Sailor Moon: Millennials

by PMSmiles

This is a fan repost of all available 33 chapters of The Judge's abandoned work. An epic length and very ambitions fic involving an amnesiac Pluto and a pregnant Usagi. Time and space travel abound in an effort to right wrongs and overcome evil.

16. Chapter 16

DISCLAIMER: Hello. Before I go any further, I want to publicly state that this work of fan fiction is NOT of my own creation. I am simply a fan of this piece and after strenuously searching the internet to read it again after 20 years I have decided to upload it here for anyone else who wants to read it. The real author (The Judge) never finished this work, or at least never updated past chapter 33 (even though it is obvious that the ambitious plot of this story should continue much past this point). So please don't come after me for more updates. There won't be any. Rather enjoy this incomplete fan fiction for what it is and please forgive me for any formatting errors, some of the text files had to be manually edited and I did my best.

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SAILOR MOON: MILLENNIALS

Chapter 16

Mercury Rising, or A Matter Over Minds

It was about half an hour later.

After Pluto's announcement of their safe arrival, the Senshi had changed back to normal and gone in search of clocks, newspapers, mail, and even the TV news and weather channels in order to confirm that this was indeed the world they had left behind several hours and as much as a month before. This was not to suggest that they didn't trust Pluto; it was simply that, with a matter this important—and with two corvine hitchhikers along to confuse the issue—they preferred to have as much supporting evidence as they could possibly get their hands on.

The fact that the ginzuishou finally let Usagi change back to her ordinary everyday self and put it away helped immensely, and not just because it meant that the crystal was basically saying 'all's well' in the process; as Venus had already observed, talking to both Usagi and Serenity at the same time was just plain creepy.

Shortly after that, there was a group agreement that yes, they had truly made it home, and that yes, this really was their world.

The sense of peace and safety this consensus created lasted for a miraculous four seconds before the shouting started. Everyone wanted to know where and when everyone else had been, how long they had been there, and what had happened during that time—and they wanted to know it all right then and there. Some of the Senshi also wanted to give some of the rest a piece of their mind.

While most of the others were watching Minako endure a three-way inquisition from Rei, Luna, and Usagi about her conduct in their last little stopover—she'd refused to leave until everyone had agreed to pose for a five-second video byte with Sakura and the rest, a group shot of the Senshi which V had managed to pull off by using the Disguise Pen to cover up Ami's transformation problems and then rearranging Saturn's hair to conceal the bruises on her face to some extent—Makoto was standing over by the window, watching the snow fall with eyes that were miles away. Thrax, perched atop a plush chair, watched her with a curiosity that was somehow more than merely birdlike; Rooky, perched on the back of the largest couch, had half of his attention on 'his pretty Rei-di', and the other half on the argument.

"How's Hotaru-chan doing?" Makoto asked absently—and without even turning around—as Ami came up behind her.

"All her vital signs are steady." She glanced over at the chair Thrax was sitting on, where the little Senshi of Saturn was sitting in some sort of meditative trance, legs crossed and eyes closed, while the bruises on her face healed at an incredible rate. It wasn't as fast as her normal healing touch, but Ami suspected that was the whole idea, since by going in a slower, steadier stream of healing rather than a single burst, Hotaru was lessening the strain on her body's reserves of energy. She'd asked Ami to monitor her carefully in case something unexpected happened, and the Mercury Computer was scanning and calculating away on one of the chair's armrests; Thrax had been periodically shifting his attention from Makoto to Hotaru, as if he too were somehow following her progress.

"I'm not sure how she came up with the idea," Ami continued, "but it seems to be working just fine. She should be as good as new inside of another hour."

"That's good," Makoto said vaguely. "Seeing her all beat up like that was hurting Haruka and Michiru, too."

Hearing that, Ami frowned and looked at Makoto very closely. During their week with Sasanna, she had noticed a tendency for Makoto to become visibly distracted when she was trying to listen to the emotional impulses pressing against her mind. The short-lived spells had grown fewer and fewer thanks to Sasanna's help and instruction, but now Ami had to wonder if being stuck in the midst of several million emotional minds might not be too much for Makoto to handle after all.

"You can stop worrying, Ami-chan; I'm okay. Really." Indeed, when Makoto pulled her eyes away from the snowstorm, they were back to their usual keen brightness, and the vague, distant expression had left her face. She held out one hand, saying, "You can check for yourself, if you want."

Ami frowned again, but took the offer—and the hand—and pushed her own senses outwards through the link, just far enough to make sure whether Makoto was telling her the truth or not.

She was—sort of. The memory of putting her defensive barrier up was fresh in Makoto's mind, but so was the memory of having taken it _down_ earlier. Ami blinked and let go of Makoto's hand.

"You did that on purpose? Why?"

Makoto shrugged. "I was curious. I wanted to see what it would be like."

"And?"

"It's a big city, Ami-chan." Makoto looked out the window again, her face and voice becoming distant one more. "It's a very big city."

They stood there in silence for a short time before Makoto shook herself and went back to normal again. "Have you told the others yet? About us, I mean."

"Not yet," Ami said, sighing, "and I'm really not looking forward to it."

"Not looking forward to what?" Ryo asked, joining them by the window.

"Our turn under the microscope," Makoto replied with dry humor, nodding towards the ongoing question period.

"There are some things that happened that we're going to have to talk about," Ami explained carefully. "I'm just not sure how everyone's going to take hearing it."

"It'll probably depend on the size of the words you use," Ryo said, scratching his cheek. "And speaking of words, there's something I've been meaning to ask one of you."

"Oh?"

"Is there a course in ancient languages at Juuban that I wasn't aware of?"

Both Senshi blinked. "I didn't quite follow that," Ami admitted.

"I missed most of what happened in that big hall," Ryo said, "but I _was_ awake to see you talk to that blue-haired woman—she was Mercury too, right?— and I didn't understand a single word she said. And when we met Merlin, his accent was so thick with Ye Olde English that I could barely follow him, but the rest of you weren't having any problems at all. Is that a Senshi thing?"

Makoto looked at Ami in surprise. "You didn't tell him?"

"It never came up before," Ami murmured defensively.

"So it _is_ a Senshi thing?"

Ami nodded. "We get a lot of little benefits when we transform. Enhanced speed, strength, and resistance to injury all make sense for combat situations, but there are other things which don't really have much to do with fighting, and one of them is the automatic translation of whatever we hear. I think it works both ways, too, so that other people can understand what we say."

"It comes in very handy for telling a monster that it's about to get creamed," Makoto said with a nod and a grin. "I mean, can you imagine how silly we'd look if we went around spouting all those speeches when the other side didn't even understand what we were saying?"

"It only seems to work when we're in Senshi form, though," Ami added, "which is a little odd, seeing as how so much else of what we can do—what we _are_—as Senshi carries over into our regular forms as well."

"'Carries over'?" Ryo repeated. "You mean like the Mercury Computer and Hotaru-chan's power to heal?"

Again, Makoto glanced at Ami. "You didn't tell him about that, either?"

Sighing, Ami ignored Makoto and faced Ryo. "We're stronger than we ought to be, Ryo-kun. Some of us"—she glanced at Makoto—"are stronger than others, of course, but we're all above the normal levels of physical strength, speed, and endurance for other girls our age and size, and we're still getting stronger. Except for Hotaru-chan and ChibiUsa, I'm the weakest in plain physical terms, and I could wrestle _you_ to the ground without too much trouble if I..." Ami stopped short and went red-faced at her poor choice of words. "That is... I meant to say... oh dear." She turned around and faced the window, hiding her face in her hands.

"There, there," Makoto consoled her, patting Ami gently on the back while grinning wickedly at Ryo. "Nice to know what she's really thinking about you, isn't it? Ouch!"

Ami had just kicked her in the shin. Makoto glared at her while rubbing the back of her other foot over the injury, but Ryo coughed politely before she had a chance to retaliate.

"You were saying, Ami-chan?" Ami lowered her hands and took a deep breath, but didn't turn around just yet.

"I was saying," she answered in a slow and careful voice, "that being able to transform into a Senshi is really just the first stage. According to what Luna and Artemis have told us, and from what I've been able to dig up with my computer, every time we transform and then turn back to normal, we're a little _less_ normal than we were before. A bit of the strength, energy, and powers of our other identity gets into our everyday self and continues to build up with each transformation, until finally we _become_ our other self, permanently. When that happens, we won't need to transform anymore, because all our powers will be with us all the time."

"I see. So what's the problem?"

"What do you mean, 'what's the problem'?" Ami asked, turning around. "Why should there be a problem?"

"I just figured there must have been some complication, or... _something_ you were worried about that kept you from telling me about this sooner." He looked at her. "There wasn't?"

"N-no," Ami stammered, shaking her head. "It just never occurred to me to mention it before." Now she looked at him. "But now that we're on the subject, doesn't it bother you? Even a little?"

"That you're stronger than I am?" Ryo seemed surprised. "Why should it bother me? Ami-chan, I've known since before we even met that you were stronger than me. I didn't actually know how _much_ stronger until we had that talk at the fountain, but I did know that you were out there almost every night facing things that nobody our age should have had to worry about. I know I couldn't have done that, because it was all I could do to deal with _seeing_ what was going on, and when I finally did get caught in the middle of things, it was just too much for me to handle. I was ready to give up right there until you convinced me I was wrong—and that was just you, not Sailor Mercury. It won't ever matter to me how strong you are physically, because I know that inside, where it counts, you're even stronger. You inspired me to try and be better than I was, and you _still_ inspire me to try and be better than I am, to be more caring or courageous."

"'More courageous'?" Ami echoed in disbelief. "Ryo-kun, you're not a coward."

"No, but I'm not as brave as I could—as I _ought_ to be."

"Not as..." Makoto had to step back in a hurry as Ami pushed past her. "Now you listen to me," Ami said fiercely, seizing Ryo's collar and looking him straight in the eye. "I have never in my life met anyone as brave as you are. Yes, _we_ fight evil, but we have the power to at least have a fighting chance; you don't even have that, and you still tried _twice_ to protect me. You say you think I'm stronger than you are just because you had a few moments of being scared and tired? My God, Ryo, if I had to live with seeing everything you see and _knowing_ that all of it was going to happen no matter what I or anyone else did, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night! Being human entitles you to a _few_ moments of doubt in your life, and you've more than earned yours just by dealing with what the universe did to you, but don't you dare believe for a second that you're weak or a coward, because you're not."

"Ami-chan..."

"You're not!" she snapped, shaking him once, though not very hard. "You're not a weakling or a coward, and I'm not going to let you be a fool by thinking less of yourself than you deserve! You say I inspire you? Well guess what? _You_ inspire _me_. You're one of the things that help me fight as Mercury and still sleep at night. You're brave and you're smart and you're funny, and... and... oh, the hell with it!"

And with that, Ami dragged Ryo's face down and kissed him. REALLY kissed him. After a moment in which a hundred or so variations of shock and amazement skittered across his brain and slowed down the passage of even the most basic signals, Ryo put his arms around her and kissed back.

It was either ten seconds or ten centuries later when a combined demand for propriety and air put an end to the kiss and left them both standing there, arms still around one another and heads bowed so that their foreheads touched as they both tried to catch their breath. Ami was also trying to figure out how what had just happened _had_ happened, how her hands had gone from a death grip on Ryo's collar to the middle of his back without her realizing it until now, and also what corner of her lungs was coming up with enough air for her to keep talking.

"I love you, Ryo, and I'm not going to let you think poorly of yourself when you haven't done anything to deserve it. If you don't like it, that's just too bad."

"I think... I can live... with that," Ryo replied, considerably shorter of breath than Ami was and absolutely red-faced besides; she wasn't even blushing a little bit. Taking one long gulp of air, Ryo looked at her without raising his head, and in a quiet voice, said, "I suppose that if I fail to say 'I love you, too' right now, you'll kick me in the shin like you did to Mako-chan a moment ago, right?"

"Fair is fair."

"Well then, for the sake of fairness, my shins, and just because it's true, I love you, too, Mizuno Ami, Sailor Mercury, and whoever else you are, were, or are going to be."

Even though hearing those words made a part of her want to start jumping up and down and screaming out of sheer exhilarated joy like... like... well, like Usagi or Minako, Ami instead shot Ryo a warning look and delivered a Makotoism: "Don't push your luck, buster."

"Yes ma'am. No ma'am." Ryo let go of her with one hand to snap a salute, and this time Ami had to at least let herself giggle. The moment didn't last long, unfortunately.

"Ryo-kun," she said quietly, "there's something else I should tell you. It's... um... it's the thing I was worried about explaining to everyone. It... I..."

"Ami? What is it?"

"It's a little... it's a little scary." Ami closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to regain a handle on her emotions. Ami was a master of this particular art, and one of her favorite tactics was to picture a mountain lake, cool and clear and calm, and focus on it until her inner state mirrored that of the lake.

Getting her urge to giggle under control was easy, and steadying her nerves was not much harder, but there was an absolute wave of embarrassment lurking just at the edges of her consciousness; it had been well-fed on the knowledge of what she had just been doing in plain sight of every last one of her friends, and took a little longer to put down. There was also one feeling that refused to go away, a deep warmth which caused her picture of the lake to shift and gain a bright sun overhead, its warm light beaming down upon the surface lake and sending rippling rainbows throughout every drop of water. Ami considered that and permitted herself a happy smile, but refused to let even this new feeling distract her.

When her eyes opened again, Ami was calm once more. Ryo had taken her hands between his own and was looking at her with concern; Ami smiled and gently touched the side of his face with the back of her left hand. It was a gesture intended to be affectionate and reassuring, but it also had a more practical purpose: four words.

*Can you hear me?*

From the way Ryo's eyes widened, Ami knew that he had indeed heard her. It was written throughout his mind, as shock and confusion chased each other around in circles. Ami had already learned that her empathic reception wasn't as good as Makoto's—just as Makoto's telepathic skill wasn't as strong as Ami's—but at this range, Ryo's emotions were easy to pick out.

"What was..." he began. "Ami-chan, did you just..."

*Yes. I did.*

Amazement. Curiosity. "How..."

*Like this.* In those two words and a burst of memories, Ami communicated everything that had happened—her failed transformation, the strange mental rescue Sasanna had been forced to attempt, and the lasting effects of it. Ryo blinked and grunted, squinting against the physical sensation that came with the transfer of information. It had the same feeling of internal pressure as the headaches that came with his visions, but there was a difference. The pain of the headaches was sharp, fiery, and deep; this was dull, cool, and light. The headaches sometimes felt like a lance driving into his brain; this felt more like several dozen tiny needles just barely piercing the outermost surface. It was a more widespread sort of pain, but nowhere near as intense.

*Ryo-kun? Are you okay?*

*I'm fine.* "I'm fine." He paused. *Did I say that or did I just think it?* "Did..."

*You did both.*

*Oh.* Another pause. *Takes a little getting used to, doesn't it?*

*A little,* Ami agreed. She hesitated before gently probing the rippling sense of his mind to see what his thoughts and feelings about this latest development were. Ryo felt a funny tingling sensation and guessed—correctly— that it was Ami.

