Chapter 4 is now available for your reading pleasure.

[Bob Schroeck]

Here.

Enjoy.

[chibipoe]

Oh, that was beautiful.

[Aleh]

Woot! (And now off to read...)

[robkelk]

Omake time! Anything that isn't from Sailor Moon canon is in spoiler markup.

Spoiler

More directly, I helped Usagi relax by taking her out that night to see "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (in English but with Japanese subtitles) which was playing at the Yebisu Garden, an art house cinema I'd come across a few weeks earlier.

...

Then she stepped in front of the door to the Crystal Seminar, kicked it open, and wordlessly flung her tiara at the disguised monster behind the reception desk. As she stepped into the Seminar's lobby, Luna dashed in and ran under one of the chairs.

The monster had no time at all to do more than turn toward the door and rise from its seat, before the tiara took it square in the chest. Smoothly catching the returning disk, Sailor Moon returned it to her brow and stepped over to the desk to see the dust now scattered over both the chair and the floor vanish.

That Rabbit's dynamite!

---

Spoiler

"I see you've been busy, teishi. What did I tell you about beating up entire schools?" he asked as he sheathed the sword in the scabbard at his waist while the staff disappeared with a loud crack.

"Always get their signboard on the way out," she replied as she started to pry the sign in question off of the wall.

"Great, just great. I've created a dojo destroyer."

---

Ramua

Family name "Saotome"? No, wait, that would be Ramua ½, and Bob isn't writing a Fuku Fic.

---

Spoiler

Once he recovered, though, we got seated quickly enough, and I was amused when Moon and Mercury both ordered the Outrageous Hot Fudge Brownie without even looking at the menu.

"An Outrageous Hot Fudge Brownie."

"Two Outrageous Hot Fudge Brownies."

"Good idea! I'll have two Outrageous Hot Fudge Brownies, too!"

[nemonowan]

Well, that escalated quickly...

[Inquisitive Raven]

Minako shot straight upright from her slumped position sprawled in an armchair in her family's sitting room, spilling a dozing Artemis onto the floor with a yelp.
The white cat shook his head to clear it, then looked up to see her staring blankly into the distance, almost quivering with... tension? Excitement? He couldn't tell. "Mina-chan? What's up?"
Minako looked down, turning wide eyes on him. "It's her. It's the sign you told me about. She's calling!"
That got his attention. "What?" Artemis demanded.
"The princess! She's calling us! All the guardians, right now!" She leapt to her feet, spilling Artemis onto the floor. In her hand was the wand she had used for so many months, and as she raised it into the air, she shouted the words that turned her into Sailor V:

Just thought you'd like to know that you have Minako dumping Artemis on the floor twice in this scene with no indication that he climbed back into her lap between them.

Another possible error spotted: When you introduce Makoto, you give her name as Makoto Kino (Western name order, AFAIK, i.e. Makoto is her given name) but most of the other characters appearing in this chapter for the first time are introduced using Japanese name order.

Re: Ami's issues with the Japanese teaching of English, I have an anecdote. When I was in grad school studying computer science, one of my professors was from Japan. He had learned English from a native speaker (a graduate from my alma mater as it happens). As told by one of my American professors, that professor and the Japanese professor had gone to Japan to give a talk. The American professor had been assured that the people he was giving the lecture to knew English, but when he started to speak, he got nothing but blank looks. After some discussion, the Japanese professor agreed to translate for him. So the American professor started talking again, and the Japanese professor repeated the lecture word for word, in English. The students basically went "Aha!" and started taking notes.

[chibipoe]

Well, that escalated quickly...

I am eagerly anticipating the fallout from this! This just takes Season 1 and flips the whole table over, board and all.

[robkelk]

Well, that escalated quickly...

I am eagerly anticipating the fallout from this! This just takes Season 1 and flips the whole table over, board and all.

Not just Season 1:

Less than a minute later, Guardian Saturn stood amidst the wreckage of the basement, the Silence Glaive in her hand angled down toward the floor with a line of crimson slowly dripping from its edge. The daimon egg was smashed and melting into a foul goo that was already evaporating into wisps of noxious green mist.

Said "daimon egg" being Mistress 9. Season 3 has been aborted just as it was about to begin.

[chibipoe]

Well, that escalated quickly...

I am eagerly anticipating the fallout from this! This just takes Season 1 and flips the whole table over, board and all.

Not just Season 1:

Less than a minute later, Guardian Saturn stood amidst the wreckage of the basement, the Silence Glaive in her hand angled down toward the floor with a line of crimson slowly dripping from its edge. The daimon egg was smashed and melting into a foul goo that was already evaporating into wisps of noxious green mist.

Said "daimon egg" being Mistress 9. Season 3 has been aborted just as it was about to begin.

Fair point! Didn't even think of that in the face of almost all the Senshi gathered and the Ginzuishou revealed so early.

[Bob Schroeck]

Just thought you'd like to know that you have Minako dumping Artemis on the floor twice in this scene with no indication that he climbed back into her lap between them.

Another possible error spotted: When you introduce Makoto, you give her name as Makoto Kino (Western name order, AFAIK, i.e. Makoto is her given name) but most of the other characters appearing in this chapter for the first time are introduced using Japanese name order.

Thanks for catching these. I've corrected them and a couple other small things.

[Dartz]

Quote possibly The most pedantic note in history.

