Number: 16 Title: No Title Type: Fan fiction SIDESTEP:EVANGELION Sailor Moon ---------- Timeline: ---------- 1990 June - James and co. graduate from high school 1991 June - James and Dave become assassins. 1992 December - James ends Durankov; Dave disappears. 1996 November - Chronicles of War starts in the mall. 1997 June - Chronicles of War ends in Washington DC. 2000 September - Second Impact 2007 May - SIDESTEP:EVANGELION starts 2015 September - SIDESTEP:EVANGELION ends 2018 November - End of the Kilrathi/Terran war. Death of Miko Mido, birth of Alex Mido. 2019 August - Sylvia Flemming, a newborn baby, arrives on Liberate 2. 2021 December - Yuriko activated, James disappears from Liberate 2. 2033 July - Sylvia Flemming meets the Sailor Scouts from their 'home' universe. ---------- Synopsis: ---------- Chronologically, this takes place BEFORE The Victors of Tomorrow, but it would probably be better read AFTER T.V.O.T. I don't have a title yet. An SM/SE Crossover... Meet Sylvia Flemming. A rather ordinary young woman, just reaching the age of fourteen. A rather unusual life she leads, however. Olde Dave acts as her guardian, Yuriko her mother and best friend, and Alex as her friend and brother. This first scene deals with the second major problem of this story: What the fuck happened to put Sylvia here? What happened to James and company after Sidestep:Evangelion (imagine I never write the sequels to SE for a moment). Major problem number one isn't so bad, it's just: How the fuck did she get there, and why? Well, that one's obvious. Hey, I think I can tackle it too. ---------- Before The Beginning of Time ---------- "Why am I here?" Usagi nodded. "Because of Dave. Dave's sort of my father; he's raised Alex and I since we were very young. He decided that since I've finally 'come of age' I needed to get out and see the world, make some friends, that sort of thing. I think he's really worried about Alex getting his hands on me, but that's what Yuriko's there for." Sylvia sighed and flicked her hair back absently. "Uh..." Usagi said, looking on blankly. "I guess I should explain it from the beginning." She said, a smirk appearing. "Yes," Luna noted, "That would definitely help." Sylvia leaned back and stretched her arms absently. Then she took a drink of water and popped her knuckles slowly. Finally, she noticed the looks the other girls were giving her. "Okay, okay. It's a long and twisted tale, and I don't have all the information, but just bear with me and I'll try to make some sense of this for you." ---------- Weaving a Story ---------- "This story starts in another universe, in another dimension, in a time long past." "Wait, another dimension, what do you mean?" Asked Makoto. "Yeah, like where the Dark Kingdom comes from?" Rei put in. "No, it all has to do with quantum temporal theory--stuff Dave hasn't taught me yet. I can tell you about the different dimensions I'm talking about, however." She pursed her lips, momentarily lost in thought. "Okay. First off, there's astrial planes, which exist in various strengths in different places. Earth, for instance, has about two thousand of them, with anywhere from four or five to many hundreds of them active at any one time. These are the places where ghosts sleep and demons roam the land. Many ancient legends come from times when these barriers were weak. This is also where magic is often drawn from, and the planes are where dreams can be influenced as well. Alex gets lots of his power from one of these dimensions. True alternate dimensions, however, are actually parallel universes. All of them started a long, long, long, LONG time ago. Every turn fate could possibly make, every different way a decision could have fallen, throughout time, has been played out. "The result is a huge number of dimensions, many of which are extremely similar, but have different histories. The dimension my father came from originally was a parallel very similar to this world. During the course of jumping through these dimensions, we've also slid around time a lot, so the chronology of this tale isn't going to be easy to follow. Is everyone nicely confused now?" Usagi wasn't even paying attention. Ami had a thoughtful look on her face. Rei's face was scrunched up, trying to figure out what Sylvia had been saying. Makoto looked at her blankly for a second, then shook her head, deciding to brush this off as unimportant. "Go on," Luna said, repositioning herself in Sylvia's lap. "This tale starts with a boy named James Rahn, on Earth, in the United States, in the year nineteen eighty eight. James