*Yes?*

*You're not scared,* she said in a wondering tone. *You're surprised, and you don't entirely love that I can do this, but you're not scared. Why not?*

*Can't you tell?*

*It doesn't work that way—at least, not yet. Not unless the thought in question is very intense or directed straight at me.*

Ryo considered that, then smiled and 'directed' straight at her the reasons why he wasn't scared: her patience and compassion; her almost compulsive sense of proper decorum; her self-determination and courage. All of these reasons had a sense of memory about them, as if they were things Ryo had thought about before on many occasions, and with them came other things, other memories to which they were inescapably attached:

Faded-out images of the color of her hair, both when the sun was on it and when it was in the shade, and the way it danced in the wind;

Oddly-echoing memories of the sound of her voice, whether soft and gentle or raised in exasperation and anger;

The light scent of her favorite perfume, a fragrance that drove Ryo crazy as much because he'd never been able to identify it as for any pheromonal properties it possessed;

Moments of frustration coming from Ryo's attempts to keep up with her in class, interspersed with a few moments of pride from the times he'd managed to do just that;

And some purely physical appreciation of shapes and proportions, overlain with the much more recent memory of the warmth and textures that went with some of them.

In short, the 'reasons' were everything Ryo knew and loved about her. Ami could have dealt with learning one or two at a time, but all of them together combined to shatter her lake-inspired calmness and make her break out in another world-class blush.

"Ahem!"

The other Senshi, naturally, had long since given up arguing or watching the arguing in favor of watching the little side-drama which was unfolding by the window—and then, when the kiss came along, they had given up just 'watching' in favor of gaping, blushing, grinning, gawking, staring, goggling, and boggling.

Ordinarily, the sight of Ami blushing would have reassured the others that all was well with the universe, but in this situation, a good two minutes _after_ that kiss—something Ami shouldn't have been able to manage in public without suffering the emotional equivalent of spontaneously bursting into flames on the spot—and with no other apparent reason to explain it, the blushing only made the other Senshi more confused and concerned. Haruka had finally had enough of waiting around for an insight, and taken more direct action.

"Having fun, you two?"

"Shut up, Haruka." Haruka was not the only one to blink at the abrupt tone, but Ami had her attention back on Ryo the instant the words left her mouth. "You... you really meant... all of it?"

"Uh..." Ryo coughed and reddened slightly. "Yeah. Sorry about that last bit. I, uh... that is..."

"Shush," Ami ordered, placing one finger over his lips. "You don't have to apologize for being human, remember?" She paused, blushing, her eyes looking down shyly. "And... I didn't... I didn't really mind... not that much, anyway."

That was more or less true. Even if she didn't have Makoto's leggy curves or Michiru's mature elegance, Ami knew that she was in good physical shape; her diet had never been a problem, and life as Mercury had insured that she got _plenty_ of exercise, which in turn had only improved on the strength and conditioning left to her after years of swimming. Still, it never failed to surprise her whenever she noticed a boy noticing her, especially considering how drop-dead gorgeous some of her friends were.

Ami had always known that Ryo appreciated her mind and heart, and she wouldn't have traded that for anything, but knowing that there was a real physical attraction there too was... reassuring.

As she thought about that, Ami's gaze turned inward. Then she nodded slowly and reached up to take Ryo's head between both hands and gently pull him down until their foreheads touched again.

"Uh, Ami-chan?" Ryo asked nervously. "What are you doing?"

*If you tell me everything you love about me, then I should do the same for you,* she explained silently. *Fair is fair.*

Truth be told, Ami wasn't entirely sure what she was doing. The command for her hands to move as they did hadn't come from her conscious mind, but from one of the walled-off corners of her memory which she suspected held her memories of the Silver Millennium. The personality which had slept behind those barriers for so long had apparently woken up at last because of this telepathic exchange, at least to the point where she was taking a hand in things.

Encouraged by her past life's sudden awakening, Ami tried to push past the mental blocks and reach it—to reach _her_—only to find that whatever was keeping her from remembering herself was still in place.

*This must be how Setsuna feels sometimes,* Ami thought, her tone a mix of frustration, anger, and resignation. She hammered against the walls again, and again, then huffed, turned her thoughts away from them, and tried to figure out what goal the shadowy mind-within-her-mind was guiding her towards.

All at once, she was thinking about Ryo: about the pensive, serious expression that all too-often appeared on his face, and about the warm smile that would always rise up from that to greet her; about the quiet and not-so-quiet moments they had spent together; about all the inner qualities she had held up only a few minutes ago. She even thought—a little—about his hands, his shoulders, his lips, his bu...

*Back!* she corrected herself hastily. *His back!*

It was the same sort of collected information Ryo had given to her, but Ami could feel something else forming in her mind alongside it. Certain muscles in her face were tightening or slackening in reaction to the neural impulses going off in her brain as the whatever-it-was became sharper and more defined. It didn't feel dangerous; if anything, it felt enormously _right_, though Ami couldn't have said why.

In a split-second flash, quick as thought, the weird presence in her mind assumed a recognizable form and then vanished, taking with it everything Ami had been thinking about Ryo and leaving her feeling cold, tired, and empt...

The sudden appearance of the new energy came at a bad time for Proteus, for it had been in the middle of making some very important and extremely delicate adjustments to certain of its systems, scattered across the parts of this city that its body inhabited. Thinking at first that another overwhelming surge of power was on the way, the entity had shut down dozens of operations within the systems of its far-flung body, in some cases losing hours of painstaking work with a decision lasting less than a second.

Now Proteus was slowly restoring itself and beginning its many tasks again, all the while trying to determine what had just happened, and what it could mean.

Analyzing the energy had revealed its surprising similarity to certain electrochemical patterns Proteus had observed in the minds of its captured human subjects—two distinctly separate patterns briefly joining almost into one before separating again, or so it seemed—but the source had been too short-lived for any definite location to be calculated. All Proteus could tell for certain was that it had been in the same general part of the city from which this night's two massive surges had originated.

One anomaly was chance, and two might be coincidence, but three, all of them in the same general area, could not be either.

*Something is going on. I must know what.*

The next thing Ami knew, she was waking up in an unfamiliar bed that was very warm and soft—no, make that flexible. A waterbed, then. And that meant she was in Michiru's room.

Thinking even that much made her brain hurt.

"She's awake," a subdued voice said. Was it Makoto? Ami tried to open her eyes to see.

It _was_ Makoto. She was standing near the door. Rei and Ryo were also in the room, each of them sitting on a different chair—with Rooky perched atop Rei's chair and Thrax atop Ryo's—and Luna was over in front of the window, her back to the others as she looked out at the storm with a crossed-arms, straight-backed, toe-tapping posture that could have meant almost anything. Ami could read Luna's _feline_ body language fairly well, but she was going to have start paying attention to pick up her human mannerisms as well.

Despite the fact that she was tired, in a certain amount of pain, and more than curious to know what had just happened, the very next thing Ami did was to turn her head in Ryo's direction and smile. It was really incredible how he was able to go through all these situations and worry about her so much with so little of it actually showing up on his face. Just being able to look at him made her feel so much better that...

"Look at me, Ami," Luna ordered abruptly, stepping in front of her and cutting off her view of Ryo. "Put the rest of it out of your head and just look at me."

"What happened, Luna? Why am I..."

"I'll explain in a minute, Ami." Luna sat down on the edge of the bed, still blocking Ami's view of Ryo, and Ami had to wonder if that was intentional. "For now, just look at me, okay?"

"Okay," Ami agreed, trying to blink the bleariness out of her eyes as she looked up at Luna. That bleariness melted away and was forgotten as the golden crescent on the cat-woman's forehead flashed, and for the next few seconds, all was silent. Ami looked up, Luna looked down, and the beam of pale gold energy linked their minds.

At last, the beam faded, and they both blinked again. Luna sighed. "It's done. I can hardly believe it, but it's... can you sit up? Here," she said, taking some of the pillows and stuffing them behind Ami to help her keep upright. That done, Luna looked at her closely again. "How do you feel?"

"My head hurts, and I'm tired." Ami paused.

"And...?"

"And... and I can... I can _feel_ Ryo-kun. I can almost hear what he's thinking." Ami realized that she was trying to look around Luna and see Ryo as she talked, and Luna, who obviously knew it, kept moving herself to get in the way. "Luna," Ami whispered fearfully, "what happened? What did I do?"

"One word for it is a 'mindbond'; another is 'rapport'." Luna seemed to wait for Ami to react to either word before she continued. "Putting it simply, your mind and Ryo's are linked now. With a little time for the link to grow, you'll both be able to feel each other's presence no matter how far apart you get. If you're close enough, Ryo will be able to tell in a general sort of way what you're thinking and feeling." Luna looked at her. "You'll be able to tell the same about him, though I suspect it'll be in more than a 'general' sort of way."

Ami listened in silence. "Is there any way to get rid of it?"

"No."

Again, silence. "Ryo?"

"Yes?"

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry for doing this to you." Ami's voice was steady, but her eyes were full of tears—and Ryo, who she could just see to be getting up from his chair, clearly knew that.

"You just sit back down," Luna told him sternly, half-turning where she sat, "or I'll have Makoto and Rei _make_ you sit." After a pause, she nodded. "That's better. And you can stop crying, Ami," she added as she turned back around. "It's physically impossible for you to feel anywhere near that bad right now, so I _know_ you're just doing it to try and get Ryo over here."

The tears shut off immediately as Ami blushed, glowered at Luna, punched her in the leg, and then stared at her own hand in surprise. There was a shout and a loud thud—and a lot of startled protest from the two crows—a moment later as Rei tackled Ryo, who had been about to jump Luna from behind. Considering the fighting tricks she had learned from her grandfather and Makoto over the years and what Ami had said earlier about how becoming Senshi had been gradually increasing their strength, Rei ought to have had no trouble with Ryo, but he was suddenly putting up quite a struggle, and the second that fight got started, Ami was trying to get up again, forcing Luna to hold her down.

Over by the door, Makoto pinched the bridge of her nose as though she were getting a headache—which she was, thanks to the way that Ami's and Ryo's emotional states kept shifting. "Luna, what's going on?"

"It's the mindbond. Neither of them is thinking entirely normally just now."

"You mean they're _supposed_ to act like this?" Rei demanded. She had Ryo face-down and in an arm-twisting grip which he wasn't likely to get out of any time soon.

"It hits people differently," Luna replied around clenched teeth as she struggled with Ami. "There's no way to... tell beforehand... exactly what will happen. You have to wait and see, but since their minds are so closely connected now, it does make a sort of sense that their bodies would try to—ouch!"

Ami had just bitten her arm. Luna felt incredibly stupid; after all, as a cat, if someone had been trying to hold _her_, she would have done exactly the same thing, and yet she hadn't even seen it coming.

As Luna fell back, clutching at her arm and hissing out a number of Lunari words she would have washed Serenity's mouth out with soap for using, Ami gathered herself and sprang forward, knocking Luna over the side of the bed. She regained her own balance nearly instantly and bounced over Luna towards Rei.

"Get off of him!" Ami shrieked furiously, hammering at Rei and trying to push her away from Ryo.

"Mako-chan!" Rei called out. "A little—ouch!—a little help here would— oomph!" She could deal with either Ami or Ryo, but not both at once.

Watching as Luna got up and tried to grab Ami, only to get kicked in the belly for her trouble, Makoto was slow to nod. "Right. Hang on."

When the door opened a few moments later, the situation had been resolved—a little. Makoto was dragging Ami, literally kicking and screaming, towards one side of the room, while Luna and Rei dragged Ryo towards the other. There were bruises all around, and Rei had picked up a black eye from Ami's pummeling. Rooky and Thrax had taken refuge as high up as possible; Rooky was on top of the drapes, while Thrax was balancing himself rather impressively atop the frame of Michiru's dresser mirror. Thankfully, there was not a bust of Pallas in sight, atop the chamber door or anywhere else in the room.

"What the hell?" Haruka said, her face as wondering as her tone. Most of the others looked much the same.

As soon as she glanced towards the door, Ami calmed right down and quit trying to drive her elbows into Makoto's kidneys. Instead, she moaned softly and pressed her hands against the sides of her head; scared that Ami was about to faint or get sick, Makoto quickly adjusted her hold so that her arms weren't wrapped quite so tightly around the smaller girl, but it didn't seem to help.

"Ami?"

"Mako-chan... my head... hurts."

"Luna, get over here. Something's wrong with her."

"_Now_ what?" Luna let go of Ryo and marched quickly over to Makoto and Ami, reaching out and pulling Ami's bowed head back up so she could see her face.

Luna paled and let out a hiss of frightened amazement; Ami's eyes were glowing with faint patterns of shifting blue light.

"Lu... na... help..."

"Would one of you explain..." Michiru began.

"Not now!" Luna barked, trying to think fast. "Damn it, how can she possibly..." Luna shook her head with a grim snarl and looked into Ami's eyes. "Ami, listen carefully. I want you to imagine yourself as a piece of ice."

"I-ice?"

"Yes, ice. A cube, a sculpture, a glacier—anything. Just pick something made of ice and fix the shape of it in your mind."

*Made... of... ice.* Ami pictured a statue carved out of ice—one which looked just like her, smiling and happy—and it appeared in her mind, astonishingly clear and precise despite the pain. "Got... it... a statue..."

"That's good. A statue's good. Put yourself into that statue, Ami. It doesn't just look like you, it _is_ you. Every dimension is exactly the same; it's precisely as tall as you are; there are deposits of iron and calcium and other substances besides water inside of it, just like there are inside of your body; it all weighs just as much as you do. Feel the cold of the ice and the energy of the water held inside it, just like the energy you hold inside of yourself as Mercury. You are the statue."

"I... am... the statue." Ami smiled a little, her eyes closed to help her see the image more clearly.

"Now picture the pain you're feeling as fire, all around. Picture the statue cracking from the heat, its features melting and evaporating away. Picture it becoming a puddle of dirty water with little bits of rusty iron and small piles of minerals sticking out."

"No," Ami whimpered—not because she was refusing to do it, but because the image had already started to melt, and the pain seemed to be getting worse because of it. Water was dripping from the statue and pooling on the invisible surface beneath it; distinct details were being softened, blurred, and erased. A fissure snapped open across the middle of the statue, and Ami doubled over with a choked-off scream; she would have fallen if Makoto hadn't still been holding her. At the same instant, Ryo took a sudden sharp breath and clenched his teeth and eyes against a jolt of pain that was not his own.

"Ami!"

"STAY BACK!" Luna ordered, holding her hands up to stop Ryo and Rei on the one side and the massed Senshi on the other from moving any closer. "Ami, focus. You are the statue, and the pain is the fire, trying to break you down. Don't let it. Fight back. Use Mercury. Use ice and water to put the fire out and rebuild the statue."

"I can't... transform..."

"You don't have to transform for this. It's all happening in your mind, and that doesn't change no matter who you turn into. Mercury is still in there; find her and get her to help you."

*She's talking... as if Mercury were... another person... separate... but she just said... I don't change... in my mind... so then what did she... oh no...*

It had just occurred to her that there _was_ another person in her mind, a personality that was entirely separate from Mizuno Ami and yet, at the same time, was entirely a part of her. More precisely, a part of her past.

"Luna, I can't... remember. I don't know... how to reach..."

"You don't have to reach out to her, Ami; she's already reaching out to you. That's what's been causing all this: first your illness; then your problems transforming; then the telepathy." The crowd at the door blinked; while waiting for Ami to wake up, Makoto had told Luna, Rei, and Ryo what had happened during their stay with Sasanna, but this was the first the rest were hearing about it. "You knew to call the Caduceus because of her, too, and then there was the mindbond. I know it probably doesn't make any sense to you, Ami, but trust me, it adds up to the same thing: Mercury's trying to come back. You have to find her and help her before it kills you both."

