- Pronouns
- He/Him
Could we get a space boat somewhere between the aesthetic of the SNES RPG and the boats in Saban Moon?
Usagi Quest (CK3/Princess Maker) (Sailor Moon)
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Hm. Can you link to pictures of them?
Psyraptor
Polania Player
- Location
- Canada
might be referring to this? the image didnt wanna work, so linking the page directly
*That moment when you realize... that the actresses that you've hired to cosplay your characters don't look a thing like the characters you've hired them to cosplay.*
Dear lord that banner on the page is cringe. *Full body shudder at the cringe levels*
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Psyraptor
Polania Player
- Location
- Canada
Agreed, the one they have cosplaying Usagi looks 30ish whilst everyone else looks their appropriate ages.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Silver Millennium Naval Engineering Student:
[looks up what the heck a 'galleon' is, as the student significantly predates the Spanish language and empire]
"Hmm. Let's see. That design has a single co-planar sail suite with an extremely simple rig arrangement, dorsal-only by the look of it... Well, the 'galleon' was a relatively less maneuverable but far-ranging seagoing vessel, with a sail plan that gave it limited ability to tack or maneuver, to the point where it was eventually succeeded by more agile or more sophisticated sailing rigs. So I suppose the name would fit. Except that unlike a galleon... this thing doesn't have wide cargo-carrying holds, it would seem. Hm. Looks like someone's first attempt to keep a workable design simple without a lot of expertise. Something that you could build straight from blueprints, not lose during its commissioning trials, and use to get from Point A to Point B with a very small crew if your charts were good, the stars were right, and you were careful to pick a favorable route, assuming one existed."
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Psyraptor
Polania Player
- Location
- Canada
Fairly sure its a pleasure yatch, I'm sure an actual warship would be...well, better equipped and laid out
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
In the spirit of my previous post, I'd probably have the student say something like: "Well, it wouldn't set any speed records and it wouldn't give bragging rights, but as a pleasure yacht, it'd work, I suppose."
Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's also the only version of Sailor Moon to acknowledge that there's no way in hell that Usagi and Ami would ever go to the same cram school.
"Aww, mom, you got me into Crystal Seminar? I knew you believed in me!"
"No, you're going to the remedial school across the street."
"Aww, mom, you got me into Crystal Seminar? I knew you believed in me!"
"No, you're going to the remedial school across the street."
As I recall, the ship from Sailor Moon: Another Story was a fairly standard sailing ship but flying through the air. It was also part of a plotline where Venus finds it and is told by Artemis it used to be hers in her past life?
Ah, I found a youtube video with it, it has some cute little stub-wings and looks better up close than you might expect from my earlier description.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Hm, yeah. It's definitely just "a sailing ship with cute little stub-wings."
I think the only way it makes sense is when we do what UsagiQuest did and strongly imply that Crystal Seminar was a fly-by-night operation that was quite happy to mind-whammy parents into sending their kids, or children into wanting to go. For all we know, some of its brochures were basically the equivalent of the Doctor's psychic paper, and would cue off the reader's expectations to procedurally generate a "and this is why your kid should come to our school!" narrative.
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Winged One
Not the Simurgh
- Location
- definitely the ground
- Pronouns
- They/Them/It
- Location
- Ohio
Simultaneously a big sad moment, reminding us of Ami's friendless childhood, and a pretty cool "oh holy shit I already know a (probably) exctinct langauge" moment.
Mmm…that's some serious Truename magic vibes going on there.
RadiantPhoenix
Trudging up the Hill
- Location
- USA, Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Not the only one: in the Manga:
- Usagi does not attend Crystal Seminar. In fact, she specifically rejects doing so, when Luna suggests doing so to get her grades up.
- They are basically trying to recruit as many students as possible to mind control into spying for them
- Usagi learns about the plot when Ami drops the CD with the mind control program on it by accident, and Luna picks it up because it's suspicious
- Ami gets the number-one high-score in the Sailor V arcade game, with about double the next-highest score
- Ami's school uniform sometimes has a black shirt insteaad of a white one for some reason?
