Chapter 2: The Big Bang
1st Dimension: Silver Millennium (pre-Dark Kingdom invasion)
Unfortunately, it had been necessary for the Inners and the Shittenou to part their respective ways after breakfast. Ami had headed for her first meeting of the day, located in the south wing of the palace. Everything had gone downhill from there. Although it had been a lovely start to the day, it seemed that Ami was doomed to meet frustration after frustration.
The Uranian ambassador refused to come to terms with the fact that no matter how much he argued, Uranus was not going to get special preference regarding the shipping of Mercurian stingray, which was considered a delicacy. It was a very expensive delicacy, and the smell and sight of it cooked made Ami nauseous. A museum curator from Mars forcibly requested the removal of several Martian artifacts from the Lunari museums, Venus reported the need for a rare piece of equipment to replace a broken section of one of their teleportation stations...and the most awkward situation of all was when a Saturnine noble refused to compromise unless she agreed to marry him.
He had gone down on his knees in the middle of the Pearl Conference Room (south wing, room one hundred and twelve, exactly twenty two kilometers from the center of the palace) and proposed to her. She didn't know when her cheeks had been redder, but she tried to handle the situation with much more dignity than she felt she had left. The only good thing about the incident was that Zoisite wasn't there. Despite the fact that their relationship was supposed to be nonexistent and that the entire court knew about it anyway (it was inappropriate for the Saturnine duke to have proposed to a woman who was not unattached), the rash general would probably have leapt from his seat and throttled him.
Mina and ringing of the noon bell had relieved Ami of her duties for the morning, and it was with undisguised gratitude that she left for the royal university. She had taken many classes there, and she liked dining with the professors. They always had interesting developments to discuss (usually scientific and technological), and it was highly unlikely that any of them would ask her hand in marriage. Lunch was enjoyable and informative, and she was able to unwind a bit from her stressful morning.
The ruthless commander in Mina had declared an extra training session for two of them that afternoon (Rei would be in charge of the communications' port and Lita at the shuttle landing station), so Ami was about to change from her formal court dress to a white shirt and tan slacks when she was summoned by one of the technicians. The pet project of one of the university's oldest (and most eccentric) professors had something to do with portals, teleportation, and time traveling. Ami had warned them that time traveling was Pluto's domain, but they assured her that they would check with the senshi of Time when the machine was perfected. She wasn't quite sure she wanted to have anything do with the questionable contraption, but the technician looked so overworked and perplexed that she agreed.
As she followed the young redhead to the room, Ami looked down at her elaborate sapphire gown and shook her head. The girl explained, with a shy smile, that it was only a matter of replacing this converter with that device and that ordinarily, she would have handled it, but her supervisor had said it was delicate work and told her to ask for help. Possibly the only intimidating feature about Ami was her title, and she was often investigating the newest procedures in the labs, so most of the workers there were familiar with her.
The technician left for her meager lunch break while Ami changed into the protective clothing she would need to work on the apparatus. Although the uniform looked plain, there were a lot of shielding mechanisms in the material. She smiled slightly as she looked down at herself: in the gray, long-sleeved shirt with its high collar and matching pants, she resembled a Shittenou–slightly. Of course their uniforms were more formal and had bright embroidery, but just thinking about Zoisite brought a smile to her face.
Within minutes, Ami was absorbed with the task at hand. She didn't notice the malfunctioning generator in the corner, whistling to itself unobtrusively, and she couldn't smell the noxious smoke through her mask. Her minicomputer beeped a quiet warning, but the machine she was fixing gave a deafening groan. She didn't notice a thing until smoke began obscuring her vision, and she coughed violently as she stumbled towards the door. Before she reached it, however, a loud explosion was heard, and all went black.
2nd Dimension: Tokyo, Present-Time (post-Silver Millennium fall) {Original Season}
"Why is that youma...throwing clocks at us?"
"That's a very good question, Lita. I don't know," Rei replied as she pulled out her transformation wand, "but it's disturbing."
"I'll say," Venus muttered under her breath, watching screaming pedestrians run from the giant clocks that were smashing into the pavement. "Ready, Mars?"
"Aren't we missing someone?" Jupiter interjected.
Sailor Moon made the scene just then, huffing and puffing as she ran up to them. "Sorry I'm late!!" she chirped. "Wow, is it just me, or is–"
"–that youma throwing big clocks around? No, meatball head; for once, you're not in dreamworld."
She stuck her tongue out at the raven-haired senshi. "That wasn't what I was going to say, Rei! But now that you mention it, those clocks look really deranged. They don't even have numbers on them! I was going to say, though, that Ami's late!"