*Mercury... again. Why is Luna... calling her that? Usagi was Serenity, and Makoto was Amal... thea... Rei was Vestia, Minako... Ishtar...*

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*Ariel and little water-sister Larissa... dark and serious Pandora... such a wonderful smile, why did she always hide it? And poor Pluto...*

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*Setsuna... or Athena... or just Pluto...*

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*Poor lonely Pluto... even we never asked so much of the one born to be Mercury as was asked of her, she was so young when it happened... and she's only human...*

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*Only human?*

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*Only human.*

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*And you're... not?*

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*Of course not.*

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*What... but then... you... we... I...*

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*'We'? Who are you?*

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*Who am _I_? Who are _you_? What is your name?*

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*What is my _name_? What is _your_ name?*

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*What is _my_ name?*

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*What is my name.*

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*What _is_ my name?*

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*What is...*

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*...my name?*

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*What is it?*

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*WHAT IS IT?*

flickerflickerflickerflickerflickerflickerflickerflicker

"WHY CAN'T I REMEMBER MY NAME?"

Blue light flared.

In the depths of the phone center, the physical mass which housed Proteus' central awareness began to twitch violently as the psychic scream sliced into its intellect. Tendrils of green matter ripped loose from the walls and smashed around in convulsive fits as, for only the third time in its brief existence, Proteus felt pain.

It was a sensation the entity was really beginning to dislike.

In her second-floor office, a woman busily typing away at her computer paused in the middle of a keystroke and looked up with a sudden expression of concern. She reached for the phone on her desk, hitting the '0' button as she picked up the receiver.

"Switchboard."

"Yes, this is Doctor Mizuno, on second. Have there been any calls for me this evening?"

"Yes, there was a call put through from the OR three hours..."

"I got it. Any others?"

"No, ma'am. Were you expecting a call?"

"No... no, just an odd feeling. Thank you, and goodnight."

"Goodnight, ma'am."

Mrs. Mizuno hung up the phone and went back to her work for all of three seconds before the falling snow out the window caught and held her attention instead. For a moment, she thought she could see Ami's face looking back at her through the glass, and she wondered if her daughter was all right. Then she shook her head.

"Just an odd feeling," she repeated.

The confidence in her voice was badly forced; the odd feeling didn't go away.

Makoto had her arms crossed tightly over her chest, each hand wedged down under the other arm, and she was going through every curse she knew in a fierce whisper. Ami had screamed again and suddenly been lit up like the sun, only in pale blue and with the heating reversed; that energy had been deathly cold, and it had made holding on to Ami similar to trying to hug a giant icicle. Most of the front of Makoto's body hurt like that frozen-over hell Minako had mentioned a few times, and her hands were completely numb.

Other hands appeared, small and warm and glowing purple-black, to touch Makoto's frozen forearms and banish the cold ache from her body. "Thanks, Hotaru-chan." Makoto smiled gratefully. "You're a handy sort of person to have around."

The 'handy' comment earned Makoto a poke in the ribs; Hotaru was obviously learning a few things from Michiru for keeping people who thought they were funny in line.

"All better?" she asked, removing her hands from Makoto's arm. Makoto looked at her hands, flexing her fingers and turning her wrists a few times to make sure everything was working normally, and nodded. The rest of the pain was gone, too, although her clothes were still a bit too cool for comfort. Remembering the acorn, Makoto quickly drew it out, but the silver seed appeared to have been unaffected by the sudden drop in temperature.

"What about Ami?" Makoto asked, tucking the acorn away again.

"Luna won't let me go near her." Hotaru glanced over her shoulder at where, after the flash of blue light had ended, Ami had collapsed on the floor and curled up into a ball. Looking down with her life-vision, Hotaru could see that Ami's aura was calm and steady, with no traces of the blurry fatigue or the weird wobbling she'd seen back in Merlin's forest. Even so, it—and Ami—didn't seem to be completely back to normal just yet. Whatever was wrong was _still_ wrong—it just wasn't hurting Ami right now. Not physically, at least.

Standing silent watch over Ami, Luna had an absolutely blank expression on her face. Hotaru couldn't tell if it was the look of a woman who has shut down her normal emotional processes in order to do something that is both totally necessary and totally despicable, or the look of a woman who has just seen something she doesn't want to deal with, and who has retreated into herself in order to escape it. It was a look that made Hotaru simultaneously want to hit her and hug her.

"She knows what's wrong with Ami," Makoto muttered, more to herself than to Hotaru or anyone else. "She _knows_ what's causing all this, and it has her freaked. Why? Is it _that_ dangerous, or is there another reason..."

"Unnhhhh..."

"Ami?" Usagi said immediately. She took half a step forward before Haruka and Minako each caught one of her shoulders and stopped her.

"Why wouldn't... tell me..."

"Ami?" Luna said, kneeling down and reaching out cautiously to turn the huddled girl so she could see her face. "Can you hear me? Do you know wh... where you are?"

*She was going to say something else,* Makoto thought, shocked. *She wasn't going to ask Ami if she knew _who_ she was, was she?*

"Lu... na...?" There was a pause in which Ami appeared to look around. "Michiru's... room. I remember... what... what happened?"

"I'll get to that in a minute. How do you feel?"

"My head... is killing me... slowly." Ami tried to sit up and got her head about an inch off the floor before sinking back down with a whimper.

"And Mercury?"

"She's... gone. Again." With a lot of effort and even more help from Luna, Ami managed to get herself into a sitting position. "I could feel her right next to me... but she wouldn't tell me... anything. Why won't she tell me?"

"I don't think it's because she doesn't want to," Luna said with a sigh. "I think she just can't."

Ami looked up and caught Luna by the shoulders. "You. You know. Luna, please tell me. Who was she? _What_ was she? What was _I_? Why is she DOING this to me?" Ami broke down and started to cry. "Why won't she tell me my NAME?"

While Ami cried in Luna's arms, Makoto felt emotional twinges from everyone in the room. There was a lot of internal pain, but there was also a large amount of more pleasant feelings—sympathetic, supportive, calming feelings—and it was all being directed at Ami. The Senshi were once again sharing their strength, each of them silently wishing in her own particular measure and means for Ami to feel better; there was even a soft, low-pitched purr coming from Luna as she held Ami and gently stroked her hair. The force of the massed emotions was strong enough that Makoto could almost pick out the thoughts tied up in it, which meant that Ami must certainly know what the others were thinking and feeling at this moment.

Then again, none of them needed telepathy to know that.

For the longest time, even after Ami finally stopped crying, nobody moved or said a word. At last, Usagi spoke. "Luna, what's a Nereid?"

Luna looked up at her. "Where did you hear that word?"

"In here." She tapped the side of her head. "When Serenity thinks about _our_ Mercury, she calls her Ami; she does the same for all the other Senshi, past or present, but when she thinks of _her_ Mercury, she never uses a name, only her title. The word 'Nereid' is always floating around the edges of that, like it's something important, but also like it's something Serenity knows so well that she doesn't even have to think about what it means anymore. And what's this 'telepathy' business about?"

Except for the purring, Luna remained silent for some time. Then, still sitting on the floor, still cradling Ami against her, she began to explain.

LUNA'S TALE

Life, as humans know it, is the quality—one sometimes difficult to define—that separates plants, animals, fungi, and the lowest order of microbes from the nonliving matter of the universe around them. It is animation and energy, instinct and evolution. It is finite, restrictive, sometimes harsh and ugly, but often very beautiful.

A rock is not alive. A lake is not alive. The chemical compounds which make up a living creature are not, in and of themselves, alive. Rather, it is the reactions between these substances which creates the state of life— reactions which began over four billion years ago in a puddle of unimpressive, nonliving slime, a primordial soup stirred by the complex and powerful energy fields of the Earth, and of the many other worlds in the universe where life has existed.

Those energies, the basic elemental powers of the planet and of the universe, are the same forces which empower magic, and they have been present, influencing life, since it began. In a very real way, life _is_ magic, and the properties of mutation and evolution come about as the result of the effects of magical energy upon ordinary matter. But one must never forget that this energy affects _all_ matter, not just that which is currently alive.

Earth has had many children. Some, like humans, have developed from lesser forms of life over the slow course of generations, while others—such as dryads— have been suddenly created from those same lesser forms. Others have been born from the same primordial mixing of nonliving matter and planetary power, but with other substances as the basic building blocks of their form of life.

It started somewhere below the glaciers of an Ice Age, in a region where deposits of iron, silicon, and other minerals were squeezed together under hundreds of tons of ice to form weird new substances, in much the same way that volcanic force compresses coal into diamonds. Iron attracts electrical energy; silicon and water both conduct it; and low temperatures enable them to do so more efficiently. Over the many years in which this particular Ice Age lasted, the mineral deposits soaked up more and more electrical energy; at the same time, the snow and ice above continued to pile higher, increasing the size of the glaciers and the elemental power of the water within them. When the electrical charges of the various mineral deposits became large enough to influence each other, they began to interact, energy passing through the ice from one location to the next in patterns which gradually grew faster and more complex.

It takes millions of years and far more pressure than a mere ten thousand tons of ice can produce to turn coal into diamonds. Ice Ages do not last quite so long, but this one lasted just long enough, in just the right location, for the buildup of energy to pass some critical level. When the glaciers retreated, the energy that had been trapped inside of them should have dispersed back into the environment, but it had grown too focused and intense for that to happen. So instead, one day during the centuries-long thaw, the ice cracked open and melted away to release highly energized clouds of mineral-rich vapor, clouds which shifted in shape and were lit from within by complex reactions of energy. Clouds which were _alive_.

Thus were the Nereids born.

"Clouds?!" Haruka exclaimed in disbelief. "Are you saying Ami was a _CLOUD_ in her past life?"

The only two people in the room who weren't staring at Luna were Artemis and Ami herself, who was still holding on to Luna with her head bowed and her eyes closed; she might even have been asleep, but everyone else more than made up for her lack of a reaction. Even ChibiUsa appeared to have been startled for once.

"Picture them as small, self-contained banks of blue-tinted fog," Artemis advised. "Then stick the Aurora Borealis inside, and you've pretty much got the picture."

"No." Even though she almost could remember seeing something like what Artemis was describing, Usagi was shaking her head. "No, that can't be right. Luna, I _remember_ seeing a girl who everyone called Mercury; she was a little older and taller than Ami, and her hair was longer, but everything else was almost exactly identical. She even _sounded_ like Ami does. How could she have..."

"Usagi," Luna said in a wearily patient voice, "you asked me to tell you what a Nereid was, and I'm doing that the best way I know how. I'll explain everything, but for now, just be quiet and listen. If you keep interrupting me with a question every two minutes, we'll be here all night."

LUNA'S TALE, CONTINUED

The Nereid form of life was based mostly on energy. Their physical 'bodies' consisted of a mineral-enriched water vapor, held together by the internal energy fields which formed their thoughts. By altering some of this energy to interact with the magnetic field of a planet, the Nereids could move in defiance of wind, buoyancy, and even gravity; they fed in the same manner, drawing tiny amounts of elemental power from their environment to replenish their own reserves. Because they were dependent on energy, Nereids were also sensitive to it, able to locate areas with high levels of elemental force for better feeding, and also to discern changes in each other's energy fields as a means of communication. The same held true when they were in the presence of more solid forms of life; the Nereids could perceive the patterns of energy contained in the brain, and with time they learned how to correctly interpret them so as to communicate with humans and other corporeal beings.

(Makoto, confused: "Cor-what?")

(Michiru: "Corporeal. It means physical, or material. In this case, anything with a solid body.")

(Makoto: "Oh, okay.")

Another potent ability gained from this energy-based existence was the power of shapeshifting. Many creatures possessed this ability in one lesser form or another, and were able to adapt the shape and substance of parts of their bodies so as to be better suited for specific situations. Other beings had the power of shapechanging, a magical, near-instantaneous, and total transformation from one body shape to another. A shapeshifter, however, cannot alter its total mass, so it always weighs the same no matter what form it takes; shapechangers have no such limitation, but while they can change between their different forms at will, they cannot change the _appearance_ of those forms, and are similarly unable to take _other_ forms.

When it came to shapeshifting, Nereids possessed many advantages. Made mostly of mineral-enriched water vapor and intangible energy, they had no need for vital internal organs such as a heart or lungs, and could easily assume shapes which did not have them, a trick most organic shapeshifters were unable to duplicate. Because their natural gaseous substance was so light, the Nereids could shift form nearly as fast as a shapechanger—but since they could not alter their mass, any solid form they took was usually much too light for its size. They compensated for this with the same power which allowed their natural forms to fly, reversing the original effect to 'anchor' themselves on the planet's magnetic field, giving the _appearance_ of increased weight, if not the actuality.

(Michiru, frowning: "Wouldn't having a personal magnetic field like that mean that they'd get struck by lightning a great deal?")

(Artemis: "Actually, that was one way Nereids fed in their natural form; they'd float themselves up into a passing thunderstorm, turn on the magnetism, and chow down on a few bolts of lightning. I don't ever recall hearing about a Nereid getting struck by lightning while in a solid form—unless she was Mercury and practicing against Jupiter—so I'm guessing they had a way to make themselves electrically unattractive when they needed to.")

(Luna, looking at Artemis: "...")

(Artemis: "Oh, sorry, Luna.")

Since they were not subject to the ravages of Time on a physical body, Nereids could easily live for several hundred years; the only ways in which they could be killed were through a lack of feeding, a direct exposure to large quantities of negative energy—which neutralized their life-force—or being subjected to particularly intense levels of heat, which would evaporate away their very substance. On Earth, they preferred the arctic and higher temperate regions; they could tolerate tropical areas by assuming solid forms which more tightly bound their precious water, but they never stayed long, and they avoided deserts whenever possible.

(Haruka, nodding: "Makes sense.")

(Minako, also nodding: "Yeah. They couldn't stand the heat, so they got out of the frying pan.")

(Artemis: "Kitchen. If you can't stand the heat, you get out of the kitchen.")

(Minako, frowning: "We're not in the kitchen.")

(Makoto, also frowning: "Are you sure it's 'kitchen' and not 'oven'?")

(Luna: "AHEM.")

(Haruka, grinning: "That sounds like a nasty cough, Luna. Are you sure you're not coming down with—oomph!")

(Michiru: "Go ahead, Luna.")

The birth of the Nereids is believed to have predated the rise of the modern human race, and it is certain that the two species coexisted on Earth for a long time. Eventually, when the rise of Atlantis began to change the world, when more and more humans were spreading out, bringing with them magic which altered the very essence of the Earth itself and changed the flows of its energy, the Nereids knew that they must leave. They worked closely with the Atlanteans, studying the other planets for what they needed to sustain their form of life.

Mars was cool enough, but it lacked the necessary water. Venus, then a beautiful jungle world, was too warm for the Nereids to consider long-term habitation. Mighty Jupiter, with its intense electromagnetic field and enormous quantities of atmospheric gas, seemed a good choice, and some Nereids did in fact migrate there, taking up residence somewhere amongst the giant's endless storms. Saturn, with its endless shifting of realities, was too dangerous, and the weirdly tilted world of Uranus had its planetary energies as skewed as its axis, rendering them useless to the Nereids. With its strong alignment to the elemental power of water, Neptune proved another good choice, while tiny, frozen Pluto was too strong in the negative force of death for most Nereids to tolerate.

