Silver Millennium Soldier
-6- First Day On the Job is Always the Worst
by
Mike Macdonald
(Age: 27)
copyright 02-19-2006
Age Rating: 18 to 127
Sailor Moon’s new palm computer had a voice-dial function not unlike her own cell phone, and she began to wonder whether or not it was equipped with a digital camera and an mp3 player, too. She learned about this feature through her finicky feline companion constantly snatching it from her when she wanted to look up any little thing that came to mind, or review her twenty year old log since arriving in America, or maybe text message other cats. Or what she was currently doing, telling the ugly little PDA to contact her partner, Artemis, wherever he was at that moment.
Moon didn’t pay much mind to her little guardian, mostly because she’d gotten fed up with her and clipped the PDA to her collar. Even so, she was preoccupied returning stares to the pedestrians she passed on the street, some of whom were friends or classmates, many of whom she was at least familiar with in one or more class, and all of whom failed to recognize her. Even the bitter Asian girl treated her like a total stranger, though still with her disapproving snort and shake of the head.
“Bonjour, ma petit chou!” another European voice sang sweetly from the little computer. It was quite charming for one supposedly belonging to a cat; Moon's mangy sidekick could have been talking to Hugh Grant on the other end.
“Artemis, we’re at the market,” Luna said, not the least bit returning the greeting or its friendly conduct. “Where exactly did you say the flux was located?”
“Always business with you,” the voice said with a sigh. “The Goofball’s scanner ought to be able to sense the negative energy of the people around her. Follow the most potent source.”
“What did he just call me?” Moon said.
“Oh, you heard that, huh?”
“I’m right here!”
“Nevermind him,” Luna said. “I want you to focus on finding sources of negative energy. Just concentrate on that thought.”
“What do you mean negative-whoa!”
The moment the word “negative” crossed the girl’s train of thought everything around her suddenly exploded with an intense electromagnetic spectrum of colors. Solid objects of metal and concrete became flushed with blues and purples, and living things burst into miniature creature-shaped supernovas of red and orange, and every one of them bled into the other colors and objects around them. Every color and shape was analyzed and monitored by a cluster of menus scrolling endless text and scientific formulas too fast for her to read. Sailor Moon let out with a strange combination of a startled shriek interbred with a groan of agitation and tried to regain her balance, afraid to move about in the liquid world around her. She was growing awfully tired of being slapped in the face by disorientation.
“I just went into Predator mode, Luna! What’s going on?”
“That’s your EMS scanner,” Luna said. “Do you see any large, black blotches?”
Most of the colors before her were intermixed with trails of white and black that flickered in and out of the spectrum with a life of their own, growing more prominent in the moving red blotches the larger they got. They danced frequently in between the human-shaped blotches like electricity leaping from one node to the next.
“Yeah, lots. But there’s a real big one…”
One of the blue and purple structures was much darker than its neighbors, engulfed in a shuddering cloud of black energy reminiscent of a horde of ants devouring the remains of a dead animal. The visor responded to her will, it seemed, as her merely wishing she could see which building it was more clearly banished the ethereal glass pane that had been hovering millimeters from her face. She now stood staring at the glass double doors of the jewelry store Moon had envisioned when Molly called her less than an hour before. Although it was midday, there wasn’t a trace of light or life on the other side.
“Aw, no…” she said, darting for the window to peek inside. “Molly!”
Two dozen or more figures stood about the store’s interior, displaying a variety of jewelry items about their ears, necks, wrists, and ankles in an equal variety of fashionable poses. She didn’t remember this particular shop having so many mannequins on display.
Come to think of it, she didn’t remember it having mannequins at all.
“I don’t like this,” Luna said. “We’ve got to get in there. Try the door.”
Perhaps slightly bewildered from worry, the rookie valkyrie drove her foot into one of the glass doors as hard as she could, and followed it with a yelp of pain and a string of whimpers. The doorframe barely vibrated from the impact.
“I meant try opening it,” the cat said, stifling a laugh.
“That wasn’t funny, you furball-hacking stray!”
“No need to get nasty,” Luna said, then examined the door with a raised eyebrow for a few minutes before adding, “Looks like you’ll need it after all.”
“Need what?” Moon said while trying not to walk like a pirate. "My giant robot?"
“Take off your tiara.”
“The tiara? But it’s the only part of this getup I like, save the locket.”
“Are we going to argue every single time I give you an instruction?”
“Fine. Sorry.”
