THREE

I open my eyes. I'm on...floor? It's very cold, sickening cold. Ice. I look around. Icy cave. This can't be Dark Kingdom again, but it feels almost that way.

I curl myself up and then make myself sit and look around. Where are the others? I can't see anyone. I can barely see the walls of this place. I try the communicator on my wrist, what the phone turns into once we henshin so we don't have to carry it. Nothing but static as I expected. Well, the only thing for it is to keep walking, stick to the right side wall and hopefully I'll find something.

Before I start walking. I use some of my power to pull the ice up onto a sort of statue, something which forms a kind of arrow and has a crude Mercury symbol on the top. If someone else comes by, one of the senshi or Tuxedo Kamen, perhaps they'll realize what it meant and follow me.

I walk slowly, in case someone else does come. Listening like a hawk and also trying to sense, but all this evil snow/ice is screwing up my sense of it. We must really be in the midst of the worst of the evil snow, as Mars was talking...so, there's really not much I can do to use that sense to track anything down. I try to remember what I did, when Kunzite had been trying to possess Usagi-chan, to see if I can repeat that and track her down instead, but all I can find is a wall of buzzing evil, like hundreds of snowy flies are in my ears and eyes, so I stop, and just keep walking forward.

It's cold, even to me. To keep my mind off I start doing sums in my head. 88 is 16, 16+16 is 32 and so on. I'm up to 274877906944 when I reach a split in the passage, and I still haven't found anyone else. I can hear something though. The passage seems to have been moving up or at least back towards the park, because I can hear the sound of motors, and cars going very unsteadily across rails, buffetted. Cars being hit by large blocks of ice and snow, perhaps...I run towards that sound, the math forgotten and the cold as well, with the adrenaline surge.

I can see hazy daylight at the end of one of the passages when I hear someone shout and turn back. Jupiter is limping towards me, having come the other way up the passage it appears. She has a gash on her left leg, and I stop so that she can catch up with me.

"You didn't see anyone else?" she asks.

I shake my head, "None of the others, no more of the snow...zombie park patrons either.

Together we walk out into the hazy light. The area we emerge into is not as full of snow, most of the snow seems to be concentrated on one side, as if being blown by a strong wind. The noise I heard was one of Adventureland's roller coasters, which is on automatic, and still going around the track, every so many minutes, even though there is noone on it.

As we come out into the daylight, Venus, Moon and Kamen appear out of other passageways. All of us look at each other making a mental count. Mars is missing. We look around.

Moon spots her and points. There's a glass bubble, it reminds me of a snow globe, and she's inside. Frozen, unconcious, held splayed almost like a figure of Jesus on a crucifix, and it's filling with something, icy water, perhaps. Whatever it is the fluid is up to her knees, and moving quickly towards her head.

Venus throws out her chain but something around the bubble deflects it away before it makes contact. Jupiter is powering up to try a thunderbolt at it, and Venus is gearing up for a second blow, when a bright light fills the area in front of us, and we all take pause. The light coalesces into a humanoid shape, slim, female, made of ice. She has perfect round breasts, no nipples, like a glass statue, except she moves. For a moment as she forms, her face is equally smooth, except for spiked hair forming behind her head, from about where ears would be if she had any, and then on out, like one of those sun carvings in one of the other park areas.

Then as the last of the light disappears from inside her body structure, eyes roll open in her head, and a crack appears below in her chin area that opens into a mouth. When she laughs it sounds like glass breaking.

"That stays where is," she says, in fractured Japanese pointing to Mars in the bubble, "No freedom. You," she points towards us, as we stand dumbfounded, "why you not fall to Kaguya as others did?"

"Why are you doing this?" Moon demands, ignoring the question, "Why are you hurting all of these people? What did they ever do to you?"

She either doesn't care or doesn't understand, "No matter. You oppose this. Die!" and a blast of negative ice energy issues from both her hands as she sweeps them and from her body and back.

I'm tempted to think she's screwed up, because I don't feel anything hit me, but then I realize the energy wasn't meant to hit us. In front of us has formed a good battallion of creatures which are almost like her, slightly trimmer, slightly smaller, more our size, and all laughing, as they start to spin, their icy hands forming into cruel talons as they launch themselves at us.