Prelude to the Cirque (Usagi Tsukino)

Prelude to the Cirque (Usagi Tsukino)
Date of Cutscene:	09 August 2023
Location:	Juuban
Synopsis:	A prelude to Cirque de Flambebebe - how did Usagi Tsukino end up on the trail of a Witch, when she's never even heard the words Puella Magi?
Cast of Characters:	Usagi Tsukino

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Juuban Ward is a place where tradition and trend meet, and with its comfortable mix of suburban charm and downtown rush, the perfect place to be. In the summer, with the days long and the nights warm, the streets are alive later than usual, the people more relaxed because the kids are out of school, running around, looking to entertain themselves. It’s a great place to be a kid on summer break.

Usagi Tsukino would know - she was born and raised here, grew up exploring the shopping district, where old school shops that have enjoyed patronage for a hundred years stand beside new, modern boutiques and cafes. OSA-P Jewelry is the shop owned by her very best friend’s family, Game Crown Arcade houses the arcade-cafe combo of her dreams. If anyone ever thought to ask her, she’d tell them Juuban is the best neighborhood in all of Tokyo.

And lately, Juuban’s been weird. She knows why, of course - it’s full of monsters, and people can’t see them. They get chased through the streets or have their energy stolen or get trapped in kaleidoscope coffins, according to Naru, and they don’t remember it after, just that they were scared, sad, hurt.

But lately, something else has been happening: people are coming home with singed clothes, with empty eyes, again and again, getting quieter and quieter until they don’t come home at all. Usagi knows, because her mama had called her, fretting, and said, Usagi, come home for a few days, I’m worried about Shingo - and Usagi had been annoyed, at first. She’s been home twice more than she expected to be this summer, and to have one of those few times be for her annoying little brother - she’d thought she deserved to be annoyed.

Then she saw Shingo, the hollowness in his eyes, the exhausted way he slumped down when Mama and Papa insisted on family time. Then she saw the charred, singed edges of his clothes, tucked away in a bag where her mother had sequestered them from the general pile of laundry.

There’s a monster in Juuban. It hunts people and it hurts them and then it lets them go, to do it all over again. Shingo says - when he finally, finally talks, trapped between Mama, Papa, and Usagi - that it was a circus. That he went to the circus.

There’s no circus visiting in Juuban, not even a little one, not even for the summer. Not even an unofficial one. There have been no signs, not advertisements, not even a sticker stuck to a pole. Usagi’s Mama and Papa didn’t know what Shingo was talking about, had whispered to themselves, worried that he was making up a story, that there was something else, something worse, but Usagi is pretty sure she knows what’s going on, and that it can’t be worse.

It’s not that there’s not a circus in town. It’s that wherever this circus is, whatever runs it, is something hidden away, protected by the Veil, and no one who could do anything about it have known to stop it.

Usagi Tsukino’s been busy - with school, with friends, with being a magical girl and all the secrets, dangers, and bothers that come with it - but she’s never too busy for her family. And whatever monster is out there, hiding in a circus, hunting her little brother?

It’s going to get the honor of being the first villain Sailor Moon ever hunted down.