Silver Millennium Soldier
-12- Dreaming Riddles
by
Mike Macdonald
(Age: 27)
copyright 04-04-2006
Age Rating: 18 to 127
Serena’s muscles sighed with relief as soon as her skin touched the hot bath water, and she slid in like a shrimp to cocktail sauce and marinated for an hour. The black stray sat atop the fuzzy toilet seat cover and watched the girl’s face flinch as her poor young mind swam in turmoil.
She nodded off for a bit in the bath, drifting off to another collage of visions. She revisited the day’s battle at the high school and felt her entire body groan even though she was barely conscious. Then the battle on that familiar part of the street bled into more fantastical surroundings, and she was rending the soldiers of the earth to pieces with a great silver and ivory claymore embroidered with gems and runes from point to hilt, her magic Frisbee friend orbiting her like a loyal moon and keeping her enemies at a safe striking distance. She was bleeding from several flesh wounds on her chest and legs, and felt a great stinging cut on the left side of her forehead oozing hot red over her eye. She was short of breath and outnumbered, and her heart pounded with adrenaline and fear.
Then she was at rest, in a beautiful field of grass, laughing with faces she’d never seen but somehow could place names with, even though the names never lingered long enough in her memory for her to recognize them, and felt a close familiarity with them as one did all childhood friends. They ate custard and fruit and watched soft, gray rabbits scamper about in the flowers which blanketed the landscape, a hundred feet from a modest but nonetheless astonishing villa, and Serena felt an empty, nagging pain like she pined for this beautiful sanctuary, and yet she feared it as well, for the colossal sense of unrest emanating from somewhere just over the nearby hills that seemed to go unnoticed by the tittering women. It was this last scenario which jarred her awake.
The battles and the fantastical locations had become a regular occurrence in her sleep for the last week, and though they disrupted her thoughts every day and scared her with fragments of long lost memories, she’d come to expect them much how she expected to see Molly or Melvin at school five days a week.
This last dream was not from an ancient time, or even an ancient place; it was an Italian countryside, and as she’d sat there laughing with total strangers not only had she recognized it, but she recalled it with vivid detail. She knew it as her home.
Serena had never once been to Italy. Was it a metaphor of some kind?
“You did well today,” Luna said.
Serena was startled by this, forgetting that she wasn’t alone. She dismissed the odd dream from her list of questions for the time being and resumed her usual snide demeanor.
“I got my ass kicked. I tried my best like you wanted, and if Mercury hadn’t shown up when she did I’d have bitten the big one. And the masked gent was there to lend a hand, too. So that’s two scratches on my Suck Board for this week.”
“You’re inexperienced,” the cat said in her most irritating matter-of-fact tone. “Over time, your finesse from the days of the Silver Millennium will return to you and you will no longer have to rely on fool’s luck to win the day. Perhaps a little martial training will awaken that knowledge for you.”
Serena closed her eyes again, but no further visions came. As it was, she could hardly recall the dream-visions she’d had moments earlier.
“I’m glad you’ve at least stopped condemning your duties,” Luna said.
“Every time I do it out loud I have to listen to your nagging.”
The cat seemed lost in her own thoughts. Serena wondered what had gone down at Amy’s house when Luna first came to her, and if she’d reacted the same way she did, herself.
“She’s a fast learner, God bless her,” Luna said as if reading her thoughts. “She will prove invaluable to you in the future, as an ally and as a friend. None were more loyal to you than she back in the day. She was the last of the Silver Millennium Soldiers to fall in that awful war.”
“I really don’t wanna think about this anymore tonight,” Serena said with a shift of her unhappy legs. “I just want to soak my bruises away and get some well-deserved sleep. Which’ll likely be filled with more of those wonderful broken images of my forgotten past you people were nice enough to give me. Thank you for that, by the way."
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” the cat said as she slinked out the bathroom door. “Artemis and I have much to discuss.”
She vanished from sight, leaving Serena in the heat and pain of one of the worst days she could remember. It was a miracle, what with that she-beast flinging her around so much, that she hadn’t broken anything. Maybe the pretty bathing suit everyone was calling “armor” had more useful properties than she realized.
Her dad shouted something unintelligible in the hallway and had to repeat himself.
“I said what’s this cat doing in here?”
“Keeping the rats away, I thought!” Serena hollered back.
“I don’t want it in here! Cats shed everywhere!”
Serena could hear her mother talking to someone in the kitchen with her silliest baby-talk voice. Dad freaked out again.
“Honey, don’t feed it! It’ll think it lives here!”
“Oh, it’s harmless, Dear,” Mom said.
*****************************
Elsewhere in Cherry Hill, another had just awoken from a series of dream-visions not unlike those of the Babbit girl. His name was Darien Shields, and he’d been suffering strange sleep-walking episodes for the last three weeks.
He blamed stress from his studies, or all the overtime he’d done at the office. He’d be in the course of a regular work day or breezing over the day’s required reading when something deep in the center of his brain would go off like a hydrogen bomb and consume the interior of his skull with a dizzying tingle. His eyesight would falter and his concentration crumble, and he’d have to apologize and leave the room to keep from making a scene.
That’s how it had gone down today. He was in the middle of a conversation with Andy and Lita at TGIFriday’s when this most recent attack struck and he excused himself from the table. He awoke an hour later to find himself on the rooftop of his apartment, which is where he almost always ended up when the episodes subsided, and this naturally began to worry him a little. The doctor prescribed some useless pills for ADHD and told him to call in another week.
The dreams were always the same, too. Something out of Phantom of the Opera or some other over-the-top theatrical amalgamation of pompous clothes and melodramatic song. He dreamt himself a Byronic Hero of the most ridiculous sense, draped in silk and velvet, spinning a gentleman’s cane about and flashing a libertine’s smile from the safety of a ballroom mask, probably singing and shouting cheesy lines straight from the pages of a smut novel. He would leap about the city streets until he came to a forlorn young goddess swimming in solitude, and with one red rose he’d win her heart, save her from some evil silhouette, then dance through the evening stars right into the girl’s bedroom and laugh the night away with poems, fresh fruit, more dancing, and other activities. The clock would strike one, and he would be sucked out of her arms and back into reality. Back to the roof of his apartment and the hum of distant traffic.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t stress. It was awful lonely in that apartment.
Darien yawned and rubbed his eyes, and brushed the soot from his pants as he stood. He’d call the crew and invite them for drinks at his place to make up for his sudden disappearance.
****************************
Melvin was welcomed to first hour the following day with most unexpected applause and openness from the whole class. Everyone clapped and cheered and hooted and hollered as he timidly waddled through the door, beaming as brightly as ever despite his attempts to hide his appreciation for all the attention.
Everyone applauded except Serena Babbit, anyway. All she did was glow the shade of a cherry blossom and hide her face in her arms, despite the ignorance of everyone around her. She tried to lose herself in the news bulletin on the classroom monitor, but the reporter only crushed her spirits further.
“-entire section of Crossroads High School closed off until further notice, and a school bus driver ended up in the hospital along with several policemen as a result of the fight. Parents are afraid to send their children to school. And what of Sailor Moon, herself? Does she simply appear as a harbinger of chaos? What is her story?”
“My life sucks ass,” Serena muttered to herself as Molly cheerfully offered Melvin a seat next to her own.
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