Heyo! Welcome to Chapter 2 of GROWING UP: A SILVER MILLENNIUM SAGA! I'm so excited about this story! This is the first time I've been so excited since I first started writing! Anyway, let's move on and cut to the chase!
DISCLAIMER: I don't own Sailormoon and everyone knows it, so move on with your lives!
Growing Up: A Silver Millennium Saga
Rated PG for some comical, yet iffy interludes
Chapter 2: Mishaps
Last time we met…
"Well, we could do some exploring of our own," Makoto suggested.
"Nobody is going anywhere," a deep voice said from behind. The four girls spun around to see four tall, male figures blocking their path.
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Suddenly, Selenity felt a strong arm across her waist and the cold metal of a sword pressed against her neck.
"One move and your head is mine."
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Endymion held the dark figure still, not able to make out any features, or even a distinct body shape, save that he must not be a full grown man, for he felt light under his muscled arm; they stood completely in the shadow of the trees.
"Who are you to trespass on royal grounds at this time of night? Who sent you?" he asked, praying that he wouldn't be forced to harm this boy. Enemy or no, he was still one of his own people, and a scrawny little kid, at that.
"Talk!" he insisted when his captive made no movement, nor any sound.
"Please, sir, spare me! I meant no harm! I just wandered off from my companions…"
Endymion let the captive go at once. It wasn't a boy he held, but a woman! And probably an extremely shocked and frightened woman.
"Forgive me madam! I mistook you for a-" but he didn't have time to finish, because she fainted straightaway. He quickly caught her, and carried her to the clearing, where the moonlight shone, and he almost hit himself for being so stupid. Now that he saw in detail her beautiful face and figure, he wondered how he ever could have mistaken her for a boy.
"Great, just wonderful Endymion! Just insult the girl by mistaking her for a guy, and then top it all off by threatening her life and scaring the heck out of her. Smooth move…" he mumbled to himself. Then he sat down beside the woman, hoping she would come to soon.
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Kunzite stood with his fellow Generals and friends, blocking the path of the intruders before them. He could see only shadowy, skinny figures, and assumed the must be young boys in their early teens.
Then they spun around and stepped into the moonlight, and Kunzite felt as though a ton of bricks hit him square on the head.
"Um, Kunzite? They're girls…" Jadeite muttered into his ear.
"I kind of noticed!" he bit back, turning to face the young women.
"Ah, forgive us ladies, we…I…um…you see…"
"No, we don't see," said a girl with long blond hair and a beaded chain about her yellow short-skirted waist, stepping forward. Kunzite assumed this was the leader.
"Nobody threatens the ladies of the court of Selenity." The other three girls stepped forward to join the blonde one.
"Is that a challenge?" Jadeite called, the most hotheaded and brash of the Generals.
"Yes, it is," said a girl with raven-black hair, and wearing the same thing as the first girl, except the skirt and little sailor-thingy on her back was red, as was the bead on her bow. He realized that all the girls were wearing similar clothes, except with different colors.
"Listen lady, I really don't want to hurt you," Jadeite said, grinning mockingly.
"Trust me, you won't," she replied, narrowing her eyes.
"You insult me? Fine then! If it's a fight you want…"
"Jadeite, don't do it. I have a bad feeling," said Jadeite's closest friend, Nephrite.
"Shut up, Nephrite! She insulted me, and she'll pay!" He began to move in, but the girl stood stock still, with her eyes closed as if in meditation. She mumbled something, and then opened her eyes. For a fleeting moment, it seemed as though fire was reflected in her eyes. Then she thrust her hand forward, and a jet of flames shot out of her hand, and landed right on Jadeite's pants.
"Hey! That's not fair!" he cried, flapping around like a goose and trying to smother the fire by patting his butt repeatedly. Kunzite could see that Nephrite was suppressing a laugh, and said,
"I told you so."
"Yeah, well, if you're so tough, why don't you go and fight?" cried Jadeite, his voice squeaking with anger and embarrassment.
"Okay, I will," Nephrite answered, stepping forward. A tall girl with brown hair and bedecked in green stepped forward.
"I'll take this one, Rei," she volunteered, cracking her knuckles.
"All right, let's go," she challenged, positioning herself in a fighting stance. Nephrite came in low, apparently aiming to wind her with his head. It might've worked, if not for the fact that she grabbed his head, and, using brute strength, flipped him over onto his back, pinning him to the ground. Then, she, like the girl before her, closed her eyes, and said something that Kunzite could barely make out.
"I call upon the power of Jupiter. Aid me in my fight!"
