Even though most of these give you about as much coverage as a g-string on a stripper, I'm going to play it safe and include it anyway...
Disclaimer: Sailor Moon and all characters contained within this work are the copyright of Naoko Takeuchi, Toei Animation, Kodansya and probably lots of other big people I'm forgetting. I am using them without permission, but suing me because of it would be futile as I have nothing. Any characters that are not copyrighted by other people are my own creation, and therefore copyrighted by myself... which means that if for some REALLY weird reason you decided you wanted to use them, (and why would you decide that?!?!?!?) you need to write me for permission.
Comments, Criticisms, and flames welcome... Starrngr@aol.com However, due to a large amount of spam I have received in the past, I have blocked off mail from some domains. Sorry if your one of them. And don't expect me to reply to mail that's nothing but Flames!
See the Character Bio for information on key people to this Fic....
The Wanderer: Wandering Moon: Episode Three: Friend or Foe?
Tinkerer looked the readouts and smiled. Indeed this 'Cherry Hill' temple was a popular place. He sent the final commands to his collectors and sat back to watch the results. Regardless of what he might claim to Cabelite's face, this time he did not want to conduct a undetected operation. Indeed, if his new creations performed as planned, he may not even need the egotistic Negaverse general. And the thought that he might be that much closer to his goals brought a smile to his lips.
'Come out, come out, wherever you are, my sailor pretties. Come out and play with the toys that will spell your doom.'
* * * * * * * * * *
"You've got to be kidding me, Raye!!" wailed Serena. "The one teacher in school who doesn't hate me is a youma??"
"That is not what she said, Serena," interjected Amy, trying to avoid the inevitable rain of tears. "She said whatever it was wasn't negavibes. After all, I have classes with him too and my computer didn't register a thing. Surely if he was sent by the Negaverse he would have done something we could detect by now."
"Maybe the reason Ray saw this 'Battleoid' form over him is because he likes these transforming robot manga. I hear this series was a big hit in the U.S. a few years back," observed Lita. "Besides, he reminds me of my sempai. I'd hate to think I was attracted to a youma in disguise!"
"That could be true, but that's not the impression the fire gave me," commented Raye. "I think there is more of a connection than that."
"We have another problem at the moment, girlfriends," interjected Mina. "What has a metal body, eight legs and drains energy?"
"This is no time for riddles Mina," replied Raye, her temper flaring. "We are trying to have a serious discussion here." Then she realized that Mina was not at the table, but looking out the door towards the outer areas of the temple.
"I _AM_ being serious, Raye. Whatever they are, they are all over the temple grounds, attacking visitors!!" As if to emphasize Mina's point, a scream could be faintly heard through the open door.
"It doesn't matter what they are, their moondust!" declared Serena. "Breaking up a meeting before I even get a chance at some food!" Raye rolled her eyes at that comment but held her tongue as she reached for her transformation wand.
"Venus Power!" "Mars Power!" "Jupiter Power!" "Mercury Power!" "Moon Crystal POWER!!!"
"SCOUT POWER!!!"
* * * * * * * * *
"I don't see what swinging through trees has to do with religion, Chad," commented Micheal, as he landed solidly next to the young acolyte. "And how the heck can you see through that mop of hair, anyway?"
"Its an acquired skill. And all I know is this is the training routine Sensei uses." 'No point in telling him Sensei was acting weird then. It would ruin the joke.' Any further commentary Chad might have made was cut off by the sound of someone screaming. "That sounds like trouble. You'd better stay here where its safe. I've got to go see if Sensei and Raye are OK."
"OK, Chad," replied Micheal to the running acolyte. 'In a pig's eye, bub. This sounds like something I should do something about!' Glancing about to make sure he was un-observed, Micheal concentrated and shimmered into Star Ranger. He moved to the edge of the grove of trees, and stopped for a moment, in confusion. 'Spyders? Here? HOW?!?!?!?' he noted in confusion, recognizing the primary terror weapon of his old adversary the Tinkerer. Then things got even more interesting....
