With Friends Like These

Chapter 35

AN: I am sorry this has taken this long. But I had such trouble with this part. I had to come up with a decent plot device in order to save a certain character from himself and get another character to feel sorry for him. Nothing I was coming up with was working, so now I'm sick of it and decided. It may not be the best idea, but it can be revised later. Sorry again.

"Why do you continue to trust that failure?" asked a young girl. "I can do so much better than he ever could, Wise Man!"

The shrouded figure raised a bony hand. "Calm yourself, Princess. You will have your chance soon enough. Tonight. I know he will fail again, but I wish him to have the illusion that he still has the opportunity to succeed. I wish him to be utterly humiliated and for you to have a grand entrance, the kind that you deserve, my dear." he traced her chin. "You will be recognized as you should be and be hailed as you always should have been. You will be not just the princess of a single tiny planet, but of the universe itself."

The girl, a teenager of fourteen, flushed and looked away. "Forgive me, I'll try and be more patient. But it's hard knowing that fraud of a Moon Princess is being allowed to lead the universe into ruin."

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"Why are you doing this to us?" Ami shouted at Rubeus as he came over to her. "I don't understand!"

"Of course you wouldn't! You pathetic humans could never understand what we've been through!" he shouted back at her. "You deserve everything you and that Eclipse witch get from us! We're going to take back the Earth and the Thirtieth Century."

"The Thirtieth Century?" she asked. "Are you from the future? But that's impossible! Time travel goes against all the laws of physics, and even it could be done, it would be terribly dangerous."

Rubeus grunted at her, "Of course you would say so. You humans and your science. Anything that disagrees with your science and your laws and theories is obviously impossible. Humans like you insist the Earth is millions of years old, and yet, how would you really know? By rocks? You come up with theories that are so full of holes, think far too hard to come up with answers that are really very easily found. You think you know everything and yet I understand that under the Fifteenth Century, all you humans actually thought your world was flat. Morons and idiots!"

Ami looked away, chastised.

"So you want to doubt me now? Is it so impossible now?"

"But that doesn't explain why you're here? What you want? What did we do to you?" she asked again. "Tell me, please, maybe we can make it right, without fighting." Serena had done it with the Negaverse, why couldn't she do it too, with this man. Maybe. "What did we do?"

Rubeus looked at Ami distrustfully. "Heh, it'll pass the time. Fine. At some point in the Twenty-First Century, the entire Earth had been enveloped in a sort of freeze or eternal sleep. In the Thirtieth Century, a queen appeared, Neo-Queen Serenity, and awakened everyone and brought about the seemingly Utopian city called Crystal Tokyo. But there is no such thing as a true utopia. This Queen and her King demanded absolute loyalty, anything else was declared treason. We, I and several others, decided that we would secede from the Kingdom, and form our own. We went and declared these intentions to the Queen. We tried to be peaceful about it, diplomatic, saying we just wanted to be free again, as we had after our ancestors had thrown off the rule of the British King in the Eighteenth Century. 'We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal.' We did not want a fight, we just wanted our freedom. It seemed easy enough and they seemed to accept our request. But we returned to our little section of the city the next day. It was blazing all around us. All of our families were killed in that blaze. The White Moon had sent soldiers to destroy our families as a warning to us and all those who would wish to leave Crystal Tokyo." He raised his fist and slammed into the wall, ignoring the pain that shot through him as a result. "All we wanted was to leave and be free and they destroyed everything. My family, my mother and father and little sister, they were all I had and they took them away from me! We had to fight back just as our ancestors did against the British Crown. But it was just us. Diamond, myself, the four sisters and two others. We were outnumbered and banished."

Ami looked down. "But I can't believe those of the White Moon would really do such a thing? Are you sure it was them because I know the Princess of the White Moon, she'd never hurt a soul. You can ask her yourself!"

"Of course it was them! It had to be! Who else?" Rubeus told her. "It's the only thing that makes sense. The Wise Man told us himself! He said he'd seen it, that he'd watched it. Why would he lie to us?"

"Perhaps to endear you to him," came a voice from behind them.

Ami looked up, relief appearing on her face. "Malachite!" Serena must have realized it was a trap and Malachite had come instead.

"Considering we saw him do the same thing to the Moon Kingdom a thousand years ago, it is quite possible that he himself destroyed your village and told you it was the White Moon, thus creating the bad blood between you." Malachite told him. "Why he wanted you, I'll never know."

Rubeus glowered, "But that's impossible. Only one man could not have destroyed an entire section of a city. Not in a single night. It had to be an army, an army sent by the queen. It had to be!"

"And what if you're wrong? You wish to punish an entire group of innocent people for nothing at all. Even if they had done it, the people of this century has done nothing to you. Your war is not with us or the Sailor Scouts. Your war is with this White Moon of the Thirtieth Century." Malachite sneered. "You are no better. What would your mother and father say to see you like this?" He knew he'd struck a nerve when Rubeus' eyes went wide. "You're so bent on revenge that you've overlooked what is so obvious. You're believing the word of the one man that saw what happened? You weren't there when it happened. You didn't see it. The first rule of deduction, the first or only witness to a crime is most likely to be the criminal. Of course he's going to tell you someone else did it, because he wants you on his side. He wanted you to go against the White Moon in an all out war. He knew you'd lose and be punished. He knew he'd get you because he knew you would see and believe only what you wanted to. Now, you seek revenge, against innocent children, little girls who nothing to do with what happened to your family. You threatened to take away another child's mother, just as yours was taken from you. I wonder what that makes you?"

As if he himself had come to that conclusion in the same instant, Rubeus fell to his knees in shock. "I…I…had to…I really believed that…I still do…but…"

"You're no better. You're worse. You're a coward who would rather get his revenge by destroying those who never even knew your family. Those who can't properly defend themselves against you."

"I…I…" Rubeus stammered. Who was this man who could bring him to this, from a knight who desired justice for his family to a blood-stained monster?

"You are a fool, is what you are…"

AN: Yes I know I gave the Black Moon Clan a background on Earth, but that's what made the most sense. And yes, I also made them descendents of Americans, probably ones who had once been Presidents or maybe even directly related to the original founders of the USA, even if distantly. It was a way to tie in real life history with the fantasy that is Sailor Moon and make it somewhat plausible since the storyline of Sailor Moon is set in a present day Earth it makes sense that America is still in existence, so it makes sense that some of the ones that NQ Serenity pulled out of the freezing would have to be American since it happened in the 21st Century. Sorry, I'm done now. Please read and review.

Next Chapter: Who is the Wise Man's new minion? Find out next time.