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The FFML Refugee List
To those who asked for a continuation of Ami's Luna-cy: this was
inspired by, "What if the senshi resumed their Moon Kingdom duties?" I
hope that's close enough...
******
Another day, another disease. Well, ok, reality was more like one and
a half months per formerly incurable disease rendered curable, but Ami
liked the sound of it. The press certainly did, on the not infrequent
occasions when it was a slow news day and they wanted to know what
horrible plague was next on the chopping block.
"You're daydreaming again."
She became conscious of her own smile, and let it slide into a full
blush. "Sorry, Urawa."
"That's ok. I was just seeing the award ceremony next week. Umm...no
Nobel Prize again this year, though the winner will say that you should
have gotten it and rail against the judges' anti-youth bias. Didn't
see whether he actually gives it to you."
Ami shrugged. "I'm only 30. The youngest judge is probably twice my
age. Besides, most of my cures are still getting approval in most
countries. Even with pressure from their leaders and their medical
institutions, I'd still give them at least five years to get through
the red tape."
"Five years for a cure for AIDS?!?"
Ami shrugged. "And each form of cancer, and that mutant smallpox
outbreak, and...well, I've done what I can in each case. I trust
you..." She pecked her love on his cheek. "...but the rest of the
world needs proof, and proof takes time. Now, which one of these do
you see working?"
Urawa examined an array of test tubes, each with a slightly different
colored liquid, holding each one up to the light to read its label and
concentrating a bit. Eventually, he removed a bright green one
slightly left of center. "This one. It gets accidentally spilled on
an open wound during production of the first test batch. Next morning,
the wound is gone, but it should have taken a week to heal."
Ami peered at the label. "That one? But it's got nothing to do with
the pathways for cellular regeneration."
"The ones you know of, anyway."
"True." She nodded. "This is supposed to be a cure for pneumonia.
I'll try to arrange the 'accident' so we can shift to testing what it's
really good for ASAP."
******
The fire flared red for a moment, prompting Yuuchiro's imagination to
form a scene of the blood-soaked battlefield Rei had just described.
"And that's how the Second Martian War ended."
He clicked off the tape recorder after enough silence to be sure Rei's
tale was over. "That was one of your longer ones. It'll take me a
week to get it typed up."
Rei nodded. "It did drag on. That was the worst part about it: few
people would have minded a short skirmish, but when all three sides
just kept shovelling in more fresh recruits with no training..."
Instinctively, Yuuchiro reached out and wiped away the tear just as it
rolled free of Rei's eye. "Say, Rei? You remember stories from all of
the Moon Kingdom, right?"
"That's right."
"When did you start remembering them?"
"Well...I had bits and pieces, but the first truly long one was about
an hour after you told me you knew who I was. I...I was scared,
and..."
"You sound like you still are." He smiled, knowing her gaze was only
on their sacred fire but hoping she would hear his smile in his voice.
"I promise now as I promised then, I will never betray your secret."
"It's not that. You know I've always trusted you to keep that promise.
I was scared that some evil or another would show up and take you
away...and, yeah, I still am, a little. I guess I'll always be, so
long as we both live." She shivered despite the room's warmth. "I
tried forcing myself to imagine us getting married, and living together
and going places...and I saw myself, my old self, hiking across a
brown desert."
Yuuchiro nodded. "The time your spaceship crashed in the middle of
nowhere. We never did record it."
"It's...not worth posting. Not like the ones I've been telling you."
She paused, but Yuuchiro could almost hear her thinking hard about
something. "These stories...do you think people will actually believe
they're the real history of the Moon Kingdom?"
"Doesn't matter." He brushed away a strand of her hair that threatened
to enter her eye and disrupt her concentration. "You've 'remembered'
quite a bit about Earth history too, including stuff after the Moon
Kingdom fell."
"I must've had more than one life between then and now. I always felt
like the original Serenity kind of threw the others straight here to be
reincarnated, but tossed my soul...well, like skipping a stone across a
river. I guess she wanted someone to make sure the Earth was ok after
whatever it was that erased all traces of the Moon Kingdom ran its
course, and she didn't trust Pluto or the cats."
Yuuchiro nodded. "I set our Web site up to separate Earth history from
everything else, so people who don't trust you yet can choose to
believe just the first part first, and think the rest is fiction. It's
all there, being mirrored and archived who knows where, so the history
will be there once people believe in the Moon Kingdom once more and
want to know what happened. Their culture - their spirit - will remain
in the permanent record." He snuggled a bit closer to Rei. "Now, one
more tale. Ami tells me you got Urawa to sneak a peek at our wedding
and describe it to you."
"He told us both."
"But I want to hear *you* tell it, story master."
******
Both sides muttered among themselves, but their weapons now pointed at
the ground rather than the other side's mob. Venus stood between them,
floating several centimeters off the ground, the power of her constant
and desparate magic imbuing the air right next to her with a holy glow.
"That's right, you don't have to get revenge. Calm down and forgive
each other, and this war will end."
Almost all of those present seemed to agree with her words, and one
brave soul from each side had actually stepped forward with empty hand
extended. However, when they were two steps apart, angry shouts from
each side halted their progress. The shouters soon forced their way
out of the crowds, revealing themselves to be the handful of "leaders"
who had exhorted their people to violence and refused all peace terms
save the other sides' unconditional surrender.
With a start, Venus realized these leaders were also armed, and taking
aim. Though it would have been more in line with their stated goals
to aim directly at each other, they aimed at the other sides' crowds.
(Of course,) she thought, (they know they need each other, even if they
won't admit it - even to themselves). Biting back these sarcastic
words, she put on her best abused puppy face and pleaded, "Please,
don't do this!"
If they heard her, they gave no sign of it. She knew the language she
used was shared by both sides - they used it to insult each other often
enough - but the leaders could and would claim her foreign tongue
incapable of speaking it intelligently, and thus claim to have misheard
her words as an encouragement to fire. She knew this even before her
brain registered the flashes of the muzzles, or the pops of the
bullets.
She was the only one not surprised when the bullets stopped in midair
just in front of her, halted and suspended by precise electromagnetics,
then crushed into a lumpy sphere and dropped to the ground. Before the
leaders could recover from shock at this, twin pillars of lightning
cascaded from the heavens to smite both sets of firers into ashes,
leaving untouched even those among them who had not actually pulled a
trigger.
Each side had its own religion, but both shared the concept of a God.
Thus, when Venus knelt and moved her lips, each side assumed she was
giving thanks to their own diety, and in this they were almost right.
The remaining leaders on each side, now facing the prospect of a divine
mandate for peace, had little choice but to publically embrace and
implement it. It was therefore fortunate that none who knew Japanese
were close enough to clearly hear "Thank you, Jupiter."
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desaix@sysnet.net
Sir Desaix, member # 116 of the Knights of the True Fiancee
anime fanfics available at
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