We do not own "Sailor Moon" nor any of the characters.
"SAILOR MOON ETERNAL"
The 6th Season of the Sailor Moon Saga
Chapter 36
"Multicolored Gemstones Glimmer in the Distance"
"The child of death was once a useful ally of our forces, young one. There is a power beyond power that lies dormant within her. Perhaps with the services of your mind, you may be able to persuade her to rejoin our fight?" Queen Metallia poses her evil question to the green eyed man perched relaxed upon the edge of a throne not his.
"That path is hopeless. Her mind is stronger than her fragile body. And yet stronger her will has become, erecting barriers that would serve to destroy her before she would permit herself to turn to our side again. No, I've decided against that particular path." Robin easily dismisses the Queen of Evil, as if she were no more than a doting aunt of his.
"Very well, my heir." Metallia smiles evilly, deep down somewhere, in the pit of her wickedness at his ambitious arrogance taking decisions upon himself.
"There is someone though, whose powerful energies may prove an asset to our cause." Robin says aloud to the dark orb Metallia's evil spirit occupied.
"And who is that?" Aquamarianna asks, as she and Pearlrellion enter the throne room.
"Of all these 'Sailors' I've been studying, there is one who interests me far more than the others—more than Jupiter's strength, more than Mercury's brainpower, more than Fighter's passion, more than Uranus' arrogance and unpredictability." At the mere mention of THAT despised Sailor's name, Robin's eyes shrink to slits, slowly plotting her destruction in particular, for some reason having a grudge against that blasted soldier of the seventh-most outer planet of this solar system.
"This one has all the earmarks for greatness, and though I have made the attempt, at the moment her mind is closed to my investigative prodding." Robin looks almost confused by his powerful mind being repelled by another.
But then that overwhelming arrogance of his own spurs him on all the more to seek her out.
"The unfortunate partner of Uranus hails from the planet Neptune and I believe she may be able to—"
Robin, unaware, strikes a chord within Metallia's wicked heart.
"NEVER MENTION THAT NAME IN MY PRESENCE AGAIN!"
Like a blast from the deep, dark nothingness, Metallia's most dreaded voice bellows out, deafening those in the throne room with the force alone. Aquamarianna glances to her husband in fear, but he, too, was taken aback by this outburst.
Robin, however, was undaunted.
"Why not?" He says calmly, with a rebellious determination in his eye Metallia knew she was not fully able to claim as her doing.
"Because I said so, my heir. You have far better things to do." Metallia calms herself against his steely, unfeeling gaze. She was still certain this star soldier was under her control, despite his recalcitrance, and she meant to keep him that way.
"Such as the training of my newest minions. Dracon, Swanette—step forth!"
From out of the shadows two figures appear. A man and woman, one with dark green hair and eyes; she with snow white hair and the blue eyes of a bird stood before them. Her hair was up in a long braid and both of them had the trance of evil in their eyes.
"At your command, Majesty." The lovers answer in unison.
"Excellent." Metallia's light gleams at their subservient bows.
"Queen Metallia, are we not pleasing you? Do we really need more—" King Pearlrellion starts to protest, but holds back at his wife's warning hand.
"SILENCE!" Metallia shrieks. "Silence." She says softer, toning her voice in a more wily way. "How are you to build a kingdom of my evil darkness without servants, my king? How are you to create an empire without a court?" The evil Queen asks metaphorically. "Lord Opalson, Lady Ruby, come forward."
Pearlrellion's anxieties are doubled upon seeing the last of Metallia's recruits. A tallish man with a firm jaw and purplish-black hair, while the lady at his side's hair was her most prominent feature—it flamed a short and brilliant red.
And Pearlellion knew them both far too well.
"Welcome, at long last, brother." He says uncordially as possible. For he and his sibling had had their share of troubles and rivalry in the past.
"Excellent." Metallia cackles, for it was within a house's structure that it could be made to fall at her whim.
Unnoticed amidst all the new combatants' introductions that were on parade for mainly his benefit, the unconcerned Heir had slipped away in the darkness. Metallia's forbidding warning had fueled his curiosity all the more to find out just who this enigmatic sailor of Neptune was.
Far, far above the evil catacombs, a mountain resort village lay dormant, closed down to the public on account of an early November blizzard. But despite the warnings to turn around, or stay at lower elevations of the peak, somewhere far above the five mile limit, a sports car peeks red beneath the piles of snow covering it as it weathers the beating of the storm, strangely abandoned and uncared for by its loving owner.
For inside a chimney smoking cabin nearby, there was something many times more important to her, requiring attention, tucked away in the loft where it was warmest and quiet.
"Do you think it's warm enough in here yet, Ally?" Sayer's voice asks from down the loft in a loud whisper, as not to disturb the silent creature laying securely snuggly, propped up on a sea of pillows and blankets, plus a pure white silvery plush seal stuffed animal that Sayer had picked up for her at the stop for food and supplies at the store.
"Any warmer and I'll have to put on suntan lotion. Have you used all our firewood up yet, firebug?" Alex teases slightly as Sayer's head peeps up over the ladder's top railing, having already pulled her shapely form from a warm turtleneck sweater. Her low voice was at a normal level for she knew there was no fear of awakening the soft, aqua beauty in the bed she was perched upon, for all the sedatives Alex had just administered to a strangely agitated Michelle.
"No, Ally. Do I look like a fool?" Sayer says with a crooked grin, gazing at Alex's raised eyes. "Don't answer that!" He adds quickly, then smiles, catching hers for a shining minute. Sayer watches sadly as his mate's dazzling smile fades away when her look turns back to a still restlessly nightmare haunted Michelle.
Alex was sad all the time now, often pensive, irresolute and worried at any given second. Sayer could feel the change in his usually confident, unshakable partner. He had always known how close Alex and Michelle's bond was, but now he could see its toll on them both acutely.
I wish there was something I could do to make it all better. But I miss him, too...So even I know it's hard to be cheerful sometimes.
Sayer's smile drops as he gazes out the loft's window over the white torrents threatening to swallow the little cabin that meant so much to this star-crossed pair up in its vast, hidden nothingness where they first dared to expose their true hearts for one another.
"Speaking of lotion…Do you think you could, um…?" He shoves away his own melancholy to assuage that of the woman he loved with all his heart and soul with his own cheeky brand of humor. Yes, his bruised leg and head wounds from just yesterday were still in need of some tender loving care, but Sayer was more concerned with getting his tough cookie of a wife to get off her own feet for just a minute to rest her own fresh torso slashes and deep upper arm clawing from the fierce battle with that bad wolf version of him.
Turning around at a sudden touch on his shoulder, Sayer looks into Alex's deep green eyes. "Hey, was it that long ago since we were last here?" Alex, sensing his need for her as well, wraps her injured arms around Sayer's neck possessively over the stair railing.
"Was it?" Sayer feels her strong hands caress his chest, sliding off the buttons of his shirt as she does.
"Almost a year." Alex whispers with a tender finger tracing his scabbing over cheek and swollen eye socket. Then she leads him down the narrow loft ladder steps with a final reassuring glance over to Michelle's finally peacefully slumbering form. Once downstairs, her eyes glaze over towards that one shining window where her name and his had been etched in the glass of this hidden away, enchanted cottage secret of theirs where she asked him to be hers.
And then this damn universe had to get in the way…
"Don't rush it, Ally! It's only been ten months." The dark haired young man winks his fully functional blue eye at her, bending down to catch her preoccupied gaze and trying to draw her to smile at him again.
"Damn, crap, shi—" But the affable action sends shockwaves of pain over the bashed leg fighter as he practically doubles over in pain near the said window she was transfixed upon.
"More like eleven." Alex corrects him as she automatically scoops up her cuss-word spouting, whiny puppy whose bruised legs she could clearly see were extremely swollen and painful after rolling up his pant leg.
