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"Giselle?" called Tallulah. Stepping into Nestor Petrova's antique emporium felt like walking into foreign territory. In middle school, at the height of her rivalry with Giselle, she'd avoided this place like the plague, even going as far as to forcibly drag her mother to the other side of the mall concourse when they passed it. Now, walking into it on official business with an invitation from Giselle herself, it felt like being invited behind the Iron Curtain.

In her backpack, she carried a thick folder of computer printouts, some in the original Japanese and some in the mangled Google Translate english. She also carried her laptop, with all the sites bookmarked, but she wasn't sure they'd get that far. She knew Giselle would probably want to replicate her research on her own - wasn't it always easier to do it yourself than to watch someone else fumble through it?

A brief word with Nestor at the counter told her that Giselle was in the back, and Tallulah pushed past an aged velvet curtain into the storeroom.

She found Giselle contemplating a Risk board set up on a workbench.

"Hi," said Tallulah, setting her backpack down on a stool. "I brought the stuff."

It was a chilly reception, but this was markedly improved from where they'd stood in seventh grade. Tallulah opened her backpack and set the folder and the laptop on the table, being careful not to disturb the Risk setup. (It appeared to be a meticulous recreation of the final weeks of World War II. Who knew how long Giselle had spent setting it up.)

She opened the folder, showing Giselle the sheets of Japanese newspaper scans and broken-English translations. "I've been doing some research," she explained. Normally she would have gone with a powerpoint - gods knew Tallulah Cowden knew how to make a good powerpoint - but she just didn't have enough information. It was better to start with just the documents.

"You remember the meeting with Luna, right?" she asked. "Well, I plugged some of the stuff she said into Google-"

She held out a printed newspaper scan from the Sankei Shimbum archives, the date placing it sometime in the mid-1980s. A grainy photograph beside the paragraphs of Japanese text showed a teenaged girl in a mask and what was clearly a Senshi uniform.

"Her name's Sailor V," explained Tallulah, handing the paper to Giselle and picking the next one up off the stack. "This is a translation of the article, but it's really garbled. Do you know anyone who speaks Japanese?"

Tallulah was almost inclined to reach out and push Giselle's eyebrows back down into a normal position. Really, she hadn't known it was possible to raise them that high - one of Giselle's myriad talents, she supposed. She pulled out another set of papers, neatly stapled sets.

"No, that's not all I've got," she objected, handing them over to the blonde. "The top set is a series of news articles. The second is -garbled- translations. Mysterious explosions and deaths in Azabu-Juuban, Minato-Ku. It's a district of Tokyo. The third and fourth pages are conspiracy sites, mixed Japanese and English, attributing the same things to Senshi and demons. Sailor Moon and some others, they're all in there. Fifth page is translations of the Japanese on the third and fourth."

Equally garbled, obviously. "A lot of the links that looked promising were dead," she frowned, and opened up the laptop. Clearly she'd interpreted Giselle's statement about where they needed to go as being somewhere in cyberspace. "You can type," she volunteered. "Unless you had something else in mind?"

Tallulah withered a bit under the look of condescension as she packed her computer and papers back up. Who did Giselle think she was talking to? The only difference between the two of them was one had a Crystal Academy scholarship and was inches closer to an official diagnoses of OCD, and there were no prizes for guessing which one. "Of course I have it," she replied, and worked very hard on quelling the desire to say more than that. No, she was not going to get Giselle Petrova get a rise out of her over something as inconsequential as a library card!



It was a short subway ride from the mall to the DCU campus, a ride that the girls had spent in awkward silence as they pretended to be interested in ads for Nyquil and Destiny City Planned Parenthood. Once they arrived at the library, though, Tallulah couldn't contain herself anymore. After swiping their student ID cards through the turnstiles and and heading down a row of ornate, ancient bookshelves, she turned to Giselle.

"I was mostly working with urban legends, though," she confessed, reluctant to sound confused but honestly doubtful of what they might find. (Even if she recognized the veritable treasure trove of the DCU stacks.)

"You really think people have written books about gang warfare in Azabu-Juuban?"

After all, who'd ever heard of Azabu-Juuban? She hadn't until this weekend! Everyone had heard of Shibuya or Harajuku, but Azabu-Juuban? Really? Tallulah was as much a bibliophile as Giselle, she thought, but she had her reservations about this expedition.

Tallulah pulled the papers from her bag again and rifled through them as they walked. "Most of them are from the newspaper," she repeated, biting her lip as she scanned for authors. "Mostly by... Minamoto Arisu? Maybe she wrote a book about it."

She glanced at titles as the headed down a narrow aisle. Japanese popular culture since 1950. "The earliest mention of it was about... Nineteen eighty five? They trickle off in the early nineties, maybe a bit earlier..."

They were in the Ms. Tallulah crouched and scanned the spines, but there wasn't a Minamoto, Arisu among them.

