Silver Millennium Soldier
-11- Mercury Rising
by
Mike Macdonald
(Age: 27)
copyright 03-21-2006
Age Rating: 18 to 127
Mrs. Babbit was carrying her second load of laundry down the stairs when she thought she heard someone say her daughter’s name upstairs, immediately followed by the slam of a door. She poked her head back into the hallway and found Serena’s door closed, and it sounded like she was speaking to a friend on her phone in a very aggravated manner.
“Can’t I have a frickin’ break from this?” Serena's voice bounced through the door and down the hallway. “What’s my quota, one a week?”
Mrs. Babbit became dreadfully curious. There was a groan from Serena’s room and the sound of hustle and bustle, and moments later her daughter was bursting out the door, darting past her, nearly tumbling down the stairs, smacking against the wall when she reached the bottom, and arcing for the door.
“Sweetie-?” Mrs. Babbit began to say.
“I forgot about my after-school study group, I’ll be back later!” Serena shouted over her shoulder.
“But you just got back!” Mrs. Babbit said. "Let me drive you!"
“That’s okay, thanks, I can use the exercise!”
*********************
The Anderson homestead was pleasant to look at in the middle of the day, when the sun was high enough in the sky to scare off any dismal shadows on its walls and bring out a healthy green shine in the front lawn, and even more pleasant when a gentle breeze massaged the leaves of the great tree standing just outside Amy’s bedroom window. It was here that a curious white stray had its rendezvous with its jet black partner to watch the lonely girl busy herself with her studies.
“It’s been a very busy year,” Luna said with a sigh. “Hasn’t it? I believe this is the first time we’ve spoken face to face in four months.”
The white cat threw the black a warm smile, though his eyes were as coy as always.
“I’m touched that you kept track,” he said. “How’ve you been? Holding together?”
“This is hardly the time for small talk, Artemis. I was merely noting-”
Luna stopped when Artemis rolled his eyes and turned his attention once again to the black-haired girl sitting at her desktop computer. She was a fast typist; her fingers flickered across the keyboard like a spider on the run.
“Straight to business, like always.”
“Do stop saying that,” Luna said. “How can we be sure this is her?”
“Well, if worse comes to worse, Mina can always rewrite her memory of the talking cat that told fairy tales.”
“I’d just rather not waste any more time on wild goose chases.” Luna said as the girl finally noticed the animals watching her. “We can’t afford it.”
Amy’s face beamed through the glass and she waved at the cats.
“You’re on,” Artemis said as he stood to take his leave. “I’m gonna scout around town some more.”
“Don’t get caught,” Luna said, letting a little more concern show in her voice than she intended; it curled Artemis’s mouth into a tiny half-smile.
She diverted her gaze from this and continued. “Lord knows how many spies are looking for us. The sixty dead strays in the last few months were not the result of a city funded cleanup program.”
Artemis was in the middle of asking Luna just who she thought she was talking to when the window opened with a click and a faint squeak, and he was gone in a hurry as Amy Anderson welcomed the black cat into her home.
“Was that your boyfriend, Sweetie?” Amy said as Luna leapt over the sill.
Luna scarcely heard the white cat’s sour chuckle from the lawn as she entered the house. She ignored it with a twinge in her chest and sat on Amy’s cushy bed.
“I doodled some more today,” Amy said to the cat. “I drew a bunch of flowers having a tea party. Something like Through The Looking Glass. I got so into it I almost missed the lecture in Economics today.”
The girl’s presence was so very warm, despite the effort it seemed to take her to express much of anything even to a domestic animal. She was very kind, and humble, and proper in her manner and conduct, and her childlike fascination with anything she took a fancy to, be it art, literature, history, languages, cultures, or poetry, had a life of its own whenever Luna got the chance to see it. Sitting on that bed and seeing her again as she was, as she always was and probably always would be, cemented the cat’s certainty of her oldest ancestors.
The quiet eccentricities had survived generation after generation from their origin in the loving bosom of the Muse of the Frozen Gale; the last of those heroic demigods to fall the day the three worlds collapsed, protecting the royal family to her last agonized breath; a noble in the Sylvan court whose death was also the death of mercy and reason.
“But here I am rambling again,” Amy said. “You already know how I am about flights of fancy.”
The cat smiled, and her eyes appeared more human than Amy had yet seen.
“Yes,” the cat said. “And I’m thankful for that. Because it will make my story much easier for you to digest.”