"Hey! Never mind me! Ally! I don't think your arms are okay to pick me up! You're in way worse shape and wouldn't even let me stop on the way here to take you to a doctor to get stitched up!" Sayer protests as Alex takes hold of him, physically carrying her lightweight husband in a pair of strong arms through the small hallway.
"Shut up, Starr. I don't need doctors. I already let you pour everything in the bathroom cabinet at home on me and bandage me up, so it's good to go. I'm a quick healer." Alex's teasing mouth reassures as she takes her partner into that oh-so-familiar room where many a passionate honeymoon night was spent.
"Glad to hear that." He smirks in relief as Alex gently lowers him to the many times repaired, familiar old bed. "Eleven months?! It almost seems like that long since we last..." Sayer's mumbled complaints were stopped short by Alex's fierce kiss abruptly be-stilling his lips. She needed to feel the security of having him near as much as he did in this crazy, upside down world as she pressed him down to the still deliciously creaky mattress.
"Time to change your bandages, Ally." After their lips part, trying-to-be-conscientious Sayer insists on the reason he wanted her down here in the first place as he begins to sit up. However, he knew he'd meet opposition after having such a hard time getting his go-getter wife to stop for even a minute during this whole long trip to the mountains. Undaunted by her rolling eyes and sigh, Sayer gingerly removes her loose shirt, placing a caring hand on her punctured side.
"Not yet. I'll do you first." As expected, stubborn as ever, Alex grabs up the bottle of muscle rub she'd brought to alleviate his hurt from the nightstand instead. "Pants down." She orders while shaking the tube of medicated rub.
"This brings back good memories, doesn't it? It's like a distant fantasy now..." The romantic rock star muses languorously as his lover crawls onto the groaning mattress over his bare form to apply the muscle rub to his lower legs.
"Minus the blunt force trauma bruises, bloody bandages and scabbing over body parts. But, yeah, I guess I can see the 'fantasy' part of it, if you do." Alex's sarcastic, smart tongue couldn't help from teasing as she gives her partner's tight tush a resounding slap.
"Ouch! Your turn for me to play the role of doctor now, you bad patient." Sweetly smiling Sayer doggedly goes through a lot of rigmarole to carefully clean and re-bandage her multiple punctured upper right arm. Then this amateur physician strips the rest of Alex naked to 'gain better access' to her pierced side. But the way her 'doctor' had been parading unclothed in close quarters around his unsettled 'nurse,' the well-bandaged, too-tense couple requiring this release had finally succumbed to participate in some extremely gentle, mild foreplay that both stressed bodies were yearning for.
Even if the world was falling apart around them, this pair needed this intimacy to lose themselves in more than either knew. The petting, the teasing, the tenderness to cling to one another for some kind of stability against this harsh reality awarded Alex and Sayer with more healing properties than any medicine or ointment could offer their beat-up bodies.
Everything was locked up tightly, and Michelle had been tenderly attended to, so Alex lets herself go. She desperately wanted to, for at least one night, let her wounded lover enjoy their first return to this cottage he had bought for her and had so many planned visits for when they were 'old and grey.'
Although, she recognized that their coming here now was not at all the pleasure trip they two once had planned. Michelle's safety required the secrecy this hidden away, winter cabin had to offer, deep in the stormy forest.
But thoughts of the upcoming war were pushed aside, just for tonight, as Alex and Sayer hold onto each other with all their might, defying the bitter winter storm beating down hard on the door outside.
Falling asleep in Alex's arms, Sayer contentedly drifts away into a world where dreams and nightmares blurred. A place where a silver-haired companion still existed but was always far away, beyond reach, where a shining golden light was the only thing to hold onto—the only anchor he had in the roughening dark seas...
Half asleep, half awake, Sayer feels Alex softly stirring at his side. He instinctively wraps his arms around her, needing her…warmth?
"Are you awake, Starr?" Sayer vaguely hears her low voice speaking to him.
"Mmmhhh..." Sayer mumbles, words slurring under his still exhausted breath, his groggy mind crediting her cool skin for the temperature drop since the fireplace had died down.
"I'm awake..." Wearing very little sheet coverings despite the cold weather storming outside, the golden haired beauty announces with a seductive tone, blowing in his ear.
"Oh, yeah?" Sayer drowsily hums, his eyes still closed. He turns on his back just in time to hear a surprising statement from his wife.
"You know I love you." Alex softly says, kissing his sleepy eyelids, his cheeks, his neck and moves down for more...
"Wait a minute. Since when do you tell me that you love me so easily?" Red flags shoot up in Sayer's mind as he holds Alex's muscular shoulders back in his hands firmly.
Though he knew her feelings for him ran deep, the navy-haired man could not honestly recall once when his wife had told him those exact words aloud.
"Since..." Alex's green eyes flash wide open at her error. Looking into Sayer's dubious blue ones, she realized that there was nothing else she could do. Quickly her hands fly over his bare chest heart, with a strength and ferocity more than the real Alex owned.
"Oh-no-you-don't!" Sayer, who had more than learned how to deal with his race car driver's quickness, grabs her two hands that were desperately trying to claw at his bare chest. He finds the struggle harder than normal, as his beautiful attacker's already impressive strength seemed to increase the closer she grabbed for his heart, her hands aglow with some ebony crystal.
"Hmph! The minute I leave you alone, I find you with another woman in your bed. Men." Battle worn and always ready with a quip, the real Alex's surprise at her evil double's appearance was not evident in her sarcastic smirk at her questionable husband. The soldier of the wind stands in the doorway, donning nothing but her pale blue, revealing low neck, sleeveless robe after just returning to their bedroom downstairs after a quick morning check on Michelle.
"You could give me a hand, if it's not too much trouble for you, Mrs. Starr!" Sayer grunts out from beneath the strong woman atop him, with a similarly sarcastic air amid his tough struggle with Alex's tall blonde look-alike.
"Oh, you're just itching for a fight this morning, aren't you, Mr. Sokova? I suppose I'll bring it all, if she's too much for you to handle…" Accustomed to zesty comebacks with him during combat, Alex enjoyed watching the equally matched scene, ribbing at her laid out mate despite the unsettling aspect of this particular attacking danger.
But after yesterday's fiasco in the apartment and the knowledge of previous sailor targets, this duplicate assailant of herself was almost to be expected.
Alex reaches into her deep robe pocket for her Planet wand with the silver engagement band and ruby wedding ringed hand she had just minutes ago been admiring as she had stroked its crimson shine over Michelle's unconscious head.
In this moment, the spirit of Uranus understood the responsibilities such great love had laid down upon her, for the two people who needed her most.
"Put that away, Alex. I don't think that's a very good idea at all."
A calm voice pierces through the darkness of the cabin as the front door swings open with a rush of chilled air that matched the cold and detached layer in his tone. The rising morning sun glimmers over the mountain peak, momentarily blinding Alex, as, in shock, she freezes. Her eyes focus in disbelief at just who she was certain THAT voice belonged to...
"But you always were a difficult woman, weren't you?" Snidely, ascerbically sardonic, the voice moves closer into the cabin. Alex's own voice catches in her throat as her eyes make out definitely just who had entered the room.
"Shrimp...?" She breathes her 'friendly' nickname for he who had become so important to her life's partner—Uranus' beloved cousin and fellow sailor soldier, Neptune. He whose disappearance was the sole reason that Michelle had given up on life, believing his shine was the only one who could bring her back to the world of the living...
"That's right." Robin's black leather pantsuit was indeed shining as keenly as the sinister look in his light green eyes. He smirks at the scantily robed woman as he coolly saunters up to her, hands arrogantly placed on his hips.
"It's me, your 'Shrimp.'" His simper, like the light blazing in his eyes, turns suddenly sneering and dark as Alex sees that the soul was gone from them, any trace of warmth and goodness was obviously overtaken by a pure look of evil and especial hatred for her.