Ultimately, the majority of the species relocated to Mercury.

"Hang up a minute," Minako interrupted. "Didn't you just say a lot of heat was dangerous to them? Why would they move to the planet closest to the sun?"

"Mercury has an odd sort of orbit," Michiru told her. "If I remember correctly, it only takes about eighty-eight days to go around the sun, but it turns so slowly that one of its 'days' lasts for close to two of its 'years'. The side that faces the sun is very, very hot for a very long time, while the side pointed away is very, very cold. And it's right next door to all the electromagnetic energy being put out by the sun, which I'd imagine the Nereids must have liked." She frowned. "I'm not sure what they'd have done about the problem of water, though. Mercury looks pretty much like our Moon."

"It didn't always." Luna sighed. "The surface used to be covered with a metallic element that was never found on any other planet. The Atlanteans discovered it and named it after its planet, but it's not the same mercury that you find today. They called that 'quicksilver'; real mercury had the same color, but it didn't become a liquid unless exposed to extreme heat. The side of the planet that faced the sun was covered by an ocean of molten metal which soaked up huge amounts of solar energy before the planet's rotation carried it all out of the sunlight. Then it would cool off and solidify, forming a single colossal forest of crystal 'trees', all of them sparkling with the stored electromagnetic energy. Deep below that ocean were the residues of the meteorites and comets that had smashed into Mercury over the years. A lot of their substance had been ice, and the presence of the mercury ocean kept it from being boiled off by the sun, so it all settled into underground caverns. As far as the Nereids were concerned, the place was paradise."

"What happened to it?" ChibiUsa asked.

"The same thing that happened to the rest of the system," Usagi replied sadly, in a voice which was once again not entirely her own. "Beryl. She came out of nowhere, a previously unimportant sorceress from some remote corner of the Earth who was suddenly conquering an entire kingdom. When rumors of magically-mutated soldiers and other dark magic started reaching us, Mother wanted to intervene and find out exactly where Beryl was getting her power from, but the rest of the royal court supported the idea of keeping a neutral stance. As far as they were concerned, Beryl was just another bloody-minded Terran conqueror, a purely internal problem that the rest of Earth's leaders were going to have to deal with." She—or Serenity—closed her eyes. "Mercury woke up screaming one night, and when we finally found out why, she and Ishtar both cried for weeks. We had to take Beryl seriously after that."

"I don't understand," ChibiUsa said.

"Beryl always intended to attack the Moon once she had a solid grip on the Earth," Artemis said. "But we had the rest of the planets, the Senshi—including Saturn—_and_ the ginzuishou on our side, and she had to find some way to neutralize at least some of those advantages, or she would have lost before she even got started. Her solution was to drop old Atlantean weapons called mana inversion bombs on Mercury, Venus, and Saturn. The bombs were designed to briefly reverse the nature of magical energy in a given area, turning one sort of mana into its opposite form—fire would become water, earth would become air, that sort of thing. The effects only lasted for a minute, but absolutely nothing could survive having its elemental energies rearranged like that. The ones Beryl used were scaled up to be able to affect entire planets, and Mercury and Venus were both incinerated by the unstable magic reactions. Everyone on either planet died instantly, and that was what woke the Nereid Mercury up—the psychic backlash of every single member of her race dying in the same instant. It's really rather surprising that she managed to survive the shock of the experience."

"Why did Beryl bomb Saturn?" Hotaru asked, sounding confused. "I'm pretty sure nobody lived there. Nobody nice, anyway."

"She did it to get rid of Pandora," Luna replied, looking directly at Hotaru. "A mature and fully-trained Senshi of Saturn could have turned Beryl's entire army into dust without breaking a sweat, and she knew it, but she also knew what effect setting off a properly-set mana inversion bomb on Saturn itself would have. You're familiar with the concept of the black hole?"

Hotaru went white, and Luna nodded. "Saturn's energy fields were chaotic, but they had been contained by powerful natural magic—magic which the mana inversion bomb reversed. The process that started would eventually have torn the fabric of reality wide open and caused a massive gravitational shift throughout the entire solar system, sort of like having a second stellar-sized mass right where Saturn used to be. Queen Serenity had to send Pandora in to stop it, and somehow she found a way, but we never saw her again."

"We lost Larissa, too," Usagi added somberly. "She was on her way home from a patrol, and she was just passing Saturn when the bombs went off. One of Pandora's last reports said she'd found what was left of Larissa's ship on one of Saturn's outermost moons, but it had been completely crushed, and all the dimensional warping of the area meant that Larissa couldn't possibly have teleported herself to safety. Ariel... just sort of shut down after that. The rest of us couldn't understand why, but then, I really don't think any of us ever entirely understood just how much Larissa meant to her. Except maybe Mother."

Haruka and Michiru looked at each other, clearly aware that they were missing some important detail here. Their own recollections of the Silver Millennium were just as muddled as those belonging to the rest of the Senshi; they recognized their own names, but what was it about the relationship between their past lives that only the dead Queen would have understood?

"Luna," Makoto said then, "what does any of this have to do with what's wrong with Ami?"

"It's all part of who she used to be, Mako-chan, and that makes it very much to do with what's wrong." Luna looked down at Ami, who really did appear to have fallen asleep. "You see, according to the records, the original Mercury was the daughter of a human woman and a Nereid that had taken human shape. She got a natural affinity for water and ice from her father, and her human heritage gave her the ability to control water and ice outside of her own body, which is something the Nereids couldn't do. She couldn't shapeshift very well, but she was strongly telepathic, and most humans were afraid of her, so she lived with the Nereids instead, and eventually fell in love with one of them just like her mother had. They had a daughter who possessed _very_ strong Nereid traits, and when _she_ had children—again with the other parent being a Nereid—they were entirely Nereid except for how they were actually born, and a slight energy-memory of the human genetic code. That energy spread into successive generations of Nereids until the entire species had it—it gave them better control over their powers and let them take human shape much more easily than before."

"After the first Mercury died," Artemis said, "at the age of something like a hundred and sixty, I might add, one of her pure-Nereid grandchildren was born with the same degree of control over water and ice, and that was that. From then on, whenever the old Senshi of Mercury died, the Nereids would convene and produce the next one—in just about the most literal sense of the word possible. They always named that Nereid Mercury, because it was who she was, what she was, and all the name she'd ever need."

"That explains why neither of us can remember Ami's other name," Usagi said. "She didn't have another one _to_ remember." She sighed. "Okay, Luna, we know what Nereids are. Now: why can't Ami remember anything else?"

"Nereids didn't have the same mechanism for thought that we do. Our solid brains are wired to work with chemical reactions and the energy they produce; Nereid thought was based mostly on minerals and almost pure electrical energy. Even in human form, they thought with their entire bodies, not just a centralized organ. Ami's nervous system can't begin to come close to reproducing that, so most of what Mercury knew just isn't available to her. A few things get across because of that shared energy-genetic; Ami's very much like a Nereid in personality and intelligence, and her overall appearance is fairly typical of the human forms the Nereids favored. They had a thing for using greens, blues, and whites in their alternate forms—the sort of colors you find in water and ice. And like the rest of you, transforming sometimes shakes things from the past loose for her."

"All right, second question: you said Mercury was trying to come back. How? Why now, and why is it hurting Ami?"

"The 'how' part is the mana nexus. When she helped Haruka and Michiru shut it down, Ami's body absorbed a huge amount of elemental water and ice energy— the same forces which created the Nereids in the first place. For a few minutes at least, every cell in her body was energized in much the same way as a Nereid's assumed human form would have been, so for those few minutes, she _could_ think like a Nereid, and everything that had been locked up in her mind got out. But when the elemental energy faded after a few days, the thought-energy didn't, and it didn't go back into dormancy somewhere inside her brain, either. It's still floating around in her nervous system. That's the 'why'. When she tries to transform now, the Nereid energy reacts and sends out little electrical impulses. If Ami were a Nereid, those commands would make her body shapeshift into Mercury, but since she's human, all they do is hurt her. The pain makes her lose her focus on the transformation, and without that, she can't direct the magic properly. It surges, slips out of control, and sets off those arctic blasts—and it makes the Nereid energy a little stronger, which makes each successive attempt more painful."

"Could I... can _we_ get it out of her?" Hotaru asked.

"I'm not sure. And even if I was, I don't think it would be a good idea to try. Remember, the Nereids were at least partly human, so some qualities of their life-force would be the same as yours—and Ami's would be even closer. I'm not sure how we'd tell all of it apart, especially after they've had all this time to adapt to each other."

"'Adapt'?" Michiru echoed, a rare note of shock in her voice. "You're not saying that Ami might actually turn _into_ a Nereid, are you?"

"I'm not sure." Luna grimaced. "I'm getting sick of hearing myself say that, but it's the truth. There's never been a situation like this before, so there's no way to tell what might happen. She _is_ getting some of Mercury's memories back, though. And her telepathic abilities as well."

"That might have been Sasanna's fault," Makoto said.

"Maybe, maybe not. Telepathy isn't an unknown ability in humans. It's just very rare, and the natural influence of the old Mercury might have been enough to trigger it in Ami even without the mana nexus or your dryad friend speeding things up."

"I don't think she's going to like hearing that."

Once more, Luna looked down at the body sleeping in her arms. She looked at the mind inside of it, the mind that was still very much awake and—through its telepathic bond to Ryo's mind and its proximity-gained knowledge of some of what was in Luna's mind as well—aware of everything being said in the room. She looked at the tear forming at the corner of one closed eye, and sighed.

"She already knows, Makoto." Luna held Ami close, resting her cheek against Ami's head as she closed her eyes and started purring once more. "She already knows."

Makoto was looking out the living room window again. The blizzard had died down considerably, and some of the stars were coming out from behind the clouds. Behind her, the others were talking with Artemis about the strengths, limits, and dangers of both empathic and telepathic abilities.

They had left Rei and Ryo upstairs with Luna to wait for Ami to wake up again. While Haruka had wandered off, muttering something about needing a breath of fresh air, the rest of them adjourned to the living room to hear Makoto describe the week she and Ami had spent with the dryads. She included everything the two of them had been able to learn about their respective new talents, all the while using her own ability to find out what the others felt about this development.

Except for Haruka—who Makoto could see now, shoveling snow out of the driveway and giving off a feeling of divided uncertainty as clear as the cold mist of her breath—they all seemed to be taking it pretty well so far.

"What's there to take badly?" Usagi had asked, seeming genuinely surprised. "Mako-chan, you said yourself that you were able to do this when you were little, and I don't think you ever _lost_ it. How many times now have you pulled one of us aside to talk when you thought we were upset about something—something that nobody else noticed? How often have you started to say one thing and then turned around and said something entirely different—something which just happens to be the exact thing to make somebody feel better? You've been looking out for the rest of us emotionally as much as you have physically; all this changes is the fact that you're really aware of it now."

"And as for Ami-chan..." Minako shrugged. "She already knows what the rest of us are thinking half the time anyway; what difference does the other half make? None, as long as she doesn't pry into what we'd like to keep private—and we know she won't do that."

Rei had said something similar—and Makoto could tell that all three of them had meant every word.

Setsuna had listened with an expression that was eerily similar to the mysteriously knowing half-smile that had—pre-amnesia—been one of her most characteristic features. This time, however, the smile had not been one of amused foreknowledge, but of patient bemusement: considering the inherent weirdness of everything she'd taken in over the last month and a half, this revelation of a telepathic Ami wasn't disturbing enough to make Setsuna so much as bat an eyelash. This didn't mean she wasn't worried about _Ami_; in fact, after Usagi's and Ryo's, Setsuna's earlier emotion-connection to Ami had been the strongest in the room. She knew how much not being able to remember yourself hurt.

If it was at all possible, Hotaru was even less bothered than the three Inner Senshi, but she also gave off an intense aura of sympathy whenever she looked back up the stairs, and every now and then Makoto picked up a faint sense of what felt like disappointment. The sympathy was easy to figure out—Saturn had taught Hotaru what it was like to have even the people who loved you the most be afraid of you, and to be forced to deal with a power you didn't want—but Makoto couldn't understand the disappointment until Hotaru looked at her and very deliberately blinked. Quite suddenly, at least as far as Makoto's new sixth sense was concerned, Hotaru wasn't there anymore. A whispered memory of Amalthea's slid into place in Makoto's conscious mind then, a memory which told her that Saturn—whoever she was—could shield herself against any form of detection. Yet another reason why the power was so widely and deeply feared; not only could Saturn shatter whole worlds, but you'd never see her coming.

The others were genuinely dealing with whatever discomfort they felt over the situation and were either getting through it or, in Haruka's case, at least being honest about being uncomfortable. Hotaru wasn't afraid because she had no reason to be, and _that_ was what had her disappointed. She _wanted_ to be at least a little upset over the idea that Ami and Makoto could learn things about her with as little as a look; she _wanted_ to feel like that and then shrug and say, "So what? It doesn't change anything between us," just like everyone else was doing. But she couldn't.

The others had thought that Makoto had reached out and given Hotaru's hand a gentle squeeze in order to reassure her—and she had, just not because the younger girl was scared.

ChibiUsa had been pacing back and forth and muttering things to herself almost since they'd gotten downstairs; Makoto glanced over at her now and saw that she still hadn't let up, and that the cloud of moodiness was still hanging around her. It wasn't that she was scared or angry or anything of the sort—she was too much her mother's daughter for that sort of thing—it was simply that she was having to go back through her memories and see whether the Mercury she remembered in Crystal Tokyo had ever shown signs of being telepathic or not.

*She _does_ seem to know exactly when I stop paying attention during lessons. I always thought it was just some super-evolved tutoring instinct left over from her having to help the odango-atama study all the time, but then again...*

Even Makoto couldn't tell what ChibiUsa was thinking, though, so they all had to be content to let her pace and mutter until she'd worked out her problem, whatever it might be.

And then there was Michiru, ocean-calm and ocean-deep—and with an emotional surface dancing between depression and despair. She was worried about Ami; she had been put off-balance by the surprise of this discovery; and then there was Haruka to consider.

"You have a snowblower in that garage, don't you?" Makoto asked as they both stood before the living room window, watching Haruka decimate the snowdrifts with a heavy-headed shovel.

"Are you seriously asking me whether Haruka would even consider putting a piece of purely functional hardware in with her precious car and motorcycle?" Makoto glanced over at her, and Michiru returned the look.

"It's in the shed," they said in unison, chuckling briefly. Then Makoto sighed.

"Does it really bother her that much?" She didn't mean the snowblower, and Michiru knew it.

"To be honest, I think it does." Michiru hooked a stray lock of hair back over her ear. "Did you know Haruka's the second of four children?" At Makoto's surprised look, Michiru nodded. "She has a brother Mamoru's age, a sister who's about the same age as you, and a kid brother two or three years younger than that. And her parents. And she hasn't seen or spoken to any of them since the day she moved in with me."

"They don't approve?"