As she expected, the girl simply sat and stared in shock, just like the other two did when they were first approached. When she seemed capable of taking in information again, which thankfully didn’t take long, Luna began to brief her on the situation.
***********************
Muddling over that day’s freshly printed student classwork papers, Miss Hilary Jones, her school day through as Computer Lab B’s supervisor and substitute CIS instructor, felt herself age another year out of pure emotional strain and shook her head with a silent groan, and mentally declared her amazement at the stupidity of Gaea’s children and wondered why she didn’t just extinguish them all for the sake of future generations.
She referred to the students as Gaea’s children because, unbeknownst to Crossroads High’s administrators, Hilary Jones wasn’t Hilary Jones by birth, or for that matter a native of Indiana, or for that matter a native of Earth. Her birthplace was a humid, subterranean jungle on the dark side of another large cosmic sphere now known to be destitute of all life, plant-life or otherwise.
She dropped the papers on her desk and sighed. While dreading her class immediately following lunch, another creature in sheep’s clothing came into the lab, to her surprise and disdain; a tall redhead in a black overcoat with the skin of an albino, and probably the eyesight, too, as she wore dark sunglasses even in the dim classroom. She was one of her employer’s boorish security team, approaching the instructor’s desk with a purposeful strut.
“Can you think of a better way to meet with me,” the teacher said, “than barging on campus like this?”
“Message from Master Jedite,” the albino said in a grating voice that hurt Hilary Jones's ears. “You’re pulling out now.”
Hilary Jones scoffed. “I’m not finished here.”
“Yes, you are. The Sylvan Guardian is active, and more of the Sylvan Elite will join her soon. You’ll have other assignments at a later date. Pack up what you have and meet Gemini at the crosswalk on Sunny Valley Drive.”
“I can’t stand those idiots. I’d rather travel alone.”
“Not with half a case of life force conduits, you won’t. Pack up and disappear. End of discussion.”
The woman was on her way out the door before she finished speaking. Hilary Jones forgot all about her simple students’ papers and propped her briefcase open on the desktop, its peculiar interior made up of rows and rows of four-inch plastic shafts, all empty. It looked like the briefcase-cum-display set of a Sharpie marker salesman. Hilary Jones took a screwdriver from her desk drawer and went to work. She scurried about the lab like a foraging rat, one with fantastic skills in computer repair as she removed the screws from the backs of each computer tower, pocketed the four-inch black crystal humming within, and put the machine back together in less than a minute. An ordinary human couldn’t have worked so quickly or perfectly, probably because an ordinary human didn’t have powerful green tendrils of all shapes and sizes to do all the work with no wrist bones to worry about.
She placed the last crystal in her briefcase when she heard a pair of voices in the hall louder than any of the others; two boys that she had in her morning class, Danny and Freddie, both primitive in intellect and manners and neither of which she liked in the least.
***************
The third boy, unheard from inside the lab, was Melvin, the object of Danny’s and Freddie’s torment. They’d ditched after-school basketball practice and followed him from the gym all the way to the computer building, inquiring in their own tasteful way about his day with the flighty pigtailed girl and the cute little Goth.
“It was a date, right, Melvin?” Danny said.
“Yeah, didja score? Huh?” Freddie said. “A little two-on-one action?”
Melvin never made eye contact but had grown very tired of the two boys by the time he reached the door to Computer Lab B, where he’d forgotten his history textbook.
“Don’t you guys have someplace else to go and bask in each other’s egos?"
Freddie laughed. “Is that what they call a burn in the computer lab?”
“Oh, Dude!” Danny said, nudging his friend. “He’s goin’ to hit on the hot substitute. Maybe we should watch the master at work!”
Melvin thought to say something further as he passed through the doorway without breaking stride and slammed right into Miss Hilary Jones, and his pursuers exploded into fits of laughter as they let themselves in to watch the poor boy further humiliate himself. When he recovered and stood gaping with his awkwardly mortified expression, and Miss Jones with her own, he realized he’d forced her to drop her briefcase and spill its contents onto the lab floor.
“Oh, geez, I’m sorry, Miss Jones-!” Melvin said before trailing off and staring in astonishment and horror at what lay at his feet, and the other two joined him.
The briefcase, laying wide open on the carpet, had wretched forth two dozen small black prisms shimmering with unearthly light, and each one hummed and moaned with the anguish of a human being. The light glinting off the surface and shining from the core of each one resembled a twisted caricature of a languishing face.