is the Nutcase, the Psycho, the most dangerous man alive. He's also the Master, Dave's teacher, and Alex's father. In eighty-eight, James was sixteen, and already an excellent fighter. He had only a few friends, kept to himself, went to high school and did most of those normal things that kids do. But something happened that year, something not even Dave--James' closest friend--knew about. For the last two years of school, he trained like a man possesed. When the lot of them graduated two years later, James simply disappeared. "A year later, he contacted Dave, asking for a ride. It was during a bad summer storm. Dave claims he barely made it there alive, and after more than a hundred miles of driving through blinding rain, he found James. "James was sitting in a phone booth in Umatilla Oregon. He was soaked from the rain, but what was worse, he was even more soaked in blood. Covered, head to toe in stuff you guys will hopefully never see in person. James had left his home town to become an assassin. Over the next year and a half, he excelled beyond his greatest dreams... then quit. From that time until the end of the world, he was ranked the number one assassin in the entire world." "And this is the father of your best friend?" Rei said, shocked. Usagi had finally noticed what Sylvia was saying when she got ready to tease Luna and had been spell-bound ever since. "James is the psycho. He's bad, maybe even evil, but he doesn't kill unless he needs to, or he's killin' bad guys." "Bad guys, so that's what they call it..." Makoto murmered. "This happened less than ten years ago?" Luna finally asked. "No. To me, the year is two thousand thirty-three. To Alex, it's two thousand thirty-eight. He was born a year before I was, but he's done a little more time traveling." No questions. "Er, continuing." Sylvia paused to take a sip of water. "Ninety-six, James meets Hiroshi Takona, and lots of bad stuff happens. Dave, Ed, James, and a whole host of other people get involved fighting Hiro. This goes on for six months or so. It turns out Hiro-san was working for a branch of a world-wide conspiracy that basically ran the world from the shadows. This organization was known as SEELE, when James finally pulled back the curtain. James and Hiro, despite differences of opinions, became good friends and worked together to put a stop to this conspiracy, but SEELE didn't go down without a fight. In the year two thousand, they blew up Antarctica." "Hold it." Ami said, putting her hands in the 'stop' position and setting aside a plate of crackers she had been digging into. "They blew it up, how?" "Specifically, an agent of SEELE moved the Lancea Longini 'a little to the left' and that detonated the core of the first Angel." "Angels explode?" Usagi asked, wide-eyed. "As I was told, they do. A lot. Very easily. But these aren't normal Angels... it's kind of complicated. I don't know the whole story myself. Any way, for the next fifteen years, the worked from the shadows and plotted their revenge, not entire sure what the Angels meant. By 2007, James and his friends from high school had themselves established as respectable mercenaries and offered a hand to the JSDF and NERV. NERV was an organization set up to keep the Angels from killing anybody else, but in reality, it was designed to facilitate Third Impact." Syliva took another sip of water. Her voice was starting to waver at parts. This was a portion of her father's life she didn't pay much attention to. Relations between Dave, Ed, and James were a little strained, and she didn't feel that the girls sitting here, girls that that had become her friends needed to find out what fate they had chosen on that other world. "My father was a master weapon-maker, a weaponsmith of sorts, if you will. This happened during his 'giant robot' phase. You couldn't blame him, what with being in Japan and all." The group shared a light chuckle. "They built some crazy hunks of metal back in those days. Wood, too. I remember Dave said that James built a wooden mecha of extraordinary power. He also said that James had some kind of magical curse, which he _did_ promise to tell me about when I got back..." Sylvia trailed off, looking to someplace beyond the room she now sat in. "Um, Sylvia, going back a moment." Luna said, raising a paw. "Huh? Uh, sure." "What is 'Third Impact' and 'Second Impact'?" "Oh, Second Impact was when Antarctica blew up. Third Imapct happened shortly after my dad left. I don't know how, but it killed everyone on Earth and remixed them into some primordial soup. I guess this was the