Sailor Moon Aeons.
Book 2: Rebirth.
Act 9: Fantastic Voyage.
Episode 126: Altered Reality.

By Razor Knight
Last update: January 3, 2017
Last edited: June 15, 2017

Ami had to admit she was surprised. While teleportation wasn't something new to her - it was something they already used to move around the city - it was something she thought normal humans wouldn't have access to for decades, at least. When Terry had told her to meet him at the mansion, she hadn't imagined she would see a teleportation device there. Of course, the device, or rather, devices, needed mana to work. But they were small, portable, made to look like normal wrist watches. "Were they tested?"

"Dad phased from our Peking labs to here. It's close to the limit they can handle now, but dad is already thinking about its applications. Imagine being able to send people to the Moon without wasting money on shuttles, and without generating any pollution."

"They could have... Harmful uses."

"Yes, but as it is right now, it's too expensive, and the batteries need days to recharge."

"I don't think you would tell me to come here just to see that device."

"That's right. Want to test them out?"

Ami looked at the devices. Sure, she could teleport whenever she wanted, but still, she was curious. Would it feel any different than that? "Let's give it a try."

Terry smiled. "Here, just put this on, I already have it set with the coordinates of the dojo." He gave Ami one of the devices, and took the other one. "Ready?"

Ami nodded, but then the sound of thunder was heard. "It's gonna rain."

"There were no clouds at all minutes ago," Terry commented. "Maybe one day we can try and create a machine that controls weather."

"Sounds like a plan. So..."

"Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts. We're about to take off." Ami rolled her eyes at him as they both vanished.

It was said that coincidences happened a lot around the Senshi, and that was proven right once again. Just as Terry activated the teleporters, a lightning bolt struck the mansion, giving Samuel, Terry's butler, something to do on that quiet Saturday afternoon, as several of the "robot maids" had their circuits fried by it.

Terry looked around in shock. They should have appeared inside the dojo, but they were... Elsewhere. "What the hell happened here?"

Ami had wasted no time wondering, and had summoned her glove, typing wildly into it. "On it."

Terry knew she was using her glove also as a distraction, and couldn't blame her. The landscape was familiar, in a horrifying way. The buildings around them were wrecked, but he recognized what was left of them. He could see Ami's building, though there was nothing but two walls and a wrecked elevator there. He could also see dozens of skeletons around. Some of them were evem pinned to the partially demolished walls, and there was even a few still sitting inside the charred remains of cars and trucks. "This is... Tell me I'm wrong, please."

Ami cursed under her breath. "I knew it. Stupid things, stupid storm..."

"Ami, calm down."

"Yeah, calming down will fix everything. You and this stupid device-"

"That's not like you. Can I at least know what the hell happened to make you look at me that way?"

She blinked at that. She just couldn't stay mad at him, specially not when she was blaming him for something he could never had foreseen. "Sorry, I just..."

"I understand, I'm also worried sick. Know what's going on?"

"This is Tokyo, but not our Tokyo. This is... I guess at some point in time, things went very wrong."

"So, we jumped to a different universe?"

"Yeah. So all we need to do is go back to-" Ami stopped as Terry laughed. There was something wrong in that laughter. "Terry?"

"Know what, hate me if you want, I should have known... Damn it, this is just wrong."

"Guess it's my turn to say 'calm down.'"

Terry showed her his 'watch' and Ami saw there was an extra set of coordinates in it, and they all kept on changing every few seconds. "A strong electric discharge messed up with its program. Since it wasn't designed to jump to other universes, it doesn't have the 'coordinates' of our starting universe."

"So you're telling me we'll have to jump blindly and hope we get to the right reality?"

"Sorry. And since this has to recharge, we could end up spending days in an unknowm land."

"I get it. depending on how close the next universe is, the battery will be drained differently."

"Yeah. It'll be a couple minutes before we can jump again."

"Good," Ami said. She took another look around. She could even see the school, in the distance, and it looked quite totalled. "What could have happened in here?"

"Something powerful did this, and I hope we don't find out what or who it was the hard way."

"Maybe it wasn't magical. Perhaps in this reality, Senshi never existed."

"If it was a nuke, then it must have happened centuries ago."