The door locked with a click. A long, slithering, plantlike tendril snaked down the wall from the door handle, across the carpet in front of the three boys, and up into the left sleeve of the CIS substitute’s jacket. Her skin was paler than usual and, maybe from the glowing computer monitors but it was hard to imagine how it was possible, greener than before.
“You idiot,” the thing before the boys hissed as its eyes took on the appearance of carnivorous jungle flowers. “Now I have to kill you.”
*********************
Sailor Moon’s casual stroll across Crossroads’ campus had attracted quite an audience of students and faculty alike, curious and a bit sardonic about her slightly dated dress and in awe of the shimmering glass pane hovering mere millimeters from her face. When she found the source of the hungry black ant-like pattern crawling all over the warmest room in the school on the building’s uppermost floor, and caught a glimpse of the awkwardly familiar thermal figure being constricted by another of a less awkward and more demonic nature, she stood for a moment and shook her head with a tisk-tisk.
“Oh, that is just pitiful,” she muttered.
A debonair voice came over her PDA’s speaker as she dismissed the visor with a thought, and all its ridiculous menus which she still couldn’t make any sense of.
“Sailor Moon, it’s Artemis,” the voice said. “Luna’s busy right now. What’s your progress?”
“What happened to ‘Goofball’?” she spat.
The cat chuckled. “Oh, sorry, would you prefer that? Did you find anything unusual at the school?”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure of that,” she said, trying to ignore the crowd gathering in the hallway. “But I’m gonna hafta break a door down just to make sure.”
“Try not to make a huge media event out of this one.”
“This shouldn’t be too much of a hassle,” she said, pocketing the PDA and brandishing her favorite little weapon, reeling back just like she’d practiced.
With a somewhat insincere apology to the school building, her Tiara Disc removed the door with incredible force, nearly flattening Danny and Freddie as they huddled together against the wall. A third of the school’s students and staff now stared in doe-eyed amazement, as did a terrified and half-asphyxiated Melvin, and an abysmal green-skinned plant woman of some kind. Its angry red and yellow irises bloomed and wilted like flowers, and its hair, a jungle of coarse green vines, writhed and twitched in primal fury.
“What the hell’re you supposed to be?” the dryad hissed, throwing the poor boy to the floor and causing Serena to wince.
“C’mon, man,” she said with an air of sympathy. “He gets enough of that in P.E.”
The computer’s dashing voice praised Sailor Moon for her professional conduct in times of crisis as the discus returned to its master’s side and orbited her head like a halo.
In an instant the tendrils of what used to be known as Miss Hilary Jones latched onto every part of the novice warrior’s anatomy they could easily get a hold of, intertwining and braiding within one another until she was unable to move from where she stood and the breath was squeezed from her chest. Just as quickly, the Ethereal Frisbee came to her aid, cutting machete-like through the vines and throwing the dryad into a fit of anguish. The two combatants backed away from each other and collapsed to their knees, the heroine to assure herself that she hadn’t swallowed any of her own ribs, the demon to regenerate its weapons as quickly as it could before the next bout. Serena was still short of breath as she watched the horrible process of her enemy’s severed appendages writhing and shriveling to nothing.
The former Miss Jones knew of her own ineptitude in any melee, being a diplomat and an agent of espionage. If she couldn’t corner and smother the girl, and this was pretty apparent with that obnoxiously deadly halo of hers fluttering about, then she had no alternative but to haphazardly flee the scene. Her newly sprouted vines immediately went to work growing and retracting with unspeakable finesse, snatching up her spilled treasures while her human appendages grabbed the fallen briefcase and tried desperately to pack everything together post-haste. The valkyrie, however, was too quick to react, and her brilliant flying weapon struck the creature across her face, and every hard-working vine flailed and dropped the life force conduits.
The crystals proved more fragile than the larger one Sailor Moon had encountered in the jewelry shop; her sprite-like tool was skipping about in an instant, going from one to the next to the next, shattering every last one and undoing the creature’s long, hard work for the last two weeks. The dryad expressed her appreciation for this with a bit of improvisation on her part; an airborne computer monitor missed Serena’s head by a hair and crashed to pieces against the wall next to the two cowering bullies. It turned out her vines made fine pitching arms.
The two conscious boys didn’t spend another moment in Computer Lab B that day, vanishing like jackrabbits.
The third, less-conscious boy didn't move a whole lot.
