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.

23. Chapter 23

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 23

Waiting Games, Some Shocking Moments, and Why Sometimes You Just Can't Let Dragons Lie

At the sound of a knock, Rei looked up from the Book and saw the silhouette of a tall woman with very long hair standing outside. "Who is it?"

"It's me," Luna's voice responded. "May I come in?"

"Of course." The door slid open; Rei smiled when she noticed Luna's cautious, searching glance around the room. "They're outside."

"Good," Luna said, stepping inside and closing the door behind her. "Because we need to talk."

"What about?"

"That." Luna pointed at the Book as she sat down. "When Usagi asked you to take the Book, she was asking with full awareness of everything Serenity ever knew about it, but that didn't include so much as a hint that it might start moving around on its own, or that any of the other things you've described might happen." She held up a hand to forestall the argument she knew Rei was about to make. "When you told us what the Book said about the Aegis, Usagi and I could tell from the wording that something had changed. The Book NEVER speaks _to_ the reader, Rei; it may talk about them, and it may provide answers to specific questions, but it never uses a direct form of address like that—and it doesn't offer warnings or suggestions."

"It hasn't ever used a legible script, either," Rei added. "Not that I've seen, anyway."

Luna's left eyebrow went up a notch. "So you can appreciate our concern when the Book, after all the thousands of years for which it's been studied, suddenly seems inclined to switch from being a passive record of history to being an active participant in it. Either there's more to the Book than anyone knew, or something else has gotten in touch with it. The first is entirely possible, but based on everything else that you've told us has been happening around Hikawa, Usagi and I are both inclined to suspect the latter."

"Lu..." Luna raised her hand again.

"I came here to ask you a question, Rei. After everything the Book has done or caused so far, and with the possibility of what else may happen because of it, do _you_ still feel you're capable of guarding it, or would you rather that someone else took charge of it?"

"I _have_ to take it, Luna. Nobody else can read it."

"That's not a good enough reason," Luna replied, "and it's not completely true, either. Usagi told me that Calypso could read it quite well when they were in here the other night."

Rei's jaw dropped, then closed. "Calypso isn't a Senshi—and even if she does have Ami-chan and Mako-chan right there to help her, they don't have my training. If something is interfering with the Book without actually being physically present, I have a better chance of noticing and dealing with it than any of the others do."

"That likely won't be the case once Jupiter comes back with the Aegis," Luna noted, "and training doesn't count for anything if you aren't willing to use it." Luna started to reach for the Book, but Rei's hands shot out and caught her arms before she'd even touched the cover.

"Luna, _please._ I _have_ to do this." In a quiet, almost fierce voice, she added, "I promised."

Luna smiled gently and turned her hands so that she could clasp Rei's arms. "That's what I needed to hear. As long as you're genuinely willing to accept this responsibility, Rei, we won't try to take it away from you—but don't be afraid to ask us for help if you need it. Okay?"

"Okay," Rei mumbled, looking down at the table and blushing. "Thanks, Luna."

"You're welcome. Now, can I have my arms back?"

The room used to house the meetings of the Directors was as dark as ever, and mostly empty. One seat, that of the Science Director, was occupied, and the woman was typing away at her console.

"You took your time," she suddenly said aloud, not looking up from her work.

"One of these days," the Information Director replied, from the darkest part of the room, "you're going to have to tell me how you do that."

"Call it woman's intuition."

"Do you really expect me to accept that?"

"Humor me." A faint note of amusement entered the woman's normally cool voice. "A girl has to keep some of her secrets, after all—and I do have something else you should see. Or rather," she added, "something you should hear."

"Oh?"

"This is a recording made by one of our friends at SETI about an hour ago," Sciences said, loading a file into the system. "They were in the middle of their usual deep-space signal recording and analysis when they picked up... this."

Information listened intently as a series of popping noises began to play over the meeting room's hidden speakers. It sounded pretty much like the usual interstellar 'noise' that the SETI researchers constantly sifted through in the hopes of isolating an artificial signal from amongst all the natural sources—and quite suddenly, it stopped. For three entire seconds the room was utterly silent, and then the sounds of deep space resumed.

"I'm not an expert," Information admitted, "but that break seems a bit unusual to me."

"One of the sounds in that recording was a pulsar with a rotational period of just under one second—so yes, a pause that long was quite out of the ordinary. There's also this to consider." With the click of a few more keys, the room's main monitor glowed to life, showing a frozen image of deep space which was positively littered with glowing objects.

"It's a recording from observations made by the Hubble telescope at the same time that SETI experienced their little glitch. Our contact at NASA passed it along."

Information watched closely, and was rewarded with the sight of this undoubtedly distant corner of the universe being blurred into a senseless blob of light, a blob which persisted for a count of three seconds and then returned to normal.

"Did the sensor network pick up anything?"

"I think the better question here is 'did the sensors NOT pick up anything?' Every last corner of the system logged a surge of that untraceable energy type we've attributed to Saturn, right before these two events occured—one of them in North America, the other in orbit."

"What time was all of this?"

"11:16 am, our local. You might also be interested to know that our specimens from last night went on a mass howling fit at the same time, and I myself felt a very definite chill, as did at least three members of my staff with whom I spoke. At the time I thought it was just a reaction to the noise those creatures were making, but after seeing these, I'm not quite so sure."

"Now that you mention it, I think I may have felt something myself." Information fell thoughtfully silent. "I'll get in touch with Media and tell him to have his people check for reports of unusual activity in the city at or around that time; you find Personnel and tell her to start checking around to see if other people noticed any strange feelings at 11:16."

"I've already put my own department to work checking our systems," Sciences put in, "just to see if anything was affected or damaged. I'll have Resources do the same—and you should call Political about this as well."

"He'll want to know if you have any theories about..." Information paused, searching for a word and finally settling for, "It."

"I'll have to get back to you on that one."

"A global shield?" Janus said incredulously.

"Yes, your Highness," Archon replied. "It seemed to be something on the order of a massive detection field, rather than a combat shield."

"'Seemed to be'?"

"It was remarkably difficult to track, my lord. The initial disturbance had passed us by within seconds, leaving insufficient time to properly record the phenomenon, and we've had no further indication of any kind to determine whether this shield is still functioning or not."

"Were you able to determine anything about its possible origin?" Janus asked.

"Not conclusively, Highness, but I'd tend to suspect an artificial source. There is no mention in the archives of any Senshi possessing a power like this, even on a small scale. By itself, that doesn't rule out the possibility that one of the new Senshi has this sort of ability, but only the Senshi of Saturn were ever able to manipulate energy on a planetary scale before—and the energy expenditure involved was lethal even for them."

"You're in trouble, Saturn," Calypso said.

Saturn looked at Calypso expressionlessly.

"Would you like to surrender now, or fight to the bitter end?"

Saturn waved her hand at the Nereid, mumbled something that sounded like "hmmnhrph," and went back to her study of the chessboard on the table between them. Calypso's white army had captured both of Saturn's knights, her queen, a rook, and several pawns besides; she had lost her own queen, a knight, and a few pawns in the bargain, but retained the overall advantage.

*Maybe if I move that bishop there...* Saturn studied the move and then, finding no obvious danger, went ahead with it. Two moves later, she realized it had been a mistake, because Calypso had reclaimed her queen and was one move away from checkmate.

"Okay," Saturn sighed, "I give up. You're good at this, Caly."

"Well, of course I am," Calypso replied, moving the pieces back into their starting positions. "We invented chess."

Saturn blinked and looked at Ami. "She's half right," Ami said. "The Nereids invented a game which humans called 'chyetsa', and some aspects of the design, rules, and strategy were similar to the game of chess. Since chyetsa was created about twenty thousand years ago and required a certain degree of magical or psychic ability to play, it's entirely possible that somewhere along the line, someone was inspired to create a simpler, nonmagical version for ordinary people."

"And if you could play chyetsa," Calypso said, "you could play chess."

Saturn glanced at Ami, who was standing over near the dimension door, scanning through it with her computer and trying to track Jupiter's progress. "Did you play this game, Ami-chan?"

"A little."

"She's just being modest." Calypso smiled at her sister. "She won the system championship five times, three of them consecutively. And then there was that Avatar match..."

"Caly, you know that was an illegal game. I only played it because I had to."

"Yes, but you still won, fair and square. You didn't even hurt him that much."

"The _what_ match?" Saturn interrupted, blinking. How could you hurt someone in a game of _chess_?

"We don't have to go into that," Ami said.

"But you've gone and got me curious, Ami-chan." A pouty Saturn was a very strange thing to behold, and when Ami turned around to get a look, Caly was into a full-blown sympathy pout of her own.

"No," Ami said firmly. "You can explain it to her as well as I can, Caly. I'm trying to keep an eye on Jupiter."

"All you're doing there is wasting time," Calypso countered. "Between the warping effect of the door and all the ambient electrical energy on the other side, your computer's scanning range is practically nil."

That was true, and after looking at the two of them for a moment longer, Ami sighed, closed her computer, and walked over to take a seat next to Caly.

"When I said chyetsa was like chess," she began, "I meant it mainly in the sense that it was a game of strategy, where each piece has different capabilities. The board wasn't square; it was a collection of hexagons in the same six-pointed star shape used for Chinese checkers, with the center of the board being a large hexagon nine spaces wide along each side. The center hex was red, and every third hex along one of the six lines running directly from the center out to the corners where the arms met was also red. The very points of the star were blue, and every third hex in a straight line from _them_ was also blue. The third space in a straight line from any of those hexes would be blue as well, and so were the alternating spaces in between; every other hex was white."

"Like this." Calypso held up her hands, and mist flowed out from her palms to assume the shape in question. The hex at the tip of the star nearest to Saturn was shaded blue, and the two-hex row beyond it had two white spaces. The third row was a white space, a blue space, and then another white space, and the fourth row was a blue hex, two white ones, then another blue. The pattern kept repeating like that across the entire board, and, as Ami had said, the center space and every third space out from it in a line was shaded red.

"The blue and white spaces were mostly for reference as to how some of the playing pieces moved," Ami continued. "Some of them could only move in straight lines, while others could jump across rows on the blue spaces. Some could advance a number of spaces in one move, others couldn't move at all once they were placed, and various pieces were able to attack or defend at a distance. The red hexes, on the other hand, had special values depending on which player held them, and with which piece. As you can guess from the shape of the board, chyetsa could be played by up to six people at once, and if—for example—one player could put pieces called Spires on two red hexes that were in a line, only that player's pieces could move across the line between the Spires. You could create safe zones for your more valuable pieces that way, or trap your opponents'. If you took a red hex with a Magus, on the other hand, no enemy piece could come within two rings of it, and any enemy piece actually in that area already was captured."

While Ami talked, Caly was demonstrating the moves in question. Towerlike structures rose up from two of the red spaces, and a soldier-like figure standing directly between them disappeared as the row of hexes lit up red. Another red hex was surrounded by a mix of pieces with different aspects, some colored blue, others green, and when a green piece with wizardly robes moved onto the hex, all the blue pieces within two spaces of it in any direction vanished. Saturn watched it and then looked at Ami.

"Okay, so it's a bit more complicated than chess. But how does magic fit into it?"

"The magic was necessary because there weren't any actual pieces in a chyetsa set," Ami replied, "just the board itself. Each player had a reserve of magical energy called a 'cache', which they would fill to an agreed-upon limit using their own energy. You started with a piece called a Lord or Lady, and as long as it was on your home space, you could generate other pieces by using energy from your cache. When you captured an enemy piece or sacrificed one of your own, its energy was transfered to your cache, and as you gained more and more of your opponents' energy, you made them less and less able to play effectively. You defeated an opponent either by forcing them to empty their cache and then capturing all of their pieces, or by trapping their Lords off of the home spaces, preventing them from generating new pieces no matter how much energy they had left."

Saturn looked apprehensively at the two sisters. "I have a pretty good idea of what the word 'avatar' means, Ami-chan, and if this game used someone's energy..."

"An Avatar match," Ami said in a steady voice, "was a game of chyetsa in which the players fed _all_ of their energy into the cache; magic, mental energy, physical and spiritual essence, everything. You _became_ the game, and if you used up your cache and then lost all your pieces, you died. Even if you survived, you could be crippled for life, to say nothing of what possession of your undiluted life-energy would allow someone with the right knowledge of magic to do."

"And the _Nereids_ made this game?"

"We made a game which didn't have a name," Calypso replied. "Our history said that the original form was created as a way to teach young Nereids who couldn't yet absorb lightning from stormclouds how to feed. One of the elders would feed, then assume the shape of the board and divide half of the energy up evenly amongst the young players, who had to give the energy shape to play the game and try to get the rest of the energy from the elder. The better they played, the more energy they got, and the more energy they could control, the closer they were to being able to feed on their own. The elders played amongst themselves as well, sometimes for fun, sometimes to determine mating groups..." She broke off with a grunt and a startled look as Ami elbowed her in the side.

