Old priest Hino shuddered as he looked up from the sacred fire. For a moment, it seemed to him as if something was wrong... that he should be worried about his beloved temple's safety.
He looked outside, at the small statue that was standing next to the entrance. It was an ornate figurine, showing a dog-like creature with a fierce visage, but nevertheless a noble appearance.
"Lord Shisa..." the old priest murmured. "Continue to protect this place and your servants..."
He then sighed and stood up from the ground. He winced when his old bones were creaking. "I'm not as old as I used to be..." he murmured. "If something happens to the temple, I wouldn't know what to do with my life... so I guess I should try to find someone who could help me with my work. Someone young..." He smiled to himself. "A young heir, yes, I like the sound of that... a young man... my granddaughter would also like that, I'm sure..."
He suddenly stopped and gave himself a light slap in the face. "What am I talking about?" he muttered. "I don't have a granddaughter..."
Setsuna shook her head as she continued to look through the Gates of Time. She could see that there were faint traces of memory in the heads of the Senshi's former relatives, even though they were born as kaiju in this new timeline.
"This has to stop!" she told herself. "Ami and Makoto might still be humans, but who knows for how long? Hotaru had been born a human in this new screwed-up world as well, and see what became of her... at this rate, there won't be any human Senshi left. And I don't even know what happened to Haruka and Michiru yet..."
But when she searched for the Senshis of Neptune and Uranus, she let out a strangled squeak when she found out where the spirit of one of them had ended up in.
"ANOTHER resident of Monster Island? Oh, that's it... I will go down there and fix things, right now!"
She would at least have to make sure that Hotaru wouldn't be turned into Destroyah. Normally, she hated it if she had to intervene into the flow of time this directly, but she saw no other way. She would have to go back to the point before Prof. Tomoe tried out the Oxygen Destroyer on her.
So she took her Garnet Rod and stepped through the Gates of Time...
But something went wrong. Call it an intervention of fate, call it a misfunction of the Gates of Time... for some reason, it didn't send Setsuna back in time, but instead transported her to another place, to the Pacific Ocean... to some cliffs that were close to the island of Japan, to be exact.
Shortly before Setsuna's arrival, however, there was another creature that had appeared on that cliff.
It was dark, creepy and disgusting. The slimy creature reached over the edge of the cliff and pulled the rest of its body upwards.
The last thing that Hedorah's primitive mind remembered was incredible pain, when Godzilla had blasted its body into pieces. Afterwards, everyone had believed the sludge monster to be dead, destroyed... but it actually survived. Using its regenerative abilities, it had managed to pull together some of its body's remains to form a much smaller, but still humanoid body that resembled its final form in appearance.
Still, because it had lost just too much of its body mass, its intelligence was even further reduced... and its IQ had never been very high to begin with. So while the pathetic remains of Hedorah knew that it had to survive, it couldn't even remember that it had fought against Godzilla. All it knew was that it had to find some additional bio-mass it could add to its body...
It was distracted from its sluggish thoughts when in a flash of light, a fuku-clad woman appeared nearby. Hedorah couldn't tell that this creature was a human, or that humans normally weren't supposed to be able to appear out of thin air like that. It only knew that there was compatible bio-mass nearby, and that it could use this to expand its body. So it slowly crawled behind a rock, preparing to pounce...
Sailor Pluto looked around in confusion. "What... what happened? This isn't the lab of Professor Tomoe... did the Gates of Time malfunction? Impossible! This wasn't supposed to happen..."
She saw the movement in the corner of her eyes, but barely had time to react. When the dark, humanoid blob of ooze leapt at her, she could only raise her staff... but the goopy form of Hedorah melted right through her staff and covered Setsuna's firm and supple body with a thick layer of slime.
"Ewww, yuck, that's disgusting!" the guardian of time said as she flailed around, trying to get the smog monster's slime off her body. "Get off, you monster!"
But even if Hedorah understood the human language, it wouldn't have listened to her. He could feel the warmth of her body and knew that he had to assimilate her bio mass to his body, where it would dissolve and adding more slime to his own mass.
Setsuna tried shooting a Dead Scream, but the powerful grip of the kaiju pulled the Garnet Rod out of her hands. She tried to scream, but then the slime covered her mouth and slowly began to crawl upwards. Finally, the heavy weight of the slimy monster became to much, and the Senshi of Time collapsed under all the sludge and slime. Hedorah continued to crawl over her, until all of her body was covered with it.
For a while, they were just laying there. No sound was heard. From outside, they were just looking like a twitching pile of goo, with nothing remotely human about it.
Finally, the oozy mass began to stir. The pile of slime slowly stretched itself, forming an arm, then a leg, and in the end, it pulled itself up into a humanoid form.