The other three sailors turned to where they expected the last member of their team to be and shared an incredulous look. It was so easy to overlook her sometimes: she was so quiet, but she was always in the right place at the right time. They had just assumed she would be there, as usual.
Decidedly, Jupiter said, "She's probably still with Greg. Let's leave them alone and go and trash this thing!"
Venus sweatdropped. "Okay..you guys go ahead and I'll contact Ami. If she's not with Greg, which is more than likely, she should be here. And if she's really with Greg, that's no excuse. We need her here. Anyway, if I was her, I'd want to be rescued from Greg."
"Mina!"
"What??" she shrugged, an innocent expression on her face. "He's sort of...dull. He's nice. But dull. Ami needs something in her life to make it exciting, and Greg's not doing it."
Just then, a shout made all four them swerve around, and they saw Mercury running towards them, holding her supercomputer in one hand and trying to activate her visor with the other. The youma also saw her, and the other senshi's attacks were too late to stop the humongous clock headed her way. It swallowed her up in the dark, swirling depths of its eerily blank face. Almost immediately, a burst of light swelled up and shot outwards with a sound like a shot, blinding all those present. When the light faded, all sign of Sailor Mercury and the youma had disappeared...
3rd Dimension: Present-Time (post-second Dark Kingdom invasion) {Season R}
Ami resisted the urge to throw her recently-reclaimed textbook across the room. She had just survived a day of hell, and now her communicator was beeping?! Taking a deep breath to calm herself down, she waited until she was absolutely sure she wouldn't go berserk on whichever unlucky victim...friend...was alerting her.
Surprisingly enough, it wasn't her communicator that was making that infernal noise–it was her supercomputer. Ami frowned as she picked it up and inspected it carefully. She hadn't known it could make sounds...she wished she knew more about the device.
The screen began glowing blue as it sensed her touch, and a message was scrawled across the screen: Space and time distortion. Caution: disruption likely.
‘Space and time distortion?' she wondered. She understood the time part...somewhat. But the space? Did that apply to distance or the actual universe they were in? And what exactly did "disruption likely" mean? The Mercury senshi's blue eyes were narrowed in thought as she looked pensively at the minicomputer.
Flashing red text caught her eye, and she focused again upon the screen, which now read: Location – Juuban park... It went on to give her the exact coordinates of the park on a small map, but Ami didn't need them. She hadn't lived her entire life in Juuban, where almost everything was in walking distance, to not know where the district's only park was.
She didn't bother leaving a note for her mother explaining that she had gone it. It seemed probable that her mother wouldn't even be back by the time Ami returned from checking out the disturbance. She was halfway down a flight of stairs when she recalled, belatedly, that she had left her communicator on her night table.
About to turn back to retrieve it, Ami's attention was drawn to louder beeping sounds her computer was emitting. It seemed that the matter had become more urgent; the space/time continuum was getting larger by the minute. Her footsteps pounded loudly in the stairwell, and she raced outside, her short hair bouncing in agitation.
She was trying not to run into any people, but all of a sudden, a large solidness planted itself in her path. She was about to go around it when a projection of that solid form extended with frightening speed to grab her arm. Ami was halted in her path, and when she could make out the details of her delayer's face, she glared at him. "I don't have time to deal with you now, Zach!"
As she shoved him aside and continued along in a mad rush, he stared after her with a dazed smile. "She called me Zach," he remarked to no one in particular, a note of wonderment in his voice. When he remembered to breathe again, he also recovered some of his sense. ‘I better go see what she's up to.' Zachary followed her but at a more sedate speed.
Bemusedly, he thought to himself, ‘Ami's changed a lot from the Silver Millennium. She was never this...temperamental. Or in such a rush.' Of course, Zachary Crystal of the present day and General Zoisite of the past had conveniently forgotten that during their quarrels, Ami had been as meek as mountain lion. She defended her values, her beliefs, and those she loved with all her heart–and it didn't heart that the arguments of her rational mind were often flawless.
There was no room for hesitation or shyness when one was a senshi. Insecurity always played a role off the battlefield–for any warrior–but Mercury had always been able to present a bold face when she was needed as a protector of the peace.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ami reached the park, still in civilian form, and halted when she noticed the large ripple of space. It looked slightly like the distortion of air around a fire...only intensified about twenty times. The other problem was the fact that there was no fire. She rubbed her eyes to make sure they weren't playing tricks on her–was it time to get contacts? The smear of air resembled a tall oval in shape, about the size of an old-fashioned, full-length mirror.
