USAGI IS DEAD II DEAD IS USAGI by DARK DAY FOR ANIME Diclaimer - Sailormoon is owned by Takeuchi Naoko and Bandai, so these characters really belong to them, except ones I made up. This means I'm only using the Sailormoon characters for purposes benign. I'm not a ripoff merchant like "Anya Romanov". ^_^ ------------------------------------------------------------------- S T A R T ------------------------------------------------------------------- "This is it, folks! Over the top!" >Take a Long Line - The Angels< ------------------------------------------------------------------- OPENING STANZA.... "So.... Why kidnap me like this? Why tie me up and all...." Usagi stared up from the floor, where the chair she was tied to had fallen, at her captor with a mixture of anger and fear, and both because she was staring at herself. Something she had a hard time getting used to. After all, it wasn't everyday that you were kidnapped and ripped from the stream of history by someone that looked like you.... Her double merely grinned, almost drooling in the process, a lascivious expression that only heightened Usagi's disgust. "Because they will chase you here.... By removing you from that stream of history, I have changed everything that was to follow. Even my own creation. And yet, I still exist." Her double held her hands aloft, staring at the ceiling in an almost messianic fashion. She stopped and looked down at Usagi, her eyes wide and manic. "What does that say to the concept of the time paradox, eh? What does that say about my existence? I'm strong enough.... POWERFUL enough... to resist the pull of the paradox." Usagi recoiled as her double leapt forward, slamming her hands down on Usagi's shoulders. "I can do anything, because I've been removed from the seed of my own creation. I am now an individual entity, with thoughts and feelings of my own, dragged from the worlds of the dead by a power greater than you can conceive. Now I shall change time, to create a universe where the destiny to which you were born shall come to pass...." Usagi was about to say something, when her double clamped her lips over hers in a passionate kiss. Usagi couldn't fight her strength, and felt sickened by the expression of lust, or love, or whatever it was her double was trying to express. The double pulled herself away, panting heavily, and gripped Usagi by the back of her hair, pressing their cheeks together. She pointed a finger in the air, a distant expression on her face. "Yes.... Together, we shall change HISTORY! Like it has never been changed before...." ----o Part Seven The Long and Twisting Road to a Shy City I ----o CHANGES.... Mamoru turned the key to his apartment door, and immediately he knew something was afoot. He'd just said goodbye to his beloved Usako, having seen her home after a wonderful dinner at a reasonably expensive restaurant. Of course, Usagi, still being 16 and reasonably immature, went nuts over the food and took a hefty bite out of his tight budget. Good thing he'd saved up for just such an possibility. Feeling happy after receiving a goodnight kiss, he'd decided to walk home, it being a warm night and all. Well, walk was a relative concept. Float would be more accurate a term. The relationship between both Usagi and himself, despite being a little rocky at times, was beginning to settle in.... For the first time, he'd begun to get used to the concept of actually being in love. Not that he hadn't felt anything for Usagi before, but he often wondered just how many of those feelings were being driven by the emotions of his past life. Because of this, he had always felt a certain nervousness.... an uncomfortable feeling, about being close to Usagi. There were other factors, of course. The drives of his past life, virtually working against the relationship.... The momentary intervention of Rei (he had almost allowed himself to fall for her), the rather incestuous closeness of Chibiusa.... (a scary thought in retrospect).... There had been so many things that had scared him from committing to the relationship. But now.... Now he felt totally at ease with her. Not only was he settling, but she was beginning to fall into the pattern of her Serenity persona. This emotional stability.... this quietness, had finally cemented the feelings he had been ignoring for so long. It still didn't change the fact that, as soon as he'd opened the door to his apartment, he just KNEW something was up. The first thing to stand out was the Usagi in the butler's tuxedo (something of an irony, there), standing in the doorway. "Ah, the man of the house has finally arrived." She said, in a slightly cultured accent that was totally unsuited to her. "Please follow me, master Mamoru." She bowed and gestured into the apartment. Mamoru was so astounded that he followed her in, speechlessly. All the lights in his apartment were on, and lining the walls of the loungeroom were a half dozen Usagis, in french maid costumes. Not that he minded this, it was just a little out of place. For a start, there was only supposed to be one Usagi. But too much was happening, too quickly, for him to think things over in a logical manner. "Wh.... What on Earth is going on here? Who are you people?" He stopped at the entrance to the loungeroom. The butler turned and scowled at him, lowering her face with patent disapproval. "Master Mamoru, it is