Pamphlet: Rise of the Tyrant

The Following Pamphlet is here to explain the events surrounding the Tyrant, The Eightfold Empire and the possession of Jupiter.

Wut's All This Then!

Everyone knows the story of the Silver Millennium and its eventual destruction at the hands of Queen Beryl and the fall of the Silence. What -really- happened, though, is not so simple.

As it turns out, the eight other inhabited worlds of the Sol system were not destroyed by the Silence. Rather, at a designated time, these societies arranged with one another to slip out of Time and Space, appearing dead to the cosmos, and would allow the Silence to wash over Sol System. When the dust settled, and the threat of the Metallia Force had ended, they would reappear. This obviously didn't happen as planned -- particularly because the Moon Kingdom, which was supposed to serve as the sentry and send the return signal, never got word of when the Silence was to be used, and was subsequently obliterated.

And so the eight worlds of Sol languished in a place outside our reality, awaiting a signal they began to suspect would never come... until 2015, anyway.

The Eightfold Empire Emerges

Acting oddly one day (even more then usual), Furuhata Motoki awoke as a member of the Moon Kingdom, stole a spaceship, flew to Mars, and discovered an ancient sigil of Mars dating back to the time of the Moon Kingdom ten thousand years ago. Soon after, Sailor Mars touched the the sigil, awakening a hidden civilization.

Over the next several days, the eight worlds of the Eightfold Empire returned to conventional spacetime -- Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus and Pluto -- and when each of them realized the scope of the disaster that had unfolded, quickly wrapped themselves from scrutiny to assess what was going on. These cultures had continued to evolve in the millennia they were sequestered, and possessed technological/magical advancements far beyond their distant backward relatives on Earth. While they cautiously reached out to one another to re-establish relationships of old, they also reached out to to the Sailor Senshi, cutting a deal with each of them to use them as 'hosts' for their ambassadors to interact with and assess the status of Earth.

What they saw on Earth did not terribly impress them. The Plutonian (Hadean) Ambassasor made the Eightfold's position on Earth clear: the third planet was barbarous, contentious, riddled with evil and opportunists. If they could ignore Earth, they would; if Earth could be proven worthy, they would delicately open relations; if Earth was somehow a threat, they would finish the job that the Silence started.

Treason Most Foul

As distantly as they had evolved from Earth, the Eightfold Empire had also evolved apart from itself. Each world developed along distinct cultural and social lines from the others for ten thousand years, and these differences proved to be their own source of tension. Inhabitants of The Hotel became aware of these differences only gradually, when the Ambassadors could be persuaded to speak about their own societies. The Venusian Ambassador was the most open to re-integration, even revealing that they had been against the deployment of the Silence; they had even sent a messenger to the Moon Kingdom in order to warn them of the impending cataclysm.

When the Venusian Ambassador nearly died from an assassination attempt, the Eightfold Empire went on high alert. Although fingers were initially pointed at Earth, the Hotel inhabitants were just able to mend Venus, and demonstrate that it was not their own that did it. The Hotel then went on to look for and investigate the courier vessel sent ten thousand years ago to warn the Moon Kingdom of the Silence. They discovered that the courier had been assassinated on the journey, that the assassin used Saturnian and Plutonian tools to do the job... which spurred both the Venusian government and the Plutonian government to make proactive strikes against one another. In minutes, both cultures were scoured Perhaps one in a thousand Hadeans survived the attack, only to be abducted and consumed by the lurking Cult of Mondas. There were no Venusian survivors.

Terrified and galvanized by the possibility of annihilation, the remaining members of the Eightfold Empire began seeking evidence of treachery... and using the chaos as an excuse to pursue old grudges. The colonies of Uranus and Neptune jointly attacked Saturn in retribution for "leaving us to die" and "murdering us in the night"; in answer, before its defenses failed, Saturn destroyed both other colonies. This left only Jupiter, Mars, and Mercury as viable heirs of the Eightfold.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to discern -why- the Moon Kingdom never received the emergency signal, HOTEL inhabitants journeyed back to the time of the Silver Millennium, at the height of the war against Queen Beryl. They discovered that the Princess of Jupiter was under the influence of a malignant entity -- one unknown to anyone present -- and had sabotaged the communications gear, knowing that it would mean her own death. Further investigation revealed that the entity had reincarnated within Kino Makoto, and had been using Makoto as a false face to further its own designs.

Exploiting the power of the Lightning Crystal, the Jovian colony seized the initiative and fired a laser of tremendous power at the Ice Warrior colony over Mars, sending it crashing down to the red planet but still mostly intact. The survivors of the attack, believing that the Eightfold Martians were behind this unprovoked assault, launched an immediate attack, taking the shocked Martians by surprise. The Jovian fleet then rolled out to lay siege to Mercury, issuing an ultimatum: surrender or be brought low.

The Mercurian Ambassador, when made privvy to the information that the HOTEL inhabitants had gathered, agreed. Flatly enough, they did not have the resources to resist the Jovian fleets, much less deal with the corruption at the top, and had no wish to join the fallen worlds in oblivion.

Meanwhile, the entity has revealed itself as the Voice of the Tyrant, and it has revealed its intentions: to create a new, more perfect cosmos. The first step in this? Dropping the Silence in the middle of Galaxy Cauldron to end all this noisy, chaotic life nonsense.

Further examination of the Silence Device by agents of the Sailor Corps indicated that its surface was composed of a living skin that drained the life energy of any being that touched it, the point of death-- its structure matching that of the skin of Shadow vessels.

The Intern and Valeria Victrix both compared notes and realized that if the Tyrant was exploiting knowledge of Shadow technology, there might be more to her operations that meets the eye. Recalling their history, they knew the Shadows-- an ancient race of vast power-- had scattered their tech in caches all over the galaxy before retreating from their last war with the Vorlons, and that Mars was one such cache.

This led to the horrifying conclusion that the entire conflict between the Ice Warrior and Eightfold Empire's martian colonies was just a distraction to allow a third party ot activate and abscond with a Shadow Vessel that had been buried on the planet.

Silence almost Fallen

On August 5th 2015, a group of warriors from the HOTEL managed to stop a plot by the Tyrant to use a Silence Device to destroy Galaxy Cauldron, an act which would have essentially stunted the creation of all new life in the Galaxy. Taking responsibility for the failure, her lieutenant, Mr. Strix, was instructed to "kill one of them [at the HOTEL], I don't care which," and to bring her a "test subject." Following his orders, on August 6th, he shot down Marcus Deadman, the head of Torchwood Japan. IT was also revealed that she used the focus of all the people at the HOTEL on the Silence Device to cover her traveling to Pluto to gift the Cult of Mondas with some kind of gift...

Patient Zero

After abducting Tomoe Hotaru as theit "patient zero", The Tyrant infected her with a custom-tailored anti-magic virus that was made to only affect Vermellia X. Rosso, almost killing her, as her part-Expellian body needed a constant supply of Mana to function. Mr. Strix informed the denizens of the HOTEL that a custom antivirus was available-- but the only catch was The Actuary had to go pick it up herself. He also revealed that the planet Jupiter was now seeded with a more generalized anti-magic virus, presumably one that would permanently debilitate any magic-user coming to the planet who was not inoculated.