The scouts emerged from the temple into a courtyard filled with chaos. A dozen or so small spiderlike robots darted back and forth, trapping innocent shrine goers in their attempts to escape. In fact, the only people who seemed to be able to avoid the things to any degree were Chad and Grandpa Hino.
"I don't know what you think your doing, but this is a place of peace and meditation. I am Sailor Moon, and for defiling this place I will punish you!!" At the sound of her speech, the spider-things as one stopped what they were doing and began to slowly approach the group of warriors. "Ooooo, I don't like the looks of this" commented Sailor Moon.
"Mercury Bubbles, BLAST!" shouted Sailor Mercury and filled the area with a concealing fog. "Come on, we need to draw them away from here!"
"We need to stop them before someone gets hurt! Come on, Scouts!" shouted Sailor Jupiter, charging into the fog. "Jupiter Thunder, CRASH!!!" The fog lit up with the glow from Jupiter's' attack, but no explosion followed. Metallic scuttling sounds surrounded them as they rushed to Jupiter's' side. Mercury use the remaining few seconds of cover to activate her visor. The information was not encouraging. "The spider things are all around us. My visor says their some sort of robots, not youma. I don't know how well our powers will affect them! There is another signal just inside the trees. It looks like Tuxedo Mask is checking it out."
The fog continued to disperse, and the spider robots began to appear. Surrounded, the scouts moved into a back to back defensive circle. "We can't just do nothing!" replied Sailor Jupiter. "Jupiter THUNDER DRAGON!!!" The electrical creature formed and swooped down on the advancing menace. A pair of the spider-things were caught in the area of the attack. They stopped dead in their tracks, electricity arcing over their metal bodies. Then the electricity vanished, and the creations began to advance again. "This is NOT good...."
* * * * * * * * * *
'What the heck??' Wondered Star Ranger as Mercury's power obscured his view of the battle. <
>>THREAT DETECTION: 165r<< Star Ranger whirled and looked behind him. "You've GOT to be Kidding me," he exclaimed. On the branch of a tree stood a man in formal dress, a mask covering his eyes. "Who the heck are you?"
"I am Tuxedo Mask. And you are history for attacking my friends." 'This thing looks just like the picture Raye pointed out. Is she right?'
'Great. They think _I_ sent the spyders. This is not good.' Star Ranger dove to the side as Tuxedo Mask made a throwing motion. Three red and green blurs flew by, just missing him, and embedded themselves in a tree. 'ROSES?? THIS LUNATIC USES ROSES AS A WEAPON?!?!?! This place just moved up to a 10 on the Weird-o-meter!' Star Ranger threw up an arm and blocked a descending cane blow. The stranger in formal wear had used the moment of confusion to close to hand to hand range.
Hand to hand, the fight was a stalemate. Star Ranger couldn't connect with anything, but neither could his attacker. 'Damn. This is gonna hurt you more than it hurts me, stranger.' <
>>Target Disabled. Life signs detected but stable.<< 'Whew. I was worried for a second there! I don't know who you are, but your going to live.' Star Ranger turned and headed for the sounds of battle. <
Sailor Jupiter looked at the face of her enemy. The scouts had thrown everything they had at the metallic monsters, and had only succeeded in slowing them down. On the other hand, the things hadn't attacked them to this point. 'Uh oh... I bet they were waiting for us to use up our powers!' Now only a meter or so away, panels opened on the front of the robots and each deployed a wicked looking set of claws. Sailor Jupiter closed her eyes and concentrated on summoning enough power for one last desperate attack.
Across the circle, a worried Sailor Mercury pushed Sailor Moon into the center of the defensive circle. Aside from the instinctive desire to protect the moon princes, Sailor Moon had suddenly become hysterical that something had happened to Tuxedo Mask. In fact, Sailor Moon was all but comatose, in a state of standing shock. 'There has to be a way to beat these things! What am I missing??' Her attention was drawn to movement from the trees at the edge of the courtyard. 'Its that large signal I detected! It looks almost exactly like the picture Raye showed us!'