"'Groups'?" Saturn repeated suddenly, staring at the pair.

"Never mind," Ami said, blushing. "The point is, the Nereid game was harmless, but when it became popular with humans, it was gradually changed to suit their way of thinking, and the practice of the Avatar match was developed during the age of Atlantis as a form of dueling among the nobility. It was outlawed during the entire Silver Millennium, of course, but out in the asteroid belt one time, we ran across a group of pirates whose leader had a board modified for Avatar play. His ship was taking on prisoners from a merchant vessel when Ariel and I caught up to him. We couldn't attack him without risking the prisoners, but he knew that he'd lose if a fight broke out, so—the game." She glanced at the illusion of the board and shuddered.

"Not pleasant?" Saturn ventured, her voice filled with sympathy.

"It was both the best and worst game of chyetsa I ever played," Ami answered, "and no, it wasn't fun at all. Every time I lost a piece, I lost a little bit of myself, but every time I captured one of his pieces, I got energy that I just couldn't stand to have. It took ages, but I was finally able to reclaim all of my own energy and then return all of his to him before I cornered his Lord. He survived, and we got all of the prisoners back safely, but I still couldn't stand to so much as look at a chyetsa board for months afterwards."

"I can understand why." Saturn looked at the image of the board, frowning. "I think... I think Pandora played sometimes, didn't she?"

Ami nodded. "We had a few games every now and then. As I recall, she was a fairly good player, but we never got to finish a game; somehow something always seemed to come up."

"Too bad we don't have a board," Saturn sighed.

"Sure you do," Caly said. "I can be the board."

Ami and Saturn blinked, and Ami started to say something, but Caly was already flowing into the shape of the board she had been holding between her hands; the six-pointed star settled smoothly to the table, nudging aside the chessboard as two figures of women in regal dresses appeared at opposite points of the star. One figure looked like Mercury and was holding a miniature replica of the Caduceus; the other was a tiny Saturn, complete with Silence Glaive.

*We can't quite play a normal game, of course,* Calypso said. *Saturn's energy would probably make me ill for the next week if I tried to absorb it, and there's no way I'm going to take anything from my sister, but I can keep track of the score for you.*

The two Senshi exchanged a look. "Should we?" Ami asked.

Saturn shrugged and gestured towards the door. "Why not? We're not going anywhere unless Jupiter calls, and if things keep on like they have been, I can't really see any reason why she'd need to."

If Setsuna had come along and used her power to stop Time, the results wouldn't have been more locked in place than the way they were now, with Jupiter staring wide-eyed up at the massive dragon, and the dragon in turn staring down at Jupiter, both of them clearly stunned by what they were seeing.

Actually, a few pointers about dragons in general are probably in order here.

For one thing, dragons are quite likely the oldest living species in the universe. And never mind their individual lifespans, which are more easily tracked as centuries than as decades or years; dragons as a whole have been around long enough that the word 'eternity' isn't quite as out-of-place as it might otherwise sound. This longevity—both personal and in terms of the species—has a lot to do with the fact that dragons have physical bodies which are among nature's finest killing machines; they are large, formidably armed, highly mobile, surprisingly quick for their size, and capable of adapting to nearly any environment they have a mind to enter. Many of these advantages are only enhanced by dragon physiology, which is based as much on magic as it is on the scientific laws of nature; they have their own kinds of magic, some of it innate, some of it studied and developed over time, and most of them back up these two forms of muscle with intellectual powers equal to anything found in smaller species.

On the other hand, when one stops to consider the sheer numbers of those smaller species, there aren't really all that many dragons in the universe. This is due in part to the concept of the food chain, where there are only as many high-level predators as the food-energy available in the number of low-level prey will allow, but only in part. Dragons have extremely efficient digestive systems that can metabolize virtually anything, even high-density minerals, in order to get nourishment, and they don't need to eat nearly as much as less-magical creatures of similar size in order to stay healthy and growing. Nor does the relatively low dragon population have much to do with the depredations of so-called 'dragon slayers'. When all other things are equal, the bigger beast always wins, and dragons are already so powerful that things are almost NEVER equal. Anyone who actually manages to kill one dragon may quickly find him—or herself the host to a steady stream of visits from the dragon's nearest kin, and if there actually proves to be an active threat that individual dragons can't handle, they'll gather in numbers to deal with it.

Unless of course the threat turns out to be something like Saturn, in which case even the dragons will turn around and fly the other way as fast as their wings and magic can carry them. There's also a very powerful fortune-seeking teenaged sorceress on a distant world who's earned herself the title 'Dragon Spooker', a girl whose name alone will send any number of dragons that hear it into an all-out retreat—but that is a very unique case, and a story for another time.

No, by far the biggest reason that dragons haven't long since taken over the universe—setting aside the fact that none of them really WANT to—is that they have tremendous difficulty working together. Not that they aren't sociable, in their own way; they're just not what you'd call team players, not unless there's something of overwhelming power or importance driving them to play nice.

It's an entirely understandable situation. Any being that can level mountains, outfly the wind, live for thousands of years, and generally be king-if-not-god of all it surveys is fairly likely to develop just a wee bit of an ego somewhere along the way, and that makes relationships tricky. Even mated pairs of dragons—and those dragons who do have mates are FIERCELY devoted to them—usually prefer to have their own separate lairs, and the offspring—to whom the parents are at least as devoted as they are to each other—tend to leave the nest for good during their equivalent of restive adolescence. Dragons are proud creatures, often to the point of arrogance, and as a result, they quarrel with one another just like any other form of intelligent life. Members of the different breeds pick fights over the same sort of flimsy excuses human nobles once used as an opportunity to poke holes in each other, and the only difference with the end results is the level of collateral damage that goes with them.

The silver-green hide, triple-backswept horns, and periodic electrical discharge from the mouth and nostrils of this particular dragon clearly identified it—to anyone familiar with such things—as a member of the breed known during the Silver Millennium as Jovian thunder dragons. These were one of the more prominent and successful of the two dozen or so breeds actually living in the solar system—though they were still not exactly common—and like most of the other creatures living around Jupiter, they had a strong affinity for electrical energy. From the sheen of its claws and horns and the overall shape and proportion of its body, that same dragon-familiar observer would judge this to be a female, one well-settled into her maturity but not really all that old yet—probably three centuries or so shy of her thousandth birthday, in all likelihood.

All in all, this was not a good combination for Jupiter. Jovian thunder dragons were not the biggest of breeds, but they were plenty big enough, and while also not the most intelligent dragons, they were still easily on a par with the majority of the human species. Females of any dragon breed are generally quicker of movement and of thought than the males, and among magical beings, intelligence frequently translates into greater command OF magic. So not only was Jupiter face-to-fangs with something roughly the size of Usagi's house, it was also a fast something, and probably well-equipped to back up its obvious physical prowess with magical attacks and defenses on a scale about fifty times greater than her usual enemies'. On the plus side, she might still be able to out-think the dragon, or even talk it out of a fight and dinner. Of course, it was just as likely that the dragon might out-think her, especially considering the sheer _presence_ of the thing.

It was partly simple size, partly because of that metallic scent, and partly because of Jupiter's empathic talent, but the dragon was just about the most intimidating thing she had ever seen, and it was making it hard for her to think. This quality, which is most frequently called 'dragonfear', is one of the more subtle and powerful weapons in a dragon's arsenal, since it impairs the ability of other creatures to fight effectively and will quite frequently send the faint of heart running or down in an outright faint. A normal human couldn't have stood at this distance from the dragon without shaking from head to toe, and even a Senshi's magical defenses didn't entirely block the effect.

Jupiter was dimly aware of all of this in one huge lump of thought as she stared up at the creature. She was also aware that the sensation of energy-presence she had been following was stronger in this cave, which she took to mean that the Aegis was somewhere nearby—somewhere beyond the dragon, naturally. Mostly, though, she was aware of a blur of scenes moving past her eyes as she remembered something from Amalthea's life.

The outlying Jovian villages were sometimes attacked by the more powerful or vicious creatures of the moons, and one day while she was away at her training on the Moon, Amma's home village of Rheos had received a visit from a large dragon—a magma dragon, a breed noted as having a propensity for violence and destruction. Amma's father had been one of those killed in the attack, and most of the buildings in Rheos, including her home, had been burned to the ground. Although enraged and grief-stricken, there was nothing Amma could do at the time except try to cope with the pain and continue her training, but years later, she heard about an attack by a dragon matching the description of the one that had killed her father; she was back on Ganymede in a flash, not even waiting for her friends as she went in search of the dragon, tracking it across three separate moons.

She learned later what she had sort of known already anyway, that the other Senshi would come after her, but she had left her communicator behind, and Mercury—after coming down from the energy high all Nereids got if they moved into Jupiter's sphere of influence too quickly—discovered that even the Caduceus couldn't pinpoint Amalthea's location against all the energy her planet was putting out—the exact same energy of the Senshi of Jupiter, and thus the perfect screen to keep both her and her personal retribution from her friends' interference.

Along the way, Amma became aware that she wasn't the only person hunting the magma dragon. It wasn't until reaching the third and final moon that she'd finally come across a tall woman with silver-green hair and eyes and no visible means of transport, who told her in no uncertain terms to turn around and forget about the dragon. Amma had refused, and told the woman that _she_ ought to be the one to leave; the woman also refused, claiming she had business with the dragon and wasn't in any particular danger. Amma didn't believe that for a second, and said as much, at which point the woman demanded to know where a scrawny child got off calling her a liar. Amma had never in her life been called scrawny, and her response to the ridiculous insult included some words borrowed from Ariel's vocabulary, which had been colored by the older Senshi's numerous voyages aboard skyships, talking with and listening to the sailors.

In short order, they had a serious argument going, and it probably would have come to blows if the magma dragon hadn't overheard the shouting, flown back to see what all the fuss was about, and started launching molten spitballs down at the pair in his own version of target practice. Then the 'woman' had suddenly turned into a dragon herself, a silver-green scaled thunder dragon, and the two huge creatures started going at each other tooth and nail. Although surprised by the unexpected transformation, Amma was not about to let even another dragon get between her and that murderous magma, and she began pitching lightning into the fray with an almost indiscriminate aim, working as much to drive the thunder dragon away as to injure the magma.

Their argument resumed immediately, punctuated now by the snap and crackle of flying thunderbolts and the blazing roar of dragonfire, and the magma dragon developed the most intense expression of confusion as the two females unintentionally tag-teamed him while doing their level best to knock one another out of the fight, all the while shouting insults and accusations.

Then one of the dragons' tails—for the rest of her life, Amma had never been able to clearly recall which—had smashed into the Senshi of Jupiter and crushed her against a stand of rock with edges like knives. Without her Senshi defenses, a hit like that would have killed her; as it was, the blow shattered Amma's left arm and hip, leaving her unable to move, barely able to breathe, and with no choice but to watch the rest of the battle play out. It quickly became evident that while the magma dragon had trouble dealing with two such high-powered opponents at once, he was more than capable of dealing with either one of them on an individual footing; nearly half again as large as the female thunder, the burning-red and soot-black armored magma soon had her pinned. Holding her neck down with his tail, the magma lifted himself up, raising his front claw in preparation for a final blow, his jaw already parting for a roar of victory...

...and thereby providing a perfect opening for the buzzing disc of Sparkling Wide Pressure, fired one-handed, as it went right down his throat. In the memory, Jupiter saw the magma's orange eyes widen and flare with green-white light as the attack discharged somewhere near the base of his brain, stunning the entire vast bulk just enough for the thunder dragon to slip her neck free and strike, sinking her fangs into the base of her enemy's throat. When the light in the magma's eyes went out a moment later, it wasn't just the flickering brilliance of Jupiter's attack, and the brute's body slumped to the ground. The female extricated herself from the carcass and crawled a short distance before collapsing in turn, not dead or dying, but very sorely hurt nonetheless, and the blank stare of the dragon's silver-green eyes was the last thing Amma saw as she blacked out.

They were also the first thing she saw when she woke up, although this time the eyes were back in the body of the woman with metallic green hair, and both she and Amma were inside a large cavern instead of out on the surface of the moon. The dragon's human form wasn't visibly injured, but she still looked seriously drained—and she was tending Amalthea's wounds anyway, with a skill which was quite remarkable considering her actual nature, and a care that Amma couldn't understand. Her face fixed in an expression halfway between annoyance and humility, or possibly even humiliation, the dragon explained that since Amma had saved her life, she was now honor-bound to serve the Senshi until she could return the favor.

"So," the dragon said firmly, "I am going to make sure you get better. Once I'm satisfied that you've completely recovered from that fight, I'll take you wherever it is on these moons that you live, and then we go our separate ways."