good ending, but Dave's never elaborated." After another moment of shocked silence, Sylvia went on with her tale. "In twenty-fifteen, Third Impact did happen. I figure if SEELE got to control this weapon called 'Lillith,', they would win the war and go off and kill God. If James welded it, he would have probably done something similar. I don't know who got their hands on it in the end, but the good guys won, and my dad and Dave and about ten thousand other people left Earth for good. Since Third Impact happened while we were off-world, we can never go back." She looked momentarily downcast. "Then, some years passed." Mina excused herself to the restroom, leaving the rest of the gang in an uneasy silence. "So, Sylvia." Rei said, getting the girl's attention. "You're never meet your father, right?" "Yeah. He's been MIA since the Gornouva Incident." "What's the Gornouva Incident?" Luna said, just as Rei opened her mouth to ask the same question. "I'll get to that soon. The short of it is, a planet got blown up and my dad was a little too close to ground zero. He hasn't been seen since, but they didn't check the Coat thoroughly. I think Dave suspects he's still alive." "What Coat?" Asked Usagi. "Oh, the Coats. I'll have to explain them a bit when--nevermind." Sylvia said as Mina returned. "Okay, the Coats. The Coats were built in 1999, anticipating a need for an advanced one-man weapon system. James needed the body armor, dad needed the carry-on space, and Dave needed the challenge." "I think I'm a little lost." Mina said. "Okay, the Coat is just what is sounds like--a coat, but no ordinary coat. The Coat is a nicely cut trench coat, made of something that looks a lot like leather. The original Coats were made of Kevlar and contained enough weapons to take down a small army. The Coats evolved over time, and by 2007, James put a turbofan in one of them and set fifteen city blocks on fire. By 2010, a single Coat could _arm_ and entire Army. By 2014, dad was doing some strange things with the Coat. He'd already created what he called the 'Heavy' Coat. It was like a normal Coat except was nearly invinceble. It made a tank look like a toy and had enough firepower to stop the entire JSDF in it's tracks--which he did exactly twice during that year. After that, the Coats advanced at a staggering pace. The suit I wear now is a derivative of Coat technology. For a long time, it was the only piece of clothing I wore. It keeps me warm and protected, cleans itself and it's wearer, and has more weapons and ammo than I've ever used. I can't crawl inside of it, though..." She paused and took in the wide-eyed looks around the room. "Well, uh, dad never even went to the bathroom without his Coat. He even installed a portable tanning saloon so he wouldn't get infections from not getting enough sunlight." "Boy, I wish I had something like that." Usagi said, sighing. "Yeah," Agreed Rei, "It would certainly make laundry easier!" "Easier? As in 'none'?" Sylvia said, laughing. "Yeah, but it would have to be stylish." Mina put in, laughing as well. The girls made some more jokes about invincible wears, but Sylvia wasn't in to it. She put her chin on her fist after a moment, lost in thought. Ed Flemming. Who was the man? He wasn't the single-minded godlike killing machine James was rumored to be. And if what Dave had told her about the assassin was true, Alex would have an... interesting time meeting his father. But dad... dad might just be dead. No, he'd survived worse. James had even been through... no, best not to think about that too much. The sheer tragedy of it brought her to tears if she wasn't prepared for it. She didn't even _know_ her own mother for crying out loud. Well, perhaps it was time she--"Sylvia!" "WHA!!!" Sylvia yelled, falling off the couch in surprise. After landing rather ungracefully on the floor, she looked up to see two faces right over hers, looking at her worriedly. "What?" "You kind of zonned out there." Usagi said. "Yeah, usually that's Usagi's job." Rei commented. Sylvia snickered for a second while Usagi tried to exact vengeance from Rei with her voice. Finally, she put herself back between the two girls to settle them down. "Okay, what was I talking about?" "The Gornouva Incident, and what happened before it." Luna said crisply, then went back to smoothing her fur out. "Oh, I remember. Well, some interesting things happened before Gornouva, so I'd better go through them. The ship this little crew left the Earth in was called the Liberate. They left the planet and engaged and experimental FTL engine Dave had