Disclaimer: Chrono Crusade is the property of Daisuke Moriyama. Sailor Moon is the property of Naoko Takuechi.

Child Of Hope

By Bissek

Prologue

The Silver Millennium was the pinnacle of civilization in the Sol System. It brought life and culture to all nine of the planets, even those whose locations made them not normally hospitable to life. It brought about levels of magical and technological development that have never been equaled. It was destroyed in a single day by a woman who came out on the losing side of a love triangle and happened to be a horrifically poor loser.

It is ironic that the only people involved in the brief and brutal war that destroyed the Silver Millennium that were remembered by the population as a whole after the ashes cooled was a race whose involvement in the war was totally accidental. The colony ship Pandaemonium, bearing the last survivors of the Banmaden race, was traveling towards Earth when the war broke out, in hopes of meeting with the leaders of the region known as Atlas (known by later legends as Atlantis) to gain permission to settle there, their home world having been destroyed. The ship was damaged in the crossfire between the two sides, and crash landed on Atlas, the explosion from the overloading warp drive causing the continent to sink into the sea.

All the leaders of the Banmaden were killed in the crash, and the organic core of the main computer was severely damaged. The survivors were forced to abduct a human female from the local population and convert her into becoming a backup core. Over time, they got into the habit of using the transporter to leave Pandaemonium, using lethal force to steal whatever supplies they needed – including more women to replace the backup core whenever the old one started to die – and then returning home. With the loss of most of the data records in the computer and the death of their leaders, later generations assumed that was how life was supposed to be. Humans came to call the Banmaden demons, and the Banmaden came to call themselves that as well. The humans believed that the demons were the embodiment of evil, and as such, any material, spell or ritual that could harm them was considered holy, and religions were formed to explain why these items could harm the demons. The war between mankind and demonkind was a never-ending series of skirmishes for thousands of years, until a mistake on the part of the demons changed the equation forever.

The demons had recently replaced their backup core with a human woman by the name of Lilith. Eight months after her integration into Pandaemonium, the birthing matrix produced a pair of twin demons, who were named Aion and Chrono, the first demons born to generation 260 after landing. When the elder, Aion, came of age, he was tested and found to be powerful and highly linked to Pandaemonium. So powerful and so highly linked that he, his twin, and all demons born from generation 260 onward were considered to be threats that needed to be eliminated. Aion discovered the plot, and formed his own conspiracy, planning to destroy the current system and remake the world in his own image. Only six people survived out of the army of younger demons that Aion had amassed, including Aion and his twin brother. They became known as the Sinners, while the loyalists were known as the Pursuers, for their quest to hunt down and destroy those who had done the unthinkable and waged war on their brother demons.

A year after the failed rebellion, Aion and Chrono came to a violent parting of ways. They did not meet again for fifty years, the night before Chrono allied himself with the Order of Mary Magdalene, a faction of the Catholic Church that specialized in investigating and dealing with paranormal incidents. The next time they met was the beginning of a series of events that ended the Sinner's Rebellion once and for all.

The battle of Pandaemonium, fought on December 24, 1924, was the end of the Sinner's Rebellion, and also of the Banmaden race. In a three-way battle between the Sinners, the Pursuers, and the Order, Pandaemonium was destroyed, taking with it every single one of the Pursuers. Of the five Sinners, one had been killed before the battle, two died during the battle, and the remaining two were last seen entering Pandaemonium's core. The sixth Sinner, Chrono, was last seen heading into Pandaemonium's core trying to ensure that its destruction would not result in legion, the symbiotic lifeforms that attach themselves in massive quantities to all demons, spreading all over the world, infecting humans and turning them into demons themselves.

None of those three demons were ever seen again. The only evidence that Chrono may have survived was that every year on the anniversary of his human partner's death, a bouquet of flowers appeared on her grave, with no person knowing who put them there. With the demons extinct, the number of paranormal incidents went down considerably. As such, the Order was reduced in size and most of the weapons they developed for fighting monsters were scrapped and forgotten.

But two of the six Sinners survived that battle. They remain, living in a world that would undoubtedly try to kill them if it knew they lived, even though neither one has anything against the human race. Seventy years after the battle, they live still. This is their story.

Eden, the Sinner's Paradise. 1994

The floating structure slowly came to a stop over the city of Tokyo. The barrier fields would keep any casual observer from noticing a five acre facility floating in midair. This development had become crucial after every approach to every developed country in the world became covered by radar stations during the cold war. Neither Sinner wanted their home strafed by a fighter that thought it was a capitalist/socialist transport bringing hostile troops into their country, so Shader had upgraded the barrier fields so that they would block out visual and radar detection, as well as the basic defensive shield they had served as during the original rebellion.

