Act two: Sailor Mercury
Bunny lay in the bathtub, soaking and relaxing in the hot water. It had been two days since that first battle, and she was still a little sore from it. She didn't have her little radio on, she wasn't listening to the news reports of the battle, Naru's account of what happened.
Goten was, though. He had promised up and down he would keep an eye on it. Trunks was VERY protective of Bunny, if anything about the identity of this 'Sailor Moon' were to get out, it would be a nightmare. As such, Luna decided to stay with him, as Naru had made the official statement that Sailor Moon was accompanied by a cat with an odd bald spot on her forehead.
She heard someone knock on the door. "Bunny, are you in there?"
"Yeah."
"Okay. Your grandmother called, I'm running late. Goten's headed by to take you to 'class', you've got three hours."
She heard him walk away, and after she felt enough time had passed, she got up, putting the cover back on the bathtub. As she did, she felt her chest tighten and felt her birthmark begin to burn.
It never did this. It felt raw, like it was ready to start bleeding. She didn't want to tell anyone it felt like this, her family would worry.
She had… dreams, sometimes. She could never remember them, though, until recently. She would know it was about… something. Over the past two days, though, she could remember more and more of them. It culminated into shrieking for a man who was dying, a girl who was already dead by his side, and then taking something – a sword? – and plunging it through her own heart.
'I read too much manga,' she decided with a grin, going to change into her clothes.
In a Sailor V shirt and a pair of comfortable jeans, Bunny was sitting at the counter, having breakfast that consisted of cereal and a banana. She had three hours to do nothing in. Spending it inside all day wouldn't be very fun at all. She wanted to go out and get some fresh air. Maybe hit the arcade…
That was her goal! Leaving her half-eaten breakfast on the counter, she scribbled a note hastily, not bothering to check her kanji, rushing out the door. The phone was ringing; the machine could pick it up. Once outside, she took off down the road.
It had taken a good half hour to get to the Juuban district, and she saw the main junior high school standing there. They wore the same uniforms that Naru had been wearing the other day and Bunny smiled. She felt like she was spying on them, like she was gathering some top-secret information from an enemy.
Though, she did notice fairly quickly that one of the students there seemed to be singled out by the others, and was the subject of whisperings. Bunny strained to hear, why couldn't she have hearing like her father?
They whispered, and she picked up bits and pieces of information from them. This girl was supposed to be a genius, the top student in the country! That was impressive to Bunny, but what got her the most was that her I.Q was a rumored 300!
'She must be as smart as 'baa-san,' Bunny decided with a huge grin. She stood by the gate, eagerly waiting for the girl with the cute, blue hair to come off the school grounds. Bunny was upon her at once.
"Hi!"
The girl was startled, dropping her book to the ground. Bunny seemed to jump slightly, scrambling to pick it up for her. "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to scare you! Hi! I'm Bunny!"
The girl just watched Bunny try to bow while still reaching for the book and some of the papers that had been in it.
"Do you go to school here? What's it like?"
"You're… talking to me?"
Bunny seemed confused and, nodding, smiled. "Yeah! You seem nice! I'm Tsukino Bunny!"
"M-my name is Mizuno Ami," she introduced with a bow of her own. "I transferred today, I start class in the morning, I was just picking up my uniform and my books, and… where do you go to school at?"
Ami had noticed that Bunny wasn't wearing a uniform, or any form of identification of school, pulling off a pair of reading glasses.
"I don't go to school… I'm homeschooled by a family friend. I'm supposed to go in a few hours and had time to kill. Hey! I know!"
"Uh, yes?"
"Let's go to the arcade!"
She wasn't about to take 'no' for an answer. Grabbing Ami by the hand, she dragged her off.
Bunny got Ami to the arcade, and was whining about how 'schools have too many rules', and how it was 'stuffy'. She got all of her information from Goten, never really thinking he might have had a more biased opinion, and was convinced he was right.
"…and Gohan, my tutor, lets me have breaks when I need them, and snack breaks! He's really cool, and his daughter and I are supposed to go to Shibuya next week!"