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Usagi is so lucky Ami is so dedicated to her schoolwork and education, otherwise she would basically own the scoreboards at the arcade.
Master Five vs Ami. Usagi as the reward again.
The battle will be legendary
Under a Rainbow Sky - Part 13
Lunaryon
Dual Aurora Wave
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Under a Rainbow Sky
Part 13
Part 13
"Thanks!' You step over and pick up one of the statuettes, examining it carefully. You turn to smile at Ami, and let the souvenir go where such things go when you don't need them.
"So… Where to next, Ami?" You ask. "This is your castle after all."
Ami huffs, but it is an amused huff. "We're trying to find the central controls, remember?"
"I mean, yeah, but like… Which way?"
The doors at the other end of the ballroom are built from the same heavy, silvery material as the ones you came in through. This time, you each take one leaf of the doors and open them together.
Something about this hallway, compared to the last one… the proportions seem different.
You're probably imagining it. Ami strides forwards, sure of where she's going, as though this entire station is very much her home even if she's forgotten some of the details. She looks very much like the queen that here, around Mercury, it's so easy to imagine her becoming one day. You follow behind, ready for wherever she takes you.
The halls of Ami's castle are wide, wide enough that it keeps striking you as strange. Not disturbing, just… strange. Admittedly, if you'd been asked to imagine Ami having a castle, you'd have imagined something more like the palace on the Moon. A building on the surface of Mercury, instead of something floating up here in space. Come to think of it, in Tokyo, or even on the Moon-as-it-was, you suppose, someone putting together a building has to think carefully about what to do with every meter of room they have. Whoever designed Ami's castle had nothing but spare room; it's surrounded by huge amounts of empty space in every direction.
Hm. Minako has a space castle. Ami has a space castle. Either you, too, have a space castle…
…Or that's just a thing for the other Senshi.
Which reminds you of things. A lot of things. What Jadeite said when you confronted him at the radio station, over two months ago now.
Princess Serenity wasn't a Sailor Senshi. There wasn't any Sailor Moon back in the days of the Silver Millennium. Maybe you don't have a space castle at all, not counting the Moon Palace, and maybe that's why.
Well, you're just going to have to find someone who can build you your own some day, then. So there.
But before you have more than a few moments to imagine what you might want in your future orbital space castle, Ami gestures to a door along the side of the hall. "I think we'd better turn here if we want to keep going towards the center."
She opens the door and the two of you look inside. It's a storeroom. A big one. There are dozens of racks, each about the size of a bus, and they're filled with stacks of the hexagonal tables.
You don't spend much time looking at the racks, because the ceiling has just sprouted a tentacle. It's… part-transparent, and it looks like a natural outgrowth of the ceiling, made from the same material as the walls of the castle. It's wobbling around a bit, but otherwise doesn't seem to be doing much of anything. It's coiled up like a big spring; you're not sure, but it looks like it could reach just about any corner of the room if it uncoiled.
You notice that there are slots along the wall closest to the tentacle… and they're about the right size for the tables.
You walk over to one of the racks, still looking up at the tentacle. "Huh. So that's how this place moves the furniture."
Ami sounds like she's still thinking it over as she answers. "I guess so…"
"There aren't any of the chairs in here, though- whoa." As you touch one of the tables, it comes loose much more easily than you'd expected. The hexagon slides out and down towards you as if it were on greased skids. You whirl out of the way easily, of course, and to your surprise the table doesn't drop to the floor. Instead, it rights itself and sits there, level, at about your waist height. After a few seconds, the clouds that act like chairs flow out from under the edges of the table like puffs of fog.
You rub the back of your neck. "Uh, I take that back."