After a moment, though, Sailor Mercury realized that something was wrong here. First of all, the attacker was no larger than an average human. Most youma stood seven feet or more. Second, it was attacking the spider-robots, not the Sailor scouts. And ITS attacks seemed effective against the Spider-robots. The strange weapon in its hands fired blast after blast of laser energy. And no robot could withstand more than three of the blasts before being torn apart by a small internal explosion. The remaining spider-bots turned away from the scouts and charged this new threat, but were helpless before its weapon. One at the rear of the attack rolled itself into a ball that seemed impervious to the stranger's weapons. It waited for the firing to stop and began to flee the area.
"Oh no you don't," spoke the strange humanoid robot, its voice metallic and distorted. It shifted its weapon to its left hand and pointed its right arm at the fleeing spider-oid. A ball of electricity flew from the pod on its arm and struck the spider-oid, which let out a metallic wail and froze, every compartment on its body springing open. The humanoid started walking towards the intact spider-oid, while returning its weapon to its right hand.
"Evil Spirit, BEGONE!" Sailor Mars took the opportunity to cast an ofuda on the Humanoid robot. The 'Battleoid' stopped, but only because it turned around and was now looking at a very frightened and confused Sailor Mars.
"Spirit charms? Six feet of metal and mayhem and _YOU_ think I'm an evil freaking spirit?? I take it back. This place gets a freaking 12 on the weird-o-meter!" The battleoid was shaking its head as it regarded the Sailor Scouts. It pulled the Ofuda off of its arm and started walking towards the paralyzed spider-oid.
"What are you and what have you done with my Tuxedo Mask!" Sailor Moon had finally found her voice, but was still rather hysterical.
"If you mean a guy with an overly formal taste in clothes and a flower fixation, he's back in those trees over there. He seems to think that I'm a bad guy too. Only he didn't give me any options, so I had to spike him into a tree. I didn't kill him, but I could have. So consider that in your is he a Bad Guy equation." With that comment, the 'Battleoid' picked up the disabled spideroid and tucked it under its left arm. "But since you ladies seem fixated with names, you can call me Star Ranger." Blue flames burst from the nozzles of the pods on its back, and the Star Ranger was propelled 300 meters and over the wall of the temple, disappearing from sight. The sounds of people moaning all around them as they started to regain consciousness decided against any thought of pursuit.
* * * * * * * * * *
Tinkerer sighed as the telemetry signals from the last of his spyders went dead. 'Looks like those sailor pretties are better than I thought. I didn't get any more energy than our last attempt, and the sailors found a way to disable the spyders.' His hands flew across the keyboard of his computer as he reviewed the data. 'Interesting. The scouts didn't defeat the spyders. Something else did. This bears further investigation indeed.'
Cabelite teleported into the lab. "I see that your machines were no more successful than my youma. Since I don't see them here, its plain that they were destroyed. Your toys are worthless, Tinkerer."
Tinkerer gave the Negaverse general a cold look as he got up from his chair and crossed the room to another of his machines. "Maybe, and maybe not. Those toys, as you call them, were sophisticated intelligence gathering units. The information they recorded about their defeat should be most helpful."
"They were destroyed, _CRIPPLE_! Of what use could the shattered remains be?" taunted Cabelite.
"The knowledge of how the scouts defeated them will be of much more use to me than your contempt, Cabelite."
* * * * * * * * * *
Amy looked up from her computer and sighed. "These readings from those robots mean bad news for us. They seem to be shielded against our powers. Whoever built them has access to a technology that shouldn't be here. We couldn't have stopped them if that 'Star Ranger' hadn't interfered. "
"How do we know that this whole thing isn't a trick?" demanded the ever suspicious Raye.
