Episode One, Part Two
Against The Negaverse!
by Jared Ornstead
aka Skysaber
Disclaimer: This is all SIs were ever derided for, but a lot more fun besides.
OoOoO
The sky split with interlocking thunderbolts and out stepped a lithe and strong young man wearing full set of armor cast out of seamless sheets of flawless pearl and polished gemstone scales, bearing a number of weapons (including a matched pair of katana forged at near-legendary levels of skill) and whose flame-like hair danced as a living part of his body.
The young man swept the streets with piercing, sapphire eyes and a sly smirk. While this was no longer the shop, neither was it his destination. "Well, I didn't expect to see *this*. Where am I anyway?"
He lifted a hand and a cantrip appeared, pointing due north. "Hmm, not very helpful. Well, information never was my specialty. That doesn't mean that I can't do it, merely that it will take more time. For now, I'll ask someone. It's not as if..."
His reverie was broken off by a feminine scream of pain. Without even having consciously realized it, he was leaping off of the ground and bounding in that direction like... well... like nothing else. One of the tricks of the kind of monk he'd become was to increase his running speed until it was flat out unreal.
He approached the scene of destruction and saw it was worse than he'd feared. Sailor Venus, okay he'd seen the series, only she was looking more like she did in the comic books as Sailor V, and fighting her were four of the nastiest youmas he'd ever seen. They were no less than four times the size of any he'd seen in the series and (now that he could actually visually see magic) theirs were approximately three times the power levels of Sailor V... each! In short she was outgunned twelve to one and at those odds had probably been running to get away from them instead of arriving to stop them.
He didn't pause. Without even drawing his weapons he rushed in, plowing his foot into one of their faces in an augmented strike he'd used to take down ogres at first level, and that had gotten substantially more powerful since then.
The thing didn't go down, which was, in his opinion, its mistake. He plowed a half dozen strikes into it in the blink of an eye, spinning and landing upon it a deadly series of blows that had once taken down a summoned arch-devil, *after* he'd body-slammed it back through the gate that had summoned it. The youma turned into a vaporous jello. Two of the others noticed him and began to burn red with energized defense fields, getting ready their attacks. The other picked up Sailor V in its tentacles and opened its maw to eat her, standing behind the cover of its fellows.
~That,~ Jared decided, ~must be the unlucky one.~
Jared performed a flying leap over the front row duo and produced his twin katanas, energizing them with spells above and beyond their original enchantments, and he became a blurring whirlwind of energy.
The monster holding Sailor V collapsed into bloody shards, though he'd had to dedicate a startling number of attacks to do it. The two others he attacked from behind while they were still adjusting to his leap. They had their defenses rocked and deep gouges rent into their hides when those shattered and quickly took to wing to avoid the alarming human in pearl armor.
One was brought down by a surprisingly powerful fireball. The other sped away and managed to gate itself back to the stronghold of its mistress before the leaping human could catch it.
Jared returned to be there for Sailor Venus after she'd fallen, slumped, to the pavement. Saving her from that fall would have been dramatic, but he'd been killing things at the time. So instead he strode toward her, stepping through the muck that had been her captors, the slime unable to even cling to his boots (a cheap cleanliness enchantment, but worth every second of not having to polish that stuff off your armor).
"Sailor V, much as I like standing around, making pretty speeches, then vanishing off in mystery, something tells me you're in rather a bit more need of help than that. First question I must ask, where are the other Scouts, and are they in as much trouble as you?"
The beautiful Sailor could only blink and stare, which was getting him nowhere. Touching her on the forehead and murmuring a spell or two, one to remove the goop from her, the other for other purposes, he took her compassionately by both hands, meeting her eyes to explain.
"Every second we remain here we are in danger. I'm not so much afraid of something attacking us, but if something were to listen to what we had to say to each other that could be disastrous. I am going to take us someplace safe. Hold tight."
The pair vanished and reappeared deep under the surface of a freshwater lake. Instantly he was soothing her before she even thought to panic. "Don't be afraid. I cast a spell upon you that allows you to breathe water. You are perfectly safe. I didn't say where we were going for fear of it being overheard, and figured underwater would be safest as I never saw either you or your enemies operating there."
Sailor V finally found some voice. "You cast a spell on me? But what about YOU!"
He chuckled, bubbles rising as he did so. "Sorry. Amphibious, I don't need the spell to breathe water. I guess now you know one of my advantages." He looked at her in concern. "Now could you tell me what those were? They were an awful lot more powerful than I remember Beryl's youma."
Actually, there were many things he wanted to know. That just seemed a good place to start, and he knew better than to overload her with questions.
Sailor V blinked for a bit, astonished and still amazed. Then, to his surprise, the plucky and ever-upbeat Sailor broke down and began to cry. She sobbed. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. It's just been so HARD!"
It seemed wrong to hold her when he hardly even knew her, on the other hand it seemed cruel and unhelpful to refuse her any kind of comfort or solace. This seemed the stage for proffering her a handkerchief, but being underwater made that ludicrous. So Jared instead laid a single hand upon her shoulder, giving comfort to some degree in its own right, but also a way of asking nonverbally for her permission for doing more.