A shapely, female, humanoid form... a form that resembled Setsuna Meioh.
Neither Pluto nor Hedorah could have anticipated this, but the Sailor Magic within Setsuna's body had caused an unusual reaction, merging their bodies without actually destroying Setsuna in the process. It was now Hedorah's feeble little mind that was absorbed in her own, but it was Hedorah's slime that made up 97% of her body mass. She was still able to assume a form that resembled her old, human body, but she could change shape easily as an amoeba.
The only thing on her body that was not made of the grayish sludge were her red, glowing eyes and a likewise red-glowing stone on her forehead... right where her tiara used to be.
Hedorah-Pluto tried to stand up, but the first few times, her slimy legs always collapsed under the weight of her body, since she wasn't used to control her formless body. In the end, she managed to gather enough willpower to at least pull herself into a sitting position.
Looking down at her gray, slimy form, Setsuna wasn't able to bring out any coherent word for some time.
When her mouth finally opened, the first thing she said was: "Well, f*ck!!"
The Senshi of Time swore for a couple of minutes, before she was out of breath. "This isn't good, this isn't good..." she mumbled to herself, all to keep herself from panicking. "Surely this can be reversed... I wasn't born as a kaiju, after all. Maybe Sailor Moon's Moon Rod can heal me... maybe I can go back in time and stop my former self from coming here... even though I hope she won't attack me... still, it's worth a try!"
She then realized that she wasn't in her Senshi getup anymore. "Hopefully I can still turn back..." she mumbled. She then fumbled around her waist, until she remembered that she didn't have any clothes or pockets anymore.
Okay, her fuku didn't have any pockets in the first place, but still...
"My transformation pen..." she gasped. "Where... where did it go? WHERE'S MY PEN? Okay, Okay, don't panic, Pluto... it's all right! You can do this! Maybe there's a spare pen at the gates of time. I only need to go back with my Garnet Rod and..."
But there also was no trace of her Garnet Rod either.
"GAH! This can't be happening! How can a pile of sludge annul a Senshi's power? It's unheard of! The power must have gone SOMEWHERE! It must have caused SOME sort of reaction!"
Upon saying that, she felt a soft gurgle coming up from her belly... or at least that part of her body where her belly used to be. The gurgling became stronger and louder, and Setsuna had a sinking feeling wandering through her body.
No... make that a stretching feeling. A feeling as if someone would take her legs and arms and pull with all his might.
"What... what's going on here?" she gasped.
She couldn't know that she had been right about one thing: Her Senshi magic did not just vanish, it was just dormant. Still, it had to go somewhere, and it did have some aftereffects: In this case, it accelerated Hedorah's biological clock, and magically added even more mass to her slimy body.
Setsuna groaned when she noticed that she was growing bigger by the second. Soon enough, she was big enough that the cliff she had been standing on wasn't much bigger than a stool for her, and her drippy legs dangled over its edge, almost touching the ocean water down below.
"Oh nonononono..." Setsuna muttered as her body slowly slid off the rock. "Not any bigger, please not any bigger..."
But it was no use, her size increased, and her slimy butt slid completely off, leaving behind a cliff that was almost entirely covered with the greyish-green sludge. Setsuna gasped when she fell into the ocean... and her eyes widened even more when she realized that she was tall enough to stand in the water... and her chest was even sticking out of the water surface. And she was growing even further.
Setsuna clutched her head, ignoring the squishy feelings it caused. "I knew I should have stayed in bed this morning..."
Finally, when Setsuna had reached full kaiju size, the growing stopped, and the water only reached up to her hip.
Setsuna looked over to the mainland. Previously, she would have needed a boat to safely get across... but now, all she had to do was to take two big steps to get on dry land. She didn't like to drag yet another giant monster onto Japan, but she couldn't stay here in the water. She'd surely catch a cold. And as long as she couldn't go back to the Gates of Time, this was her only option.
"I just need to stay away from any towns and villages," she sighed. "It's not like I want to go on a rampage or anything... I might be big and deadly now, but I'm harmless. That's right, I'm a harmless kaiju! I'm sophisticated!"
She took two steps and stepped onto the mainland. The beach (which wasn't a public beach OR a holiday resort, thank goodness) wasn't much more than an elongated sand bin to her now. Only one more step, and she reached the trees of an idyllic forest.
Setsuna sighed when she saw the trees. "Well, this looks like a nice place to rest and think about my next steps..."
But when she took one step into the trees, the oozy mucus from her legs dripped down, onto the trees... and dissolved them into sludge, within a matter of seconds.
Setsuna stared at the black spot which was all that remained from the majestic trees. "I... I didn't mean to..."