You glance at Ami, who's still standing in the doorframe. You realize that you have no idea how to put the chairs away. And, apparently, she's realized the same thing. Then you look away, blushing slightly, trying to pretend you didn't see her amused smirk. Which would be embarrassing on Earth, but somehow makes you feel twice as foolish here. There aren't any controls on the table itself… You walk around the table, peering at it suspiciously.
It feels wrong to just leave the table and chairs floating there, but you're not sure what to do. Should you just shove the table back into the rack and hope the chairs merge with it again? That feels like an even worse idea, somehow.
With a quiet huff, you start to walk away. Then you whirl around as you hear a sound like a cross between a set of windchimes, a ringing telephone, and a wetted finger on a wine glass.
The ceiling tentacle is unfolding, uncoiling, seeming lazy even though it's probably moving as fast as a running man. It reaches out, and its tip lightly taps the tabletop.
The chairs immediately flow back under the table and disappear. The tentacle thickens slightly, then sprouting a set of narrower limbs that grip the table like fingers. It puts the table neatly back into the rack, then returns to the ceiling.
"Well that's…" weird "...Useful." You don't want to call any part of Ami's castle weird. But then you hear Ami giggle behind you, so you get the feeling she probably knew what you were going to say. At least she doesn't seem to be upset.
You pass through this storeroom, cutting over to another hallway that angles off in a different direction. The doors are infrequent, and plain, and lead to- you check after a hundred meters or so- more storage rooms. The first one you check has big storage racks that remind you of the ones for the ballroom tables, but these hold things that look like little like spiders made out of spun glass.
You decide not to take a closer look this time.
The next storeroom is a stack of neatly labeled metal boxes that would be too heavy for most people to lift. Then again, you suppose that doesn't matter if all the heavy lifting is done by weird tentacles that grow out of the ceiling. Ami takes one look at the boxes and sighs. "This is some kind of raw material storage. I wish I'd known about this before I wasted all that time in the library back in May. Maybe I wouldn't have blown us up in Kibougahana..." You're not sure what she's talking about, and it doesn't sound very Ami-like, but you're sure she has her reasons.
This corridor ends in a right-angle corner, and you stop and turn to Ami, confused. "...I thought we were going towards the center of the castle."
"We are. This… I think this must be an illusion. Or something." Ami frowns and starts waving her hands in the air as her visor appears. "Okay, I'm calling it an or-something. But we're definitely at least close to a kilometer from the nearest outside wall by now."
And you'd say 'sure doesn't look like it,' but then you realize that this can't be a balcony looking out over empty space, because there's air. It just looks that way. Also, the sunlight isn't nearly as harsh as it really was outside. You look towards the direction of the sun, and yes, it's tinted. The stars still show clearly, but the sun… distorted and blurred into something softer.
It's so obviously an artificial view, but a perfect one for getting a clear view of the planet below. You hastily pull out your camera and take a few more snaps. You aren't sure if it's even still working, but the more pictures you try to take, the more likely you are to have at least one good one of your own, apart from whatever Ami gets.
A minute or two after that, you go back into the hallways once more. And soon enough, you come across another tall, wide doorway.
Ami gasps. "Usagi! It's another ballroom!"
The two of you rush through. It's… it's the same. Similar music, perhaps even lovelier. Different light-sculptures. Different views through the… windows?... in the walls. The same tables along the sides. Tables… wait a minute.
"Ami? I think we've gone in a circle. Look." And Ami covers her mouth quite suddenly as she follows your eyes to a table with three carefully rearranged statuettes.
She looks confused. "How could we have gone in a circle? Hang on…" She brings up her visor and wiggles her fingers for a moment. "I've been playing with this inertial tracking thingy back on Earth. Let me see… um."
"Um?"
"No. No, we have not been going in circles."
"Are you sure? Because this looks like the same room we were in before."
"Let me rephrase that. If we were going in circles just now, the other application I'm running right now should be screaming about spatial distortion. Because we'd need to be going in a complete circle that only has about a hundred and ninety-five degrees in it. And it's not screaming."