Bunny squealed to see the new Sailor V game and rushed over, knocking over no less than three other patrons, dropping in a token and beginning to play. Ami stood behind her, watching with an analytical gaze, as if absorbing the information. They both lost track of the time, and it didn't seem to be long before Goten wandered in, holding Luna in his arms, trying to gently pry her off his shirt.
"I wasn't going that fast," he said in his own defense.
"I suck!" Bunny announced, kicking the machine a little. Goten would have said something about her language, but bit his tongue. She had a temper she'd acquired from her grandfather and was pretty strong, all things considered. "Ami-chan! I have a continue! You wanna try?"
Again, without waiting for an 'okay', she put Ami in the seat, bouncing a little in her happiness over a new friend. Ami looked at the screen, and Luna stared hard. The glow of the screen seemed to be masking something that was under her hair.
Ami began to play, and sat there calmly. She took no notice of the large group that began to gather around her. Motoki came over, wondering if one of the machines was broken again. He'd heard Bunny's voice and was worried she'd kicked it again… she seemed to have a bad habit of accidently breaking the games when she got mad.
"Motoki! Come look!" the girl shouted, pulling him over. Goten floated up a few inches when he realized he could have screamed 'Bunny is Serenity Briefs and Sailor Moon!' and no one would have noticed. He saw what had gathered so much attention.
Ami's score was in the millions.
Dropping back to the ground, he heard something clunk out. A pen had fallen into Ami's lap as she managed to finish the game in record time. The crowd began to dissipate, people muttering to themselves. She put her initials into the system and picked the item up out of her lap.
"Oh. I must have won a prize," she mulled. Bunny looked at it and she became a little jealous.
"I want a pen, too…" With a sudden movement, she kicked the machine. "Gimme one, too!"
Motoki tried to stop her, though Goten pulled him back pretending to try to do so himself, in reality trying to keep him from getting hurt. Another pen, one with a little moon on the body and a jeweled cap, dropped out.
"Yay!" she cried, kissing it a few times. Ami said something about her being so funny, but it was lost in her giggles. "Ami, wanna hang out some time? Go have ice cream? Goten-oji here'll buy!"
Goten sharply glared at he before smiling and rubbing Bunny's head. Ami smiled.
"I'd like that. But I'm afraid I have to go to cram school, Crystal Academy."
"I was just telling Bunny about that place the other day." Goten nodded, looking down at her. Ami bowed in a farewell, and left. Goten just pulled Bunny into an alley, scooping her up into his arms to take off for his brother's house.
"Your friend is something else," he chuckled.
"Yes… and I have a feeling I know what, too." Luna stared off into the distance.
Bunny ran into the house, calling out her arrival a she kicked her shoes off.
"I'm here!" she shouted, plopping down at the table where her lessons were laid out. Gohan walked out of the bathroom, looking over to see his younger brother digging through his cabinets.
"What are you doing?" he demanded. Goten barely gave a 'hello' or a 'how've you been?' before going back to his rummaging. He said nothing else about it, and looked to Bunny, who was grinning from ear to ear.
"Judging by your smile, should I assume you met Sailor V?" he asked curiously.
"Even better! The Sailor V game gives out prizes," she showed him the pen "and my new friend Ami got a cool pen, and so did I!"
"And you had to beat the crap out of the machine to get it," he reminded. Bunny said nothing else, going to work on some math problems.
Not wanting to listen to it, Goten took his food outside, along with Luna. She had something in her mouth that he pulled out, carefully.
"What's this?" he asked. It was a flyer for the cram school Ami said she was attending. They had her picture on it as a promotional. "Geeze… I hope she gets paid for this kind of advertising."
"We should go check it out."
"It's a school," Goten reminded with a sour look on his face. "What can go wrong in a school?"
Luna scratched his face, hissing, ears laid back. He decided, very quickly, that they SHOULD go check it out. It WAS quite suspicious after all. He stuck his head inside to tell Bunny he had to go somewhere, and he'd pick her up later.
Lifting Luna up, letting Luna grab tight, he took off.
Goten snored on as he slept on his couch, where he had crashed last night due to exhaustion. Luna had him follow Ami all over the city last, like she was trying to prove something.