She winced when a flock of bird was flying out of the forest (the part that was still intact, that it). Upon seeing the giant kaiju, they were feeing in a panic.
As soon as they flew past Setsuna, the horrible, poisonous stench of Hedorah touched their delicate organs of smell, and they fell plummeted down to the ground, dead within seconds.
Setsuna was horror-stricken at that display of her deadliness. 'Oh no... I'm deadly to any living creature... I can't even get near them...'
Frantically, she looked around, but the spot on which she had entered the mainland was covered entirely by forests... she would have to wade through the trees to reach an area that was not as covered with plant life. She would leave a horrible trench of destruction in her wake.
Just when she thought her situation couldn't get any worse, she heard the sound of jet engines, and a cadre of military jets came flying towards her. They were part of the JSDF forces that were assigned to patrol the Japanese coastlines, in case Destroyah would return to the mainland. But now they witnessed the destruction of an entirely different kaiju.
"See that?" one of the pilots called the others. "That giant monster... it's Hedorah!"
"But... Hedorah was destroyed, wasn't it?" an other pilot asked. "And this kaiju looks kinda different..."
"It's still Hedorah, I would recognize that icky slime anywhere!" a seasoned veteran told his companions. "Prepare your guns, guys... we'll show that menace that it's not welcome in Japan! Maybe we can drive it back, into the ocean..."
"Roger, sir!" the other pilots replied, and the jets nosedived at the shocked form of Setsuna.
She winced when she felt the gunfire sting into her body. Most pellets harmlessly flew right through her slime, but it still stung like thousand tiny needles.
"No!" she shouted. "You've got it all wrong... I don't want to hurt anyone!"
"Aim for her eyes, boys!" the cadre leader commanded. "That's its weak point!"
The jets circled Setsuna like a flock of condors, and she ducked underneath their fire. She knew she couldn't endure this pain for forever... but she didn't want to hurt the soldiers either.
So she did the only thing she could do: She turned around and fled, running right through the forest. And just as she had predicted, her deadly sludge left a trail of death behind.
"She's on the run, sir!" one of the pilots said. "She's too fast for us... what shall we do?"
"Inform HQ," the leader told his men. "We need to tell Commander Ikari that yet another menace has returned." He grimly looked down at the black morass that had once been a beautiful forest. "This monster... is the most horrible abomination of them all!"
Setsuna, meanwhile, had run until she left the forest behind. She felt like crying, but she had no tear glands. She looked back at the destruction she caused and covered her eyes with her hands.
'It's no use... I can't return to the Gates of Time... I can't go close to anything human... I can't even ask Sailor Moon for help... I am damned to spend my life in exile, in a desolate area where nothing grows and lives... only there can I stay without causing any destruction.'
She was standing at the edge of a rocky plain, close to the mountains. Only a couple of trees were growing here and there, and there was no trace of any animal life.
Setsuna sat down on the ground, pulled her legs close to her body and hung down her head. 'I may as well stay here and wait until I starve to death...'
But even here, Setsuna was not safe. Her deadly mucus was slowly seeping into the earth as she sat there, until it hit something that was hibernating there... another ancient creature of earth that was rudely awakened by the stinging pain Setsuna's slime caused on its hide.
Setsuna gasped when the earth beneath her began to shake. The ground itself erupted and spat out a kaiju that was not as big as Godzilla, but nevertheless fearsome. It was a giant, four-legged reptile with a pair of huge ears and a single horn on its head.
It roared at the intruder that dared to disturb its sleep, but in Setsuna's head, the growls transformed into words: "Who dares hurting me? You looking for trouble, buddy? You're SO gonna get it now..."
"Now hold on there... I didn't mean to..." Setsuna pleaded, even though she was surprised that she was able to understand kaiju language. "Look, I'm sorry... I just wanna stay here and..."
"Too late for that now!" Baragon growled. "This is MY territory, and a big, walking pile of goo like yourself is not welcome here!" The reptile opened its muzzle and fired a beam of searing heat at the female smog monster.
Setsuna cried out when Baragon's breath weapon singed her arm. This was much worse than the stinging pain caused by the military jets. She jumped to her feet and nervously backed off. "Please, I don't want to hurt you..."
"Oh yeah? Well, if you don't fight back, it's going to make winning all the easier."
Setsuna nervously awaited her opponent's next move. She would have fled, but that would bring her presence back into areas where she could endanger humans. And if she had to choose between killing one kaiju or hundreds of humans, she would choose the former. She didn't like it, since Baragon was a creature of Earth, after all... but the stubborn kaiju left her no choice.
'This REALLY isn't my day...' she thought.