Okay, those who have been sending me plaudits about my portrayal 
of Raye won't find a lot to interest you here ... this one is about my 
third favorite Scout, Minako Aino, Mina.  Sailor Venus.
	It is also a crossover, between Sailor Moon, one of my own 
personal characters ... and another, rather popular anime.  But to reveal 
just which one would give the game away at the very start.
	I'm not going to try to put this into continuity with the series, 
as I've had a bad experience with that.  Figure that it takes place at 
sometime in between Sailor Moon R and Sailor Moon S.
	If this were a movie, it would probably be PG-13.  No *brutal* 
violence, some mildly erotic imagery, and some harsh language.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
                            "The Road We Walk"

	He could never bring himself to sleep on an aeroplane.  The 
memory of his first voyage into the sky was still with him, and every 
time he felt the vast body defy gravity, a surge of wonder ran through 
him.  Wonder, aye, and terror too.
	Aethan looked out of his window seat at the cloudbank beneath the 
plane.  Through gaps, he could see the vast blueness of the Pacific.  So 
much water.
	As he sometimes did, he wondered what would happen if the plane 
developed engine trouble, and it crashed into the ocean below.  There 
would be a great loss of life, truely ... but what would happen to him, 
should he survive the crash, and be forced to step into a life raft.
	He visualized himself, afloat on the open sea.  A wave breaking 
over the small craft, smashing him into the water.  And then ... he did 
not know.  He had never seen for himself the true effects of immersion in 
running water upon his kind.
	"Certes, you'd be so seasick you might welcome death ..."
	"Excuse me?"
	Aethan shook himself out of his revery.  The middle-aged, 
bespectacled man in the seat beside him was staring at him.  Aethan, 
Aethan thought sourly, if you must think out loud, could you possibly do 
so in Latin, so no-one will know what you're thinking about?  'Twill be 
less painful on your dignity.
	Oh, shut up you old windbag, Aethan answered his own thought.
	"I was just thinking about a rather unpleasant possibility ..." 
Aethan explained.
	"Ah.  My pardon."
	The bespectacled man went back to reading his book.  He was, if 
Aethan guessed right, Japanese.  A native of the land to which Aethan was 
voyaging.
	A land of dragons, ghouls, and spirits; and also, if more modern 
legends were to be believed, giant dinosaur-things and warrior women who 
ran around in sailor suits.
	What, Aethan wondered idly, would they make of a thoroughly 
unextraordinary, run-of-the-mill, fourteen-hundred year old vampyre from 
Sussex?

                        *         *          *

	"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
	Minako was very conscious of being in the immediate vicinity of 
the centre of attention for the entire airport terminal.  EVERYone was 
staring, even the disembarking passengers who had no idea what was going 
on ...
	Serena was clinging to Darien, whose hands were filled with his 
luggage, and crying her eyes out at a decibel level beyond the dreams of 
rock and roll guitarists.  The other Scouts were hanging back, more from 
a desire to avoid getting Serena's tears all over their clothes than out 
of any hope of avoiding being associated with the hysterically weeping 
teenager.
	"Serena, I've really gotta get going ... my plane's boarding ... 
they won't wait for me ..."
	"I don't WANNNNNAAA!  You might not come back!"
	"Serena, it's only for a week!  What could possibly happen?"
	"There could be a revolution!  Yeah, and they might seal up the 
queen in the tower, and you'd have to go lead a desperate attack to 
rescue her, and GET KILLLED!"
	"Great idea, letting her borrow your collection of "The Rose of 
Versailles" the night before Darien goes to France," Lita muttered to 
Mina.
	Darien let out a sigh, dropped his luggage, and lifted Serena's 
face from his drenched shirt.  "That won't happen," he explained 
patiently.  "France is a republic now ... and besides ..." his voice 
dropped, "... you know you're the only queen I ever want to save, meatball 
head ..."
	"Oh, muffin ..."
	"Oh, gag me," Raye muttered.  Mina shot a look at her that said, 
in crystal clear kanji, drop it.
	Darien had just about disentangled Serena's arms from around him, 
when a second look of raw panic erupted on her face, and she clamped 
tight again.  "What if killer tomatoes come after you and eat you up and 
I never see you AGAAAAAAAINN?!?!"
	"And whose bright idea was it to watch that stupid American movie 
last night?" Mina whispered to Lita.
	"Serena!  You're being silly.  There are no such things as killer 
tomatoes!  The whole idea is as silly as ... as ..."
	"Pretty Sailor Suited Warriors For Love and Justice?" Amy asked 
straight-faced.
	They all turned and stared at her.  Amy flushed.
	Darien took this chance to get out of Serena's tight embrace, and 
back away.  "Serena, I'm just going to France for a week, to study at a 
fencing academy.  That's all.  I'm not going to go leaping around Paris, 
battling evil by moonlight.  I'll be careful.  And I'll come back.  And 
now I have to get on my plane!"
	He took off at a run for the gate, pausing just before he stepped 
through door.  "Good-bye, Meatball Head!  I love you!"
	
