Shadow of the Sun: The Dark Side of the Moon

by Almech Alfarion

While the Nobility of the Moon Kingdom and a select few elites among society sit in luxury, the rest of the people live in poverty and fear of their masters. All things change in time however, and a pair of orphans on the streets are the key...

3. Chapter II: Setting Things in Motion

Legal Stuff

1) The Characters and Stories of Ranma ½ and Sailor Moon are Copyright © Rumiko Takahashi and Naoko Takeuchi respectively, and are used here without permission or license.

2) No claims to the above copyrights are made by the author of this work.

3) This is a work written for non-commercial use ONLY, and is not to be reproduced.

4) This work is the expression of the author, and the depictions of the characters of Ranma ½ and Sailor Moon herein are in no way represented to be a part of Ranma ½ or Sailor Moon as depicted by the original authors and copyright holders.

Beginning Notes: Wow... Long time no see? As the announcement "chapter" said, I'm still working on these, and here is the continuation of Shadow of the Sun: Dark Side of the Moon.

Ok, so there's been a little rearranging of the chapter formats here and because I had nothing better to do I've also gone over and rewritten some small parts of the previous chapters. Nothing major, like the overhaul I did on (the now) chapter 1, but I did update some of the dialogue and rough areas to help fix spelling and some inconsistencies I found and to just clean them up a little in general... It shouldn't affect the overall story, so it's still going the same place as it was before.

Thanks go out to Wyrd42, Torgamous and CaedesPlerique for their input and advice on the storyline and plot in general. I still don't have a pre-reader for this story but all the help they have given me (and being patient whenever I went on a tangent about one thing or another) has helped the direction of where I want this series to go in the long run along greatly from where I started at.

(V. 2.15)

The Dark Side of the Moon

By: Almech Alfarion (Child of Fire)

Chapter II: Setting Things in Motion

-o-o-o-o-o-

A woman sat silently behind her desk as she observed the four figures arrayed around the arcing table in front of her. From what could be seen by the only lighting in the room, provided by a softly glowing crescent moon insignia inscribed on the floor in the intervening space, there was clearly enough room for several more occupants further around the table. As it stood, the lighting only provided enough illumination to reveal that the figures arrayed before her were all female. Finally the woman behind the desk broke the silence.

"Report."

A bright shaft light flashed into existence around the figure to the far right revealing a severe looking woman with piercing blue eyes that looked to be in her mid thirties. She was dressed conservatively in a blue suit with her almost neon-blue hair done up into a tight bun. The only jewelry on her person was a lapel pin shaped as the crest of Mercury, "Initial readings from before the unknown mages from the incident were able to mask their output coincide with reports from that fiasco at Neptune's Naval Yards a year ago and the raid on a suspected dissenter safe-house in Athena five months later. Also, our preliminary investigations into the know assassination attempt on King Endymion XXIV have been all but stonewalled by Terra's government citing clauses from our neutrality treaty. The only leads we have are from the bodies recovered from the nearest bathroom to the ballroom discovered by patrols when looking for the interlopers. Initial reports of said bodies say they bore matching identifiers to the captured assassin and initial screens indicate some sort of toxin designed to force massive internal hemorrhaging, beginning with the digestive track to cause the victim to mimic symptoms of severe indigestion. It could have been anyone in the ballroom and people as apparently skilled and well equipped as these would no doubt have… neglected… to sign the 'guestbook'. However, such drugs are rare and highly controlled for obvious reason. We're working on tracking down where they may have gotten their hands on them." She intoned in a cold, controlled voice.

The light shut off abruptly and another beam sprang around the next occupant down revealing a seemingly young lady of refined stature wearing a daring orange patterned dress with a gold chain pendant around her neck and the symbol for Venus situated comfortably between her generous assets while silver pins held back her long mane of gold hair. Her own pair of dark blue eyes held a sparkle of amusement as she spoke, "The Media Department is taking the story we gave them in stride and I'm told that popular acceptance shouldn't be an issue. The interlopers appeared unannounced, and clearly armed, to a gathering meant to celebrate 'peace'… It won't take much for the populace to ostracize them and whatever 'cause' they may represent." Her voice had its own slight, amused, ring to it as it reverberated off the walls.

Again the light moved to the next occupant. Her face was hard with dark, almost black, violet eyes and close cropped black hair. The refined features of her figure couldn't hide that she was in extremely good shape despite being hidden by a grey dress uniform with several pins attached to her left breast, above which sat a stitched patch in the shape of Mars' crest. "Armed forces are on standby system-wide. Port-authorities are on high alert for suspicious personnel and patrols have been doubled and informed to look for ships in places there shouldn't be any… though, to be honest, as Mrs. Kreia said, they are well trained and appear to have substantial financial backing, so it wouldn't be without reason that, in the likelihood that they should be in possession of a ship, that it have at the least some stealth capabilities…" came the crisp report.

The next woman to be revealed by the light was clearly the eldest of the gathered individuals and held herself with an air of aged refinement with her long brown hair held up in a ponytail. Her conservative dark green dress almost perfectly matched her board eyes. A pair of dangling earrings wrought in the shape of Jupiter's emblem was her only embellishment. "I must disagree with Lady Venus on the point of total public acceptance… In the last few hours my departments have reported a scattering of unsettling rumors pertaining to the incident and arrests are on the rise. As previously stated, the interlopers appear to be both well trained and equipped, suggesting a need for large amounts of capital. Our investigations are covering all of the usual areas, however we are giving special focus on attempting to track down their finances, as tracking any potential training facilities would be more than futile considering that we hadn't found them before this incident... We're increasing our observer drone patrols to try and find something on that band as well. What worries me is that we hadn't found this operation before, considering the financial, material and human resources required to design armor such as they had, as well as the necessary time to train the two mages to the level of their displayed skill…" With the end of her report the light cut off a final time and silence filled the room for a few moments to once more be broken by the woman behind the desk.

"What of their magical signatures themselves, Mrs. Kreia? Do we know which planetary line, or lines, they are from?"

The light shone once more, "No, your highness…" the blue haired woman spoke as she shuffled through some papers in front of her, "The readings from the signals themselves indicate signs of a planetary bonding equivalent to a C-ranked mage in power, but spiked to high B-rank when their cloak activated before disappearing completely. In the brief period when they activated their cloaking magic we were also able to gather strong readings for a Light-Natured attunement from the white armored one, but the over-all signature was unique enough to rule out all of the known planetary bindings and the readings from the one in black armor have defied all of our efforts to categorize so far, though it has been theorized by some of the less conventional members of my department that her magic is somehow Shadow-Natured because of the visible effect of when her cloak was activated, despite there being no planetary bonds capable of producing such an attunement. The only information we were able to find in the archives is from an attached file to a standing search-and-destroy order passed two hundred forty eight years ago detailing somewhat matching signature readings, but no planets were named in the file and no other details were given other than that anyone found to have them were to be approached with extreme caution and to be reported to The Crown immediately upon which the Sailor Scouts would be dispatched to initiate… peacekeeping duties... These orders have been acted upon several times since issued, though the number of recorded incidents has steadily dropped over time with the last being just short of nineteen years ago." when the light shut off again several forms were heard shifting in their seats…

"Very well." Spoke the Queen after a moment's pause, "Mrs. Thalia, keep pressure on the media. Unless they move again soon, I want this incident to be forgotten quickly but we should use it to our advantage while it's still fresh in the populace's minds to solidify our power in their eyes. Should they move again before the populace has time to cool down I want the people to reject them and everything they may or may not stand for. We can't afford an uprising ourselves while Terra's government is still sorting itself out in the wake of the late king's assassination. Mrs. Soren, Inform the Sailor Scouts that I want them to go on a tour of the system. Ostensibly, it will be a good-will gesture to show the populace that they are being protected from these enemies and to introduce Ami Kreia to the masses as the newest Sailor Mercury. Mrs. Maddock, you will reorganize some of your black-bag teams into hunter-cells to assist the Inner Guardians in their real task of hunting these rouge mages down as the scouts travel from planet to planet. The interlopers are to be treated as enemies of the state with a capture or kill on sight standing."

