I was standing in the middle of a crowded city street. I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know how I’d got there. All I knew was that the people on the street were fleeing in panic and screaming in a language I couldn’t understand.

"Junsa-san! Junsa! Youma desu yo! Tuskete kudasai!" One woman shouted as she fled. The language might have been Japanese, but none of the people on the street were Asian. Curiouser and curiouser.

"Excuse me!" I said. A burly man bumped into me as he ran down the sidewalk and didn’t look back. His eyes were unnaturally wide with fear. They must have taken up almost half of his face.

"Excuse me!" I tried again. Again, the fleeing pedestrians ignored me. "Goodness!, people come and go so quickly around here," I muttered.

I drew my Browning and started pushing my way through the crowd like a salmon swimming upstream.

Finally, I saw a park at the end of the street. There was some sort of green female monster there. It was grabbing people and sucking the energy out of them. I was about to shoot it when a bunch of teenage girls came running up the street from the opposite direction.

They were dressed like a pedophile’s dream-come-true. They all wore short-skirted school-girl type uniforms and high-heels.

I thought that it must be difficult to run in those heels.

A black haired girl in a red skirt and high-heeled pumps clasped her gloved hands together and steepled her fingers in front of her forehead. After a few long seconds of intense concentration, she aimed her fingers at the monster. I heard some sort of weird drum music playing in the background.

Had these girls brought their own sound system?

The girl in the red skirt shouted, "Fiiiiyaa Soul!!!" and a stream of red fire shot from her finger and singed the monster. Fire Soul. That had been English, right? I walked more quickly toward the park. Maybe the girl in the red skirt could tell me what was going on.

The green monster roared and charged at the girls. They scattered like pigeons when a cat leaps in among them. Four of the girls fell into practiced rolls and were on their feet in seconds. The fifth, a blonde girl in strange pig-tails and a blue skirt, fell on her butt and started crying.

The other blonde in the group, the one wearing a big red bow in her hair and an orange skirt, pointed at the green monster and shouted, "Venuss Love-a Me Chain!!!" A chain of gold hearts flung out at the monster. The monster barely slowed down.

"Hey!" I shouted. I was almost within shooting distance of the monster, but the girls looked like they were going to take care of it. I held my fire and waited to see what they would do. Silver bullets are expensive. Why waste ‘em if you don’t have to?

The short-skirted teenagers didn’t pay me any attention. They were busy flinging fancy magical attacks at the green monster. Yellow hearts, red fire, blue mist, and green lightning—were these attack moves, or the new marshmallow treats in Lucky Charms?

Then, I heard a strum of guitar music and the distant click of castanets. A single rose came out of nowhere and sliced through the monster’s shoulder. I turned to look across the street. A man in an old-fashioned tuxedo, Fred Astaire top hat and dorky white glasses stood on top of a building. He was saying something, but I could barely make out the sounds over the thrumming of the guitar and the annoying click of castanets. The man in the tuxedo spoke for a long time.

Was this a fight, or a poetry recital? Finally, the music died down and the man said, "Sailormoon! Ima, yo!"

The blonde girl in the blue skirt nodded sharply, stood up and started to talk…and talk…and talk…

"Ai to no seigi no bishuojo no sailorfuku no senshi, Sailormoon!" the blond girl recited.

Jeese! This could go on all day. I sighted down the barrel of the Browning and plugged a bullet between the monster’s eyes.

The monster crumbled into a heap of ash, and all the weirdly dressed people in the park turned to stare at me.

"Nani yo?!?" The girl in the green skirt said.

The blonde in the blue skirt looked puzzled, like she didn’t know what to do because I’d interrupted her speech. Finally, she turned back to the pile of ash, put an earnest expression on her face and finished her lecturing.

"Tsukini kawatte, oshiokiyo!" She pointed at the pile of ash and stared at it like it was in big trouble. The pile of ash just sat there.

And then I woke up.

I was sitting straight up in bed with the Browning in my hand. "That was strange," I said.

"Hmph!"

I looked at the door of my room. A tall, thin young woman with wild black hair and a crooked smirk leaned casually against the door frame.

"You think that was strange?" She asked lightly. Her voice sounded kind of ragged. Either she was getting over a cold or she was doing a really bad imitation of Lauren Bacall. I couldn’t quite tell which.

She looked me in the eye. "You ain’t seen nothin’ yet."

...