Imagine there was a puddle of water lying in the middle of an empty street in the middle of the day. Imagine there was a flash of light, with a strange blue after image. Imagine that the street was no longer empty, and a blue-suited man was standing where the puddle used to be. Then suddenly, without warning or reason, he doubles over until his head is inches from the ground. He adjusts his glasses and, in a voice brimming with intrigue, says, “Fascinating. This ground is made of an unusual compound.”
He raises his head, looks around and adjusts his glasses once again. “Given atmospheric conditions, the substance is unnatural. Artificial. Does not benefit biosphere, but could benefit intelligent beings for purposes of transportation efficiency. What other wonders does this world hold?”
Blue was not the sort to be restrained so easily as his friends appeared to believe. To think that Green alone could keep him contained? No, it was easy to outwit that brute. Especially with the others gone. All that Green had attempted to do was keep him ensnared within his room, standing guard by the door after placing a solid wall in front of the window. The fool failed to understand, you don’t imprison a genius with a lock: You imprison him by making him design his own lock.
How had he escaped? Trivial, with the aid of foresight and preparation. A simple duplication, set to automated action coupled with a recorded voice. Easy. By the time Green figured it out, Blue would have done enough analysis of this Place that they would be as well to let him finish. Upset? Irrational, yet it was the likeliest reaction from them. If only he could comprehend why they insisted on leaving him behind when he was the most perfectly suited at gathering information, understanding it and applying it towards their strategy! Why, if he wasn’t so curious about this particular Place, then he might well have gone about doing something about that right this very moment. A mind probe of some sort might do the job…
To begin his vital work he needed more data. A simple scanning device. Yes. Something that would cover a wider area… Yet it would certainly be detected by local public protectors, thus creating what others would consider a dilemma. How to keep the scanner from being noticed, recovered, and then used against them in the future? Blue saw it the other way around. How better to ascertain the strength of this Place’s warriors? And all he would have to use was an obsolete scanning device. A worthwhile sacrifice for the sake of significant gains.
Blue tilted his head and considered: Where might be a good location to place a scanner?
<hr>
Imagine a girl with short blue hair. Pretty, but a shy beauty. Introverted but brilliant. Imagine that she is walking down the street with her nose buried so deeply in a book you’d need a team of archaeologists to uncover her face. A cat rushes by her feet and she nimbly sidesteps, but in a way that’s sort of clumsy yet also sort of calculated if anyone took the time to really analyse it. And who would ever analyse something so trivial as the way in which a girl avoided a fleeing cat?
Ami Mizuno. She would analyse it, provided there existed a useful means to acquire comparable data. You never know what you might learn by looking at things. Because Ami was the kind of girl that loved to learn for the sake of learning. Oh, certainly! The more practical aspects of learning were also interesting to her, and she intended to apply her knowledge to follow in her mother’s footsteps, become a doctor, save people’s lives in ways that didn’t involve magic, summoning bubbles or the like.
If she had a problem, any problem at all, then… It would be a lack of actual love in her life. You see, Ami had friends. Good friends. People she loved to spend time with, talk to. That was great, but they were the kind of people she would never normally approach. In point of fact, Ami would never ever approach anyone with the intention of becoming their friend normally. She was the very model of a shy genius. A brilliant mind, but limited social talent.
Which is why - even though she was recognised for her beauty in school - she had never had a boyfriend. Oh, sure. She noticed that boys in her class had rather blatant crushes on her. But the idea that she would make the first move… Nope, not happening. And from the perspective of the boys, this was the smartest girl in Japan. You don’t ask out the smartest girl in Japan. You just <i>don’t do that</i>.
Well, it wasn’t as if she felt she was missing much. She’d probably meet someone later on in life once her career had settled down, she didn’t need to help save the world quite so often, wouldn’t have to worry about her boyfriend getting pulled into some monster attack or interrupting a date or what have you… So she actually didn’t mind that so much. From her point of view it worked out quite well. Besides. The way Minako went after boys and Makoto would routinely pull the “reminds me of my old boyfriend” routine, Ami was pretty sure she would just die if she started behaving like that in publi-
“Aaaaaargh!”
The book snapped shut and Ami’s gaze scanned the immediately surrounding area. Her brilliant brain had only been about 50% consciously devoted to her surroundings, but now it was all guns blazing, so to speak. She’d been Sailor Mercury long enough to recognise a cry for help when she heard one, and that was <i>definitely</i> a cry for help. She rushed to the corner of the nearest wall and flipped out a mirror to peer around the corner. Which is where she saw it. A bright blue monster that reminded her of the minotaur, a giant bipedal bull standing in the middle of the street.
“And me without the sword of Aegeus or even a ball of twine,” Ami mumbled while pulling out her transformation pen. “At least there isn’t a labyrinth to get lost in… Mercury Make Up! Power up!”
