Celeste was excited. Today was the first day of the annual anime convention. She’d worked hard for the past few months on her costuming. She’d hand stitched the sailor scout costumes for all her friends. She picked up her own fuuka to admire her own stitchwork on the emerald green uniform. It really was the perfect material choice. A lot of cosplay makers chose the wrong kinds of materials to work with, which could lead to tacky looking results, but Celeste had pride in her material choice, a heavy, durable textured cloth that looked rich and complex in most lighting conditions.

She undressed from her regular blouse and jeans, and took off her glasses, flipping open her contact case to remove two prescription emerald coloured contact lenses. Celeste popped in some eyedrops and then carefully placed them into her eyes with her fingertips. She blinked a few times to get rid of the grainy feeling. Then she slipped her cosplay over her slender frame. She looked in the mirror critically, comparing her figure to a picture of Makoto Kino that she had pinned up beside it. A little cosplay tape fixed under the uniform to where it needed to be taken in a little to achieve the proper look. Celeste twirled a little, admiring the likeness to her favorite anime character of all time. It was perfect.

She emerged from the dressing room to see all her friends already finished with their costume prep. They were the spitting image of the sailor scouts from bishoujo sailor moon. They’d gone to extreme efforts to pull off the look. Each one wore one of Celeste’s perfect clothing replicas, and not one of them wore a wig, it was their own hair, dyed and styled to their beloved characters. It was as if the characters had stepped out of an episode of bishoujo senshi sailor moon, and into reality.
Mei was dressed as Sailor Moon, her platinum blonde hair pulled up into the impossible buns of Usagi. Millie as Sailor mercury had dyed her hair a healthy, shiny aquamarine, and was rocking her blue sailor uniform. Gracie looked stunning as Sailor Venus, and Olive was the very image of Sailor Mars with her natural jet black hair.

“Wow, girls, you are all just perfect. Now does everybody remember to practice the choreography for the cosplay competition at home? We’re on in 5 and I’d like to get in a soundcheck before we go on.” Celeste stated excitedly. This was going to be a perfect performance. They were going to win the competition for sure this year.
“Now let’s get out there and break a leg.” She encouraged them all.
“Um, Celeste, I really need to use the bathroom first… I need to pee” Mei said timidly.
“Um me too”, a little” piped up Olive.
“There’s no time for that now Mei, You’ll have to hold it in until after we’re finished. Girls, you should have gone earlier.” Celeste facepalmed. She should have known there’d be something. She couldn’t be chasing down her friends right as they were about to go onstage,


Hot lights flashed down on the girls as they got on stage to do their skit. Celeste had written it herself. They blinked at first, but once they got used to it, it actually helped, blocking out their view of the audience. Mei took the lead role, and led the girls as they started their routine on stage.


They were all sweating a bit by the time they finished, holding their poses an extra long time, just so the crowd of their fellow geeks could snap some pictures as they roared their otaku applause. Celeste regretted not getting as much exercise as she could, she was huffing a little, herself. But she really needed the time to make all the costumes, and it had been worth getting a little winded for an audience reaction like that.

Right as their set ended, there was a gust of wind that came from literally nowhere. Celeste tried to settle her skirt a little, before resuming her frozen pose. The last thing she wanted was to have pictures of her knickers circulated around the web.
Then the air in front of her turned golden and ripped down the middle. It glowed like some kind of hologram. That was probably what it was… she’d seen some of them on stage before, though she’d thought that they needed a watermist or something to make the lasers work. Maybe it was new technology?

A portal to another dimension opened right in front of Celeste. It kind of looked like the dark kingdom from sailor moon if she squinted hard enough, except with pools of glowing lava. A purple goblin-like Youma shuffled up to the portal with a pitchfork in hand. It was a surprise though, this wasn’t part of the script Celeste had written. Was this Mei’s doing? She was big on all that computer stuff… if Celeste had known she could pull something like this off, she would have changed the script to incorporate more of it. It was so realistic looking. The demon leapt out of the portal and yanked Mei through it by her outstretched hand. She squealed in fright. Her acting was fantastic, she looked genuinely frightened, why hadn’t she brought that energy to the rest of her performance?

In the blink of an eye, the demons tumbled through the rip and kidnapped her friends. One of the holograms reached out and grabbed celeste by the wrist. Her heart skipped a beat. She could feel it, she could actually feel its cold, slimy hands on her own. It was real? It was all real! Celeste panicked

“Noooooo!” She screamed as she was dragged through the tear in reality. As she passed through the glass, she felt her body tingle, and she tasted copper. It was like being dragged through mildly electrified jello. She found herself stunned by the experience.
“Huh?” She exclaimed dumbly, as the goblin demons clamped manacles around her wrists. One of them poked her in the ass with a trident, and she found herself moving along with her friends as they were herded through an alien looking world. Was this hell? She found herself wondering. There was certainly enough lava, and demons.

They pushed her up a winding stone staircase. Up to a rocky precipice. As Celeste looked at the desolate landscape, she became aware of its details. The rock was covered in a fine regolith, every so often she’d spot what looked like a human skull buried in the sand. And everywhere she looked were these round rocks, that were the same colour and material as the underlying rock, but looked enough like eggs that she had to wonder. The air was cold, and made her nipples perk up, but she could also feel the raging heat radiating from the lava pools beneath the cliff where they were being marched.

Celeste could hear Mei sobbing pitifully. All of them felt a sinking trepidation . At least they weren’t dead…. But being the prisoners of demons hardly rated much room for much hope. For a moment, Celeste considered trying to run away, but the goblins with tridents were behind them, and they were hemmed in on both sides by sheer cliff walls that dropped down to bubbling lava pools. The only way to move was up, towards the dark throne atop the peak, the direction the goblin demons were shepherding them already.

The girls came to a halt in front of the shadowy throne. Behind them, the goblin demons bowed, more out of fear than respect. Celeste could tell by the way they immediately scattered and ran back down the hill in the direction they came from. She recalculated her chances for a successful escape, but paused when she saw canine forms materialise from some nearby shadows. Their smoky forms never left the dark, but the hellhounds' outlines could clearly be made out. There was no way she’d ever be able to outrun then, so Celeste shelved her thoughts of freedom for the time being. Millie stepped a little too far out of line, and one of them nipped at her feet. She scooted back closer to the others.

Celeste’s eyes fell on the creature in the throne. At first, all she could make out were blood red eyes that made her blood freeze. Then the demon lord slowly stood from his contemplations, rising above them by twice their height. It was an imposing sight, and Celeste found herself cowed by his fearsome visage. He wasn’t conventionally attractive by any measure, but his muscles were pronounced, and rippled like water as he walked, and his giant cock swung with every confident stride. The demon lord raised a clawed fist and took Celeste’s face in his hand, like he was a farmer inspecting livestock. The second he touched her, she felt a psychic presence in her mind, peeling back her thoughts and exposing her to his mind, and he to hers. His mind was like being bathed in fire and ice. It was old, powerful, and clever, and absolutely evil. Her mind fought against his, and was batted away like a mosquito. She knew then that there was nothing she could do but submit herself before him.

He screeched an order in a foreign demon tongue. The air was thick with his psychic dominance. The girls had never heard the language before in their lives… but the word penetrated their brains anyway.
“OBEY”
The ancient magic worked its way into their brains, binding them to the demon lord’s will absolutely. They were no longer capable of even thinking about disobeying now,
Celeste and her friends were now thralls to the demon lord.