Such permission was not only granted but nonverbally welcomed, so he put his far hand on her opposite shoulder while transferring the first to stroking her hair. It was the 'I am not close enough to you to actually hug you' sort of hug that proffered support without presuming any kind of relationship. After five minutes it became clear that it was insufficient, she wanted and needed more nurturing than that. And so he gave in and simply hugged her in earnest, cradling her to him and offering soothing words of comfort, nurturing as much as he could with words and gestures, stroking her face and hair as he felt appropriate.
Intuitively, he divined that she'd been all alone in fighting this evil, whatever it was, and it had simply been too much for her. He inhaled deeply before murmuring in to her hair. "It's okay. I'm here. You won't be alone anymore. I won't let anything harm you. You're safe."
It was way too forward for his tastes, and might easily be misinterpreted. But nothing else sprang to mind and she seemed to receive it well, calming slightly though she continued to cling to him and sob for some time.
Feeling a tad guilty for doing so, he also used the opportunity to try and read her mind with an innate ability, hoping to shortcut everything by getting to the cause of this upset and maybe learn what had been going on. But, to his actual relief, her mind was shielded and unreadable.
"Feeling better?" He asked after somewhat more than half an hour, when her sobs had finally stopped. He'd had to renew the spell letting her breathe down here, but that was of no consequence. His group had played with some variations on the spellcasting rules, opting to have them powered by an internal store of energy instead of forgotten in the instant of casting. It made for reduced bookkeeping and the magic system seem less ridiculously awkward.
"Yes, thank you." She still clung to him, though less tightly. He knew neither she nor he meant anything more than simple comfort given and received by the contact. Or at least that was what he hoped they meant.
Jared took a deep breath, exhaling a small line of bubbles. "Well, why don't you tell me about it? You have my word that I'll help you as much as I feel able. Now, can you talk about it?" He asked gently.
Sailor V nodded a few times, still pulling herself together. Then she seemed to see her gloves for the first time in almost an hour. "Oh! I'm sorry, I've got to leave! I shouldn't..."
He grasped her by the hand and looked past her mask and into her eyes. "If you are worried about my learning your identity, don't be. I know your name is Mina Lovejoy. And I know your birth date is October 22 1978, that you are 5' 0", your blood type is B, your favorite gemstone is topaz and that your hobbies include shopping, acting, and chasing idol singers. In return I'll tell you my name is Jared Sanzennin, err Saotome, actually I can't remember what my name is right now. I keep getting confused between Jared and Ashida. I'll get back to you on that. But my blood type is O+, I am 5' 11", my birth date is irrelevant, as I can be any age I need to be, and I have too many favorite gemstones to name. My hobbies include reading, martial arts, singing in the shower, and stomping bad guys."
He saw her curious look and headed off her question. "I am a little confused as to my name right now because I've just... One part of me was a perfectly ordinary, by some standards, college student. And the rest is the hero you see before you. Or at least what passes for a hero, I'm just now realizing that powerful by one standard is still pretty limp by another."
That was, if his mental comparison of their different RPG rules was correct. He'd fought by her rules before, as a Knight in an obviously different Sailor Moon universe. And he was beginning to miss the flexibility having her style of powers offered. The way he was, while powerful, had sharply defined limits.
Suddenly he recalled that Ashida had been the given name of the character he'd now become. Okay, that meant his own real given name was Jared.
Nice to know these things. So what was his own last name again?
Sailor V, trembling, shook her head, having stopped to absorb his rant. "No, it's not that. It's Jedite. He can... He can tell when I'm in this form. He'll come after me... I'll..."
Once again Jared had to calm her to forestall panic. "Don't worry about it. I can't be detected by magical scrying, that much I know. That means Jedite and it means his master, Queen Beryl. I also took the liberty of placing us under a shell of protection as we arrived. Those things I *can* do, I do very well, and what I did was to place this lake into a... well, it'd take awhile to explain it, but I made sure no one could find us here. Not by trying to trace us, not by looking for us with magic or technology, not unless they were here with us, and I've got a pretty good suite of abilities for detecting anyone who was nearby and trying to hide."
Seeing her doubt, he continued. "Look, if anything nasty shows up, I'll kill it. Not going to be a problem. You're safe for awhile."
Sailor V finally seemed to calm down some.
"Pretty rough, huh?" The flame-haired youth offered in sympathy.
Sailor V laughed. "You have no idea." She looked around, finally appreciating the beauty of the place they were in.
Jared blinked and tried to hide a scowl. Emotionally distraught females; either take the time to put their feelings back together, or just accept that you'll never get any sort of useful information out of them. It's not that he minded the duty, it's just there were bad guys to kill, and he was beginning to feel this driving urge to go kill them. It had always seemed a little thing on the character sheet 'feels compelled to fight evil when opportunity presents', but in actual life he discovered that knowing evil things were out there made him want to go kill them. Desperately. Fortunately, patience was a virtue and therefore its opposite was an evil trait and so he felt no urge to shake this Sailor by her shoulders demanding his targeting information.