It was a funny thing how alien the change had seemed at first, but now it was simply second nature. The water washing all over her like a refreshing shower, her clothes melting away only to be replaced with her uniform, her armour, the symbol of Mercury’s wisdom (though strictly speaking if we were actually following mythology that should be speed, but that was a mythological discussion worth having another time) and an outfit far, far more daring than she would normally ever be seen dead in when out in public.
Mercury rushed out into the street just in time to prevent a rather unfortunate electrical worker from being gored where he stood, tackling him to the side while the beast rushed into a wall, easily knocking it over. She didn’t even have time to alert the others using her communicator.
“Th-thanks!” the man said. “That thing, it just appeared out of a puddle of water!”
“Mercury bubble blast!” she yelled. “More information,” she said, tugging the man back to his feet and urging him away from where they’d landed before the beast rushed them again. ”Quietly, quickly, please!”
“Not much to say,” the man whispered. Shock hadn’t quite set in for him yet, he hadn’t quite been overwhelmed by the experience. His mind hadn’t quite processed it yet, but she could sort of see it in his eyes. “There were complaints about surges from that power station, I came to take a look and then - Oh, by the gods, it appeared out of nowhere! Tossed my buddy across the street like he was a ragdoll.”
Well then. It didn’t exactly take a genius to work this one out. In point of fact, she was pretty sure most people could sleepwalk through this one. Someone put something in that power station, didn’t want it to be disturbed, left a blue mythological creature in place to keep it safe. She could hear it wandering around in the mist, grunting and breathing heavily. Heavy footsteps like jackhammers on the pavement. This thing wasn’t as big as she might expect from a minotaur, but it was just about as strong.
Question: How could she attack something like that? Her abilities were best used as support measures. Second question: If it appeared from a puddle, where was that puddle now? Her memory was perfect. She could return to a memory in an instant and pick up details she didn’t actually pay attention to the first time around. There had been no puddle there. Was it possible this thing was made of water? In which case, big mistake leaving it in charge of a power station… Especially given its tendency to rush things. It was as if she’d suddenly found herself in a video game and the designer had deliberately set up the scenario so she could beat it.
Which made her suspicious. She wasn’t normally suspicious, didn’t have the mindset for it. But she did play chess and that smelled like a trap. Stunk to high heaven. But as to the nature of the trap -
Mercury stopped. Her mist was thinning out far sooner than it should be. The creature had stopped grunting as well. But if that was the case then -
“Run!” she yelled to the engineer. “Keep people away from this street!”
As if to punctuate the point, a giant fist landed exactly where she’d been standing a moment ago. The mist thinned out some more, and Mercury’s assumption proved horribly correct. The creature was absorbing the water from her own mist attack to grow in size. Using her own power against her.
“On consideration, as far as pop culture is concerned, you would be more suited in red than blue,” Mercury said. The creature’s now massive faced turned towards her in the mist, catching her attention with another fact. Interesting… “Blue Minotaur!” she called. “Your days of terrorising local workmen trying to do their job are over! Now, you face the wisdom of Mercury!”
The creature roared and stared down at her from above. This situation was pretty bad. Her spells were all based on ice and water. If it grew in size whenever she hit it, then her options were pretty limited. All she could do for now was dispel her bubble blast, causing the mist the creature was using for its giant form to dissipate and leaving it at its normal size.
But this was not a solution, as she quickly found while diving to the side. It merely prevented the problem from being a truly terrible one. Tactically speaking it very much did appear as though she would have no choice but to fall into the enemy trap, assuming that calculation was correct: She would have to lure it into attacking the power station and hope the electricity took it out. Otherwise… If it was made of water, then why -
“Then why is in the form of a horned beast?” a man atop a nearby building asked, completing her thought. He was wearing a labcoat and sunglasses, which he adjusted slightly while looking at her. “Every problem has a solution,” the man continued. “When a beast confronts a beauty, then the data reveals: Beauty shall tend to triumph. Now, solve this problem.”
Of course. She saw it now! She could see it so very clearly. While water is blue, it is also mostly transparent. This minotaur isn’t actually made of water. That much water would still be transparent, and this beast was a solid blue colour. It wasn’t made of water at all, which meant that earlier when she -
“Mercury bubble blast!” she yelled, and the street again filled with mist. It had confused her before. Why hadn’t the creature damaged any of the surrounding buildings with its enhanced size? How had it been able to stand in this street when, if it were really as large as it had appeared it should have taken up the entire width with one single leg? Again she saw it appear to swell up in size as the mist dissipated, but this time instead of preparing to dodge away she did something completely unorthodox.
She ran into the mist. Right into the maw of the beast, so to speak. Then, upon finding the middle point she stuck out her hands again and cried out for the dispersal, sending the mist to wherever she had summoned it from in the first place.