not good to keep our lady, Serenity, waiting. Please proceed to the bedroom forthwith." She turned and stepped over to the doorway that lead to the passage. With a flourish with her arms, she turned back to him and gestured to the doorway. As Mamoru slowly stepped into the room, the maids bowed, one by one, as he passed. "Welcome home, Master Mamoru..." They would say. He looked at them. Each and every one of them was precisely the same. The golden hair, done up in those super-kawaii odangos and ponytails, sitting underneath the little caps. The black and white dresses, hugging their waists' in a rather interesting fashion. The short, frilly skirts.... The suspenders and stockings.... Mamoru found himself drooling. Despite his misgivings about the situation, his ecchi side had taken the controls. This could be heaven.... Then again, this was Usagi.... It could be hell on Earth.... He shook his head, trying to clear out those thoughts. What was he doing? He was allowing the situation to get control of him. "Hurry up, Master Mamoru.... the Lady Serenity grows impatient." The butler peered from the passage door after stepping through, beckoning to him with an arm. Mamoru managed to avert his gaze from the maids and followed her, through the passage and up to his bedroom door. He could smell the gentle fragrance of incense, wafting from the tiny cracks around the bedroom door. The butler stood beside it and watched as he sniffed.... A kind of soft musk. He placed his hand on the doorknob to open it, only for the butler to smack him across the back of that hand. Whipping the hand away, he stared at her with surprise. "What did you do that for?" It IS my bedroom, was what he was going to add, but he wasn't given the opportunity as the butler leaned forward, prodding him hard in the chest with a very stern finger. "One should not enter the domain of the Lady of the house without announcing one's presence." She chided him. He swallowed as she softly tapped on the door. This was nuts. Now he was letting himself be criticised by someone who may or may not be Usagi.... "Haiii...." Said a soft voice from within. Mamoru jumped, even though he expected an answer. After all, what else COULD he expect? "Ma'am.... His most gracious Lord Endymion has arrived home." The butler Usagi looked at Mamoru with a cheeky grin. Mamoru smiled back, more a nervous reaction than a knowing expression. "Ah. Send him in immediately." The voice carried a hint of amusement, and the butler smiled, nodding to Mamoru. "Now you can enter, my lord." Mamoru looked at the butler, then at the door. Slowly, he mustered up the energy to bring his hand to the doorknob again. He turned the knob, opened the door, and looked within. "Ah, my dear Mamo-chan.... Where have you been? It is so late." Said the seductive figure of the young woman, dressed only in lace underwear, lounging on the king-sized bed that replaced his normal one in his massively enlarged bedroom. His jaw hit the floor. "Usa.... ko....?" "Hai, Mamo-chan?" Usagi smiled. ----o MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH.... Usagi staggered through the corridor of the Hotel, away from the Activities Room, feeling less than fortunate to have been saved by that dirty, lewd Security Guard.... It was only then that she realised she was being followed.... By a young girl. Younger than herself. The girl had been sitting off to one side in the Activities Room, and had been spared the more violent ministrations of the Security Guard and his cohorts, probably because all she did was sit there and do nothing. The girl had a pasty white face and deep shadows around her eyes. Her light brown hair was unkempt and unwashed and she wore a dirty red jumper and grey skirt. She was barefoot. Usagi looked back at her as she shambled along, nervously contemplating what fresh hell this denizen of the Hotel wished to bring to her. This was what was going through her mind when she struck the door at the end of the corridor, leading to the safe stairwell she had been told to take by the Security Guard. She fell to the floor, dazed. For a few minutes, she was lying back in a hot spring, counting Pen^2's as they floated past. Then she felt herself being shaken awake by a soft and gentle hand. "Oneechan? Oneechan?" Usagi opened her eyes, and stared up into the girl's almost soulless, dark-rimmed peepers. "Are you alright, Oneechan?" The girl mumbled, helping the stunned Usagi sit up. "I.... I think so.... Who are you?" Usagi looked at the girl, who was kneeling next to her. "Who am I?" The girl blinked her tired eyes. "I am.... I was.... My name was.... It's hard for me to remember." The girl looked away. "Yeah... Great." Usagi rubbed her forehead. "Oh, I could murder for a aspirin right now...." "Aspirin?" The girl turned back to Usagi. "I seem to remember that word...." Usagi looked at the girl as if she was mad. "What do you mean, you seem to remember that word? EVERYBODY knows what aspirin is." "They do?" "Yes." "Sorry. I've been a bit out of it for a while, now." Yes, thought Usagi, you look like you have. "Do you know where we are?" She thought she might try and ask. There was no harm in it, at least. "The Hotel." The girl replied, absently. "Thanks. I know this is the Hotel. WHERE is the Hotel, is what I wanted to know." The girl continued to look at her blandly. "Only the manager of