The described layout for Fuji speedway in this time period may be wrong. The track was completely remodelled in 2005. Prior to this, it was a long, sweeping bend at high speed that led into the main straight.

These are the things we remember from thousands of hours orbiting the track in Grand Turismo when I should've been socialising.

Green is what it should be

---

Sorry.

I'll reread everything in the morning because I've sieve brain from work.

[Shepherd]

A minor error in the cram school fight:

Sailor Moon immediately threw herself backwards and away from it, dismissing the shield so it wouldn't get in the way.

As the fog vanished like someone had turned off the fog-switch, she dismissed the shield and turned back to face Ami-chan... no, Sailor Mercury.

She dismissed the shield twice.

[Matrix Dragon]

Stations of canon have been taken out by derailed trains with the power of rock drivingthem onwards.

[Labster]

> Shanahan Plaza
🍀 Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone!  Thanks for the typo!

> Long description of driving Fuji Speedway
Bob: brags about research done on speedway course
Brent: (to Bob) noone will ever notice if you don't put it in the concordance
Dartz: (walks in) hey you got the speedway track wrong

> "Make me a bicycle messenger with a package to deliver!"
Obvious mistake here.  This should say "Make me a pretty bicycle messenger."  Despite what Bob says about "Usagi's maturity" and all that jazz, I still insist she is a 13 year old girl and wants to grow into an attractive adult.  Plus "pretty" is part of the activation phrase I'm pretty sure.

> Is that a... red cocktail dress she's wearing?
I have now learned not to mess with a girl wearing a cocktail dress in a clock shop.  Also, I blame Ikuhara for this, like everything else truly strange in Sailor Moon. 

> quantum gravity which predicts a spin-2 massless messenger particle
Spin-2?  Who ordered that?
I'm also legitimately worried that being a fluent speaker of English would harm Ami's ability to score high on Japanese tests of English.  They seem to have evolved their own testing dialect over there.

> she'd learned the hard way that guards didn't like it when you roofhopped onto their buildings, she'd made a point afterwards to memorize all the embassies in Minato
Oh come on, it's not like she's driving a truck into the embassy gates in a Jeezit-mobile.

> A few rotted scraps of cloth lay among the bones
Honestly this is the thing that surprised me the most, given there is atmosphere and humidity there.  Cloth almost never survives where there's humidity (though fibres do pretty well in Egypt).  Doug is destroying mountains of archaeological record here, which is actually in character for him.  (Mainly thinking about this because in my own setting, Fujitaka Kinomoto will be the PI of the site up there.)

> Luna laughed. "'Stupid' was a word no one — not even her enemies — ever used to describe Her Majesty."
I see she didn't grow up with her own version of Sailor Mars

> Solider of Revolution, I am Guardian Pluto!
But how much solider is she?  Does she blend?  Can I eat it?

> you, o theoretical reader
I'll take that as a compliment.

[Bob Schroeck]

> Shanahan

Don't do that! I went nuts looking for that "typo" just now.

<sigh> And I had so much fun doing Haruka's drive from her POV, thanks to Google Streeview...

I had several different typos on "soldier" in the final few Kb of the chapter; they were all fixed in the online copy by 6:30PM EDT last night. (This is what happens when you don't give the end of the chapter the same year-and-a-half of proofreading you gave the rest of it.)

As for archaeological evidence, yeah. At some point Doug is going to realize what he did when he decided to spare the girls the gruesome sight and facepalm.

And you make a good point about the disguise pen... but then I'd have to retcon Doug asking to it to transform him into "a pretty ugly guy".

[robkelk]

> "Make me a bicycle messenger with a package to deliver!"
Obvious mistake here.  This should say "Make me a pretty bicycle messenger."

I still don't know why she needs a pretty bicycle.

[Bob Schroeck]

I'm guessing it's the sheer size of the chapter that's keeping there from being more replies so far. Fair enough. Now consider this: Chapter 4 was originally intended to be the back half of chapter 3... Imagine just how big that would have been.

[Labster]

> Shanahan

Don't do that!  I went nuts looking for that "typo" just now.

And you didn't find it, because I still see it in the story.  More context:
... trouble between the Shanahan Plaza management ...

As for archaeological evidence, yeah.  At some point Doug is going to realize what he did when he decided to spare the girls the gruesome sight and facepalm.

Yeah, I figured.  Doug's typical MO is to do a good deed without thinking it through, then figure out how he screwed up later.

[Bob Schroeck]

The hell? I can't find that typo with my editor's search function. But if I manually go to the only place it can be in the chapter, there it is.

Grr. And now that I found it manually, the editor's search goes, "Oh, you wanted to find that? Here it is!"

[Labster]

That sounds an awful lot like you either need your search box to have search up/down changed, or wrap-around box checked. Probably cursor position caused different results.

[Bob Schroeck]

It's always on wraparound. All i can figure is somehow I was misspelling the search target consistently without noticing.

[Aleh]

... well, that's *one* way to accidentally handle the problem of a hungry, invading eldritch abomination...

Also one season down and an... interesting... cliffhanger.

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh, no, Season one isn't done. It's just shifted into a higher gear.

[Aleh]

Oh, no, Season one isn't done.  It's just shifted into a higher gear.

Not Season One — one season. I was referring to S, actually — the whole Death Busters thing.

[Bob Schroeck]

Ah, yeah.