"Understood." The gathered individuals intoned as the room went completely dark…

-o-o-o-o-o-

Setsuna Meiou turned away from The Gates of Time at the completion of the meeting. It wasn't a foolproof method of gaining information on the movements of The Crown, but the situations that had been popping up from nowhere recently had turned it into a necessity. The fact that something seemed to be actively blocking her from looking into most of said situations more thoroughly with the gates was even more worrisome to the green haired woman. In the end, she needed to get as much information as she could about the various factions in any way she could so she would at least have some idea of the next move she and the girls needed to make.

Thankfully, the wards that screened the 'Royal' meeting chamber were calibrated to the frequencies the gates had used nearly a millennia and a half ago. It still didn't mean that they wouldn't have caught on if the five women had been paying more attention to their other senses...

'Pride and arrogance go before the fall...' Setsuna thought darkly...

It was a risk... A big risk... But a risk that had much faster results than her or Nabiki's usual methods, and that was what made it necessary. Where it would normally have been close to a week for Nabiki and Setsuna's combined information resources to report about this "Good Will Tour" of the Inner Scouts, she now had the information before any major arrangements could be made on The Crown's side, and she could plan accordingly.

Bringing herself mentally back to the task at hand the Senshi of Time turned back to the gates and called up the image of the woman who had contributed the most to make Setsuna who she was today. The person to give her a direction... a purpose... other than just living out her immortality until the end of time or some idiot managing to get her killed.

Before her was a still image of a woman in moment frozen in time from nearly three thousand years in the past. She had long silver hair arranged in an elegant ponytail that almost reached her ankles. But instead of the white formal gown this woman was most well known for, she was wearing a rather plain pair of pants and a turtleneck sweater under a knee length lab coat. She was looking over the readings from some experiment or another on a transparent data-panel with the most intense expression Setsuna had ever seen on her best-friend's face. Despite the youthful appearance the woman portrayed however, you could see the beginnings of crows-feet forming around her eyes...

"What would you do if you were in my position Senny?" Setsuna asked into the quiet. "They remember you, but as some stoic figure who forged an 'Empire'..." The Time Senshi snorted in dark amusement when she said this, shaking her head slightly as a single tear rolled down the side of her face, "Your dream has been lost to the same greed you fought against when you built your kingdom..."

The Senshi of Time stood there for a while longer as she contemplated her next move before she 'stepped' through time, into her office in Charon Castle.

She had work to do...

-o-o-o-o-o-

Ranma stretched after running through her ship's power down sequence. It had been a long flight to Eris from Pluto after she teleported from the safe-house in Ares. It annoyed her that her own world was the only planet in the entire system that she couldn't teleport to, regardless of distance. But no matter how much she complained about it, the risk of spontaneous decomposition of her component matter, due to the planet's chaotically attuned magic, was all too real and far too high for her to consider it...

There were, strange as it may seem, limits to how much she could bend the law of infinite improbability after all...

Stretching again and stifling a yawn she looked out the view window to look at the darkened landscape of her world. The scenery had changed dramatically since she had been here last...

-o-o-o-o-o-

- Ten Years Ago -

Thunder rumbled across the high altitude overcast that shadowed Eris in perpetual darkness as great arcs of green lightning flashed from cloud to cloud in a type of chaotic dance. Though the illumination cast from these great bolts could be seen from the surface they failed to cast any light on the broken and shattered landscape of what was once the Tenth Solar Kingdom. Barely visible through the unnatural darkness that permeated the planet's skies were stones, both great and small, that floated through eddies of chaotic mana that twisted their way through the atmosphere. Occasionally a particularly bright flash of lightning would illuminate these floating monoliths slightly and reveal shapes reminiscent of architectural structures. A pillar here, an archway there, occasionally even what seemed to be an entire building, somehow still mostly intact from whatever tragedy struck the dead world.

The surface itself was scared and ruined, as though some god had taken a great blade to the landscape. Fissures crossed the surface at all angles. Some were short and shallow, while others stretched on for miles into the distance and were too deep to see the bottom if someone were to be standing on the edge, should they have a proper light source strong enough to pierce the unnatural darkness. In contrast, great slabs of what was once bedrock jutted up from the surface, their broken and jagged forms reaching towards the heavens at unnatural angles as though in hope of salvation from this all but dead planet. Warp-stone deposits, once buried in the surface were now exposed to the air on the walls of the fissures and broken cliff faces, casting an eerie green glow over what area they could like the lightning above before the darkness swallowed the unnatural light despite still being visible from the air.

From the bottom of the cloud cover, a ship descended, frost trailing from its black, teardrop shaped hull. Forward sweeping wings, reminiscent of a crescent, intersected with the main body at the halfway point and gave the vessel stability in the turbulent atmosphere as it first wove its way around the lightning, and then descending lower, through the floating stones.

Inside the cockpit, one Setsuna Meiou was not having a good time. Everything was going fine until about halfway through her descent through the cloud cover before every single one of her instruments and scanners started going haywire from the interference being given off by all the chaotically attuned mana floating around in the atmosphere. It was all she could do to avoid the lightning.

Now that the ship was under the cloud cover and low enough where the lightning wouldn't bother them, she had the floating stones to avoid while she looked for a safe place to land. A task made even harder by the fact that, as low as she was flying, there wasn't nearly enough illumination provided by the plasma storm above to see by and even though she had the flood lights on full blast she could at most see a few yards in front of her, forcing her to slow the ship down to a crawl. Compounding the difficulty was the fact that, from what little she could see, the area where she had descended from the clouds apparently had been a sea or ocean before the planet had undergone the massive orbital bombardment of the Queen's Navy, both cratering the surface heavily and causing an over abundance of fissures as a side effect of the massive thermal shock the crust had undergone when the oceans evaporated under the magi-technological onslaught.

She had to once more remind herself of why she was here. It had been roughly half a year since Nabiki had managed to achieve a full transition into her Senshi Armour, but every time Ranma had attempted to do the same something had happened to prevent it from working. It was all very frustrating to tell the truth. And that's when the idea to come here came to the Time Senshi. An idea she was hoping she wouldn't come to regret.

She was so busy concentrating on not being smashed to pieces by the floating debris that she almost missed the quiet shuffling sound behind her. She wasn't worried about who it might be considering the only other people on the ship were Ranma and Nabiki, who were supposed to be sleeping further back in their quarters, but she was slightly concerned that one of them was awake considering that they were still exhausted from the mock scenario training they'd gone through shortly before the trip. It didn't take long for an extremely tired looking red haired girl, who had wrapped herself in a blanket, to come into Setsuna's peripheral vision as she sat herself down in the co-pilot's seat.

