Alright, I tried posting this earlier this week, but I completely
messed up the formatting, and it came out looking all ugly.  And so,
apparently, nobody read it.  I can deal with that... hopefully this will
have better formatting.

	Now, this is my first fanfic, and I'm not entirely sure of what I'm
doing here.  So I need feedback.  Otherwise my little,  tiny ego will
undergo gravitational collapse and I'll have to go jump off a bridge. :)

	Serina, Ami, Darien, and all are copyrighted by someone in Japan.  I'm
only borrowing them, Honest!  Leona McAllister, Tessandra, Sam, Amy,
Rosemary and Jasmine are products of my own fevered imagination and
misspent Youth, and I'd really rather you asked before you use them.  I
suppose they're Copyright 1997 John C Fiala.

	
--------------
	Prologue:

	The woman appeared in the alley, a flash of green light and ozone
heralding her arrival.  She picked herself off of the ground unsteadily,
leaning on the brick wall.  She was short: five feet tall, with a head
of blazing red hair, a somewhat plain but somehow distinctive face with
an oriental cast, a T-shirt, jeans, and a jacket.  She looked rather
boyish, her figure looking like she was just beginning her maturity
rather than the mature age she had actually reached.
	Shaking her head, she stepped out of the alleyway to see where she was.
 The writing on signs around her showed it was somewhere oriental, and
listening to one conversation in particular helped her determine it was
Japanese.  Japan?  Perhaps.  She tried to walk to a newspaper stand, but
stumbled and fell into the street.  A car honked and swerved, missing
her barely.
	As people gathered to help the woman, a cat that had been hit by the
car was overlooked as it lay in the street, it's coat ripped open from
the collision with the car.  A pretty black cat with a yellow birthmark
on its forehead...


	The Chase: Part 1 - A Total Eclipse of the Moon

	Several Months Later:

	A mile out from Tokyo, on a major highway heading to town.  Late at
Night.  Thunder calls.

	A blast of blue and green electricity burst out of nowhere some six
feet above the ground, quickly spreading into a spear of energy whose
point expanded to a large size, the point of the spear then splitting
and giving birth to a large, dark blue minibus that shot into this world
like a watermelon seed.  The driver fought to control the vehicle as it
dropped two feet to the pavement, and pulled it over to the side.
	The minibus changed in shape slightly... ovoid electrical equipment
that had been sticking out from all sides slid into recesses, reshaping
the minibus to look more like a legal street vehicle.
	Rosemary, the driver, sighed - letting the tension go out of her body
with her breath.  She was a tall girl, some six feet or so in height,
with auburn hair that she kept short.  Mildly pretty with brown eyes
peeking from under her bangs and a friendly smile.  She was wearing a
Miskatonic University sweatshirt and a pair of brown slacks.
	Turning to her friends, she let her smile widen.  "Now, that wasn't so
bad, was it?"
	Tessandra was the first to look back at her, her expression one of
disbelief.  Tessandra was a short girl, around five feet and a wish,
whose most striking feature was her long, silver colored hair that
reached to below her rear.  Beyond that, she was a thin, pretty girl,
looking almost fragile.  Jasmine was the next to look up, her dark
fingers almost imbedding themselves into the arms of her seat.  Jasmine
was a large black woman, taciturn but friendly when you got to know her,
not fat but not fashionably thin, either.  Between her legs, clutched
tight, was her saxophone case, and after giving Rosemary a nasty look
she bent down to check how it had endured the experience.
	Samantha, nee Sam, on the other hand, peeled a pair of electrodes-like
pads off of her forehead and grinned.  She was a six foot three inch
figure who looked almost elfin with a pair of pointed ears and thin red
hair that moved to the middle of her back, her eyes green and lively.
"I agree.  Better than I expected."
	Retching noises came from the back of the bus, where Amy was getting
over what could best be described as 'continuum sickness'.
	Having checked that everyone was mostly okay, Rosemary put the mini-bus
into gear and drove towards Tokyo.

	Chapter 1:


	Serina Tsukino sleepily opened her eyes, gazing at the alarm clock in
front of her.  It was moon shaped,  the actual clockface encircled by a
golden sliver of moon that nearly surrounded it.  It had been hers since
she was very little, and it was her favorite.
	And then she looked at the time.
	"AWWWW, NO!  I'M LATE!!!"
	Serina jumped out of bed in a hurry to get to the bathroom.
Unfortunately, her foot landed on the manga she had been reading before
she went to sleep, and shot out from under her, dumping her
unceremoniously to the floor.
	"AWWWWW!  WHY DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN TO ME!"
	Trust me.  The morning went downhill from there.