"Come back from the dead to haunt you, Wind Bitch!"
Alex's paused hand urgently digs deeper into her pocket for her transformation stick.
CRACK!
But it was a hesitated moment too late. Metallia's Heir seemed to foresee her move and countered it with a speed he never possessed before. Dark energy surges within him, causing the smaller, thinner person to snap Alex's wrist as easily as he would have broken a flower's stem.
"I've always wanted to do that." Robin smiles evilly at Alex, though no scream of pain escapes her stabbing lips to reward him. She reels back, while her other functioning hand turns into a fist.
But Robin again was too swift. He dodges the swing and leeringly reveled in decking Alex with one of his own electrically power charged fists instead. Her literally shocked body skids across the hardwood floor, quivering with the high voltage.
"I'll take everything away from you, you vile creature. Everything you love, starting with this one." With a hiss down in Alex's ear as he then vindictively belts her across the bloody mouth hard to unconsciousness, the gloating Heir next haughtily steps into the small bedroom.
Inside, a focused Sayer was still duking it out with Alex's clone. Their bed tussle now had graduated to hand-to-hand combat scuffling on the hardwood plank floor over the energy-hungry dark gemstone Sayer had thus far kept at bay.
Unaware of his silent wife's newest injury just cruelly inflicted by his thought-deceased brother, Sayer had just landed a power punch in the gut of his own vicious assailant when he noticed the figure standing in the doorway.
In a burst of adrenaline, amazingly finding the strength to physically overpower the fake, evil 'Alex' with a knock-out kick to her shocked face when he saw the fantasized apparition, Sayer Starr thought his instantly teary eyes were lying.
"Rob...Is that really you?" He whispers softly as he gathers himself from the floor, staggering across the room forward to Robin hesitantly, slowly, as if he was almost afraid the longed for bubble would burst if he moved towards it too quickly.
"What a stupid question from a stupid person. But what did I expect from you, Sayer?" The silver ponytailed man, clad in open shirted black leather, replies with a small, snarky, overconfident grin at his youngest brother.
The annoying brother whom a mind infused of evil ambition and a heart full of pure hatred had turned Robin to despise exceedingly now.
"DIE!"
Eyes glowing neon green with loathing, Robin shouts suddenly. He points a single finger at his sibling, while cold burning electricity sizzles from it, directed right at a frozen-in-place, utterly confused Sayer.
"Watch out!" Alex races past in a flash, knocking Sayer's body out of the way, just in the nick of time as the electrified energy inferno explodes the back wall of the cottage, the smoking, snow covered fields now plain to see.
"Ally, is this a dream? A really bad dream?" Sayer asks his rescuer as his eyes spill over with tears.
"No dream, lover." Alex confirms the horrendous scenario, her eyes darting up from the quickly driven snow-filled bedroom. "More like a nightmare." She pulls Sayer out of the way just as the smoke clears and another blast destroys another wall.
"Transform now!"
Alex forces her broken wrist to do as she wills it to, thrusting her golden transform stick into the air.
"URANUS CRYSTAL POWER!"
Alex grits her teeth as she tastes the blood that jerk had inflicted to her swollen mouth, fighting the pain of both body and soul as she transforms into Super Sailor Uranus, ready to battle him.
"FIGHTER CRYSTAL POWER!"
Uranus watches Sayer transform out of the side of her eye, damning the tears that were flowing from his eyes as he does so.
"MAKE—"
Halfway through Sayer's transformation into Super Sailor form of Star Fighter, a sneaky, more powerful hand that had been revitalized into a new form reaches up from the cabin planks to wrap around his painful lower leg, constricting the deep hemorrhaged bruising excruciatingly.
The doppelganger of Alex was becoming energized into its true evil form by its master's direct beckon, into a shimmering ruby red, swiftly rotating column of an intangible whirlwind, cosseted by a reflective pure silver, thermally conductive band.
Understanding every inch of a Sailor Starlight's unique transformation, the Heir had endowed this demonic nega-creature with such a ferocity that it was able to snake like the wind right through Star Fighter's star field, grasping at Sayer's neck and squeezing hard before he was even able to transform.
KICK!
Sayer, through tear-stained eyes, precise aim power kicks the attacking red wisps of wind, right between its revolving silver halo shield, in its all-too-solid, ruby-red heart. The caught-off-guard creature falls back just in time for him to finish his transformation.
"—UP!"
Sayer finishes his sailor yell painfully as he prepares to engage the evil crimson monster, but suddenly finds everyone, including Uranus, had vanished.
"Where—?!" Star Fighter asks the wind and to his shock, it answers back.
"Here I am, lover." Softly, the translucent red wisps reappear as the, at first, teasing breeze of wind abruptly screams in towards him, smacking Fighter hard right in the face.
"Can't you touch me?"
Uranus sees Fighter decked by the whirling wisps of wind and she was about to rush to his rescue when her other eye trained on the new enemy she feared far more, sees Robin's gaze turn coldly up towards the entrance to the loft.
"URANUS WORLD SHAKING!"
She quickly calls out, the golden energy orb smashing the ladder to wood chips as Robin moved towards it.
"As always, a headstrong fighter with a brain full of rocks." The Heir taunts with a sarcastic hand sweep over the world shaken destruction. He merely folds his arms and easily blinks into thin air to teleport to his destination without missing a beat.
"DAMN!" Uranus lets out the cry as she bounds up through the rubble to catch up to just where she knew the man in black was heading.
Silently, Robin stands, perfectly still, over the sleeping form of a woman wrapped up tightly on a bed. She was in a lace nightgown, with aqua hair well groomed and cascading down her bare white shoulders. Her lips were a pale, yet rosy pink and her perfect alabaster skin looked so soft that Robin felt the need to touch its white cheek...
His hand slowly, tentatively moves closer as he wished for some reason to look into her eyes and scan the mind of this Sailor Soldier who had intrigued him so much that he intended to take her back with him into the evilness enveloping his soul...
"GET AWAY FROM HER!"
Like a lioness, wind endowed athlete Sailor Uranus leaps from the ground floor straight up to the loft. In one motion, she grabs the arm that was reaching towards Michelle's innocent form, snapping it back so hard, so viciously, his arm would've broken if Robin had still been 'normal.'
But as Uranus could clearly see looking into his eyes, this Robin Starr was no longer normal.
"Do you love her?" Robin asks as he shoves Sailor Uranus by her weakened painful wrists against the chalet wall.
"You know I do! What's happened to you?! Stop this now!" Uranus growls. Her hard won trust in him was betrayed, for she saw there was no recognition of what that word 'love' actually meant in them. Something had been added and something equally taken away, Alex was certain, as she wildly searches his strange eyes.
"Nothing has happened to me." Robin calmly states. "But something IS about to happen to you." He smirks, grabbing her neck and holding her over the loft's empty opening where the ladder no longer existed.
Kicking and thrashing her fingers at the unbelievably powerful hand clutched around her throat, Uranus' eyes catch a glimpse of the fiery light show of lasers and red wind cyclones doing battle below.
But that similar light of a star was no longer in the eyes of the man holding her tauntingly over the railing's edge.
"You know, it joys me to kill you. I don't exactly recall all the details why, but I truly despise you. Do you know that?" Robin chuckles at the power of life and death he was holding over this rebellious soldier.
"The feeling—ugh—is—unhg—MUTUAL!"
Sailor Uranus does a swinging kick, propelling herself upwards and her assailant downwards as they both fall perilously to the ground floor below.
Just in time to both be walloped by a forceful gale of red wind blasting in their direction with a power so strong that it blows out the other old cabin's wall.
"FOOL!" Robin shrieks at the wind creature that Super Sailor Star Fighter was keeping at bay with his remarkably quick moves and power punches and kicks. Quick study Fighter had learned that this squirrelly red wind column was excellent at absorbing his laser energies and reflecting them back in a machine gun style shooting spree through the silver ring encircling it that could knock down walls.