Somehow, as if she were a human lightning rod, a flash of lightning came to her at her command. She thrust her hand toward Nephrite and gave him a shock, literally. She let him go, apparently satisfied, and Nephrite wobbled back to the group of men, looking a bit charred. Jadeite laughed harshly.
"Look who's tough now, big guy!"
"Oh, ha ha ha. You are so funny," Nephrite wheezed sarcastically.
"Hey now boys. I'll show you how to fight the real way. With strategy." Zoisite said, in a tone that suggested this was the simplest concept in the world.
"I'll show you how to fight the real way," Jadeite mocked in a pretty fair, yet high-pitched impression of Zoisite.
"Just watch." Zoisite stepped forward. "Who's going to face me?"
"I will," said a girl with short blue hair and a matching skirt. She could only be a Mercurian; they were the only known humans in the galaxy to have such exotic a look. Zoisite smiled.
"A Mercurian maiden. I hear your kind are very intelligent, but you won't outwit me," he said. The girl's eyes shot an icy glance of annoyance at the young General, but otherwise, her composure and expression remained the same calm, cool mask.
"I hope I'm not so little of a challenge," she replied, and Kunzite detected a note of mockery in her tone. Zoisite, clouded by his own arrogance, took her comment seriously, and said haughtily,
"Don't hold your breath." The Mercurian girl merely smiled, and held her hands to her chest, as if she was gathering something. Then she thrust her hands out, and a deep fog shrouded them all. Kunzite could hear Zoisite's surprised gasp. Then he heard a crumpling sound, and when the mist lifted, he could see Zoisite curled on the floor, unmoving. The blue-haired girl picked Zoisite up, set him on his feet, and, still holding him in one hand so he wouldn't fall, slapped him. Hard. Kunzite winced as the sound like the cracking of a whip reached his ears, and Zoisite woke with a cry like a baby being spanked.
Nephrite and Jadeite looked at each other, then back at Zoisite, and laughed heartily.
"Yeah, great showing us, Zoisite!"
"You really showed her!"
"Shut up, man! That hurt!" Zoisite cried, holding a hand to his cheek where the red finger marks still lingered. His two fellows only laughed harder.
"You get slapped by a girl and cry about it! You should be embarrassed!" Nephrite laughed.
"Well, I guess it's my turn," Kunzite said rather calmly, stepping forward.
"And mine," said the last of the girls, the one he had earlier established the leader. If the other Generals had been beaten so easily by the other girls, then this one should be the toughest, and he knew better than to underestimate her. But he smiled to himself, despite it all. He wasn't the leader of Endymion's Generals for nothing, and it was fitting that he should fight the leader of the opposite team.
"I really don't want to hurt or embarrass you in front of your friends, Madam," he started to say, trying to give her an upper hand. She may be a warrior, but she was still a girl, and it was a well known fact that men always surpassed the strength of women, if it came down to that.
"Funny, I was going to say the same exact thing to you," she retorted, grinning a little. Kunzite felt his blood boil a little at the rude comment. He was only trying to save her embarrassment, and this was how she responded? But he controlled his emotions and nodded his head slightly.
"As you wish," he answered as calm as ever, positioning himself in a quite average fighting stance; feet planted slightly apart and one in front of the other but firmly anchored into the ground, knees slightly bent, hands in guard position, covering the face and chest. He waited patiently for her to make the first move, but apparently she would have none of that, so he did instead.
He aimed some blows around her chest and torso in rapid succession. She blocked them all swiftly and almost effortlessly, not giving him a single opening anywhere. He continued his barrage, planning to wear her out quickly, as every woman he had ever met wore out just by climbing too many flights of stairs, and automatically assumed this frail-looking young lady could not be very different. He finally spotted a small breach in her defense, and threw a powerful roundhouse at her torso that would wind her and bring her to the ground.
That is, if it had worked.
Kunzite realized just a second too late that the breach in her defense was a fake one, for she moved as if she had completely expected the kick. She slid gracefully and artfully aside, making his kick go wide. That was when he realized that he had indeed underestimated her and that it would take a little more work to defeat her. He would have no mercy.
He aimed a hard punch at her belly, but she dodged that easily as well. For a moment they circled, and Kunzite came in on the offensive once more, aiming a number of parry-like kicks at various sensitive spots of the body, but none of them landed. Finally getting fed up and deciding to end this nonsense immediately, he feinted a cut the right, but swept his left leg low, planning to sweep her feet out from under her and pin her to the ground.
What she did next astounded him.
