as Usagi was wearing except hers were a dark black color. She was also sporting a pair of stockings that ran up to the tops of her thighs and matched the color of her gloves. Her dress didn't have the same magic visibly flowing across it but Xellos could tell that there was still plenty of magic in it and he knew that all of her clothes would function almost like a form of magic armor but they were far more pleasing to the eye than the magic armor was he accustomed to seeing in his time.
He frowned to himself and decided that the new person was rather troublesome to have such incomplete and dangerous magic to be running around with and he had a feeling she was rather old, not anywhere close to his age, but old nonetheless and he decided that he was going to have to deal her carefully lest she destroy the world with a stupid mistake.
He was drawn out of his planning as she began to speak and he listened carefully.
Pluto took a good look around and was very confused with what she saw. She walked over and picked up the two dropped talismans and noticed that Uranus and Neptune were coming around. She knew how this battle should have gone and this wasn't it. After she handed the two talismans to Uranus and Neptune silently very glad that Usagi had figured out how to restore their pure heart crystals. She focused and made sure all of her emotions were under control and spoke.
"Moon what happened here?"
"Eudial used her fire buster to pull the talismans out of Uranus and Neptune before I got here...."
Screw it! With all the mess present to the timeline and the amount of damage and problems present among the Senshi she couldn't hold it in and she let her anger flair out a bit in her reply.
"I know all of that! I mean where is Eudial? Events should not have happened this way. You were supposed to be fighting her still as I reclaimed the talismans and then revived Uranus and Neptune. Also, didn't I tell you to bring the others? I thought we had been over this before about you working alone?"
Pluto spoke all of it in increasing volume that made Moon nervous and feel like her mother was yelling at her. Pluto had befriended her and been trying to help her for a while now but at times Pluto could really make her feel like a little child getting scolded by a parent. Their relationship was a very complicated one at times.
"Well some strange guy appeared and he made Eudial disappear."
Pluto's mind froze for a second. She didn't want to hear that at all. Now she would be spending who knows how long at the Time Gates researching and tracking this new interloper and then she would have to figure out what kind of risk he might represent. Of course, there were the other issues she had to consider, like how in the hell could she have missed him in the first place. Someone who could just take out Eudial with ease should have stuck out like a sore thumb. She rubbed her temples trying to fight off the headache that was approaching like a massive freight train approaches a car stopped on the tracks. She relaxed as best she could since she really didn't want them to noticed the issues she had with this new information.
"Strange guy?", asked Pluto with an arched eyebrow. "Do tell me everything!"
Usagi noticed the flash of frustration move over Pluto even though she had turned her back to them for a moment but to Usagi it was as plain as day. She had always been very good at reading people and Pluto was no exception. She figured that the idiots behind her might not have noticed it but she sure did and she filed it away to talk with Pluto about later.
"Well she had just finished firing off a huge burst of fire towards me when he walked over and tapped her on her head with his staff and she just vanished. She looked rather surprised at it as well."
That response sure confused Pluto. For both Usagi and Eudial to miss him and for him to be able to so easily neutralize Eudial gave her much cause for concern. She was rather worried now but that didn't matter at the moment. She decided to double check her assumptions real quick and spoke again.
"And where did this guy come from?"
"No idea. He was just suddenly here."
Pluto ground her teeth in frustration and spoke in as calm a voice as she could for her next questions. However, she knew Usagi must have already noticed her growing panic and frustration. She tried her best to be a good friend to the girl as well as the teacher she desperately needed but it was times like this that the simple nature Usagi possessed at times would get to her.
"Alright. So, did he say he wanted anything, or offer a name? How about what he looked like? Those types of things would be a bit helpful."
"Yea, you moron", spoke Uranus.
Pluto looked at her and gave the girl a deadly look and she shut-up as quickly as she had spoken but Usagi was already rather pissed off at the girl's outburst. Pluto knew that those two had somehow managed to make the short list of people that Usagi actually felt hate towards. Normally the girl was incapable of actually hating anyone but if someone did a certain set of things then Usagi believed that they had crossed some forbidden line and actually began to hate them. Usagi didn't even hate Rei and her ex-boyfriend Mamoru even though they had horribly broke her heart with what they did. Pluto suspected that it was the willingness of Uranus and Neptune to hurt anyone they needed to accomplish their mission and such things were never allowed in Usagi's mind. Pluto herself thought somewhat the same way as Uranus and Neptune but her time with Usagi had begun to change her and she desperately hoped that she would never end up on that list as well.
"He said his name is Xellos and then he disappeared. I didn't pay much attention to what he looked like except for his purple hair but since those two asses seem to think they can do so much better at everything how about you have them figure it out. I'm out of here!"
Pluto watched as Moon took off running and knew she was probably starting to cry as she ran from the building and back towards her home which she would eventually reach after blowing off some steam in her usual ways. She wondered how in the heck she was going to fix the giant mess the Senshi were in but right now she had to focus on this newest problem. She then turned her eyes back on Uranus and barely contained her anger at the pair of idiots sitting there.
"You know you both should be quite a bit nicer to her. If she hadn't bothered to show up when I asked her too both of you would be dead right now. I'm starting to think dropping both of you off in some separate timeline where horrible monsters would chase you night and day and where you wouldn't have the use of your powers. Perhaps something along those might be able to teach both of you idiots some much needed humility."
Pluto enjoyed seeing the surprise and shock wash across both their faces but it was short lived as Uranus' usually arrogant attitude quickly reappeared.
"Yea whatever. You need us and we are better than any of those other brats so your stuck with us."
Pluto offered them a thin smile as she faded from view and Xellos watched the other two pick themselves up and walk off together arm and arm. He found himself smiling and thinking one thing, 'This is going to be so much fun!'.
Notes: Okay here is the small start to a project I have been thinking about doing for a while. It will be long and will be a good counterbalance to work on when I not in the mood for my other stories. As you can guess the tone of this story is going to very different than canon and the Senshi are in a total mess right now. As Xellos would say if he was thinking like Tom Cruise, "A target rich environment!".
I had origionally put this under Sailor Moon but later decided it would appeal to the Ranma type crowd more so I have moved it over.
Update: Okay, I think I finally have a usuable starting structure to work with here. Sorry it usually takes me a little while to actually get a base framework all laid out correctly. I'm going to post the next chapter soon which will bring in Ranma into the mix and let people know what is going on with him.