You actually know how many chapters this'll run?
I'm impressed.  The temptation to keep adding
chapters towards the end should be quite strong.

are, I sincerely believe. Let's rule them. We did
not want it that way -- but if someone has to be
boss, I want it to be us.
-- Robert A Heinlein, in a letter to John W.
Campbell, Jr., dated December 9, 1941.

Nice foreshadowing.  I didn't get it here, but this
quote explains quite well some of what would
otherwise be mysterious later in this chapter.

     The house that has become the current locus of our
awareness (227 Greenwood Avenue, incidentally)

Since we know from the prolog that this "locus" should be
Usagi's house, the "Greenwood" is certainly disconcerting
at first read.  Taken together with the Heinlein quote,
one starts to sense what "ruling" Japan might mean.

     At precisely 7:08:37, a small brown-haired tornado 
erupts from one of the three bedrooms upstairs, streaks
down the stairs and screeches to a halt by
hopping into a seat at the table opposite Father.
"MorningpoppamommacanIhavepeanutbutteronmytoast?"
     "Good morning, Diane," replies Father, without setting 

Well, you got me here.  Despite the "brown-haired", I
really did think this was Usagi at this point (the name,
of course, only underlining the identification).

     At 7:12, the clock radio erupts into the middle of Mina 
Rush's cover of "Jailhouse Rock", specifically the synthesizer

So Minako is already a rock star here?  Precocious of her.

descends the stairs like a blonde fury.

Here, of course, is where our perceptions as to who is who
get adjusted.  Perhaps a pity, in some ways, that Sailor
Moon must always be blonde, but you did tell us in the
prolog that the Togetherverse's Usagi's DNA was the template,
so if there is a blonde here, it must be our heroine.

She can tell just by looking that her little half-sister is

At first, we think that the "half-sister" may be necessary,
so that Alcyone (or whoever that was in the prolog; description
sounded like her) can maneuver the DNA into existence
properly.  But the explanation given later provides another
reason for this.  Just misdirection?  Maybe.

     She notices that Father looks mildly concerned by her 
statement, but decides that if he doesn't want to bring his
concerns up -- whether about her taking public transportation
to school,

Hmm.. so US rule gives Japan our drawbacks, too?  No, it
seems worse than that.  I'm not sure there is a city in
the U.S. where teenagers wouldn't be safe taking public
transportation to and from school during the day.  But it is
clear that Sam's father thinks there is not insignificant
risk involved here.

     Sam descends the stairs just in time to see Father 
pulling his jacket on over his shoulder holster,

Definitely not the Japan we know!

     "Well, it already hasn't been as long as that one time," 
Sam comments, remembering when she was only eight and Father
had gone into work shortly after midnight. By the end of the
day, there had been a new President in the Oval Office.

There are several hypotheses possible here, and no way to
choose between them (hopefully later chapters will allow us
to select).  Was Father trying to stop an assassination?  This
seems to be the meaning you'd like us to assume.  Or is Father's
agency the secret master of the world, one against which the
President had been trying to rebel in the cause of freedom?

resemblance to each other. The differences -- Mary's long, 
curly red hair vs. Sam's short straight blonde;

Clearly Mary is the Naru analog here, a point the rest of the
plot bears out.  I also note the reference here to Sam's
_short_ hair, another unexpected difference.

     Sam was only a few months old when Mother's first 
marriage, to Sam's biological father, ended in divorce. The
allegations of adultery were flung by both sides, but only
stuck to the husband. One of those named by the wife's
attorney was Mary's recently widowed mother.

Ah, Dirty Surrealism.  (One presumes that this father, the
probable donator of the DNA Alcyone borrowed, might prove
interesting; might not even really exist.)

friends. There are things that they both know, and yet have 

Did you really want "There are things..." here, or possibly
"These are things..."?  The latter is a more natural reading
for the paragraph as a whole.  The former implies that they
know MORE than you've just told us, an interesting supposition.

OTOH, combined with the "tension", and one of the things you
have a bit of a rep for in your stories, I can derive another
meaning from this.

Mary smiles as she sees Sam walking briskly towards her,
and stubs her cigarette out on the sidewalk beneath her shoe.

Might the smoking have been inspired by the dub's Brooklyn
accent?  Listening to the dub, I'm always surprised that
Molly doesn't have a cigarette in her hand.

     He is, unfortunately for him, running against a girl
who has won every foot race she ever entered from the time
she was five. 

Definitely a departure from SM canon here.  Reminiscent of
Quantum Destinies, though (as are other elements of this
narrative), in the suggestion that Sam's normal form has
been genetically enhanced.