An ocean away from there, a couple figures were scavenging for supplies. They knew it was risky, but they needed food and water. If their enemies found them, they would fight them. After all, normal monsters were no match for them, it was the Queen they had to worry about.

But said Queen saw them as a nuisance, a relic of a war she had won, remnants of a destiny that would not come to pass.

Still, they were growing tired of just surviving. Their friends would be disappointed at them if they saw them, two warriors reduced to dirty, thin figures, scavenging what was left of a city once known as New York for food and water.

"Hey there, tasty," one of th said as she checked a scorched fridge. "Look what I found!"

The other woman stared at the small package and smiled. "So we eat burgers tonight."

"Or whatever is left after I'm done scorching them."

The other woman tensed and looked to the west. "This has to be wrong."

"What?"

"Computer's picking activity in Tokyo. Two very powerful entities. Guardian Senshi."

"No fucking way. Let's go check it out."

"We need to be careful. Maybe they're alien Senshi."

"Well, we won't know until we meet them."

"The watch is ready to go."

Ami nodded. "Let's get the hell out of here, then. "

"My thoughts exactly," Terry said, and they both vanished.

The two figures walked to where the two 'visitors' had been, both lost for words. "That was..."

"I know, Rei. That was me. And Terry."

"Ami, how the hell is that possible?"

"Crazy as it may sound, they're probably from another reality. One where things did work."

"Well, they're gone now."

Sailor Mercury checked her visor. "But they left us a gift, in a way. I knew I had seen those watches they had somewhere.. Zephyr Robotics had an abandoned project, a teleporter. Wasn't viable because of how much electricity it would require."

"So how-"

"They must have borrowed that idea and modified it to enable travels outside their reality." She saw her friend was quite confused. "It's simple-"

"Keep the science to yourself, just tell me, could you build a couple of those?"

"I've scanned them. With that and the teleporter project's blueprints, I could build a few of them. In theory."

"Here's what I think. Those two, their world might still have a full set of Senshi. A Sailor Moon."

Mwrcury nodded. "That's a possibility we can't pass. If they already beat that bitch in their world, they might be able to do it here as well."

First thing Terry noticed was, there was a road close to them. No, a racetrack, he realized as he saw several cars racing by.

Ami recognized one of the drivers. "Was that... Sonic?"

Terry nodded slowly. "Sonic. Driving a car that's slower than him. That makes a whole lot of sense to me."

Ami sighed. "So, we went from a nightmarish version of our world, to what seems like a hallucinogen-induced bad dream about Sonic driving a racing car."

"That pretty much sums it up. Good news is, the watch only needs a minute or so to charge up."

The cars zoomed by again, and Ami saw it wasn't just Sonic and his friends (and foes,) there were characters from other games there as well. "Good, let's leave before we see Mario shooting at monsters with a water gun."

"... You've been talking to Chie and Umino too much."

Ami chuckled. "Nah, I just had a horrible teacher when it comes to comedy."

"Ouch."

"Where the heck are we now?"

Ami wasn't sure they were even on Earth. The landscape was strange, they were in a dense forest, but fifty meters to the west there was a snowy field. Looking south she could see a desert, and to the east there was... Burnt trees, blackened ground, wrecked buildings. "How's the device?"

"A couple hours to charge up."

"We could just sit here and wait, or we could try and see what-" Ami trailed off as she saw a dog approaching. It was a large dog, but that wasn't what worried her. She could see the animal's ribs through a fist-sized hole on its side. Her visor was telling her what she could have easily guessed. "That dog... It's not alive."

"A zombie dog? And here I was about to tell it to play dead."

Ami shook her head at that, then shot an ice blast at the creature, which was frozen solid by it. "Guess that answers my question. Let's explore and find out what's going on here."

Terry nodded. "I see a small town a few miles to the south."

"Let's see if we can find information, from either the living, or the dead."

Five dead zombies later, they reached the town. They knew upon arriving that it would be unlikely anyone was still around, as there were dozens of undead around. There were boarded houses, but no signs of anyone there. "Hey look, triplets."

Ami sighed at Terry's attempt at comedy. Still, he had a point, zombies seemed to have five or six different 'types,' and all zombies of one type looked the exact same, like the three obese zombies shambling towards them, all wearing the exact same black tank top and sporting the same open, rotting wound where their right eye should be. "We're in a game, aren't we?"