"Well, get out of the way next time, Master!" The ever-changeable, wild and free wind creature was not one for asking forgiveness, even from her authorities.
"Rebellious wind beast is just as bad as the actual sadist it copied...Just collect their energy, then destroy the Sailor Soldiers before I destroy you, okay?" With a sighed murmur under his breath, Robin's temper flares as he snobbishly dusts himself and his sleek black clothing off.
"I thought it would be a breeze to steal away something precious you possessed, foolish woman. But your man was unwilling to oblige me." The red wind cloud whips from spot to spot of the now well-ventilated cottage, mocking Uranus as it girlishly laughs. "But look at him now! Such a waste!" The now seductive, prejudicial wind whines as gusts fly everywhere at Star Fighter, thrashing her female unsatisfactory screeching form about the broken down cabin.
Ignoring the wind creature's denigration of his feminine form, Fighter rushes up to where his fellow starlight soldier had been leaning lazily against the last remaining wall of the beloved log cabin. The one where the window glass was yet intact, etched with Sayer and Alex Starr's forever entwined names.
"Do you think so?" Covering for her partner, Uranus feigns talking to the monster as her wind sensitive soul calls for her guardian planet's help with this one, until suddenly a knowing smile etches across her face.
"I still find my sexy Fighter desirable, in any form." Uranus declares defiantly before launching her combined power attack borne of love at the silver band protected, circling red wind streams that could not foresee the upheaval coming.
"URANUS SPACE SWORD SHAKING!"
Uranus' well-aimed, glowing red, pure heart's talisman, merged with her fiercest ground shaking winds that bend the metal mid-air, make a full assault upon the red wind wisps believed protected by its silver ring shield. Super Sailor Uranus' power tears the very fabric of the unpredictable breeze asunder by her sheer force of will, until its ruby heart was shattered.
"Whhhoooo—!" The wily wind whistles its last song as the ruby red currents cease whipping around at Uranus and Fighter at last when the invisible creature's formless form begins to dissipate, screaming in pain as it shrinks.
"YOU'LL PAY FOR THAT!" Still, the diminished, yet unquenchable wind monster manages to grasp onto one last biting wintry gust to echo across the cold stillness, until it builds to rumble the entire cabin in an even more terrifying manner.
Even the mountain peak shakes as the vengeful tone turns markedly lower and angrier. "I, too, can change. For even the gentlest breeze can always turn into the fiercest twister in the flash of a moment. But I doubt you'll find me 'desirable' now, Wind Witch." The red, feminine voice and wispy shaped, flowing wind column transforms into a dark, obviously male, large silver circlet shadow monster that the reflective ring had morphed into. The wind whistled through its circular halo for a split second of visibility as it stalks towards them, unseen in the dark corners it hid within.
"Hahahahaha! You can't fight what you can't see! Hahahaha!"
"Where'd this one go now?!" Super Sailor Star Fighter glances around nervously, hearing the cackling shadow as he and Uranus take an intimate back to back stance at the center of the wind ravaged, now open concept living room.
SSCH-ICKTT!
"Keep your guard up. I hear the breath of steel close." Experienced lifelong fencer Uranus' glance darts about, warily sensing the sadistic shadow wind unsheathing a sword—swords?— as it was creeping up right behind them with an unseen blade. Invisibly moving in upon them at incredible speeds, the silver ring monster had sprouted a quartet of retractable scimitar blades along its large rounded band of silver, spinning and slashing at their already injured arms and legs at unexpected time to time as the gloom overshadows them from all sides.
"Ahh! Ugh! Uh! Argh!"
"Argh! Uh! Ungh! Rrgh!"
In tight formation, Fighter and Uranus glance down to see and feel the intermingled blood dripping down from one another's appendages. Fighter was more than perturbed that Uranus' previously gashed arms were suffering tremendously, and it was all caused by this invisible shadow enemy skulking in the shadow that Robin, floating high in the air to block out the sun, was purposely casting over the pair of battered sailor soldiers.
"Robin! What's wrong with you?! Please stop this! Eeyk!" As he endures another deep scratch across his exposed side, an angry countenance rises to a screaming Fighter's features as he calls up at his blameworthy attacker.
Anger that was intermixed with a confused, sad look in his eyes at his brother's betrayal.
"Don't do this! It's me, Sayer!" Star Fighter pleas with genuine eyes up at his lifelong former roommate and brother.
"You're wasting your breath." Uranus mutters to her forever optimistic mate, already glimpsing the lost look in the soulless eyes of Robin Starr which spoke volumes to her more cynical mind.
"I know who you are…brother." Robin's indolent eyes snap open as he floats above them in the sky like a dark rising tide, directing a sinister negative infused energy attack down at his concerned sibling callously.
"STAR CHAOS FLUX BEAM!"
Chaos Star Healer's new attack beam that his Princess had recently sent them energy for had been warped by Metallia's evil turmoil gene that ran through his veins fluidly now. The concentrated current of radiation to fry his synapses was about to make a direct target contact to rain down upon the disbelieving Star Fighter.
"Rob…" Emotional Fighter whispers in soulful agony, unable in his sorrow to move out of the way.
"SPACE SWORD BLA—oof!"
"Fighter?! Are you crazy!?" Uranus' swift counterattack that would have struck the attacker and mediated his intended dark magic was thrown off balance when Sailor Star Fighter at her side had physically grasped her glowing blade between a pair of star-powered up pale blue hands to halt it—
"Don't hurt Healer, Uranus!" Shrieking right in her livid face, Star Fighter cries out plaintively to his fighting cohort. His generous, charitable heart and intensely beseeching eyes loudly beg her not to strike at the obvious enemy as he pushes Uranus' space sword's aim off kilter, the attack from above still imminently about to hit him—
However, incensed Super Sailor Uranus suddenly spins the pair around to switch places to be the one to take on the searing surge about to swallow the vulnerable, badly injured foolish Fighter up in its electromagnetic force.
"U!" Guilt-ridden Fighter screams as a Uranus' body slumps down to the floor at his distressed back, her talisman that she had quick used in semi-defense to deflect the massive radiation force, clattering at her electrocuted side.
"Wind Circlet Sabre! Strike them down now!" The Heir calls upon his chosen creature of darkness to finish the despicable, rascally pair off, boosting its power to attack even in the light of day.
"Yes, Master." The gleaming silver ring of swords begins to spin wildly at a frightening speed…
"WIND TWISTER SABRE RAGE!"
With a silver howl of the madly gusting wind, the upgraded scimitar ring sends out a vicious stormy band of tornado-like airstreams, exploding out the remaining walls and floors, while logs and furniture fly everywhere. Uranus firmly grabs onto Fighter by his new armor sleeves as he was being thrashed about the disintegrating cabin, thrusting him out from being crushed by the falling mainframe beam.
"Lead it away from the house!" Tactical planner Uranus shouts loudly to be heard above the din of the tormenting winds. Star Fighter nods and dashes in leaps and bounds across the mountaintop's foot high snowbanks, leaving Uranus' vigilant eyes to warily search for the silver ring sabre's suddenly absent 'Master.'
Anxious to not leave her alone with predators roaming about, Sailor Uranus quickly moves in to collect Michelle from the destroyed log cabin, hoping against hope her sedated cousin was yet unscathed upstairs in the one section of the poor cottage thankfully left untouched.
Catching Fighter's movements, the silver wind monster chases after him at full cyclone throttle. In the bright sunlight, the invisible in the shadows creature of evil remained plain for Star Fighter to see. Its frightening spinning swords were all too real, and drawing nearer.
SLASH SLASH! SLASH SLASH! SLASH SLASH!
