2:
It all started in 3005.
(Who's telling this? I say it started then, so it started then.)
The Academy had only been open for about a decade, and I hadn't
really had a chance to see what it was like. So when the History
Department invited me to give a lecture on the impact of time travel
on historicity, I figured it might be interesting.
While I was here, I found out that my cousin, Mizuno Ryouko, was a
student at the Academy, and so I paid a call on her to see how she
was doing. Poorly, as it turned out. Ryouko had ... done some things
in the past that she was ashamed to have done, but she wasn't sure if
what she'd done was *wrong* -- if she'd known there was something else
that she could do and not done it, or if she'd been incapable of
making the right decision, or what. So she asked me to scourge her.
That's one of my attacks, as Sailor Erinyes. It forces the ...
subject to look at what they've done through a more objective lens,
using their own guilt as a lever.
So I transformed to Erinyes for the third time in my life, but before
I could scourge her ... something went wrong. I lost control, and
Erinyes -- the single-minded essence of retribution that powers my
magic -- took over completely and set out to scourge everyone.
Now, about twenty years before that, I went on an adventure that led
to my first meeting with Athena. We ended up swearing an oath to aid
each other through whatever happened, and twenty years later -- which
was a lot longer on her world than ours -- she sensed the trouble and
pain that I was in, and came to help me with some allies of hers. The
short of it is, she wound up helping me re-establish my equilibrium
and then we found a way for her to stay here permanently.
And so we should have lived happily ever after.
But.
The equilibrium wasn't really stable. Sometimes Erinyes can surge up
out of my consciousness, almost forcing me to transform, whenever I
witness something unjust happening. I always manage to fight her down,
but --
(Because I don't like being Erinyes. I call what she does scourging,
but you could just as accurately call it a kind of psychic rape. It
violates the subject, and I end up feeling violated too.)
Anyway, I started looking for ways to get better control over that
part of me. I tried therapy, psychoanalysis, meditation techniques
from all over. But it still kept happening, and I began to think that
I was never going to get anywhere. And the frustration was starting to
hurt my relationship with Athena.
Last year, I was talking to a new therapist about it, and he started
telling me about a revolutionary new way of treating problems like
mine. He made it sound like it was part theatre, part exercise, part
ritual, part therapy -- really interesting. So he gave me a ring and a
number I should call.
It *was* interesting. Every now and then I'd get a letter from
someone, challenging me to a duel, and I'd go to meet them at the
arena --
(I'd rather not talk about that now.)
I'd fight them. Blade to blade. Not to the death, not even to first
blood. To the point where one of us cut a flower off the other one's
chest. We all wore masks, so we were free to view the other person as
the subject of whatever tension we were suffering. It was all very
civilized, very chique. I stopped feeling as though I were about to
explode, and I never lost.
Until yesterday.
There as nothing unusual about the match, at first -- no, maybe the
masked girl who put the flowers on our chests lingered just a moment
as she set the red rose in my vest. But then I was locked into a
fight, and for the first time in ... *ages*, I was fighting someone
better than I was.
The duel felt as though it lasted hours. I don't know how long it
actually did. But ultimately, I lost.
... the flower petals fluttered in the wind ...
... and he called the other girl over to him ...
... and he made her take off her mask ...
... and it was Athena underneath.
The next thing I remember was waking up in our room. Only it wasn't
"our" room anymore, because she was gone and so was everything that
was hers. I'd lost her.
By the rules of the game, I get one rematch.
That's tonight.
TBC