"So..." Setsuna prompted gently in a quiet tone after a minute of silence between the two as she decided that she could spare the attention to at least find out what seemed to be bothering the twelve year old, "What's wrong?"

Ranma seemed startled slightly by the sudden noise before she sheepishly shook her head in embarrassment. "Nothing much... Just can't sleep"

The older woman simply raised an eyebrow at this. "Oh Ranma... You know you can't lie to me... Is it really that bad?" she said in chiding tones, but not unkindly.

The small redhead at least had the good grace to look embarrassed as she was called out before her thoughts turned inwards for a few quiet moments. "Do... Do you ever hear... voices? When you're on Pluto I mean?"

"No, I don't." was the Plutonian Senshi's reply with more than a little worry barely hidden beneath the surface. In the over five thousand years she had been alive, hearing voices when no one else could was almost always a bad thing, "What are they saying?"

"I don't..." the tired girl began, pausing to gather her thoughts through the haze of sleepless fatigue, "It's like... Eris is trying to talk to me... only... only I can't hear what it's trying to say. Like listening to someone trying to talk to you through an aquarium..."

Setsuna let out a mental sigh of relief that her charge wasn't going insane, but at the same time she was a little confused. "I think I know what's happening..." she began carefully, "In the past, it hasn't been unheard of, where a Senshi has a stronger connection to their planet than is considered normal... It's supposedly has nothing to do with how powerful you are... but it does mean that if this is the reason why you think you can hear Eris, when you do come into your full Senshi Powers, you may be able to make your magic do things that it otherwise shouldn't be able to..."

That was the short version of it of course, and Setsuna was fairly certain that she was right so she wasn't concerned. Though what did concern the greenette a little was that if she was right then Ranma should have by all means achieved a full Senshi Armour transformation months before Nabiki. Had the bindings somehow been damaged when the Queen's Navy glassed the surface?

Silence reined in the cockpit for a few minutes as Setsuna mulled over the possibilities while weaving the ship through the flying stones and Ranma gazed out the domed window in front of them with dull eyes as she tried to fall asleep in the copilot's seat.

"We're over a city..." the redhead mumbled sometime later as her eyes focused on the lower half of the window.

"Oh?" the Time Senshi began, not doubting the girl for a second due to her dark-vision ability, "Can you see a safe place to land?"

Ranma nodded and pointed out the viewing window to the left even as she yawned, "There's a stadium over there that's missing one side, but it collapsed outward and I can't see anything inside."

Setsuna simply nodded and once more marveled at the girl's ability to see through blackout conditions without help while bringing the ship even lower and slowing down even more so as not to miss her goal. It was a few more minutes with a few corrections from Ranma before she found the stadium and confirmed that what was once the playing field was indeed clear of debris and other destruction for the most part before lowering the ship's landing gear and setting down with hardly a jerk.

"It's going to be a while before Nabiki wakes up and I don't want us to get separated while we're here... Go back... Get some sleep..." Setsuna gently said as she started going through the ship's power down sequences before the still tired pre-teen nodded once and began shuffling back to her quarters, not seeing the small smile on the Time Senshi's face...

-o-o-o-o-o-

Darkness... That was all that was visible in every direction to her companions beyond the floodlights of the ship, but to her the eternal shadows of Eris were clearer than a perfect summer's day on Venus. The skeletal remains of the city's once proud towers, many of which were half as tall or less than they had been when this place had been alive, stood out in sharp relief to Ranma as she stood atop a particularly large piece of rubble just inside the visible area of their camp. Wisps of frost formed with each breath she took and the only reason she wasn't shivering in the fridge environment was thanks to her ZERO Armour.

It truly was her world...

It had been about an hour since she and Nabiki had woken up on the ship and they had spent that time preparing the things they might need for their inevitable foray into the dark. Ms. Meiou had ordered them to not leave the area without everyone else, but not because she was worried about wild animals. Eris had been a lifeless rock ever since the bombardment and much of the water that once made up the planet's oceans, seas, lakes and rivers was currently trapped in the stratosphere in the form of the ever present cloud cover. The reason was so they wouldn't get lost in the dark regardless of the fact that Ranma could see clearly. She didn't go any further than her silent vigil while the older woman worked on getting a locator to at least function through the chaos magic, and had succeeded a short while ago after some effort, a bit of cursing and a lot of pulled hair. But as amusing as it would have been to watch the normally aloof woman lose her nerve from the comfort of the heated interior of their ship, the sensations she was receiving from Eris held the twelve year-old's attention.

She had no doubts in her mind now that what Miss Meiou had told her about her having a strong connection to Eris was true. She could feel the dark, chaotic mana laced in the frigid breeze that blew through her hair, and the steady ebb and flow of the ley-lines running throughout the whole planet. But more importantly, she could feel its pain now that she was standing on the surface. She could feel the scars that crossed it and how something seemed to be preventing the world from healing itself...

The voice of the world was stronger too, now that she was on the surface... It was like it was trying to tell her something important, but what it was saying came out garbled and muffled. There was a distinct... pull, now that drew her attention to somewhere in the distance...

The crunch of footsteps on the frozen ground momentarily drew the redhead's attention away from the ruined horizon and she found her guardian walking up to her with a carefully neutral look on her face.

"Anything the matter?" the green haired woman asked. Ranma would have wondered how the woman could be warm, what with the revealing cut of her Scout Fuku, save for the fact that she knew it possessed a suite of environmental protection fields similar to her ZERO Armour's...

"There's something out there..." Ranma said as she turned her attention back to the darkness. The shades of grey she saw everything in whenever the level of light reached below a certain point always seemed more natural to her than whenever she saw in normal light. "It's like there's something that I need to find..."

The Time Senshi just nodded before turning to get Nabiki and a light crystal powerful enough to illuminate an area of a few meters regardless of the omnipresent darkness...

They set out shortly after that with Ranma leading the way...

-o-o-o-o-o-

- Present -

Ranma stood at the bottom of her ship's boarding ramp, once again wearing her ZERO Armour to ward off the cold as snow lazily drifted to the ground. That in itself constituted the first major change on her world since ten years ago. Eris hadn't seen precipitation since the Queen's Navy bombarded the surface.

Now a mental query through her connection to the planet told her that it was snowing across the entire world, and had been for well over three Standard Terran Months. Glaciers were already beginning to form in places and the only reason that it wasn't blizzard conditions was due to the fact that there were no temperature differentials large enough to cause such an imbalance. It would take time for the environmental wards to repair themselves enough to increase the intensity of the sunlight that reached the surface. As it stood they could do little more than keep the air breathable and gravity at a comfortable level.

Looking across the ruined city from her landing site she absentmindedly noted that it looked more the frozen wasteland than it had before with the thick blanket that buried anything shorter than seven stories and she had been forced to locate a different landing site. The old stadium they had used before had been all but buried and would have been dangerous to land in with the unknown depth of soft snow filling it. The mostly intact building she had found close to the city-center worked just as well though, with the frozen winds having blown most of the snow off.

In the distance she could make out the fissures that crossed the surface. The smaller ones were already completely covered by the snowfall by now, but despite how long it had been snowing quite a few of the larger ones were still visible.

The second major change to the planet she noted was that it was dark. Just dark... The omnipresent darkness that you could almost feel was all but gone and as the occasional bolt of normal lightning flashed overhead she watched as the landscape fluoresced white.

Maybe, given enough time, her world would be able to heal itself...