Proud of her innovative defensive maneuver, and probably in fight or flight mode at that point, the dryad grabbed the next monitor with her tendrils and sent it in her enemy’s general direction, and did the same with the next, forcing the Sylvan Guardian to duck for cover behind the lab’s desks or otherwise leap for her life. The monster’s attacks grew more aggressive as her primal instincts took over. Another monitor, much faster than the last, shattered to bits of glass and silicon against the girl’s protective disc. Yet another just missed her head and crashed through a window, grabbing the attention of the passers-by outside as it exploded on the sidewalk three floors below.
One such pedestrian, a tall red-haired woman with sunshades, took particular interest and stared with curiosity and amusement from across the street. As she expected, this was immediately followed by the alarmed beeping of her digital phone, specifically the conference line, from operative Daphne whom she’d just spoken to ten minutes prior. She answered along with her teammates stationed all over Sunny Valley.
“I’ve got a problem here at the school and I need assistance! Somebody better get their asses over here now!”
The cool voice of the team captain acknowledged the call. “Understood, Daphne. Anyone on that side of town, please respond.”
“I got it,” Kyulene said without hesitation, snapping her phone shut and darting across the street.
On the third floor of Crossroads High, the Goofball’s PDA asked in a dashing voice how she was faring in the battle against the dryad. She requested a Time-Out as her enemy’s loyal snakelike slaves neatly removed the steel leg of a nearby desk, twisting it free from the rest of the frame to keep one end sharp. Serena wasn’t prepared for her sudden rush-attack, and stumbled only a tiny bit, but just enough to give her enemy the split-second opening she needed for a clean blow to the ribs. But the steel weapon didn’t hit its mark, blocked by a stunning white cane appearing out of thin air; the dryad’s attack was parried and countered with a heavy kick to the chest that reeled the creature back over a desk and onto the floor. The cane and the leg which followed its appearance were both connected to a striking young fellow Serena immediately recognized with a sudden murmur of her heart and a gasp from her chest; her Dumas-esque guardian angel had saved her life for the second time.
He gave the object of his infatuation a charming smile and a wink.
“Don’t mind me,” he laughed, stepping aside. “Please continue.”
The dryad recovered quickly and sent her last computer monitor his way with her regards. The gent swiftly drew a three-foot blade from his cane and halved the monitor in midair; both pieces flew harmlessly past him and clattered to the floor as the dryad watched in stunned silence. The gent then sat on a nearby desk with his legs crossed and his arms folded, observing like a prince enjoying a floorshow.
Sailor Moon then took her turn to improvise: With a monitor cord in hand, unplugged from its power strip and wound around her back hand snugly, one trip around her head gave her unusual flail more than enough momentum to floor her opponent upon release. The dryad failed to catch the cumbersome object with her hands or her vines where she succeeded with the tender spot between her eyes. Serena took a moment to catch her breath while the masked gentleman clapped, prompting several members of her growing audience to join him with a few hoots and cheers. She almost didn’t hear her PDA speaking to her over the racket.
“Sailor Moon?” Artemis said. “Hello? You alive over there?”
“Scratch that last bit, Artemis,” Moon replied, still a bit winded from the battle. “I think I got it under control.”
The back wall exploded in a storm of glass, drywall, and concrete, so great in force that the nearest desks were twisted like tinfoil and splintered like brittle autumn leaves, and with a deafening howl that drowned out the terrified screams of the onlookers inside and outside the building. The core of the awful hurricane took the hapless heroine in its talons and carried her through the opposite wall with yet another musty explosion, into the scream-filled hallway, and against a painful metal wall of lockers, many thankfully padded with textbooks if that might have made any difference to Sailor Moon when she was nearly embedded in them. She barely recovered her rattled senses when a face appeared to loom in hers, more horrible and bestial than her previous enemy’s. Its mouth, ear-to-ear with dagger-like teeth, wore a sneer parallel to the gleaming look of malice in it animal-like yellow eyes. A flaring monolith of a snout spat a hot wave of steam into her face like a blood-caked exhaust pipe, followed by a monstrous voice like gravestones being ground under a steamroller.
“Hi, there,” the monster croaked.
“Can you guys stop greeting me like this?” Moon cried.
The she-beast had a bat-like wingspan of fifteen feet, and she had to lower these great devices to address her colleague, staggering to her feet in the computer lab.
“Daphne, get out of here,” Kyulene said. “Your work is done. I’ll handle this.”