	That day, during lunch, Serina groused about her day with her best
friend, Ami.  "FIRST I oversleep, THEN I trip on a manga, THEN I'm late
to class and Ms. Haruna gives me the third degree!  Why am I so
unlucky?"
	Ami sighed.  "Serina, you were up all night again, weren't you?"
	Serina nodded, following the conversation as she stuffed a riceball
into her mouth.
	"And why was that?"
	Serina sighed.  Ami knew well what had happened, as it happened often
enough.  First she had goofed off reading her manga, then she had
daydreamed for a few hours about Andrew, the local arcade operator who
she had a crush on, and then she worked as hard and as fast as she could
on her homework so she could go to bed... and thus the homework was
messy, and partially wrong.
	Serina sighed, and looked to the sky, her hands clutched together
dramatically.  "I wish I was a Princess!  Then I wouldn't have to worry
about homework, or anything!  I'd have people waiting on me hand and
foot, and handsome princes would come from far away and court me!  It'd
be so ROMANTIC!"
	Amy grinned.  "Watch out what you wish for: You might get it!  And then
you'd be in trouble!"
	Serina giggled.  "Hey!  What would be so hard about being a Princess?"
	Ami's face went blank with terror.
	Serina frowned.  "Ami?  Hey, it's not that bad of an idea!"  Then she
heard the monster behind her.
	Turning around, she looked up, and up.  The Monster looked like some
sort of severely elongated man, with eight arms like tentacles.  She
could feel her chest freeze up as the monster started to reach for
her... when it's reach was cut off by a flash of green light that
resolved itself into a woman in jade-green samurai armor wearing a
domino mask.
	Ami and Serena grinned with delight.  "JADE SAMURAI!" they choroused
with the other kids in the area, thrilled at seeing one of the biggest
heroines in Japan so closely.
	The monster roared, and focused it's attention on the intruder, making
as to wrap it's long, flexible arms around the Jade heroine.  However,
she would not be so easily contained, jumping straight up at high speed
and then floating in mid-air.  Creating green rope out of thin air, she
whipped it around the monster, wrapping up his legs and hauling him
upside-down into the air.
	Unfortunately, this caused the monster to flail it's arms around
wildly, and one of the arms came down towards Serina.  Ami tried to pull
Serina away, but the girl was frozen with fear... until a man in a
tuxedo and a mask appeared out of nowhere to scoop the two of them up
and move them away from the errant arm like a flash.
	Serina looked bug-eyed at the new arrival.  He was so handsome!  "Uhh..
do I know you?"  'ARGH!' She thought to herself, 'Good going, Serina!
Now he'll think you're a dofus!"
	The enigmatic figure bowed deeply to the two girls, and smiled
gallantly.  "My name is Tuxedo Mask, my Princess, and I am here to
protect you from danger."  He produced a rose out of nowhere and gave it
to Serina, who started gibbering in shock as he swept up his cape and
disappeared.
	Serina grinned happily, clutching the rose carefully, but tightly, in
her hands.  "Did you see him, Ami?  He was so HANDSOME!  And he called
me a Princess!  Wishes do come true!"
	Amy frowned a bit.  "But we don't know him, Serina.  He could be
dangerous!"
	Serina grinned at her friend.  "Lighten up, Ami!  Someone so gorgeous
just has to be a nice guy!"
	Amy shrugged.  "He reminds me...of someone."  She concentrated, trying
to remember what.  For a moment, she remembered... something.  Her, in
an outfit like Sailor V's.  She shook her head, trying to loosen the
headache that had suddenly blossomed.
	"You okay, Ami?"
	"Yeah.  Just... got this odd picture.  Me, dressed up as Sailor V."
	Serina grinned.  "Hey, it'd show off your legs pretty nice.  Betcha the
boys would notice you then!"
	"SerEEENa... I don't have time for boys.  I'm having trouble staying
five chapters ahead of everyone in chemistry!"
	Serina giggled, and smelled her rose.  mmmmmm.  A good day.

	Meanwhile, as Serina dreamed about her knight in pressed tuxedo, the
Jade Samurai had vanquished the monster, which had melted away into
dust.  Several of the schoolkids ran up for autographs, which the woman
signed.  She was now almost as popular as Sailor V, and enjoyed the
attention.  When the teachers called the class back inside for the
afternoon, she walked away, stopping in a secluded batch of tree at the
corner of the school grounds.  Her figure quickly shifted to the form of
the woman who had arrived several months ago in an alley, a jade ring
with a o superimposed on a = on her finger.  She walked off towards
work.  
	'Wouldn't be good for me to show up late back from lunch.' Leona
McAllister thought as she walked off to work.