Unfortunately—at least from the dragon's perspective—Mercury finally lucked out and got a fix on Amalthea's position, and the other Senshi arrived on the third day after the fight to take their friend back to Ganymede, so her mother could look after her. That had left the dragon-woman in an absolute taking; she wasn't about to interfere with a mother's right to look after her child, but this meant she had no choice but to go along as well and wait for some other opportunity to save Amma's life to present itself.

Amalthea therefore became the only person in living memory—up to and including the memories of the dragons themselves—to have a dragon for a bodyguard. Some of the more powerful and clever wizards of the bygone Atlantean era had managed to tame dragons through the use of potent spells, but such mind-slavery was one of the many Atlantean secrets the original Serenity had outlawed, and it had rather sharply altered the personalities of the dragons in question. No one had ever had a free-willed dragon at their beck and call before, so Amalthea had no references, no way to be sure what to expect. Neither did the dragon.

They argued. Gods, goddesses, and devils all, but they had argued. Even living in service to another creature, a dragon was still a very proud creature; a dragon that had to spend nearly every moment—waking or otherwise—in a form other than its natural, was an irritable being; and a free-willed dragon could periodicially go off and do dragon-things that inevitably made the life she was hanging around to save some day anything from interesting to extremely difficult. Amma was every bit as proud and stubborn, and frequently had plenty of reason to be just as irritable as her new companion.

They taught each other. Amma learned things about draconic history and culture she never would have imagined, and often quite by accident, with some idle question or casual remark which would set off a flood of information. In turn, she was obliged to explain thousands of things about human culture, the everyday things she took for granted as often as the deeper, older facets of human existence for which they had to go to Luna, Vestia, Mercury, or even—in one or two rather specific instances—Ishtar to get a definitive ruling on.

They spent the better part of a year together, and somewhere along the way, they had become friends, close enough that the dragon revealed her given, draconic name, and then taught Amma how to pronounce all twenty-three syllables of it—some of which required a near self-strangulation for a human throat to produce. Up until then, Amma had only known the dragon by her common name, a name adopted to suit the attitudes and vocal capabilities of the humans whose form she wore, and which—despite its shortcomings compared to the elegantly interwoven meanings of her true name—the creature had become rather fond of.

*ALEXIA?!*

The word had no sooner popped into her mind than Jupiter realized that this couldn't be Amalthea's friend. For one thing, she'd already noticed the size and condition of the creature, the length, the wingspan, the sheen of the claws and horns and armored skin; all of it belonged to a dragon older than Alexia had been the last time Amalthea had seen her—somewhere in the middle of her third century, give or take a decade—but not to a dragon as old as Alexia would have been now, a thousand years later. The eyes were different, too. Alexia's eyes had always been the same silver-green as her human hair or dragon's hide, but this dragon's eyes were silver-blue.

What really drove it home was the lack of recognition on that large, armored face. Jupiter knew she had changed quite a bit, but there was enough of a resemblance between her and her past life that anyone who had known Amalthea would have been able to recognize her now.

"I must be hallucinating," the dragon rumbled. The voice was powerful, resonant, and undeniably female, but not really all that loud, considering the size of the owner. It set off bells of recognition in the back of Jupiter's mind, which clashed rather strongly with the warning bells that started ringing as the dragon got to her feet up on her balcony. "A human?"

"That's right," Jupiter replied. "I'm..."

She was cut off by a loud snort. "Even sounds real," the dragon muttered, glancing briefly at Jupiter before turning her attention to the tunnel entrance, as if expecting someone or something to be out there. "Whoever's there," she called out, "your little illusion is very well-done. Now kindly get rid of it before I do it myself."

"Excuse me!" Jupiter objected.

"Fine then," the dragon said, after ignoring Jupiter's outburst and waiting for several long moments. "Have it your way." The creature looked down, her eyes narrowing slightly in concentration, and then she said a word that Jupiter didn't understand. The tingle in the air around Jupiter's body suddenly increased tenfold, and she shuddered from head to toe, not from pain, but from a ferocious tickling sensation; it took every ounce of self-control she could muster to hold in the laughter.

"Cut that out!" she snapped.

The dragon blinked, and the energy faded. "Any illusion would have been destroyed by that," she rumbled, a note of caution entering her voice. Slowly, the dragon lowered her long neck, bringing her head almost level with Jupiter's, and then she sniffed at the air—and blinked again, drawing away. "You're... real?"

"I am," Jupiter replied steadily, trying not to let her nervousness at being so close to such a large mouth get too obvious. "I'm from Earth."

"This is impossible," the dragon declared, rising back up with a perplexed expression on her face. "The people of Earth haven't had the magic _or_ the technology necessary to get this far out into the system since their Silver Millennium fell apart."

"We're relearning," Jupiter said. "I'm here, aren't I?"

"Yes, and I can smell the magic leaking out of you. Fah! That must be why I didn't notice your scent when you were coming down the passage; you smell just like all the energy floating ar..." The dragon stopped short and looked down sharply, her eyes narrowing in suspicion. "Who are you, human?"

Memories of something Alexia had told Amalthea came to the surface, a description of how dragons exchanged greetings when they had no intentions of fighting, and Jupiter straightened up, doing her best to imitate the proud, neck-arching, puffed-chest pose that Alexia had demonstrated.

"I am Kino Makoto," she began, gathering her resolve not to flinch when she said the next part, "daughter of Hana and Kaminari"—there, she'd said their names—"of the city of Tokyo, Japan. I am the Senshi of Jupiter; I am"—and here, she forced out a word somewhat similar to the one the dragon had used to cast her spell earlier. This wasn't a word of magic, but rather a fairly ordinary word that Alexia had taught Amma how to say—the draconic name for Jupiter, planet and Senshi alike. She had to physically say the word because the translation magic that came as part of the Senshi deal didn't include the draconic tongue, which had never been translated sufficiently for use by humans—partly because the dragons were secretive about their ancestral speech, and partly because it was almost physically damaging for humans to use. Letting her throat relax for a moment after the difficult pronunciation, Jupiter pressed on to complete the ceremony with a short bow and another draconic word, which translated into, "I am pleased to meet you," "I come in peace," and "I wish to speak with you," all in one.

Not many people ever get the satisfaction of seeing a look of surprise on a dragon's face, but when Jupiter straightened from the bow, she saw it. Shock, confusion, and the overall stalling of a mind that has just been handed a situation it can't make sense of. It was the same sort of look Luna had been forced to endure whenever one of the girls heard her speak for the first time.

"How do you know that greeting?" the dragon demanded, her talons gripping the ledge and her body rising into an almost feline arch. Amma's memories urged caution at the sight of that pose, for the most common way among dragons to deal with fear or uncertainty was with aggression, and Jupiter could tell that this dragon was definitely uncertain, and if not specifically afraid, then certainly nervous. "Answer me, human!"

"Not until you tell me who you are," Jupiter said, snapping right back. "The custom is still a name for a name, isn't it, _dragon_? Give me your name, and I'll give you my answer!"

There was silence, and Jupiter winced inwardly. Thanks to her own empathic abilities, the dragon's unease and aggressive compensation were literally contagious—and an outburst like that was NO way to get this creature to settle down!

Or rather, it was the perfect way. Triggered by her empathic reception of the dragon, Jupiter's outburst carried the exact same blend of uncertainty and posturing menace, both of which the dragon picked up on in turn. Realizing the intruder wasn't as sure of herself as she might have seemed, the dragon relaxed a bit.

"Fine, little one, I'll play along." The dragon shifted into the proud pose Jupiter had tried to imitate earlier, arcing her neck and extending her wings to form an image of majestic power, and when she spoke, her voice was clear, calm, and full of that same pride. "My name is my own, but to other races, I am known as Alexandra. I am the daughter of Alexia and Tyrus, of this moon, which I believe is known to modern humans as 'Ganymede'." She did not add anything else to the greeting, but then, Jupiter hadn't been expecting to receive the full welcome.

*Alexia's daughter,* she thought absently. *That explains the resemblance, anyway.*

"And now that we've been introduced," Alexandra said, "I want some answers."

"I agreed to give you one," Jupiter replied. "If you want any more answers besides that, then you'll have to give me some in return."

The armored ridge over the dragon's left eye rose in a slightly disbelieving expression. "Is that a challenge, little one?"

"If it makes you feel better, yes."

Alexandra's snort almost sounded like a chuckle. "Alright, then, challenge accepted—but I go first. Where did you learn that greeting?"

Jupiter didn't miss the faint change in the feel of the air, the local magnetic field being altered in some fashion. The dragon's overall emotional state was caution, tinged with curiosity; based on that and what Amalthea was telling her, Jupiter guessed that this feeling was a reaction to another spell, probably one meant to verify the truth of her answers, and possibly even enforce it. Naturally, such a spell would only work for the dragon herself, but Jupiter had already learned how to use her empathic talent to pick up on lies, so things would be fairly even. She had to be careful about what she said, though, and to pay close attention to what Alexandra said in turn; according to Amma's experiences, dragons were masters of these little challenges of wits and words even without magic.

*Maybe I should have brought Calypso or Mercury with me after all,* she thought. Aloud, she said, "I learned the greeting from a dragon, who was my friend." Jupiter saw Alexandra's eyes twitch in an averted blink and guessed that both parts of her answer had just been confirmed to be true; she took that as a cue to ask her own question. "What happened to the human colonies on these moons after the Moon Kingdom was destroyed?" She had almost asked about the Aegis, but Jupiter didn't see the harm in getting the details about some other things that were just as important to her as the Weapon, which wasn't going anywhere.

"I'm told it was a famine," Alexandra replied, the words ringing true. "What was the name of this dragon friend of yours?"

"Her name was her own," Jupiter responded, noting a definite shift in the dragon's mood as she got her words turned back on her. This was how it would go, both of them trying to get the most information while giving away as little as possible in return, and they had both known it from the start, but it seemed that Alexandra was either out-of-practice at dealing with humans, or just had a low opinion of their cleverness. "What caused the famine?"

"Saturn." Again, it was true, and Jupiter thought she understood how things must have played out on the moons. Saturn—first altered by Beryl's bombs, then by Pandora's self-sacrificing repair effort—had done something to the crops on the Jovian moons. Mars, which had always depended quite heavily on offworld food, would have suffered a Jovian famine just as badly as the people of the moons, and the outposts and minor colonies further out in the system had no means of growing their own food at all. Without the resources and assistance of the worlds of the inner system, the last pieces of the Silver Millennium would have been in serious trouble, and a long enough blight, coupled with one or two waves of monstrous attacks when there were no Senshi around to stop them, would have been enough to remove the Jovian tribes from the moons and seal the fate of the outer system. As for Mars...

"What was your friend's name among humans?" Alexandra said then. It was the specific question she should have asked earlier, and Jupiter wasn't completely sure she ought to answer it. 'Alexia' might be a common alternative name among dragons, but Alexandra would get suspicious even if it was. Since the dragon's magic would alert her to a lie instantly, the only alternative Jupiter had was to say Alexia's real name—but that was almost guaranteed to provoke an unpleasant reaction from Alexandra. Only other dragons were supposed to know a dragon's true name; revealing hers to Amalthea had been an expression of just how much Alexia had come to care for, respect, and trust her human friend, but it would seriously disturb her daughter. The key component of the ancient mind-control magics of the Atlanteans was the true name of the subject, and if Alexia believed that a human who could use magic had her mother's name, she'd be almost certain to take action and ensure that it couldn't be misused.

"The name I first knew her by was Alexia," Jupiter replied cautiously, paying close attention to her sense of the dragon's emotions. The reaction was surprise, suspicion, and disbelief, but nothing overtly dangerous. Not yet, at least. She breathed a sigh of relief and asked her next question. "What happened to the human society on Mars after the Moon Kingdom was destroyed?"

"War and disease," Alexandra replied shortly. Truth again, and once again, Jupiter could picture the course of events. Mars had been a world of soldiers and craftsmen, regimented and methodical—but the most powerful army still marches on its stomach, and the greatest metalsmith in the world can't make food in his forge. They might have been able to save themselves by establishing farming colonies on Earth, but if there had been attacks from supernatural forces to contend with at the same time, even the great Martian war machine would have been hard-pressed to hold out. And if the Martians had contracted a disease while attempting to recolonize Earth, something that their many centuries of isolation from the mother planet's complex blend of environments had left them unable to cope with...

"What was the name of the place where you first met your dragon friend?"

*Damn.* Jupiter had no idea which of the modern names for the Jovian moons applied to the moon where Amalthea and Alexia had met, and she couldn't feign ignorance, because Amalthea—and virtually every other Jovian child— had known the names of the moons that appeared so often in the sky. "Aurionne." As she had feared, the old name provoked a much stronger sense of surprise from the dragon, who obviously recognized the old Silver Millennium name. "How did you get your claws on the Aegis?"

"No such thing is in my claws," Alexandra replied—and since she didn't have the Aegis on her, that was technically true. The question definitely rubbed her the wrong way, though. "In human reckoning, what was the year you met your friend on Aurionne?"