She gingerly removed the tiara from her head: no sooner was it in her hand she realized with another startled yelp it had been replaced with a dazzling discus of white light. She found she couldn’t look directly at it as its brilliance was akin to that of a car’s rear view mirror reflecting the sun in the middle of the day.
“That is your Tiara Disc,” Luna said, apparently able to look at it just fine. “I’ll need to give you a crash course on its use. It’s one of your more complicated tools, but it’s the least destructive in the hands of an amateur, so this will be your first weapon.”
“My name is Serena and I’m in second grade,” the girl muttered, still squinting.
“Refrain from using your real name in public,” the cat said. “It doesn’t take much to kill the illusion the uniform provides."
Luna sat in front of Sailor Moon and to her left and watched her expectantly.
“Now, I want you to concentrate on the door and command the disc to cut through the lock.”
“That sounds complicated,” Moon said with mock insecurity. “Can’t I just blow it off its hinges? I am an amateur, after all.”
She never heard a sound as irate and resentful as the one the black cat made just then.
“Fine, whatever,” she said. “Just get on with it. Drop dead, Artemis.”
A chuckle bounced out of the ugly little PDA, which had evidently been listening the whole time.
“I suffered with the Eccentric in Europe for the last ten years. It’s someone else’s turn to ride the Ferris Wheel o’ Shame.”
Tear-inducing weapon in hand, Sailor Moon planted her feet firmly to the ground and faced the shop’s doors. It couldn’t be that difficult, could it? It was just like when she played Frisbee with Molly and Rachel at the park. Except that she was never able to throw it straight then. Ah, but this was a magical Frisbee. It’d surely fly as straight as she wanted it to. Still, she couldn’t help but feel silly about the whole thing, standing out in public in such flamboyant getup, about to damage public property with a glowing hubcap.
She reared her weapon back, across and under her chest, wrist arched tightly in. She practiced the throw in her head, then briefed the needed muscles on what they were about to do. The cat was watching her like her homeroom teacher during a test, so the old “one-two-three” motion she always used probably wouldn’t fly, and probably wouldn’t be needed if the thing was as mysterious and amazing as the cat implied. The visor thing had come and gone when she felt it ought to, and so this new item would work the same way.
The cat looked like it was getting impatient, so Moon checked her stance and focused on the door, and when she felt her aim was perfect, she flung her arm out as gracefully as she could.
As she’d almost released the discus, a pigeon landed with a flutter and a coo on the bike rack in front of the shop next door to her target. She gave it only an instant’s notice.
The Tiara Disc shot six feet away with blinding speed before veering at a sharp forty-five degree angle to the bike rack. There was a loud, sudden sound like a sack of flour bursting before the disc shot back into Moon’s arms with the force of a little kid on a motor scooter, almost knocking her over. The bike rack and two pedestrians were covered with gray and white feathers.
Moon's jaw dropped. She felt tears welling up in her eyes. Luna groaned.
“Omigod, I’m sorry!” Moon squealed. “I didn’t mean to hit the pigeon! It was an accident!”
“She hit a pigeon?” Artemis’s laughter exploded from the PDA for the next two minutes.
“I told you to concentrate!” Luna hissed at the blubbering girl. “The Tiara Disc is directed by your mere thoughts! If you target the pigeon, it will attack the pigeon! Target the door now! Let us move on!”
At least she had a better feel for it. Returning to her stance, albeit red in the face and finding little comfort in the PDA’s subsiding laughing fit, she locked her eyes on the jewelry shop doors and wound back for her second attempt.
She paused briefly to think of Molly, narrowed her eyes, and sent the discus on its way again.
The doors shattered and flew free of their hinges, clattering onto the carpet. Startled by her unexpected success, Sailor Moon woefully lost her concentration and watched as the Tiara Disc ricocheted about the building’s interior and its frozen patrons, destroying any display cases it came in contact with. A few of the mannequins toppled like a bad stage actor’s awkward death scene as it careened into them. Serena panicked, and this only made the weapon more aggressive.
“Call it back,” Luna said, no longer watching.
The girl merely stammered in response. She wasn’t ready when the discus finally decided to return to its master and found its mark square between her eyes despite her desperate attempt to catch it.
“We’ll work on the return catch first," Luna said. "After we're through here.”
Sailor Moon did not respond, as she was, at the moment, lying on her back in a spread eagle with a large bruise on her head beneath her tiara.