Groaning at the way he was acting, splayed out, Luna hopped onto a window sill. She wanted to call Bunny, but Goten had explained she would be in training at the moment with her grandfather, so getting her out of there would take nothing less than a miracle.
"Hmph. Honestly, Goten, if you leave your window unlocked like this," she managed to squeeze herself out "any thief could just wander on in."
Stretching herself out, Luna sauntered over towards Juuban Junior High, trying to walk like a normal cat. She wanted to see Ami again, try to get a feel for what she was.
Though, she was walking a little drunk. She'd spent the entire night working on information to upload into the control room, and had gotten maybe three hours of sleep. She'd gotten nowhere, and fast. Rather than dwell on it, she snuck her way into the school, peering in from a window.
There sat Ami Mizuno, in her Chemistry class. 'She takes such advanced classes for someone her age… such great intelligence… is she one of the princesses?'
It wasn't long before class let out for the day, though Ami only went to another room. Luna ran into the school itself to not lose sight of her, though she did fairly quickly.
"The school is so big...where is she?" Then Luna remembered her excellence in the Sailor V game the previous day and began to look for the computer lab. Finding it, she peered in to find it empty of anyone except for Ami. Rubbing her temples, the girl popped a disk out of the hard drive.
"My head is killing me. I can't get into this disk method Crystal uses. Taking notes the old fashioned way feels much better," she muttered to herself as she used the pen she won the previous day to begin to take notes. As she sat it down to rub her hand a little, Luna hopped onto her head and down to her lap, startling her.
"Oh! Oh, kitty, you startled me," Ami laughed, reaching to pet her. "You belong to Bunny-san's uncle, don't you?"
It was that moment that Bunny wandered in, wearing her training clothes.
"Well, to be honest, Goten-oji isn't my uncle. He's papa's best friend, they grew up together," she explained, sitting down. "If anything happens to the rest of my family, Goten-oji gets legal custody of me."
"What about your mother?"
"Mama… mama died when I was little. Papa said she was killed, shot while we were gone."
Ami gasped. Her mother had been killed when she was an infant? Ami's parents had divorced due to conflicting interests, and even though she rarely saw her father, she at least knew he loved her for a fact. Bunny only had her own imagination.
"I-I'm sorry," Ami began, starting to stammer from embarresment.
"Don't be. It happened a long time ago, and it isn't something that bothers me… you can't change the past, after all." Well, that wasn't entirely true, was it? Her papa HAD changed the past, didn't he? Forty years ago, his future self had made this world peaceful. But no one knew that, and she kept silent.
Bunny perked up. "Hey! You've been using the special pen! Me too!" She pointing to the jeweled item in her own pocket. Ami smiled as well before hearing in the hall that someone had signed up for Crystal.
"Oh. I have to be going Bunny..." Ami explained, standing up and bowing. She remembered what her teacher had said the previous day, how everyone was trying to catch up with her and that she needed to keep raising her level. Getting up and gathering her things, Ami left. Bunny blinked as she watched her friend leave the school. Then she noticed the disk still in the computer.
"Luna, Ami left her disk behind!" she cried. Grabbing it, she ran for the school entrance to try and catch up with the girl.
'It's times like these…I wish I could fly, like papa!' she thought, hopelessly. Rounding a corner that led outside, she made it past the gate and right into someone, having slipped on a Crystal flyer that was lying on the ground.
"Ow! Hey, watch it Odango!" A familiar voice came. Bunny opened her eyes and looked up from where she was sitting to see the man from the Osa*P jewelry store.
Growling, Bunny jumped up. "Bus! BUNS! THESE ARE BUNS YOU LOWER CLASS, NO GOOD, WORTHLESS HUMAN! BUNS!"
"Bunn-meow!" came Luna as she finally noticed the man. He stared hard at her.
"Did I just hear that cat talk?" he asked. Bunny caught her temper and made some hasty explanation that he was hearing things and scooped her up, running off, leaving the man with the flyer behind, letting him gather it up.
"Luna, Ami's gone and I don't think Crystal would let us in during a class." Bunny said as she carried the cat down to her basement, which was set up like a home arcade and spare bedroom. Luna grabbed the disk out of the girl's hand and moved to one of the two computers sitting next to the wall.