"That would be the only logical explanation for all the weirdness we're seeing."

"So I suppose that theory I heard was right. Maybe imagination is just the ability to see other dimensions, and all stories and games actually exist as separate realities."

"You know I love how smart you are but right now, there's zombies all around us."

"I'm aware of that." Ami mentally summoned a technique she seldom used anymore. In a blink, the whole town was covered by a thick, cold mist. The undead around stopped and growled, their senses confused by the mist. "There."

"Nice. Let's explore a bit more, maybe-" Terry looked east and frowned. "Is that a house?"

Ami could see what he meant. There was a building there, but different enough to the town's houses to know it hadn't originally been part of it. As the two walked to it, they noticed there was a moat all around it, filled with large metal spikes in various degrees of disrepair. There were also dozens of corpses down there. "Anti-zombie security system, I guess?" Terry commented.

A large metal drawbridge was the only way in, and it was raised. The rest of the inner 'wall' was seemingly made of steel bars. "That would keep any normal humans out too," Ami said. "Good thing we're not normal," she added from inside.

Terry phased inside and smiled. "Someone must have built this place to be able to have some zombie-free time. Must have taken them weeks, though."

Ami nodded as Terry opened the door. She them yelped in surprise as something exploded under his feet. "Terry!"

Terry was glad his normal form was several magnitudes tougher than normal humans. Still, while not hurt physically, the small mine had hurt his pride a bit. "Making a mine out of a tin can... Whoever lived here was crafty."

Ami walked in, scanning the floor with her eyes. She saw no more mines, but there was a piece of paper on top of a wooden chest. She picked up and read it first, then gave it to Terry.

'If you're reading this, you're either good enough to get in alive, or lucky. In either case, you're free to use this house for as long as you want. I sucked this town and the surrounding area out of resources. It's time for me to move on. If you're brave, or foolish enough, take the road west of here. Maybe you'll find me along the way - hopefully still alive. Enjoy my old base either way, I'm not going back there. Oh, name's Jim, by the way. See you on the road to survival."

Terry looked around the building. There was some sort of workbench, a forge and what looked like a distillery. No other furniture could be seen, besides the burnt out candles on the walls and a dozen chests, all empty. Outside the building, there was a small field with dead crops. "That guy had quite the fortress here."

As they phased out of the 'house,' Ami looked back to it. "I can't believe one single man could build all this."

"Maybe he had help, but the others weren't as lucky, or skilled, as he is."

"We could go west and ask him, or-" Ami stopped as she saw someone walking to them. It was easy to guess the girl was a zombie, but her looks were different. She was wearing a dirty, white dress and had stringy, long black hair covering her eyes. As she got close to them, she started screaming, and zombies rose from the ground behind her. "That's a new one."

"That's a dead one," Terry said.

Ami wasn't too surprised at what followed. Terry used his swords to swiftly cut every zombie's head off. "So much for boss monsters."

"Yeah." He looked at his watch and nodded. "We're ready to jump."

"Wonder what we'll see next..."

"Hopefully, our own universe," Terry said before activating the teleporters.

It didn't take them long to realize the universe they had jumped to wasn't their own. They could see hundreds of soldiers around the area, and much like the zombies in the last one, there were few 'types' of them. Terry saw a couple taller men amongst the clashing armies and smiled. "Oh wow, I know this one."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Ever heard of the 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms?' story? Well, if this is the game I think it is, then it's like that, but with the story's important characters turned into superhumans."

"Sounds interesting," Ami said, then realized a group of soldiers was heading their way. "I wonder, though... Won't interacting with people from other realities alter their history?"

"Remind me to ask Setsuna about it after we're done shouting at her for not warning us about this whole mess."

"Sounds like a plan."

A/N: Yes, I don't hold any 'spin-off' of classic game sagas in high regards. (Mary) Sue me.

In case anyone's wondering, second universe was 'Sonic & Sega All-Star Racing' and third was '7 Days to Die' a game I've spent hundreds of hours playing the last two years. Last one is the Dynasty Warriors saga. Will there be universes based on things other than games? Quite probably.