	Meanwhile, the group of five girls in the minibus had arrived at the
local library, intending to do a little research.  Given all the monster
attacks, it was pretty easy to find several stories about the Jade
Samurai.
	Tessandra nodded.  "That's Mom, all right."  Her finger tapped the
computer screen.
	Amy, recovered from her bout of timesickness from earlier in the day,
peered at the picture, and then switched to another one.  "Look, she's
making everything come out of her hand.  What's..."  She switched to the
first picture, "What's that on her hand, there?"
	Tessandra pounded on the keys, and managed to convince the computer to
give her a close-up of her mother's hand.  "Ha!"
	Sam wandered over.  "What?"
	Tessandra pointed to the screen.  "What does that look like to you?"
	Sam shook her head.  "A ring?"
	Jasmine looked over.  "A Green Lantern ring."
	Tessandra nodded.  "Exactly!  Mom's pretending to be a Green Lantern."
	Amy looked at her friend.  "Why would she want to do that?"
	"I dunno... Maybe nostalgia.  What I'm wondering is why there's so many
monsters attacking around here.  That isn't normal."
	"Well, " started Amy, "let's go with the Story Theory of alternate
universes.  That would suggest that this universe had a story going on,
involving monsters, and someone or someones to fight them.  But where
are they?"
	"They must have been interrupted." said Rosemary, who had just gotten
back from a quick jog through the neighborhood.  "Her arrival must have
messed up their 'Origin'."
	"Exactly." Said Sam.  "And so the universe is encouraging her to think
she's a superhero."
	Tessandra closed her eyes and started rubbing her head.  Amy noticed,
and gave her a quick hug.  "Don't worry, Tess.  We'll find her, and then
we'll give her the cure."
	Tess nodded.  "Okay, so next we need to figure out who got replaced."

	A few hours of research, though, hadn't come up with much.  It didn't
help that they weren't too strong in their written Japanese.  The girls
had translation earrings to help with the spoken language, but it didn't
help for reading.  The girls lunched in the minibus as they discussed
it.
	"The only other big hero we were able to find was this 'Sailor V'
character." said Rosemary, dipping a pair of french fries into ketchup
and using them as a pointer to underscore her words.  "And she seems to
mostly take on regular human-level crimes, not these monsters."
	They nodded, each of them.
	Tessandra sighed.  "Look, we need more information.  We need a hint."
She turned to Amy.  "Amy... could you do a quick reading?"
	Amy thought about it.  It was only recently that they had discovered
that she had a gift with Tarot cards that seemed to be as strong as her
gift with regular playing cards.  But it spooked her a bit and she
wasn't fond of doing it.  But Tessandra was one of her best friends, and
the whole situation with her mother wasn't getting any better.
	Jasmine frowned.  "Why do we have to find who the heroes were supposed
to be?  Let's just get your mother and scram."
	Rosemary shook her head.  "No, we can't do that.  With all of these
monsters, this city needs a protector.  We can't just rip away it's
biggest one and run off to let the bad guys win."
	Jasmine shrugged, and bit into her sandwich.
	Meanwhile, Amy had returned with her deck of tarot cards, and began to
shuffle and cut them to mix them up.  Then she offered it to Tessandra.
"Think of your question, and then cut the deck to your answer."
	Tessandra thought for a moment, and then cut the deck.  Amy turned up
the top card.  The Nine of Wands.
	"Nine Wands?" said Sam.  "Not very evocative."
	"Nine," said Rosemary.  "What are there nine of?"
	"Levels of hell?" said Jasmine.
	"And Purgatory, and Heaven." Tessandra thought out loud.  "That's
Dante."
	"Nine's a mystical number, isn't it?" Said Amy.  "Three Threes."
	"Then there's nine planets, of course." said Sam, biting into an apple.
	Jasmine stopped eating in mid-chew as she tried to remember something
as the girls continued talking.  'Planets?  Something about planets, and
wands...'  But whatever it was remained elusive.