Shaking herself out of her hopeful musings and bringing her attention back to the task at hand Ranma turned to look in a particular direction and concentrated on her magic, tapping into her link to Eris slightly in the process. Her brow furrowed as she mentally ran through the necessary calculations for one of the most complex spells she knew. Gold tinted dark mana swirled around her for a moment before the spell matrix snapped into place.

"Ebon Wing." She whispered, and the surrounding shadows seemed to thicken further around her shoulder blades to form a pair of large gold flecked shadowy feathered wings. Stretching out her considerable wingspan she briefly frowned at the gold colorations before she leapt over the snow below and flew towards her destination.

"I just hope it's still there..." she whispered...

-o-o-o-o-o-

- The Past -

"Is this it Ranma?" Nabiki asked after a minute of standing in the same spot while Ranma looked in seemingly every direction. They had been climbing over, under and through the ruined city for well over an hour now and when they reached their current location the 'pull' that had been drawing her in a particular direction ever sense they landed had stopped and she was now trying to figure out what to do next. The pull may have stopped, but now that they were wherever they were there was a much more vague 'feeling' of what she needed to do to continue on, as though instead of needing to be somewhere there was something she needed to do...

They were in the middle of what must have been a park considering the openness of the entire area. The ground around them was scarred and cratered with the signs of conventional weapons and mana fire instead the debris of gigaton range warhead detonations, and the low walls that had once lined the paths were all but destroyed. This place had been a battlefield in a war fought with soldiers instead of ships. The blasted remains of a monument lay about a hundred meters to her right and the petrified remains of trees in areas not quite as heavily scarred by the battle reached their bare branches to the heavens.

Ignoring her older friend's comment for now Ranma followed the feeling she had and walked over to the monument, crouching by what was left of its base. This was where she needed to start... Closing her eyes she concentrated on the feeling as Setsuna and Nabiki watched in anticipation.

There... A shift in the black wind... A change in the pattern she felt the mana around her taking... Fundamentals of how she perceived the "voice of Eris" lost to her before now clicked into place and a few moments later she stood back up and resumed walking, still not opening her eyes as the feelings drew her onward. Minutes passed as she traced the path she perceived not through sight, but her connection to Eris, and as she moved forward its voice grew stronger... clearer... With each passing moment she received impressions of the history of this place. She didn't understand all of it, but through the garbled perceptions the planet gave her as she walked she could make out events long past that affected the whole planet. The arrival of the first settlers and the bio-domes erected by them thousands of years ago, and its eventual terraformation, first through technology to make the environment livable and later magic to make it pleasant, coming to the height of the golden age the world shared with the rest of the Moon Kingdom...

Finally she stopped again and opened her eyes. They had apparently left the park behind some time ago and were now at the front of the blasted gates in the perimeter wall of a building that appeared to have partly collapsed with a clear path of destruction leading further in. The structure diverged from the architecture of the much taller towers that made up the majority of the inner city, being made primarily of quarried stone as opposed to concrete, metal alloy and composites while the bases of five of the towers could have fit comfortably within the area it took. Sweeping arches, pillars and balconies contrasted the smooth lines of its taller brethren and the apex of a collapsed dome at the center, at least five hundred meters above, constituted the highest point.

Continuing through the gates and looking around for a moment Ranma realized that the courtyard they had just entered eerily paralleled the park they had passed through earlier. Here too there were signs of conventional weapons discharge, and what must have once been a beautiful garden now lay in runes like the rest of the world.

The voice of Eris still whispered through her being, and through what Ranma could only think of as the planet's equivalent to incoherent mutterings she could make out that this place had once been the seat of power for this world's government. 'That would make this place the palace...' she numbly realized as she resumed walking, with her companions following behind as she made her way through the ruins.

The content of her perceptions had changed for some reason, now that she was in this place. She looked around as she walked onward and upward through the ruined structure, and received impressions of combat...

"There was a battle here..." Ranma whispered to no one in particular as she stopped next to what was left of a staircase and placed her hand on the railing.

"Oh?" Nabiki asked, startling the redhead slightly. She has almost forgotten that they were there. "And just how do you know that, besides the obvious of course..." the brunette sarcastically said as she looked around at the wreckage in the small area that was visible under normal light.

Ranma gave her friend a flat look. "Eris told me..." she answered simply, and took silent pleasure in the incredulous look she got in return. It wasn't very often that she was able to catch the older girl off guard like this, so she had to take whatever she could get when the opportunities came along...

"Be that as it may..." Miss Meiou began, "Is there anything in particular about the battle that took place here that stands out?"

Ranma frowned when she saw the way her guardian was carrying herself. The stiff posture was all she needed to know that the green haired woman was in 'business mode'. She frowned deeper as she thought of the answer to the question.

"They wanted something..." she said as she looked back in the direction she somehow knew the park was in.

"They?" Nabiki asked, tilting her head slightly while folding her arms in front of her chest.

"The Silver Moon Militant forces that landed on Eris before the bombardment." Ranma answered distractedly. She was still getting impressions of the battle and one thing in particular was starting to stand out to her...

"First contact for both sides was made at a park we passed through earlier, and the Queen's forces drove Eris' militia and the civilian defenders that joined the battle to here..." she said as she started slowly climbing the staircase, hardly paying attention to her friend and guardian as they followed. "Eris' Senshi was in the battle too, but apparently Senshis Venus and Mars had been deployed here to collect something before the bombardment took place and they engaged each-other..."

The top of the steps opened to a partly destroyed balcony that once overlooked what must have been the antechamber under the central dome. The entire area seemed to have been blasted outward and looking over what was left of the banister Ranma could see that part of the dome above had fallen almost straight down, and was presently blocking her view of the room's heart.

"They fought here..." she said as she worked her way down a ramp of rubble that led to the ground floor and continued deciphering the impressions Eris was giving her as she moved around the fallen dome. The clarity of the impressions had become sharper the closer she got to this point, and she had a feeling that she was almost to where it was trying to lead her. "Eventually Senshi Eris managed to injure both of the invading Senshi enough where they were forced to retreat without whatever it was they were after, but not without amassing quite a few injuries of... her... own..."

She trailed off as she rounded the edge of the dome and stopped at what she saw. It most definitely was not like anything she had been expecting. To be perfectly honest she didn't exactly know what to expect when they'd set out earlier, but it certainly didn't include this...

Kneeling in the middle of a perfectly smooth, shallow bowl shaped depression at least ten meters in diameter was the first body she'd seen among the ruins of Eris. The rest had either been erased after over two hundred years of being exposed to the elements and wild magic of the surface or atomized when the bombs fell. This was no two hundred and fifty year old skeleton though. What instead sat in front of them, was the body of a young woman, who by all means looked like she had died only hours before, and the only sign of time having taken its due out of the cadaver was the wispy and frail quality to the unnaturally white hair on her head. What held her attention even more though was the fact that she was wearing a set of battered and bloodstained armour...

Senshi Armour to be precise...

Somehow the armour was able to defy the normal color blindness of her dark vision and she saw every detail in a clarity she had never before experienced in her life. The breastplate was more or less form fitting and made of a black substance that looked more like polished onyx than any metal, with a flexible looking dark matte grey material covering the sides and bands of metallic gold running around her waist, splitting around her navel to form an open diamond design.

Above her heart sat a golden crystal cut into an eight pointed star with the two longest arms lying along the vertical plain. Forming a sort of collar that surrounded the crystal and came to a V just above her breasts was more of the same matte grey material coming just short of her neck where the onyx like material took over once more while veins of gold etched leaf-like patterns overtop.