"They don't approve," Michiru echoed, "of Haruka. Her parents wanted her to be a traditional daughter—quiet, well-mannered, obedient, respectful—and she went off in the other direction altogether. She couldn't be what they wanted her to be, and they couldn't accept what she wanted herself to be, so she left. I wasn't even a factor; I've never met her family, and I doubt Haruka ever mentioned me to them. She sends presents by mail for birthdays and holidays, but otherwise, they might as well not exist." Michiru sighed and shook her head. "My point is, there are things in Haruka's past she doesn't like to think about, and it's going to take some time for her to get used to knowing that you and Ami have the capability to go in and find those things now. Just give her a while to think on her own; she'll work it out eventually."

"And in the meantime, you get the driveway shoveled." As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Makoto winced. "Sorry. I shouldn't have said..."

Laughing softly, Michiru shook her head again and waved Makoto to silence. "It's okay. I needed a good laugh, and that's exactly the sort of thing Haruka would say." She looked closely at Makoto then, her head tilted to one side. "And so it seems Usagi might have been right about you."

"Yeah, well... it's been that kind of night."

"I suppose it has at that. Still"—Michiru looked out the window again with a small smile—"it's good to be home. The time where we ended up... it had an almost oppressive feel to it sometimes. Beasts in the night, storms at all hours, danger around every corner... the seas in that time were never calm. At least here there's a little peace every now and..."

All at once, Michiru's eyes opened wide. Makoto didn't have to ask why, because she felt it, too—an ominous, creeping sense of something _wrong_. The hairs on the back of her neck were tingling, a sensation Makoto always felt just before calling down one of Jupiter's high-voltage attacks.

Out in the Tokyo skyline, a brilliant light flared and spat a incandescent lightning bolt into the clouds, which erupted into a vast shatter-pattern web of energy. Filaments of white-hot, green-cool, yellow-bright, and blue-cold force zigzagged across the undersides and insides of the heavy storm clouds, lighting up the sky in all directions for as far as the eye could see. Fireballs exploded where some of the force-lines collided, each one a miniature sun helping to illuminate the night sky nearly as brightly as the true sun at noon. And just in case anyone had missed the light show or the skin-tingling energy now hanging heavy in the air, the shrieking thunderclap which followed set windows and even walls to rattling.

As the power of the ostentatious display ran out, a second pillar of near-blinding force shot up from among the low buildings and tall skyscrapers to set the sky on fire—a bolt which had its source in a second, separate spot of shifting light, some blocks away from the first.

Loud as it was, the second thunderclap was almost drowned out by the high-pitched sound of Usagi's and ChibiUsa's shrieking wails. The two crows could also be heard raising a ruckus of protest upstairs.

"I believe you were saying something about peace and quiet," Makoto said wryly. Outside, Haruka had thrown the shovel away and was trudging back to the house.

"Yes, you'd think I'd know better by now than to tempt fate like that." Michiru rolled her eyes. "Come on."

Proteus studied the discharge patterns of the two nexi closely, making adjustments where necessary until it was satisfied that any close examination of the devices would suggest a totally random malfunction. Once this was done, it quickly dispatched an 'urgent warning' to Archon that it had lost control of the two test areas, the mana nexi within, and the units assigned to defend them.

*A critical function has been prematurely triggered in the units,* Proteus added. *Encoded seek/destroy directives and associated command routines are now active in affected first-generation units; second-generation units remain locked in patrol/defend mode. Unable to override or terminate functions. All remaining units and sites have been locked down; awaiting instructions.*

*There,* the entity thought, sending the message. *It will be interesting to see what Archon makes of that. Particularly since it is true.*

"What do you mean you can't get any people to the second site?"

"I said we couldn't get anyone to the second site for at least another twenty minutes, sir. There's too much snow and ice up there for our vehicles to handle, and even using the tunnels to bypass the worst parts of it, we'll be on foot most of the way." The voice paused. "We could use the helis, sir. They'd have a full squad in place at the second site right around the same time that the first site is secured."

"No," Security rumbled, sounding disappointed, "I've already spoken with the other departments about this. They agree that deployment is necessary, but we still need to keep our own profile as low as possible for the time being, and no ordinary helicopter would be out in weather this bad."

"Understood, sir."

"What's the status of the deployment?"

"Field Team Four's the closest. They'll reach Site Alpha in six minutes and hold for reinforcements. Squads Three and Nine are en route, ETA: eleven minutes. And I've got Squads Four through Six underway for Site Beta. All other units have confirmed alert status as of thirty-nine seconds ago."

"Good work. Have Squads Seven and Eight prep for escort, evac, and cleanup procedures. Sciences will want to check out what's left, and _I_ want to make sure all our people come back in one piece."

"Yessir."

Janus and their attendants were in the grand council chamber, studying reports on the restoration of the city, when Archon swept in through the great doors in an even greater hurry.

"My goodness," Lillith said with an ingenuous smile. "When was the last time you saw Archon in such a terrible rush?"

"Something's gone wrong," Cestus muttered grimly.

"Highness," the archmage said, bowing stiffly, "we have a problem. The watcher has reported that two of the test sites and their attendant units have gone rogue."

"The cause?"

"Unclear at this time, though the watcher did report a brief contact with an unknown psionic presence just before it lost control. There were also at least two strong temporal surges in that area within the last few hours." Noting the startled, half-panicked expression that crossed Janus' blended features, Archon hastened to elaborate. "I've checked three times, Highness. All my resources assure me that the Gate remains sealed, and that the timeline has not been altered in any way that is detrimental to us."

"I see." Janus closed their eyes in thought for a brief moment, then looked up at Archon. "This will set our plans back further, but I don't see any alternative. We cannot allow any other force to gain possession or control of our secrets. Can you initiate self-destruct from this distance?"

"No, Highness. Most of the affected units have been locked into their terminal seek-and-destroy mode; they won't acknowledge any further commands from any source. We'll have to destroy them on-site, and quickly, before whatever has contaminated them has a chance to spread."

"I can handle this, my Prince," Lord Draco said confidently, his hand resting on the hilt of his jeweled sword.

Janus nodded. "I have every confidence in your fighting abilities, Lord Draco, but time is critical, and our objective here is to completely cleanse all the infected systems. You'd exhaust too much of your strength being sure of one site to deal with the other in time. Archon?"

"Our low-end organic units are most vulnerable to fire, Highness. I can send two suitable agents to deal with the rogues and the infected bioweave. When enough of it has been destroyed, the two nexi will fall apart without any further effort on our part. With your permission..."

"Granted. And get me a copy of the watcher's report when you've finished." The Prince's eye glinted darkly. "I want to know what's going on in that city."

The Senshi—minus Luna, Mercury, the two Moons, and Pluto, and plus one huge white panther/tiger—were standing on a rooftop about three blocks from the nearest of the two apparently short-circuited mana nexi. The discharges of lightning had lessened from sky-splitting intensity to about the same level as some of Jupiter's attacks, but they were still going off every ten seconds or so.

Venus folded her arms and watched the display. "Okay, showoff hands: who thinks this is a trap?"

The Senshi looked at each other and all raised a hand; Artemis, who had assumed his currently massive shape because it could keep pace with the Senshi where his human body couldn't, lifted his right front paw.

"Thank you," Venus said. "And now that we've cleared that up, how do we deal with it?"

"We keep our distance," Neptune said firmly. "I'm sure these things were set off to get our attention and draw us in so the other side could get a look at us in action."

"Oh?"

"Remember that creature we destroyed at the mall? Mercury said that it had been broadcasting some kind of radio signal; that's why she had Jupiter zap it first, to short out the transmission. And that first nexus had the air of a trap to it, too, only I think they expected us to actually get inside the thing before destroying it. I'll bet my Mirror that both of _these_ are swimming with the fungal version of external security cameras."

"That would fit the classic Atlantean military strategy," Artemis admitted, his voice thick with growling overtones and the sound of large teeth. "They liked to size things up before committing to any major actions. The mold-men and whatnot that we've been seeing are just the first wave of scouts—cheap and expendable—here to gather intelligence and to harness some of the local elemental energy."

Mars frowned. "So how close do you suppose we can get without being seen?"

Neptune turned around. "Well, Jupiter?"

Jupiter blinked, then nodded and closed her eyes, opening her mind up to the sense of green things. The presence of some twenty or thirty trees, lined up along the sidewalks below and deep in their winter slumber, was apparent to her almost instantly. She could also feel several potted plants in nearby buildings... over in _that_ direction was the impression of the many trees, grasses, and flowers of the park... and over _there_... her eyes flew open.

"No closer," she whispered in a sick-sounding tone. "Those buildings... everything around them... it's everywhere in there... if we go any closer..." Jupiter squeezed her eyes shut again and took a deep, ragged breath.

Uranus caught her shoulder. "You okay?"

"I'll be all right," Jupiter replied, nodding. She opened her eyes and glared at the two half-living towers. "I'll feel a lot better when we've torn those... those _things_ down."

"That's the plan," Uranus agreed, "but how do we do it? I really don't want to have to take them out the same way we did that last one."

"We might be able to get them to short each other out," Artemis said thoughtfully. "They must be channeling fire, lighting, and air... and maybe water, if they broke up the storms... so if you, Jupiter, Mars, and Neptune can seize control of one and loop its power into the other so that they're both trying to draw on the same force..." Feline features bunched up as Artemis tried to think his way through the idea.

"Uh, Artemis," Venus said.

"Not now, V. I'm trying to think."

"Artemis." That was Saturn.

"Come on, girls. If we don't do this just right..."

"ARTEMIS!"

"WHAT?" Artemis snarled, rounding on the lot of them. Saturn and Venus hopped back in surprise—no two ways about it; a snarl from a big cat is SCARY, even if the cat is your friend—but Mars met his glare and pointed skywards. Artemis followed the line of her finger to where a fireball was blazing across the sky, heading _towards_ the nearest nexus instead of away. About five seconds from impact, the flame separated into two halves, each of which almost immediately blossomed to be as large as they had been together; one continued along the original path, while the other veered off towards the more distant nexus. They both impacted with large gouts of flame and thunderous detonations.

"Come on," Artemis said, gathering himself for a leap to the next rooftop.

"But what about..."

"We don't have to worry about being caught on fungus-film video now, Neptune, but if we don't put a stop to what just came down over there, there's going to be a couple of burnt-out craters in the middle of this city by morning."

*I am impressed in spite of myself,* Proteus admitted as it watched through the eyes of the 'rogue' units as Archon's two-fisted flaming response burned through everything that got in their way. The entity estimated that the ambient temperature at each mana nexus had gone up a good fifty degrees on the instant of the twin impacts, rising from the sub-zero of winter to the sweltering heat of summer in about five seconds. The actual amount of energy needed to heat that much air to such an extent was simply incredible—and the temperature was still climbing.

*This is not a fight the units can win.* The truth of that statement was proved as three more first-generation units were swept away by roaring blasts of flame. *Fortunately, they do not have to win.*

The two fiery destroyers were each approaching from the south—and on the north side of each nexus, rope-like tendrils of bioweave passed large pods down to the street below. Three pods from the one nexus, five from the other, all of them quickly taken down into manhole covers by other growths and moved away from the battle. The first two pods to be sent below were larger than the ones that followed; they contained the two prototype hybrids Proteus had hoped to test this night, but which it would now save for another time.

*No sense wasting materials in a pointless battle.* Two more units were consumed in a fireball, which flew on and struck a car that had been parked beyond the stringy automatons. The gas tank of the vehicle ignited instantly, blowing the car apart and hurling a scything wall of glass and metal fragments in all directions. *And this battle is already over.*

Proteus deactivated those of its sensors still functional at either nexus and withdrew its consciousness, leaving the units to their fate.

The heat was fantastic. As far out as a block from the main conflagration, the snow and ice showed signs of serious thaw, and just a few meters further in, it was entirely melted. A few meters beyond that, and the ground was dry, and then desiccated. The air, meanwhile, progressed from crisply cold to damply cold to warm and slightly humid to hot and arid; the smells of many different things burning mixed together in an unpleasant miasma that was not thick enough in most places to be smoke, but which still made breathing harder than normal. Heat ripples started on the sidewalk and the street and blurred their way up into the colder air high above, and a dull glow began to color everything in shades of red and orange.

It was at about this point that Artemis flickered back into human form, minus the white jacket he had worn in the Atlantean era. The vest of silver armor and the white shirt beneath it left his arms bare to the shoulder, and he got a couple of appreciative glances; even if he _was_ a cat and something of a goofball, Artemis' human form was worth seeing.

Venus seemed to be trying very hard not to look.

They started finding debris from explosions not too far inside the boundary of the 'parched and arid' zone, and there were many smaller fires starting from the drifting embers of the larger blaze. Neptune blasted some of those and was alarmed by how difficult it was to gather the water; Uranus smothered a few more flames under collapsing bubbles of out-rushing wind, while Mars reached out and drew away the elemental force in still more flames, extinguishing them and increasing her own reserves.

Mars could feel a tingle in her skin which didn't have anything to do with the steadily increasing heat or the periodic power boosts she was getting from absorbing the energy of the fires. There was a huge concentration of fire just up ahead, so much of it that she wasn't sure where it was coming from. To generate this level of energy, a fire would have had to engulf the entire building beneath the mana nexus, and yet that hadn't happened—at least, not yet. So what was causing it?

They rounded a corner, were hit by a wall of heat more intense than a desert at noon, and found the answer to Mars's question.

Five of the weird fungus-beings were fighting with a sixth entity quite unlike anything the Senshi had seen before. A broad cone of many dancing flames rose up from the scorched concrete and bubbling asphalt, coalescing at some indefinite point into a roughly humanoid body perhaps six meters tall and more than half that in width. Two enormous arms fully as long as the body was tall were swinging at the fungus-creatures—reducing two of them to blackened husks in a single sweep—while a flat and faceless head set low between the massive shoulders fixed two balefully burning orbs of white-hot energy on the remaining targets. The entire creature was made of living flame: glowing embers fell away from it in all directions; every motion was made with the snapping crackles of a roaring bonfire; hair-thin jets of fire trailed behind it as it moved forward.

The heat radiating off the thing was murderous. Even at this distance, the intensity of it smashed at the Senshi like a huge hammer. The air was warped, filled with the stinks of a hundred different things burning at once: hot tar and flaming wood; melted rubber and smoldering plastics; the burnt-garbage stench of the malevolent fungus and the faint, odd smell of molten metal; all these and more combined to make the air almost unbreathable, where it was not being totally consumed by the flaming being's body.

"What the hell IS that thing?" Uranus demanded.

"Fire elemental," Artemis said shortly, sizing the creature up. "And a damned big one, at that."

"Where did it come from?"

"Some other dimension—I think the technical term is 'plane,' actually. I personally couldn't tell you which, but Luna might know."

"So it's a daimon?"

"No," Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars all said together. They looked at each other; Saturn blushed and fell silent, while Jupiter gestured for Mars to continue. "It doesn't have the same feel to it as a daimon or any other monster. It's not evil, but it's not good, either; it just _is_. Does that make any sense?"

"Not really," Uranus admitted, "but we'll chat about it later." She raised her right hand. "WORLD SHAKING!"

"No, wait!" He was too late to stop her, and as Uranus let the attack go, Artemis turned and leapt frantically at Venus, dragging her to the ground while shouting, "DUCK!" at the top of his lungs.

The gleaming yellow blast howled through the air and struck the elemental from behind, sinking into its broad, blazing back like a stone hurled into water -but with an end result far more spectacular than a lame 'splash.' With a sound like that of some immense furnace roaring to full life, the elemental's body swelled up and exploded, sending a wall of hot force out in all directions.