“…and after you wake up again…”
*********************************
The interior shimmered with a nearly indiscernible violet hue that could not be seen from the other side of the windows, weaving back and forth like the glare of water on the walls of an indoor swimming pool. The store’s patrons stood frozen like lifeless portraits, flaunting their new objects of vanity where no one could see them. Their faces dressed in narcissistic smiles, each one sneered at the next, yet saw nothing.
Both the cat and the Sylvan soldier with the headache felt chilled by the utter lack of life in the jewelry shop. The air vibrated with a slight hum emanating from the room’s exact center, where a black crystal six inches in length levitated with its peaks pointing toward the ceiling and floor, rotating sluggishly as though surveying the room. With each full rotation, the ghastly device pulsed like a human heart and swallowed a mouthful of what the horrified girl could only assume was the soul and essence of each of the patrons’ being. Though they could show no other expressions than the phony smiles plastered on their faces, she could see them grow physically weaker with each gulp, and her stomach felt the urge to tear free of its prison and run far, far away.
“This is the eeriest thing I’ve ever seen…” she said as she reached out to touch the abyssal rock at the room’s center.
Luna somehow made herself airborne enough to reach the girl’s hand with her painfully sharp fangs, a touch of pressure away from drawing blood. Sailor Moon yelped and clutched her hand, wondering exactly how effective her armor could be if it couldn’t stop the wrath of a small, domesticated animal.
“Son of a-!” she cried. “What the hell, man!”
“Are you a child?” Luna said in the loudest whisper Moon ever heard. “Do you try to touch anything strange that appears in your immediate line of sight? That is a life force conduit! If you come into direct physical contact with it, your life will be sucked dry!"
“I haven’t been properly educated on life force conduits, thank you!”
“How about common sense? If it looks weird, don’t touch it!”
The young valkyrie and her angry guardian were not alone, though the girl didn’t know it and the cat merely suspected. Two others stirred in the dark shop at that moment, waiting patiently in the managerial office for the conduit to finish its job. The toothy shopkeeper, her lips reared as far back as her cheekbones to bare her inhumanly long incisors, had been startled by the sudden racket that erupted from the main room, as was her manager, a spruce, peridot-eyed man seated before a desktop computer. They had become extraordinarily alert since everything had gone silent again.
The shopkeeper’s ears perked, listening for more chatter. It no longer even resembled a woman, or the profile of a human being.
“Someone’s in the shop, Excellency,” it whispered.
“Well, then, kill them,” Jedite said. “You don’t need me around for that.”
The shopkeeper slipped into the shadows like a warm bath, and was gone in an instant. Jedite returned to his monitor and mindlessly clicked the mouse now and again. The jewelry store surplus sale operation had proven prosperous once before, but this second application had dragged on for too long. It would be completed within the hour, fortunately.
Sailor Moon discovered Molly by one of the glass counters, permanently admiring her own reflection in a small mirror. She appeared bedazzled by two glimmering emerald earrings, and a matching necklace clutching her neck like a noose. She waved her hand in front of her eyes, but the poor little redhead didn’t even blink.
“We’ve got to deactivate this thing,” Luna said, grabbing her attention, “before it kills everyone in here. Scan it to see how much time we have left.”
The ethereal glass visor materialized over Moon’s face once again, and she stared blankly at the dizzying array of figures before her. Her heart skipped a beat when she took note of the lack of color in the room, particularly the prisoners of the life force conduit as it drained the red from their forms with each rotation. The crystal exuded so much black energy she couldn’t even see it with the scanner.
“Well?” Luna said.
“Um...you didn’t tell me how to read this thing.”
“Oh. Alright, what does it say in the bottom-left corner?”
“Uh…Lotsa stuff…”
“What does it say?”
“I can’t read it, alright? It’s scrolling too fast!”
“Do you see anything like ‘Absorption Rate’?”
“Like what?”
A sudden jolt disrupted Moon’s concentration, and the visor and all its baffling displays were gone. The chill of death clutched her shoulders with stinging talons, and she felt the color drain from her face before the cat had time to shout her warning. She spun around and looked into the blackest, deadest eyes from the deepest pits of her own worst childhood nightmare, complimented with a razor-lined grin too wide to suit anything of flesh and blood, a demonic cartoon come to life. Its breath smelled of coagulated human blood, and the inside was stained with it.
“Shop’s closed, Sweetie,” the wight crowed.
The thing relished its victim’s terrified scream before breaking into a fit of insane laughter and flinging the girl with incredible strength to the opposite side of the building. A deafening crash of glass and metal caught her and dropped her roughly to the floor with the remains of a once exquisite cabinet and its priceless contents.