Fast, but not fast enough with his current injuries, Fighter's vivid red blood spills out onto the white snow as he falls to his knees after the twister had cruelly sucked him up in its whirlwind wake. The relentless meteorological creature breathes a violent wind stream down his neck, its cache of swords metamorphing into a single blade, prepared to strike for the kill...
"STAR FURIous punc—gakt, gakt—!"
Coughing up blood, Fighter intended to use his new punching fist power to fight it off, but he was already losing consciousness as the wind circlet aims its blade for his exposed heart. Its malleable metal fashions the dark crystal to be embedded at its shining silver tip in order to drain the last of this Sailor Starlight's energy for Queen Metallia before the razor-sharp sword would plunge down to rip Fighter's chest asunder...
"FIGHTER!" Uranus could feel her lover's energy ebbing away from somewhere inside of her. Placing Michelle carefully down onto a tree-covered snowbank, the anxious golden soldier races out into the mountainside to help, aiming her powers as she summons the wind that she called her own to her fingertips.
But in doing so, Super Sailor Uranus didn't see Dark Star Healer's raging, backstabbing lime green "CHAOS FLUX BEAM!" racing towards her back. Sizzling with the evil energy that begins to shut down her brain synapses, she falls to her knees. Her electrified body melts the snow, as she goes down, just a few feet away from where her Star Fighter was being drained dry of his energy.
In some cosmic play of fate, Alex had fallen into a pile of the disintegrated cottage's wind-tossed shrapnel, her face pressed down upon a singular ripped out, yet unbroken, windowpane, right over where a pair of names had been etched in implausibly unbreakable, enchanted glass…
… Alex and Sayer Starr…
Reaching out with the unforgettably inspired love energy her soldier from the stars had etched on her heart's talisman, Uranus summons the last of her strength, despite the pain shooting through her entire shutting down body...
"URANUS SPACE SWORD BL-"
CRUNCH!
Rematerializing mid air, Robin's black leather boot comes squashing down forcefully on her raised arm, cracking its distressed humerus bone in another location yet again. Maliciously cackling as he stands, towering for once over her prone, defenseless form, evil green eyes flash as he actually smiles down at her.
A wicked smile of pure evil.
"Yes, I will enjoy killing you most of all. I don't think I'm even going to wait for your worthless energy, Uranus. I'll tear your mind apart piece by piece with my psychic worm and make you beg to die first." He smiles at the thought of strong Uranus begging at his feet. He aims his hand at her with a devilish look in his eye. His deadliest new power of a malicious 'Chaos Maelstrom Worm' gleams in radiant lime at the Heir's vengeful fingertips, aimed at defenseless Uranus with vindication in his dark gaze down at her.
Damn it, Starr!
...Michelle...I'm sorry...In the end, I couldn't protect either of you…
As the skies she commanded grow dark and inky above her, Alex knew her fight was futile, with the last of her strength expended, this traitorous shrimp of an enemy was too much of an irony for her warrior's soul to take would be the one to spell her final demise…
"STAR DELIRIOUS KICK!"
From out of nowhere, a totally unexpected, new power borne of a passionate love's intensity for a Star Fighter's chosen life partner explodes through the still skies to dare to challenge the darkness about to overwhelm her precious psyche.
Super Sailor Star Fighter had—in that moment when his Uranus needed him most, in her worst nightmare of weakness and failure to protect those she cherished–-risen above his fiercest opponent with a heart that could limitlessly soar for the amazing woman he loved more than life.
Fighter's previous furious punch had shone through at the last possible second, walloping the sword circlet monster straight up through the stratosphere with such an intensity, it most likely disintegrated. Its turmoil of gusts disperse to the ends of the earth as its shadow sinks deep into the ground with a final, defeated howl.
But Star Fighter, though energy drained, beat down and slashed up to the painful Nth degree, didn't stop being amazing there in order to save his Ally. His feverishly energized body pulls out all the athletic stops, his impressive physique performing a dynamic high kick at Robin with one of Star Fighter's well-toned, muscular legs frenetically kicking straight up to the heavens.
Fighter's newest Super Starlight concentrated power had a blinding 'kick' indeed, full of true love's delirious effect fireworks raining taser shocking beams of dazzling, radiant light straight down from the starfields high above upon Uranus' aggressor, blinding this Dark Healer.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
The incessant fireworks show deleteriously envelops Fighter's lone target's every sense, proving damnably blinding in shockwaves. Grabbing at his rendered sightless eyes, disturbed by this raving lunatic's abrupt glaring frenzy, the Heir recoils his about to be unleashed, deadly mental warping 'worm' power away from killing a downed Uranus in the most horrendous method imaginable.
Astounded to have been preemptively shock attacked and momentarily blinded by this dumbest of all sailor soldiers, a growling Robin scrambles. Pulling his low-neck, black leather collar up, Metallia's emissary shields himself from the painfully descending bright lasers in a dark dome bubble to avoid the remainder of the vividly wild firework barrage.
But he would not give up the fight this day when he could sense, through his greater mental capacity, that both his idiotic, doggedly stubborn opponents were beyond their break limits. Robin gazes down at Uranus and Fighter, crawling to one another with badly damaged bodies that were as worn down and broken as their bled dry energy and fighting spirits.
But his 'great' mental faculties had overlooked the fact that the pair of despicable, star-crossed lovers did not come to this mountaintop alone.
WHOOSH!
Like a gentle ocean tide, the wind picks up the scent of the salt sea air a second before a crashing blue-green wave of warm water washes over, crashing a beaming energy sphere at Uranus' all-too familiar attacker. It dissolves his protective sphere, allowing a few of Star Fighter's last blinding taser lights lingering in the atmosphere to strike his cheek.
Dismayed at being thwarted in his planned, psychologically macabre slaying of his most despised adversary, touching his injured cheek, Robin spins on his heel in irritation at yet another interference.
There, standing tall, her arms crossed, her aqua skirt fluttering on the now gentle, breezy wind, high heels sparkling as she poses high upon the rooftop, was Super Sailor Neptune.
Her hair glows with a pale aqua aura as the sun rises behind her. Michelle looks down to where she instinctively, without thought, sensed Alex was in danger. Her duty, her loyalty, her embracing love, had all awakened her from the self-imposed slumber of unconsciousness where the sensitive woman shielded her soul, through her bond with another, from being torn apart.
She knew from the depths of that profound soul, ingrained unfathomably in every part of her being, Michelle knew that HE was here, too.
You're alive...you're alive...I knew it...You're alive...I hear you echoing over the ocean!
Tears spring to the oceanic maiden's biting eyes.
"Robin!"
"Robin! Please answer me!"
Her mind screams, her heart aches, her soul longs to hear him speak to hers again. Michelle wanted to run to him, take him in her arms, kiss him and love him again—just like before.
But no. Something was wrong now.
His voice was all wrong.
Your beautiful voice that serenades me is not the same.
He was not the same.
Robin...
Michelle's silent heart cries as the man she loves stares at her through the eyes of a stranger. Their eyes lock across the still air and then a long silence passes.
How familiar your eyes are...Who are you, Sailor Soldier of the Water? Robin feels a strange...something...slowly setting ablaze inside of him.
Your eyes are cold...why are your eyes cold? Michelle's own soul sinks, heart breaking, as she stands frozen in place, her heart freezing along with it.
ZZZZZZZZTTTTTTT…..
Robin feels the urge to go to this frail female, to be with her, to take her away with him, as he teleports to the top of the roof, right beside Sailor Neptune.
"Robin? Why can't I find your soul? You're hiding it from me, aren't you?" Michelle desperately tries to reach out to him, but finds their link severed, their bond dissolved, so she must speak the words aloud.
"Sailor Neptune?" Robin almost whispers, unable to unlock himself from the sea of her blue eyes. "Join me. You can rule the world at my side." He says with a serious, soft smile, extending his hand out to her invitingly.
Just like before, but...no...you're different now...everything's wrong now...
Michelle's soul shrieks as she grabs his shoulders, gripping them firmly.
