I don't own Sailor Moon.
For two dear friends on mine.
Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon: Inheritance
Chapter 1 – Do You Dare?
Elaine 'Ellie' Channary had always thought of herself as a straight-laced kind of girl; bad habits kept to a minimum (drumming your fingers wasn't a crime, after all), grades a steady line of Bs with the occasional A (mostly in Literature), and, best of all, her parents were heavily into charity work (especially her mother).
That Ellie had chosen to follow in her mother's footsteps before she had graduated the 4th Grade made up for a lot of her faults (finger-drumming aside, she tended to have no concept of time and let's not get started on her Math skills).
So, it stood to reason, that the mocha-skinned High School Freshman would be a shining pillar of good etiquette and ethics among her peers, especially her unruly homeroom. Having grown up with a good chunk of the student body helped, what with Pinion Bay being the small town that it was, and Ellie never went anywhere without her besties.
"Ells, seriously, what were you on when you took this dare?"
So of course she hauled them with her to Deadman's Point after school to keep her company.
"I was trying to prove a point," Ellie explained, making her way down the bumpy incline, trying not to facefault into a rock.
"And that point was that you're crazy?"
"No, that this whole curse business is baloney."
Not too far behind her, Inaya Brenton rolled her eyes as she scooted carefully down the patchwork hybrid of hillside and giant rock garden, wondering for the eleventh time since this whole business started why she'd agreed to this bullshit.
"Why'd I agree to this bullshit?"
"You didn't have to come, Innie," now it was Ellie's turn to roll her eyes, setting one foot down safely onto solid ground, then the other, "I didn't twist your arm-"
"You guilt-tripped us both and you know it."
"Did not."
"Did too!"
"Did not!"
"Neri, tell her she guilted us!"
"Um..."
"No, no I did not," Ellie glared at Inaya as she hopped down onto solid ground, locking her coffee-colored eyes with her friend's dark ones, "I was perfectly fine with going alone."
"Then why did you spend ten minutes going into detail about how scary this whole death march was gonna be?"
"Aha, so that's what this is all about," grinning in triumph, Ellie jabbed an (exaggerated) accusing finger at Inaya, "you believe in this curse stuff too! I knew I didn't twist your arms-"
"No, no I don't!" Inaya felt all the blood rising to her face as her childhood friend stepped closer to her last nerve, "you totally guilted me into this."
"Uh...technically all she told us was that she was going to Deadman's Point and that she'd see us tomorrow," from behind Inaya, a shorter girl with dark brown hair finally made her way down to the bottom, being extra careful not to collide with her more hot-tempered friend.
Biting back a groan as Ellie's grin got even bigger, Inaya glared over her shoulder as Nerina 'Neri' Dillon scooted out from behind her, big blue eyes shying away from her friends'.
"Which sounds like a final farewell!"
"I...don't think she meant it like that-"
"UGH!" throwing her arms up in the air, Inaya marched away from both girls, cheeks piping hot, "I knew you'd take her side."
Neri's blue eyes went wide, "No, I-"
"Take it easy, Sweets," Ellie put a hand on the girl's shoulder, her grin morphing into a reassuring smile, "she's just being melodramatic. As usual."
Calming down a bit, Neri gave a meek nod and followed after Ellie when she turned and went to catch up with Inaya as she stomped her way through the tall grass, scaring off whatever snakes or creepy crawlies lay in wait with just her Aura of PO'ed alone.
Deadman's Point had been the centerpiece of many an urban legend in Pinion Bay since way before Ellie was even born, ranging from ghosts to zombies, one story even claiming it as an inland Bermuda Triangle. But the most popular and wide-spread rumor (and that's all this stuff was to Ellie) was of a deadly curse that made the whole chunk of land a deathtrap to those who stepped foot inside its perimeter.
Well, Ellie and her friends had stepped with that foot, granted Inaya complained the whole way and it took a good ten minutes to convince Neri that she didn't have to text up her Last Will and Testament (no, for real, she had a goodbye letter halfway written on her phone), but they were here, in one of the few areas of Pinion Bay that hadn't been marked for development.
That the adults gave this place a wide berth only served to reinforce the legend more, not that Ellie paid it any mind from the get-go.
Through the tall grass they marched, Neri sticking so close to Ellie, she could be piggybacking, and soon, their destination came into sight a good five minutes later, embedded in the side of the bay's cliffside. At which point Inaya came to a halt, knuckles going white as her fists clenched even harder.
"Here we are," she said, quietly, staring at the cave before her.