The cat was shouting something. Moon couldn’t make it out. She struggled to get back on her feet and succeeded only in sitting up part way while her brains rattled in her skull. She was barely able to wrap her mind around the next image. The wight grinning madly at her through the shadows far across the store, the silhouettes of the frozen store patrons, their shadows skipping and dancing along the walls, the black crystal sucking in another bellyful of human life, Luna’s enormous eyes trying to warn her, a crude javelin made from the frame of one of the glass counters, the jutting edge three feet from her head. She screamed and cringed, and the makeshift weapon found its mark on the Tiara Disc’s side. The glowing dog-like saucer hovered nearby, awaiting the next attack.
“You’re using it by instinct alone!” Luna said. “Concentrate! Destroy the conduit, quickly!”
The wight cackled, throwing a foreboding smirk at the young heroine. Its eyes flashed, and then the room’s meager lighting dimmed, pitching Moon into total darkness for only a moment. When the purple capillaries of light again poured over the room, abject terror poured over her with it; the human mannequins had abandoned their pretentious poses and now stood staring at her with black pits where their eyes once were, their skin colorless in the ominous flickering of the dark crystal. Their hands twitched with some chained feral rage trying to claw its way out of every one of them. Their lips quivered.
They began sauntering toward her. Moon whimpered and backed against one of the glass counters and watched in horror as they came closer to her their hands raised higher, their jaws opened wider, their eyes shone more with an evil light, and their needs became more apparent.
“Luna, I’m scared! I don’t know what to do! Help me!”
“Destroy the crystal, for God’s sake!” the cat screamed. “Get up and move around! Do something!”
The shopkeeper laughed horribly as Sailor Moon’s eyes welled up with tears. They were salivating, almost upon her. Then, as a shrill sound tore through the air, holding their heads and screaming in pain, and stumbling over one another to escape the girl sitting on the floor at their feet. Even the master wight was covering its ears and hissing as though in physical pain.
The cat was holding her head, too, but for different reasons than the monsters.
The noise became so unbearable Jedite was forced to investigate, bursting out of the office door with the intent of requesting silence at the top of his lungs, but the moment he saw the blonde pigtailed girl wailing like a newborn infant in the far corner of the shop, adorning an armored garment from the Silver Millennium, he stopped in his tracks and his eyes grew wide.
A storm of memories swept over him in the form of blood-soaked clouds raining his fallen comrades in arms one by one. The golden braids of the elite Sylvan Guardian, her rune-encrusted claymore high over her head and her halo burning bright like the sun, slaying armies with the power of a deity. A noble but nonetheless useless death he nearly received, himself.
This was, however, not the Sylvan champion he remembered sitting before him. It was something else entirely.
The bestial shopkeeper shrieked. “What is that horrible noise she’s making, M'Lord?”
“She’s crying, you idiot!” Jedite said. “She is but a blasted child!”
“How do I make her stop?”
“Use your imagination, Fool! Jabbing a nice hole in her throat ought to do the trick, don’t you agree?”
The writhing zombie at the wight’s feet sported an orange backpack, which was spilling its contents onto the carpet as it rolled about like a broken wind-up toy, among them a glass cola bottle. With a murderous grimace, the fiend snatched the bottle from the bag and promoted it to a gruesome jagged weapon with a swift blow to the counter’s edge. It slid across the room, its feet barely touching the floor, toward the sobbing wreck of a would-be hero, and wrenched her frightened head back with a fistful of her hair. Serena knew immediately what was at hand but her terror prevented her from doing anything short of wishing for a quick death.
“This’ll shut you up, you little twat,” the creature said, rearing back the glass sliver, its sharpest point coveting the helpless girl’s throat.
The valkyrie closed her eyes and awaited the inevitable.
The wight shrieked, partly in pain but for the most part in surprise, and its weapon broke on the floor at its feet. A cold black substance trickled from the wrist the being was clutching dearly when Serena opened her eyes once again. It was looking in bewilderment at something on the floor to her right, and she couldn’t help but look, herself, despite the danger afoot.
A single red rose was somehow embedded in the floor a foot away from her.
“Weep not, Sylvan Guardian,” a gallant voice echoed throughout the store from somewhere high above.
Sailor Moon saw him before the two villains did, standing proudly in the sill of the store’s highest window, twenty feet from the floor, gazing down at the chaos like a guardian angel would; a tall gentleman in fine nineteenth century dress as white as the clouds, shrouded in a cape of crimson velvet, and from beneath a sleek white cane appeared and pointed at the trembling girl to reveal a white rose at its head. Although she couldn’t clearly make out his face because of the white opera mask he wore upon it, his gentle smile was evident and his piercing eyes felt without needing to be seen.