 	The plane's landing gear hit the ground, and the jolt ran up 
Aethan's spine.  He was, truely, in Japan.  Practically the other side of 
the Earth from England.  *Perhaps I should name myself Aethan Farwalker 
.. Wotan knows I've gone further than any of my clan ever did.*
	"Thank you for flying Northwest Orient's Seattle-to-Tokyo 
express," the stewardess enthused.  "Please enjoy your stay in the Land 
of the Rising Sun, and we hope you fly with us again."
	Aethan rose from the seat, stretched once, pulled on his 
trenchcoat and fedora, and started to walk to the plane's gate.  He 
studied his phrasebook intently as he walked up the passageway.
	He'd learned bits and pieces of Japanese during his brief 
alliance with the U.S. government during the Second World War, and had 
augmented his vocabulary since.  His accent was, he had been told, only 
somewhat atrocious, and he had quite accidentally developed the knack of 
knowing how to bow.
	Aethan was reasonably certain that his command of the language 
would be enough to do what he'd come to do.

	Serena stared at the plane, face pressed to the window, as it 
taxied down the runway.  She held her position as it took off, and 
disappeared out of sight.
	She sniffed once, turned around, and smiled at her friends.  
"Gee, I think I handled that rather well."
	Had they been in an anime, this would certainly have been cause 
for a face fault.  As it was, all that the girls could muster were a 
series of disgusted, disbelieving looks in Serena's direction.
	"Heh-heh ... I think I deserve a nice cream soda after that.  
Let's go!"
	Serena dashed off in the general direction of the terminal's 
restaurant.  In typical Serena manner, she focused only on the 
restaurant, not noticing anything else.
	Like the tall, slender, trenchcoated man engrossed in his book who 
stepped, completely unaware, into her path.
	She slammed into him at full speed, and they both hit the floor 
hard.  Serena had the breath knocked out of her, while the tall foreigner 
seemed more startled than anything else.

	Aethan blinked, and stared at the young lady who'd just knocked 
him over.  She was blonde, had a certain ingenue quality, and was gasping 
for air.
	"I'm sorry, I ..." he began in English.
	"I'm so so sorry, I ..." she started to say in Japanese.
	They paused, re-evaluating the situation.
	"I must apologize for my error ..." Aethan continued in Japanese.
	"O, so solly!  So very ..." she began in English.
	They paused again.