*Double damn.* "It was the twenty-fourth year of the reign of Serenity XXVIII." Alexandra's eyes went wide, and the flood of emotions that surged out from her nearly defied interpretation. Jupiter knew this word game was about to come to an end. "Why is the Aegis in your lair?"

"Because I want it here!" Alexandra thundered, rising to her full height. "And no one is going to take it without facing me first! How do you know so much about the Silver Millennium, girl?"

"Because a part of me lived there!" Jupiter shouted back, once again unable to fully resist the emotional impulses of such a large being. "Amalthea, the daughter of Jana and Amalthus of the tribe of Evora, of this moon, Shalboraea!"

"Amalthea is DEAD!" Alexandra roared. "My mother brought the Aegis here to guard it, and when the last Jovian died, it became hers by right, just as it is _mine_ now that she's gone!"

That stopped Jupiter short. She closed her eyes and took a deep, calming breath. "Alexia... is dead?"

"Two hundred and nine of your years ago," Alexandra snapped, "for which you ought to consider yourself lucky. She was always a bit strange about humans, but if she heard you claiming to be her friend, she'd have torn you apart on the spot." That was also true—at least, true as far as Alexandra believed. Jupiter sighed.

"I'm sorry to hear about your mother," she said levelly, "but that doesn't change why I'm here."

"I already told you, the Aegis..."

"...was never yours to begin with. It never belonged to any people, not the Jovians, or the Lunari, or the Atlanteans. It belongs to the Senshi of Jupiter alone; everyone else merely held it in trust for her. That included your mother—and now includes you."

"Human foolishness," Alexandra snorted, tiny bursts of smoky lightning flashing from her snout. "A thing either exists free or belongs to the one who can control it—and my mother learned how to control the Aegis as well as any Senshi. Better, in fact, since it didn't harm her to use it, just as it doesn't harm _me_."

"Draconic tradition," Jupiter snapped back, drawing on Amalthea's memories. "Ownership of a thing only goes to the one who can exercise total and unquestionable control over the thing—and the Aegis will never fully obey anyone except Jupiter, no matter how well they can handle its power. You should know that, if you really are the daughter of-"

Each of Alexandra's eyes seemed to become as large as the great red spot of the planet outside as Jupiter said her mother's true name, perfectly pronouncing all twenty-three syllables of it. The dragon's response was as Jupiter had expected; Alexandra opened her jaws and exhaled a crackling blue-green thunderbolt at the tiny human figure before her.

"SUPREME THUNDER!"

Jupiter was nearly blown off her feet by the sheer force of her own attack. At least three times more intense than it should have been, the lightning cut through Alexandra's breath weapon, tearing the energy of it to harmless shreds and then sizzling on to slap at the dragon's armored face. Showing no outward signs of injury or the surprise which Jupiter could sense in her, Alexandra leapt from her place on the ledge, landing with an explosive force and sending the Senshi scrambling out of the way. The dragon turned, whipping her tail around and into the wall, a massive blow that roared through the air, shattered stone on impact, and missed Jupiter, who had thrown herself flat on her back and called another Supreme Thunder from that position.

When the blast snapped against her exposed haunches, Alexandra let out a bellowing roar that shook the cavern. Jovian thunder dragons had a sizeable degree of resistance to electricity, to the extent that most lightning-based human magics were useless against them at best, but Jupiter's Supreme Thunder—enhanced by her proximity to her world and the abundant energy in the atmosphere—was packing more electrical force than the dragon's own breath attack, which would itself have been enough to injure another member of her breed.

And even for an armor-plated creature like a dragon, getting shot in the backside is no fun at all.

Alexandra twisted her neck around and spat another jagged bolt of lightning at Jupiter, who tucked her legs up, got to her feet with a backwards somersault, then crouched and launched herself clear as the spot on the stone floor of the dragon's lair where she had been standing was blasted apart by the attack.

"I don't want to fight you!" she shouted. Alexandra replied with a word of magic, conjuring up an invisible, shapeless force that slammed into Jupiter in mid-air and blew her back into the cavern's stone wall. The impact was nowhere near bone-breaking, but it was still rough, and the formless power of the spell remained, holding Jupiter pinned in place as Alexandra approached.

Unable to move her arms or legs, the Senshi leaned her head back against the stone and called down the Thunder again, discharging it from the lightning rod in her tiara through an act of pure will—the same trick she had once used against Beryl's DD Girls, although fortunately she understood how to direct the power much better than the last time, and was able to send the majority of it flaring towards the dragon. Alexandra took the blast head-on and stumbled back, and with her opponent's focus broken, Jupiter dropped to the ground, free of the spell.

A prickle at the back of her neck was the only warning Jupiter got before lightning began falling at her from somewhere above, bolts much smaller than the ones Alexandra had been exhaling at her, but also much more plentiful. She dodged most of them, but one clipped her left shoulder, and another sizzled shiveringly down her lower back, rattling her teeth and leaving her legs decidedly numbed. Then the shadow of Alexandra's large claw replaced the bombardment, forcing an off-balance jump to safety. It only worked because Jupiter lashed out with lightning again, covering her escape by stunning the dragon's limb.

This time she got to hear a buzzing sound in addition to the warning tingle. Looking up, Jupiter saw a swarm of teardrop-shaped bolts of white energy flying at her, first five, then ten, then too many to count. She leapt as far away as she could, but the projectiles tracked her movement and kept coming. She ran full-out and leapt up over the edge of Alexandra's wide balcony, intending to use the rim for cover; the glowing missiles shot up past the edge and twisted around to streak down at her even as she threw herself to the right and then over the side, spinning to fire still more lightning up to intercept the bolts.

It didn't work. The lightning passed right through the streaking energy-darts, and the act of firing it had taken up too much time for Jupiter to try and dodge again. The projectiles shot home, every last one of them striking in rapid succession, their repeated impacts pushing Jupiter over and to the ground. The first few slammed into her numbed shoulder, and when she rolled to protect it, the rest rained down on her back, forcing out a choked scream. Her mind interpreted the cold, solid impacts of energy as something close to what it must feel like to be stabbed, and they just kept coming...

And then she was airborne, the energy of another spell tingling around her body as Alexandra tried to smash her against the stalactite-covered ceiling. Dazed from the painful barrage of magic and disoriented at suddenly being on her way to the roof, Jupiter focused down at the large form of the dragon, her face shifting into an expression that her friends all knew and had learned not to look at too directly whenever it appeared. It was an expression which went way beyond the flaming auras and eye daggers that Rei and Usagi fired back and forth so readily, and who—or whatever happened to earn a place on the receiving end of it inevitably ended up in a world of pain. Of all the Senshi, only Haruka or Hotaru could muster a look to match this one, but Makoto's version had an edge over theirs because, quite frequently, she didn't seem to be aware of it.

"THAT DOES IT!" she shouted. "SUPREME THUNDER DRAGON!"

When the electrified image of her own species came roaring at her, the look on Alexandra's face was almost comical. Between her own size, the limited space of her lair, and the inflation of this attack to around three times its usual power and area of effect, there was nowhere for the dragon to go.

Saturn and Ami turned from the chyetsa lesson to look back at the open dimension door as a somewhat muffled but still discernible howl cut through the nearly-nonexistent atmosphere of Ganymede, passed through the rip in space-time, and reached their ears.

"What was that?" Saturn asked nervously.

When the flaring light had faded out, Alexandra was stretched out in a heap on the stone floor, quivering, twitching, and here and there sparking with brief electrical discharges.

Across the chamber, Jupiter drifted gently to the ground, landing smoothly enough that her injuries didn't flare with new pain, and watching her opponent closely. It couldn't be THAT easy to beat a dragon—could it? One on one? Granted, not being able to fly had put Alexandra at something of a disadvantage, especially since Jupiter's power was over the same element which was so much a part of the dragon's own nature. The dragon's sheer bulk and armored hide would defeat all manner of physical insults, and her strong magical nature would overcome many spells, but pure elemental force was something else again, to say nothing of the power boost Jupiter's attacks had been getting because of her proximity to her planet. But even so, could it really be that easy to beat Alexandra here, in her own lair, which should be packed to overflowing with spells of defense?

What the dragon had said earlier about Jupiter's magical energy masking her physical scent came back now. It was possible that the triggers for those spells couldn't tell the difference between a Senshi of Jupiter and the pervasive energy of the planet any better than Alexandra's nose had been able to sort out her scent... or something like that. Jupiter wasn't especially given to puzzling out 'how it works', so long as the 'it' in question was working, and her curiosity tended to take a serious nosedive after she had just been though a series of events like being bounced off a wall, struck by lightning, and pelted with the magical equivalent of a rain of knives.

*I'm going to be feeling that for a week,* she thought, taking a step and wincing at what the shift in balance and posture did to the nerves in her back. She twisted her uninjured right arm around to lightly touch the areas of the worst pain, and when she brought her hand back around, there was no blood on her gloves. Reassured, Jupiter did her best to ignore the discomfort as she walked over to Alexandra. The dragon saw her approach and tried to rise, but the best she managed was to lift part of her neck off the floor before Jupiter clamped a hand on the horned tip of her snout. If not for the lightning-induced semi-paralysis, Alexandra would have been able to shake off even a Senshi's grip just by wrinkling her nose or exhaling sharply, but as it was, Jupiter had her pinned—so to speak.

"I don't want to hurt you," Jupiter said, "and I'm not going to repay Alexia's friendship with Amalthea by killing her daughter, but I'm not going away without the Aegis."

"H-how... her name... how do..."

"Alexia told Amalthea her true name, of her own free will—and Amma's spirit was reborn inside of me, just like all the other souls whose lives ended on the Moon were reborn on Earth."

"That's... impossible..."

"Whether you believe it or not, it's the truth. Queen Serenity used the ginzuishou and gave her own life to give her daughter—to give _all_ of us our lives back. There ARE Senshi again; there IS a Princess of the Moon who needs our protection; and the Aegis IS mine, to use as I see fit. And I don't see fit to leave it laying around where anyone strong enough to subdue a dragon could come along and take it. If you want to argue the point," she added, spotting the shift in Alexandra's mood and posture, "I just beat you in single combat over something in your possession; according to what your mother told me, draconic custom now says that the Aegis is mine, too. Are you going to stain your honor by breaking your traditions?"

"My mother," Alexandra growled sourly, "seems to have talked too much in her youth."

"It gave us something to do when we weren't fighting." Jupiter let go of the dragon's head and straightened up with a soft grunt. "Do you yield the Aegis to me, Alexandra?"

"Yes," the dragon muttered, grunting in turn as she sat up. "It's down in my nest." She shook her head a few times, then let out a sigh and climbed up onto her ledge, going up the three-meter high rim of stone as easily as Jupiter would have a step in a staircase. "This way."

*That makes sense,* Jupiter thought, leaping up onto the ledge and following the dragon down the passage beyond. All dragons had a thing about collecting treasure, but often for very different reasons. In the case of the thunder dragons of Jupiter, the electrical conductivity of refined metals and the capacity of certain gemstones and other shaped crystals to harness energy was what made such things attractive; they used those items to enhance the electrical charge of the environment around their nests, increasing the rate at which their eggs developed. Males provided some of their own wealth to help fill out a nest, and so walked a fine line when seeking a mate; if a male displayed too much of his treasure, he would be expected to give up that much more of it, but if he displayed too little, he might not attract a female at all. The females in turn made their nests as large and expensive as possible, maximizing the chances for strong and healthy offspring.

The Aegis, with their power to harness and amplify Jupiter's electrical energy—particularly at this close range!—would have made just about the finest addition to a nest any thunder dragon could ask for; small wonder, then, that Alexandra didn't want to give them up.

The chamber into which Jupiter and the dragon emerged a few moments later was about the same size as the upper one, with a bowl-shaped depression carved into the center of the floor for the basis of the nest. That bowl was lined with and surrounded by piles of gold and silver, melted and reshaped from their original forms into a myriad of shapes which looked simple at a distance and became more complex as one drew nearer. There were massive growths of glowing rock-crystal lining the walls, their size and stability undoubtedly brought about by Alexandra's magic, and gems of all shapes and sizes had been fused into the metal mass, seemingly at random, but in what Jupiter understood to be a pattern that would naturally absorb and focus the electrical energy of the chamber onto the central part of the nest. Dragons had an instinctive feel for such forces, and a female thunder dragon would know without the need for blueprints or words exactly where in her nest this particular gem must go, and how it would balance all the others.

As Jupiter had expected, the Aegis had been incorporated into the design of the nest; the green, electric light of the orbs flickered steadily atop the four tallest spires of melted gold and silver, and from a ring of twelve points around the rim of the bowl. The air in this chamber was almost as fresh and thick as the air on Earth, and it was literally humming with energy. There were, however, no eggs in the nest.