What he *did* feel was the wish that he could just create a highly-accurate map of Japan and just have her point to where the bad guys were. Unfortunately, as he had already surmised, his style of magic was not big on flexibility. In the game in which it was created his style could do most anything that needed doing, but outside of those parameters it could not adapt. He could hold a specific number of spells in memory, and each one performed as advertised, no on the fly modification. He felt sure making such a map appear was within his level of power, well within it. Jared even had some idea of how it might be done. But, lacking a specific spell to make it happen, he was helpless as far as actually doing it. He couldn't even do all the things he knew how to, as he could only hold so many spells in active memory ready to use.
One of the main reasons he'd trained in two styles of magic. Being both a druid from that game system and a mage held more options open. The same limits were still there, just a little less restricted. He didn't advertise the druid part because it encouraged enemies to underestimate him.
He liked being underestimated.
Sailor V apparently appreciated the scenery quite well. She pirouetted to face him seeming almost cheerful. "You were very helpful back there."
He accepted the thanks, hoping they were getting somewhere, though at this rate it would be swifter to prowl the streets looking for trouble than to rely on her help. But that would leave her undefended and you do not leave vulnerable things lying about if the forces of good were to suffer by them being destroyed.
In the back of his mind he was playing with the hit point equation. Those youma had taken a dozen times the damage he'd thought they'd be capable of. In D&D he'd been Stud-Boy, able to kick anything that moved and do it in a round or less.
Here the proportions didn't work that way. Either he was comparatively less powerful, or they were more so. He'd have to judge when he had more information to feed into his comparisons.
Sailor V flushed somewhat, her eyes dropping as she played in the near free fall of their liquid environment. "And so I want to say thanks. And I was going to ask, can I... I mean, we could... err... I mean, that is..." She blushed furiously. "Would you like to see me without my costume? In normal clothes, that is? You already know so much about me, you probably already know anyway, but... What do you look like when you're not dressed up like that?"
The great question burning behind her eyes was: "Are you cute?"
Actually, insofar as he knew, this *was* his natural form from now on. But then he recalled his limited and yet still extremely useful shapeshifting powers. It was a good thing, too, as he could hardly attempt to live anything like a normal life looking as he did.
Jared brought both hands before him and interlocked them, bending his head over them in thought. He tried to recall what he'd looked like before this mess, and he *thought* he got it, but was fairly certain some deep part of his mind had done some editing to get his former self's image updated with his new statistics, like the increased strength, dexterity and so on, because he *really* didn't think his former self could out super-model Fabio.
Just a little line on a character sheet: Charisma/Attractiveness of 22. It didn't mean much until it was pointed out that the normal human maximum was 18, without magic or special circumstances like the intervention of something powerful, such as he'd had.
Weird how trivial stuff in the game made so much difference outside it. He made the change.
He got the fairly certain impression, from the stars in Sailor V's eyes and her ever-rising blush, that he should've taken the time to plain his image down. But at least he'd gotten his armor and things to vanish back into magical storage.
Sailor V floated absolutely speechless for several moments.
"I'd better get you home." He tried to head off disaster.
"?"
He blinked once. "What?"
She grew even more shy. "I was wondering if you wanted to go out. I know this great movie place..."
He was having difficulty believing that a thirteen year old was asking him. Yech! Then again, Sailor Moon had Darien, and that seemed pretty extreme. A line from the Sailor Moon RPG rules returned to his memory. 'Sailor Scouts are typically 14-20 years old while Knights usually range from 17-25 years of age.' And that sort of understated the actual situation represented by the series.
This sort of match seemed endemic of the genre.
Then again, they were all going to live thousands of years. A difference of a decade here or there was meaningless in all that. And he knew, having made the character he now was, that he was good for that long quite easily.
He exhaled a line of bubbles, attempting to put together a good negative reply.
Sailor V simply forged ahead. "Or we could just hang out together. I haven't really had a good person to hang out with since I left England."
Okay, she got points for that. He knew what being lonely was, and if he was hanging out with her, he'd also be protecting her. Jared nodded. "Okay, but I've got to do something." He concentrated a bit harder and reduced his age to merely a year or two above hers, then took her startled hand and explained.
"Sailor V, when I got a powerup, I got a POWERUP! I'm fairly sure that I'm not entirely human anymore. In fact I'm certain of it, since something happened to change the way I was to the person I've become, and that person has always been an elf. But apart from that, one of my powers now is to alter my appearance. I can look as human as anybody, and so I can look like I did before I got changed. But as a side benefit I don't *have* to look exactly as I did. And if I am more your age people won't hassle us for being friends."
Her features changed to those of wonder.
"So could you tell me why those youma were attacking you?" Jared slipped in the question.
She finally answered him with some information he could use. "Oh, Jedite had opened his gate, and I wanted to get at least a look to see if there was anything I could do about it. But he'd set a trap. Those youma are ones that he'd been using to track and hunt me for weeks now. Usually I escape, but this time there were *four* of them and I couldn't get away! They would have had me if you hadn't showed up."
Her starry expression spoke volumes of gratitude.
But Jared was worried. "You say Jedite has opened his gate? The one he was going to create to facilitate travel between here and the Negaverse?"
"Was THAT what that was for?" Sailor V began to look slightly scared.
