We've been here before.
     It's a bit of Earth -- the planet, not the synonym for dirt -- that
doesn't have a great deal to recommend it. Gale force winds sweep across the
top of the glacier. The temperature only rises to just a bit below freezing
for few days in the middle of the "long day", when the sun rises and doesn't
set for weeks. And it's just a little after sunrise, now.
     Nothing to see here. An ecologist might have a few odd questions, though.
Questions like, "how'd a lot of the upper layers of ice come to melt fairly
recently?" and, "where'd that chasm come from?" and, "how deep does it go?"
     Tempting though it would be to reply to the ecologist's last question, in
sonorous tones, "It goes all the way down," we have to admit that it's only a
few hundred meters deep. But at bottom, it opens up into a vault that fills
almost the entire glacier; there's actually only a few meters of very dense
snow between the surface and the hollow, in most places.
     Examining the hollow would reveal the wreckage of a civilization. It is
divided up into about a thousand empty chambers; empty save for broken
crystals, torn fabrics, and the occasional grease stain. If anyone who lived
here survived whatever tore the hole in the roof -- and an architect would be
able to tell us, after she finished oohing and aahing over the obelisks, that
the hole was a fairly recent addition -- they've left. And they probably aren't
coming back.
     Can you blame them?
     If by now you haven't guessed the identity of this little island at the
top of the world, let's clue you in:  this was the Dark Kingdom. (Despite
claims that the place was actually in some negatively-oriented parallel
universe, a close examination of final stories about it suggest otherwise.)
Now, though, it is not much of anything, and no one knows or cares what happens
here.
     Which may be why the woman, who is gazing intently at a hand-held scanner
as she stands on the glacier's surface, is able to do so unchallenged.

     Who is this woman, wearing a long, black cape over a costume best
described as a burgundy-colored leotard with matching knee-length boots? What
thoughts run through her head as she frowns, chewing on a stray lock of shiny
gray hair? What's her plan, her agenda, her raison d'etre?
     Stick around and find out, suggests the author. And it is at this point
that a vital digression should be made. The author isn't going to tell you
everything, Constant Reader. There will be times when he will note something in
passing, such as the number of stars on a certain flag, which may leave you
wondering, "Hey wait, how did that happen?" But there will be very few
expository pauses for such trivia. And even worse, sometimes the minds and
hearts of important characters will be closed to our observation, even if
they've been open only a little while before. We've got a lot of distance and
duration to cover, and not a lot of time or space to do so. If we sit around
jawing constantly, we might miss --

     Whoah, that was close! The sensor in the woman's hand just started buzzing
frantically, and a sudden smile creases her lips for just a second. (If we'd
taken the time to explain who she is, we might have missed seeing the vital
character-developing moment of her smile.) Now she strides purposefully towards
a certain piece of the icy landscape; specifically, part of that area which
would have puzzled our ecologist. We know, of course, that it was that area
where Princess Serenity and Queen Beryl faced each other in final combat, which
was melted and shattered by the force of the magic each used against the other,
before the entire area turned into a pink hole in the space-time continuum.
     But, wondered the woman some time ago, was every thing about these
combatants swallowed up by that hole? And now she knows that something does
remain, something that she can use. For the beginning of this story is also the
end of another one, as is often the way of such things.
     A few adjustments to her sensor narrow the field, and now she stands
directly in front of an otherwise unremarkable patch of ice which holds what
she needs. With a sigh, she spreads her hand.
     "That's not a very good idea," comments a cool, feminine voice from behind
her.
     She doesn't really *look* surprised as she turns around, cape flaring
dramatically. The woman standing a few meters away, in ground marked by the the
other woman's footprints in fact, wears the black-and-white, mini-skirted
uniform of Sailor Pluto -- to be expected, since that's who she is.
     "I'm a bit surprised," says the woman we first met just a few minutes ago.
"All the literature suggests that temporal sensitivity isn't any use in
discerning the presence of an extra-continuual intrusion."
     Sailor Pluto doesn't blink. "I'm sure that you can account for my
awareness of your presence, all the same."
     "Wards!" the woman replies in a tone of great enlightenment. "You must
have set up wards to warn you if someone got too close to your princess' DNA!"
     "As you say." You'll note that's not a confirmation. Pluto does that a
lot.
     "Very well, then. If you are determined to keep me from the fulfillment of
my mission --"
     "Not really," Pluto interjects.
     "-- then you'll find me no easy -- did you just say `not really'?"
     The Guardian of the Gates of Time shrugs vaguely. "If you wish to recreate
the legend of the Moon Princess on your own world, and this is the method you
would use to do so, then who am I to stop you?"
     The woman stares at her anticipated adversary for several moments, and
wonders if this might be some bizarre tactic of reverse psychology. At last she
decides that it doesn't matter, that she's come too far in her plans to turn
aside now. Thus, she turns back and extends a ring-adorned hand, which
commences
to glow with a faint red light. A frozen chunk of something flies up into
her hand.
     She returns her gaze to Sailor Pluto, hoping to see dismay on her face.
Disappointingly, Pluto answers her gaze with equanimity, or possibly even
disinterest. The woman, affronted by this, tries for another moment to summon
up a stinging retort to verbally put the arrogant magical soldier in her place,
but finds that she can't think of anything sufficiently sneering and vicious.
With a disgusted snort, she wraps her cape around herself, and vanishes without
any noteworthy effects.

     "You're welcome," murmurs Pluto, as she begins to consider what she ought
to do next.
     This particular intruder, as it happens, fell under the category in
Pluto's mind that translates as "Mostly Harmless". Her continuum is
sufficiently far removed from this one, that even if there are spill-over
effects -- which there always are, after a sufficiently extended period of time
-- they shouldn't affect the continuum Pluto watches over. This sounds
cold-blooded, but policing a long stretch of time in a single reality is a
difficult enough task; Pluto's soul rebels at the thought of trying to police
the multiverse.
     Still, the woman's strategy points out a potential resource that much more
dangerous intruders might exploit. Since it's unlikely that her planning went
unobserved, it's quite possible that such exploitation could be imminent.
     Pluto draws a deep breath of Arctic air.
     Dozens of tiny deathscreams erupt all over the glacier, destroying all the
fragments of life that linger from where five teenaged girls and a college
student had their lives cut short, before a wish from one of them set matters
right. As an afterthought, they obliterate all traces of the remains of Queen
Beryl, and set up an avalanche which will crush the ruins of the Dark Kingdom
out of existence.
     That done, and the collapse of the glacier still minutes away, Pluto
pauses to rest and to imagine the world that the Outsider plans to create. It
is Pluto's great secret -- at least, one of the great secrets of this
particular Pluto -- that she has seen the three hundred thousand years of her
life repeated an impossibly large number of times, with millions of potential
variations of every event. But she has never seen the birth of a truly new
continuity, and wishes momentarily that she could watch what will happen.
Perhaps it will be better than her own. 
     Folly, of course; she will never see it, and *this* is her world. With
that, she teleports away, moments before the ice beneath her feet collapses on
itself.

     Listen; there's a universe about to get interesting as hell, just a few
blocks away.
     Let's go.




=====
Chris Davies, Advocate for Darkness, Part-time Champion of Light
"One begins to long to come across a female protagonist called,
say, Naomi the Castrator. One could tell her to look up John
Norman for a start." -- Michael Moorcock, "Wizardry and Wild Romance"
Fanfics: http://members.fortunecity.com/c_davies/
Fanfic Revolution: http://come.to/hauthor

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