It wasn't a tall, gaping, ominous cave like the kind you'd see in horror movies: it looked ready to collapse at any moment, small and somewhat hunched over. The stone ridge looked to be tall enough to allow someone entry, but they'd have to slouch to do it. Historically, it was the remnants of a mine that turned out to be bone dry of any sort of mineral ore and was thus abandoned, but by urban folklore standards, it was the epicenter of the so-called curse.
"Jeez, could this thing look anymore biohazard?" Ellie muttered, coming to a stop beside Inaya, Neri hiding behind the two of them as they gazed at the scrunched up cavern mouth, "who needs a curse when you look ready to implode?"
"Does...that mean we're not going in?" Neri sounded neither hopeful or scared.
"Oh I'm definitely going in," Ellie shook her head with a sigh, fishing around in her jean's pocket, "stupid as it is, I gave my word." She looked at her two friends, sharply. "You two don't have to come in with me. If this thing collapses, I don't want either one of you to get crushed. You came with me this far, I'm not holding you to-"
"Ellie, shut up," Inaya frowned, but continued to stand beside her friend, "I'm not ditching you now, after your crazy ass dragged us this close to death."
"That's not funny-"
"Neri, if you-"
"I'm going in too," though her voice still sounded neutral, neither girl could deny that they heard a strange sort of eagerness in it, "don't worry about it, Ellie." She flashed her friend a simple smile.
For a good ten seconds, Ellie looked at them both – Inaya standing firm and resolute, Neri fidgeting from one foot to the other – and thought about what she was about to do. They weren't going to leave her, not now, even after her ongoing argument with Inaya the whole way over here. She'd been teasing, of course, but now that she got a good look at what they were supposed to enter, she wondered if she really had, somehow, guilt-tripped them into coming with her.
Me and my big mouth, she thought, cell phone now gripped tightly in one hand, staring at the crumbling cave with a sense of foreboding, of all the things to get riled up over...
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The cave didn't really look all that bad on the inside, at least compared to its exterior appearance, which Ellie found to be equal parts a relief and strange.
She still had to hunch over when she entered the cave, hitting record on her phone and praying that the light on her keychain was enough to light the way, but as cramped as it was (and already her neck was developing a kink in it), it didn't look like something that would fall on top of her head if she so much as sneezed. This was reassuring, true, but Ellie had been expecting to be walking into something dangerous and the expectation to see one thing only to witness something entirely different was in full effect seven minutes into the trek.
What exactly were you expecting? she asked herself with a scrunched up frown, Count Dracula's vacation spot? This is so stupid-
"At least we can breathe in here," she heard Neri mumble from behind her; Neri's voice was naturally soft, but Ellie had been hearing her voice since they were both nine and so had learned to key into its volume, "I don't smell any kind of underground gas."
Ellie hadn't thought of that. Super.
"Isn't that shit supposed to be odorless?" Inaya's voice bounced off the walls nicely, which meant that the cave was still a cave, despite its best impression of a bellybutton.
"Some gases are, yes, but we would have been feeling the effects a lot sooner if that were the case."
"How do you know that? We could still croak within the hour!"
"Hey, don't knock it," Ellie raised her voice enough for it to echo too, "a lucky break's a lucky break. Don't jinx it."
"Can we turn back, now?" seven minutes of walking in a straight, hunched line in a supposedly cursed cave hadn't done wonders for Inaya's patience.
"Carlson said to go straight to the back, so that's where I'm going," shining the light this way and that, checking for any signs of a potential cave-in, Ellie checked her phone's battery life. Having left it on all throughout the schoolday, it was at 50%. She hoped Neri's phone was better off. "If you want to turn back, though, I'm not twisting your-"
"Ellie, once again, shut up."
Rolling her eyes, Ellie turned back to the front of the cave, doing her best not to lead them all into a bottomless pit.
"You know what's strange?" Neri spoke up, sounding very curious, "this is supposed to be an old mine, but I don't see any leftover equipment."
That grabbed Ellie's attention back.
"Wasn't that over a hundred years ago or something?" Inaya paid as much attention to History as she did her mother's ranting, "it all probably rotted away."
"Not likely," despite still looking ahead in near darkness, Ellie could tell that Neri was shaking her head, "unless it's organic, things don't rot underground. The wooden parts, yeah, they'd probably rot. But there'd still be shovel-heads, pickax-heads, metal carts-"
"They probably took it all with them," Ellie grabbed for the other, logical option, "you said the town abandoned the mine, right?"