	The girls had seen the crash, and come running to help Serena, and 
to a lesser degree the guy she had smashed into, back to their feet.
	He was a westerner, of course.  English, it seemed.  His hair was 
a sort of mix of dark blonde and light brown, and his eyes were a very 
deep green.   
	Mina listened with wry amusement to their linguistic 
difficulties.  "I think my friend is trying to apologize," she explained 
to the tall foreigner, in her almost accentless English.
	The traveller blinked.  "I ... gatherered that much."
	"She doesn't speak much English, though ... the school system is 
pretty terrible in that respect ..."
	"It was really my own fault," he said.  "I wasn't watching where 
I was going ... erm ... <I apologize for making you fall, small lady>" he 
said in ... well, reasonable Japanese.  It wasn't his fault that he 
didn't know the connotations of that particular term for Serena.
	"Agh!  Reenie?  Where?!"
	The traveller stared at Serena's current spasm with an 
uncomprehending look on his face.
	"That's a nickname of one of our friends ..." Amy explained.  Her 
English, while not as accent-free as Mina's, was still much more 
proficient than the rest of them.

	"Oh."  Aethan didn't bother asking why they called their friend 
"young lady" -- nicknames were often based on private jokes, and this one 
would probably be as beyond his understanding as his own -- "Sussesson" --
would be beyond theirs.

	"I'm very sorry that this is how you're introduced to Japan," 
Mina apologized.
	The traveller laughed.  "Goodness, I've had much worse receptions 
than this.  *Domo arigato* for helping me up."  He bowed politely.
	The girls bowed as well ... except for Raye, who was staring at 
the traveller as though he had horns coming out of his head and a long 
tail.  The traveller noticed this, and stared back.
	"Heh ... well, good man has ... many things to do, hai?" Raye 
burst out, a desperate smile plastered on her face.  "We got ... things 
to do, also!  <Move it!>" she barked in a Japanese idiom that she prayed 
that he wouldn't know, and started pushing her friends away from the 
traveller.
	"<Hey, what's the big deal?>" Lita demanded.
	"<Lita-chan, even if that guy looks EXACTLY like your long lost 
boyfriend, stay away from him!  I got vibes off of him like I haven't 
gotten since Kunzite!>"

	Aethan wondered at the black-haired girl's rudeness, but shrugged 
it off as being uncomfortable around strangers.  Such a mixture of 
girls.  Two blondes, a brunette, an auburn-haired lovely, and that one 
with the ... bluish shades.
	And to think he'd been expecting exclusively shiny black hair ...
	Suddenly, with an instinct he'd been developing for over a 
thousand years, Aethan felt a hostile gaze.  Slowly, he turned to look in 
the direction the gaze came from.
	No one.
	He had been being watched, but whoever it was had fled when he 
began to turn ...
	Aethan shrugged, and continued through customs.

	The man who had given up his name had known the creature for what 
he was the minute he'd caught sight of him.  The vampyre gave no hint of 
the depths of its power and malignance, but the man knew them both.  He 
recognized this one, from a piece of the Bayeux Tapestry thought lost by 
modern scholars, but actually deliberately hidden.
	The vampyre Aethan had come to Japan.
	The war had begun anew.

	"What do you mean, he's evil?"
	Mina's question hung in the air as the girls sat in the airport 
restaurant.
	"I mean ... he stinks of the negaverse."
	"Raye ..." Lita sighed.
	"Okay, it's not a ... stink.  It's more of a ... shimatta!  How am 
I supposed to put something into words for which language was never 
intended?"
	"You said that he felt like Kunzite.  Was it the same sensation 
as anytime you sensed anything from the Black Moon Family?" Amy asked.
	Raye struggled with it for a minute.  "Sort of."
	A pained expression crossed Amy's face.
	"Psychic impressions should not be expected to fit into 
mathematically accurate categories, OKAY?" Raye shouted.
	Serena let out a deep sigh.  "Look ... Raye, if he's evil, and he 
does stuff, we'll probably find out about it eventually, and we can deal 
with it then, right?"
	Everyone blinked.  "That ... made sense," Raye muttered.  
"Serena, are you feeling well?"
	"No!  Darien's gone to France, baka!  I feel lousy, and lonely, 
and depressed, and hungry, and tired, and ..."
	Sigh.

