Luna watched Usagi awaken with a critical eye. The lazy girl was usually never up so early. Maybe it was something to do with this mysterious Libra character, or maybe it was a coincidence. The little black cat couldn't quite tell.
"How did it go?" Luna asked while Usagi stretched out her limbs, arched her back and yawned.
"Nice," Usagi sighed. "Libra gave us all a neat power boost and taught us how to use it." She reached out to stroke Luna's back. "You should have come with us, you know. Libra's not all that bad. Maybe a little lonely? Being awkward isn't the same as being evil, you know."
Nope. Not going in to meet him. Not until she had a better idea of who this Libra was, and what they were really after. While it was true enough that the girls usually got a power-up when they encountered a threat, Luna felt like she could at least trust the source of that power-up to some extent. Usually. Sometimes. Pretty often. Probably. Maybe. Alright, she was usually suspicious more often than not and it turned out to be unfounded, but one of these days she'd be proven right! Someone had to be suspicious. Usagi was too naive and nice for her own good.
Which left the little cat in the unenviable position of trying to deal with the situation while avoiding direct contact with an entity that, by appearances, did not physically exist anywhere but preferred psychic contact. For some reason. Which made Luna's role simple. She would watch. From a distance. If anything seemed untoward, even slightly? Then she'd... Do... Something about it.
But until she knew what she was dealing with more properly, all she could do was watch and wait for an opportunity to see what sort of power-up this Libra had given the girls. Maybe then she'd be able to better understand exactly what was really going on.
<hr>
The key word was "discipline". It was a vital resource that so, so many maggots in this world today lacked, letting them run free, run wild, run without direction in disorder, confusion and chaos. Without discipline there was no focus. Without discipline there was no direction.
"Aten-hup!"
At once, twenty youths stood upright at attention, staring straight ahead with straight backs, short, straight hair, straightforward clothes and straightened-out souls. In front of them, Soldier did his equivalent of a smile: He grunted and snarled.
"Well, well, well!" he yelled at the unflinching group. "If I didn't know better, I'd be asking where you lot went and hid my sorry sacks of shit! Your own mothers wouldn't recognise you if you stared her in the eye and asked for lunch money! You used to be proud of being pathetic. You used to waste your time on frivolous things like fun, games and dating. But now? Now if you ain't careful, my shrivelled, blackened heart might swell up with pride of its own accord, and we wouldn't want that, now would we, Private Sakura?"
A pretty young thing with a chest like grapefruits barked out a "Sir, no, sir! We will be careful, sir!" Heh. She used to be the most boy-crazy chick around, the kind of girl that would date multiple boys at once and play them off each other for her own amusement. Used to have her hair up in the cutest pigtails. Now it was cropped short. Efficient. Easy to manage. Practical. Orderly.
Just like all the rest of them. Silly ideas drilled out of their heads. Replaced with common-sense discipline, making them move, think and behave smarter. These twenty kids were a damn fine military unit, a well-oiled machine, and the very first step of his plan to increase local order.
Which meant it was time for step two. "While I'm sure you would all love to just stand here all day eyeballing the wall behind me, we've got ourselves a mission to take care of." Reaching into his pocket, Soldier clicked a button that switched on a projector at the back of the room. A series of girls clad in quite frankly disgustingly revealing parodies of sailor fukus appeared on the back wall. "These girls are enemies of Order. These girls do not appreciate what it means to be decent, upstanding or moral human beings! These girls are in desperate need of discipline! Now, I know what you're thinking: We should gang up on them, force it on them through strength of numbers, but that ain't gonna work. Strength of numbers is not what I've been trying to teach you! Strength of numbers is only worth dirt if it doesn't come with a great spoonful of strategy and planning! Private Takahata! What is the first step of strategic planning?"
"Reconnaissance, sir!"
"Damned skippy it's reconnaissance! That is why you are all heading out there into that big, beautiful world and you are Not. To. Engage. The. Enemy. You are all on information gathering until further notice. Report all useful information discovered back to me, but Do. Not. Engage. The. Enemy. Until I give the say so! Dismissed!"
They filed out smartly one by one, off on their first mission. Soldier nodded along, and damn if they weren't careful, 'cause his heart was sure about to burst with pride. Give him a boy or a girl for an afternoon, and he'd return you a man!
Almost the instant the last of them filed out and the door was creeping closed on the youth centre he had acquired... A woman wearing a blue jumpsuit and yellow gloves rolled in, pulling a professional-level vacuum in behind her. She started methodically using it to suck up dust around the sides of the room, not looking at Soldier at all.
But the funny thing was, Soldier was watching her intensely, while standing completely at attention. They kept on like that for a full minute, before finally the cleaner spoke up.
"Weren't you supposed to be luring out those short-skirted sluts?" the cleaner absently asked. "Clandestine operations do not seem to be what you were instructed to do."
"No, ma'am," Soldier agreed. "However, when you advertise that you are setting a trap, it is unlikely that even a servant of chaos would be foolish enough to step into it willingly! That's why I'm leaving them a deliberate trail of breadcrumbs that won't look like a setup!"
Cleaner was silent for a moment. "I don't like trails of breadcrumbs. They leave an awful mess."
Oh, yes. That's right. Even though Cleaner was one of the most powerful Uniforms in terms of combat ability, she did not handle metaphors or similes especially well. They "messed up meaning" or something ridiculous like that. In which case he should try to explain it a bit better.
"My point is!" he yelled with great enthusiasm. "One of the enemy is bound to take notice of young students behaving differently! And that all of them are behaving in the same kind of different way! With each new class of recruit that I acquire, the likelier it is that the enemy will notice! This will lead them back to me -"
"Where you will make a terrible mess that I shall have to clean up," Cleaner sighed. "As always, you are overthinking your strategy when something far more blunt would suit you better. If you had your recruits force other youths to come to the centre for your brainwashing, and then use those new recruits to perpetuate the cycle then you'd have drawn attention much faster. At this rate it might be a full week or even a month before the enemy notices anything strange."
Soldier internally disagreed with that assessment, because that was only half of it. True, he expected it would take a little time for them to notice but that also played to their advantage. It would give him time to build up an army, it would give him time to acquire more resources, and it would give his recruits time to gather more information. Heck! With this kind of setup there was a decent chance these sluts wouldn't even have to worry about Cleaner in the first place! Because Soldier's discipline would get them first.
Or... At least one of the Senshi could take notice of his recruits pretty much immediately. After all, they had already finished getting their powers from Libra and it was a brand new day....
- Makoto is interrupted from dealing with some bullies by a bunch of the recruits.
- Minako has a crush on one of them.
- Usagi encounters some of them while out on a date with Mamoru.
- Rei meets some at the shrine behaving weirdly.
- One of Ami's online friends is a recruit.
- Some other way
No comments:
Post a Comment