On her shoulders sat a pair of miss matched pauldrons. The one on her left shoulder was a simple curved design that had a second layer underneath it that covered more of her arm, while the one on her right shoulder had a beak like look to it, but with a section of the middle depressed more than the areas to either side. Strapped to her arms were a pair of gauntlets with crossing plates protecting her forearms and connecting to the plates that covered the backs of her gloved hands.

Her legs were unarmored save for a pair of plates that curved around her calves and arched into downward points while the rounded tops connected to the bottom of her breastplate. Over her otherwise bare legs was a grey coat like battle skirt with black trim that was slit in front of either leg all the way up to where it was covered by her armour. On her feet was a pair of, ornamented, armored black boots trimmed with gold that covered her shins and curved to a point just above her knees.

Protecting her head was a tiara like helmet, trimmed in gold and made of the same black material as the rest of the armour. A curved plate covered her forehead like a visor, on which was set another gold gem cut in an elongated diamond pattern. Rounded geometric plates covering her temples and ears held four black and gold feathers each and connected to the visor plate while another pair of smaller plates extended from below them to follow her jaw, stopping just short of her chin. Woven gold bands arched over her crown, coming around to meet in the back to hold the helmet in place.

Yet held in front of her chest by both hands was perhaps the plainest, yet still most interesting thing of all for those who knew what its purpose was... It was an orb about the size of a large grapefruit that looked like it was made of gold. Down the middle ran a jagged crack that nearly split the entire thing into halves.

Ranma quietly walked towards the remains of the last Senshi of Eris. She seemed to be mesmerized by it and her companions gasped as they moved close enough where their light allowed them to see it for themselves...

No one said anything as they looked at the remains of her predecessor to the mantle of Senshi of Eris, Ranma most of all as she saw the expression of concentration and pain that had graced the woman's face in her last moments.

The voice of Eris was clearer than ever now and the impressions were almost overwhelming as it tried to show her everything that this woman... her great grandmother... had ever done. Choices she had made, friends and enemies she had had, things she had learned... her actions and the soldiers she had fought with and killed during their world's last stand against a Queen who had not wanted anything more or less than complete and unquestioning obedience to her will, even if that will ran counter to those of the many... Through all of the garbled impressions Eris was giving her, one in particular began to stand out.

"Ginzuishou..." she mumbled as she focused on the voice of her world and looked around the area slowly.

"What was that Ranma?" Setsuna asked distractedly as she looked on with wide eyes at the nearly perfectly preserved body.

"She tried to fight the Ginzuishou..." the redhead said in a whisper as she walked towards the remains of her predecessor and slowly reached out her hand, stopping just short of touching the gem on her helmet. "When... The Queen tried to destroy Eris herself when Venus and Mars failed their mission... she tried to purify the planet of its chaos magic...? But she..." Ranma trailed off as she looked around her in shock as she realized something from what the planet had told her.

"She fought back..." the twelve year old said in a horrified whisper, "She channeled more of her magic than she could safely use, injured or otherwise, through her talisman... all the safeties were either turned off or destroyed in the feedback as she channeled almost the entire mana pool of the planet to fend off the effects of the Queen's spell." She paused and turned her gaze towards the floating rocks and flashes of lightning above them, shivering slightly, but not due to the cold. "She managed to succeed, but having so much power run through her system without the proper preparations killed her... This is all the backlash of having so much of the planet's mana pool expended in a single spell. It's still trying to balance itself, but it can't without a conduit to direct how..."

"That explains the lovely weather," Nabiki stated sarcastically, "but it hardly explains why she..." the teen motioned towards the kneeling armored figure, "...is still here..."

"My guess would be that having so much magic channeled through her body during her last moments somehow managed to preserved her..." their green haired guardian mused as she began to walk in a circle around the depression.

Ranma was still looking at the body with morbid curiosity. Kneeling in front of her was the last Senshi of her world, almost perfectly preserved for over two and a half centuries. Cautiously, she reached out her hand and the tips of her fingers lightly brushed the gem on her helmet...

The others didn't seem to notice, but the moment her fingertips brushed the golden crystal the entire planet seemed to shiver. The force of the vibration was so intense that Ranma had no choice but to fall to her knees and it took her a moment to realize that Eris' voice had stopped. The very air around her seemed to still, as though in anticipation, and only moments later she distinctly felt the mana around her begin to shift, and re-align.

The planet shook again, and again Nabiki and Miss Meiou didn't seem to notice it. They did, however, notice that she was now on both her hands and knees.

"Don't Touch Me!" she shouted when Nabiki made a move to help her, the slight panic in her voice more than evident. She didn't know exactly what was going on, but she had a feeling that something bad would happen if they tried to help her at the moment. It wasn't just the free mana around them that was shifting now. Through her connection to Eris she could feel every single ley-line, large and small across the whole world, slowly realigning.

The actions of her world were no longer completely invisible to her companions as the eternal night that surrounded them seemed to grow darker, causing the illumination of Setsuna's crystal to shrink even further. The steady, frozen breeze that had been blowing ever since they landed picked up in intensity and grew into a full blown gale as it swirled around their position, forcing Setsuna to erect a quick Garnet Ball to protect her and Nabiki from its strength. The only thing that saved Ranma from being torn to shreds in the icy gale was the protection offered by her ZERO Armour, having barely managed to summon its helmet in time to protect her head.

The exposed majority of Ranma's hair whipped around her and she could feel pieces of debris ablating off of her armour's protective fields. Larger pieces would cause her to jerk violently to one side or another as they struck her. Distracted as she was from repeated impacts Ranma almost missed that the remains of her predecessor were changing. Her body was slowly transforming into what Ranma would later only be able to describe as liquid shadows while the Senshi Armour began to take on a golden glow that quickly grew in intensity until it was nearly blinding.

The gale grew even stronger as it began to create a vortex that seemed to be drawn into the transforming form in front of her. The only thing she could hear was the pounding in her ears as adrenaline kicked in, but Ranma seemed to be rooted to the ground.

She could feel the mana swirling in front of her. It seemed as though every drop of magical energy that had been floating free across the planet was currently being drawn towards this single point. The presence of the surrounding darkness that one could almost feel was leaving and the illuminated area of their light crystal grew as the dark mana that had previously saturated the atmosphere was drawn into the magical maelstrom. Chaos mana powered lightning crashed above them and the defining peals of thunder could be heard over the wind. Looking up she saw the clouds above had formed their own maelstrom and she was sitting dead center in its eye...

She felt the buildup of energy in the magical vortex reach a peak and turned her attention back to in front of her just in time to see the epicenter of it... pulse.

Hard magical energy radiated outwards from the point where the remains of her predecessor had once been and she cried out as it washed over her. Once... twice... three times she felt the mana build before it reached its critical mass and sent out the shockwaves, and each time the redhead felt the full force of the blast. It seemed to take hours for each buildup to complete and she remained anchored and immobile throughout.

As the aftershocks of the third pulse died away the transformed mass of condensed mana contracted in on itself to form a swirling, glowing gold and black ball the size of her fist that hovered half a meter above the ground. The wind had stopped dead and for a moment Ranma thought it might be over, but she was still unable to move from her crouching position when she tried. She could still feel the planetary ley-lines realigning themselves, though most seemed to have stopped. Doing some rough mental calculations she realized that they seemed to be aligning in a manner that eerily synchronized with her own magic's wave pattern.