The girl moved swift as lightning but with the gracefulness of a cat as she completely back flipped, dodging the kick and landing some feet behind him. What happened next happened was so quick, he didn't see her pull anything out. But a chain was suddenly and tightly whipped around his wrist, and as she yanked it, she flipped him, shocked, onto his back, and sat almost on top of him, pinning the grown man's body to the ground with her knees. She leaned forward so that her face was extremely close to his and he could now see every detail in her stunning face. Some of her golden hair spilled silkily onto his face, but he couldn't do anything to push it out of the way. She smiled dazzlingly then said softly and with something of a mocking laugh in her tone,
"Thanks for the warm-up, ma'am," And promptly got off him. He tried to get up, but she had already pulled him up and pushed him into his other men so hard they all fell over. She blew a kiss at them in a very sarcastic and mocking way, then turned around, and all her women followed her out of the small clearing they had been fighting in, leaving the humiliated and humbled Generals behind to simmer in their own bitter emotions.
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"Oh, man, oh, man!" Endymion whined to himself. "Oh, mom's gonna kill me when she finds out what I did! She's always talking about not jumping to conclusions. But did I listen? Oh, no. Wittle Endo-kins has to go and act like a wittle heathen. Oh, by the gods, if I get out of this, I'll never do this again!" He sneaked a worried glance at the silver-haired young woman. When he saw no change however, he began pacing the small clearing in a very peculiar manner, more like skipping than walking.
"Oooooh, please get me out of this!" he whined once more at the sky.
"Get out of what?" replied a giggly voice. Endymion jumped and yelled, but instead of his voice coming out deep like it usually did, it squeaked. He turned around and saw that his young charge had propped herself onto her elbows, with her legs curling around to the right of her body in a kind of ladylike ball. Or at least, that's where Endymion thought they were. It was kind of hard to tell with all that … dress … going all over the place. He rushed over to the girl, jabbering all the way.
"You're up! Now, let me – "
"STOP!" the girl cried, obviously forgetting her light, giggly tone from just a moment ago, for her voice seemed to be edged with a diamond-hard command. Her face, just a second ago innocent and curious, now seemed hard and somewhat shielding, though just as beautiful. There was a somewhat hazy sheen to her eyes, which could only be tears that were threatening to form. The only time he had heard or seen something like that in women was at his mother's court. All those times, the woman had been either frightened or angry, or both. And what followed afterwards was never very pretty.
Endymion took a tentative step forward, only a foot away from the woman.
"STOOOOP!" she insisted, the tears that had been forming threatening to spill over. Now that he looked at her from closer up, he could see that there was something that glimmered on the bust of her dress, and he could see that it hung on a very fine chain. He was perplexed by the little jewel, and stared at it.
He noticed the direction and intensity of his gaze at the moment she did, and turned a very bright, and very comical had it not been under such awkward circumstances, shade of red.
"My mother told me about men like you!" she yelled in a high voice. "You see a pretty girl, threaten her with her life, act like you're an official or something and pretend that she did something wrong, and take her away to someplace isolated, then take advantage of her! Well, that's not going to happen to me, you … you … you fiend!"
"What!? No, it's not like that-" he protested, but it was too late.
"HEEEEEELP!" she screamed at the top of her lungs. "RAAAAA-"
"No, stop!" Endymion exclaimed, now very, very, red, trying to do anything to avoid both of them being embarrassed.
But it was too late, a strong arm grabbed him tightly, and he felt a muscular, yet female form pressing his back to herself to keep him from moving an inch. Three other women charged in, each yelling some sort of battle cry, two moving to block the woman who now held her dress tightly to the parts that the garb revealed, and one moving in a threatening position facing Endymion.
"Are you okay, Selenity?" they chorused, all shooting darts at Endymion with their eyes.
"Who dares to violate Her Highness, Heir to the throne of the Moon Kingdom and future ruler of all the planets in the reach of the Silver Millennium?" the woman that held him growled deeply.
Endymion, now tomato red, looked at all the warrior-women that were protecting the poor, misled girl. No, not a regular girl, a princess, and the princess to the most powerful kingdom known to man, no less. Not to mention the one he himself was supposed to be visiting on a diplomatic mission tomorrow. He took a good long look at the women he now realized were the Sailor Senshi, the legendary protectors of Princess Selenity, and possibly the most powerful fighters in the universe, second only to Selenity herself, and had only one thing to say:
"Oh, crap."
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Well, how did you like Chapter 2? Though I would add some comedy! As always, send me yours reviews! Ja ne, or for all you English speaking peoples, buh-bye!