“Gladly,” the dryad said with great relief, already slipping through an air vent in Lab B’s upper wall, dodging two of the gent’s airborne roses in her escape.
The she-beast’s hungry eyes scrutinized the frozen bystanders, then returned to the victim clutched in her talons. The colossal maw sneered again.
“No fighting allowed in school,” Kyulene said. “Let’s take it outside.”
Like a ragdoll, Sailor Moon was flung back through the two new doorways Kyulene had installed for the school. The helpless young heroine bounced off the hood of a Cadillac parallel parked just outside the school fence, and sprawled upon the pavement with a series of painful squeaks. She tried desperately to get back on her feet. She heard the gent call her name, or at least her formal name given her by the cat. That stupid mangy cat. This was her fault.
Another horrible screech. She was draped in shadow in an instant. She was on her feet again, but she couldn’t see clearly. She couldn’t focus with her disk. A sudden pain burst into her forehead. The monster was directly above her, and the sun was blinding her to make matters worse.
Another explosion inside her head, and another in her chest, and another, and another. The monster was directly overhead, just out of her reach, but swooping in and out. Another pair of blows to the chest. She was kicking her. Another to the face. Moon’s temper was gone, and her sight had finally cleared enough to get a bead on her opponent, but the she-beast throttled her so relentlessly she couldn’t gather her coordination enough to fight back effectively. Her PDA was inquiring after her health.
“Where’s my backup, man?” she said in a daze. “Thought I had backup-?”
Sailor Moon was then a snake, snatched up in the talons of a mother hawk; it slammed its prey onto the Cadillac’s hood and into its doors, hoping to breach the mail shirt protecting her chest cavity. She was airborne again, crashing into the soda machine across the street. She was outside the school supply store next door to the Burger King. Little good geography did her now.
She barely had the strength to move, let alone get up. A few of the kids in the school were cheering her on in worried tones. The she-beast was on the ground now, dead ahead of her, stalking toward her, making a ghastly chuttering sound. Probably laughter, or her ghastly equivalent to.
Screeching tires; a reckless driver had happened on the scene and was slamming on his brakes upon his first glimpse of the horror in the road in front of him, and the screeching stopped as the sound barrier tore violently open. All the windows for a two block radius burst in showers of glass dust, people near the fight collapsed to the floor and slid away several feet, and the speeding car was sailing through the air like a pebble, and slamming a block away, to everyone’s horror, into the side of a passing schoolbus on its way to pick up the kindergartners. More tires screeching as the great yellow animal howled in pain and veered off the road into someone’s front yard.
Then police sirens filled the air. Three squad cars arrived at the scene on either end of the road where Sailor Moon tried again to stand and face her enemy, the she-beast now amusing herself with the meddling humans. The sound barrier ripped open again to fling the squad cars on the right back the way they came, and Moon noted the source of this phenomenon was the ungodly vocal chords of her opponent. Kyulene turned to the other set of toy cars and swatted them away just as easily with another swipe of her monstrous voice.
It was a perfect nightmare, this creature. Sailor Moon had no hope of beating her. She knew this as Kyulene remembered her first victim and casually strolled towards her. Moon’s senses had at least recovered enough to tell her she was sticky with Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew.
“Your athleticism is pathetic,” Kyulene said. “I was told to fear you. That you were some kind of all-powerful super soldier. You’re a god damn creampuff.”
She tried to stand again, but the monster woman took her in her talons and threw her to the pavement. She salivated like a starving canine and coveted one of Serena’s thighs with her claws.
She couldn’t beat her. Not in a million years. The air grew cold as a breeze swept gently over the pair of them with the tranquility of the grave.
Not in a million years, Serena thought with finality and a face full of tears.
“You know,” the she-beast said with a smile, as if that horrendous mouth could help it, “I just remembered I skipped breakfast today. I think you might manage to tide me over ‘til dinner.”
Serena fought the urge to burst into tears as the monster’s teeth protruded like that of a shark, nearly doubling in length. The breeze picked up and grew even colder, like winter had come over half a year early, and even the dancing of snowflakes could be heard on the wind’s breath.