He nodded. "That gate makes the cost for them sending out youma a fraction of what it was, and they could send more generals, too. They've got more than Jedite." The redhead looked her in the pupils and addressed her seriously. "Where did they build it?"
"Tokyo Harbor." It was clear in her reply that she'd thought everybody knew.
There was a glint in his eye. "Somebody is REALLY going to hate me in the morning."
OoOoO
It was clear why Sailor V had thought that everybody knew about the gate's location. Standing in Tokyo Harbor was an immense structure of black material, like a grotesque, demonic, water lily perched on the bay.
It was ugly, but that was to be expected of the Negaverse.
Jared, presently in what he was beginning to think of as 'hero mode', and Sailor V were standing in a cloud overhead watching as the evil fortress crawled with dark minions.
Sailor V tamped the cloud underfoot uncertainly, staying close by his side.
"Well," Jared surmised, looking at the fortress, "that had to require alot of energy from their side. If the gate is inside it, and I believe you, the power flow indicates that it is, then that will cost them doubly. Plus, I intend to be taking out rather alot of servitors with it. So, with any luck, they'll lose months of work in this attack."
"What are you going to do?" To Sailor V this seemed an obvious question.
He answered with a grin. "Mina, within city streets I am fairly limited. I can do martial arts and strike things with that, but to really upset the enemy requires spells, and being honest most of mine are of the 'level the countryside' variety. It's just pure luck that these guys chose to locate their base in a bay. Property values along the coast will drop a bit, but I can hit this thing hard."
She blinked at him. Assault on a Negaverse base was something she'd not considered doing just as the average cocktail waitress living on tips does not go and casually buy the Bank of Tokyo.
"No." He answered her unspoken question. "I could *not* take them all on in a straight up fight. The whole idea of this kind of assault is to give them enough *other* things to deal with that they can only focus a minuscule amount of power on me. That way I can, hopefully, continue to inflict mayhem and at some point they lose their ability to cope with it and start to crumble." He rubbed his chin. "Actually, that's exactly what they're doing to Japan, come to think of it, so this is a just revenge." He looked at his companion. "But I'd first better get you somewhere safe."
Sailor V shook her golden-haired head. "Sorry, but I've been alone so long... you win or fail at this, you're doing it with me."
Jared actually felt touched by that kind of loyalty. He rarely felt anything for romance, but displays of courage could bring him to tears the same way girls cried at mushiness. He made an effort not to get choked up.
Mina was 'good people' in his book from now on.
He knelt down on the cloud they were riding and opened his bag, rummaging through to bring out potion flasks of nearly a dozen varieties. He waved her down beside him, proffering the first bottle.
"Please drop your Sailor form for this, I don't want it interacting with that magic and taking effect only when you are transformed." He was openly trying to ignore the fact that her offer really *had* gotten him to tear up. He hoped that he could hide it.
Sailor V looked at him a long second, and then de-transformed to her non-costumed state. Accepting the now opened bottle, she examined it critically. "What is it?"
"I once knocked over a subterrainian city full of non-human alchemists who kept human slaves. I took offense at how badly they treated them and killed large numbers of the alchemists involved. They ran away too fast for me to get them all. But the loot I got out of sacking that city was rich beyond price. This is one of the best there was. It is a potion of immunity, and that particular one covers poison. Drink it, and you will never again be poisoned by anything, ever. You can bathe cuts in scorpion venom or drink bleach if you care to. The first will sting and the second won't taste good, but they won't hurt you either."
He watched her startled look, but she drank it. He was all ready to hand her another. "This one covers disease."
Again, startlement, but she drank it.
He was proffering a third. "Have you ever wanted to be Supergirl? This one will make you immune to weapons unless they are enchanted. I admit that most of what they *would* do to us would still hurt you just fine, but there's always hope that it would stop something. For instance, the bullets from misguided or possessed police will just bounce off of your pretty chest." His grin relaxed somewhat. "You'll just have to avoid nurses or explain why their needles won't puncture your arm."
Mina gave a giggle and downed the bottle, hiccuping a little after she was done.
He was already retrieving the fourth. "Normally, drinking this many potions in so short a time would be a problem, but these are a special case. They change you in a 'twinkling of an eye' as I believe it was put, afterwards they're not even there anymore. They've worked their magic and are done, gone, though the effects are permanent. If it were not so I couldn't feed you this many in so short a time in safety."
He found the bottle and lifted it. Each of these were worth a king's ransom, in literal truth at times. Any one of these bottles he was or had given her could have been sold for an amount that could retire Nabiki to live in luxury. For anyone less greedy you could feed a city on the sale price of any one of them.
There weren't any cities in need of feeding that he was aware of. He proffered Mina the fourth potion. "This one is the one that I hope will do the most good. What it covers is 'Death Magic', and in the school of spells I was trained in that meant a huge array of magic that would cause you to die without their first going through the formality of burning, blasting, freezing or otherwise rendering your body incapable of sustaining life. It is my hope that since the attacks they frequently use are of negative life energy, that this would at least blunt them. At worst it would do nothing, at best they'd have to resort to fire or electricity to harm you."