	It was after school, and Serina was trying to convince Ami to spend an
hour or so in the arcade with her.  Ami was arguing against it by
pointing out how much work she had to do.  Serina was arguing for it by
pulling Ami physically along by the arm while keeping up a stream of
chatter about Tuxedo Mask.
	"But Serina!"
	"But nothing!  You spend entirely too much time in your books.  C'mon,
we'll try the new Sailor V game!  I betcha with all the stuff you know
about computers, you'll wipe me out!"
	Arriving at the arcade, the girls got change and Serina took a few
moments to moon at Andrew.  Then they found the new Sailor V game.  In
it, Sailor V and a pair of new 'Sailor friends', Sailor M and Sailor
Crescent fought against lots of monsters.  They watched the boy
currently at the machine die at the fists and tentacles of something
that looked like a geometry exam come to life, and then stepped up to
the machine.  In moments even Ami had to agree that they were having a
good time.
	"Watch out!"
	"Duck!"
	"Argh!  Don't you dare do that to my hair!  Sailor Splat!"
	GWORF, went the machine as another faceless youma bit the dust.
	Serina was playing Sailor V, and Ami was playing Sailor M, a blue
haired figure who had much the same abilities as Sailor V.  The pair
reached the end of the level, and watched with one eye the animated bit
between levels.
	"You're right, Serina, this is a fun game.  And I'm doing better than I
thought."
	Serina grinned.  "Told ya!  Although I did have to help out a bit at
first."
	Ami nodded, watching the animation again as she shook out her hands,
tense from wiggling joysticks and punching buttons.  Then she gasped,
and pointed to the screen.  "Serina, Look!"
	Serina looked.
	Computer fight games often don't have the resolution to show the faces
of the characters in detail.  It's one of the reason all the characters
dress so differently: so the players can tell the characters apart by
their color scheme.  But in the between-level animation, the 'camera'
had panned closely to the face of the new Sailor M, showing her in
detail.
	And she looked like Ami.  It wasn't exactly like her, but it was very
close.
	And then Serina had a chance to gape as the new Sailor Crescent stepped
into the scene... with two large balls of hair on top of her head...
with two trailing streams of hair behind her.
	"Oh, no...." whispered Serina.  "This is too wierd."

	Meanwhile, Leona McAllister was hard at work watching 'The Seven
Samurai' on a big TV at one end of the video rental store she worked in.
 Leona was working on a degree in film criticism at the local
university, and worked here both to get her through school and to keep
body and soul together.
	Admittedly, with her abilities she didn't need to work to get along,
but she had found out several decades ago that she actually *liked* to
work.  And besides, she didn't like to use her abilities more than she
had to, for fear of Them catching her.  She nodded as something
whispered in her ear, telling her to watch out, watch out, keep away.
	The bell over the door jingled, and she jumped, pausing the VCR to see
who had come in.  Darien.  She shared some classes with the boy.  She
waved.  "Hi Darien!"
	Darien walked up, and smiled.  "Hi Leona.  How's it going."
	She grinned, and waved at the TV with the remote.  "Professor Asuma
wants to know everything interesting about the Seven Samurai next
week... so it's homework time."
	Darien nodded, and started to go through the aisles.
	Suddenly the voices grew louder in her head, and she leaned against the
counter to steady herself while she listened to them.  Her daughter had
arrived, and was with the fiends who were pursuing her.  She shivered.
She didn't want her daughter to get hurt... she would have to find out
if they had perverted her daughter to find her, or were merely holding
her hostage.
	Darien came up with three movies, and she entered them into the
computer and took his money.
	'It had better be the latter', she thought to herself.  'I don't want
to hurt my daughter, but I can't let them have me.'

	Serina walked home, carrying her books.  After the 'video game
episode', as Ami was referring to it, Ami had left, going home to study.
 Serina tried playing a few games by herself, but the Sailor V game
bugged her, seeming to almost watch her from across the arcade.  And so
she was going home a little early.
	Wrapped in her thoughts, she ran full tilt into a man coming out of a
Video store, carrying three tapes... which then were scattered about the
sidewalk much like they were.
	"Why don't you look where you're going, Meatball-head!" cried out
Darien has they fell.
	"Don't call me that!" shot back Serina.  She got up, and frowned at
Darien as she dusted off her uniform.
	Darien bent over to grab a tape.  "Well, you weren't looking where you
were going, were you?"
	Serina steamed as Darien picked up his tapes and went off.  'Self
righteous boob!' she thought to herself as she stalked home.  A block
from her house she saw the cutest white cat.
	"Hello!" said Serina, bending over to look at it.  The cat gave off a
hearty meow and raised it's head to be petted.  "Who are you?"
	The cat meowed.  Serina giggled.  "Well, I don't know how to speak
'cat', but it's nice to meet you.    I'm going home.  Would you like
some cream?"  she suggested.
	The cat wrapped himself around her ankles lovingly.  Serina opened her
arms to pick him up, and he let her, crying out softly as she pinched
him by accident.
	"Sorry!"
	They walked the rest of the way home, arriving there soon.  Serina went
inside, dropped off her books, and went into the kitchen to pour the cat
a bowl of cream.  The cat quickly started licking, when there was a ring
at the front door.  "Sammy, would you answer that?"  she cried out to
her brother.
	"Get it yourself, Lazy!  I'm doing my homework!" was her reply.
	Serina sighed, and went to the door.  Opening it, she discovered a
blonde, pretty girl wearing the uniform of another school.  "Hello?"
	The girl gave a bow, and then a friendly smile.  "Hi!  I'm Mina.  Have
you seen a little white cat running around?  I'm afraid he got lost.  He
answers to the name of 'Artemis'."