"Robin! Robin dearest! Wake up! Please wake up!" The tears begin to bubble in her clear blue eyes when he doesn't respond to her psychic pleas.
"Let go of me." Robin says indignantly.
How dare this mere mortal woman touch me!?
His still high-class sensibilities and now cutting coldness protest Michelle's demanding touch.
"Robin dearest! Come back to me! I love you! I love you..." Michelle begins to tremble, shaking his shoulders hard as she collapses her head to his chest beseechingly, her tears spilling on his neck.
"You love me?" Robin coldly detaches Michelle's sobbing head and hands from his chest as he looks down at her. "Then come with me." Robin says, engaging her eyes and grasping her trembling fingers in his.
How rough the seas are as you reach out to me...But it's you, Robin. It IS you. But then...it's not. I need you, but I'm so confused. Help me...I'd follow you anywhere—because I love you. Remember, you and I...You are my destiny...
Michelle loses herself in past dreams as she closes her eyes. Robin senses her uncertainty, her weak will and touches her cheek lightly, ready to take her away with him to the darkness below and prove Metallia wrong—that there was nothing he could not do, nothing he could not have...
If his mind so willed it.
"MICHELLE! Move away from it!" A booming voice calls Michelle back to harsh reality—the voice of the only other who could pull her from her reverie—her dream—to be with her true love again.
The one other soul in the universe who Michelle loved with everything in her.
"SPACE SWORD—"
"Amara...?" Michelle feels tears spill down her cheek as Alex stands tall in the snow, her Space Sword gleaming as it points deadly directly at Robin.
"Uranus, you swing that sword and I'll slit her throat." Robin threatens suddenly, grabbing Michelle and putting an arm around her neck in a forceful, hurting way in which he had never touched her before. The sharpened neon green chains wrapped around his wrist readied to mercilessly slice at Neptune's neck.
"You wouldn't." Uranus' eyes widen in horror at his betrayal as Robin yanks Neptune towards him, floating through the air with her.
"Why wouldn't I? What do I care about this worthless female?!" His cold words cut through Michelle like a knife. His being, his physical form was here, yes, but his soul was no longer. And it was his soul that Michelle cried to love again. For without it, she knew she could no longer live.
"Robin..." She whispers, her overwhelming sadness overtakes her so much that she is ready to die. Her powerful mind had the ability to shut herself down.
And Michelle was ready to use that ability as she looks frightened and scared into her love's soulless eyes...
"You rotten son of a—" Sailor Uranus feels within her body her adored Michelle's pain. She silently swears at the man who had caused it. She saw Michelle's will to live fading, but there was nothing else she could do.
One last long look in her beloved Robin's evil, cold eyes proved to Neptune the loss of all love, of all heart, of all soul.
"STAR SERIOUS LASER!"
Suddenly, without warning, a depleted Super Sailor Star Fighter manages to shoot one more fierce call, blasting an intense beam of energy from where he lay in the snow, catching Robin unexpected again.
But at the last second, the Heir teleports away, higher in the sky, to safety.
He lets Neptune fall into the cold icy snow, physically unscathed by Fighter's pinpointed laser just missing her neck where the beam had been aimed at Robin's gripping hand around it.
But mentally, Neptune's mind and heart were torn apart. Immediately, Uranus is at Neptune's side with her sharp, gleaming talisman guarding her adored one from the attacker above.
The man in black was nursing his own singed arm with an angry look on his face down at Fighter, who joined Uranus, to stand protectively over Neptune's shocked form.
"I can easily destroy both you whipped dogs, you know." Robin's voice was dripping with spite and anger as he decides to rid this world of the two insects who dared challenge him. Uranus and Fighter's battle worn bodies steeled themselves once more, taking defensive stances despite the pain rushing through their every sinew. But their undefeatable eyes were alight with determination, and a few tears Fighter was trying to blink away, as Robin raises his hand to exact a final, deadly blow against them.
"No."
A small voice could barely be heard above the din of whistling winds, when suddenly, the aqua figure of an elegant beauty stands and moves forward from behind them.
Despite the pain, heartbreak and soul wrenching her Robin was causing her, Michelle had someone else to live for, too.
"You won't hurt them." Sailor Neptune pushes in front of a stunned Fighter and Uranus who knew, at the last second, from the detached, unfeeling look in Neptune's blue eyes, what she was about to do.
"Why wouldn't I? It will be as easy as–AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
Robin's head explodes in pain as he screams in a shrill voice, grasping his head as he falls from his hovering perch in the sky to the snow below.
Super Sailor Neptune pummels him over and over with waves and torrents of pure psi energy, battering the shields he had erected against such attacks.
Anger, pain, and love all fueled Neptune as she continues until his dark chaos shields bend and warp, just enough for her to sneak in and maybe discover what was wrong with him...
"AHHHHHHHHHHHH!" Neptune's high-pitched shriek now pierces through the mountain's misty peaks as she, too, sinks to her knees. Her mind was afire with the pain of the overwhelming evil now invading Robin's soul, possessing his entire being to a degree beyond her recognition.
"Michelle! MICHELLE!" Uranus shakes her, dropping to her own knees beside Neptune. But the aqua soldier's eyes were glazed over. The realization of what her love had become—irretrievable to even her powerful psychic abilities was too heartbreaking to bear.
ZZZZZZZZZSSSSSSSHHHHHHH!
To Fighter's horror, a bubble of dark energy he was running to envelops Robin's motionless form just as he knelt over his downed brother, praying desperately for Robin to wake up and be normal again.
But that was not meant to be as the dark mists swirl over him and Robin is swallowed up again—into the dark nothingness sucking him up into itself.
"Robin!" Star Fighter reaches up to the sky, but his brother was gone yet again—vanished into thin air, by some evil hand.
"He's gone. Vanished! Damn it!" Fighter falls to his knees, pounding both fists uselessly at the hard, frozen ground, as tears stream down his anguished handsome features.
These thoughts echo unrelentingly through Michelle's tortured soul. Her worst nightmares had come true. The one she had sworn forever to, shared everything with, was alive, but his soul was no more...
As was her own.
Michelle feels her heart, her emotions, withering away into dust, leaving only the shell of her body feeling cold and detached. The only thing in this world there was still to live for was the woman who was holding her in the safe embrace of her strong warm arms.
"Amara, it was horrible...His mind…so cold…such chaos…" Michelle whispers as the tears run uncontrollably to the wind, and Uranus holds her tightly. Her own heart was breaking for the loss of the one who had become so dear to her beloved.
But more than that, there was a passionate anger at what he had done to her Michelle. The trust for men was slipping away all over again.
"I'm here, Michelle. I'll always be here for you. It's only you and me, remember? We don't need him. We don't need anyone else." Damning her excruciating limbs to work, Alex whispers into those aqua curls, fiercely determined now not to ever let that creature near Michelle again.
Her own body would heal, but Alex could see the damage to Michelle's soul was irreparable.
Love is a wretched thing for a soul.
C-RR-A-ACC-KK!
As Sailor Uranus defiantly stood, her yellow high heel had stomped down hard into the snows. Alex heard—no, felt—the sound of glass shattering beneath her feet. She gazes down at the fittingly smashed and splintered glass shards of the windowpane where her name and a certain star wanderer's had been romantically etched almost one year ago, now aptly split apart right between them.
Love is a terrible mistake for a woman.
Alex's extremely angry mind lashes out at what she knew she should've shielded Michelle from. There should have been no other allowed to glimpse her fragile, beautiful soul—
To be able to glimpse it—and moreover, be able to utterly destroy it.
Love is a mysterious war for a soldier.
Literally leaving a shaken Star Fighter in the cold as she carries Michelle towards the decimated cottage, Uranus silently scorns the world's unjust cruelties and everyone else in it, too, save for the aqua angel in her arms, as the unkempt wind howls wildly through the ice covered mountain peaks.
