Uchuu wa Taihen Da
A Tale of The Silver Millenium

Benten wanted to frown as she examined the hovercycle engine parts. She really wanted to frown. But the damn thing had been so lovingly crafted by Mercury's magesmiths, and their attention to detail showed in every tiny ridge, that it was impossible to frown.

So she smiled wryly, and set to cleaning them.

She heard the small, light footsteps coming from outside the garage as she squirted the solvent over one of the components, but didn't look up until it was completely spotless. With a satisfied grunt, she set it down on the towel, and picked up the next component, looking up at the door as she did.

The small head that had been peeping through the door ducked back quickly, but not before Benten got a clear glimpse of light blonde hair tied back in pony tail, which curled up over the head as it was pulled back.

"It's not polite to peep, you know?" Benten asked in the common dialect. "Didn't your mother tell you that?"

Slowly, the downward looking little girl -- she couldn't have been more than a few months younger than Benten's daughter -- walked into the garage. Benten recognized her, and instantly regretted her words.

The little girl was the daughter of the Hagiarch of Uranus, and Benten was fairly sure that the child had been taught to obey her mother in every way. Uranus' harsh, rigidly moralistic government would have demanded nothing less from its ruler than she demanded from its citizens.

"What's your name, child?" Benten asked in a gentler tone.

"Alesca," the girl said after a few moments, still not looking up.

"Shouldn't you be in the nursery, instead of wandering around?"

"I ... I was bored watching the roboteacher."

Benten swallowed a smile. A few weeks ago, she had whimsically decided to watch a few hours of roboteacher with her daughter ... and promptly been bored out of her skull. The thing seemed more designed to put children to sleep than to educate.

She started to clean another component, watching the child out of the corner of her eye to make sure that she didn't try and touch her cycle. Unusually for a child that young, she didn't fidget. At all.

Unusually? More like unnaturally ... Benten thought. Abruptly, she asked, "So what's so interesting about the floor?"

The child started, but didn't look up.

"Listen, kid, we have a choice in this life -- we can walk around looking at the ground, and run into things; we can walk around staring at the stars, and run into things; or we can look at people's faces, and see to avoid running into things. What's it gonna be?"

The child looked up at Benten.

For a full second.

Then she went back to looking at the ground.

The mortal fear that she had seen on Alesca's face disturbed her slightly. "Something bother you about my face?" she asked, calmly beginning to spray the component.

"shrthr"

Benten blinked. "Short hair?" Her choice of hairstyle gave her locks the appearance of being rather short. Appearances could be deceiving, though.

Alesca bobbed her head in a nod, once. "'For behold, the hair of woman doth grow, and to hinder this course is to hinder the path of nature, which is the source of all sin,'" she intoned softly.

Benten considered this. "One of your people's holy texts, right?"

"Written by my martyred father."

"Oh, yeah," Benten said dismissively. "Listen, kid, the reason that men want us to grow our hair long is so that we have to spend hours getting it to look good in the morning, so that they have a head start on us. There's nothing holy about it."

It was after she had said her piece that the implications of the word "martyred" occured to Benten.

Alesca looked up at her with utter shock and horror written all over her face.

"Um ... at least, that's what I always thought ..."

Alesca looked down again.

Benten mentally kicked herself for having said something like that, and started to rub the component with her rag.

"Uh ... where ... are you ... from?" Alesca asked slowly.

If she had been looking up, she would have seen a brief wince of pain cross Benten's face. "Earth," she said, simply.

Alesca looked up with another startled expression. "But --"

"What?"

She looked down again. "I was taught that the people of Earth didn't go into space. Ever," she added, as if for clarification.

"They don't ... anymore," Benten muttered. The child was unwittingly hitting several sore points.

"The roboteacher back home said that ever since High Queen Rheannion expelled all the demons from Earth, she has kept the Sacred Blue Planet inviolate from ..." Alesca trailed off as she heard something break.

Benten stared down at the sundered component that she clasped in her hands.

"I suppose they also say that Rheannion was the only godling ever born to Earth, don't they?"

"Um ... yes ..."

For as long as she lived, Benten would never forget the look in the eyes of the first oni she'd killed. The demon had looked, for all the world, like a girl not much older than she herself, with cool green hair, deep blue eyes ... and horns.

And she had looked so shocked as Benten had driven her axe into her collarbone.

Rheannion had gathered all the many godlings of the Earth into a mighty host, and told them of a threat which had arosen far to the east of Rheannion's stronghold. Oni had invaded. Not the bogeymen of some of their legends, but actual demonic beings from beyond the stars ... which had to be expelled before they gained a foothold.

Benten, along with most of the warlike godlings, had agreed. Those who were less ... martially inclined, had been asked to go out to the other powers of the System -- the Kingdoms of the Moon and Venus, the Republic of Mercury, and the tribes of Mars -- and ask their godling rulers for aid.

The battles had been absurdly easy to fight. The oni had been far more ready to run than to wage war, it seemed. Eventually, they retreated entirely from Earth.

Before the celebration could begin, Rheannion asked the Host to pursue them, to make sure that they were not only the advance scouts for an even larger fleet. She had provided them with ships, and they had eagerly embarked.

To watch as the remnants of the oni activated their dimensional travel device, and fled this universe -- swearing, as they did, never to return -- for the one in which they had originated. The one from which they had come ... by accident.

And the godlings found their way home barred.

Rheannion had used the dimensionally displaced beings as an way to trick all the other great powers of the Earth into leaving, voluntarily, so that she could claim sole power over the planet. And when she had done so, she sealed it against them ...

... and also against the thousands of godlings of the other planets, who at the time were embarked in a vast war of mutual annihilation. Benten and the others had swiftly been drawn into that endless conflagration, and had fought with courage and power.