"My mother began this nest nearly one thousand of your years ago," Alexandra said, "when the city below was beginning to dwindle away and the remaining inhabitants had no use for that hangar up above. I and my brothers and sisters were all hatched here, with the energy of those orbs shining down on us." She sat down near the entrance and looked at the nest with a look of regretful reminiscence.

"I'm honored that your mother chose to add something of mine to her nest," Jupiter said honestly, "and I'm sorry I have to ruin such a beautiful nest by taking back the Aegis now."

Alexandra snorted. "Don't try to make me feel better with flattery, human. Just take them and go."

"Right." Jupiter paused. "Um... that would be... how?"

Alexandra blinked and looked down at the Senshi. "Do you mean to tell me that you just fought me for something you don't even know how to use?!"

"In so many words," Jupiter mumbled. She looked up at a twinge of exasperation coming from the dragon. "I can't very well learn how to use them if somebody else has them, now can I?"

There was another snort. "Humans." Shaking her head, Alexandra lumbered over to her nest and fixed her attention on the orbs. They flared brighter, and Jupiter could suddenly feel... something... One by one, the pink-hued spheres smoothly pulled themselves free of the surrounding metal and floated up to gather over the nest, narrow bolts of energy leaping between some of them while others remained relatively inactive. The sense of massed energy in the room shifted considerably as the Aegis separated from the nest; the air was still thick with energy, and the substance of the nest itself retained a considerable charge, but Jupiter had no doubt that the largest portion of the force she was feeling had just gotten up and moved.

The strength of the energy in the Aegis and Jupiter's reception of it were both strong enough that she didn't notice when the lightning rod in her tiara activated itself—at least not before two crackling tongues of energy snapped into existence between the tip of the rod and the nearest of the four large orbs. Alexandra hauled her head back in a hurry as a network of energy erupted between the sixteen orbs with a rippling thunderclap, connecting the segments of the Aegis for several seconds as they continued to float above the nest. The Weapon was either drawing energy from Jupiter or sending it to her through that dual connection, along which buzzing lines of white-hot force moved in a sort of free-floating Jacob's Ladder. Pulses moved towards Jupiter and away from her, some of them shorting out as they hit each other, others fading away for no apparent reason, and still others reaching the opposite side of the link.

The last pulse started at the Aegis and gathered up all the energy in one rapid swoop as it flew towards Jupiter and was absorbed into the lightning rod, which withdrew back into her tiara. Right on the heels of the disconnecting pulse came the Aegis, all sixteen orbs moving through the ozone-laden air at a steady pace to halt in front of Jupiter, bobbing sedately before her, waiting. Their light seemed a little different now, the color of it subtly altered.

*I suppose that makes sense,* Jupiter thought, looking at the hovering spheres with a cautious air. *The Garnet Orb has the same sort of color as Setsuna's aura, and the energy of the ginzuishou is the same color as Usagi's aura... or maybe it's the other way around... well, whatever. Now how do I get these things out of here without actually using them?*

The separate orbs suddenly moved towards each other, and there was a series of faint clicks as they touched. Then the light in them went out, and a string of sixteen pearly spheres fell to the floor. Jupiter blinked at it/them/whatever before kneeling and slowly reaching out to touch the nearest orb. It was one of the twelve smaller pieces, hardly any bigger than the end of her thumb, and it didn't react at all when she touched it, which was reassuring. Still, there was that odd sense of... not energy, and certainly not intelligence, but... there was a very real presence in those small stones. It didn't come from any one of them, and was no stronger in the four large orbs than in the twelve lesser ones, but it was there all the same.

She picked up the string and looped it around her left wrist. It was just long enough to go around twice, and the spheres clicked again when they touched, held in place by what was probably a simple magnetic attraction. Jupiter flexed her wrist and then shook it a bit to make sure the orbs wouldn't fall off, before looking up at Alexandra again. The dragon huffed and turned around, curling up in her empty nest so that her head was pointed away from Jupiter; getting the message loud and clear, Jupiter turned and headed for the exit, but she stopped at the mouth of the tunnel and looked back over her shoulder.

"Thank you."

Alexandra ignored her as she left the chamber.

"You found it already?" Ami asked.

"Yeah," Jupiter's voice replied though a continuous field of static, "I've got it. Or them. However you call it."

"What was that noise we heard a few minutes ago?" Saturn asked.

"The previous owner didn't want to give the Aegis up, so I had to argue with her a bit."

"Oh." Saturn frowned. "Are you okay?"

"I wouldn't mind a little healing when I get back, if that's what you mean, but I don't need a rescue party or anything. Just keep the portal open." There was a pause. "Ami-chan?"

"Yes?"

"When you were on Mercury, did you feel... well, stronger?"

Ami thought about it. "Now that you mention it... I wasn't really paying attention to anything right at first, and I was distracted in the city, but after I'd actually transformed... yes, I think I did feel stronger. I was a little surprised at how easy it was to teleport myself and Caly out of the cave, but at the time I just thought it was either a natural power of the place or something to do with the Caduceus."

*You did turn into mist once before,* chyetsa-board Calypso reminded her.

"When was this?" Saturn asked, blinking and looking back and forth at the two of them.

"When was what?" Jupiter asked, confused. The communicators didn't pick up telepathy, after all.

"When we were fighting those daimons back in Atlantis," Ami explained. "One of them got me in a hold, and I just turned into a mist without really thinking about it. I wouldn't call it teleportation, since I didn't actually go anywhere."

"Is that normal?" Saturn asked. "What I mean is, was that Mercury the Senshi doing the morph-to-mist bit, or was it Mercury the Nereid?"

*We're not entirely sure,* Calypso replied. *All the Mercuries before Ami were Nereids—or, in the case of the original, partly Nereid—and becoming mist was a natural power for them, so it's possible that human Mercuries can do it as well...*

"...but it's also possible that the transformation was because of the energy-imbalance being caused by my condition at the time," Ami said, finishing her sister's sentence. "Like those cold flares that kept going off when I tried to transform. I haven't really had a chance to do any experimentation with it recently." She glanced meaningfully down at her metamorphosed sister; following the look, Saturn made a silent 'O' of agreement and nodded her head.

*I heard that.*

"But you _did_ feel stronger on Mercury?" Jupiter asked again.

"Yes. I take it you've been experiencing some kind of power boost up there?"

"You could say that. Supreme Thunder is really living up to its name, and the Thunder Dragon I used a few minutes ago could have levelled a house. Is this supposed to happen?"

"I think so, yes. Distance from our worlds doesn't make us any weaker, but the energy we tap into is much more concentrated when we're on or right next to them than here on Earth, and that makes it easier to harness. We're used to using a certain amount of our own strength to activate a specific power, so if we use the same amount of strength in a place where the energy takes _less_ effort to gather... you see?"

"Yeah, pretty much. Well, that's good to know. I was a little worried that SCHREEEENGZZZZRRRRT!" Ami and Saturn both flinched away at the sudden burst of interference that obliterated Jupiter's words. On the table, Calypso shivered, sending a blue-tinted ripple across the image of the chyetsa board and the pieces currently on it.

After first turning down the volume on her communicator, Ami tried to reopen the connection, but all she got was static. Saturn tried her communicator, again receiving only garbled interference, and when Ami switched to her computer, it fared no better.

She and Saturn looked at each other, then through the dimension door, trying to see if Jupiter or anything else might be moving around on the mountainside.

Jupiter was just coming up into the storage section of the old hangar when her end of the transmission suddenly shorted out. She stopped at the mouth of the carved-out section of Alexandra's lair and tried several times to reestablish the link to Ami and Saturn, but finally had to shake her head and give up. Wondering what had happened, she took a step and then stopped again as a dull red glow became evident up ahead, and started getting stronger. Brighter. Closer. Her skin was tingling again, and she was aware of another presence in the tunnel.

In the short weeks since her meeting with Sasanna had reawoken her empathic abilities, Makoto had been forced to cope with a variety of sensations she had little or no experience with. Feelings that were not her own occasionally made their way past even the mental shielding she had been taught from the dryad history-memory, and she was always aware of the overall presence of others. Every individual's 'signature' was different, but there were certain similarities between members of a given types; thus far, Makoto had come to recognize human, dryad, dryad-brother, Nekoron, Nereid, cat, dog, plant, unit, daimon, and elemental types. And now dragon.

What she felt up ahead wasn't like any of them. It registered against her mind as a constantly shifting blur of emotion, a blank wall that was warm, then hot, then cold, then normal, then soft, then hard, then spiky... The sensation danced around at random, oddly compelling and equally frightening. Mad. Chaotic.

A Fury.

From the description Ami and Calypso had given her, Jupiter had been expecting to see a red version of a Nereid's natural form, a cloud of mist dotted with countless points of sparkling energy; instead, she saw something that looked more like a small red sunrise in the middle of a cloudbank. The heart of the Fury was a jumble of energy, a thousand tiny lightning bolts dancing back and forth in a space no larger than a human head, out of which larger, less-intense bolts periodically escaped, diffusing into the shapeless gas which wreathed the center on all sides. It was all shades of red, some dark and some bright, all of them shifting and changing endlessly, and it stank of hot ozone.

Stories from Amma's life floated to the surface of Jupiter's mind at the sight of the Fury. They fed on electrical energy, everything from the radiant power of the great planet to the artificial energies used by humans to the electrical energy of a living being's brain. A brief touch from a Fury could inflict paralysis, madness, terrible electrical burns, or just a brief sting; being totally engulfed by one was fatal, and they seemed to be drawn to do just that. They could pass through solid walls and magical shields alike and unleashed red bolts of destructive energy without warning. Weak Furies, it was said, became nearly invisible, and could enter a living body without killing it, but their energy drove their hosts mad and often killed them as the Fury gained in strength. They could fly in complete defiance of air currents or gravity, and some were able to teleport, but fortunately, they could not venture far from Jupiter itself without starving, and the Jovians had discovered early on how to attune their atmospheric shields to repel the creatures. Most of the time.

These were the sort of memories which would be unpleasant at the best of times, but they were considerably more disturbing now that Jupiter found herself face-to-face with a live Fury. It didn't help that there had only been three confirmed ways to kill such creatures. The first was to hit it with a strong dose of anti-magic and hope that it was enough to shut it down. The second method was a complicated process in which the Fury was surrounded by multiple electrical fields tuned to its electric charge and frequency, fields which were then forced into the Fury's body, scattering its energy in all directions in an effect not unlike a small-scale electromagnetic pulse. The last way was to get a group of people with some degree of magical ability to corral the Fury, take part of its energy into themselves, and then expel it, and keep on doing so until the Fury was dead.

Given the damage raw electrical energy could do to the human body, this third method tended to injure or kill considerably more humans than it did Furies, unless you had a very large group indeed, or one with a lot of talented individuals in it. Supposedly, past Jupiters had been able to pull it off alone and survive, but the current one really didn't want to try her luck.

*Ami better have been right about these things not being able to sense me,* she thought, stepping slowly to the left side of the storage bay, away from the entrance to Alexandra's lair. She glanced down at the Aegis and hoped that it wouldn't suddenly spring to life to protect her the way the ginzuishou sometimes did for Usagi. The warning from the Book for her NOT to use the Aegis was strong in Jupiter's memory just then, as was Artemis' succinct assessment of what would probably happen to her if she tried. *Just be a nice, cooperative little alien and float on down the tunnel or go back the way you came.*

Predictably, the Fury did not cooperate. It continued to drift forward for a short distance and then abruptly stopped, its sun-like interior directly level with Jupiter. The energy-being's drifting edges closed about Jupiter on either side, but not in a way that suggested an attempt to wall her in. It was just the normal, unmonitored ebb and flow of the energized gasses, and very soon she spotted an opening and was past the Fury. Jupiter looked back over her shoulder several times as she headed towards the ramp, but the Fury made no move to follow her, and then started to drift down the tunnel towards Alexandra's lair.

Seeing that, Jupiter almost turned back to warn the dragon, but stopped as she recalled Alexia's disdainful attitude towards Furies. They were a threat to dragon eggs and hatchlings, true, but an adult dragon of any breed had very little to fear from the creatures, and thunder dragons—with their high tolerances for electrical exposure—feared the Furies even less. They also apparently ran into them quite often, since the Furies were drawn to abnormal sources of electricity, which they could 'smell' from quite a distance; this one was probably going to investigate the residual energy of the fight, or possibly the power shift that had occured when the Aegis shut down.

Heading up the ramp, Jupiter glanced at her wrist again. She had sensed the Aegis as an unusually strong concentration of electrical energy, coupled with just a touch of something that wasn't quite awareness. It was possible that the Fury had stopped moving back there because it had picked up on the Weapon's presence, even when it was deactivated, and not been entirely sure what to make of it.

"There you are." Jupiter blinked and looked up. Uranus was standing about halfway across the hangar from her, Sword out.

"What are..."

"Ami and Saturn got worried when your communicator shorted out all of a sudden, so they called and sent me to find you." The older girl looked her over with a frown. "You look awful."