And in the process leaving herself completely covered in blue… Whatever this was. Maybe not her best idea, but under the circumstances it was not as if she had anything in her possession that was large enough to act as a disturbing force for the transformation spell.
“Remarkable,” the man said, producing a tissue. He wiped the blue liquid from her cheek and stared at it intently. “You risked your own body to disrupt the transformation effect. Do you know what this is made of?”
“Do you?”
The man stared at her, tilted his head and stared at her quite intently. “I would like to perform an analysis in my laboratory. Perhaps it would be better if we shared notes? You will, of course, need to clean yourself of this mess… And it might be safest for you as well, in case of side effects.”
“I’m sorry,” Mercury said. “I don’t usually go places with people I just met. I don’t even know your name.”
The man adjusted his glasses and smirked. “Doctor Kimyō, though my friends call me Blue. It is a pleasure to meet you… Sailor Mercury, was it not?”
It was a strange thing, but somehow when she looked at this person Sailor Mercury couldn’t help but think of whenever Tuxedo Mask would keep showing up during their battles. He would give them moral support just when they needed it, provide a distraction or make an opening they could exploit to finish off the enemy once and for all. Then again, he had alternative motives for doing that at the time and -
And she appeared to be fainting, so the decision was rather out of her hands either way. The weird thing was, rather than seeing complete blackness as she lost consciousness instead all she saw was an endless sea of blue.
<hr>
It’s a little rough having to put up with the nickname “toughest thing alive in Juuban” sometimes, but then again she kind of lived up to it. Not because she went out of her way looking for fights, heaven forbid. It was just that she couldn’t stand watching bullies picking on -
“Aaaargh! Put me down! Put me doooown!”
Picking on people. Makoto rushed forward and saw a big guy, very big with muscles that had muscles on them and a face that, under other circumstances, she might think looked exactly like her boyfriend. He was holding up two guys half his size, one in each hand, and pinning them against the wall.
“Hey!” she called out, pounding her fist. Looked like she would have to get in a fight she didn’t want, and even a guy of this size didn’t intimidate her. She’d put down bigger. She’d put down badder. “Let them go!”
The guy turned towards her with a look of genuine surprise, like he didn’t even know he was doing something wrong. To his credit, he at least let the two go. They scurried off out of harm’s way, which was for the best. They’d been scared enough today, had filled their fear quota. No need to scar them any more than that.
“Looks like I have to teach you a lesson!” Makoto yelled, rushing forward to give him a punch in the abdomen - Which he caught, wrapping his big meaty hands around her fist and forcing the two of them into a pushing contest. Neither of them giving an inch.
“You fight like an old girlfriend of mine,” he said. “We used to spar like this all the time.”
“Hardly the time to flirt,” she replied, stomping on his foot. Hard. Then while he was distracted, headbutting him under the chin. That was a decision she regretted. Guy’s jaw felt like it was made of iron, but she wasn’t down for the count just because of that! Hell no! A quick little judo flip later and he was flat on his back. “I’m not the sort that likes bullies,” she sniffed.
“Bullies?” the other guy said, and if she didn’t know any better she’d say he was genuinely disappointed. “But those guys… I caught ’em trying to rob some students. I was just holding ’em until, um, the police? Yeah, until the police got here.”
“Right,” Makoto said. “Pull the other one, it’s got bells on. You still want a lesson?”
“Hey, I’m not here to fight or anything!” the guy replied. “I’m just looking for a buddy of mine. He played a really mean joke on me earlier on, and now I gotta track him down before he does something really stupid. Only trouble is… I’m kind of new to this Place. I dunno where I’m going.”
So this was the point where Makoto rewound a little and replayed the last few minutes in her mind. She caught this guy holding up two other smaller guys by the scruff of their necks, got into a fight with him about bullying them. He claims they were bullying someone else, then asks for help tracking down his friend. And now he was petting a random cat, which was nuzzling up against him like he was the nicest guy in the world. Guy was <i>weird</i>.
But then again… He was also strong, handsome and now that she was getting past her completely lousy first impression of him, he seemed pretty genuinely soft hearted.
“Alright, fine!” she said, offering a hand to help him to his feet. He didn’t need it. Practically bounced up before she even knew it. “I’ll help you out. Just this once. If you’re trying something shady, I’ll beat you up again.”
“Hrm… Maybe I’ll try something shady then,” the guy said. “It’s been a while since I’ve had a good sparring partner.”
And before she even knew what was happening, Makoto had a brand new crush. It really wasn’t a fair fight, though. She didn’t stand a chance! After all, and especially from this angle? Spitting image of her ex-boyfriend. It was uncanny.
- Blue takes Mercury to his laboratory so he can scan her and maybe question her on various details.
- Green and Makoto hit it off while searching for Blue.
- Meanwhile, the others gather at the party.
- Yellow and/or Red wind up creating a monster.
- Something else
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