You trust Ami. And somehow, you feel instinctively that nothing that would happen normally here could really be allowed to truly hurt her, or could be allowed by her to really hurt you.
You are not trapped in an ancient haunted space station, doomed to wander in circles forever. If all else fails, you can just teleport out. Back to the Earth, or certainly the Moon, or just outside into space. Whichever you want. Whenever you want.
So you draw a deep breath, point in the direction Ami has told you is more or less towards the center of the station and its main control, and say "This way?"
"Yeah, that should work."
You walk along for another five minutes. You go through a couple of rooms with blinking light and equipment, and several long corridor sections. Ami uses her inertial gadget to keep track of which way to go at the intersections, and she seems to be able to read the signs on the walls. The signs, though… you have a bad feeling about them.
And then you see another large door. You've seen some like it in places that were clearly meant to have big machines or loads of heavy equipment passing through, but those weren't as fancily decorated. A door like THIS, well, you remember it from one place. Two places. You try not to let it scare you.
Ami opens the door, and you pass through.
The ballroom is beautiful, of course, as beautiful as ever. With fairyland light and fairyland music and… you almost don't dare to look… and that table, with three statuettes. For the third time.
You very carefully say nothing to Ami.
Ami, of course, can hear you very carefully saying nothing to her.
"Usagi, I know this is weird, but I swear, as far as I can tell, we've been going in more or less a straight line towards the center of the station the entire time."
"Ami? This place is starting to scare me. I'm not saying we should turn back-" if we even can, wait, of course we can- "but… I don't like this. I think your castle is haunted, Ami…" You can't help but let your nerves into your voice.
Ami pauses. She is… actually taking that possibility seriously. "Well, maybe it is. But I'm sure the ghosts mean well."
"I think maybe they're helping too much. I wonder what they want?" You think about it. "Hmp. If they're ghosts, either they want their statue back… or they want us to dance again."
"..." Ami freezes, though the sudden curls of frost around her feet are small and disappear very quickly.
flicker
It's a sign of how distracted you are by this place and by Ami! and by that thought and by everything else that you forget to walk over to the table. You teleport across and put the statuette back where you found it, rearranging it and the others carefully. You've come to realize that no two of the little ornaments are exactly alike. You're not sure which order they were in when you took one, but you hope that this will be good enough to placate the ballroom-spirits or whatever is happening. If that's the problem. There may not even be any ghosts; you're kind of grasping at straws here.
You turn, walking back to Ami the long way… she's still standing still, staring at something down at the other end of the room. And then, as though she's straining under a weight of dozens of tons, she turns to you.
"...If we had to dance again, would that be so bad?"
Oh.
Oh.
Suddenly, the fear of being trapped in some kind of ghost story of a haunted castle leaves your mind entirely. Well, almost entirely.
You take a deep breath and decide that someone is going to have to princess here. And if Ami! won't do it, you'll have to. To push right past that beautiful 'queen of the world' aura to get through to your friend, because underneath the Ami!, you know Ami. And maybe it's the music being pretty, or that lovely special glow she has here in her world, but you're fairly sure what's happening and she could do this to herself for weeks, the poor girl. And you could never let her do it any longer, now that you understand.
You draw a deep breath.
"Ami Mizuno, did you bring me on a hundred million kilometer trip through outer space and learn how to fly with magic wing rocket boots and pull a giant haunted space station out of a hat because all of that was easier than asking me out to a festival dance?"
"I… agh, not like… it just kind of happened!" Her words start tripping over each other. "Things are just happening and this place doesn't make any sense and I don't know what to do!" She looks down, clenching her fists, and you sense that she's close to tears.
And you're standing close, and you smile up at her and tap her lightly on the lips with a gloved fingertip. "Ssh. Ssh. It's okay. You're doing fine. Now, this place is kind of wacky for me to feel much like dancing right now. Especially if a bunch of ghosts that might be here might be watching us and might think I stole something. You… you understand what I mean, right?"