“Stand up and fight!” he shouted, and vanished as a display counter launched itself at the window by some unseen force, and smashed harmlessly against the sill with a curse from the demon’s devilish master.
“Kill her!” Jedite screamed, flailing at his servant. They both had lost track of the girl for far too long, and she now stood firmly on her feet again with her primary weapon at hand.
“Sailor Moon-!” Luna began to shout.
“I got it, I got it!” Moon said.
The Sylvan soldier took only a moment to focus on the black crystal as it neared the end of yet another full rotation. With a powerful overhand pitch, she winged the blinding discus at her target, and in an instant and a loud electric burst it became a cloud of dust, and the store was dark again. The paralyzed shoppers collapsed to the floor in exhaustion, and the hum no longer polluted the air.
“Are they okay?” Moon said just before the snarling wight thrust its extending arms into her chest and send her reeling into the wall.
“They’ll be fine!” Luna said. “Keep your guard up!”
The screeching fiend swept toward her with its horrible teeth bared and talons raised. Still throbbing with pain from its latest attack, Sailor Moon glared at the wight and dearly wished it to no longer exist; in response, the obedient Tiara Disc moved with a life of its own in the motion of a vicious ethereal hornet and tore the advancing creature to smoldering ribbons.
All at once it was over, and the disc rested once again in its owner’s arms. It managed to land itself in a softer spot that before, namely the pit of her stomach.
“Dammit,” she said with a cough.
Jedite was nowhere to be found, having abandoned his operation empty-handed. Except for the stirring patrons littering the carpet and the ruined pieces of wood and glass lining the walls, the store was still.
Sailor Moon glanced behind her when she heard her friend’s familiar groan; Molly appeared to be all right since she immediately went about chattering to everyone about the weird experience she’d had and the hangover she was currently suffering from. No one seemed to pay any mind to the girl in the over-the-top outfit by the entrance, surveying the damage.
“Where are you going?” the cat whispered as she started toward Molly.
“I’m gonna see if Molly’s all right!” Moon whispered back.
“You’re not Serena Babbit right now, remember?”
“Yeah, but-!”
“We must be as discreet as possible. You’ve made a deadly enemy today, and he will exact himself upon you and any friend you have that you make him aware of. We should leave now before they start asking questions.”
The Sylvan guardian said nothing in response. With one last glance at her oblivious friend, the hero-in-training slipped into an alley and vanished from the scene.
Several blocks away, Serena Babbit strolled down the street to her house, chatting with her feline companion as it slinked atop a brick wall. A Rottweiler barked at her from one of the yards below her, but she ignored it.
“What’s bothering you?” Luna asked.
Serena didn’t answer and merely kept walking, lost in her thoughts. The cat cleared her throat.
“You’ll get used to the killing, I’m sure,” Luna said matter-of-factly. “That is what you're thinking about, isn’t it?”
“She was evil, right?” Serena said. “Like, no-question-about-it evil, right? Like, she wasn’t sapping people’s life force or whatever to feed her children back home?
“Covert operatives like the one you just vanquished today, saboteurs, assassins and the like, are covert for the simple reason that the very nature of their work is unspeakable. They are good at what they do, and they enjoy doing it. Your conscience should be clear.”
“Still…” Serena said, “I mean, I’ve wished people would just lay down and die before, but I never meant for it to actually happen. And that’s exactly what happened. I killed somebody with a thought.”
“Let’s go home and rest,” Luna said. “And we’ll think no more on the matter. We’ll practice your technique tomorrow.”
“So how’d I do?”
The cat stopped for a minute and looked at her. Asking that question, she could have been a student of the theater who’d caused all but one audience member to walk out on opening night.
“Terrible,” the cat said, walking on. “But you came through and no one was hurt, and that’s the important thing.”
“I just can’t believe I fought a monster and won!”
“I can’t believe you almost beat her by sobbing your brains out…"
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This series keeps getting better and better with each chapter! Again, the word choices were excellent and the flow was perfect. Your trademark sense of humor shows once again, in Luna's numerous cutting remarks and Artemis on the other end. Serena's hitting the pigeon brought a smile to my face because I could imagine her doing that! The attention to detail you give is one of the strongest points of your book, and I appreciate that.
Welcome !