"Thanks."

"No charge." Uranus nodded at Jupiter's wrist. "Is that it?"

"Yes."

"Doesn't look like much."

"Let's worry about that later and just get out of here. A Fury went down that tunnel a minute ago, and..." Jupiter had turned to look back at the ramp as she spoke, and in so doing, she caught a glimpse of the red glow again, much brighter than it had been.

She was just turning to shout at Uranus to run when the Fury surged up out of the mouth of the tunnel and swept forward, blazing with red energy. It missed Jupiter entirely, but she wasn't its target. Just as the scent of shifting electrical fields had drawn the energy-creature to Alexandra's lair, so now was it drawn away from the leftover traces of those expired fields and towards an active source of energy—namely, the electrical impulses in Uranus' body.

"RUN!" Jupiter shouted—too late.

"WORLD SHAKING!"

The Fury took the hit and was pushed backwards, the vaporous extremities flickering and guttering in the blast of wind, but its core flared, and the creature came to a halt. Its substance gathered up and surged forward again, and again, Uranus blew it back, but without any sign of injury to the Fury. It began to swell again.

"Use the Sword!" Jupiter shouted, knowing that Uranus couldn't use World Shaking continuously for long. "They don't like metal!"

Uranus didn't have time to reply, but she went into a flurry of slashes as the Fury closed on her again. Each time Uranus struck, there was a bright flash from the Fury's internal energies, and it quickly fell back, billowing rents covering its 'front' side where the Space Sword had cut through it. Uranus, though, was holding the wrist of her sword-hand with her other hand, and the set of her face indicated she was in some degree of pain.

*Discharge through the Sword,* Jupiter thought. "Get out of here, Uranus! It won't bother me!"

"Thanks for the vote of confidence!" Uranus shouted back, switching the Sword to her other hand as the Fury rushed in at her once more. This time she settled for one massive overhead swing, cleaving the Fury from top to bottom. It backed off with a violent shudder, red sparks of energy spilling like blood from its torn front, but Uranus nearly dropped her weapon as electrical pulses rippled up her arm. She switched the blade back to her original hand, grimaced at the twinges that provoked in her fingers, and then ducked hastily as a bolt of red-tinted energy flew out of the Fury's body.

"SPACE SWORD BLASTER!"

The shot tore right through the Fury's blazing center, and this seemed to hurt it considerably more than the other attacks, but its response was a stunning flare of red energy that shot out in all directions. Both Senshi automatically raised their arms; Uranus was knocked backwards, the Space Sword flying away from her hand in a red flash of electricity, but when the energy hit Jupiter, the Aegis exploded into life, their green glow swallowing the Fury's energy without a trace. Just as suddenly as they had blazed up, the orbs faded back to dormancy, except that Jupiter could feel a mild tingle about her wrist.

The red glow of the Fury was suddenly upon her, drawn to the greater energy of the suddenly-active Aegis. Jupiter took an unconscious step backwards, raising her arms again...

The point of the Space Sword erupted from the middle of the Fury's body, the blade's golden light forcing a path through the heart of the red energy. Jupiter was so surprised by the sudden appearance of the weapon—just a tiny gap of air away from being right in her face—that she moved backwards again, lost her footing on the ramp, and went tumbling down to the lower level of the hangar with a yelp.

Up above, the Fury writhed spectacularly around the Sword, energy flaring and erupting wildly as it tried to escape, but for every move it made, the Sword moved as well, twisting and weaving around to increase the level of interference it posed for the Fury's core energies. The blazing entity swelled up with force once again, and Jupiter, laying half-stunned at the base of the ramp, heard a loud 'pop' as the red light suddenly vanished. She recognized the phenomenon; the Fury had not died, merely teleported itself away, leaving the Space Sword and a battered-looking Uranus to collapse to the floor of the hangar.

Jupiter pushed herself off the floor and moved back up the ramp. "You okay, Uranus?"

"I've been better." The older Senshi was on her knees, looking at her hands with a pained expression.

"Can you move your arms?" Jupiter asked.

"The arms, yes." Uranus curled the fingers of both hands and bent her elbows to demonstrate. "Although they do hurt like hell just now. My right leg is the problem; it got zapped during our little playmate's last tantrum, and now I can't feel it below the hip."

"Come on." Jupiter started helping her up. Standing on one leg, her left arm propped across Jupiter's shoulders, Uranus looked down at the Space Sword, laying on the floor. Just like that, it was back in her hand, and she made a few experimental thrusts into the air to make sure she could use it again if she had to. Then she shook her head.

"Some rescue this is turning out to be. And if you breathe a hint of 'I told you so' at me, Jupiter, I swear I'll kick your ass."

Jupiter resisted an urge to tell Uranus that she didn't have a leg to stand on; it was a good line, but it would have been too close to Minako. "Can you teleport us home?"

Uranus shook her head. "I was about to teleport through the door from your apartment before Ami and Saturn stopped me. Apparently, something about the warping effect of the door forces you to physically move through it in order to get anywhere—but I can at least get us down off of this mountain."

"Please do," Jupiter said, looking at the softly glowing stones wrapped around her left wrist. "Before any more Furies show up to investigate the energy coming out of this thing."

Two seconds, a yellow glow, and one blinking out/blinking back in of reality later, they were at the foot of the mountain.

"I've got to learn how to do that," Jupiter said to herself, as she looked around the barren landscape for a sign of the dimension door.

"If what Luna and Artemis were saying earlier about this Aegis being able to triple your strength, you probably will." She gave Jupiter a considering look. "That is, unless you've decided not to use it...?"

"I'm... still thinking about that," Jupiter replied, stopping her search for the door to look down at the Weapon again. "Having access to that kind of power _sounds_ great, but it's... well... after seeing what it takes out of Usagi-chan to use the ginzuishou, the thought of trying to control something that strong myself is really scary, you know?"

For a moment, Uranus stopped using Jupiter for support and instead returned it, folding her left arm around the younger Senshi's shoulders in a reassuring hug. "Nobody would think any less of you for walking away from it, Makoto," she said quietly. Then she smiled. "Especially since I'd get to keep my title as World's Strongest Senshi if you did."

"Feh. I could take you in a minute."

"Care to back that? We've got a nice empty moon here..."

"It's not as empty as it looks," Jupiter replied, looking around hastily to make sure nothing had come up behind them while they were talking. No Furies, dragons, or hideous monsters with unknown names showed themselves, and there was the door, over on the other side of a low ridge of rock Jupiter remembered from the beginning of her climb. She indicated it to Uranus, and they set out.

"It's not just that it scares me," Jupiter said. "Every fight we get into ends up being somehow mixed up in the fate of the world, but to me, it doesn't matter if it's a battle against a daimon or a fistfight against some schoolyard punk in a back alley. When I fight, I want to win—but I want it to be _me_ that wins, not some thing that I'm using. I don't want to blow in with some overwhelming advantage that nobody can stand up to unless it's part of my own skills, because otherwise, I'll end up relying on that other thing too much, and when I finally run into something it can't help me against, I won't be able to handle it." She looked at Uranus, frowning. "Is this making any sense?"

"I used to run track," Uranus reminded her. "The same question comes up in the locker room, though for slightly different reasons—so yeah, I know what you mean. I can't help but notice, though, that you're starting to sound a lot like I used to, not all that long ago."

"What, that whole 'back off, we don't need your help' Outer Senshi routine?" Jupiter shook her head. "That's not the same thing at all. I don't have a problem with asking friends for help, because real friends will back off and let you handle things your own way when they know you don't need them."

"And they'll get in the way no matter what you say if they think you _do_ need them," Uranus noted.

"Well, we were right, weren't we?"

"Mmmm," Uranus mumbled. "Tell me," she asked suddenly. "Have you been working out or something?"

Jupiter looked at her. "No... at least, not besides our practices. Why do you ask?"

"You just seem like you've put on a little extra muscle recently, that's all." Uranus smiled. "Or maybe you've just been doing a little too much taste-testing when you cook..."

"You can always walk home, you know."

"Saturn might take it the wrong way if you left me here for the atomic vultures."

"Oh, I think she'd understand completely."

"I'd understand what completely?" Saturn asked from the other side of the now-near door. Her eyes went wide when she saw that Jupiter was holding Uranus up. "What..."

"It's not as bad as it looks," Uranus said automatically. "Just get out of the way so I can stagger through without crashing into you or that oversized can-opener."

Saturn quickly put the Glaive aside, sending it floating across the living room on ribbons of dark energy, to a soft and silent landing over in the corner, propped up against the walls. Saturn turned back to the dimension door, ready to help Uranus through and completely ignoring the attitude-filled look she got for her trouble.

When Uranus was about one step away from stepping through the dimension door, Jupiter felt a twinge of alarm go off in the back of her brain. She was suddenly feeling the presence of intense energy again, as well as a nonsensical jumble of emotional states. In front of her, Saturn's startled face was being lit up by red light—light coming from somewhere above them all—and Calypso, who had begun resuming human form when the two Senshi reached the door, had a look of wide-eyed fear on her face.

Uranus let out an indignant shout as Jupiter shoved her through the dimension door, right into Saturn, who couldn't react fast enough to stop both of them from falling over into a heap. Jupiter herself leapt backwards, away from the door, as a wide pillar of red lightning shot down where the Senshi had been standing a split-second before, ripping apart the rocky ground with a resounding blast of thunder.

The landing from the hasty leap was a bad one, and Jupiter tumbled backwards when she hit the ground, rolling head over heels and finally stopping laying belly-down on the rocks, stretched out and with her head aimed towards the door. Stifling a groan, Jupiter pushed herself up far enough to peek over the line of stones and into the heart of the electric red light.

Everywhere she looked, Jupiter saw red. Swirling waves of crimson light, dancing motes of scarlet fire, and thick wreathes of rosy smoke filled the air around the dimension door. No single Fury could have thrown an energy bolt that large, and sure enough, what she was seeing was no single Fury. This was a full-blown swarm of the crazed creatures, dozens of them gathered together and locked into a killing frenzy, lashing out with lethal doses of electrical force at any living thing that crossed their path. Not even full-grown thunder dragons messed with a swarm, and this one was crowded around the dimension door on all sides, struggling to penetrate whatever barrier Saturn had erected within the fabric of the portal.

Fortunately, swarms didn't last long. This one was already losing intensity after that staggering first strike, individual Furies breaking off and drifting away in an apparent lack of further interest. Some disappeared with teleportational speed, while others moved off under their normal method of propulsion. Many of these were discharging tiny, raking bolts of energy against the ground, scrounging for residual energy from their collective attack, and several were clearly headed in Jupiter's direction. She didn't have to look at her wrist to know that the Aegis, having absorbed additional energy cast off by the Furies during their attack, were glowing even more brightly now than they had back in the hangar.

Jupiter took hold of the Aegis with her right hand and pulled it away from her left wrist, the orbs coming free from their magnetic adhesion to reduce the 'braclet' to a string of glowing stones once again. She hated to have to do this, but as long as the Aegis was on her, she was a sitting duck. She threw the Aegis away to her right, the string whipping end over end and covering quite a distance in the low gravity, and the two approaching Furies changed course instantly, going after the green-glowing orbs and accelerating rapidly. Taking stock of the movements of the other Furies, Jupiter decided it would be best to put some distance between herself and the door, at least until the swarm broke up and left. Keeping the Aegis in sight wasn't necessary, since she could still sense its energy right there behind her.

*Wait a minute. Behind me?* Jupiter turned around and was greeted by the sight of sixteen small, faintly green-glowing pink orbs moving towards her in an irregular formation, a bunch of spherical boomerangs coming right back to their thrower. The two Furies were some distance beyond, and a third was coming up to join them, no doubt attracted by the intermittent arcs of energy jumping between the orbs.

"This could be bad," Jupiter mumbled, backing up a few steps and not feeling at all reassured when the Aegis drifted closer. She turned around before they reached her and ran all-out for ten seconds straight, a dash that—thanks to long legs and Senshi speed—would have left anybody but Uranus eating dust.

When she risked a glance over her shoulder, Jupiter swore. The Aegis were still right behind her, glowing a bit more brightly as they worked to keep pace with her—and there were now five Furies crowding in after them at high speed, with red blurs off to either side suggesting the approach of more members of the swarm. She turned her eyes front and kept running.

A rise of stone rose from the ground in front of her, too high and steep to run over and too wide to go around, so Jupiter took one last stride, jumped towards the rock, and brought her feet up in midair. Using the vertical face as a springboard, she catapulted herself back the way she had come, clearing the Aegis, the pursuing crowd of Furies, and—once again thanks to Ganymede's low gravity—about twenty meters of open air in a long, slow arc. It gave her a great view of the incredible smoothness both the Aegis and the Furies displayed as they turned to follow her. Neither group even slowed down, and they didn't even turn all that much; one moment they were moving _that_ way, and the next, they were moving _this_ way.