Kyulene noticed the sound, too, and knew the direction of its origin better than any human ever could, having used her hearing in place of her sight and smell since childhood. The she-beast’s curious gaze, as she pivoted one-eighty degrees toward the source of the sound and the breeze, caught a glimpse of the most astounding thing she’d ever seen: a young pixie in colors and fashion identical to the one she now pinned mercilessly to the asphalt, soaring along a self-sustaining and ever-growing path of solid ice like a whelp would irresponsibly down a playground slide, and the path appeared to originate from another part of the city entirely. Both the she-beast and her victim had only a moment’s view of this image before the incredible little creature left its exhilarating ride in a graceful pirouette and put Kyulene on the ground with a flying spin-kick to the jaw.
Sailor Moon watched, completely forgetting where she was at the moment, as this new player’s ice trail continued without her and curled up at the end to receive its creator in a clumsily executed harlequin backflip onto her feet. By the time she’d landed, her means of transportation had vaporized into thin air, leaving only a trail of mist behind.
She was a girl around Sailor Moon's age, with short, dark hair, and a pretty face wearing a darling look of concern for the weary heroine she’d just rescued. She did, indeed, wear an identical getup to her own.
“I’m sorry,” Amy said. “Am I late?”
Moon stood up immediately, juggling her confusion between the rapidly recovering threat with the fifteen foot wingspan and the arrival of her newest friend in the same gaudy armor she was forced to wear. Amy saluted timidly.
“Sailor Mercury, the Muse of the Frozen Gale, at your service,” she said, then when this failed to get a reaction from either party, she smiled sheepishly and remarked, “You called for backup, right?”
Sailor Moon made the connection instantly and resumed her panicked state.
“What took you so long? I’m getting murdered here!”
“I was practicing,” Mercury said. “I didn’t want to enter the field without knowing what I was doing.”
Kyulene graciously said, “Oh, well, allow me to fill you in on the situation, then,” shortly before baring her fangs and lunging, wings at full-span, at her newly upgraded two-course meal.
The new girl threw her arms out in what appeared to be a defensive combat stance, and the next thing Kyulene knew her inadequate eyesight, already retarded by the blinding midday sun, was rendered completely useless as an explosive cloud of thick, frigid mist enveloped her and gave her a perfect view of the interior of a cumulonimbus cloud.
“What’d you do?” Moon asked her friend. The icy fog enveloped them as well, but their EMS visors made the battleground as clear to their eyes as a summer’s day.
“Defensive maneuver,” Amy said softly. “She’s blinded.”
The beast half-laughed, half-snarled, and broke another window somewhere nearby.
“I’m blind to begin with, Girl!” Kyulene hissed. “Your tender little heartbeats are all I need to hunt you down and rip you to pieces!”
The she-beast tracked them as though the fog wasn’t even there and lunged with a howl at their location, their terrified pulses pinpointing them as clearly as if she were looking directly at them. Sailor Moon turned to run. Mercury winced with a squeak, but held her ground as her enemy locked on to her throat and swept in for the kill.
The sound barrier tore open in agony once more with the bat creature’s shrill cry. Certain that the threat was no more, the cloud of mist dissipated, and one or two pedestrians gasped in surprise as Mercury revealed a grand example of her power; while Kyulene knew perfectly well where her prey stood in the fog, the six-foot frost pike in Mercury's arms, summoned with but a thought, took her completely by surprise. The creature coughed and fell limp, hissing in defeat and awaiting death’s cold embrace from the frozen lance piercing her torso. The wound crystallized, and a wave of ice, like a miniature glacier, swiftly began to envelop the bat-woman, sweeping over her limbs and crawling up her shoulders to her grimacing face.
Mercury stammered, “I’m…I’m sorry…”
Kyulene cursed the girl to the darkest pits of the abyss with her gaze as the mystic ice swallowed her scowl. Her final breath came out in a small white cloud, and she remained still as a statue.
The entire city was quiet for a long time as Sailor Moon and her new partner embraced and exchanged groans of exhaustion.
“Anything broken?” Mercury asked.
“No,” Moon said with little confidence. “You look…uh…really silly.”
Mercury laughed through the tears forming in her eyes. “Thanks. I gotta take you on that ice slide sometime! I did it all the way here and it was such a trip!”
Her face remained confident and didn’t grimace as one on the verge of crying so often did, but her basset hound eyes were more rattled and tortured than Moon had seen before. Amy Anderson had never hurt another creature in all her life. Even without knowing her exact thoughts, Moon saw them in her wet eyes and in the hands which held each other to keep from trembling in front of everyone. Moon embraced her friend again and planted a tender kiss on her cheek to calm the storm brewing in her face, and she succeeded.