"That's what the old newspaper said," because of course Neri had to know more about where they were going, dare or no dare, curse or no curse, Neri was someone who needed all the facts before making a decision. Plus, she'd insisted that it would help Ellie make the right choice (and right after she made it, Inaya forbid the shorter girl from using Google again for a whole week). "But...Ellie...it wasn't in an organized manner."
"What do you mean organized manner? You abandon someplace, you pack up and leave-"
"No, they literally dropped what they were doing and left," Neri's response made the hair on the back of Ellie's neck stand on end, "when the miners got back to town, they were all white as sheets and refused to go back."
"Yeah, I read that part," Ellie then voiced aloud what she had told herself after reading the article, "but it also didn't say why they left. It could have been a bear or something; bears were still around these parts back in the day, right?"
Neri was silent for a moment, leaving plenty of time for Inaya to speak.
"'Back in the day'?"
"Oh hush. You know what I mean."
"Yes, brown bears would come here during their mating season," Neri finally replied, "but all bears, even the big grizzlies, often stay away from humans."
"Never stopped them before," Ellie flashed her keychain light up for another sweep...and froze.
"That's only if—oof!" Neri's nose poked Ellie right between the shoulder blades.
"Hey!" Inaya, meanwhile, felt the back of Neri's head bump into her chest, "why'd we stop?"
"Is...did we reach the end of the cave?" Neri's voice was muffled due to the close proximity of Ellie's blouse.
The keychain light stayed trained on the wall in front of them, revealing a surface way too smooth to be natural. Neri had to look over Ellie's shoulder, but there it was, and engraved upon it was a circle of symbols, all evenly spaced from one another (at least five inches worth), taking up a majority of the wall. At the very center of this circle, something very bright glinted beautifully in the light of Ellie's mini-light...
"Holy..." Inaya's voice tapered off into a small grasp before she could complete her thought, eyes locked on the sight.
No sound came from Neri while Ellie traced the entirety of the circle before going back to the glint in the center. As it was, she – technically all three of them – were standing a mere foot and a half away from the polished wall and they still found it difficult to process what they were seeing.
"This is..." Neri tried to find her voice, which had gone softer than its usual pitch, "...those-"
"The fuck?" Inaya picked her jaw up off the floor, "what the hell were those miner-people doing down here? What the fuck is all that gibberish?"
"But...but that's not gibberish! That's-"
"It's a circle of lumpy circles and lines, Ner. It's gibberish."
"No!"
"Unless...oh shit. This is all that witchcraft stuff they used to go on about way back when, wasn't it?"
"'Way back'...what?"
"Crap!" Inaya kicked at the floor, dislodging a rock that nearly collided with the wall, "then there is a curse! Crap crap crap crap, we just walked up to the remains of some huge, old-fashioned black magic ritual!"
Neri opened her mouth to object-
"What's that thing in the middle?"
Both girls turned back to Ellie, who hadn't moved her light away from the center of the circle; she was leaning forwards a little and squinting, trying to make sense of what she was looking at.
"It's so...bright."
"It...it could be some kind of quartz crystal," Neri offered, distracted from Inaya for a moment, "they're common in cave systems-"
"It's the only thing that's bright in this entire place, though" indeed, her light had fallen on no other shiny stone. That's what it had to be: a shiny, clear stone...
"And why is it in the middle of all those voodoo symbols?" Inaya tried very hard to keep her voice from cracking, even as a chill went down her spine at the many thoughts running through her head of what might have happened in this cave right then and there, "that's...that's not some freaky occult thing, is it?"
"Those are not voodoo symbols!" Neri turned back to Inaya, catching a glint of her eyes in the reflected mini-light glare, "they're-"
"Ellie?" Inaya's eyes suddenly went dinner plate round, which made Neri look back at their fearless leader, "Ellie, what the hell are you doing?"
As the other two had argued, Ellie had never looked away from the clear stone embedded in the wall, curiosity growing stronger the more she stared at it. A perfectly circular, clear stone that shined in the light nestled dead in the center of a circle of symbols? No way in hell was that a natural phenomenon.
It feels...alive...almost, she didn't say this aloud or Inaya would really flip her shit, but it only made Ellie want to know more about the sight before her.
She hadn't realized that she'd taken a step forward, then another, grabbing her friend's attention right as she let go of her keychain light, letting it dangle from her phone so that she could reach out to the clear stone with her now free hand. Even in the dark, it seemed to shine; how the hell had she not seen it earlier?
"Ellie-"
Mocha fingertips brushed against the stone and then the entire cave seemed to explode with light.
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Be sure to leave a review if you liked what you read. Don't be afraid to fave, either. This is gonna be quite a ride "smirks"