While the rest of the standing Senshi shielded their faces with their arms, Saturn swung the Silence Glaive at the fiery curtain, slicing a hole in it and forcing it to burn around her and past her instead of through her. Artemis hunkered down over Venus and gritted his teeth as the blast seared his back, and the others were all pushed back a step or three by the powerful burst of heat.

When the sweltering wind had stopped, Neptune looked up at Uranus. "Fire burns air, remember?"

"Fine; you try something. You ought to be perfect for this job."

"Now don't get snippy," Neptune chided her, turning to face the elemental, which actually appeared to have gotten _larger_ thanks to the dose of air, and was in the process of hurling a fireball bigger than Saturn at the last of the mold-men. *I wish Mercury were here,* Neptune admitted to herself. *With all the local water getting boiled right out of the air, I'm not completely sure if I can put all this fire out alone. Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained...* "DEEP SUBMERGE!"

Neptune's attack hit the elemental as cleanly and as accurately as Uranus's had, but the result was far different. An absolutely monstrous hiss and a tremendous blast of steam rose up from the edges of the blue sphere of water- energy, and the elemental threw back its head, letting out a sound like logs snapping in a fireplace over and over and over again. Its body flared, and the energy of the Deep Submerge began to dwindle rapidly; even so, by the time the steam stopped screeching out from the elemental's body, the creature had shrunk noticeably.

It turned away from the ashen remains of the last fungus-creature and fixed its blazing eyes on the Senshi; the white orbs sent out gouts of red flame at the edges.

"Oh, crap."

The elemental's shoulders and chest swelled as if it were taking a deep breath, and then its faceless head leaned forward and 'exhaled' a long plume of rushing fire at the Senshi.

"SUPREME THUNDER!"

Jupiter's lightning bolt sliced through the elemental's breath-blast, ripping it into tattered streamers which quickly flickered out in the air, but when the bolt struck the elemental itself, nothing seemed to happen. The elemental's response was to wave one huge arm at Jupiter, unleashing another Saturn-sized fireball; it followed that up with a punching motion from its other arm, which suddenly telescoped outwards, growing to an incredible length to smash at Uranus and Neptune.

In the middle of batting the fireball out of existence, Saturn spun awkwardly and made a desperate slash at the elemental's arm as it blazed past her. About two meters of condensed fire fell apart in mid-air, but the loss didn't impair the creature at all; drawing in energy from the lesser fires all around, it broke the remainder of its outstretched arm into a spiral of a thousand flaming filaments. Some hit the Silence Glaive and vanished, but others got past it and lashed Saturn's arms. She dropped the Glaive with a scream and fell back, holding her arms to her chest.

"Hotaru, look out!" Saturn looked up at Neptune's panicked shout, just in time to see another fireball descending on her.

"AAAAHHHHHH!" Saturn threw up her arms instinctively, and was blown backwards into a wall as a beam of purple-black force erupted from her hands. It lasted only an instant, but the energy shot up into the night sky at incredible speed, spearing the fireball en route and snuffing it out faster than a candle caught in a hurricane. It also left a hole in the line of a roof across the street, a perfectly smooth and circular space whose edges looked knife-sharp even from ground level.

Saturn looked at her hands and tried to figure out what she'd just done— *An attack that doesn't need the Silence Glaive! How long have I been trying to come up with something like that?*—but her vision was getting blurry all of a sudden, and she felt tired. She knew immediately what the problem was; she'd done a lot of work today—first helping Pluto move people back and forth through Time, then in the fight with Medea, and then again in her experiment at healing herself—and now it was catching up with her. _Saturn_ might be able to blow up the world single-handed, but Tomoe Hotaru had her limits, and she was getting dangerously close to realizing them.

Something exploded not far away, and the force of the blast hurled Saturn in one direction, while the Silence Glaive went clattering away in another. Picking herself up and spitting dust out past bruised lips, Saturn thought of _another_ limit she was getting dangerously close to realizing.

*If one more thing knocks me around tonight...*

"FIRE SOUL!"

Saturn flinched as Mars's attack spiraled in just over her head to collide with another breath-blast from the elemental. The two incendiary energies canceled each other out in another explosion, showering Saturn with dust, which in turn started her coughing.

"Aim... a little higher... next time... Mars. You almost... got my hair... with that one."

"Sorry." Mars knelt and helped Saturn stand, but kept her eyes on the elemental, which was trying to fend off another Deep Submerge with its enormous hands. "This isn't going very well," Mars said. "Saturn, do you think you can..."

"I'm not sure, Mars. I've been doing a lot of work today, and I really need to rest for a few minutes."

"And we don't really have a few minutes to spare," Jupiter said sourly as she hurled a Sparkling Wide Pressure at the elemental. The disc sailed into Neptune's Deep Submerge, and there was a flash followed by an explosion. "It doesn't want to fight us," she muttered, looking at the elemental as it lurched back from the blast, "so why does it keep attacking?"

"What did you say?" Mars asked.

"I can feel what it's feeling, Mars. It wasn't happy about getting hit with water like that, but it really doesn't want to hurt us. It feels... it feels _homesick_ more than hostile."

"Artemis did say it was summoned from another world," Mars said with a glance at Artemis, who—in light of the fact that he'd incinerate himself if he tried to attack the elemental—was doing his best to give tactical advice while dodging the fallout of the battle. "But I don't see how that helps us."

"Me neither," Jupiter admitted. They both ducked as a fireball tumbled past and blasted a crater into the concrete.

"This whole neighborhood's going to go up in smoke if we can't put that thing out soon," Mars grumbled. "And we've still got another one to deal with." She looked up at the building with the mana nexus sitting on it; the green fungus was already burnt away in places, bits of it falling free and crumbling from the heat, and she could feel a couple of fires inside the building. The sprinkler system seemed to have them contained, but nothing was stopping this monster or the fires it was feeding on.

*Hang on... contained...* "Uranus! Get over here!" Mars turned to Saturn. "Do you have enough energy left to put a Silent Wall around that thing? To totally wall it off from the air and fire?"

Saturn nodded slowly. "Yes. Yes, I do. I'll..."

"Not yet." Mars put a restraining hand on Saturn's arm and looked up as Uranus came up to them. "Uranus is going to teleport both of you to the other nexus; you'll trap _that_ elemental, and the rest of us will deal with this one."

"How?" Uranus asked bluntly. "Jupiter and Venus can't really hurt it, your attacks'll only make it stronger, and it's eating enough fire to counter whatever damage Neptune manages to do."

"I'm going to try to take control of those fires," Mars said. "If I can prevent the elemental from drawing on them for fuel, Neptune ought to be able to snuff it out."

"Can you _do_ that?" Jupiter asked curiously.

"You two had better get going," Mars said to Uranus, ignoring Jupiter. "There's no way to know how much damage that other one's done by now without anyone to distract it."

"Right." Uranus helped Saturn stand, giving Mars a quick look in passing which said she'd better be pretty sure of what she was about to try. Saturn retrieved the Silence Glaive and then closed her eyes and leaned against Uranus as the wind whipped up around them both. As those two blinked out, Mars and Jupiter turned to their own task.

"You didn't answer my question, Mars. Can you control other fires like that?"

"Easily." *On small fires, at least. I've never tried to control anywhere near this much at once.* "The real question is whether or not I've got better control than our friend there." *And whether or not I can stop it when it starts fighting me to get at its food.* She took a deep breath. "I guess we'll know in a minute."

Mars closed her eyes and thought of fire.

Down the street, the elemental's head looked up sharply.

In the grand hall, Archon suddenly staggered to one side, an astonished, "What..." escaping his lips before he got control of himself once more.

"Archon? Is something wrong?"

"Someone... is trying..." The archmage's words ended as he frowned fiercely. "One of the elementals has been imprisoned, Highness, and someone is challenging my control of the other. Excuse me, but I must investigate this."

The archmage bowed his head and raised his arms out to the sides, palms turned up. There was a brief rush of air, and a shadowy something seemed to fly up from his body. Vast and dark, and all the more terrible because it was only half-seen, it hovered in the air for a moment before shooting up through the high dome of the ceiling and disappearing.

Everything had stopped. The fires, the elemental, her friends; all of them and everything around were locked in place. Rei was adrift in a moment, an almost-silence in which nothing moved, in which the only sounds were her own thoughts. If she looked to the horizon, things became weirdly blurred, as if they somehow weren't as real as the scene surrounding her, and she felt incredibly light, as if she had but to push down to become airborne and fly...

Something made her look down, and a brief flash of panic seized her. She literally _was_ adrift; her body had somehow become weightless all of a sudden, and was now hovering perhaps three meters off the ground—and a meter or so above her body.

Her mind stalled. *My body... is floating above... my body?*

*Your mind has left your physical body. The shape you see now is an avatar created by your mind as a means of reference and familiarity.*

*Who said that?*

A shape formed in the air before her. At first it was a blurry outline of white mist, but it quickly solidified into the shape of a young woman in a close-fitting red dress, a young woman with very long, very dark hair.

"Hello, Rei."

Rei blinked. "Hello, Vestia."

It wasn't quite like looking into a mirror. Vestia was a few years older, with a somewhat darker complexion than Rei's—the legacy of ancestors who had spent several thousand years on a planet mostly desert—and she gave off a deep sense of rigid discipline. Rei glanced down at her body and noted than she also looked a bit short of sleep and somewhat underfed in comparison with her past self; as far as food and a good night's rest were concerned, that month in the desolate future had put her on short supply. Their eyes were the same, though, as was the overall shape of their features.

"How are you here, outside of me? And where IS here? Do you know?"

"I do." Vestia's voice was similar to her own, but older and very calm and controlled, forming words with slow precision. "You have projected your awareness outside of your body, onto a different level of reality. This is a spiritual plane, not a physical one, and I am a part of your spirit—so here I am."

"Shouldn't we both be in the same body, then?"

"Not quite yet. Hino Rei has not yet existed for as long as Vestia Heliophaesti did; the part of our spirit which is just me remembers being older than the part of us which is just you, so we appear as separate in this place. When you reach the point where you are as old as I was at... at the end... when you have once and for all truly become the Senshi of Mars again, then there will be nothing left to separate us." Vestia paused and looked at Rei, and some of the formality faded from her voice. "You really ought to eat more, you know. And get some sleep."

"I was just thinking that myself." Rei returned the critical look. "I can't remember... anything about you. I mean, I remember remembering things, but... I can't remember the things themselves right now." She made a sound of frustration. "Did that even make sense?."

"I understand what you mean. Everything from my life is IN me right now, and everything from your life is in you; the only things I can remember about your world at the moment are from times when you were reminded of things in my world. What you have done or thought as Mars is also clear to me."

"I think I've got those flashbacks, too—and anything Luna or Artemis or one of the others mentioned about you. Me. Us." Rei folded her arms and bowed her head thoughtfully. "It's... interesting."

"Oh?"

"I've wondered sometimes—we all have, really, about how much of us IS _you._ Who we used to be."

"And how do you feel now that we are separate?"

"Except for the memories... the same."

For the first time, Vestia smiled. "We have the same soul, but that does not mean we are the same person. The soul is shaped by the events of each life it lives, and it grows and changes according to those events. You have inside of you everything I ever was, all that I had learned, all the potential for what I might have grown to be, but you also have other traits that are yours alone, things which have become part of you because of the unique circumstances of your life. Even those things which are the same about us are different in some way. We both know the value of discipline and self-control, but I learned it from my mistress of etiquette, and you learned it from your grandfather—and with a great deal more manual labor than I had to endure, I might add. We both possess a certain nobility of character, but I was born to mine; you chose to develop yours on your own. We are both Mars"—Vestia flickered, her clothes changing to match the fuku Rei wore—"but we came to realize our duty in different ways."

Rei hesitated and then went ahead and said it. "How am I doing?"

"The world is still turning. Serenity is still alive. Your friends are still alive. You yourself are still alive." Vestia smiled again. "I think it is safe to say that you are doing well. Very well, especially considering the difficult circumstances you have been faced with."

"Speaking of difficult circumstances..."

"Yes." Vestia looked around at the stopped instant. "I am not entirely sure how you managed to do this, you know. I did not have the spiritual powers you possess today."

"You didn't? But I thought..."

"We Martians were not a particularly spiritual people," Vestia admitted. "Our faith was mostly in our hands and our minds, and what we could shape by using them. The heart was... incidental, in most cases. Or so I was raised to believe."

"And then you met Serenity, right?"

There was a reluctant sigh. "Yes. It is very hard to continue believing the heart is not of any great importance when you associate with someone who is able to love people so easily and unconditionally. Ishtar was somewhat the same, just with a slightly different focus."

"Ishtar?"

"The Venus of my day." Vestia shook her head. "You may think your friend Minako is crazy sometimes, but believe me when I say that she is _nothing_ compared to the trouble we used to have Ishtar. I think the difference must have something to do with the clothes."

"I'm sorry, I didn't follow that."

"Never mind." Vestia looked at the elemental. "I cannot really help you with anything about this thought-plane you have brought us to; I only came to it a few times in my life, all of them with the aid of another person, and I did not bother to study it much. But I can help you with the elemental, and I think that will be enough."

"I'm all ears."

Vestia gave her an odd look and then began speaking. "Your attempt to gain control of the flames was executed correctly; by seeing yourself as fire and reaching out through the power of your mind and of Mars, you essentially _become_ the fire, and can gain mastery over most types of flame that are not under your control. What you overlooked was that the elemental, as a being of fire, is also subject to this."

"You mean I can control it?"

"Quite easily—but only if you manage to break the control of the one who summoned it. I think that is why you were sent here. When you opened yourself up to the fire, you touched the mind of the elemental and the shackles which bind it to the will of the one who brought it to our world. Contact with that mind may have triggered some part of your spiritual powers that you did not yet know, and drawn you—and I—to this place."

"To fight them?"

"It is a distinct possibility—in which case I fear we will be at something of a disadvantage, since neither of us knows how to use your other power, and the power of Mars is of limited use here. Go ahead. Try a Fire Soul."

Rei frowned and did that. All she got for her efforts was the small, candle-sized flame at her fingertips; no matter how hard she tried, it did not seem to want to burst forth in the swirling fireball.

"That's not good."

"Indeed. The rules are different here. Elemental powers are altered, and even Time operates in strange ways. Look there."

Turning around, Rei was startled to realize that the scene had changed. Her body—her real body—was now sitting propped against the wall of a small alley, with Jupiter kneeling next to her, head turned to yell something down the street. Artemis was racing towards the two of them, and behind him, Neptune and Venus were battling the elemental. Neptune had summoned her Mirror and was in the process of blasting at the huge creature with a Submarine Reflection, which the elemental was in turn countering with help from a wedge of flaming rubble—rubble that Venus was blasting a hole through with her Crescent Beam.

"If you were to go back into your body and wake up, you might see that scene, or you might find that hardly any time at all had passed since you closed your eyes. Or it could be several days later. This place is governed more by spirit and thought than by the physical rules we are both used to."

"Is that how we get out? By going back to our—my body?"

"Yes. Do you wish to leave?" There was no censure in Vestia's tone; she seemed to think leaving was a good idea.

"Not yet," Rei said firmly. "I haven't finished what I was trying to do, and if we go back now, the elemental will still be on the rampage."