                      *           *            *

	Aethan took a cab from the airport to Tokyo's inner city.  He had 
memorized the map that the smugglers had given him, so it was 
comparitively easy to find the particular alley that the transaction 
would take place in.
	The young man leaning against the wall of the alley reminded 
Aethan very much of the various dealers in prohibited goods that he'd had 
to deal with over the centuries.  It was intriguing to contemplate 
exactly how much it was profession, rather than culture or race, that 
truly coloured a person's personality.  Of course, the other 
considerations often had an impact on the professions made available, not 
to mention the social credit accorded a given profession ...
	Aethan quietly berated himself for, once more, allowing his 
rigourous discipline to slip, and his thoughts to travel down a winding 
path that led nowhere.  *I've GOT to learn to concentrate ...*
	"You are Degares-sama?" the young man asked with a smile.
	"I am," Aethan answered.
	The young man beckoned him to follow him further into the alley.  
There was a van parked there, and the young man slid open the side door, 
and lifted out the package -- a long, oblong box.
	"You don't mind if I inspect it before handing over the rest of 
the payment?"  It wasn't really a question.
	"Of course not."
	Aethan opened the box, then dropped it to the ground, unwrapping 
the object that was within from the towel.  It was a beautiful katana, 
easily four feet long, with odd symbols enscribed down the length of the 
blade.
	And it was, beyond any doubt in Aethan's mind, the most brilliant 
forgery that Aethan had ever seen in his existance.  He almost admired 
the sheer craftsmanship that had gone into it.  The ogham symbols, which 
few if any Asians would be familiar with, had been replicated perfectly.  
This was an incredible blade.  Only someone familiar with the true 
besigiled sword would have been able to divine the difference ... and 
only if that someone was capable of percieving magical energies.
	Like Aethan could.
	"A marvelous blade, to be sure," Aethan said, and with one swift 
motion, grasped the other end, and snapped it in two pieces.  "Now 
where's the one I paid your people to bring to Japan?"
	Before the young man could even think about pulling his gun, 
Aethan grabbed his throat in one of his hands, and jabbed his other into 
the young man's stomach.  "WHERE.  IS.  THE.  SWORD?"
	"In ... the back ..."
	Aethan slammed a clenched fist into the young man's groin that 
left him moaning in anguish when the ancient vampyre dropped him to the 
ground.  Aethan climbed into the back of the van, and sensed the sword's 
presence instantly.  It was following its usual, annoying habit, and 
singing to him.
	The sword was hidden under a panel in the floor of the van, which 
Aethan opened easily, and lifted up the sword.  Man could replicate many 
things, but the powers that had gone into the forging of this blade were 
not so easily invoked as to be duplicated.  Aethan neatly hid it inside 
his voluminous trenchcoat, and exited the van once more.
	The young man was trying desperately to crawl away.  Aethan 
lifted him up once again.  "You would have been paid fairly and well for 
your troubles," Aethan said in his flattest tone.  "The expense involved 
in duplicating the sword cannot possibly have been justified by any 
amount of payment by another party.  So, why did you do it?"
	"Hadda have that sword ... it's just so ... magic ..."
	A latent sensitive.  *Just your luck, Aethan.  What should you do 
with him?  Can you honestly justify killing a man for answering the 
summons of a power he doesn't even comprehend?  For being true to his 
true nature?*
	"There is a tale that you may be familiar with," Aethan 
muttered.  "An old woman found a dying snake, nursed it back to health, 
and was then shocked when it attacked and poisoned her, claiming that it 
was her own fault for not realizing what sort of monster it was.  But 
what the tale-tellers don't say is that after it killed the old woman, 
the snake was itself killed by the old woman's son, who told the snake 
that it was its own fault for not realizing that humans must obey the 
call of their nature as well."
	His fangs dropped into place.
	"As must I."
	The scream started out high and piercing, then dropped suddenly, 
and faded out altogether ...  

                         *          *         *

(to be continued)

  	"The way you walk is thorny ... through no fault of your own.  
But as rain enters the earth, and rivers flow to the sea, so do tears 
flow to their predestined end.  Your suffering is over.  Now find peace 
for eternity."
			from "The Wolf Man; or, Destiny" (1940)