A sense of dread slowly began to sink into the pit of her stomach as Setsuna and Nabiki watched in silence from the safety of being shifted 'slightly to the left' of normal time. Sweat began to flow down her face in rivers, invisible to her companions thanks to her helmet, as she thought about what was most likely happening to her and her world. It was a completely harebrained theoretical exorcise detailing a situation that had never, ever been seen in over three thousand years of magical research. She had worked on it just once in the first year she and Nabiki had been with Miss Meiou. The necessary calculations were so complex that she had given up before she finished it, but the one thing she remembered was that unless the alignment was exact... Well... She didn't really want to think about the alternative.

'Please, please, PLEASE let it work... Twelve years is far too young for me to die, and no one ever deserves to die like that...'

Minutes passed as she felt the few remaining ley-lines fall into place. Finally there was only one left and she swallowed hard when she felt it finish aligning itself...

A moment passed where nothing happened before the softly glowing ball of mana hovering in front of her flew into her chest. Ranma's world went white and she knew pure, unfetid ecstasy as more mana than she ever believed possible blasted its way through her system as it assimilated into Eris' Mana Core. The last thing that registered to her mind through the pleasure induced haze before the intensity of the sensation drove her to unconsciousness was that she was wearing her own set of Senshi Armour in the colors and pattern of her predecessor...

-o-o-o-o-o-

- Present -

Ranma breathed a sigh of relief as she looked into the ruined antechamber under the palace's central dome from the apex of the section that hadn't fallen. The winds were apparently strong enough to have removed enough snow from the area where the palace itself wasn't completely buried and the interior of the room in question was sheltered enough where only a light dusting covered most places. The pit in the center was completely filled of course. 'But beggars can't be choosers now, can they...'

Her mental assessment of the planet when she had landed told her that the ley-lines had since realigned themselves back into their natural configuration, which would make her job a little harder, but that was a minor concern all things considered.

Unfurling her wings she leaped from her high perch and descended to alight on top of the collapsed section of the dome. Looking around from her lower vantage point as the snow continued to fall and swirl in the wind she assessed the situation and all of the work she would need to do to prepare.

Giving herself a mental nod she dispelled her wings and watched as they faded away like smoke in the wind. She concentrated on her magic again and a moment later she was surrounded by liquid shadows that somehow emitted a golden light. The moment passed and when the shadows receded they revealed her Armour to be very much changed.

Covering Ranma's torso was a cuirass of the same design as her predecessor's, with an equally similar pair of pauldrons covering her shoulders. The same similarities followed through to the gauntlets, boots, plated battle skirt and helmet she now sported as well, with the only difference being that instead of four feathers to each side of her helmet, there were five.

Jumping down to the ground below, she watched in amusement as the loose snow puffed upwards and swirled momentarily around her boots before mentally shaking herself as it settled back down.

"I've got work to do..."

-o-o-o-o-o-

Nabiki was bored...

It wasn't very exciting, crouched and cloaked on the ceiling of the Terran Senate chambers. The novelty of standing upside-down in a setting with higher than zero-gravity without blood rushing to her head had worn off years ago, and this was the third full session in just as many days that she'd sat through for cripes sake. It was with good reason that she only skimmed over the reports on the minutes of these gatherings that she received, after all.

The room itself was bland enough as far as she was concerned. The egg-shaped dimensions were odd, but nothing awe inspiring despite the size of the room itself, and the floating platforms that the senators occupied, most of which were currently docked along the walls, were nothing new to the brunette.

Down below one Senator Ghram had the floor and the only reason she was even paying attention was in an effort to stay awake.

"- need to strengthen our ties with The Moon and accept their offer to bond our Royal House to Terra! The embargo on their Magi-tech has left us weakened and vulnerable!"

"Nonsense!"

'ah...' the Spy thought to herself as a red haired woman interrupted Senator Ghram while maneuvering her own platform towards the center of the room, 'Senator Beryl, now there's someone to watch out for.'

"We are not weaker from being denied new Magi-technologies, but stronger for it! Our own development into alternative technologies has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last twenty five years. We do not need -"

The white armoured fly on the ceiling tuned out the rest of the woman's rant for the most part, only paying enough attention to notice if she did something unusual. It was common knowledge on Terra that Senator Beryl was strongly against legislation that would move Terra to a closer relationship with the Moon, and she had a very strong following for it. The lower forms on Terra had always been fiercely independent, and they still remembered their history. As long as they were concerned, Terra was independent, is independent, and would stay independent of a government that had at one point been nothing more than a colony of theirs, despite that having been well over three and a half millennia ago.

In truth though, she wasn't here to spy on the byplay of Terra's Senate. After all, she had people to do that for her. Down below and seated on a special platform that hovered in the exact center of the room was the recently crowned King Endymion XXIV. It was currently her job to make sure that nothing happened to the young man as she personally worked over the less secure Terran data networks for clues to the assassins' whereabouts, and who might be behind them. She didn't have anything yet that she didn't already know, but she'd only been on Terra for three days and there was a lot of data to work over.

In the mean time, she needed to keep an eye on him whenever the man went out into public. Normally this would be a job for both Senshi in exile, so that one could rest or do research while the other stood watch, but Ranma was assigned to a similar detail on Saturn after she got done with whatever-the-hell she was doing on Eris. Amaterasu could do some of the computer work, but the Mau's abilities were limited in that it would be a bit... odd... for most of her contacts to be talking to a 'cat'...

Especially when said 'cat' didn't know when to shut up half the time without her there to control the orange fur-ball...

This all meant that the Solar Senshi was on her own when gathering information from her human contacts and had to limit her time spent actually watching the King in person to when he was most vulnerable so she could carry out the other part of her mission.

"- security is threatened by the Moon Queen and the Sailor Scouts, who she uses as her Personal Enforcers! It's only a matter of time -"

'Ok, that was new...' Beryl hadn't ever been this vocal about her opposition towards Luna before, 'I wonder what's changed...'

"- as it may," Senator Ghram had taken up the debate again, "It does not change the fact that the Magi-tech Embargo has left our existing magi-tech systems to decay and grow out-dated. Regardless of our own advancements, if the Lunar Queen were to decide we were an inconvenience it would -"

Nabiki began to wonder if it wouldn't be more convenient to set up an away base inside the air vents with surveillance equipment to monitor the Senate chambers. That way she could kill two birds with one stone and get some of her other work done while still being on sight in case something came up... 'Yah... And maybe I could tap into their own security feeds.' She absently thought as the byplay below went back and forth, 'Much more of this and I'll need to see about getting something to do besides just sit here...'

The current topic of discussion was an offer made by the Queen a little over twenty five years before and was complex in its simplicity... The logic on the Lunar end was that since Terra didn't have a planetary bond to their world, they didn't have an adequate means to monitor the planet's magical resources when it came to their more advanced magi-tech, and as such they offered to bond Terra's Royal House like the Senshi were three millennia ago. Terra's response was a vehement "NO!" coming from the political block Beryl was a member of, as they claimed that the Moon was attempting to gain leverage over them. In response, the Moon had raised export taxes on all magi-tech being shipped to Terra while prohibiting trade on anything that could be considered industrial or military grade over the course of a few years. The goal was to force the Terran government to eventually cave in and accept their offer, but instead Terra just put forward funding into advancing magically inactive technologies that hadn't been regularly used since just before the Moon Kingdom's rise of all things. The results were surprising none the less in that they were already catching up to an equivalent level of their own technology to their larger neighbor, but progress had begun to slow in recent years.