You feel a sudden wiggle of nerves under the princessing, hoping that she'll understand. It's a relief when she nods quietly, and you feel all the more right about going on.
"But if you'd like to go to that festival… we can pick one after we get back to Minato. That sounds pretty nice, really."
Your dear brilliant knight nods. Her head jerks up and down, almost frantically, as dawning relief and hope fill her face.
You smile softly. Whether this is what a princess should do, or what Serenity would do, seems somehow unimportant. You lean close and bring your hands up. You can't stand that much more on tiptoe than you already are in these boots, but transformed, especially with the lightness Senshi strength gives you, you have options. For instance, it's possible, even easy, to lift yourself with a fingertip on each shoulder of someone taller than you are.
Which gives you the altitude to quickly press your lips to Ami's cheek, then drop back to the ground and smile softly up at her, grabbing her hand in yours. "Okay!"
While Ami's still catching up with that, you half-turn away, still holding on. You continue, in a rather more serious and practical tone of voice: "Right then. Now, hm." You turn to the center of the room, giving the ballroom a quick, deep bow. "I really enjoyed dancing here, Ballroom. But there are other parts of the castle that we need to see today, so would you mind letting us go and see everywhere else, please?"
You can feel Ami giving you a look, but with a giggle you pull the girl after you, out of the room and back into the halls, almost breaking into a run on the giddy momentum of it all.
The corridors stay decorated, rather than plain. They curve slightly. Ami seems a little distracted, but she occasionally manages a squeak of direction to turn the two of you to the left or right, and once calls out "WAIT!" because she needs to think about the direction for a moment. She's guiding you towards the main control room…
And then she stops again, without saying anything.
"Ami? Are you okay?"
"This hallway feels… very familiar."
You blink. It doesn't feel familiar to you. "...Are we headed back to that ballroom?"
"No, no. This is… definitely not the ballroom. Or anything near the ballroom. I just can't quite remember."
You come to a door smaller than the ballroom and storage room doors, smaller than the equipment room doors. It looks much more normal, even if it's made of Mercurian not-glass-not-metal instead of, say, wood. It has a handle and slides when Ami pushes it, like a normal door.
After everything you've seen in the Mercury Castle, there are a lot of things you might have expected. This was not anywhere on that list.
"..."
"..."
"This… this was Ermis' bedroom suite."
It reminds you of the way you lived back before you became a Senshi.
Granted, it's a lot bigger. Ermis' bed is way too high, but when you look closer, you realize that it's not as high as you thought. It's like a cross between a hammock and a bed, with a sturdy frame and a center that dips down under the weight of pillows and blankets. That's… funny. You've never seen anything like that before.
But the rest of the room is much more familiar. Because it's a mess.
There's a few outfits' worth of clothing that have been casually tossed aside here and there. Crystals like the ones that keep shocking you, that you gave to Makoto because she's the only one who can handle them comfortably, are scattered across the floor. Though they look dull and- experimentally you pick one up- yeah, no shock. You guess they're like dead batteries. And there's stacks of little boxes and medium boxes and big boxes against some of the walls, and things left in unstable heaps, and you don't know what they all are, and.
There's a device plugged into the wall, no, devices, a bunch of them, with cords. Some of the cords just seem to end; they don't connect to anything, or even have connectors on their ends. But there are still so many. Enough cords to tie you and Ami both up in hopeless tangles, and surprisingly they are the only thing in the room that are clearly put into careful order. All the cables are carefully aligned and stuck into place with glimmering dots of blue light that must be doing the work of tape or thumbtacks or something. Spells that just may have lasted for ten thousand years, untouched, outliving their caster. You find that perversely satisfying. Princess Ermis COULD make things be neat, she just chose not to.