Chrono thought of his sister with a smile. Her technical genius in developing the Astral Organ is what made Aion's plan possible in the first place. Yet even though she stayed loyal to Aion for fifty years, she still helped Chrono out whenever she could. She was the one who invented the Clock of Life, and gave it to him, enabling his survival for the fifty-four years between Aion's maiming him and his retrieval of his horns, restoring to him his source of life-giving Astral. When Pandaemonium's core was destroyed, she arranged for his contractor Rosette and the seven Apostles to be returned to the ground, allowing them to live out the remainder of their lives rather than be stuck in a battlefield they didn't belong in. And when Chrono finally defeated Aion, it was Shader's skill that allowed him to safely dismantle Pandaemonium so that it wouldn't scatter legion across the world and harm the human race, even though that was the whole point of Aion's plan in the first place. She threw herself into any technical challenge that presented itself wholeheartedly, without ever considering the implications of what she was working on.

That peculiar mixture of absolute genius and total innocence was part of the reason that Chrono had spent the sixty years since the end of Pandaemonium's dismantling with his sister. There was no telling what would happen if you let somebody who could probably build a Death Star if you asked her to and would never once wonder what you wanted to do with the thing loose without supervision. That letter she sent to Dr Fermi at the University of Chicago back in the late thirties about the properties of refined uranium ore ended up sparking the nuclear arms race. The other reason was that she was almost totally incapable of caring for herself in a world outside her lab. When she got to working on a project, she often forgot to eat unless somebody brought her a meal, and when she did remember, the meal usually wasn't healthy. If she tried to market any of her inventions herself, the companies she was trying to sell to would undoubtedly con her out of what she had rightfully earned, and she wouldn't even notice.

So Chrono found himself acting as his sister's caretaker and business agent. Shader developed brilliant technological devices, and Chrono would arrange for them to be licensed to various corporations for a fee, making sure they got a reasonable percentage of the profits. With only two people to feed, and their legion keeping both themselves and their home intact, this enabled them to make a very comfortable living.

In the intervals between business deals, Chrono would seek out and deal with any paranormal incidents in the area that Eden was located in at the moment. Between the remains of his Magdalen exorcist's kit, his restored powers, and various toys that Shader had developed (and would NOT be marketed to the general public – EVER) he could deal with most of them without any difficulty. The only problem was that he could never be seen in his natural form in public. Reduced as it was, if the Magdalene Order ever learned that he didn't die in 1924, the order from the Council of Bishops that all demons be exterminated without exception would be acted upon, and he didn't want to have to kill people who were honestly doing what they believed was right. That order had made it unsafe for Chrono to see any of his friends from those days for decades.

A couple of years ago, he had heard rumors of creatures draining Astral from the local population in London. Wondering if that meant that others from his kind had either survived the war or recently came from some other planet, the two Sinners had headed to London, but found that the monsters had been dealt with by the time they arrived. They continued on to Japan, the second source of these monsters, but a situation regarding a cult of Kali Durga in India delayed their journey to the point that they only recently arrived.

A quick flight down to the surface allowed Chrono to rent an apartment from which to have a long-term transport gate set up. That way dropping the field to enter or leave Eden wouldn't be needed, and people wouldn't see a demon flying around the city. Then he started to look for information on the monsters.

He didn't find any usable information on the monsters. He did find a great deal of information about the people that dealt with them, however. These exorcists, known as the Sailor Senshi, were apparently the local heroes. From looking at a video recording of one of their early battles, Chrono made a sudden realization.

This 'Moon Tiara Action' seemed similar to the razor boomerangs that the Elder had developed back when Chrono was with the Order (discarded because nobody knew how to catch the things when they came back without losing fingers). Could it be that after seventy years somebody had finally figured out how to make them work? The outfits the girls were wearing seemed to include the armor-plated miniskirts that the Elder had come up with at about the same time. Chrono smirked as he remembered how Rosette had pulled her gun on the old pervert and told him that she'd kill anybody who tried to make her wear something that skimpy. Were these Senshi the new generation of the Order? Or were they just a group of people who managed to find some out-of-date exorcist's gear and somehow made them workable? In the second case, he hoped they hadn't found any Spirit rounds. Those demon-possessed bullets caused far too much trouble the first time around. As he was pondering these possibilities, he crossed into a park. There he heard the sound of a group of kids beating on a smaller child.

Demons are raised communally. They are brought up to believe that they are all children of Pandaemonium, and as such, that they are all kin. Because of this belief, harming a fellow member of their kind is tantamount to harming a relative, and is considered an unforgivable crime. Chrono's killing of a hundred Viscounts during the rebellion in 1869 left him forever branded a kinslayer by his people, marked for execution with no hope of redemption or forgiveness. That mark was erased only because there was nobody left to enforce it. As such, Chrono could never understand how humans could inflict harm upon each other so casually, and tried to discourage the practice whenever possible.