     "Crazy bitch tried to kill me!" shouts the pickpocket, 
who then beings to

'begins'

walk through the front gates of Robert A. Heinlein Academy
of Learning, beneath the thirteen stripes and sixty
stars of the United States of America. 

The flag from the prolog.  Sixty?  Some are Japan, obviously,
but not ten.  I'd guess four, one for each major island,
which means six other states.  Germany seems implausible
unless the US also annexed most of western Europe.

the rumor that she relaxes by seducing and emotionally 
devastating promising but politically unreliable students

"politically unreliable"?  note to self:  don't trust
government spokespeople in this narrative.

not to mention the occasional passing reference to the
admirable policies of the Reich -- their policies in
educational matters, of course.

Unlike one of the other commentators, I interpret the "Reich"
as being American (the Heinlein quote at the beginning almost
mandates this).

none of whom are important enough to the narrative
to have names),

I rather liked this; honesty w.r.t. the storyteller's trade.

mean, does anyone care how Vancouver entered the Union? It 
was more than a hundred years ago!

<clip>

     "British California," Sam supplies.

So the deviation point is NOT WWII, but earlier; and at least
one province of Canada in among the sixty.  The "British
California" suggests, to me, a variation in history stretching
back to before Mexican independence, which might in turn
suggest that other states might be south of the border as
well as north.

sides lined with the month's new graphic books. She examines 

American rather than Japanese comic industry, given the
monthly rather than weekly distribution.  Although some
of the American pulps once had bi-weekly; I think the
Shadow did at one point.

It's set in Japan, 

<clip> 

how she does with Sam's home state.

Okay, maybe the whole of Japan is a single state.  Strikes
me as an odd decision on the part of the occupiers; breaking
Japan up and setting up separate regional governments would
have been an obvious way to reduce the risk of rebellion.

"Thank you so much, Miss Tsukamura."
     "You're welcome," Sam starts to say, but he words
smash into the wall formed by the freezing of her smile,
as how she's just been addressed registers. It has been
nearly eight years since she last heard her biological
father's last name ... and it has never been applied to her.
     "That is your name, isn't it? Samantha Allison Tsukamura?"

Trying to derive a meaning here... "inconsistent messenger",
perhaps?  There seem to be several possibilities, none of
which stand out (to me).

you again. For the recorrrd ... my name is Rune." With that, 

Another nice fakeout; I was trying to force Rune Venus
into this person, scratching my head, and ignored the
obvious.

woman. Whatever she fears -- and she has a very specific, 
very great cause for fear -- the description doesn't
provide it.

Heh.  Nice hook.

"It only takes two incidents to make a pattern, and if we can 
show a pattern > --"

Twice is supposed to be coincidence; it takes three times to
make enemy action.  ;)

     "I told you," the cat says in Rune's voice, "that I 
would be seeing you again soon, Samantha."

And you'd better believe I was kicking myself for missing
the obvious when I got here...

     And all at once, something is different. No, not a 
definable something, but everything. Everything is more
there, more solid, more real, as though she'd been watching
televideo and was suddenly there at the place it displayed.

I really liked this description of Sam's transformation.

"Assuming all goes well, the only people who'll see you 
aren't going to care about your clothes or your voice,
or anything else but how your insides taste!

Ah, a manga-derived approach:  where nobody much ever
DOES see the senshi.  But in the manga, those few who do
have no trouble recognizing them.

     "Open it," Sam snaps at Rune.
     "What --"
     "Like you opened my window! Hurry!"

This version of Sailor Moon really does think fast...

     Somewhere -- but we don't know where, not yet -- a 
gray-haired woman in a brown leotard and cape watches an

It was burgundy in the prolog.  Of course, this is, in
her timeline, seventeen years later.

     "I told the hospital that my gran would come and stay 
with me at our place."
     "But your grandmother's dead."
     "They don't know that."

Pertaining to a sixteen-year-old girl, this is VERY interesting.
"Society" needs her to have someone to live with... why?
The sort of "scandal" an earlier America might have assumed?
Not obvious why there would be any political connotation to
a teenage girl temporarily living alone.  Also means that
this world's Jupiter will have alternate living arrangements.
(or maybe be a professional?  That would be different.)

     Sam doesn't meet her eyes. "Not really a lot I can do, is there?"
     "Well, no, but ... I mean ... are *you* okay?"
     She does, now. "Yes. But I think I have more important 
things to worry
about, now."
     And on they go.

Nice ending.


I find I'm quite caught up in this.  I REALLY, REALLY, want
to read the rest.

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