Reign
                                by Ken Arromdee

    I'mn Tsukino Usagi, age 22.  The year is 2002, and I graduated from college
a month ago.  It's been five years since I made Galaxia realize all that she
had done...  five years since I saved the universe.  But that's not all I was
fated to do.

    I'm going to save the world.  I'm going to rule the world, because nobody
else can.  But it's going to be so hard to do....

    Someday in the future this room is going to be a grand crystal palace.  I
can see it in my mind, just like when I saw the future.  Someday everyone will
look up to it and be happy, but not now.

    But now, it's still a room.  I used the Silver Crystal, picking the right
spot in Tokyo carefully.  It was just a garbage dump until I used the Silver
Crystal.  Now my friends, and my husband, and my newborn daughter, and I, can
all see  the future starting to form; the palace, even just a few rooms of it,
is so beautiful.

    And everyone has been such a great help.  Mako-chan helped me put up the
curtains...  we have to have some privacy.  Just because you can see through
crystal doesn't mean you should be able to see into people's homes!  Ami-chan
created the fog outside; it's calm and peaceful and the owner of the dump
can't bug us any more.

    Like I said, it's been hard.  Rei got hurt the other day...  nothing
Hotaru couldn't heal, of course.  The owner's gone, but there are still some
troops who support the government with the Emperor and Prime Minister and
all that.  Rei's fire scared them away before any of us got hit by more than a
grazing shot.  I hope nothing happens to any of them; I've killed lots of
youmas, but people?

    Anyway, it doesn't matter who's outside the door.  Nobody uses it anyway;
it's easy for all of us to combine our powers to do a Sailor Teleport.  That's
what we did in Saudi Arabia; we just appeared in front of the King.  Can you
imagine a country where they think of women so little that they'd sooner die
than surrender to a woman?  I'm glad I didn't have to kill anyone; we just
grabbed the king and teleported to a desert island.  After doing this a couple
of dozen times, we found one that would surrender.  But I made him get rid of
the rule which lets people have lots of wives.

    North Korea was easy, since we could teleport in and Rei's predictions
let us know where anyone who might shoot at us was.  Next time it's going to be
China; we hope we'll get it right this time, because getting the leader just
wasn't enough last time.  At least Haruka knows enough Chinese to get by.

    But I'm still wondering.  There's more than one future there could be.
Pluto told me about one, where the world is covered in ice, and another, where
Chibi-Usa lives hundreds of years as a child and my reign starts next month.
Ami told me that the fake Kaguya we ran into years ago is dead; her comet
would have reappeared this year, and she would have covered the world with ice
the second time if our victory the first time had been a little less complete.

    So it must be the other future.  I can see the stars now, and I imagine
them shining over the palace in the future...

    "Wait!" yelled Ami.  "Usagi, we got it all wrong.  It wasn't Kaguya.  Use
the Crystal...  save us..."

    I don't understand.

    "Usagi, I know you don't pay attention to these things...  but the ice
isn't Kaguya.  We made a mistake, a big mistake.  We went too far..."

    "What is it?"

    "Nuclear winter."

    And the stars, not stars after all, came closer as I raised the crystal
over my head, hoping that I'd save all of us, but realizing what I had goaded
the world into doing to itself....