"STOP FOLLOWING ME!" Jupiter shouted. *The Aegis are supposed to obey me, right? They should stop when I tell them to, shouldn't they?*

The Aegis, it seemed, were hard of hearing today. As Jupiter came down from her leap, tucking into a crouch and rolling to burn up her momentum, she could feel the orbs getting closer. Swearing, she scrambled to her feet and started running again.

More Furies loomed up in front of her, but by this point Jupiter was fed up, and she cut loose at the nearest of the creatures with Supreme Thunder. There was a tremendous flash and an even louder bang as the lightning impacted against the Fury, and when the brilliance faded, the Fury was staggering through the air off to the left, green lines of energy conflicting with its usual red interior. Even these twisted Nereid descendants, it seemed, could get a bellyache from drawing in too much electricity in one go.

Gathering her energy again, Jupiter jumped skywards, twisted at the waist, and launched a Thunder Dragon at the crowd of Furies behind her, angling the shot to avoid the Aegis. She had no idea WHAT would happen if she hit the orbs, and this was definitely not the time or place to find out.

The dragon-form's gaping maw swallowed the entire cloud of Furies in a single gulp, and then its body contracted in a blast that made the report of that last Supreme Thunder sound like a firecracker by comparison. Jupiter had to turn away and try to land with her eyes narrowed to slits against the glare and the sudden dust cloud, and her sense of the Aegis told her that the orbs were drifting somewhat past her, pushed along by the force of the explosion.

When she looked again, there was no sign of any of the Furies from the pursuing group, and the face of Ganymede was sporting a new, modestly-sized crater. Or was that two craters...?

Jupiter shook her head, squeezing her eyes tightly shut to get rid of the double-vision. Even with her planet's energy flowing all around her in such concentration, she was getting tired, and she was definitely feeling pain. Fighting Alexandra had done a number on her in pure physical terms, and all this running and jumping and sliding around in the dirt and rocks hadn't helped.

Crackling and flashing from behind her brought Jupiter's attention back to her other problem. On the far side of the Aegis, a Fury was floating away with a decidedly pale cast to its coloration, while the orbs—shining more brightly than ever—merely held their position, waiting. Several other Furies were rushing towards the still-smoking edges of the crater, sending out their buzzing lengths of energy into the air around them as well as against the stone surface below them.

In Jupiter's mind, it was even odds as to whether the Furies that had been hit by the Thunder Dragon had been blown to their component particles or had somehow managed to teleport to safety before the explosion. Either way, they were no longer an issue, and their nearby cousins seemed to be too occupied to pose a problem—provided that they had all left the dimension door by now, and that she moved quickly enough to take advantage of their distraction.

It took her another two minutes to find the dimension door again; not an entirely terrible time, considering all the running she'd just done, and the fact that the local geography was unfamiliar to her, but some of the Furies seemed to be drifting her way once more, and she simply wasn't up to another round of tag. Considering that a dozen or so Furies were still trying to force their way through the dimension door, with at least that many moving towards her from other directions, it seemed she didn't really have much choice. She moved away from the door again, taking a course that would have most of the Furies gathering into a group behind her, a nice easy target that she could take out in one shot. The Aegis followed her, punching through and seriously sapping the energy of several Furies that didn't get out of the way, their glow intensifying and their speed increasing.

For a second time, Jupiter took a quick peek over her shoulder and saw the Aegis and a group of Furies after her; this time, she stopped, crouched, and leapt straight up, once again turning at the waist to fire down over the Aegis and into the path of the oncoming Furies.

"SUPREME THUNDER DRAGON!"

Hanging there in mid-air at the peak of her jump as the rippling energy gathered into her tiara, Jupiter realized with horror that the Aegis, glowing like tiny green suns, had caught up with her faster than the first time, and were now hovering all around her. When the Thunder Dragon fired, it was swallowed up by the sixteen spheres, and suddenly there were crackling lengths of electricity all around her. The four large spheres were orbiting around her at the level of her waist, each connected to the next on jagged green-white lines of force, while the lesser orbs had formed two rings of six intensely shining points each. These thinner, longer rings spun around her and the orbit of the four major spheres at opposed angles from one another, and energy was continuing to pour from the lightning rod in her tiara, to be absorbed by all the sections of the Aegis.

She wasn't falling, and neither was she being attacked. The Furies had come to a halt some distance away, shifting and flashing, and their emotional states had suddenly locked into one solid course: fear. As the orbit of the Aegis picked up and the rings suddenly began to contract in on each other and Jupiter, several of the alien beings blinked out, and the rest began to move away at high speed, leaving Jupiter a little relieved, and a lot worried. So far as Amalthea knew, Furies might teleport away when hurt, and they might be repelled by some kinds of energy, but they had never RUN from anything.

Her energy-sense climbing higher with every second, it suddenly occured to Jupiter what the spinning image of the Aegis reminded her of—pictures from a science textbook, in the chapter dealing with the structure of the atom.

*Oh, no.*

Sixteen shapes pressed very softly against her body.

"I'm okay, Saturn, really."

"I just want to check your hands again," Saturn said. She avoided the Sword-bearing right arm, but that freed up both of her hands for a good grip on the left. "Those things left a lot of energy in your system, and I just want to make sure I got it all out."

Uranus pulled her hand free and moved over to the door, where Mercury was standing, this time using the Caduceus and her visor to scan through the rift. "Anything?"

"The Furies seem to be leaving. I count nine... fourteen... sixteen of them moving away in various directions. I'd guess they exhausted themselves trying to get through the door. Jupiter's life-signs are steady and strong in that direction."

"Good. You wait here, and I'll go..."

"Wait," Mercury said suddenly, holding out an arm to block Uranus. Readings scrolled down her visor, and when a large red symbol appeared on the blue-tinted display, Mercury's face turned absolutely white. "Close it! Saturn! Close the door, NOW!"

It was one of those tones of voice that you generally don't stop to ask questions of—and the wall of green-white energy that was suddenly sweeping towards them killed any curiosity Saturn might have been feeling. The edges of the dimension door began to fall apart instantly, and then a dark, loosely ovoid shape appeared around the space where the door existed, sealing it off as Mercury and Uranus backed away in a hurry. Saturn went the other way, putting her hands on the edge of the barrier and setting herself as if she was about to try and move a mountain.

The Silent Shield didn't budge or flicker in the slightest, but Saturn herself shifted slightly, and the air was suddenly heavy with a feeling of intense stress. Mercury felt a frightened grip close on her arm and reached over to put a hand over Calypso's, never taking her eyes from Saturn or the Shield. A moment later, the sense of menace passed; the little Senshi let out a sigh of relief and allowed the Shield to disperse, leaving behind no trace of whatever had happened inside of it.

"Are _you_ okay?" Uranus said instantly, coming up behind Saturn and taking her by the shoulders.

"I'm fine." Saturn leaned back against Uranus, breathing in deeply. "But that was too close for comfort. Whatever that thing was, it ripped the dimension door apart like paper—and Artemis wasn't kidding about what happens when the door gets blasted. It would have taken out most of this floor if I hadn't contained it in time."

"What about Jupiter?" Uranus asked, looking back at Mercury. "Was she far enough away to be clear of the door's explosion? And WHAT was that shockwave about?"

"I don't know," Mercury replied. "We've got to go get her."

"Not from here," Saturn insisted. "It's too risky to open another dimension door right where one blew up. We'll have to get to a safe distance and try from there." She reached out a hand, calling the Glaive to her from its place in the corner, and then turned around and took Uranus' hand. "Ready."

Uranus blinked. "If you didn't want to open a door here, what makes you think it's safe to teleport?"

"The dimension door alters the laws of reality," Saturn said. "It connects two points in space by changing them so that they're exactly like each other. Teleportation converts whatever's being teleported into energy and moves it somewhere else; it doesn't affect the rest of reality at all. Trust me, it's safe." She looked at the three of them. "Really. Look, we can have Mercury do a scan..."

"Never mind," Uranus interrupted. "If you're that sure of it, then that's enough for me." She began powering up for the trip and looked at Mercury. "I'll be right back to get you."

Mercury smiled. "We'll race you." Uranus blinked in confusion at the statement, and then blinked again as Mercury and her sister both glowed a bright, pale blue and disappeared in a short-lived plume of blue-white mist.

"I think you just lost that race," Saturn noted lightly. Uranus gave her a look and then teleported both of them to the foyer at home. Mercury and Calypso were over by the door, and Michiru was halfway down the stairs, looking at all four of them with some surprise.

"I take it there was a change of plans?" she asked, as Saturn closed her eyes and assumed a pose of deep concentration.

"We'll explain later," Uranus promised.

"It's safe to open a door here," Saturn said then, opening her eyes, "but there's some sort of interference on the other side in addition to the distortion the gate would have caused when it blew. I'll have to put the other end pretty far from where the first door was."

"Just get it open," Mercury said. "I'll find her once you do."

When the dimension door swirled open this time, it showed them a landscape being systematically blown to pieces by volleys of lightning falling from a cloudless sky. Patterns of energy not entirely unlike the Aurora Borealis writhed and crackled overhead for as far as the eye could see, and the continuous thunder was deafening. The volume of the explosions fell to a whisper as Saturn did something to the door, but the sheer violence of the rest of the storm remained undiminished.

The Senshi stared at it. "Jupiter's out in THAT?" Uranus finally said, her voice sinking. Mercury walked over to the door and moved the Caduceus through to get a clearer scan.

"I've got her," she said a moment later. "Fifteen-point-six-two-three kilometers in that direction"—she pointed straight into the center of the storm—"near the heart of the storm. I can't make out her vital signs from this distance, but she's out in the open, and she isn't moving." Mercury looked at the raging storm, then turned and looked back at the others with an almost helpless expression.

"Saturn," Michiru said then, coming down from the stairs, "can you put a Silent Shield on a person so that it moves with them?"

Saturn blinked. "I think so, yes."

"Try it on Uranus."

"Hey," Uranus protested, "why do _I_ have to be the guinea pig?"

"Because you and Mercury are the only two who can teleport," Michiru replied, "and we need Mercury to scan and make sure nothing will go wrong when you try to teleport with a Shield around you."

"What do you mean, 'go wrong'?"

Saturn ignored Uranus and put up a Shield around the two of them. It started out as a dome, then rapidly shrank down and began changing in color until it was invisible, a second skin of energy surrounding Uranus from head to toe. Saturn stepped away and turned around to give her handiwork a close inspection; nobody else could see it, but she nodded in satisfaction.

Uranus looked down at her hands. The Shield didn't cover the Space Sword, although whether that was because of the Talisman's own potent magic or Saturn's choice, she couldn't be sure. There was a faint pressure, too, but nothing uncomfortable. Sighing, she looked to Mercury, who was already busy scanning her. The frown on the younger Senshi's face did not help Uranus feel any better about this, but when Mercury finally nodded, Uranus closed her eyes and teleported out to the living room.

When she walked back into the front room, Saturn looked at her closely again before turning to create a second Shield. This one divided into two separate sections, one shrinking down to fit Mercury and the other to protect the Caduceus. Mercury repeated the teleport-test for herself and then started checking to see whether the Shield interfered with the functioning of her Weapon or not.

Everything seemed to be muffled—the faint noise coming from the dimension door was entirely gone—and when Uranus tried to mention that, nobody appeared to notice. She had to wave her hands to get their attention, at which point Saturn's mouth quirked into a noiseless "Oops," and she brought the Shield down.

"I forgot to mention that," she apologized. "If you went out into that mess able to hear normally, you'd be deaf by the time you came back, so I set the Shield to block sound, but I can't make it work against one sound and not against all the other kinds. Sorry."

Uranus looked through the door for a moment, then shook her head. "On second thought, that sounds like a good idea. You may want to warn Mercury, though."

"No need," Calypso said, her hand resting on Mercury's arm. "I already told her." Uranus looked over at the pair, and Mercury nodded at her in silence. "She suggests you switch your communicator on, Uranus."

Uranus did that. "Can you hear me?"

"Yes," Mercury replied, her words coming clearly from Uranus' wrist. "This won't work at a distance," she added. "The Shields protect our communicators, but the energy of the storm would overpower the signal fairly quickly once it got outside; as long as we stay close together, though, we'll be able to hear each other." She paused as Saturn restored the Shield around Uranus. "Can you still hear me?"

"Loud and clear. Come on."

Mercury nodded. She gave Calypso a hug and sent her over to Michiru before following Uranus through the door and making another scan to confirm Jupiter's location. She glanced past the readings on her visor a couple of times, unable to suppress a shudder as she watched the vicious intensity of the storm continue, even inside the Silent Shield.

"Got a fix?" Though she was within arms' reach and they were both at the extreme outer edge of the storm's influence, Uranus' voice was scratchy with static.

"She hasn't moved," Mercury replied, "and her vital signs haven't improved, but they haven't gotten any worse, either. That's something."