He watched as she drank that potion, thinking furiously in the time that allowed. What he'd done was to cut down the enemy options in the dirty tricks department. Well, and Mina would now have a clean bill of health into perpetuity. But as far as aiding her in a stand up fight against a Negaverse creature that merely wanted to shred her into pieces, he hadn't helped her a bit. If she got cocky from it he might even have hurt her.
He looked at the potions that were left, finally selecting one and returning the rest to his bag. Popping out the stopper, he poured some of the liquid into his hand and began to rub it on his arm. Answering Mina's look, he stated. "We don't drink this one. It is to be applied externally. Just don't spill any on the outside of the bottle or we'll never be able to pick it up again. Actually, you might want to be in costume to do this, your transformation might remove the oil."
The teenage girl peered at the label and tried to read the wiggly script. Looking at him, she made her transformation and began to apply the oil without a word. After she'd done both of her legs she sited. "This stuff is pretty slick."
Jared moved from doing his chest to his neck and head. "That's pretty much it. It's called Oil of Slipperiness. While it's in effect you are slicker than a greased eel and ten times harder to grab. I've noticed they like to use the tactic of holding you in place while they zap you. This makes that impossible for a short time."
Sailor V continued to apply the oil without any more comment.
He gazed at her for a long moment, then made a choice and removed the open front, split-sided robe he wore over his armor, taking off his cape as well and handing both to her. She took them, but was clearly puzzled.
"Just put them on." He asked of her.
She complied and how much she was trusting him was really getting to him. He wasn't used to being trusted, and to have so much lavished on him was starting to affect his emotions, making him want badly to deserve it. As she didn't have any way of knowing if he was for real or a clever fake.
The clothes were a little baggy around her, and the robe completely covered her Sailor costume. But her trusting face over his too large clothes made her look raffish and endearing, a loyal ragamuffin sort of look.
He almost choked up.
"Just... they will protect you. My robe is soft as a breeze to wear and stronger than a castle wall to attacks. Pull the cloak around you and you will become invisible. I doubt they'll be expecting that, so it'll give you a surprise attack on at least one of them."
Again she accepted that on faith.
His throat felt tight. This was uncomfortable! If she kept trusting him like that he'd fall in love with her! He knew it! And he'd been burned too many times before to want to fall in love with anyone. It hurt too much!
Swallowing, he handed her two last things, a bottle and a scepter. "Here, the bottle is of a solvent. I've seen the Negaverse use alot of sticky goo to help pin you down while they shoot at you. This will dissolve anything they try to use, but there's only one use, so be careful with it. The scepter... it heals things. If you get hit bad this will put you back together, pretty much whatever they do to you. Worst case it would take a few days."
Trying not to look at her, unable to bear the amount of cheerful support he saw there, he went about busying himself with his spells. His own setup took well over a half an hour, which his companion bore patiently.
Finally he was finished. His defenses were in place, and his assault spells were already gathering. He spoke over his shoulder to Sailor V. "I'm dropping the spell that hides us. There's no way they could fail to notice us with the amount of magic I'm brewing. The spell could continue to disguise us for several minutes, but they *would* see through it. It would be better for us to keep the fact that we *can* hide like that a secret, so we can use it another day."
With that he turned back to his work, saying. "Let's get this started."
He brought his hands down before him and cupped them, chanting while gradually bringing the swirling globe of sapphire blue energy that formed between them high so that it faced the sky, little streamers ran off and began to touch the distant horizon, forming clouds above them almost immediately.
"Zephyr's rage and tempest gale,
Come ye now beyond the veil."
Clouds began piling up and the sigils drawn into the passenger surface of their cloud began to glow with a foxfire radiance, indicating detection spells finding them.
"I call the elements to cleanse this site,
Heaven's guardians, lend your might."
Flickers of lightning began to show within the darkening clouds and a cold wind whipped through the area, flicking Mina's blonde hair about where it had escaped from the cloak.
"Purge this darkness from the land,
Here is where I'll make my stand.
Spirits of ice and wind and storm,
I name you now, and give you form."
The wind had gone from strong to typhoon force, and Mina's eyes widened at the shapes illumined within the clouds. "Here be dragons," she breathed.
His chanting went on at a rising pitch of culminating effort as the globe within his hands began to pulse with lightning strokes held within it. Above them, storm clouds brewed at an astonishing rate, churning into a full fledged typhoon within moments.
"Enemies of the darkest night,
Purge them now with eldritch might!
Clouds to swirl, and lightning crack,
Tis time to pay the darkness back!"
The sapphire globe of light within his hands had grown exponentially, until it looked as though he held a smaller copy of the world over his head. One raging with hurricanes. He inhaled deeply to shout in his loudest voice.
"SIEGE STORM!"
He released the globe, which shot upward like a bolt to strike the clouds above them. Instantly, the wind cracked to a new velocity and rain seethed down with great force. Lightning crackled and the terrible typhoon began as if by a flipped switch.
The cloud they were standing on dropped low, to just barely over the sea level, and beyond the reach of wind-capped waves. The fury of the storm somehow missed the little cloud, rain falling around it while even the wind gusting over it seemed almost mild when compared to the vast destructive force raging beyond its boundaries. Thus it was that Mina's eyes were clear enough to make out several dark shapes lifting off from the besieged Negaverse fortress before those same shapes were flattened by the wind and swallowed by the churning waves.
