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Angel, by Kristii
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Moral…Immoral…Amoral
Mortal…Immortal…Amortal
Angelique Hino is, if anything, the latter.
The Princess of Mars lost to history, she is the only Senshi
to escape the fate of the others, the only Senshi to live outside
the shadow of duty.
This is her story...
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Sailor Mars and affiliated characters (c) Naoko Takeuchi, with
the exception of Angelique Hino
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I am the Dark Angel.
There are two of us, actually; yin and yang, light and dark...
She is the nicer twin, you might say. Certainly, she is more popular
than I. Rich, pretty, famous, the darling of the press; scarcely a week
goes by without some magazine plastering her face across its cover...
And every one of those magazines finds its way to my office; I
keep a thick stack of them on hand at all times, leafing through the
pages in my moments of quiet--laughing at the irony...
For, God, what those editors wouldn't pay to see MY face across
those glossy pages! Not one of them has ever guessed, that even as they
splashed their pages with my sister's image, they are providing law
enforcement with my own much-coveted mug shot--a picture worth, as of
this morning, $1,000,000 to the FBI...
For as my sister's realm is light, her audience the public; so
I rule the shadows, by cover of the night. The same fuku that has
helped my sister through many a noble battle--that same fuku was the
key to my own success, the edge which allowed me, at nineteen, to
overcome five Mafia families; the edge which allowed me, at twenty, to
seize Gotham's terrible Triads...
It has been two years, since, but law-enforcement is still
muddled, unable to untangle the web of events that led to this sudden
usurpation of power, desperately trying to uncover the "man" at the
heart of the plot. They have tried everything-bribes, moles,
wiretaps-but it is all to no avail; after the trail of blood I left
behind me in my swift rise to power, not one man will turn against my
rule-especially not the few who have actually seen my visage...
They call me the Dark Angel, and I relish the irony.
But it was not always like this, you realize--in my earliest
years, few would have predicted that I would become the embodiment of
the Neo-New York Mafia; few would have guessed, even, that I could
rule with such an iron fist, so stern and harsh and cold...
I began life as the eldest daughter of one of the wealthiest
families in the world. My father held an important position in the
Japanese National Diet, while my mother, a beautiful Japanese
socialite, was sole heiress to the largest conglomerate on Earth...
I think I was happy then... I do not remember. My only memories
from that time are brief and blurry: playing with someone's long, silky
dark tresses, begin twirled around by a man... My father, perhaps? I
remember an apartment in Tokyo, large, airy, spacious... And of course,
my friends, my sister, playing, laughing, the tinkling sound of
innocent laughter filling the house...
And then the nightmare that would become my life began.
My mother had picked the two of us up from kindergarten that
day. We were turning five, both of us, and we had been promised a
party...
But my mother was not able to fulfill her promise. As we sped
down the lonely road that led to the outskirts of Tokyo and to our
country estate, we were pulled over by a police car. It contained no
officers, but two men, huge and ugly to five-year-old eyes, who pulled
us out of the car with guns to our mother's head and tore off our
skirts, telling us that if we behaved and followed their orders our
mother wouldn't die...
But they were drunk, and drunk men lie.
We lost our innocence that day. Our mother was gone, and our
father abandoned us... My sister was sent to live with my mother's
godfather, while I went to live with uncles in New York City...
I spent my childhood away from my family. That hardened me, I
think: I cared nothing about what other people thought of me, and even
less about being popular, or fitting in... And somehow, that made me
more popular: the beautiful girl who was so enigmatic and intelligent,
who some knew as the ice queen but nearly all admired...
But though I was at school halfway across the world from my
sister, I could still talk to her at any time. We had something between
us--I can't explain it, really, but it was like a telepathic link,
almost: we could talk to each other instantly, and without others
knowing... and so we kept each other updated on our lives, and shared
our hopes, our fears, our dreams...
And then, one day, when I was in middle school, my sister told
me of the girls she had met. Senshi, they called themselves, one from
each planet, destined to protect their leader, Sailor Moon...
That was when I remembered the past. My past. My sister and the
others had a different past, pasts that did but for a year coincide
with mine...
I was the Senshi of Fire. My sister and I were twins--the only
twins among the Royal Houses. But one queen, mother of the one we were
to protect, saw no use in having two Fire Senshi. And when we visited
the queen and her young daughter together, when I was but eight months
old, the daughter tried to take a toy from me. That sealed my fate: the
princess had been spoiled; no others would dare to withhold anything
form her, yet when she reached for my doll, I hit her and bit her and
wouldn't let go...
The queen was ready to kill me when she saw what had happened.
Her darling little girl, so beautiful and blonde and pure, had been
hurt by the little bitch from Mars. And so when, three months later,
the ruler of another race offered technology in exchange for something
else, her choice was obvious:
The eldest of Mars' twins, the Angel of Fire...
And so I spent my years as a concubine, a slave to the queen
who, in addition to putting up with the queen's wrath, was carried
each night, beginning when I was five, into the king's bedchamber,
where I would fight down waves of nausea as the giant, bloated blimp
of a man plunged into my body, destroying my innocence...
I learned early what power could do. And so I hid my disgust
and murmured words of pleasure into the king's ear, and rubbed his
back and did all kinds of degrading things... But my plan fulfilled
its purpose: soon, the king was seeing me exclusively, of his three
hundred seventy eight concubines, two thousand one hundred seventeen
slaves, and one queen.
And so, with murmured words into his ear late at night, I
managed to turn the king against the queen. At fourteen, my fire powers
finally developed to their fullest--I killed her in her bath, and the
king wrote down the cause of death as "struck by the Gods..."
I became the queen then, and when the king died without an
heir, I ascended to the throne... Three years I ruled, and then, when
I was eighteen, the queen who I had nearly forgotten teleported me to
her planet to die in battle--
--and had she but told me, I could have sent troops, men who
could have easily destroyed her attackers in one single blow...
And then I was reborn....
I began life as the eldest daughter of one of the wealthiest
families in the world. My father held an important position in the
Japanese National Diet, while my mother, a beautiful Japanese
socialite, was sole heiress to the largest conglomerate on Earth...
I was nothing once, a nobody who was thought of as a rich
airhead, who had no brains and no life and no intelligence... But I
showed the world how wrong they were, whether they know it or not: I
dropped out of sight years ago; rumors say I am dead, that I am crazy,
that I am a CIA agent... They do not know what I truly am: Sailor Mars
at fourteen, NYC crime boss at twenty, self-made billionaire at
twenty-one...
But still, there are days when I look at myself and wonder
just what, exactly, I have become. I have made myself a success, a
woman whose tale is whispered and rumored and made more legendary
every day... Yet though, by any standards, I have succeeded, I alone
know I have lost:
That day, when I was five, Angelique Hino died with her
mother. Something else, driven by hate and ambition, took her place--
sometimes, even I know not what...
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