devised from working on Angel corpses. They didn't work." "FTL, you don't mean faster than light travel, do you?" Asked Ami. "Yes, that's exactly what they were for. They didn't actually make you go faster than light, they just performed a dimension jump. Unfortunately, the jump didn't move us through our own space, it just jumped us to a parallel Earth. J.T. showed up right then and explained everything. J.T.... he's James' counterpart in another alternate Earth. His world's population was wiped out by a plauge years and years ago and J.T. works to keep peace in the dimensions. He's a little like James. Dave says he's like Diet Coke compared to Nitric Acid. "After that, the Liberate was left in the middle of an intergalactic war, crashed on a world that used magic instead of technology for their needs, stopped several smaller conflicts, and got destroyed in a war between some colonies and the earth in another dimension with giant mecha. "To make a long story short, we have to fast-forward past it's replacement--the Liberate 2 and fleet--and go straight to the Terran/Kilrathi War. The Terran/Kilrathi war spanned half a galaxy; in this case, the Milky Way. The thing started over some misunderstanding, and had been going on for over sixty years when the Liberate 2 appeared on the scene. By this time, dad and James had built an entire fleet of the most power ships ever created and had taken well to trolling space like some wandering monks. James eventually got married to a half-demon girl named Miko Mido, who came from Earth with them and--" "Hold it," Rei interupted. "Half-demon?" "Yeah, her father was the ruler of the Shikima realm." She blinked. "Oh, sorry, I forgot. They're nothing like the demons we're fighting." She almost started telling them what the Shikima were, but stopped, reminded by her own blush that it would be best to move past this subject as quickly as possible. "Each dimension also has these various planes... Shikima are like spirits, you see..." "Uh-huh." Rei said while slowly nodding her head. She wasn't buying a word of it, but Sylvia felt she had nothing to prove. It wasn't like they were going to actually meet Alex. Outside, thunder rumbled in the distance. "Looks like the storm's finally coming." Usagi said. "Um, guys?" She looked at Sylvia, then at the grinning Rei. "Shikima... they weren't always up to no-good, but they need people. They couldn't take over the world; it wouldn't be entertaining enough, and they can't just kill all the people, since they would turn on each other right away. Well, Miko was kind of a bond between the Shikima plane of reality and the Earth plane of reality. Her body literally acted as a gateway to hold the Shikima power with her wherever she went. After the first jump, the bond marked her with strange symbols from head to toe. I heard they were quite fetching. Since she died, Alex got the same symbols, but he can hide them real well, thanks to his father. "This all centers around the war I was talking about." Sylvia continued. "James figured he could kill the emperor of of the Kilrathi and demand their surrender. Despite everything dad and Dave did to stop him, he gunned down the emperor just 48 hours after finding out where Kilra Prime was. What happened next was unthinkable." She put her head in her hands, her voice dropping to a flat monotone. "Once news of the emperor's death came through, it was like the Kilrathi changed completely. Little things like getting slaughtered meant nothing to them as long as they could inflict pain on the alliance. They used every dirty trick in the book to annihilate the Terran alliance. In the first day alone, they killed almost forty billion people. James' response tells a little bit about the man and what he does. "It also tells a little bit about Alex." She sighed. What could she say about Alex? "Alex was born into chaos. "During the ending weeks of the war with Kilra, Miko was pregnant and still she fought on. Her last mission was to escort some frigates of medical supplies to the Gimile system. The convoy ran into a Kilrathi carrier and support ships. A massive transport carrying some ten million survivors of the Hiro Star Holocaust, was under attack by the Kilrathi fleet. Miko and her two wingmen fought like they were possesed, three fighters against an armada of hundreds of fighter pilots and seven capital ships. After her two wingmen were killed, she even managed to push them back into a neighboring star, some no-name red giant without any planets. It was a star that hadn't even been named by the residents of the Gimile