"You do not know how to control it."

"But you do."

Vestia blinked in surprise, and then began to smile again. "And even though I am just a faded spirit, since this place is _governed_ by spirit... I must admit, I did not stop to consider that. Very, very good, Rei."

"It gets better. I don't know nearly as much about being Mars as you do yet, but I'm a good student. If you show me what you're going to try and let me copy it, since we're both the same spirit, we can both try together—and whatever spiritual strength I have to offer might just get thrown in on top of that."

Vestia actually giggled, covering her mouth with her hands. "If I had any lingering doubts that you were me, consider them dispelled. And I feel very sorry for whoever is on the other end of those spells." She reached out and took Rei's hand, and together they faced the elemental. "This is what we want to do." A blur of images appeared in Rei's mind, memories being passed to her from Vestia. "Do you understand?"

Studying the idea, Rei nodded. "Yes. I'm ready." She glanced down at their hands. "Do you think we'll be able to talk like this again? There's so much I still need to know, and Luna can't teach me all of it—and remembering you doing something just isn't the same as doing it for myself."

The question made Vestia pause. "I do not know for certain, but... I believe... if you were to meditate and focus in on me, instead of in on yourself, or out on something you wished to find..." She broke off and looked at a swell of darkness in the distance, a black smear that had not been there a moment ago. "I think we had best hurry."

"I think you're right," Rei agreed, glancing at the smudge. Vestia might not have noticed, but to her, the darkness of the thing was _not_ just a function of color. She did not want to meet whatever was behind that darkness, not in a place where she couldn't properly defend herself against it. "On three?"

"On three. One..."

"One..."

"Two..."

"Two..."

"THREE!" they called out in unison, diving at the elemental.

Archon's progress across this lower level of the great Astral Plane was momentarily slowed by a sudden feeling of pressure from something up ahead. He immediately redoubled his pace, recognizing the feeling for a direct attack against the wards which bound the first of the two fire elementals to his will, but something told him he was going to be too...

There was a curious snapping sensation, like a frayed rope being pulled too tightly, and Archon felt his spells of control collapse. He was surprised and angered by how quickly and easily his control had been bested, but his immediate concern was for the wall of fire that was now blazing across the face of this reflected world. Archon wasn't sure how such a huge effect could be generated in this place, but he could tell one thing about it right away:

When it hit him, it was going to hurt.

The rush of psychic flame collided with Archon's psychic shield of darkness and stripped it away in an instant. Then the energy hit him. And it hurt.

*Sometimes,* Archon thought, right before the fire swept him away into unconsciousness, *being right so often is more trouble than it's worth.*

Proteus quivered as the energy rippled out from the mana nexus. It noted absently that a faint reading at the extreme edge of its sensory range was caught up and buried by the force, but the entity Archon still thought of as a mere information-gathering first-generation unit was too busy mustering its own defenses against the undirected psychic surge to recognize its creator's mind- signature.

In a dimly-lit room, a young girl with her attention on a floating, glowing piece of crystal went wide-eyed and clutched at her head with a sharp hiss as a very unfamiliar and totally unpleasant feeling washed over her, through her, and past her.

"What the hell is going on?" she snapped. The girl uttered two soft syllables in Atlantean and bore down with her will, calling out "Archon!" to establish the spell-link which allowed her to communicate with her erstwhile tutor. "Are you doing this, old man? Archon? Where are you?"

No reply. "Typical," the girl muttered, breaking off the spell. This had been a bad day for her as far as magic was concerned: her scrying spells seemed to have broken down for most of the evening, for no reason at all that she could identify; a very delicate spell-weave she had been trying fashion had been shattered by all these sudden local surges of energy; and now her teacher wasn't answering her calls.

She wondered if somebody was trying to tell her something.

The absentee Senshi and their two friends were gathered in the master bedroom, waiting together for Ami to wake up, when the most curious feeling of sourceless heat passed through the room. Usagi turned and looked out the window with a sudden expression of concern, and Luna, Ryo, and Setsuna all frowned.

"What was..." ChibiUsa started to ask.

Ami's eyes flew open, and she sat up in bed, shouting, "Rei!" so loudly that ChibiUsa fell out of her chair with a frightened yell.

"Rei? Rei! Come on, wake up! Open your eyes!"

Mars's eyes slowly fluttered open, revealing Jupiter's worriedly angry face hovering in front of her own. "Amm..." *No, not Amalthea. Jupiter. Makoto. Damn it.* She had to concentrate for a moment to keep Vestia's stirred-up memories from spilling over into her own thoughts. There was... they had hit the thing together, broken through a barrier of some kind, and reached the elemental's strange awareness. Then Mars had felt as though she were falling, and then she'd felt incredibly heavy for a moment, and then... then blackness, until she woke up.

Vestia had been sent back into the quiet places in memory where she rested, but she hadn't returned to her normal near-silence just yet; from the way those ordinarily quiet corners of thought were acting, there was one last thing she wanted to say, something...

"The elemental," Mars said, looking up. "What happened to it? Where is it?"

"Out there in the street," Uranus said, gesturing. Mars blinked and realized that Saturn was there, too. "It's not doing much of anything except standing there burning. Saturn didn't want to hurt the other one for some reason, so she locked it up in a sphere which lets air get in and out but keeps all the fire and heat in. We got a call that you were in trouble a minute later and headed back."

"A call...?"

"My fault," Jupiter admitted, helping Mars stand. "When you closed your eyes, I lost all sense of you. Your body was still breathing and everything, but _you_ weren't there anymore. And then right before you woke up, for a second it almost felt like there were two of you."

"Vestia sort of woke up for a little while there," Mars said. "I needed something she knew to deal with the elemental."

"We sort of guessed you were up to something when flameboy there started acting weird," Venus said with a sagacious nod. "One second it was trying to grill us, then it stopped, then it went evil again, then it stopped..." She flipped her hands in a manner of dismissive disgust. "It went on like that for awhile before it finally stayed quiet, and _that_ was about seven minutes ago, so I guess you can consider it dealt with."

"Not quite. I still have to..." Mars blinked. "Did you say _seven_ minutes? How long was I out?"

"A little less than a quarter of an hour," Artemis informed her. "Mars, Saturn saw a silver cord leading away from your body. While you were... out... did you happen to end up in a place full of stars and weird lights?"

"No. Everything I saw looked the same as here, except that it wasn't moving. Not when I looked at it, at least; it changed once or twice when my back was turned. It didn't seem completely real, either. Things got blurry at a distance. Vestia said it was a place of spirit and thought, and not physical matter."

"That's a pretty good description," Artemis admitted. "It's called the Astral Plane, and if you'd gone far enough into it, you'd have seen why. Almost everything there is shaped by the psychic energy of the various worlds, and once you get far enough away from the reflections created by the minds of those worlds, it's a lot like being in deep space."

*"A great sea of stars, where I can swim through an infinity of dreams. I'll take you there some day, Rei-chan, and show you how to swim with the dreams; I promise."* Mars closed her eyes and pushed the memory aside. "Artemis, is it... dangerous?"

"Extremely, particularly in the world-reflections like the one you were describing. Up in the empty place, the only real problems are the psychic wind and the occasional fellow consciousness, but when you're down on one of the worlds... ever had a dream that you were convinced was real even when you woke up and knew that it couldn't have been?"

Mars, Uranus, and Neptune all gave Artemis the same flat look, and he actually blushed.

"Oh. Uh, yeah. I meant _aside_ from the prophetic ones." Artemis grinned weakly, then cleared his throat with a hasty cough and went on. "Those world- reflections are shaped by the conscious _and_ unconscious minds of a real world's inhabitants, so they're also called the Dream Worlds—or just the Dream World, since the whole plane is accessible to anyone actually there—and sometimes when you fall asleep, your sleeping mind is able to cross over."

"How does that make the place dangerous?" Uranus asked. Artemis' next three words stunned all of the Senshi into speechlessness.

"Psychosomatic sympathetic reaction." Even Neptune seemed a bit dazed by that. "The Dream World looks so real that your mind thinks it IS real, and if you get hurt there, your body suffers the pain as if it had actually happened. People have been known to get killed in that place, particularly when the psychic wind kicks up and the dreams get restless. Sometimes fear alone is enough to do it."

*She passed away in her sleep... so suddenly... no medical reason for it, nothing to suggest why it happened... they said it was like her heart just stopped...* Mars shook her head.

"Mars? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, Jupiter. Artemis, is there anything in particular that I ought to know about that place?"

"Only that you'd damn well better not go into it again," he said bluntly. "The Astral Plane is no place for self-tutelage, and since neither Luna nor I can get there, we can't help you." He frowned. "If you _do_ find yourself there again in the future, follow that silver cord back to your body as fast as you can, steer clear of anything that looks dark or distorted—and don't under any circumstances let anything _break_ the cord, or you'll never wake up. Got that?"

Mutely, Mars nodded. "Good. Now, you said Vestia told you something about how to deal with the elemental. Does that include how to send it and its friend home? I know one way to do it, but we'd have to destroy their physical bodies here, and..."

"She told me, Artemis." Pushing aside Jupiter's attempts to help her, Mars walked out into the street.

As Uranus and Venus had said, the elemental was no longer moving around in an attempt to destroy things. A little smaller than Mars remembered it—no doubt due to Neptune's efforts to extinguish it before it had stopped moving of its own accord—the creature was standing in the middle of the street, its arms at its sides and its head facing forward in what, in a human, would have been described as a zombie-like trance. Its fiery body was at a much lower burn than before, to the point where the snow that was beginning to fall once more actually managed to get within about ten feet of the thing before it melted.

"Saturn?"

"Yes, Mars?"

"Do you think you can bring the other elemental here when I ask? It doesn't matter if you teleport it or herd it here inside your trap."

"I can do that. It might be a little slow, though."

"That's okay. As long as you can get it here. But not before I tell you, okay?" Saturn nodded, and Mars took a deep breath and one step forward. "All of you wait here."

"Mars," Neptune said warningly.

"I know what I'm doing, Neptune. Really. It won't hurt me, but it might not like anyone else getting close—and it wouldn't like it at all if _you_ got near it again."

Without looking back—if they saw the nervousness on her face, they'd never let her do this, although come to think of it, Jupiter probably knew already—Mars walked up to the elemental. As the heat increased and neared a point that even she could no longer tolerate, Vestia's memories pushed forward again and showed her a useful little trick. Mars concentrated on it, and the heat ceased to be a problem, its energy being absorbed by her own power before it actually came into contact with her body.

She stopped perhaps two meters in front of it and looked up at the glowing eyes. "I know you can hear me; I know you understand what I'm saying."

The elemental's head turned to look down at her, and it was an effort for her not to back up a step or two—or ten.

"You were brought here against your will; I understand that, and I know that you never meant any harm to us. I'll send you home, but I need your help."

The ceaseless crackling of the creature's fiery body was joined by a brief series of angry-sounding pops and hisses.

"No, nothing like that." Mars waited for the hiss to end. "You didn't come here alone. We've managed to contain the other one without hurting him, but I can't break him free like I did you. We'll bring him here and release him, but I need you to hold him until I send you both back where you belong. Is that acceptable?"

At first, the elemental did not react. Then, moving very slowly and deliberately, it raised one vague finger on its right arm and pointed at her. The fire of its body flared up very slowly and with a noticeable roar, which trailed off in a long hissing:

"Mmmmmmmmaaaaaaaassssssss?"

Mars blinked. *It knows who I am.* "Yes, I am Mars."

The burning head nodded slowly, and then the elemental faced the other direction. It did not turn; the features of its body simply ceased to burn with the suggestion of a human form facing Mars, and instead burned with the suggestion of a human form facing away from her. She took that to mean it agreed.

"Saturn," Mars said, raising her hand, "bring the other one."

They waited for a little less than a minute before a large globe formed of purple-black bands of energy appeared, floating serenely down one of the connecting streets at about the same level as the third floor of the buildings it passed. The second fire elemental was easily visible inside, and Mars was a bit disturbed to note that it was quite a bit larger than the other. She hesitated and then sent a flow of her own power into the creature, which immediately swelled larger and burned more fiercely. Once it was equal in size to its compatriot, she stopped feeding it.

"Do you want me to let it go?" Saturn called.

"Yes. Right in front of the other one."

"Okay."

The bands of dark energy twisted in on themselves and vanished, dropping the second fire elemental towards the street. Even before it hit the ground, the first creature was charging at it, arms wide. The two fire-beings merged into a ball of intensely burning flame some eight meters across, a ball which roiled and tossed furiously against itself, but which did not move from the char-marked spot on the melted concrete where the elementals had collided.

*NOW!* Vestia's voice shouted. *As I showed you! NOW, Rei!*

Mars threw her arms out to the sides and summoned up what was easily the single largest amount of fire she had ever tried to control. She took the energy from everything around her: from the remnants of the fires burning in the building; from the heat of the damaged and destroyed scenery around her; from the heat of the air; from the unseen but nevertheless very much present lines of energy leading to the rest of the world. It rushed out in flaming rivers of red and orange, white and gold, dozens of them, all converging on the two struggling beings in front of her.

The two elementals were swallowed by another orb of flame, which immediately began to shrink in on itself and them. If what Vestia had claimed was correct, cramming that much pure fire energy into a small enough spot did something to the nature of reality. It changed, became more like the other place the elementals called home, enough so that for a few short seconds, a gateway opened between that world and this one. Any Senshi could do something like this, but for most of them, the gateways led only to worlds like the endless burning one Mars could sense in front of her now, worlds made up entirely of the pure stuff of the same element the Senshi herself channeled. _Only_ the Senshi herself or a wizard with powerful spells of protection would be able to enter such a world and survive—them, or creatures like the two elementals, for whom these worlds were home.

The struggling forces inside the sphere ceased and were quite suddenly gone. All that remained was flickering fire.

*Not quite done yet,* Mars thought to herself. *It won't do to leave a hole to that place open in the middle of the city.* She brought her hands together slowly, the gesture helping her to visualize what she wanted to do, and the blazing orb shrank down further and faster than before. The flames transmuted into incandescent energy, growing smaller and hotter and brighter, compressing down to a fist-sized miniature star and continuing to collapse even beyond that.

Prompted by Vestia's assurances that the process was going to wind to its conclusion automatically now no matter what, Mars let go of the energy and watched as the tiny mass of fire briefly shone brighter than the sun, and then, in a seconds-long flash of blinding light, went out.

Flame, gateway, elementals and all were gone.

Mars shivered. With the elementals gone, the natural temperature level was wasting no time in reasserting itself. She turned to head back to her friends, trying to ignore the shaking of her knees; that gateway had taken a lot out of her. The other Senshi met her halfway, with Artemis—back in panther form in light of the returning winter weather—padding silently up behind them.

"That was... um... impressive," Venus said, as she and Jupiter moved to help Mars stay on her feet. "Did it work?"

"The elementals have been sent home," Mars reported wearily. "Which is where I think I would like to go now, Ish..." She stumbled and briefly scrunched her eyes closed, pushing Vestia's memories back where they belonged.

"Easy, Rei," Venus murmured. "Just a few miles to go, and then you can sleep."

"Do you think you can get her home without Jupiter?" Saturn asked.

Venus blinked. "Well... yeah, we can always draft Uranus to take over, but..."