the Hotel knows that. The rest of us know better to ask. You would be well advised to do the same." "Thanks, but no thanks. I'd rather check out of this no star dive. Call me a bad guest, but I'm not exactly enamoured of its facilities." "Rina." The girl said, suddenly. "Eh?" "Matsumoto Rina. Yes, that's my name. Been a long time since I told anyone. So hard to remember, now.... Can't remember when I got here...." "Ano... Rina?" "Hai?" The girl smiled at Usagi, tiredly. "Can you help me to my feet?" "Hai." Rina stood, helping Usagi to do the same. "May I be permitted to ask you your name?" She leaned forward, staring into Usagi's face blankly. Usagi swallowed. "Usagi.... Tsukino Usagi...." Rina chuckled. "Rabbit on the moon. How quaint." Her face became a bit more serious. "I take it you were thrown out of your room?" "Umm.... Yeah. By the room, no less. Why do you ask?" "You wouldn't be wandering around the Hotel in your underwear, otherwise. I was thrown out of my room, too. It took me five days before I could find myself an even barely decent set of clothes." Usagi looked down at Rina's dirty clothes. "How long ago was that?" Rina frowned, then turned in lost thought. "Umm.... I can't quite remember. It was a long time ago.... I think I stepped into the Activities Room about a month ago. I've been in there ever since...." "A month ago!?!?" Usagi felt a cold shiver run through her. Getting out of this Hotel might be more difficult than she thought. ----o MORE CHANGES.... "Well, I must say, here's another fine mess you've gotten us into...." Princess Serenity, aka Usagi, stared down at the silence glaive, the handle of which was protruding from her chest. In front of her, the young Sailorsaturn shifted her feet, hands behind her back, looking like a schoolgirl who had been caught out doing the wrong thing. "I tripped, okay? It was an accident." Behind her, the amorphous figure of Pharaoh 90, who had been the intended target of the glaive, facefaulted and fell to Earth in disbelief. Serenity and Saturn watched as it crawled into a corner and muttered. "I give up. How am I supposed to feel anything about conquering the universe when the forces of light are so bloody incompetent. I'm sure it wasn't like this for Metallia.... Mumble mumble turtle scrubs mumble mumble...." "Looks like we got it demoralised." Saturn muttered, cringing under a disbelieving stare from Serenity. "You could, at the very least, whilst performing a Death Ribbon Revolution, to rid this world of menaces like Pharaoh 90, check to see if anyone is in range when you swing this thing around." Serenity coughed blood as she pulled the glaive from her chest and held it out to Saturn. "Yours, I believe." "Umm... Yeah, thanks." Saturn took the glaive and turned back to the shambling presence of Pharaoh 90. "Now, where were we?" "Death Ribbon Revolution. You'll find it in the dictionary under D, next to Dork, Dickhead, Dumkopf, Dipstick and a couple other words not worth repeating right now." Serenity offered, and promptly died. "Oh yeah, that was it." Saturn waved a finger in the air as Serenity's body fell at her feet. Pluto, Uranus and Neptune watched this train of disastrous ineptitude from a safe distance.... Safe being a technical term considering nowhere on Earth was safe, now. "Well, there goes your messiah." Uranus turned aside to Pluto, who shrugged. "So what. I can't always predict when strange young women are going to jump out of the doorways to the worlds of the dead and trip up a sailorsenshi in full flight." Setsuna put her hands up, helplessly, reminding the others of the Serenity lookalike with the strange expression of madness on her face, who had, as Pluto stated, stepped out of nowhere and put a foot in Saturn's path, causing the aformentioned events. "Where did that silver-haired bitch go, anyway?" Neptune rubbed her chin as Saturn started the end of the world with much banging and crashing of thunder. "Dunno. Probably back through the same doorway, or another much like it." Rumble crash rumble. "Doesn't look like we're going to get an opportunity to find out, does it?" "DEATH RIBBON.... REVOLUTION!" "By the way.... Is it 'Ribbon' or 'Reborn'? Never could work that one out...." Neptune asked Pluto. The elder senshi was not given an opportunity to answer. Everything exploded into a large expanse of white.... ----o INTELLECTUAL INTERLUDE.... "Aww bugger shit damn!" Makoto found herself floating through a series of blue clouds, all of which were immediately recognisable to her, much to her chagrin. "What the hell did you do this, for? I don't wanna ever come back to this place for as long as I live." She looked over at Naiad, who was also floating, mesmerised by the patterns of the blue clouds. She roused herself from her musings. "Ah, yes, well.... There was something I had to ask you." "What?" Makoto looked up at the blue sky, lit by a pale blue sun. Was everything here blue? Not really.... Most of the clouds themselves were wispy and white.... Something she'd obviously failed to notice on her previous visit. She still didn't want to be here.... To take notice of these amazing little packets of detail. "Before I entered the doorways of the dead, to find who it was that had been playing with time, I experienced a vision.... within the dream of Tranquility, the Queen to be of the Moon Kingdom." "Oh her." Makoto