I is for Insurance
My name is Hanada Kaito, and if you are reading this, two things have happened:
1. The World has been saved.
2. My friends and I are dead.
Those two statements may seem to be unconnected, but I assure you, they are intimately linked. Our performance today will determine the fate of the planet, and the chances that we will survive are knowingly slim, but still we will fight to our utmost to save this world. We are the Kings, and we are all that stand between peace and utter annihilation by an alien force, and if we do die while saving the world, I, North King, do not want to slip quietly into the night, leaving parents and loved ones in the dark as to our whereabouts and the rest of the world blind to our sacrifice, so in this missive I intend to spell out everything that lead up to this point, answering questions I'm positive the police and media have been dying to understand.
First off, many suppositions made on the web forum Tokyo Underground have gotten very close to the truth, and I'm almost sorry to have had to purposefully lead the authors astray in their trains of thought by providing false logic – my screen name there is TrueBlue, and after _May 19th_, anything I wrote was purposefully leading a false trail away from the truth.
Chronologically, the truth is this:
Many millennia ago, the world was united under one kingdom – the Golden Kingdom – centered in what we believe to be the old Babylonian area near the Fertile Crescent, in a place then called Elysion. All corners of the planet – not just Europe, Asia, and Africa, but the Americas, Australia, and Antartica, too – paid homage to the Golden Kingdom; major rulers of the areas sent their first born sons to serve as guard for the heir to the Throne of Earth to show their allegiance and solidify their ties. It might have continued in this manner indefinitely, but the era came to an end in what was meant to be a great time of peace, when suddenly and without provocation, the Moon Kingdom attacked.
What we have pieced together in this present time is that certain powers within the Kingdom of the Moon – eventually named the Dark Kingdom – used the knowledge that the Prince of Elysion, Endymion, possessed the powerful Soul Gem of Earth to twist the Moon Queen's mind against us. (I know this is complicated and foreign, but try to keep up).
Before the Moon Army struck, the magical priests of Elysion moved the capital to an alternate dimension, so that the Moon Armies could not strike at the rest of the planet and endanger its citizens unnecessarily. The armies met in a great battle, and in the end, the Moon Princess died. Upset by this, the Earth Prince used the soul of Earth to end the fighting by transporting all of the lives in that battle to be reborn in the future.
And now we get to the present day.
Months ago, odd attacks started on citizens of the city that left them either dead or drained of their energy, until sightings of a mysterious costumed hero started saving the day. The name he was given in the papers – the usually dismissed articles – was the Evening Star, a moniker, I believe, granted by the sight of light reflecting off of his scimitar. We know him as West King, Kobai Khalid to this era, Kunzite, a guardian to the Prince of Earth, in his last. He was the first of us to awaken, and served as a decoy to better protect the reborn Prince.
Unfortunately, fate saw differently, as the next of us to awaken was none other than the Prince himself, though neither he nor many of us recognized him until much later. Many remember the attack on the jewelry store where only a rose was left behind, and the sighting of a mysterious masked youth reported by the night worker – that was Cardinal King, Chiba Mamoru in this life, Prince Endymion of Earth in his last. The pegasus spotted with him was Helios, the High Priest of Elysion who sought us out to fight against the creatures that were attacking Earth.
Next to awaken was yours truly, in the fight on the cram school. I awoke as North King, and in my past life I was Zoisite. Cardinal King and I worked together alone for a time, as West King kept his distance and we had yet to find others.
When we did, it was during our first battle against a powerful warrior for the Moon Kingdom, reawakened in this life and turned against the planet that had raised her. Her name was Sailor Mars to us, but in recent newspaper articles about the five missing girls, I'm confident that she was born here as Hino Rei, daughter of the congressman. Unable to change her, we had no hope to escape without defeating her, and we would have been defeated ourselves had it not been for Moegi Yuu, who transformed into South King and turned the dangerous situation around. In his past life, he was Jadeite, another of Prince Endymion's guardians.
Our folly at this point was that we did not remember any of our past lives until much later. We pieced together that Evening Star was a protector of the Prince, but not that Mamoru was the prince reborn, so, treating Mamoru as another of our own, and knowing only what Helios remembered in his fractured memory, we set out to find our Prince.