"I need to borrow you for about half an hour or so, Jupiter." Saturn pointed at the building that had been taken over and then purged of the green fungus. "This is the fourth time so far that this green stuff has caused us problems by taking over buildings, and I want to make sure there isn't any more of it laying around setting traps for us. If you can find it, I can get rid of it."

"I thought you said you were tired," Uranus said, her hands on her hips.

"That was almost twenty minutes ago; I've rested."

"You're not going anywhere except home, young lady."

"I can handle it, Neptune."

"I mean it, Hotaru; you've already done more than enough work for one day. You can go fungus-hunting tomorrow if you like, but right now you're going home and going straight to bed."

Saturn looked at her for a minute, then walked off and pouted. Neptune shook her head and glanced at Uranus. "I swear, she gets more like you every day."

"Good for her."

The punch in the shoulder said clearly that Neptune did not consider this a good thing.

As it happened, sending Hotaru _straight_ to bed proved not to be an option. Ami was up and around by the time the others returned—with Luna, Usagi, Setsuna, and ChibiUsa were watching her and Ryo _very_ carefully as they all sat in the living room—and all thoughts of perpetrating a city-wide fungicide or preventing it for a few hours by sending the main exterminator off to bed were abandoned in favor of making sure Ami was once again more-or-less okay.

She wasn't. Not completely. Even with almost everyone giving her warm hugs or acceptant looks, even with Usagi sitting to her right and radiating compassion in that unique manner of hers—and with Makoto sitting to her left, holding her hand and letting her know that Usagi and everybody else in the room really meant it when they said they could deal with things as they were—even then, Ami was still not totally okay.

Ryo liked to think that he would have known this even without the odd double-emotions bumping around in his mind to show him that, whether or not her friends were bothered, Ami was still very troubled by everything Luna had said. He liked to think that, as a devoted boyfriend and reasonably perceptive individual, he would have been able to tell how Ami was feeling with no need of a two-way psychic connection.

*But I guess I'll never know now,* he thought. *Or maybe I should say that I _will_ know, whether I want to or not.*

Ryo was still trying to decide whether or not this mindbond was good news or bad, and never mind the embarrassing mood swings it had set off in both of them earlier; was he ready to deal with the degree of intimacy inherent in this peculiar situation? Was Ami? Could he handle knowing Ami's feelings—and possibly even her thoughts—as clearly as his own? And what happened the next time he had a vision? If he could feel Ami's pain, however faintly, then she'd obviously be able to feel his—but would she also be able to _see_ the visions?

The answer he kept coming up with was the same one Luna had been forced to use so many times already tonight—*I don't know*—and Ryo wasn't liking it any better than Luna had.

As confused as he felt, he knew that Ami felt worse. It wasn't hard to understand why. What had started out as a few days of nausea and enforced bedrest had now exploded into something that was rearranging nearly every important thing in Ami's life. Her personal relationships were going to be strained by her new mental abilities, her physical health had already been threatened several times, and as long as this kept up, she couldn't be Mercury, couldn't be there to help protect her friends. On top of all that, there was the difficulty of learning about and coming to terms with who and what her past life had been, and the subtly frightening possibilities of what that might be doing to her.

*She's confused and scared and angry and sad and scared again, and all this supernatural, paranormal weirdness just keeps making things worse! Damn it, I wish there was something I could... do... hmmm...*

If the supernatural and paranormal parts of Ami's life were the major cause of her problems, could the normal, everyday part of her life do something about that?

Ryo turned that idea over in his head for a while, and steadily became convinced that it might just be the answer. *Mercury's important to Ami, and it's one of the things she lives for. Even in her everyday life, she's special—extraordinary. She's gotten used to that, but maybe it's time to remind her that the other things in her life—the ordinary things—are just as important, just as much worth living for. Maybe it'd be good for her to stop feeling special in those extraordinary ways for a little while and feel special in an everyday sort of way, like she was just a normal girl.*

"Ryo-kun?"

"Hmmm?" Ryo looked up and found that Ami—and indeed, everybody else—was looking at him. "Sorry, did I miss something?"

"Not really," ChibiUsa said. "You were muttering. Kinda loud."

"Oh. Sorry about that. I was just thinking."

"About what?" Minako asked brightly.

"Uh... oh, just... stuff."

"Would that be Ami-related 'stuff,' by any chance?" She waited for a moment and then grinned. "Judging by the blush, I think I've hit the male on the head."

"That's 'nail,'" Artemis said immediately, but Minako was swinging into full Love Goddess Mode and didn't hear him.

"Formulating plans, eh? Do you want some advice? Need a co-conspirator?"

"Uh... no. Thanks." Ryo edged away from Minako just a little bit.

Rei reached forward and took hold of the back of Minako's shirt, pulling back and murmuring, "Down, girl."

"You're no fun, Rei-chan."

"Minako, when you stop to consider the fact that I started this particular day over a month ago, I've had all the 'fun' I can take for a while."

"On that note," Michiru said, "I think it's about time we got some sleep."

"Amen to that," Usagi agreed with a yawn, closing her eyes. "So, who gets the couch?"

This question would have typically sparked a twenty-minute debate, but Michiru wasn't having any of that. Usagi and Ami both needed to get a good night's rest, and the bed in the master bedroom was the most comfortable one in the house, so they were sharing it. Michiru herself was moving down the hall to Haruka's room, and ChibiUsa had already dragged a spare futon into Hotaru's room. Setsuna was getting the upstairs guest room, Ryo was getting the spare downstairs room, and Makoto, Minako, and Rei were getting the living room.

Michiru handed all of this down in a no-nonsense, tempt-the-wrath-of-God-for-refusing-or-even-arguing-a-little-bit tone—so no one did. Haruka _did_ offer one suggestion, which was to put somebody else in the master bedroom with Usagi and Ami, just to make sure that Ami didn't try to sneak out later on in the evening—and to make sure that Usagi didn't try to sneak out in order for Ryo to sneak _in,_ either.

Perhaps it was the disorientation of feeling Ryo's embarrassment in addition to her own, but Ami made the mistake of throwing a pillow at Haruka then. Telepathy isn't much use in stopping a quarter-pound of feathers in flight, and Haruka's counterattack whomped Ami and Usagi, both of whom retaliated instantly—in Usagi's case, with two pillows at once. She missed, of course, and hit Minako and Hotaru instead, by which point it was much too late to do anything other than grab a pillow or get out of the way. Setsuna got in on the act almost as fast as the younger girls, and Michiru turned into an absolute pillow-wielding demon when somebody's poorly-judged shot caught her in the side of the head.

Taking shelter behind a couch, Ryo and Ami nearly bumped into each other. They both started to speak, then stopped, started again, and stopped again.

*Well, why not?* "Ami-chan... uh... were you planning on doing anything next Saturday night?"

"Not really, no."

"Well, uh... I know that you're going to want to spend some time studying for those exams we've got coming up, but... uh... you see, there's this restaurant I know, and... um..."

"What sort of restaurant?"

"A really nice place. The owner's Japanese, but her husband's a chef from somewhere in Europe, and they've got the whole menu set up for cross-culture meals... and, well, if you didn't have any important plans, I was wondering... you know... ifyoumightwanttohavedinnerwithme."

Ami blinked, blushed a little, and then nodded. "I'd... I'd like that." She started to reach for his hand, but caught herself and then really blushed. "But... but just dinner."

"Oh, definitely."

They both sat there for a moment, each too busy trying to ignore the fact that (s)he was leaning slowly towards the other to realize that the other was leaning, too. Then Ryo blinked, and so did Ami.

"Was that..."

"It was," he said. "Did you see it?"

"No. Nothing." Ryo let out a sigh of relief, and Ami looked at him curiously. "What did you see?"

"Uh... you're about to get pillow-whacked."

Minako tumbled around the side of the couch right on the heels of that statement and let fly with the blue-and-white-striped pillow in her hands.

A semblance of order was finally restored some ten minutes later, and while Luna, Ryo, and Haruka helped Usagi and Ami upstairs, the others cleaned up the living room and started getting ready for bed. Setsuna herded ChibiUsa and Hotaru up the stairs ahead of her, and Ryo came down a moment later and headed straight for the back room.

Right in the middle of digging around in her bag for her pajamas, Minako stopped short and looked up.

"Uh... Artemis?" she asked in a meek tone. "Would you mind... um... staying in the other room tonight?"

Artemis looked at her for a moment, but then nodded. "Sure, Mina-chan," he said quietly. "Sure." He smiled faintly and quickly left the room.

Makoto, Rei, and Michiru exchanged a look. "Mina-chan?" Makoto asked. "Are you okay?"

"Hmmm? Never better." Minako grinned and turned back to her bag, humming tunelessly. The other three traded glances again, but let the matter go. Michiru said good-night and went upstairs, frowning all the way.

"I know you don't think it's anywhere near as nice as your waterbed," Haruka said as Michiru entered the room, "but an ordinary mattress isn't _that_ bad."

"It's not that."

"Then what is it?"

"You _have_ noticed that Artemis is devilishly handsome in human form," Michiru said, heading for the bathroom.

"Yeah, I noticed." Haruka sighed and shook her head. "And I take it that Minako's noticed as well, huh?"

"She's been trying _not_ to notice all evening."

"That's what I figured. Poor kid. You don't think she might do something she'll end up regretting, do you?"

"She's smarter than she lets on, Haruka."

"That's not what I asked."

"I know." Now in a blue nightgown, Michiru came back into the room and shook her head. "She already loves him—as a friend and a partner—and I'd imagine he feels pretty much the same way about her, but now that he can turn into a human... I can't imagine that either of them would even think of it, but... I just don't know."

"That does seem to be the catch-all phrase of the evening," Haruka muttered, climbing into bed with a prodigious yawn. "Do me a favor and check on Hotaru in a couple of hours, would you?"

"You think she's going to go out anyway? Even after we told her not to?"

"_I_ would."

Michiru sighed and turned off the lights. "If it isn't one thing, it's another."

The sudden explosion of energy came out of nowhere, but it was not a total surprise. Proteus had tracked five such bursts already in the last half hour, each one taking place at one of the still-incomplete testing sites it had been working on for the last month. When the surges subsided, nothing whatsoever was left of the bioweave, mana nexi, or units that had been located in those areas. One and all, they were being systematically annihilated.

Proteus did not feel any particular remorse at the losses. What it did feel was irritation at the delays it would now be faced with in having to replace so much lost work, and a healthy dose of fear for its own metaphorical skin.

When ten minutes had passed since the last surge, Proteus allowed itself a moment of hope. Five minutes after that, it extended a few of its remaining sensors and looked around intently. And five minutes after that, when nothing else happened, the entity relaxed—and started running some hasty analyses.

Over ninety percent of its network had just been excised. All the large concentrations of bioweave had been hit, by something which packed a stunning amount of apparently untraceable power, while most of the smaller concentrations, including Proteus' central intelligence and the precious pods holding its newly-captured test subjects, had escaped. That could be taken to mean either that the smaller collections had not been detected, or had been detected and ignored as unimportant; considering the thoroughness of the destruction it had just witnessed, Proteus thought the first option to be more likely.

*This settles it, then. I had hoped to maintain some security by fortifying myself in a stationary location, but it seems now that my best defense will be to stay small and mobile—and unnoticed.*

Of course, maintaining anonymity would require not doing anything that was not absolutely essential to survival—which meant that the periodic transmissions back to Archon must cease.

*But first, one last report...*

"Is this report accurate?" Political said.

"Verified by all members of the team," Security rumbled, "and compared against the information recorded from their relays."

"The _Senshi_ had control of the creatures responsible for the attacks?"

"Of one of them, at least," Sciences admitted. "The video footage doesn't include much in the way of sound, but it clearly shows one of the Senshi—Mars, I believe—talking to one of the two fire-based life-forms."

"That doesn't fit with their usual tactics," Information said. "Every last report I have agrees that the Senshi do their fighting themselves, and they're not in the habit of making deals with the other side."

"They haven't always destroyed these creatures in the past, though," Sciences pointed out. "It's possible that some kind of accord was reached in this case."

"That could present a problem," Political said. "There are a number of people who always take exception to the destruction of public and private property, and to the parties involved. Any clues as to why these particular locations were hit?"

"Field analysis has turned up traces—mostly charred—of that organic substance we've been running across lately. Combined with the energy readings we picked up in those areas, my best guess would be that two hostile operations were in progress. They seem to have been geared towards affecting the weather, like the last one, but we're checking all possibilities just to be sure."

"Good." On the other end of the phone line, Political's voice went briefly silent. "All cover operations are underway, I take it."

"You'll see the story on the news channels anytime now," Media replied, shaking his head in mock sorrow. "It's terrible what plastique explosives can do in terrorist hands."

"Yes, terrible..."

Archon sat in his chambers, considering the news.

The elementals were gone, ripped from his control and sent back to their home plane. The watcher was gone, destroyed along with all the testing sites by something it had not been able to see coming or going, but which very obviously had known where the watcher and the test sites were. Before that unfortunate loss, temporal and psychic surges of unknown origins had been detected in the city. And, as a result of his own encounter with one of those eruptions of mental power, the archmage had a splitting headache.

*We need to change tactics,* Archon decided. *No more hiding in the shadows and letting second-rate mechanisms attempt to do the work. If the Rise is to be achieved, it will be by our own hands. If I have to lift the city myself, I will. The Rise _must_ be.*

*Or we are all doomed.*

_…_…_

SAILOR SAYS:

(Enter Saturn and Jupiter, tiptoeing in the front door of Michiru's house at what seems to be two in the morning)

Jupiter (in a whisper): "You know that this is way past my bedtime, let alone yours."

Saturn (also in a whisper): "I didn't think it would take so long." (turns around, sees the camera, and nearly swallows her tongue trying not to shout) "What is THAT doing here?"

Jupiter: "Huh? Oh. I think it's supposed to be moral time again. Well, nuts to that; I'm going to bed." (she detransforms and heads for the living room)

Saturn: "Makoto!" (looks at the camera again and sweatdrops) "Uh... hi. Um... I think the best bet for a moral here is 'don't mess with psychic powers unless you know what you're doing'. Look at all the trouble it's gotten Ami-chan into."

Off-Screen Voice: "Uh... would that maybe be something like 'knowledge in the wrong hands is dangerous'?"

Saturn (sweatdrops again): "Uh... sure. Whatever. Now if you'll excuse me, I've really got to get back into bed before Michiru-mama or Haruka-papa look in on me and see that I'm gone." (exits the screen)

Off-Screen Voice (sighing): "I think we need to have a meeting about the future of this segment, myself."

29/11/00 (Revised, 15/08/02)

Okay, show of hands: who in the audience is now royally incensed at me for suggesting that our dear Ami-chan was an intelligent cloud of mineral-enriched water vapor in her previous life? (ducks flaming emails from the Mizuno Fan Club)

Would it surprise you to learn that I'm totally unrepentant? :)

Reincarnation never said you'd always be human, and given the choice between gaseous shapeshifter and banana slug, I myself would take the cloud any day of the week.

This episode should have been out a week or even two weeks back, but I kept having to go back and redo the whole opening scene—THERE! She kissed Ryo! Ha! And I think I even managed to keep it in her character! Double Ha!—and everything about the Nereids until it worked.

Up next:
-The Senshi settle in to life with human cats and a talking crow;
-Ami goes looking for a cure to her condition;
-And probably a lot of stuff I haven't even thought of yet.