blinked without understanding. Naiad sighed. "Serenity's replacement." "Oh her." For a few moments, Makoto was none the wiser, as Naiad proceeded to pull out her hair. How could she be in the presence of such a decerebrate individual, the Miko thought to herself. Then a look of realisation crossed Makoto's face. "You mean Naru-chan, don't you?" "Naru-chan...." Naiad thought for a few moments. "Her next life.... Well, whatever.... I experienced this in a dream of hers, and somehow, you were connected to it." Makoto's face became an expression of exasperation. She wasn't really vaguely interested in this thread of conversation. "In what way?" She asked, painfully. A figure fell between them, crying out in mortal fear as she did so. Makoto watched herself, dressed in her traditional, and lately lamented, green and white senshi fuku, tumble towards a small object that was floating in the lower cloud decks. "Oh... I see... That way." Makoto sweatdropped. "Well, that's kind of hard to explain, really...." She looked up, and saw the door close on the passageway of the dead she had fallen through in the dim distant past. A passage that lead to Earth, shortly before all of her friends.... All that she knew, with the exception of a very few, were killed. "You said you never wanted to return to this place, again.... Why? What happened here? And why would the Queen-elect dream of this event?" Naiad rubbed her hands together, desperate for the answer to the dream. Makoto sighed, looking back down at her. "How would I know, fer chrissakes.... I'm not her. Maybe she had eaten too many pork dumplings for dinner or something...." Naiad rubbed her face with her hands and counted from ten to one. "How about the events that are taking place here? Why do they hold such a sense of fear and trepidation for you? Enough to make you resist returning...." Makoto turned away. Not easy to do when one was floating in mid-air, thus negating any solid surface with which to actually balance the motion. "I'd really rather not talk about it.... It's too personal." "How did you find yourself in this place?" "I'm not sure.... One moment I was on Earth, the next...." Makoto pointed a finger upwards, then dropped the finger down towards the rapidly disappearing object. "A door to the worlds of the dead opened up beneath your feet?" Naiad seemed prompted by searching Makoto's thoughts. The senshi curled up, holding her knees. "Stay out of there. This mind belongs to me." Makoto spat, bitterly, shivering with anger. Naiad was surprised by the vitriol. "I'm sorry...." "No you're not. You read my thoughts... Entering the very core of my being in a cavalier manner. Don't you ever give thought to your actions? To what you're capable of doing to others?" "What are you afraid of? In this place?" "Fortress Makoto, that's what my mind is. I will kill you if you even so much as try to do what you just did, again." "Jupiter...." Naiad started. "Take me away from here." Makoto turned, almost lashing out at Naiad.... For a fraction of a second, Naiad saw a being of immense size and ethereal beauty.... Its form made of gossamyr-like thread. It descended upon what looked like a floating glass and metal airship. And immediately, Naiad realised that this was the fearful memory that Makoto was hiding within.... ----O MYSTERIOUS FRIENDS.... "I feel strangely tired..." Usagi said as Rina helped her through the doorway to the stairwell. Rina nodded in the blank manner she seemed to have perfected. "You do, after a while. It might have something to do with all the crap you go through in here, but it's like all your energy is slowly drained out of you...." Usagi looked at Rina's face. The whiteness of her pallour, combined with the dark rings around the eyes, made her feel a certain queaziness. "You look pretty awful, you know that?" "Thanks. I try to keep up the image." Rina chuckled. "I started to look like this after the first few days. It seemed to get better, every time I tried to get back into my room. Almost like one has to stay in their rooms to remain healthy in this place." "Why did your room throw you out?" Rina looked at Usagi, tiredly. "I was confused, okay? I didn't know the room was trying to look after me. It wanted me to be warm and comfortable. For me to sleep in that nice warm bed. Forever.... and ever and ever...." "Forever?" "That's the thing, you see. The room is like a womb.... It's almost an allegory to death. You just want to curl up and let the darkness of an eternal sleep take you over in there." Rina turned away, staring blankly ahead of her. "Then.... Surely, getting out of those rooms is a good thing, is it not?" Usagi let out a short gasp of strain as Rina helped her to sit on the first step of the 'down' stairs. Rina sat beside her. "It's like birth, you see.... Once out of the womb, the world starts taking a physical and emotional toll on you. You start to die in a colder and more horrible way, both inside and out." END OF PART 7 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Next Chapter - "A Long and Twisting Road to a Shy City II" _________ / @ \ DDFA (The Right Dishonourable Mark A Page) / / ^ ^ \ \ ayanami@merlin.net.au /\ Chief Propoganda Officer, Keeper of / \ the Tapes and Co-Founder of the Saitou-chan \___________/ Appreciation Society - Adelaide Japanese /_/ \_\ PU Animation Society Version 2.0 - 24th Jun 1998