Jared flipped fiery hair out of his eyes in a confident gesture. Bringing one hand to about shoulder height, he began to twirl one finger about as if stirring the air above him.
"Now let the wind begin to curl,
And the storm begin to swirl.
Let it curl and it swirl and it twirl and it whirl,
With the fury of the sky!"
The youth raised the hand, now curling and twisting from elbow to fingertip like the most accomplished pantomime imitating a twister.
"Whirlwind!"
Jared brought his hand low and a funnel of wind reached down from the clouds, and a tornado *added* to the typhoon both struck the Negaverse fort. Dozens of dark servitors, still small with distance, began to be flung about like chaff. The tornado was reaching into crevices sheltered from the fury of the typhoon, flinging those it found in them to be battered about by the greater mass of winds and pulped against the keep's own walls.
The young mage merely raised his gaze to the clouds above and said.
"Come, Lightning."
An extremely thick shaft of electric violence ripped down from heavens above and shattered one of the keep's walls. The wind immediately picked up the pieces and flung them about, striking and breaking other parts of the fortress and servants not yet destroyed by the wind itself, while the hole created by the first blast of lightning was being torn steadily wider by the devouring storm.
There came a powerful pulse of opposing magic and his storm began to fade almost immediately. Jared grit his teeth and extended his awareness. The net of forces that was his Siege Storm spell was actually a delicate thing, not a match for the planes of shearing force being sent against it. Minimizing the damage and continuing on, the mage in question was essentially performing an aikido move, allowing the force of the blow to pass undisturbed through his weave and knitting it back together in the wake. It would have been no problem with one or two of the attacks, but there had been over a dozen of the shears sent through.
When the wind began to die another wave of flying youmas lifted off to come for them, well over a dozen strong of horrible, skeletal things too thin to be disturbed by the flagging winds.
Jared reestablished his spell before it could die, adding flakes of ice and hail to the storm. The blizzard coated the flying skeletal things and added mass, catching the winds and adding weight while freezing joints. They were destroyed in moments. His hold over this was precarious, they'd mustered STRONG resistance, far stronger than he'd expected. But while he held control, the ice chips burrowed into the fortress' walls and burned into it like a sandstorm.
A surge of opposing magic overcame his hold directly and he lost the storm, the wind beginning to fade away in seconds. But to his enemy's chagrin, the lightning and tornado were separate spells over which the redhead still retained full control. A stroke of electric mayhem brought down an ugly tower in the center of their demense, while he focused the tornado's attentions to continue on in the wake of the storm's demise.
Still more flying creatures took to wing to face him. Grimly, the mage split his attention and set his shoulders, chanting.
"Allies of Air, heed my call!
Lock them now within zephyr's wall.
Block our enemies at their gate,
Helpless made by their own hate!"
He brought up a fist to point with. "Wind Wall!"
A white globe of swirling forces formed over the fortress, spattering the flight of tiny youmas as they tried to cross through it.
He got one more bolt of lightning in before they put a stop to that, but he grimly hung on to his tornado, recasting it the moment they wrested control of one, so at one time there were three of them running rampant over their structure before they realized this particular spell wasn't something the controller could just cease, so they redirected the wind funnels over the water where at the least the cyclones were no longer tearing apart their own fortress.
As they wrestled with him through spells for control of his remaining tornado he could feel a surge of triumph.
They'd failed to notice the real attack.
A wall of water a mile wide and over two hundred feet tall crested and crashed down onto the Negaverse fortress going in excess of a hundred miles an hour. Rubble splashed high as the wave came down, utterly disintegrating their fort with its massive kinetic attack.
It was really hard pulling any kind of fancy tricks against things like that.
Jared then terminated that spell before the beach could be hit. There'd still be a wave, but it would no longer be a directed force of destruction and most of it would go in other ways. There'd be minor damage at best.
That was when a bubble of force emerged from the wave waters and rose to hover above the sea, a bubble containing the vital core of their fort within it. A pair of winged draconic youma issued forth and began to fly in his direction, their large white bodies leaving trails of ice crystals glittering in the air behind them.
"Here's where things get ugly." The youth prophesied aside to his companion. He'd either defeat these things quickly to continue the real assault, or he would not and they'd have to retreat without doing the damaged enemy in.
He pointed at one and suddenly its wings clawed ineffectually at the air, unable to find purchase. Lacking lift, it plunged into the sea, freezing acres of it and becoming trapped within the ice. The other youma landed on the berg rather than suffer the same fate, and sent a cone of freezing particles in their direction. The cone parted, leaving a sphere of space untouched around the cloud they stood upon. Jared began to reply in kind with fireballs.
The battle between him and the ice dragons became complicated by the arrival of a spell casting youma in support of them. She broke the first dragon free of the ice it had been trapped in, and while they kept him busy she would then probe and remove with crackling sheets of darkness the defenses that their attacks revealed.
Deciding he was not winning that war, Jared leapt down onto the iceberg and went toe to toe with the ice dragons, lighting up with an aura of flame and laying into them with physical punches and blows that staggered them.