The downside lobbied by the political block Senator Ghram represented was that with it now being twenty-five years since the beginning of the embargo all of the existing systems they were in possession of had been left to decay or become outdated, reducing the number of conveniences the people had enjoyed that had only been practical through the use of magic. More importantly though, was that the systems in place to detect mages and unauthorized magical devices were just as old and obsolete, more than enough time for enterprising mages and technicians to find ways to mask their presence. It made Nabiki's job both easier and harder in the long run. On the one hand it allowed her to move about freely with almost zero chance of being detected, while on the other it meant the same thing for any rouge mages who may or may not be working for or with the Lunar Brotherhood...

According her sources this issue was an almost weekly topic of discussion in the senate chambers, but it hadn't made any headway since it had first been brought up. On the plus side, if 'tradition' held then the session would be called about an hour from now due to a majority not being able to come to a consensus and it would be put off for another time. With that happy thought in mind, the Senshi of Sol settled in for what she hoped would be a short while before the King went back to the security around the palace and she could catch up on some much needed sleep...

-o-o-o-o-o-

Lightning crashed overhead while snow whirled in the black wind. Ranma stood close to the vacant center of an otherwise brightly glowing circle of interconnected runes and archaic symbols. The area, once choked with rubble, debris and snow was now all but clear of any obstruction. The raging blizzard spawned by her machinations severely limited visibility, and the redhead knew that it was like this all over the planet.

The seal, painted with painstaking precision, circled around the sides and over the edges of the place her predecessor had been when she died. Golden arcs of chaotic energy discharge danced over the area while shadows so thick they almost formed a liquid mass swirled just centimeters over the ground. Yet despite their almost tangible state they were unable to obscure the soft golden glow of the empowered runes...

The Eridian Senshi took in a deep breath and slowly let it out through pursed lips in a stream of mist. To say that she was nervous would have been an understatement of titanic proportions. Her preparations were almost complete, with only two things left to add. After that it was all up to chance...

Reaching into her subspace pocket she proceeded to remove an item of much grief for anyone to oppose her in the Rocket-Ball Pit for the last several years. Clenched in her gauntleted hand was a familiar, flexible composite shaft with a long scoop attached to one end and a mallet-head on the other. The racket she had won on her fifteenth birthday had seen its share of abuse since she received it, but it was still more than serviceable. This would be the model for the form her talisman would take...

Taking in another deep breath Ranma felt out the energies surrounding her and permeating the seal matrix. Everything seemed to be in order for the time being, but she had been double, triple and quadruple checking everything ever since she began empowering the massive array that surrounded her, and it wouldn't have been the first time that a chaotic flux began threatening the integrity of the seal...

Bringing her thoughts back to the task at hand she placed her Racket in the middle of the circle. Magic immediately latched onto the tool, lifting it up to float unassisted mere centimeters from the bottom of the bowl. The arcs of golden energy that surrounded her picked up in intensity for a moment, but a mental command brought the flux back within manageable levels.

Slowly backing away from the center of her array the Senshi of Eris began muttering the incantation that would start the process upon its completion. Eventually backing out of the bowl completely she continued on until she was outside of the area covered by the seal. She approached a hovering mass of shadows, thick enough to achieve a solid form, some distance away from the seal itself.

Reaching out her hand, palm up, until it was beneath the orb of dark energy Ranma mentally pulled at the containment spell's weave and watched it dissolve, letting an orb roughly the size of a grapefruit and seemingly made of pure gold drop into her hand. The sphere was perfectly smooth, save for a jagged crack that almost split it down the middle. The old talisman, destroyed when her world fell, was all but useless as a tool to focus magic but enough of the patterns left behind by often used spells still remained imprinted within its matrix to serve her purpose.

Walking back to the edge of the array Ranma moved around it until she came to a part of the seal that extended beyond the normal edge in a much smaller half circle. The region where the two circular areas met was crisscrossed with runes that traveled in either direction to complete both circuits and mesh them together into the single large array that it was. In the middle of the smaller circle was another void, above which she placed the damaged orb which began to hover as the racket had while she continued muttering her incantation.

'It's time...' Eris' Senshi nervously thought. Moving with deliberate purpose she walked to the edge of the larger circle opposite the smaller and directly in line with both centers. Focusing her magic on the seal again, she began working at balancing its power levels more exactly even as she kneeled and placed both hands on the glowing circumference.

The last words of her incantation left Ranma's lips even as she managed to achieve the correct energy balance...

And the world around her exploded with power...

-o-o-o-o-o-

Nabiki was walking through one of the many markets of the Atlantis Arcology. She had finished setting up shop in one of the larger interchanges within the duct-work of the Senate structure not less than an hour earlier and now she was meeting with one of her Terran contacts.

'No matter how many times I come here, this place still amazes me... Construction only began fifteen years ago and now they've almost finished the upper tiers...' she thought as she passed stall after stall to reach her destination. 'Its base being fifteen hundred kilometers long from end to end, two hundred kilometers wide, and checking in with a population of over seven billion people and counting makes it the single largest super-structure constructed... in the recorded history of mankind...' She turned to look over a display of hand forged knives that had caught her eye as she added the addendum to her inner monologue with a depressed sigh. After all, When the Solar Kingdom had been in its hay-day its structures had spanned the entire circumference of the star, but now only a handful of people even knew that it had ever existed...

'Not to mention that Atlantis just happens to be the only Arcology capable of being fully self sustaining in the system.' she continued, shaking off the morose thoughts while examining a blade with a distinguished pattern of wavy light and dark metals caused by how they were folded, 'And it isn't even complete yet. The Gas Giants simply don't have the right environment to sustain the large scale production of food necessary for their populations even with magic, not to mention that the Queen spreads her resources too thinly in her attempt at control to organize this sort of project anywhere else... Hmmm... These are nice. Truly a lost art...'

Absently thinking that the vendor would have been arrested anywhere but Terra she turned away from the knife display and continued to wander through the multi-level market, occasionally stopping at a stall or walking into a store to look at something that caught her eye. Sometimes she would buy something, but more often than not she would simply leave empty handed.

Finally she came to the far end of the market. Behind her she could hear the din of thousands of shoppers and the cries of vendors alike, but in front of her was a sight to behold...

Nabiki was on the very edge of the superstructure that made up the Atlantis Arcology. Before her were windows over three stories tall, currently retracted to allow fresh air in thanks to the fine weather. Outside and hundreds of meters below she could see the vast expanse of ocean that Atlantis floated on and in the far distance she could just barely see the African landmass drifting by.

She waited there for several minutes as pedestrians passed before sensing a presence approaching her from behind. "Fine whether we've been having lately." said a male voice as its owner came up alongside her.

Nabiki didn't turn her head to look at him, but she could see her contact out of the corner of her eye well enough, 'Male, appearing to be in his mid twenties, clean shaven, neat brown hair and wearing casual dress with slightly tapered ears indicating Fey descent, but not enough to be obvious unless you're looking for it... Yup, this is my guy.'

"Indeed..." the brunette began, reciting her part of the code-phrase. After all, the idea of being 'too careful' was laughable in these covert operations, "But I heard that it's supposed to storm soon..."

"Really now?" he said, feigning surprise, "Then I feel sorry for those poor sods working in maintenance."