"Then we'll have to find out what's on the disk ourselves." Luna explained. Popping it into the A drive, she began to type when Bunny caught the sound of her father's footsteps heading for the door leading to the basement. Popping it back out and dropping Luna under the desk she looked up to see him.
"Hey Bunny. I got out of my meeting early," Trunks said. Bunny smiled a little.
"Cool! Um, hey… papa? Have you heard anything about that Crystal cram school?" she wondered, causing Luna to become confused What was she getting at?
"Heard about it? That's all Gohan talks about right now. He thinks it's great, even Chichi wishes it'd been around when Gohan was younger."
Luna nodded, smiling. Bunny was collecting information! Very quick on her feet, this was something to add to the computers at the control room.
"My new friend goes there every day, Mizuno Ami," Bunny said, watching her father go through a stack of letters he'd fished out of the post box.
"I've heard of her. The smart girl, right? She's supposed to be as smart as Gohan was when he was that age. She's gonna grow up to be like him, I'm sure of it."
"She's gonna save the world from a killer monster from the future, too?"
Trunks bopped her head with one of the letters, grinning. "You know what I mean. This is for you. An invite to that ball next week. Gonna come along? It's been a while since I got to go anywhere with Serenity."
Bunny just shrugged, and put it on the shelf. Trunks rubbed her head, before going upstairs for a nap. Once he was out of earshot, well up on the second story, Luna came out.
"Was that your father, Bunny? He seems very kind," the cat told her.
Bunny smiled. "That's papa. He spoils me all the time. 'Jii-san doesn't think he should, he thinks I should be a fighter. He cares, he just doesn't show it, but he cares, or he'd have killed me in training by now." She leaned back in her seat. "Papa wants me to be who I want to be, and I love him for that. But 'jii-san has some good ideas as well, and I don't know who I should be like. It's really confusing."
"Who is your grandfather?"
"Vegeta."
"That name is a-"
"He's the king, now, since he's one of the only two left alive," Bunny grinned, knowing what Luna was about to say.
"So that would make your father and your aunt a prince and a princess? That means that you're-"
Not wanting to go into it, Bunny popped the disk back in, politely interrupting her. Luna hopped into her lap to do some typing, but nothing happened. Pushing the chair back, Bunny hit the tower with her foot a few times.
"Bunny, you ARE a nut!" Luna yowled, her shouts masked by Bunny's yelping. A voice began to come over the headphones, and she listened.
"Luna, it's telling people to become slaves to some great master and to find the Ginzuishou!" Bunny told her. Luna gasped.
"Bunny, your hitting it must have forced a subliminal message to play over the lessons." Luna said. Bunny blinked.
"Wha?"
"A message, played at fixed intervals, normally so short it can't be noticed, but over exposure to it makes you obey," she explained.
Bunny gasped. This was Ami's disk! "So, Ami-chan's been brainwashed? We gotta help her!"
Writing a hasty note, again not checking her Kanji, Bunny was out the door, running down the street, heading downtown for Crystal.
She arrived nearly a half hour later, heading to the doors, as Luna called for her to stop.
"You need a disguise!"
Bunny spun on her heel to face her companion. "What are you talking about?"
"Use the pen you got the other day. Wave it high in the air and call out 'Moon Power' and tell it what to change you into!" Luna said.
Bunny pulled it out, unsure at first, but with acceptance, she nodded and smiled. "That's so cool! Moon Power! Change me into a doctor!" Her clothes altered and so did her hair. It was cropped short now. Bunny didn't notice or care. Changed into this new form, she ran inside, to see the teacher choking Ami.
"You haven't used the disk! You're not brainwashed like the others!" the woman roared.
"I don't need your methods...I can learn on my own...!" Ami said, struggling to breathe. Bunny slammed her shoulder into the door, forcing it off its hinges.
"I've heard there's an emergency requiring my assistance!" she yelled as an excuse, before realizing it hadn't been necessary. The teacher slammed Ami into one of the desks.