Against her better judgement, she remained untransformed and reached out a hand, as if mesmerized, to touch the oval. The transparency quivered, and blue shimmers began to color the air. However, the first sensation she'd noticed had been one of extreme cold. She tried to yank her hand back immediately, but it seemed to be stuck. She stood there panicking for a few seconds, and her anxiety only increased when she saw that her hand was becoming clear as crystal and lit with blue sparkles, like the rest of the oval.
Her frenzied struggle to pull her arm free became more and more difficult, and Ami realized, all of a sudden, that she was being sucked into the circle of air. She had no time to cry out before she disappeared completely from sight; her eyes closed against the brilliant light as she hurtled through time and space to a dimension parallel to hers...one that she was never supposed to have intersected.
4th Dimension: Alternate Universe (post-fall of Silver Millennium, before the first strike of the restored Dark Kingdom)
Sapphire left the throne room by a more conventional means: teleporting was useful, but it was flashy and took energy. She preferred to use her own two feet to get where she needed–unlike Zoisite, who could never be bothered to do anything that would mess up his perfect hair. Her lips compressed at the thought of the infuriating general.
Their problems had begun when Sapphire, newly-awoken in the Dark Kingdom without any memory of her life before, had been under Zoisite's wing. He hadn't been nice–nothing in the Dark Kingdom was nice–but there was something that had begun to draw her to him. And why not? She could admit his handsomeness...on her good days...and his skill...when he wasn't throwing about his magic like there was no tomorrow...and his charm–but that was rarest of all, because Sapphire's view was that most of the time, he acted like a complete ass.
Her very, very slight inclination to him had been nipped in the bud when she had discovered that while he would hit on anything that had remotely feminine features or anatomy, he was completely intent upon ignoring her. Any of her attempts to get to know him had been coldly rebuked. A woman's pride is a dangerous thing to wound. Zoisite had been determined to keep his distance, and her defensive annoyance had led to rivalry and bitter anger.
Thinking about their early encounters made Sapphire dig her nails into her palms, and she sighed when she examined the red marks. Nothing and no one got to her–ever. Except General Zoisite. And she was damned if she was ever going to let him know that.
"Hello, Lieutenant," he said smoothly, appearing to float two feet above her.
She halted her tracks, and once she got over her initial surprise, she was irritated enough to hope that the microorganisms that proliferated in the dark, dank, low hallways of the Dark Kingdom would result in some kind of hair fungus. Sapphire smiled inwardly. She so hoped it would be ringworm. The mental image almost made her laugh, but she had enough control to suppress it. She just hoped the devious sparkle didn't show in her eyes. Because of her amusing thoughts, she was able to respond to his challenge coolly. "Good day, Zoisite. What may I do for you?"
"Tsk, tsk," he scolded, hovering along beside her. "I didn't expect such blatant insubordination from you, Sapphire. You should address me as ‘General.'"
Her fingers were itching to close around his neck and squeeze tightly, but Sapphire exercised her sizeable self-restraint by sticking them firmly into her pockets. In a dulcet tone, she replied, "If we're going to be working together, we should be on equal terms, wouldn't you say, General?"
He grimaced at the mention of their task and landed with a soft thump on the moss-covered ground next to her. She turned to smile at him, and he hid his nervousness as he met her stare for stare. Sapphire never smiled...and the thought was so frightening, it made his heart race. Or perhaps that was the startling...prettiness it had given to her face. ‘No!! No!! Completely off-track! Absolutely impossible!' Zoisite berated himself. ‘How could you have thought something like that?'
"You're losing your touch, Zoisite. A few months ago, you wouldn't have made any sound landing. Or perhaps you've been spending too much time in the air? If I were you, General, I'd make sure I spent enough time land-bound. Your fluttering is having a negative effect on your hair." Her smile was sweetly poisonous as she flicked a speck of imagined dust off her uniform and stalked off, leaving him behind.
Zoisite spent a few minutes fussing before his hand mirror, making sure not a hair was out of place before he intercepted her again. "You weren't going to go off without me, now, were you?" he asked with his most winning smile.
Sapphire wondered how long it would be before the urge to kill him became too strong for her to resist. Considering how annoying he was being (on a scale of one to ten, she rated him ten million), it would be less time than she'd originally thought. "Actually, the plan was for me to leave you in pieces after inflicting torture through dissection without anaesthesia, but if you have a more painful alternative, General, I'd be absolutely delighted to hear it."
She waited for the stunned look to spread across his face before her own words hit her. The color began draining from her face as she wondered what had possessed her to say such a thing out loud... He was one of Beryl's highly-esteemed generals. She was a lowly lieutenant who no one trusted. The queen seemed to hate her and her three comrades. Would she end up dying–or worse–because of her inability to hold her tongue?? Sapphire held her breath, but to her immense surprise, Zoisite laughed uproariously.