He put down one while the other reeled from a broken neck, then he battled the spellcasting youma, getting his defenses tested by it and by the other, minor youma that began to appear. The mage was just putting down the third assault and killing the spellcaster when the last ice dragon, recovering from its broken neck as no living thing could, reared behind him and encased him in a prism of ice, held totally immobile within it.
"Venus Power: Meteor Beam Shower!"
Sailor V dropped invisibility and held out a pointed finger, from which emerged her trademark beam of light, only this light split into a dozen or more separate beams which diverged and then slammed in from every angle on the target. The weakened ice dragon perished.
Looking every which way, nervous of the minor youma still flitting about in utter chaos, but in ever greater numbers as survivors emerged from the wreckage of their fort, she uncorked the solvent and poured it over the icy prism. It melted, but the mage in pearl armor slumped listless down to the surface of the ice flow.
A trio of vulturelike youma appeared, hunting over the iceberg as the last known source of conflict. Fearing to use the scepter for its promised delay, Sailor V struggled to lift the unconscious mage, pushing and skating him ineffectively across the ice. In the end she unwrapped one of the nets from his belt, catching him in it despite his slippery effect, then lifted and shouldered the mage's pale form and scampered off the ice and back onto the cloud still lying low.
"Uh, take us home. Okay?" She asked uncertainly, unwrapping the mage.
The little cloud sped off.
OoOoO
"Artemis!" Mina's voice whispered. "Artemis!" She hissed a little louder.
The cat came awake on her bed. "Huh? Mina! I'm so glad you're well. You'd been gone for so long that I'd..."
"Will you quit yakking?" She whispered from beyond her just barely open window. "Get out here and help me, will ya?"
The white cat hopped up onto the window sill. "What's the matter, Mina? Does this have something to do with the battle I sensed earlier? What are you doing outside your window anyway? This isn't the ground floor." Then he caught sight of what Mina was standing on. "Hold on a minute! Where'd this come from? And who is he?"
"This guy saved my life earlier." Mina hauled on his pearl clad arm, noting the oil had evaporated and trying to maneuver him in through her window. "Hey, do ya got an idea on how we can get him out of his costume? My folks'll freak if they see him all dressed up like this."
Artemis hopped out onto the odd behaving cloud. "I don't recognize him."
"Will you quit it with the suspicion already! I told you, he's already saved my life and he spent close to an hour blowing apart Jedite's fortress. I DON'T think he's a friend of the Negaverse!" Her cheeks blushed a little rosy. A Good Guy. An ally on *her* side, AND he was majorly cute to boot! It was about time the universe dropped something good her way. She didn't even have to worry, like she would with a normal boyfriend, because this guy *wasn't* useless in a fight! AND he already knew about her costumed identity!
Her expression of dreamy adoration, mingled with her history of boy-crazyness, was actually slightly scary.
"C'mon, help me get him inside." He was freezing. Her cheeks flushed with twin, bright spots of scarlet as she struggled on a sudden, naughty thought about how she could be keeping him warm...
Eyes went to pink hearts, an image of him asleep curled up next to her, both in their pajamas...
"Hold on a minute!" The cat cautioned. "Okay, he's a good guy, but do you want your parents to just find him in your room? Far better if we take him in by the front door. That way you can explain that he's a classmate of yours or something and got knocked out by the storm. At least then you won't be grounded for the next little while."
Little while. Mina rolled her eyes. Artemis had a point, but 'little while' would probably be the remainder of the school year! "Okay, but how do we get his costume off? My parents won't believe he's a classmate with his hair on fire."
The little cat paced around the armored figure lying prone. "It looks like he got hit with an ice stasis spell."
"Will you just answer the question!" Whispering this long, floating outside of her second story window where her parents might wake up and hear, or worse, see them, was fraying at her nerves.
"Queen Serenity had a way to do it, in case any of you Scouts got injured and she needed a way to treat you without the protective spells of your costume getting in the way. Why don't you try your transformation brooch or disguise pen on him?"
"Okay." Dubiously, Mina tried it, holding her pen, thinking hard about restoring him to normal while she touched it to his chest. He faded and rippled, returning to the boy a year or two older than her.
"Uh, Artemis? Why didn't any of his armor or weapons go away?"
"Uh," the cat sweatdropped.
"Never mind." Mina grabbed the bag he'd worn throughout the fight. "Lets see how much of his stuff fits in here. We can shove the rest under my bed."
To their surprise everything fit without any problem.
"Who *is* this guy?"
"There don't seem to be any jeans in here." Mina was rummaging around in the still spacious bag. "We can't take him inside wearing that. It looks like he just got out of some Old English play!"
Artemis perched atop of the breathing corpse still dressed in tunic and tights. "You could say he was going to a stage rehearsal."
Mina looked down on the boy and sucked in her lip. "I guess it's got to do. My folks are going to ask his name, though."
"Don't you even know that much about him?"
Mina replied by saying, in a slightly exasperated tone of voice. "We were a little too busy fighting the forces of evil for a formal introduction, okay? He told me he'd tell me later. But he DID say that his first name was Jared. Jared Saotome, I think."