system, just given a number. It was on that nameless battlefield Miko died, saving the survivors from three planets with her life. "James showed up just as her ship was being torn apart by Kilrathi fire, and, to put it mildly, snapped. No-one knows what happened there. When the Liberate 2 jumped into the system, both Gimile's star and the red giant had been blown to space dust. James landed on the ship long enough to hand a naked newborn baby to dad, the kid still covered in blood, and fly off. And when I say fly off, I do not mean in a ship. He wasn't even wearing a pressure suit, he flew away under his own power. "They didn't see him for a month. "James was found on the drifting remains of a Kilrathi destroyer four weeks later. He was alive, but in bad shape. Along the way to get him, the Liberate made a stop at Kilra Prime, and... no, it's more like they _didn't_ make the stop." "Didn't?" "There was no Kilra system when they got where it was supposed to be. There was no asteroid belt from the planet. There was no planet; no sun; no nothing. There wasn't even inert gases or stray particle fields. Everything within one hundred light-years had been utterly annihilated. They found out later this scene had been repeated over and over again across more than fifty Kilra planets--most to a lesser degree. The Kilrathi simply ceased to exist. Without an enemy to fight, the politicians of Earth were left with a kind of hollow victory, winning a war they had fought for the better part of a century due to the actions of one rogue madman. "James wasn't in any condition to talk about what he did or how he did it. In fact, he wasn't in a condition to talk, period. Dave started some investigation while dad reassembled the fleet and took up James' duties while he recovered. The whole thing had been a massacre, and dad was extremely pissed off. Before Dave even got back, he took a few of his inventions and left for ten months. When he got back, he brought me with him." There was a long moment of solemn silence as the asembled senshi were left in their own thoughts about the awesome tragedy of a war they never knew about. Finally, Rei broke the silence. "What happened while he was gone?" "He never told anyone who my mother was, or what happened to her. He just came back and said 'this is what's left of my family; don't ask'." The tableu was silent again for a long time. War was an insane thing that brought about insane conditions, that much was certain, but never before had the girls known someone who had been almost literally born into such circumstances. It was a powerful reminder of just how terrible the very battles they fought could become. "James left about three years later, after building an android to take care of Alex and myself. He left because... he left because of dad." She sighed deeply. "Gornouva was just a name for an operation the crew of the Liberate had to undertake. Dad had built a massive refining facility on it's own planet in another dimension just to produce fuel for the Liberate. The place was genius in it's design, completely self- sufficient and self-repairing. It was overbuilt, according to dad; _waaay_ overbuilt, but that was the design's fault. You see, it was made to produce antimatter. By the time the Liberate got back, it had amassed about a thousand tons of antimatter particles, and was running out of space. Dad couldn't just turn the thing off; that would cause the whole machine to explode. So, he had to move it. "Unfortunately, this was a Bad Idea, and they were attacked several dozen times by more idiotic bad guys than ever before--which is a lot. Right before they reached the 'parking lot' where they were going to store this antimatter, a military intelligence operative finally stole some of it. Just five ounces of it, inside of dad's special containers. When he tried to stop the man, something... something went wrong, and there was a big explosion. "The planet they had been fighting over was vaporized... all James and... and... Dave ever found was his..." Sylvia swallowed, her eyes beginning to water. "His Coat. That's the Gornouva Incident." "Five ounces? As in one hundred and fifty grams?" Ami questioned. "One hundred and sixty grams, actually. Dave said it left an 'impression' in the system's star." "My God... you had a thousand _tons_ of this stuff?" Mina shrieked. "Well, because of the time-shift, it had been running for four thousand years. Dad thought it wouldn't be nearly so efficient, so he planned on letting it run unattended for a long time, then come back to pick up their fuel."