So, how about a crossover with The
Backrooms? If you're not careful, you could no-clip out of reality, and wind up in The Backrooms.
9.223 quintillion Levels, as the different dimensions are called. Level 0 is an endless backroom of an office space(hence the name) a second-order infinity. That is, it has infinite floors, and each floor is an infinite plane. If you don't use the specific mechanism (a series of 'service shafts' accessed through metal doors) you can't move between floors no matter how far down you dig or if you try and knock out some celling tiles.
The idea is that after Serenity killed herself, her status as the incarnated soul of the universe led to some serious issues. Either that or the splintering of the Silver Crystal into the Rainbow Crystal caused some problems with reality for obvious reasons. Though I suppose that's still technically her death causing problems.
My thought is that, since it's disjointed from normal reality, it's also disjointed from time, so time runs about 90 times faster in The Backrooms than normal reality in terms of 'doing things' but stuff like food, sleep, and aging all run according to normal reality, so 3 months in The Backrooms would be a day on Earth. This would allow for a lot of study and training time to be freed up later on, but I actually want Usagi to encounter the thing early on, and, due to what she is and her role in their creation, be able to jump back and forth between them and reality as we know it at will. Her parents brush it off as a weird imaginary friend, and Usagi eventually stops mentioning it, since she's worried she won't be able to bring them back out if she tries showing them, as she hasn't managed to get any of the people she's met inside out. I expect the hazards and injuries encountered by people lead her to awaken her magic early, perhaps to save someone who's dying.
It has a side benefit in that Usagi's presence helps stabilize The Backrooms, restoring a number of decaying/destroyed Levels and Sub-Levels(a variant of a normal Level, a fusion of two different Levels, etc. intrinsically tied to the main one), and she herself gets a huge amount of time to sleep, study, play videogames on her... Atari 2600, according to wikipedia's article of console history saying that's the sort of thing that would be out in 1992, and the like. She also sometimes goes on snack runs and the like, since she can pop out of the place and back in at will, to the point she's regarded by most of the people inside as a friendly Entity(one of the bizarre native inhabitants) and considering she's sort of Azathoth under the impression of being a normal human, that's not exactly wrong.
Anyway, this causes a few changes at first, such as Usagi being even more desperate to help people than in canon, and with her 'I can't possibly be good enough' aspect a little more obvious, since she's failed to help with this whole Backrooms thing for literally her entire life. The fact that it's a problem more than a million times higher than a human could count to in their lifetime(a little over ten billion, if you were wondering) and she has a Tobi-esque 'just hide in another dimension you can't reach' dodge trick she can use almost as casually, though she doesn't remain visible in the normal world. I imagine that reveal's going to garner some very different reactions in this timeline.
Anyway, things proceed mostly as canon, though Usagi's grades are somewhat better(well, sometimes she forgets a bunch of stuff since from her perspective she studied it over a month longer ago than they'd expect at minimum, so the incident with her mother kicking her out in Episode 1 could still happen) she tends to say she's using a weird trick(which is not incorrect) to study when asked about it. Canon goes wildly off the rails as of the Rainbow Crystal arc, as gaining access to the Silver Crystal makes her advance from 'copying Tobi's trick' to 'can extrude places from The Backrooms and vice versa' to 'can open permanent gates' setting off a new Age of Exploration, among other things. The permanent part comes into play when Chibiusa takes the crystal because her mother is acting like an irresponsible teenager.
Another cross idea I had. Ever heard of
Gloomverse? Well, I'm not surprised if you haven't. It's a project of loverofpiggies, better known as CrayonQueen, creator of Error!Sans. It's a world where(with the exception of the Mancers, more on them later) one's magic is tied to a hat and a wand, with a more general rule that it's tied to the soul. Basically, a kid picks out a hat that they feel a connection with(it actually works very similarly to Epithets), and they'll reach inside and find a wand. These are powerful focuses, but since the soul is tied to the magic(so magic tends to be personality-based, such as Seaweed, who has water magic due to her affinity for it) damaging the wand can damage the soul. Overexerting yourself can crack the wand as well.
This is a world where the vast majority of the population has magic to at least some degree, though there seems to be some kind of Warhammer Fantasy polar gates thing going on, as magical power seems to be at least partially a product of geographical location with Stratoverse(where the culture is deliberately engineered to favor development of weather magic) is known to have the strongest magi, with a general downward trend as you get further away.
Inversians have no magic, which is explicitly noted as being weird to everyone else, kind of like Blanks in 40K. They also can't see in color for some reason without eye transplants, to the point an Inversian parent passes down some pretty sensitive eyes to at least the next generation. It should also be noted that while you can mess around with the big three rules(you have to have a hat and wand to use magic, and the latter can only be obtained through
your hat. You cannot directly use your magic on someone, not even yourself. You can't go past a set potential, otherwise you'll be Severed, which leaves you little more than a soulless husk. You also can't create sentient beings with magic) you can't actually cheat them. You could set someone on fire by throwing a fireball at them, but you can't set them on fire directly. You can disguise your hat and wand, or have the latter surgically implanted/taped to your arm, but you can't do without. You can overexert yourself, but that will at best make you collapse and temporarily short out your powers by cracking your wand/damaging your hat. The Mancers were a set of 5 exceptions from a thousand years beforehand. All indications point to them being able to ignore these rules, as well as having been killed by one of their own. They seem to be connected to a set of 'Colors' people who turn a color when they get their magic, to the point even their clothes shift after a few seconds, regardless of what color it was before.
