(Eyecatch, _The 20th Century_ on the History Channel)
MW:	And then, on the fiftieth day of the standoff, the Dark Kingdom
	intefered in the affairs of the United States for the first time.

(Footage from outside Waco, TX, and the Branch Davidian compound.  Heat haze
and dust faintly obscures the actual buildings, as well as the vehicles and
giant robots)

MW:	They appeared, as we have now come to expect, out of nowhere,

(The footage changes to a different camera, but still there is only a slightly
bluer patch of sky to mark the gate.  Through the gate flit six Wombat attack
helicopters, the large water tanks of their fire-fighting gear making them
look almost pregnant, followed by the three Muskrat prototypes.  The Muskrats
settle to the ground near the camera, and the Wombats appear again after a few
moments, settling a bit further away from the center of things.  The camera
changes again, showing five Sailors and twenty-five Militia people exiting the
Muskrats, the rotors spinning down slowly as the pilots unbuckle their helmets
and shift in their seats)

MW:	and Sailor Moon, leading the Dark Kingdom force, managed to convice
	the ATF agent in charge to let her take over the operation.

	Dark Kingdom precognitives predicted disaster for April 19th, and Dark
	Kingdom chemical sensors showed large containers of kerosene spread
	throughout the building.

	Sailor Mercury predicted that the whole place could be burned to the
	ground in a half-hour.

	The ATF forces, confronted with this information, admitted that they
	had made no preparations for a fire, despite a planned assult the next
	day.

(Six Militia people and a Sailor with long, golden hair walk over to the giant
robot nearest the compound, an Army type called, appropriately, an "Ugly".
After a while the robot's pilot follows them back towards the main group)

SMars:	In my fire-reading that day I'd seen the compound devoured by flames,
	tanks and giant robots around, doing nothing, firetrucks arriving too
	late, and then, somehow caused by that, later, a big, ugly building
	with its face blown open, bodies being pulled out, devistation.

	I knew we had to do something, and I told the others, and we came.

SMercury: I had the Wombats almost ready, but only the prototype Muskrats were
	in any shape to go anywhere.  The prototypes, you see, were made by
	retrofitting a two-vane motor onto each of three surplus Vietnam-era
	US Army Hueys.

	The Wombats were completed, but only two of them had their
	finish-coats, which is why three and a half of them were primer-grey
	for this.

	I knew we could stop Mars' vision from coming true, but I wasn't so
	sure that we could save those eighty people in the building.

SMoon:	My biggest problem was trying to talk to people through the
	translation spells.  They are poor enough when one only has to use
	one, say from Japanese to {DKNL}, but at that point I hadn't learned
	{DKNL} yet, nor English, so everything I said had to go from Japanese
	to {DKNL}, then from {DKNL} to English, with all of the normal
	problems of machine translation at each step.  I'm somewhat surprised,
	now that I know what they were hearing, that we didn't get shot.

	I should have understood how bad it was from the garbled Japanese we
	got back from the arrangement, but still.

MW:	The Dark Kingdom team, having stabilized their situation with the US
	team, turned their attention to the Branch Davidians, and David
	Koresh.

(Footage, with audio, of Sailor Moon walking towards the compound, then
beginning to speak)

SMoon:	You are looking for a message from your God, a sign that the
	Apocolypse has come.  It will not.

Joshua Bryant, Fmr. Branch Davidian:
	It was at that point that I knew, this was our sign.  She spoke
	softly, but all of us could hear her clearly, and so could the ATF
	team outside.  The ATF people were shifting nervously, and Koresh
	looked worried.

(cut back to Sailor Moon talking at the compound)

SMoon:	It will not come, for I will not let it.

	David Koresh says that God told him the end of the world is coming,
	and you must prepare.  I can tell you that this is not true.

	Hard times are coming, yes, and it would be good to be prepared, but
	this is not the way.


Joshua Bryant, Fmr. Branch Davidian:
	She said that, and suddenly everything shifted.  What good did it do
	to prepare less than a hundred people for the end of the world?

	At that point there were three and a half billion people living on
	Earth, and I was holed up in a tiny compound with a bunch of guns and
	a man preaching about the end times.  It just didn't seem right
	anymore.

(Sailor Moon walks up to the door, three Sailors flanking, a Militia woman
with a camera following.
We shift to the camera the Milita woman was holding, watching over the top of
Sailor Moon's head as she opens the door and walks in)

SMoon:	What god would chose David Koresh to speak for him, if she or he
	wanted to have the word spread?  Who has gained anything from this,
	other than David Koresh?

(she turns, and the camera follows after a few moments, to focus over her head
on a young woman)

	You?

(the woman looks confused for a moment, starts to nod, then stops, and starts
to cry)

	What god would sacrifice three and a half billion people he supposedly
	loves for being as he created them?  Weak, failable, unwilling to
	believe the lies of thousands of years of power-hungry humans?

	Anyone who doubts the wisdom of staying should follow me out of here.

(Sailor Moon turns, walks back towards the door, one of the Sailors walking
backward, facing into the compound, the other turning to face the camerawoman,
who is also walking backwards)

MW:	Seventy-five of the eighty people in the complex followed her out.

	Another three left later that evening, surrendering to the Dark Kindom
	forces, rather than the ATF.

(footage of the brightly lit compound, darkness all around)

	Tensions amoung the forces around the compound dropped significantly,
	and most slept that night.

(flames suddenly appear from the top of one of the second-floor rooms)

	At around three AM, that all changed.

(much rushing around, and the sharp Twhop-Thwop of the Wombats dual rotors
starting, the twin counter-rotating shafts intermeshing their blades visibly
as they spin up in the firelight.  Within sixty seconds, before the flames
appear out of a second-floor room on the other side of the compound, the first
of them is off the ground)

	The Wombats were in the air within two minutes, but even that was too
	late for the remaining two people inside the compound.

(The Wombats are circling the blazing building, great jets of cold mist blown
from the ducted fans mounted under their noses, the long, flat craft otherwise
hard to see in the dark.  Within ten minutes the pumper-trucks brought in
earlier are putting out the remaining hot-spots, and Militia people are
looking for the two people known to be in the building)

	They were found quickly, David Koresh, burned almost beyond
	recognition in the blaze he set, and his eldest wife, her skull
	crushed by repeated blows with a bat, who had been dead for several
	hours.

(a blackend body being hauled into an ambulance, covered in clear plastic)

	Within forty-eight hours there were hearings scheduled into the ATFs
	handling of the situation, and there was talk of treason on the part
	of the team commander, for letting the Dark Kingdom take over the
	operation.

	More when we continue with The 20th Century.

(eyecatch)

---
log:
3167/Chaos/4x:		plotted
3167/Chaos/47:		started
3169/Discord/15:	Edited, a little