There's something that might be a computer console built into the opposite wall, and a shelf in front of it with several… wait. Those are game controllers. It's close enough to the door that three strides bring you there and you've picked up a controller and it has two joysticks and too many buttons and it's not plugged in and you're not sure it can be plugged in, but this is a game controller, you recognize it instantly.
The Super Duper Mega-Famicom or whatever has got to be around here somewhere… no, not now. With a deliberate effort of will, you put it back down, making a mental note to be very sure something like this gets re-invented some day.
Which means you are no longer distracting yourself from noticing the hot tub in the far corner. Which is the most different thing about this room, because your room certainly doesn't have that. You're trying not to be jealous and grouchy at the princessly whispers in the back of your head because apparently some magical space princesses get to have messy rooms and their own game console and a hot tub and you have to put up with incessant nagging to tidy things up-
You grit your teeth and push all of that down, because if you get much grumpier Ami's going to notice and it's not her fault. Probably. You're almost sure. But… you really have no idea what's going on or why you're here. You turn to Ami, and you're sure she can see the confusion on your face. She seems pretty confused herself.
"Was Ermis' bedroom near the main control areas?"
"I have no idea, Usagi. I just… I don't know." She shrugs helplessly.
You look at her, feeling faintly suspicious. "「[Versatile]」rooms again. Are you feeling sleepy or something?"
"I…" Ami looks stricken. You're not entirely sure why. "Um. Definitely not. Especially not now."
"...Are you okay?" She does look very upset, somehow, and you wish you could make her feel better. But she just stammers.
"Let's just, uh. Um. Er."
You step up close to Ami, taking her right hand between your hands, because she's worrying you-
"Should we teleport out of here, Ami?"
She seems to brace herself. In very careful tones, she answers you. "No. No. Let's just… go back to the intersection and go the other way. But… this place is starting to scare me, too."
For a moment, she stares past you, looking at something that isn't there, that you can't see.
***Several Minutes Later***
You squint, looking at the passage ahead. The walls and floor are nearly the same color, so it can be easy to miss the places they connect, but…
"Ami, why isn't the floor level?"
Ami frowns, squinting into the distance just like you. "It seems to be curving down. Let's follow it a little more."
Soon, you're far enough down the passage that you should definitely be noticing the downhill slope. Except the floor still feels level. You look ahead of you. The passageway not only curves down, the floor seems to be twisting to the right and up onto the wall like a corkscrew now. You look behind you. The passageway behind you slopes down. You pause, blinking hard, trying to imagine what this could be. Then you realize that this is a geometry problem and Ami Mizuno is right there.
"Ami, what's happening?"
"The corridor's curving, but the artificial gravity must be curving with it. So it feels like we're walking in a more or less straight line."
"Can we trust that inertial gadget your computer has?"
"The application? Yeah, it shouldn't be fooled by something like this. We're still headed more or less for the center of the station."
You nod. "The only problem is, are the rooms shuffling around us? Because I'm starting to get the feeling that they're too helpful."
"I haven't found any way to tell yet." Ami sighs. "And this is different. Everything was… linear before. I think whatever the castle is doing, it's getting more sensitive, or twitchier, or something. I don't know why."
You pass through a couple of corridor intersections that seem, strangely, to meet at irregular five-way angles. You see what strongly resembles a pallet of soft drinks, still packed up in cases, just left lying out on the floor like something forgotten at the supermarket. The bottles are labeled in that funny language that uses High Lunar characters but isn't High Lunar.
You pass through a room where you are firmly convinced that you are walking on the side wall, and another where you are clearly walking on the ceiling. And the halls are still different, with more curvature. And…
Ami stops, looking up at an enormous staircase.
There weren't any stairs on the way to the ballroom before. Maybe you're not going in circles anymore! You take a few steps forward, looking at Ami from the side. She chews on her lip, lost in thought. Gears in her head are turning; you imagine she'll tell you when the time comes.
You, you're just glad to be doing something other than circling around and around through the same possibly-haunted ballroom, however magnificent and romantic it may be.