"Good." Uranus pointed at a mountain off by itself, some distance out into the storm. "If Jupiter's near the center of this mess, then that mountain must be the place I found her before."

"Let's go."

They teleported to the top of the mountain with no trouble, and Uranus searched the ground below with her eyes—there were a lot more holes in it than she recalled—while Mercury scanned again. They both blinked and jumped involuntarily a moment later as the air around them was suddenly filled with raw energy, but the Shields held, and the Space Sword was no worse for the wear.

"Why does your Weapon get its own Shield, anyway?" Uranus said.

"I'd think it was because the Caduceus is a highly complex device with many delicate internal sections, whereas the purely physical nature of the Space Sword isn't much more than a piece of metal and a whole lot of magic," Mercury replied tersely. "Lightning won't damage it, and there's no air around it to carry sound waves, so there's no chance of it getting damaged by thunder."

"Wait a minute," Uranus said. "If there's no air to carry the sound, then why are we..."

"Do you really want to get into a discussion of the laws of both the physical AND magical sciences as they pertain to the conduction of acoustic vibrations?" Mercury interrupted bluntly.

"Not really..."

"I didn't think so." She pointed down the side of the mountain. "There. She's on the other side of that outcropping. The one that looks like a saw."

"I see it." They glowed and blinked out again, and this time they didn't need the Caduceus to spot Jupiter. She was laying sprawled on the stony surface of this moon, with a small fleet of green-glowing spheres hovering above her, each ringed by an aura of electrical force. Although short bursts of energy danced freely between the sections of the Aegis, none of the destructive power of the storm was getting anywhere near Jupiter; even as Mercury and Uranus watched, a thunderbolt smashed into the network of orbs and fizzled out. If the lightning wasn't hitting Jupiter, though, something else obviously had been, because the back of her fuku was torn and burned, with even the ribbons hanging in ribbons. The worst of the burns were concentrated around small, perfectly round gaps in the fabric, through which Jupiter's unmarked skin showed much paler than usual.

"I think we can take a pretty good guess as to what happened out here," Uranus said with a cold look at the Aegis. "Is it safe for us to get near those things?"

"Jupiter's out cold," Mercury said, "so that means the Aegis are running on automatic... give me a minute. Computer, engage memory search mode. Subject: Aegis. Find operational information and security data and then display." The blue gem atop the Caduceus glowed more brightly, and information began to appear on Mercury's visor. She read through several screens and then told the computer to stop and back up. Rereading the section, Mercury nodded and raised the Caduceus. "Access displayed program and execute."

The gem lit up again in a single pulse, and the sixteen orbs responded in kind, flashing simultaneously and then moving further out from Jupiter, maintaining their protective barrier while leaving enough room for the two Senshi to get through to her. Mercury stepped forward immediately; Uranus followed a little more cautiously, then knelt to help Mercury turn Jupiter over. They both winced.

The front of her fuku was just as ripped up as the back, and again there were the holes, the small, circular burns that had gone right through the supremely damage-resistant Senshi fighting gear and yet not left so much as a mark on the body beneath. There were also quite a few scrapes and bruises on the front of her legs, plus an ugly, blood-smeared cut on her forehead, and a lot more dust in general.

"Pulse and breathing... are steady." Mercury took her hand from Jupiter's throat and began moving the Caduceus down over her friend's body. "Her left shoulder is dislocated, three of her ribs are cracked, her legs are both half-broken, and there's that"—she nodded towards the gash on Jupiter's forehead—"although thankfully it's not deep, and there's no sign of a concussion. I'm seeing traces of internal bleeding, but it seems to have stopped." Mercury frowned at an analysis that popped up on her visor. "Judging by the location and severity of the injuries... she fell?"

"From what?" Uranus demanded.

"I'm not sure... but according to this, these injuries occured _after_ she was knocked out, by what looks to have been a massive electrical surge..." Both Senshi looked at the Aegis. Mercury shook her head. "There are also signs of earlier injuries, mostly bruising along her back. Some stress damage to her left shoulder, unrelated to the dislocation." She sighed. "Let's get her back to Saturn."

"What about those?" Uranus asked, glancing at the hovering orbs.

"Now that they know who we are, they won't try to stop us from moving Jupiter. As for anything else that they might do... it depends on what really happened out here."

"I don't follow."

"It has to do with the design and function of the Aegis, and to be honest, I don't entirely understand it myself." Mercury sighed and ran a hand across her face, hooking a few errant strands of hair over her right ear and out of the way of her visor. "Let's get her back to the door, at least. I'll be able to tell what we should do next once we're there."

They set about it very slowly and carefully, with Uranus doing most of the lifting and Mercury working to keep Jupiter's head and dislocated arm from being jostled around too much. Then, nodding at one another, they began mustering their strength for one last teleport. Even though she was unconscious, Jupiter's powers reacted to her friends', and she began to glow with the same green light as the Aegis. Their eyes closed as they pictured the area near the door, the two Senshi failed to notice as the floating orbs drew nearer and glowed more brightly, then floated back out, formed a strange pattern, and began drawing electrical force from the storm in on themselves. Although Mercury had dismissed the Caduceus, her visor went into display mode again, filling up with lines of text and insistently flashing diagrams that she didn't see.

A moment later, the Aegis flared.

The Sciences Director counted herself fortunate to have been on-hand in one of the sensor control rooms when the readings started coming in this time. So did her suboordinates, for that matter; her air of cool, calm, self-assurance tended to have that effect on people. It was a feeling badly needed when equipment readouts started exploding in showers of electrified sparks.

"The new sensor shielding seems to be working, ma'am," one of the more fortunate operators reported, his console not being one of those currently going up in smoke.

"Readings?"

"Anomaly in motion within metropolitan airspace. Composition, location, airspeed... indeterminate. Large energy readings scattered over a two-kilometer radius, but with no apparent physical source that the system can find. It looks like..." He stopped and checked a different screen. "Confirmed. Broad-spectrum electromagnetic radiation."

"Dangerous?"

"Not at the level recorded, ma'am. Temporary television and radio signal interference, cellphone failures—not much different from sunspot activity. Our equipment reacted as strongly as it did because of its sensitivity."

The Director didn't reply, but moved over to a phone on the wall and dialed. After a moment and an identifying, "Lab," she spoke.

"Nenori-san. I'm in one of the sensor monitor stations, and an anomaly was just recorded. Have someone get in touch with Resources and tell them that the model nine sensor shielding is effective. What? Yes, and then inform the technicians to start repairs." She paused. "Tell me, did the specimens there react in any way just now? I see. No, I didn't expect that they would. Yes, the analysis will be on its way shortly. Thank you." She hung up the phone and turned back to the sensor operators. "Have a full report on my desk in half an hour. Damage assessment included."

Several "Yes ma'am"s followed her as she turned and left the room.

Saturn, Michiru, and Calypso hadn't moved very much since Mercury and Uranus entered the door. They had all taken a seat on the stairs, Saturn putting the Silence Glaive to one side, Michiru putting an arm around Saturn, and Calypso floating behind them with her head resting on their shoulders and an arm around each of them—and, given the lack of space, not much else in the way of a body.

The sight of a disembodied head and upper torso hovering in the air and trailing off into blue mist would have freaked out most people who saw it, let alone got near it or had one of its arms touching them, but the Senshi were not most people, and both Michiru and Saturn understood that Caly was just doing her best to help them—and herself—feel a little less worried. So they sat there, watching the dimension door in silence and waiting for their friends to return.

Both Michiru and Calypso felt it when Saturn suddenly tensed—and then their quiet vigil was shattered as something large in size, indefinite in shape, and intensely bright appeared in the foyer, accompanied by an electric tingle and a blast of thunder that smashed into the sitting group like the proverbial bull in the china shop.

Blinking away the stars as she sat up, Saturn was the first to recover, and her jaw dropped. Uranus and Mercury were standing in the middle of a ring of small, green-glowing spheres, carrying an unconscious and badly-hurt Jupiter between them and just opening their eyes. Seeing the same looks of surprise on both of their faces that she felt on her own, Saturn quickly dispelled the Silent Shields so she could shriek: "WHAT HAPPENED?!"

"How the..." Uranus began, stopping short as the Aegis moved in, their electric glow fading rapidly away. One by one, the orbs touched with tiny clicks, forming the same string that she had earlier seen wrapped around Jupiter's wrist, the four larger orbs together with six of the smaller ones at each end. The Weapon moved down until it was resting lightly over Jupiter's body, the two ends lifting themselves up around her neck while the rest hung down, looking like nothing more than an innocuous necklace of pretty, pink-hued stones. The 'necklace' lit up once more, and—as if that had been a signal—Jupiter's tattered uniform became light and was absorbed into the Aegis, leaving behind Makoto. Mercury immediately recalled the Caduceus and started scanning her again.

"Is she alright?" Michiru asked, her voice surprisingly calm as she stood up.

"The change didn't heal everything, but she's better off than she was." Mercury's voice was just as calm as Michiru's, but also decidedly neutral. "Saturn?"

Saturn nodded wordlessly and moved over to see to Makoto. Halfway there, she stopped and looked at the dimension door. The storm on the other side had died down considerably in just a few seconds.

"How did you teleport through the door?" Saturn asked.

"We didn't," Mercury replied. "Not through the door."

There was a silence. Her eyes wide, Saturn very slowly pointed towards the ceiling, a gesture that was also a question; Mercury's response was a neutral gaze, directed not at Saturn, but at the sixteen pink spheres resting on Makoto's body, rising and falling with her breathing.

Under that gaze, the Aegis shimmered.

_…_…_

SAILOR SAYS:

(The scene is somewhere on Ganymede. Saturn and ChibiMoon enter from the left.)

ChibiMoon: Aren't you just the slightest bit worried that those Furies are going to show up?

Saturn: Nope. (She waves the Silence Glaive)

ChibiMoon: It must be nice to be so unconcerned.

Saturn: Oh, hush. (She drops a Silent Shield on her friend and turns to the camera) Today, we actually seem to have a selection of morals to choose from. There are several points there—Rei keeping the Book even though weird and potentially bad things are happening because of it; Mako-chan facing up to a dragon and debating the wisdom of using the Aegis or not—that could be taken as a commentary on responsibility and the courage it takes to face up to it. Mako-chan and Haruka-papa got into a whole piece about the satisfaction that comes from making the best use of your own abilities, and I think the author even managed to smuggle in a veiled statement against drugs before it was over. And the running statement for the episode appears to be one of how while a little power is good, a lot of it isn't necessarily better. (She makes a face) As I can plainly attest.

ChibiMoon (struggling out of the Shield): Are you STILL feeling sorry for yourself? This, despite the fact that you've recently discovered that you can make yourself any age you want?

Saturn (rolls her eyes): Like I don't have ENOUGH of an identity crisis going already... first I'm a sweet little girl, then I'm a possessed teenager, then I'm the End of the World Incarnate, then I'm a toddler, then I'm a rugrat who can turn INTO the End of the World Incarnate...

ChibiMoon: Oh, quit whining. At least you get a respectable-looking weapon out of the bargain. (Pulls out the Cutie Moon Rod from somewhere, even though it's long since been upgraded.) Look at this. THIS is what I have to look forward to in the way of accessories.

Saturn: It works, doesn't it?

ChibiMoon: But it doesn't GO with anything! (She transforms to her civilian clothes, then to her Future Princess Serenity gown, then through every fuku design Sailor Moon has ever worn.) You see?! NOTHING goes well with it!

Saturn: Now that's not true at all. It matches your brooch perfectly.

(ChibiMoon gives her a dirty look as the screen fades to black.)

26/05/01

Considering the length of this one, and that I went back and re-wrote the end of 22... yeah, one week behind schedule doesn't seem too bad.

Before I forget to mention it again, the Venus Chain Wink Sword that appeared last episode is a DIRECT copy of the same weapon/technique Venus uses in the manga. She IS the Senshi of Metal (or Gold), after all, so she ought to have a sword. I have never seen the original, however, so if any of you HAVE and find that my description doesn't match... well, now you know why. The Love-V-Chain Song—AKA Love-Me Chain Song; aren't dual (or is that triple?) identities fun?—is, so far as I'm aware, completely original. With some inspirational credit given to Mars and her Burning Mandala rings.

Some of you may also be wondering where in the world I got the idea for the design of the Aegis. Well, if you find out, let me know, because I wonder about it myself—but I like what I have planned for them, and I think you will too. A little wholesale destruction always goes down well, and I know the Jupiter fans out there will be happy to see her one step closer to the same status her original namesake held. King of the Gods, in case you missed it. Or Queen, in this case. Or is it Princess? Hmmm...

Also, if you've been seeing me refer to the Aegis as 'it' and 'them', don't worry, they're not typos, and you're not seeing things. I suspect I'll be doing that a lot.

Up next:
-Senshi spring break; and
-Why nuclear necklaces don't make good gifts.