"We don't need your help doctor," the teacher said, baring fangs and turning into a monster. Bunny took a slight step back before getting her nerve again.
"I'm afraid you're wrong! That's MY friend, and no one hurts my family OR my friends!"
"Moon Prism Power, Make UP!" Bunny called. Pulling the wing clips out of her hair she threw them at the teacher slash monster. The monster growled and threw...tests at her?
"Ah! Papercut! Owie! I hate tests! Make it stop!" Moon shouted, wanting to cry. Luna jumped up onto the desk.
"Don't cry Sailor Moon! Your shrieks will amplify and blow the computers out!"
Ami blinked. Bunny was Sailor Moon? Goten's cat turned to her and smiled. Unknown to Ami, that strange birthmark she had that rarely appeared, had.
"Ami-chan, do you remember that pen you received? Grab it, now!" the cat ordered. Wondering if all that studying had gone to her brain, Ami nodded. She was now taking orders from a talking cat! Maybe this was just a dream. Doing as she was told, she grabbed the pen and felt a strange sensation overcome her. A familiar one though. Like something she knew was in her memory, but couldn't remember. She gasped, feeling ice rush out of it, running down her arm, to her chest, rushing into her heart…
"Where did this fog come from?" the monster demanded, looking around frantically. Bunny looked around, too, but couldn't see it. A male voice called out to her as someone lifted her up.
"Goten-oji?"
"Now Sailor Moon!" The voice shouted. Bunny kicked at it as hard as she could.
"Sailor Moon Kick!" she yelled. The attack was now Ki powered and slammed the creature into a wall. Sailor Moon looked up to see Tuxedo Kamen tip his hat to her and leave through a window. She wanted to run after him, but Luna pulling on her pigtail brought her back to reality. Moon pulled the Tiara off and it clipped into the Frisbee.
"Moon Frisbee!" she called out, throwing it at the monster and watching it rip through her, destroying it instantly. Acting as a retriever, Luna returned it to Moon, letting her place it back on her forehead where it belonged.
"Ami-chan, where are you?" Moon asked, looking around frantically. Turning to face behind her, she saw a figure become clear in the fog around them.
A girl wearing a sailor uniform, not unlike Moon's own was there. Hers was in a various amount of blue, and had no sleeves. The symbol for the planet Mercury was glowing on her forehead, before being replaced by a tiara with a light blue stone.
"Ami-chan, is that you?" Moon asked. The girl looked at her and stood up, looking herself over.
Moon noticed a change in her own uniform. The choker turned red and the knot that held it tied together vanished. Her boots reversed colors and began to bands on her gloves turned red and began to shrink as well and the blue stone on her brooch lit up as well.
Then Luna began to speak. "I was right! Soldier of wisdom, Mizuno Ami is Sailor Mercury!"
Mercury looked confused. "I… I am?"
Moon hopped up and down, excitedly. "I'm not the only one anymore!"
"Jadeite!"
Jadeite knelt down before the woman, his damaged sword at his side.
"Yes… my queen?" he asked, his voice shaking so badly, he might very well have been a teenager again.
"I have forgiven you for the betrayal of Sailor Earth… I have forgiven you for nearly costing us the power of the Forbidden Omega… I have forgiven you for your demands that we take greater care in the revival of your daughter. I am running low on forgiveness!" she spat, her hard consonants making him jump.
"Now, you have cost our great ruler another chance to retrieve the Ginzuishou. Do NOT fail again, or you will pay!"
A new voice spoke up. "He was unable to stop them forty years ago in their weakest moment," it reminded. "Rather than send him, allow me to go, Queen Beryl."
Jadeite looked up. "My queen, I assure you, I will not fail again! I will retrieve the Ginzuishou, so you may safely awake An'ya!" He paled. He was worried for her, worried they would grow weary of his tries, and hastily wake her, harming her. He'd lost everything fifty years ago, he wouldn't lose An'ya.
"I will destroy these Senshi! They are less powerful than their protectors, I will NOT fail!"
"You should hope not, Jadeite. The next time you leave this place, it had better be with the Ginzuishou, or the Princess… otherwise, join the Lady Earth in betrayal."