You start down the stairs, and you can hear the soft, tentative sound of Ami's boots behind you. She's taking it slower than you…
Step. Step. Step. Step.
You start to feel something. These steps are… sort of like the strange hallways you were passing through before. The steps don't feel flat. Well, they're flat, but they're not even with each other. Each step is ever so slightly tilted forwards… but each step also feels flat and level once you put your foot on it. Is the castle playing more games with the artificial gravity?
You look further down the stairs, and you see the effect getting greater and greater. The steps get steeper the farther down they go. You hadn't noticed that before, but now that you're on the stairs, it's easy to see.
Or… were the stairs not like that when you started climbing down? You've seen parts of the walls flow here.
Behind you, you hear a giggle. Glancing back, you- What?
The eep of vertigo passes quickly as you decide to concentrate on the simple truth that you are standing on solid ground in no danger of sliding or falling. But Ami… Ami is not. Because you're staring
Wait.
The vertigo comes back. Are you standing on the sides of the steps, and is she on top of them?
But then Ami's walking upstairs, instead of you walking downstairs, and… And… Wait.
Are both sides of the steps the top of the steps?
The gravity of the hallways always made it easy to keep your feet on the ground, and you suppose that technically it still is. Maybe too easy.
You decide that proper magical space princesses should pretend not to be driven crazy by this kind of thing. So you say to Ami, very calmly, "Hi there."
Ami's giggling only gets louder, so you follow up. "I'm not used to being able to look down at the top of your head."
"There's nothing especially interesting up there," Ami says, with so much amusement she's barely keeping the giggle down. "After all, I get to see the top of your head every day."
There's no easy answer to that, so you do the smartest thing you can think of. You stick your tongue out at her.
As Ami looks up to you, sticking her own tongue out right back, an idea strikes you. You can see the moment that Ami notices, the moment she stops giggling at you and starts watching. Watching you stalk over to the side of the stairs and raise a foot. You step, up- no, you will not let this be up, down, onto the wall. Which is now the floor. Let Ami hang around on the wall. Or better…
You cross the
You lift up your feet.
And down becomes suddenly negotiable again. With a crisp motion only gymnasts and magical beings can match, you find yourself sliding down the ceiling towards the door at the end. Before you've even reached the door, you hear a quick "Out of the way, Usagi!" and more laughter. Ami's decided to follow you.
The two of you don't quite end up crashing together at the bottom.
You rise to your feet, and go through the next doorway.
But your earlier hopes… didn't work out. Because you come to a very familiar stretch of hallway. Or rather, an unfamiliar stretch of hallway, decorated in a style you have seen three times before.
"Ami…"
"Yeah, I know. Here we go again."
And okay, in fairness, it was a nice ballroom. And not just because you danced with Ami there and sort of judo'd her into asking you out. That too, but it's really, really nice, You're pretty sure you can somehow get some place in the Moon Palace made up to be that nice. Or maybe that there already is one that you haven't found yet. If there isn't a place like that in the Moon Palace, you want one.
So you guess it's not so bad if you pass through this room a fourth time.
Some day, you will look back on this moment, on that thought, and laugh.
Ami's become a bit withdrawn again. She still carries that air of possession, of being in a place that is hers even if it surprises her, but you find yourself half a pace in front of her.
And so it's you who opens one leaf of the double doors that have led you three times- now four- into that same ballroom.
You open the door and water.
There is… there is water. Right in front of you. Floating there. You almost imagine that it's frozen into ice, but no, it's just… water that's deciding to not go anywhere. The water forms a neat vertical surface right where the door used to be.
Weird.
The light is strangely distorted as you peer down towards a lovely star-spangled floor lined with hexagonal tables and swirling cloud-chairs. Yep. Same ballroom. Only this time, for some reason, there's a main entrance several meters off the floor, and you're looking down at the parts of the room that are for dancing.
You can't hear the music through the water, which is a pity.
