Fission

By HomerNet

Disclaimer: Ranma ½ and Sailor Moon are properties of their respective owners who are not me. This is an original work by the author and any resemblance to the works it derives from is totally intentional and meant as a form of praise and flattery. No money is being made off of this in any way.

Author's Notes: I keep writing fics I keep SWEARING I'll never, ever write! But this one just called out to me, darnit!

Prologue:

Time gets away from you.

This was ever apparent to Sailor Pluto, for whom time had done it's level best to impersonate Houdini for over 3,000 years.

Contrary to the views of those she worked closely with (and completely beyond the ken of those she didn't), her job was not to force the timeline to her whimsy and lock every possible contingency away. In fact, contingency locking was one of the very LAST things she considered as a sort of "Scorched Earth" policy. Up until that point, she did her best to...nudge the general course of things in the general direction of Crystal Tokyo. Her girls (as she sometimes refered to the other Senshi) would handle the rest. Terrible things, like World War II, tended to happen when she had to cap off a contingency timeline to keep the world from going Bad (with a capital 'B'). Very bad indeed.

Although that one with the tentical-rape demons had it's appeals for someone who had experienced 3,000 years of sexual conquests...

The simple fact of the matter was that there was "Real" time, wherein things happened to most every day mortals, and subjective time, something which Setsuna -a.k.a.- Sailor Pluto, had an over-abundance of. Subjective time was a screwy thing. One could literally spend YEARS idly dining with Ford Prefect at Millyways, then return to one's own "Real" time to have less than a second pass. Conversely, one could chase an errant mouse that had somehow made it's way into Pluto Palace through the timegates on accident and dart back through after a mere second of realizing one's error, only to return approximately 30 years later, having one's friends all graduate, go to college, graduate from THAT, pursue careers and love, not necessarily in that order, have kids, raise them, and have THOSE kids start pursue careers and love, again not necessarily in that order.

Of course, being the Senshi of Time had it's advantages. One of those was that she could indiscriminately bounce through time at will. The chief difficulty in this was finding the right moment to jump back to. Schrodinger's Cat haunted Sailor Pluto like, well, ANY cat haunted Ranma Saotome. No matter where she went, if she jumped blindly, she would affect the timestream in some way. Even viewing the course of time had it's consequences, as she had to watch how events played out, all the way out, before she could decide on whether or not to change things around, and even then she had to explore loads of other branches of time, other contingencies, to see what affects her interference might have. It was rather akin to watching a very long, very boring Gilligan's Island marathon where every episode was a repeat with only tiny variations, like Gilligan's hat being blue, and every episode being produced without a laughtrack, score, and filmed in real time. Oh, and not being allowed to use the fast forward button, 'cause you might MISS something.

And her associates wondered why she seemed so humorless.

One can understand how, after years of that kind of monotony, Sailor Pluto would choose to take a vacation, just get away from it all for a while.

She had used the odd quirks of her profession (that being, naturally, Guardian of Time) to hop out for a bit. Take a few days off, go to Disneyworld, play with the micro-raptors...

...did we mention that she could take a vacation to literally any possible version of Earth conceivable?

Anyway, she strode into the gate room, popped off the silly mouse ears, and checked the "real" time clock.

Bugger, six months had passed. She checked the Crystal Tokyo map; still there and holding strong at 98...

Wait.

When did the Imperium Palace get eight Junon cannons, one for each point on the compass? And what was with the red and black subtower in the Nerima district?

Sighing, Sailor Pluto grabbed a bag of Doritos, yanked the timestaff out of her "stuffspace" pocket, sat down on the couch she had set up just for this purpose, and hit the magical staff equivalent of a rewind button.