We thought we found him in Midori Nero, our investigations landing on the night his mansion was attacked by Sailor Jupiter; that night, too, we might have been defeated were it not for Jewel Tiara, an as-of-then unaffiliated heroine who appeared periodically to help us out or collect a Sailor Crystal (left when a Sailor Senshi, like Sailor Mars, was defeated). In this life, Jewel Tiara was born as Tsukino Usagi; we do not believe she was reborn from the past, so in all of this, her actions are to be the most applauded, and the most grieved should we fail and she not return.
In the attack at the Bridal Store, Midori Nero awakened as a King, and while we thought he was the Prince, he is instead East King, known as Nephrite in his past life. He was instrumental in saving the day, having defeated Sailor Jupiter, saving the rest of us and several members of the public in her downfall. In this life, I believe she was the missing orphan, Kino Makoto.
The night of the jewelry store riots was yet another attack by the Dark Kingdom, orchestrated through video tapes by Sailor Mercury. That night, West King officially joined our team, and Sailor Mercury, the missing genius Mizuno Ami, was defeated.
At that point, things became even more complicated – skipping over a small number of events, we arrive at the first city-wide blackout, and the appearance of Sailor Venus. We knew she had to be taken down, and devised a plan to do so, but in events that followed, Jewel Tiara was attacked, East King – then still thought to be our Prince – stepped in front of the blast and nearly died. Cardinal King, in an effort to save his life, unlocked the power of the Golden Crystal, the soul gem of Earth, to heal East King and fully awakened as Prince Endymion.
In the confusion that followed – suddenly our Prince's identity had changed and the Crystal, the object the Senshi was searching for, were both out in the open – we got Endymion out of there, but Jewel Tiara was captured by Sailor Venus, who then escaped our grasp. In a courageous act, Jewel Tiara left behind the crystals she had collected from the fallen senshi, refusing to let them be used by the Moon Kingdom to further their ends. We kept them safe for as long as we could, and learned what we could from them and the ancient Moon technology that contained them.
Next we get to the most recent blackout, wherein most of the city and many people were attacked. That was no U.F.O., or great creature – it was Sailor Venus. Her attacks – golden lasers – drained targets of their energy. We finally caught up to her, fought her, and defeated her. In this life, I believe she was Aino Minako.
Cardinal King was the reason those at the hospital fully recovered that night. He selflessly risked exposing himself to the media to save as many lives as he could, channeling the healing powers of the Golden Crystal to energize and stabilize the injured population. Many people owe him their lives, and based on what happens tonight, many more now do, too. Chiba Mamoru is the most selfless, honorable, and best person I know, and if his name is ever forgotten, I will never forgive any of you.
That night Tsukino Usagi was returned to us, and awakened days later from a coma. She found Midori, and tricked him into retrieving the sailor crystals for her; when she got them, she nearly killed Midori before teleporting back to the enemy's base – in her time being kidnapped, she was brainwashed and is being controlled by the enemy to serve their needs.
We are now flying towards where we believe the enemy to be stationed – to Babylon, to the alternate dimension created thousands of years ago – to Elysion, and the battlefield that has stood empty since that time long past. We believe the enemy, Diana, will use the powers contained in the sailor crystals, along with the energy Sailor Venus collected from the people before her demise, to awaken the ancient Queen of the Moon, who will then destroy or enslave the planet in revenge for her daughter's death all those years ago. We believe this threat is credible as she may possess the Silver Crystal, a gem as powerful, if not more powerful than, the Golden Crystal, with a near infinite capacity for destruction.
We do not know if we will win, but we will do our best to save this world.
If you do not wish to share our story in its entirety, please at least tell our families and the families of the missing girls that we will not be returning, so they don't worry unnecessarily and can move on with their lives.
And open some sort of medical treatment fund in the name of Chiba Mamoru. I think he'd like that.
Hanada read over the final draft of his work, finally deciding that he had struck the right balance of information and too-much-information in the piece. He sighed, then signed it, and placed it in a fresh manila envelope. The plane began its descent and he sealed it, and wrote out careful instructions on the front, despite the captain's instructions over the loudspeaker.
When the plane hit the tarmac and everyone started to leave, he stayed behind and gave his instructions verbally to the flight attendant before relinquishing the envelope; if Midori hadn't assured him that she was left with instructions for time-sensitive, important documents before, he wasn't quite sure what he would have done to ensure its security.
He felt more at peace as he piled into Kobai's cousin's van now that their legacy had a chance to be shared, but the peace was soon overtaken by nervous energy at the idea of what was to come.