Ami tilts her head. "It seems like the castle is holding the water in place up here for some reason, but I don't know why. I wonder, because I can't quite see the use of-"
In hindsight, you'd probably have been able to brace yourself and even keep on your feet, if you hadn't been caught off-balance by how sudden it all was. It was more a matter of psychology and surprise than of physical force; you and your friends are very, very strong.
But it was very sudden, when whatever was holding up the water either forgot what it was doing, or decided to go do something else.
Water, you remember reading in a math book, weighs one tonne for each cubic meter. That ballroom is a lot of meters long, and many meters wide, and this water is about three meters deep. A lot times many times three is a bunch, and so a bunch of tons of water all decide that they want to go through right where you and Ami are standing. And then they decide that they want to play with you and take you along with them to go exciting places and do exciting things.
And once it's got you off your feet, here amid these bare, unadorned corridors with not much to grab hold of, it's kind of hard to stop. For a moment when the current's steady enough that you can think straight, you imagine Ami! going "no, bad water, sit, stay!" But apparently Ami isn't feeling queen of the world enough, or princess of her element enough, to manage the trick.
It's like being body-slammed by a Zakenna. Dangerous to a normal person, maybe deadly dangerous, but not all that dangerous to you. You bounce off a few things, sure. But you don't really even ache afterwards, as you wobble to your feet. You're not hurt. Just uncomfortable, disoriented, soggy, and about two intersections back from where you were standing when you opened that door.
You think you hear some splutters from- yep. Ami, lying face down, a little farther down the hall from you. You're both soaked. It's very strange because your fuku seems to repel the water quite well. So you feel quite dry except for your arms, legs, face, and of course, hair.
Your boots squish strangely, since the water's gotten down them, but it hardly weighs anything. For a moment, though, you worry that Ami may have come out worse from all this than you did…
"Ami?"
"Ooof…" She pushes herself to her feet.
"Are you okay?" You start wringing out your twintails, which you know from experience is probably going to take a while.
"Yeah. And you?"
"I'm fine. But Ami, why is there a swimming pool on the ceiling of your ballroom now and why did it decide to give us swimming lessons?"
She sighs, clasping her hands to the side of her head and leaning forward to lightly bonk her forehead against the wall. "I really, really wish I knew."
It's Ami's castle. It's still hers. You really are fine, despite the unexpected flash flood. You confidently expect that some day, you'll be very happy to be here with her, and you'd love to bring everyone to visit on that day. After… after whatever this is gets fixed.
But every girl has a limit.
"Ami?"
"Yeah?"
"You are the shining queen of this world and your palace is beautiful. I want you to know that. I want to see this place again some day. And also I still want to go down to Mercury with you and try to find that cryo-chamber. And to go to that festival with you. All of that. Nothing has changed."
Ami looks down, clasping her hands, squirming slightly with shy embarrassment at the praise. She's starting to blush furiously. And you step close and reach down and take her hands, and you tilt your head up to stare at her until she raises her eyes to meet yours.
"But right now we are teleporting out of here."
"...Okay."
Mercury Castle brought out from occlusion!
Mercury Castle special trait revealed: 'Versatile Architecture!'
Mercury Castle quirk revealed: 'A Little Unstable!'
AN: Just in time for Ami's birthday!
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I think that, on the whole, Ami will be happy with her birthday present. 
ReaperofInterest
Herald of Disaster
Well this was interesting.
- Location
- Pittsburgh PA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
So the castle is reacting to Ami's subconscious desires? At least it isn't proper haunted but it is still a bit of a silly place.
DocMatoi
Theoretical Lover of Girls
- Location
- within 2 hours of the White House
- Pronouns
- They/Them
"station we are done dancing and would like to go somewhere else now"
'dont worry Chief I got exactly what you need'
[sends them to the bedroom]
joe6168
Just a humble lurker
- Location
- Michigan, The lower left glove
LOL, the princess envy is strong.