But no matter how hard Benten tried, she could not escape the memory of the oni's eyes. They haunted her dreams. She knew, now, why the oni's deep, blue, innocent eyes had been asking why as her life's blood spilled out ... the girl had truly not understood why she was being killed.

No, murdered.

The war ended, not because cooler heads prevailed, but because the most powerful of the godlings -- Rheannion of the Earth, Ourrannos of the Void, and Pluto -- had grown weary of the conflict, and so joined their powers to cast a mighty spell, draining away much of the power of the other godlings, and placing it within Rheannion's Silver Crystal.

Some godlings -- Anhur of Mars and Astarte of Venus -- had resisted the siphoning almost completely. Serenity of the Moon had been completely unaffected. Others had been much less fortunate.

Benten had lost nearly everything, save one "gift".

Immortality.

Barring violence, she would not die.

And so she had sought out death in creative ways, until at last she was found, lying in a gutter in one of Neptune's cities, by --

"Lady?"

Benten was jolted from her reminiscence by the tiny voice. She looked down at Alesca, who had summoned up the courage to approach her until she was only a step from her.

"Lady? Did I do something wrong?"

"No, child," Benten whispered. "You only touched a part of my heart that had been locked away for a long time."

The girl blinked. "I ... I don't understand."

Benten shook her head. "It doesn't matter." She paused, then nodded. "You should go back to the roboteacher. Your mother wouldn't like to be talking to someone like me."

Alesca looked upset, but bowed, and turned to walk away. She paused. "What is Earth like?"

Benten took a deep breath. "It's what the great wizards who crafted the spells to make the other worlds habitable were aiming at, and failed to achieve. The wind's scent is sweeter, the grass is cooler, and the sun shines brighter than it does even on Mercury." She paused. "And I would give my soul to go back there, and I never ever will."

Alesca stared at her, a look beyond words on her face, then bowed, turned, and ran.

Benten resumed her cleaning, but the parts no longer seemed to glisten as they had before, and Benten could not help but wonder what they would have looked like under Earth's sunlight.

She looked up at the soft step near the door, and gazed into the unchanging features of her mate.

"Are you hurt, my love?" Oyuki asked.

Benten shook her head. "No. Just remembering ... things. How did the council go?"

Oyuki shrugged. "Astarte and Anhur want to lead an immediate attack on Rheannion's citadel to get back their daughters, and I tend to think that the President of Mercury ... can't remember her name ... is leaning towards them. The Jovian leader spent the whole time crying for her daughter, and the Saturnians didn't bother to send a representative. Again." Her voice took on an vaguely amused tone. "Politics tend to make strange bedfellows, indeed. I found myself in an alliance with the Uranite Hagiarch and Serenity, stopping any immediate attacks. If the Jovian stops crying, though ... is something funny?"

Benten couldn't keep a grin from her face as the image of her lover in bed with the notoriously homophobic ruler of Uranus came to her mind. "Do you imagine that this alliance will lead to better 'relations' with Uranus?" she asked, loading the word with every bit of inuendo she had.

The Merchant Queen of Neptune lifted a single lavender eyebrow. "I doubt it. When she wasn't telling Anhur and Innana that this was punishment for their sins, she was glowering at me and threatening me with vile fates should I even think about letting you or our daughter near her child."

"Oh dear," Benten said in mock concern, "she was just here. You probably passed her in the corridor."

Oyuki blinked. "That little blonde girl is the Hagiarch's daughter? Oh dear."

"What?"

"I --" Oyuki went back to peep down the corridor. Suddenly concerned, Benten followed her.

She looked down the corridor, and saw Alesca sitting on a bench, beside their daughter, Melusine. They were talking softly ... Melusine's cool green hair contrasting with Alesca's light blonde.

"... so what do you do for fun on Uranus?"

"Fun?"

"Yeah! On Neptune, we go skiing, we have snowball fights, we have hot tubs ... what do you do all day?"

"We pray."

"Oh." A pause. "Do you have a lot of friends?"

"No ... not really."

"Oh." Another pause. "Do you wanna be friends with me?"

"... Okay. I guess."

"Great!" Melusine enthused, and promptly kissed her on the cheek. Alesca's hand flew up to her cheek, and her face was almost funny in how shocked she seemed.

Benten and Oyuki slowly withdrew back into the garage. For a moment, they stood in silence.

"You realize that she'll be in trouble with her mother if it comes out that she's friends with 'the abomination', as one of her mother's sermons termed our daughter?" Oyuki asked, quietly.

Benten nodded. Then she shrugged. "I guess we'll just have to keep it a secret, then."

"However shall we do that?"

"Give'em a distraction. Something else to talk about." Benten looked at her hovercycle. "Like, say, the ruler of Neptune and her crazy lover buzzing the castle?"

Oyuki appeared to give the matter a great deal of thought. "That might work," she said. She didn't sound eager, or amused.

Appearances can be deceiving.

"Great," grinned Benten, and started to clean the engine parts, with less care and attention than she might have, but striving for cleanliness, all the same.

Tonight, with her true love clasped tightly behind her, she would feel the lunar air whipping through her dark hair.

And it would not be as good as the wind of Earth.

But she thought of the children playing together.

And it would be good enough.

This is Sean Gaffney's fault, for explaining the Oyuki/Benten situation to me.

Sailor Moon was created by Naoko Takeuchi and brought to North America by DiC. Urusei Yatsura was created by Rumiko Takahashi and brought to North America by Viz Communications and AnimEigo. The preceeding story, while incorporating elements of these films held under copyright by others, is copyright 1997 of Chris Davies.

Nobody sue me, okay?

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