Far, far away from the snowcapped region on the opposite side of the world, crossing distant oceans a continent or two away, four young girls, now just coming into their formative teenage years, bask in the unusual perspiringly hot weather. For even in the Amazon jungles of the sun drenched shores of South America, November was generally cool. But who was complaining?
"Strange weather, isn't it?" A maroon haired teen asks her companions as they lay out after a day of foraging. Long ago, in now forgotten wicked days spent with the Black Moon circus, these youthful children were once the Sailor Soldiers' enemies, but now they had blossomed into the lovely, healthy young women that only the vigor of the rainforests they had instinctively migrated back to, could offer.
"You can certainly say that, Ves Ves. Look how burnt my flawless skin has become." Evilness had been eroded, but true personality still remained. The hot pink headed girl examines with disdain her red, sunburnt arms.
"That's because you were a dodo, Cere, and didn't put on the skin lotion I made!" A shocking green ponytail to suit her shocking behavior, Jun Jun waves the homemade jar of lotion into the air under Cere Cere's nose. Jun Jun was proud of her botanical achievements and her roughhouse ways of tromping into even the deepest parts of the forest had produced some rare, medicinal blends, though none of her compatriots ever seemed to appreciate it.
Smirking at Jun and Cere's continual battles—sophisticates and wild ones rarely combined civilly—Ves Ves, the self-appointed leader had taken over and managed to keep them all together. The pact they had made to always be so, no matter what, still held true.
After Sailor Moon and the others had rescued them from the nasty old meanies in the Black Moon Circus, Ves Ves, Jun Jun, Cere Cere and Palla Palla had gone on as normal girls. But traditional Japan they found to be too restricting and too busy for their playful souls. Longing for freedom and adventure, mischievous as ever, Ves Ves had decided to take her quartet out onto the high seas, stowing away to a continent much like that of their homeworld, where greenery flourished everywhere—where things were still simple and basic, with much wonder to discover in it.
Especially where, hidden in their own forest, no 'mean' adults would try to separate or put them away.
Here, in this world's equivalent Amazon, the four girls had found what their hungry souls yearned for, even if Cere Cere would complain from time to time. Running around unfettered, collecting samples of this and that, finding all sorts of interesting plants and animal life—this was where Ves Ves was sure they all belonged.
"Looky, looky what I found today!" A sky blue tinged waif's baubles bounced as she, too, vibrant with childlike energy still, skips across the leafy bamboo makeshift hut they had built as they moved from interesting spot to spot.
"What is it, Palla Palla?" Over time, Ves Ves had become more and more protective of the little girlish innocence Palla Palla still possessed. Though it had tapered off from the rest of them, living in this jungle the past few years, they were still just four young girls out in the wilderness alone, where the responsibility of growing up was being laid down upon them no matter how hard they tried to avoid it.
If we grow up, then we'll grow apart—just like all adults do. I won't let that happen.
Ves Ves thought sadly as she smiles to her babyish friend's important new discovery.
"Look! Isn't he cute?!" Palla Palla bubbles over a frightened looking little primate, squeezing his little tummy as she displays him like a toy.
"Eww! Get it away!" Despite all this time spent in the jungle, surrounded by all types of animals, wildlife and creatures, Cere Cere was still scared of the little 'creepy crawlies' and she backs away, her hand flying to her horrified mouth.
"It isn't a stuffed animal, Palla Palla." Ves Ves softly chides. She had a bond with creatures, having been once a circus animal trainer. She didn't want Palla Palla to be bitten either, if she should squeeze the poor critter too hard.
"Palla Palla knows! But isn't Monkey just too cute!" Palla Palla eagerly kisses the creature's forehead to Cere's disgusted expression.
"Palla! Don't! That's gross!" Cere whines at the uncleanliness of the small beast.
"Pipe down, primadonna. It's only a monkey and I bet he's cleaner than you are, anyway! He smells better than that flower perfume junk you just brewed up!" Jun Jun was always ready to pick a fight with her arch-nemesis as she playfully pulls the monkey's arms and legs about like a puppet.
"WHAT?!" Cere explodes, her red face reddening more with anger to match her sun burnt arms at this clear insult. But Jun Jun just chuckles, pleased with herself.
"Where'd ya find him, Palla Palla?" Ves Ves asks, being the responsible 'mother' to her feuding children.
"Over there by the riverbank. Baby Bonk-Bonk was falling in and Palla Palla saved him!" Palla proudly states as Jun Jun offers the little squirt a half-eaten banana. Then she shrugs, eating the rest when the scared critter refuses her offer.
"We can't keep him, Palla. His momma's probably looking for him already." Ves Ves says softly in that tender, caring tone she always used when chiding her little blue friend.
"Palla Palla's his momma now!" She pouts, hugging her 'baby' primate to her chest.
"Of course we can't keep it! It will make horrid messes!" Cere's vanity showed in her section of the hut. Her bought mirrors, jewelry, outlandish clothes and even a CD player, were saved up and traded for, just for her, with her perfumes and potions, by this finicky little lady.
"Oh, put a cork in it already, Cere Cere!" Jun Jun says off handedly as she, too, felt a sort of responsibility over Palla Palla, and challenges her pink haired friend.
"It's better for the munchkin to be out where he belongs, Palla. You just show us where he lives and we'll visit it all the time, I promise." Jun Jun then turns, saying it seriously with a determined look in her green eyes that Palla found reassuring.
"Okey dokey lokey. Come on, Bonk Bonk. Palla Palla will take you home." She sings sweetly, skipping out the door with Ves Ves and Jun Jun at her heels.
"What about you, Miss Priss? Aren't you coming?" Jun Jun glances over her shoulder to find Cere lazily lounging on her cot for a mid afternoon siesta.
"I, for one, am not going to be traipsing to Heaven knows where just to return a stupid little orangutan." Cere begins to complain but Jun Jun had a better idea.
"Fine. Just stay here by yourself when the crocodiles decide to swim up and eat you alive." She wickedly grins as she dashes out the hut's front grass door.
"Crocodiles?" Cere was a bright girl, but the thought of a large, oversized lizard, seemed outlandish yet still...
"Jun Jun! Wait up!" Her shiny new pink high heels clicked on the boards but there was no where Cere felt safer than beside her capable sparring partner.
Tromping through the thickness of the dense vegetation, knowing this forest like the back of her hand, Jun Jun leads the way at Palla Palla's dizzying direction. The girl sighs, going around in circles until Palla Palla is sure she is right, at long last.
"Momma Monkey! Baby Bonk Bonk is here! Palla Palla took good care of him for you!" Palla Palla suddenly sings out in her baby voice, jumping up and down in her sky blue jumpsuit.
"You're not going to find any animal like that!" An annoyed Cere Cere says curtly. Her own pink circus outfit was dirtied from a mud puddle they had passed which Jun Jun had 'accidentally' slushed through right in front of her.
"Are you sure this is where baby comes from?" Ves Ves asks, when not a thing stirs in the bushes or trees at their close examination.
"Uh-huh." Palla nods, her strangely balled blue hair swaying to and fro.
"Well, I don't see any—" Cere starts to say but is stopped by Jun Jun's palm over her deeply rouged lips.
"There. There she is." Jun's keen-for-the-outdoors senses registers the momma monkey's presence, even before it appears in the bushes.
"Momma!" Palla erupts, rushing to it, but her sudden outburst frightens the creature as it backs off, though looking fully prepared to stand its ground if it came to reclaiming its lost baby.
"Palla! Be careful!" Cere cries as she hides behind Jun Jun when Palla continues to move towards it.
"Here, momma. Bonk Bonk misses you." Maybe it was her sweetness or her childlike innocence, but something about this sky blue little girl made the mother primate come down to her unthreatened, as if she understood, reaching her hairy arms out to the baby.