Nabiki's eyebrow imperceptibly twitched at the jab, but otherwise she maintained her chosen persona. He had completed the code within the guidelines, but he didn't need to remind her that there was still a lot of work to be done. "So... what have you got for me?" she whispered.

"Nothing much to be perfectly honest, but hopefully it will be enough to get you and the rest of your friends pointed in the right direction. These bloody ingrates don't know how good they really have it..." the man huffed before continuing, "There's a bloke who works in industrial storage on the lower decks called 'The Dealer'. He's actually a black market middle man, and word is that he knows how to get his hands on anything using his day-job as a cover. Now, I did a little digging and found out that he handled a rather large shipment recently. That isn't all that odd to be perfectly honest, but thing is, it didn't go to any of his usual buyers. I don't know where it went, but I'm sure you can find out if you talk to the right people."

"Anything else?" Nabiki asked.

"Some..." her contact said as he checked his time-piece, "But I need to get going... The miss's wants me home in time for dinner."

She nodded in assent for him to leave, and as he turned around there was a barely perceptible pass between them. Nabiki felt as he slipped a small data crystal into her hand before walking away as though nothing happened. Nabiki stood there for a few moments longer, giving him time to disappear into the crowd before heading out herself.

'Finally, a lead!'

-o-o-o-o-o-

Ranma collapsed to her hands and knees in exhaustion. In front of her was a familiar, but currently steaming, circular depression as the glowing runes of the most complex sealing array she had ever constructed slowly darkened before flaking away in a nonexistent breeze. She could smell pink and hear ozone as a result of all the highly condensed chaotic mana that was still floating around as she crawled to the edge of the pit before sliding over and down the slick sides to come to a stop in the center. Turning over to lie on her back she took in the view of the sky above. Thunder rumbled in the now clear sky overhead as the last vestiges of magical discharge from her efforts bled off into nothing...

'Son of a bitch, I'm tired... At least it stopped snowing...'

For five days she had worked non-stop on those seals, making sure that her efforts wouldn't destabilize and quite literally explode in her face. For five nights she tweaked and fiddled with the power output for similar reasons. In the end though, it had all been up to chance. Every record she had dug up when trying to figure out how to re-make her talisman told her that the originals had been forged by Queen Serenity I with the assistance of a contingent of technicians. Magi-tech had been discovered only a hundred years beforehand but they still possessed a great enough understanding of how it all worked to have made machines to do most of the work for them.

Three thousand years later and the understanding of magic Ranma possessed far surpassed what they had had. It didn't change the simple truth that a drawn seal, no matter how powerful or advanced, had nothing on a supercomputer that could make micro-corrections to the desired matrix faster than a picosecond. That went doubly so when half of the magic being used could be equated to chaos theory distilled into energy if she felt like exaggerating a bit.

Three thousand years and Ranma had worn herself into the ground attempting a procedure that in all truth only had a little over fifty percent chance of success. But it had worked, and compared to that, the fact that she was too tired to stand at the moment was a minor concern. The only reason she hadn't passed out yet was because of the extended operating time all Senshi experienced whenever they activated the full extent of their planetary bonds, but even that had its limits...

The planet wide blizzard her efforts had created had driven the last of the trapped water out of the stratosphere and now she stared tiredly into the clear, starry abyss above her. Ranma could just barely make out one star that was noticeably, if only slightly, brighter than the rest. 'I wonder how Nabiki's doing...' she thought as she took in the rest of the starry expanse. The view was truly amazing from where she lay. On most worlds there was too much light pollution to properly see the starry firmament. Sure there were the settlements and small mining colonies still dotting the larger asteroids scattered about the system that offered a descent view of the sky, but she had never had very many opportunities to visit them save for a few times when she and Nabiki had been on training exercises.

Now though, she looked up into the infinite expanse in front of her and could only marvel at its vastness. The bright band of stars that represented their galaxy stood out in sharp relief as she rested. She let a smile cross her face as she thought about what she had just accomplished. In five days she had done something that no-one else had been able to do ever since the early years of the Moon Kingdom...

Reaching up with tired arms, she grasped the jet black meter and a quarter long shaft of her new talisman and began pulling herself upright. At the top of the shaft was the maul, which had become larger and more ornate than before. It had taken on a gold hue and luster during its transmutation and a wicked looking spike extended from the other side. On the other end and seemingly as a piece with the shaft was the seventy five centimeter long peeler which had taken on the same golden appearance as the maul along the concave surface of the scoop while maintaining the shaft's black coloration on the outside. The end had narrowed into a point that was, with the sharpened edges, easily sharp enough to impale the stone by about half its length while keeping its slightly curved design.

Finally reaching a standing position Ranma leaned against her weapon for a moment to steady herself. Her Senshi magic was slowly refreshing her, washing away the fatigue, but if she didn't get some real rest soon her body would begin to break down. Pulling upward on the shaft she drew it out of its resting place in the stone and gave it a few experimental swings and grip reversals before her fatigue forced her to steady herself again.

'Good... the balance is perfect.' She thought, smiling to herself before giving it one last swing. Having completed that task she moved onto the most important test she needed to perform.

Reaching out with her magic she let a trickle of her power integrate with the weapon in her hands and began grinning when she felt the matrices ingrained into it. Everything seemed to be in order...

Ranma drew on her power, not directly through her bond to Eris, but through the Talisman in her hands, and for the first time in her life was able to completely separate the two halves of her magic from each-other.

"Ebon Wing"

Shadows condensed around her back again to form the umbral wings, and Ranma smiled when she noted the complete absence of gold in their coloration. Stretching them out, she made a running start and took to the skies. What she saw from the air took her breath away...

Below her was a nearly endless expanse of pure white, only broken by the buildings tall enough to escape the depth of the snow. The barely perceptible shadows cast by them could do nothing to dull the intensity of the snow's brilliance to her dark vision and she needed to actually blink a few times in order to let her eyes adjust to the unusual spectacle. The former Eridian Palace was almost completely buried, with only the central dome she had just left being high enough to escape.

For minutes that seemed to stretch into hours she slowly wove her way through the city until she reached where her landing zone was. Circling for a moment and noting the distinct circular pattern to the drifts surrounding her ship and was glad she had left the ship's force fields active in her absence. 'Otherwise it would be my former landing zone...'

Dropping out of the sky and letting her wings fade away Ranma keyed the access-pad for the ship's boarding ramp and waited for it to lower before making her way to her quarters, making sure the ramp closed behind her.

Dismissing her Senshi Armour as she entered the room Ranma felt her previous fatigue wash over her tenfold, and she barely made it to her bed before passing out.

Her Talisman was still clutched in her hand as she fell asleep...

-o-o-o-o-o-

- End Chapter II –

-o-o-o-o-o-

End Notes:

Wow... This one's been a long time coming I guess... The only thing I can say is that I'll try to not have another year long hiatus anytime soon... I won't make any promises though, seeing as Murphy seems to have taken an interest in me for the last year or so...

Ok... some things happened here, but I'm still setting things up to get everything rolling. Also revealed some more of the last 14 years history like I said I would. I'll reiterate, I'm planning on revealing more of the past fourteen years over time, but hopefully by the time I'm finished with Chapter five that will be mostly over with... Maybe before that even...

And on that note, leave a review if you feel like it. If you like it, thank you. If you don't, tell me why but please don't be an ass about it. Flames will be religiously ignored by this author, but if you have something constructive to say, I'm all ears. It helps me figure out where I'm screwing up, making it less likely I'll make the same mistakes in the future.