The boys had just knocked the small, frail-looking girl to the ground. One of them was drawing back his fist for a punch, when suddenly a hand grabbed the boy by the shoulders and spun him around.

"What do you think you're doing, boy?" The owner of that hand asked. Said owner looked to be about twenty years old. He had highly pointed ears, and purple hair tied in a long braid, going down to his waist, tied at the end with a yellow ribbon. The boys might have teased anyone their own age for wearing his hair like that, but something in the way that his deep red eyes glared at them implied that that would be a very bad idea.

"S-She's a freak. We're just trying to get her to stop acting like one." Stammered the boy, who found this stranger far more intimidating than any of his teachers. Maybe it was the way that his eyes appeared to be slightly glowing.

"And what has she done to be considered a freak?" The stranger demanded.

"She h-holds her hands over people where they've been hurt, and they suddenly heal! I-It's not natural!"

"I see. She has a gift which enables her to help people, knows that using it will cause her to be accosted by hooligans such as you, and does it anyway. All this proves is that she is a far better person than you are. Now get out of my sight!"

With that, the boys took off. Chrono bent down and helped the girl to her feet. His mind rushed with the revelation the boys had given him. The girl had the ability to heal wounds, but judging from the fact that she didn't even try to use that skill on the mild abrasions she got from the fall, could not heal her own. Adding in the obviously weak constitution the girl had, and there was only one person that she could be. The Apostle of Hope, one of the seven humans in any generation capable of manipulating the Astral Line directly. The previous holder of that title was the late Father Joshua Christopher, Rosette's brother. Now it seemed that the dubious honor had passed on to a new person.

"Thank you," The girl said.

"Not a problem. My name is Chrono. What's yours?" He replied.

"Hotaru. Hotaru Tomoe."

OMAKE: After hearing from Chrono that an Apostle had been found in Tokyo, Shader turned on the Astral scanning device she had built to find the apostles seventy years before. Looking at the readings, she found that a second Astral focus was in Tokyo, in the region known as Nerima. She decided to head down there and take a look.

After seeing another cat-girl running around the area without anybody noticing, she decided that it would be alright for her to shift to her natural form. The only reaction anybody had was that some people inquired if she was related to the other cat-girl, who was apparently named Nuku-Nuku.

Eventually she found the person she was looking for. It was obvious who she was looking for just from overhearing gossip as she walked by. A boy who had superhumanly good fighting skills, that often got him into trouble and rarely resolved it in a permanent manner. A typical example of the Apostolic gift of an incredible ability which never does any good for the person who has it and often brings in trouble whenever it's used for any reason. When she saw him, she decided that he looked so cute that she just had to get in a snuggle. She ran towards the boy and grabbed him in a friendly hug.

"You Apostles are always such cute kids! I just to give you a big hug!" She gushed.

The boy's reaction wasn't what she expected.

"C-C-C-CAAAAAAATTTTTTTTT!" The boy screamed, breaking free of her grip and running down the street with a speed borne of sheer terror.

Shader was confused. She'd never seen anybody act like that before. Then she saw three unhappy looking girls produce a variety of blunt implements and decided that running away would be a good idea for herself.

A/N: This is based on the Chrono Crusade manga, not the anime. If you haven't read the manga, I recommend that you do so, it's much better than the anime. The only things I will take from the anime will be minor bits that didn't affect that main storyline.

The bit about the razor boomerangs and the armor plated miniskirts was borrowed from the fic "Inventions of the Worst Kind" by Adrienne Channing. I figured that (and the bit about anti-demon attack cats) would be a funny way to give Chrono some confusion.

I realize that I didn't explain a lot of CC terminology and background very well in this prologue, but that's because Chrono will be obliged to explain it in detail to members of the SM cast eventually and I didn't feel like writing it twice.

Hotaru being Joshua's successor as an Apostle is not related to genetics or reincarnation in any way. Reincarnation according to the way souls are explained in the CC universe is a very rare event, and by that explanation Serenity's spell back in the Silver Millennium is the only reason any of the Senshi reincarnated at all.

Chrono's people are really aliens? Yes. It's in the last volume of the manga, as is the explanation of what the fatal mistake the demons made in the 19th century was. I left a hint of what that was here, but will explain it in detail later for those who don't figure it out.

I am considering a Chrono/Senshi pairing, but have yet to decide whether or not to use it. If I do, it will be a secondary plot.

What destroyed the Banmaden homeworld? Having it be Galaxia would make a good grounding for a sequel if the story makes it that far.