"Bye bye, baby Bonk Bonk. Palla Palla will see you soon." She says, looking into her little friend's scared eyes. He had taken to her and only her, clinging to Palla's arms even as she offers him back to his mother. "Bye-bye!" She bites her trembling lip, giving her new buddy a final squeeze as he, cooing and cawing, passes from Palla's tiny hands into the monstrous ones of his Momma monkey.
BANG!
An explosion sends jolts through the still Amazon forest. Momma Monkey and her bewildered baby quickly take off into the brush as exotic birds and frightened animals of all sorts scatter above, where the Amazoness Quartet knew their hut lay.
"HURRY!" Ves Ves shouts, as the agile four race to where all of their gathered belongings were. The humble hut they had affectionately called 'home' for the past three years goes up in a billow of smoke. It was everything they feared. Their home had been destroyed to a ball of dust and weeds as their eyes set sight upon it when they erupt from a thicket.
"What happened?!" Cere cries, her cherished collection of classical CDs, especially her rare imports of violinist, Michelle Moreau, had bitten the dust.
"Brush fire?" Ves Ves tries to sense it out logically.
"It's nothing natural." Jun Jun suspiciously scans the area, sensing something wrong with all of this.
"Palla Palla is scared." Palla begins to moan, she also sensing that something was amiss.
"There's no need to be scared, little girl." A woman's sugar coated voice comes down from the tree tops above, as the four girls look up to see a lady with hair of snowy white standing above them on the highest bough. She was lovely in her pale blueness, though seeming like a bird to them, somehow. Her tight, formfitting periwinkle suit was similar in a way, to theirs.
"We'll take good care of you now." She says with a too-sweet smile as she poses above them.
"Who are 'we?'" Ves Ves demands, as she and her companions look all the more wary.
"'We' represent the newly formed royal family who are extremely interested in your energy, young ones." A man's voice, deep as his green hair and dark foreboding eyes, steps out from behind the smoky shadows.
"Are they really, vomit-head?" Jun Jun takes a defensive stance, her offensive words biting. "You and albino there sure drop in with a nice 'How do you do' and blow up our house!?" She angrily glares at the obviously dangerous pair.
"We had to get your attention, sweethearts." The smiling bird lady swoops down to stand directly in front of the back to back girls. "I didn't feel like getting runs in my hose from these horrid weeds and twigs, so I had to bring you here." Her vanity was apparent to even fashion-conscious Cere Cere.
"Those stockings are sooo last season, old woman." Cere comments with a crooked smirk.
"How dare you!? You impudent child!" Swanette's blue eyes flash angrily as she grabs hold of Cere's shoulders. Jun, Ves and Palla all try to stop her but the green haired man's strong, muscular arm holds them back.
"Don't bother reasoning with them, Dracon! They're only a bunch of spoiled brats." Her true colors show as she whips out a dark crystal from inside her costume and begins to press it to Cere's chest. "Your energy will make a tremendous addition to Metallia's plans." She chuckles evilly as Cere begins to feel her life-force draining from her body.
BITE!
Swanette's high pitched voice shrieks even higher as a small, little furry brown blur appears 'magically' on her hand with biting teeth.
"Get it off! Get it off! DRACON!" She shakes her arm up and down like a scarecrow, rushing to her lover to save her from the rotten vermin attacking her delicate hand.
"Routine 7, girls!" Ves Ves suddenly shouts at the opportunity presenting itself. She and the three of her quartet leap away in the split second their attackers were not paying attention.
"Routine 7? What does this mean?" Dracon asks the empty air, knowing as a warrior, that those blasted brats were hiding around somewhere. All he had to do was flush them out—an easy task for this highly trained, ex-soldier, against four inexperienced little—
"THIS!"
Suddenly out of nowhere, a maroon flash whips by, followed by that of an acrobatic pink and a monstrous bamboo branch slashes across his chest, knocking the tall man flat on the ground. But he was not safe, even down there.
Chik, chik!
In two little cuts, but deftly working little fingers, a flying ground dragnet goes up, bagging the man like some defenseless creature. Shocked and dizzied from the flurry, Dracon cannot imagine how a simple mission to collect four little energy blips out in the middle of the Amazon could turn into such chaos.
"Ha ha ha! Ha ha! Hah!"
Like a bunch of tourists laughing at a cage at a local zoo, the Quartet comes out of their hidey holes, defiantly chuckling in the adult's face at their tricks.
"I wouldn't be laughing, children!" Swanette comes up, still nursing her sore arm. Palla Palla looks around for her little monkey friend, and catches sight of his beat up fuzzy body, tossed aside on the ground.
"Bonk Bonk!" She screams, racing right past the nasty lady, to scoop up her downed friend. "Hey! Palla Palla doesn't like you! You're meaner than old Granny Zirconia! Now you'll pay!"
Holding the monkey in her arms, sweet as candy until her anger was released, Palla Palla's crystal blue eyes turn dark and scary.
"Now you've done it! Palla's mad!" Jun Jun says, having seen the devastation that could be caused if one of Palla's toys was damaged purposely.
"I couldn't care less if that spoiled little brat is—" Swanette begins to say, her hand on her arrogant hips. She then holds her hands up to energy release Dracon and then to obliterate these horrid little monsters.
But the 'spoiled brat' hands Bonk Bonk's unconscious but still breathing body, to Cere, who amazingly, accepts the filthy creature warmly, even tenderly, as Palla stoops down to the rubble that was once their home and picks up something familiar she sees in the pile.
"Is that a doll?! Are you threatening me with a cheap doll?!" Swanette begins to cackle in disbelief at the child's audacity, when suddenly her about-to-fire-feather-blast-shards stop in mid air. Her arms begin to contort strangely.
"What's happening to me?!" She shouts as painfully her arms move and her legs give way beneath, till paralyzed Swanette could no longer control her movements at all.
"All right, Palla Palla!" Ves Ves shouts with pride at her angered friend.
"Kick ass!" Jun Jun seemed to be enjoying the action of battle again as she swings her fist in the air.
"Such undignified language, Jun Jun!" Cere chides, but a smile was on her face and tiny Bonk Bonk was wide awake, happy to see them.
But in their fun at watching Swanette, the four youthful girls had forgotten their other adversary. His dark power energy had dissolved the net he had been captured in as he angrily wanted to take revenge on the bratty children tormenting his partner.
Aiming silently to shoot a wide storm spray of energy bubbles to demobilize them all, Dracon was about to fire when a dark, strong arm wraps around his legs, pulling him screaming down to the green Amazonian floor, his stormy spray going askew, high, just over skimming the four girls short heads. But it wasn't high enough to miss Swanette...
"DRACON! You FOOL!" She screeches as she is now totally stunned motionless, just as she was about to break out of Palla's voodoo like control.
"My love!" Dracon shouts in horror as one angry monkey momma comes to the girls' aid and her baby's rescue, pounding at the man with a strangle hold.
Seeing no other option than to retreat with his immobilized partner, Dracon takes one final glance at the despised little rebels.
"We'll get you next time, brats!" He shouts as he and stunned frozen Swanette fizzle away, leaving the Momma primate with no one left to pound.
"Thank you, Momma! Bonk Bonk!" Palla Palla switches back from scary, angry warrior to innocent child again as she reunites baby monkey with big one.
"So what are we going to do now?!" Cere Cere looks to Ves Ves for guidance after she and Jun Jun sift through the ruins of their once home.
"You heard what they said. They want our energy and they seem to know how to find us, no matter where we hide."
Jun Jun twists her lips, liking the danger herself, but not when it came to the safety of her other companions.
"So what does that mean? Palla Palla wants to know." Palla Palla joins them, though still cuddling Bonk Bonk.
"That means we're going back to Japan, gang. I think we have a few friends there who can help us out with this." Ves Ves exchanges nods with her little group.
They all knew exactly who she was referring to.