“I’m glad you showed up when you did,” she said, the screaming muscles in her back suddenly apparent. “I was running out of ideas. You saved my bacon.”
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Mercury said after a deep breath.
“I didn’t say that. I’m just still alive. Which reminds me…”
********************
Poor battered Melvin awoke to a rough shaking and a slap or two to the face, and some stifled giggling from voices he didn’t recognize. The darkness cleared away to reveal a fuzzy haze of indiscernible shapes smooshed into each other and moving about like amoebas, and then the details finally set in and he realized he was surrounded by concerned faces. A few snickering ones, too.
The face immediately before him, staring down into his not three inches away, was a dream come true: A golden goddess with sky blue eyes hovered over him, asking questions in some strange language he couldn’t comprehend, but with the most soothing voice the heavens could offer him.
And as he sat up he did something completely regrettable, and the voices around him exploded with laughter and crude hollers.
***********************
Miss Hilary Jones, freshly relocated to the first floor of Crossroads High School, brushed her coat and fixed her hair as she walked briskly to one of the school’s less often used side-entrances for her discreet departure. Her head ached with the pressure of the ocean’s depths, and not just because of all the things that she’d stopped in midair with it that day.
The operation had certain flaws that required its termination, due to several unforeseen complications, and His Excellency, the Colonel, was not too proud to sacrifice his less effective projects and begin others in their place, the busy and sleepless genius that he was. This operation was a failure on account of powers outside of her control, but now her own incompetence was also to blame. A satisfactory profit had been lost. She would be discredited, possibly detained or put out of service altogether. It would be years before she would get an opportunity to redeem herself. Then again, His Excellency was a shrewd and ruthless director, but he wasn’t beyond all reason, or forgiveness.
Hilary Jones stopped in her tracks. Not of her own accord; a brief flash, like sunlight, swam across her line of vision, directly in front of her face, and in the next moment she was in a state of paralysis with her arms bound by a sunray-link whip like Houdini, lashing and crisscrossing over her shoulders and chest and abdomen in a strangling harness. From the front, over her heart, the chain trailed off in one lone strand, into the vigilant gauntlet of a fair young woman, dressed in the legendary mythril armor of her master’s only fear save the wrath of Her Majesty. Her hair draped in long spools of golden silk, gleaming in the light of her ominous weapon. Her eyes were an Arctic blue, and fixed upon Hilary Jones in a manner that scared her beyond words. She leaned casually against the wall by the door from which she’d just exited.
“Hope you’re not in a hurry,” the girl said flatly.
“I have a bus to catch,” the dryad said.
The girl’s chain groped another part of the dark world agent’s nervous system with an unbearable needle-like touch and sent her into a shuddering fit.
“You’re missing it.”
She never quite fully understood what happened in those four seconds the moment it was happening, as the devilish young woman, through her devilish implement, probed and drilled into the crevices of her mind and pulled something out with the precision of a master surgeon. Colonel Jedite shot past her eyes; His purpose on earth; The harvesting of life force at the whim of her queen, Beryl of the House of Metallia; Her abandoned operation and recent defeat; The successful operations based in Sunny Valley Hospital and Queen Anne’s Bath and Body Shop. Before she knew it, it was over. The girl's eyes returned to the present and, still holding the chain like a pet’s leash, took her leave of the dryad in the grimmest sense.
“Danke,” she said with a yank.
In that final moment, Hilary Jones realized she had betrayed her master in a manner beyond her control. She hadn’t the time for any other thoughts as the chain of hellfire sank its teeth into her flesh and bone and left her in a dozen pieces to wilt in the sun.
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It has been awhile, Mike. This is another solid chapter to your book in every aspect. The grammar and word choice are nothing short of excellent: the effective word choice has always been one of the strongest aspects of your book. I also like the descriptions that you lavish upon the characters: these descriptions may seem excessive to some, but to others they are worth their weight in gold. They give the characters a distinct personality instead of them merely bleeding into one another.
I also like the length of the chapters. Instead of rushing the beginning to make room for the middle and end, you balance the length of all the parts to make it solid all the way through. What else can be said for this solid chapter? I know you want some criticism, so here goes...
If there is any real criticism to be offered here, perhaps you could have included a postmortem from the Dark Moon general's side. Maybe this was one of the failures that helped sink Jedite's ship, or was this another leader's project? It has been awhile... I have to read the others. I know that criticism may seem petty, but take it as a testament to quality, my friend!
Welcome !