When he got himself under control, he grasped her hand in his. It was unusually warm for a Dark Kingdom dweller, where everything was cold and wet, and he was wearing gloves. The color raced back into her cheeks as she looked straight into his eyes. Why hadn't she ever noticed how green his eyes were?
His voice held a hint of dry humor as he drawled, "So the score is now Sapphire one, Zoisite nothing, isn't it? I commend you, my dear lieutenant."
He continued to hold her hand–and her eyes–as he continued, "Although I wouldn't suggest that you don't try your luck with the other Shittenou. They don't have the same sense of humor we seem to share. Besides...I wouldn't want any of them to suddenly realize, as I just have, how attractive you can be when you're riled up. I like a woman with spirit, Sapphire."
For her part, she was beginning to feel unsettled. Very unsettled. The ease and laziness in the long lines of his form belied the lithe agility she knew resided there. Zoisite was dangerous, and it wasn't just because of his fighting skills–he was looking at her with an almost predatory look on his face, and she drew her fingers from his hold quickly.
Sapphire began to walk more rapidly, trying to increase the distance between them, but he kept up with her easily. She cursed the shortness of her legs. Just as she reached her room, Zoisite slipped ahead of her so that he blocked the entranceway. The blue-haired woman glowered at him crossly and crossed her arms. "Are you planning to move anytime soon?" she asked.
Thoughtfully, he said, "Well...if I said no, what would you do about it?"
Making a frustrated sound in the back of her throat, Sapphire turned on her heel and stalked away. She could head for Ruby's quarters. The only person Ruby hated more than Zoisite was Jadeite, and if Zoisite liked women with spirit, he could try hitting on Ruby. The end result would probably be her hitting him...
"We're not finished, Sapphire."
She turned around, resentment plain on her face. "Ask me if I care, Zoisite."
He strode up to her and pinned her against the wall in a fluid movement so fast that it frightened her. Her eyes were huge as she stared up at him, the shadows turning their usual medium blue to midnight darkness. Silkily, he said, "When I tell you we haven't concluded business, Sapphire, you don't walk away from me. You've been in the Dark Kingdom long enough–learn your lesson soon or you might have it taught to you in a way you might not like. Understand my meaning?"
She closed her eyes, and the dusky lashes fluttered upon her porcelain skin. He drew in a sharp breath, and she braced herself, waiting for his blow. Topaz could probably have turned the situation to her advantage. Ruby would have socked him by now. Emerald's views on egotistical chauvinists would have blistered her ears.
When nothing happened, Sapphire opened her eyes cautiously. Neither of them moved a muscle, and it seemed like time had frozen–for a split second. Zoisite released her and strode away without another word. She sagged against the wall in relief, her knees going weak. She didn't notice as her support started to give way. Walls tended to be spongy, not solid, in the Dark Kingdom. He had shocked her twice in one day, and she had only surprised him once. Another time, she would think of proper retaliation. But for now...
‘Certain areas of the Dark Kingdom tend to...shift around. Watch your step, Sapphire.' She bit her lip at the memory. Why was did it have to be his voice, mocking and arrogant, in her mind?
‘Things are very unstable here. Our time and space overlap with parallel dimensions, Sapphire. Be careful.' She smiled at that, not noticing that the inky darkness around her was oozing and contracting. It was strange that basically the same thing said in a different tone of voice by a different person was much more reassuring. They were Topaz's words, said in her high, sweet voice.
Sapphire began feeling sleepy, and her eyelids began drooping shut. She realized something was going wrong when she struggled to stay awake. Her arms flailed uselessly, and when her eyes opened at last, it appeared that she was about to impact a painfully solid plane. The resounding bang rang in her ears shrilly, and the building pressure inside her head finally became too much: she fell into uneasy unconsciousness.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AN: *grins* You don't get to find out who goes where until next chapter...oh, right. I was supposed to clear up some confusion here ^^;; All the Amis are not going to one universe (but wow, universe 4 seems to be popular. It's my favorite too ^.~), they're all going to be switched. For example, Princess Ami could go to...the second universe, and another Ami would take her place and find herself in the Silver Millennium (ack!!)...and they all switch around.
It's been established so far that the first universe is sappy, the second goofy, the third...I like the third ^^ angsty, maybe...and the fourth is just plain fun. *grin*
But thank you everyone, for all the wonderful responses to the first chapter!! ^^ Thanks always, Yosh' :)
And expect the next chapter...when schoolwork is not actually ruling my life ^^;; Adios!!
~Ice
Return to: Mercury Revolutions
Infinite Ice