"Well, now that that's settled with, let's get him to the front door. You can ring the bell and get your father to drag him inside. We don't want to reveal how strong you are."
Some of her perkiness returned. "Right, Artemis. Uh, Cloud? Could you set us down please?"
The obedient little cloud floated around to the front door, settled down there, and vanished, leaving them on the front porch.
"Wow, that was some instrument! I wonder what power went into making that?"
"Jared made it, but I don't know how. Most of what he did didn't make much sense to me. But the way he fought was just *dreamy!*" She pulled on the rope that rang the bell and used her key to open the front door. Leaning in she yelled. "Mom! Could someone help me please?"
There was some rumbling and Mr. and Mrs. Lovejoy rounded to the top of the stairs, wearing their pajamas under light robes. The light and noise of a battery TV still on came from their room. Her dad was carrying a candle while both he and her mom rushed down to see her. "Mina-chan! What are you doing in so late?" Her mom called. "With those monsters about and that storm running we didn't know if you were coming home! We were afraid something might have happened to you!"
Mina got hugged and the top of her head kissed.
She sighed. "Thanks, mom. Dad? Could you help me move my friend in? He kinda got hurt when we were out together."
Her mother did not release her hold, but her father went out to look at the boy, suddenly lightened by their neighbors getting an emergency generator to work. When Mina's mother glanced that way she gasped, then released her daughter, helping her husband to lift the solid weight of the boy and carry him over the threshold, setting him down in the dark of the living room on their couch.
"What happened to him, Mina-chan?"
"We were... meeting for sodas after his play rehearsal!" The blonde girl said on a sudden inspiration. "Then the wind picked up and he carried me most of the way home."
"So he's probably just exhausted, instead of being frozen." Her father surmised, packing blankets around the limp body while his wife lay a hot water bottle across the youth's forehead. Then her father raised his head from appraising the patient. "We've been hearing on the TV that the winds had even picked up small cars and thrown them hundreds of feet! You should have stayed indoors until the winds died down. This was on the news as the One Hour Typhoon because it built up and went away so fast."
"Well, the soda shop had these big, glass windows." Mina temporized.
Her mother fixed her with an appraising stare, having caught the boy's entirely too handsome features and turning to memorize every nuance of her daughter's face, calculating the equation from there. "Mina. What were you doing out with a boy so late?"
Every available surface of Mina's flesh went rosy. "Nothing, mom."
Her mother could tell that this 'nothing' was something indeed. "Young Lady, do you understand what trouble you might have been in if this 'nothing' had turned out to be what I think it was?"
Mina's blush receded and her hands went to her sides. "Nothing happened! This was to have been our first time out, okay? Besides, I was just going to date with him. I wasn't going to... you know." The blush returned in small measure.
Detecting honesty, the mother relented and went to enfold her young daughter, shifting to address her in her arms. "I'm sorry, dear. We're your parents. We worry about you. And he IS a handsome boy." She stroked her daughter's long hair. "I should have trusted you. The storm had us so upset. But you *would* tell us if anything like that were to...?"
Mina nodded. It was a small request. "Sure, mom."
Power came back on. Lights returned with whizzes and clicks as various electronic appliances reset themselves.
"Dear, come look at this." The father called, both mother and daughter oriented on him. "I was looking to see if I could find a wallet or a school ID card, something with the boy's address or a number so I could call his parents. Look at what I found."
He held out a roll of yen bills that, when looked at closely, had to approach the fair market value of their home.
Mina laughed and made up a story in fine anime style. "Oh! That, hehe, well... you see, he's a... he's a movie star! And, uh, err, well he just moved to our school..."
Artemis jumped up to the bannister above and behind her parent's heads. The cat pointed at each of her parents and then rolled over, playing dead.
"...and he's an orphan..." Mina said to her audience.
Artemis rolled up and held his tail above him, making a startling representation of a peaked roof.
"...and he was looking to buy a house in the area."
The cat made as if a homeless person sleeping in a box.
"But he hasn't found one yet."
Suddenly the cat was in a girl's school dress and whispering to the side.
"Or at least that's what the gossip is, we hadn't gotten to talk very much." Mina finished, feeling very pleased as her parents moved back from suspicious to being sympathetic.
"Oh, well the boy should know it isn't very safe to carry cash. Do you know what kind of movies he... hello, what's this?"
Out of the waist pouch Mina had somehow neglected to take off of him, and that her father had found the cash in, fell out a videotape cartridge. Both parents read the cover.
"Skysaber, The Motion Picture?"
"That's certainly his face cartooned on the front, though the drawing doesn't do him justice."
Her mother slid the tape out of the cardboard jacket and put it into the living room TV, turning it on. The opening credits began to roll, and in the background was this boy, singing in dubbed Japanese and fighting nameless thugs with a laser pistol.
Mina's mom stopped the tape, meeting her husband's gaze. Simultaneously, they both shrugged. It looked like the boy *was* a movie star. At least they could stop worrying if he was a criminal having that much money on hand.
Mina was stock still with an electric look. He really WAS a movie star! And an IDOL SINGER TOO! The sparks flying off of her grin in every direction might have disturbed more alert parents than ones she had.
And he was HERS! *All* hers! Bwahahahaha!