"Doesn't look like she ever published anything in English," she grumbled.

"Oh? What are you doing later?" she asked. Probably snickering with Tate about how Tallulah had gone absolutely bonkers.

"Japanese teen subcultures, 1980-1990: a case study," she read off, and pulled the book out. "Worth a try?"

Tallulah bit her lip to object to the fact that if Giselle found anything, it would likely be entirely in Japanese. Her google searches hadn't yielded any American sites at all - despite that the blonde was probably now wracking JSTOR and AccessMyLibrary for clues, Tallulah wasn't entirely hopeful. Maybe it was just that she didn't want to admit being one-upped by her old rival.

She pulled a few more books - Tokyo Underground Culture, 1970-2000, A Brief History of Asian Urban Warfare - off the shelf and added them to her pile, then joined Giselle at the computer terminal.

"These looked sort of promising," she said, setting the books on the desk and pulling up a stool. She opened the first one and flipped to the index, scanning for anything about terrorism, or even a senshi mentioned by name.

"You know," she said, in her best library voice, "I don't think anyone outside of Destiny City really knows what's going on here. If they did, it would be front-page news, wouldn't it?"

Not to mention most of the population of Destiny City didn't know what was actually going on here.

"I had," said Tallulah guardedly. She most certainly had given that notion plenty of thought - it was mostly a matter of following through. Because what if you assumed the information had been hidden, and it turned out you were wrong?

She looked back down to the book in her lap, scanning the index. Sailor Skirt. Sailor Suit. Sailor V. Page 328.

"Found something!" she exclaimed, a bit too loudly for their present location, and flipped to the page. The section had been highlighted in fading pink neon. Tallulah scanned it quickly. "Giselle," she said, dropping her voice to more acceptable levels, "Listen to this."

"Over the years, many theories have been put forward to explain the mysterious urban figure known as Sailor V. Notable mostly for her assistance to the Minato-Ku Police over the course of several years, Sailor V, along with several other similarly-costumed vigilante crime fighters, have remained in the Japanese nostalgic consciousness of the 1980s. In their heyday, Sailor V and her teammates were linked to numerous strange occurrences in and around the Minato-Ku district, and inspired fashion, copycat crime fighters, and even an arcade game before vanishing as mysteriously as they appeared."

Tallulah liked her lips dryly, thinking. "It's basically the same thing as the news article, but less garbled, I think."

She scanned down the page, looking for another mention of the Sailor-suited warriors. There!

"In the years since the events unfolded, citizens of the district have sought to unravel the mystery behind their costumed heroine. Some suppose that they were simply ordinary girls with athletic training, but others, pointing to acts of apparent magic performed by the so-called 'scouts,' uphold a myriad of other ideas ranging from the outlandish to the downright bizarre. The most prominent of these theories are that they were either a promotional tie-in to a Super Sentai series, or a government experiment gone awry. Others uphold that the girls came from outer space."

Tallulah could not help but smile at that. "Still, it's not a whole lot we didn't know before," she said. "Any luck?"

Tallulah leafed through the magazine with a frown. It could basically be described as a guide to classic-seasons-of-shows-basically-similar-to-the-power-rangers, and so its presence in the library at all was puzzling. But then of course this was the recent Asian history and culture section, so anything was possible. She was about to cross the whole thing off as a waste of time when she flipped the page and came across a photo of three smiling Japanese girls in what were quite obviously meant to be Senshi uniforms.

But they weren't Senshi. The caption read, "From L to R, actresses Hanako Takahashi, Erika Ono, and Suzume Honda." Tallulah scanned the page for the accompanying article, which explained that the girls were part of a short-lived series inspired by events in Azabu-Juuban, but the details of the show had been largely fictionalized and only six episodes had ever been produced. The studio had ultimately decided the time "wasn't right" for a Magical Girl Super Sentai series.

Tallulah passed the open magazine to Giselle upon her return. "It confirms that it happened," she supposed to the blonde, "But it doesn't give us any specifics."

She pulled the books towards her and looked them over. Who would have thought that Zimmerman, Zaria would have written a book on Japanese urban warfare? She scanned the index, flipped to the page on "Scouts, Sailor," and read quickly.

"The exact motives of the Sailor Scouts (This term being the generally accepted translation of Sailor Senshi, the sailor part presumably originating from the resemblance their costumes bore to Japanese school uniforms, or "Sailor suits," and senshi being a term alternately translated as warrior, scout, or guardian) were never made clear. Although sometimes aiding the police, especially in the case of Sailor V, the scouts generally worked outside the law. Oftentimes the only evidence of their presence were eyewitnesses, whose accounts were hazy, and gross damage to public property."

Tallulah looked ahead. The section went on at least to the bottom of the page. She flipped and read ahead, silently. It went on for another few pages.

"I need copies of this," she announced.