"If that 'Star Ranger' thing created them, he wouldn't have had any reason to stop them from destroying us. And I doubt that he would go to the trouble of creating these things just to blow them up to get on our good side," replied Amy.
"It was quiet before Micheal moved in," observed Darien. "And now we have attacks by someone who has access to technology we have never seen before. We know Micheal has a computer that is at least one generation ahead of anything on the market now, and a car loaded with cutting edge electronics. He was at the sight of the last attack and vanished when this one started and hasn't been seen since. I think he bears watching."
"Whatever is going on, I don't think he is evil. If he was, Raye's ofuda should have done SOMETHING," observed Mina. "And he claims he could have killed Darien but he didn't. I think we are way out in the dugout here."
"Don't you mean left field?" corrected Amy.
"Whatever."
* * * * * * * * * *
"I wish you would tell me what it is about this thing that has you so worked up, Muck," FRED commented.
"How could you tell?"
"Your repeating yourself. You normally don't do that when your cursing."
"This spyder shouldn't _be_ here, FRED. I've seen these things before. They were a favorite toy of a person a fought once, went by the name of Tinkerer."
"Wasn't he the one you were trying to stop when the accident happened?" inquired FRED.
"Yes. I don't see how he could be _HERE_ though."
"Why not? Who says that only you got blown through the rift? Or that you two would wind up in the same place? We know someone brought us here; why couldn't it be to stop him?"
"That's an awful lot of trouble to go through to deal with a problem," Micheal observed.
"Those girls that the spyders were attacking weren't able to do much to them. I say thetas why we're here, to help those girls this morning handle this robot bug problem."
"Since you are so certain, lets do some digging FRED. We are looking for anything about teenage girls in short skirts fighting evil, and or Tinkerer. Physical Description of Tinkerer: Six Foot even, bout 250 pounds, Brown curly hair, brown eyes. Sort of a middle eastern complexion. Check newspaper archives, police records, anything you can get into."
* * * * * * * * *
Tinkerer scowled at the unmistakable image on the screen before him. He had found the remains of the spyders, but one was missing. Of the remaining eleven, only one had a recorder that had survived the damage. And even then the information was damaged. None the less, he had deciphered enough to tell that the spyders had fulfilled their design. The 'Sailor Scouts' had been unable to damage his spyders. 'But it's no wonder that you could. To you, my life was nothing more than a piece of trash to be collected and disposed of.' "I don't know how you found me, but this time it will be you who falls."
Tinkerer had not realized that he had spoken aloud until he heard Cabelite's voice behind him. "It appears, _cripple_, that the thought that I can do something that you cannot is driving you quite over the edge." The general's voice was full of scorn and contempt.
"We, general, have something far more important to worry about. Take a look at that monitor. It shows the face of our real enemy. One who is much more of a threat than those silly girls." The picture displayed struck Cabelite of a youma, for a moment. The arms and legs were square, the chest tapering to a conical lower torso. The head was an irregularly shaped box, with two antenna extended from protrusions where the ears would be. Two pods extended from its back, over the shoulder. Some sort of armored pod rested on the underside of each lower arm, and covered the lower leg as well. A green and black stripe ran across the chest, paralleling the lower edge of the chest. The pods were a matching shade of green, and a black visor covered the eye area of the head. Yet, this creature was made of metal, not negaflesh, nor had he ever seen a youma with that style of hip articulation. In its hands it held a large black device, its pistol grip marking it a weapon.
"How do you know this... _thing_?" inquired Cabelite.
"He and I have met before. In a very real sense, he is responsible for my presence here, as well as my present physical state. His presence here represents a definite threat to us."
"You sound as if you have a plan to deal with this... this.. thing."
"That thing has a name, General. It is called 'Star Ranger', and its quite possible that it's almost as intelligent as myself. I doubt that fact will help it against a youma, though... "
coming soon: Part 4: Secrets