Anyway, the main character is a girl without any magic. As she is seventeen(not unheard of, but exceedingly rare past 15 or so) people often give her crap over it. Her parents are especially bad about it, to the point of regularly calling her lazy for failing magic classes despite the obvious issue of sending someone without magic to take magic classes. The story starts by having her get fed up and run off with nothing but the clothes on her back and a cellular(the old antenna type that evolved into the cell phones we're familiar with) before managing to become the assistant to Wallis Gloom, the most famous, popular magician in the entire nation.
Wallis is significantly jerkier than his image/stage performance would suggest, and he pressured her to sign a contract with him before revealing his true colors, so she's kind of stuck. That being said, he's not all that bad a guy, having felt sorry for her since his brother Harold was in a similar 'no magic at 17' situation and was also homeless at story start, hence making her his assistant. He has a thing for helping downtrodden people.
Anyway, Assistant, AKA, Rylie, AKA Royletta Greenwitch Biv(Roy G. Biv, she hates Royletta, hence Rylie) has a terrible home life. Seriously, she fell into a coma for two weeks, and her parents didn't visit her once, just using it to rile up the crowd against the Gloomverse president literally right outside the hospital in question, to the point she could hear them through the closed window.
Society is very, very heavily stratified against people without magic. The vast, vast majority of them are homeless people literally referred to as defective in Gloomverse, and there is a very strong prejudice against Inverse, partially because they haven't contacted anyone in 50 years, but mostly because they don't have magic, which is mutual on Inverse's part regarding mages. I imagine they have some strong support in the Steamverse territories, who have focused on technology over magic, and frankly aren't big fans of magic. Stratoverse, meanwhile, has it so that being without magic, or even magic that isn't strong enough, means that you basically aren't human, as it's considered a sign of the disfavor of their goddess.
My idea is to have the three laws of Magic be a result of Serenity attempting to screw over Beryl and her minions before they died, or perhaps Selene, since she figured she was dying anyway. The first Law is about screwing up the magic of the generals and Beryl herself, since they'd have a problem similar to new She-Ra after she lost her sword and kept trying to become She-Ra on reflex. Basically, they'd suffer from the 'trained wrong, have to fight your muscle memory' issue. The second Law keeps them from just ripping Life Energy out of people directly, forcing them to do it second-hand via various schemes. The third Law is meant to keep them from juicing themselves up with Metallia's power or Life Energy, and possibly to cripple Youma.
Now maybe we modify canon to have all three Laws come into effect, and part of the reason it took so long for Beryl to start Dark Kingdom-ing was because she had to figure out at least partial solutions to each of these problems(and/or just train herself back up), or maybe we have them apply only in part(ie, second works fine because it's applied to other people, not the Dark Kingdom directly) or not at all because of Chaos' juice in Metallia and/or Selene working off the absolute last dregs of her power, which would also explain the Mancers being able to ignore the Laws, which is suggested to be a result of raw power.
Either way, I imagine the girls would have their Gloomverse magics work with their Senshi powers because of Selene, possibly fusing their wands directly with their transformation devices and their hats with all the ribbon(it's implied the cloud hair of the Stratoversians is a modification of their hats, like how their wands are explicitly surgically implanted in their arm) they wear, or maybe Usagi's tiara. Someone using their wand as a weapon would be quite a shock in that universe.
See, since magic is heavily tied to one's interests, I expect something like this: Usagi becomes the Video Game Wizard, Ami becomes the Book Wizard(or possibly the Doctor Wizard to give the team another healer pre-Chibiusa), Rei becomes... hm, Priestess would be sort of redundant, as would fire, maybe Cleric, leaning into the follower of a god angle, with it being Usagi, who basically gives her diet versions of the other Senshi's powers, allowing Rei to be a good Jack of All Trades. Jupiter gets Cooking Magic similar to Charmy from Black Clover, which allows her to make more magic than she puts into it, granting her the ability to serve as a perpetual motion machine for the team, and turn them into such machines themselves. Venus would probably get some kind of Detective magic, both as a riff on the Love Detective from Love is War, and as a general 'finds DK hideouts really fast' sort of deal. Saturn might get some kind of Freedom Magic to counter Mistress 9's control. Uranus and Neptune would probably gain racing and violin magics, respectively. Pluto... probably Time Magic so she can do stuff like Kingdom Hearts Haste, Slow, and Stop spells without killing herself, though something more death oriented isn't out of the question. Using Necromancy for good isn't something we see often in fiction. Naru would probably get a Gem Magic similar to Rin Tohsaka's. Magical batteries would probably sell like crack in this setting.
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