Gel Sadra stumbled up the hill, whimpering with pain. "Mama," she gasped, tears stinging her eyes. "Mama..." Darkness was eating away at the edges of her vision, but she had to get out of the pit Sosai X had left behind in the earth. She didn't want to die here... not in the devastation X had left in the world, the devastation she had helped him to build...

She crested the hill, and gasped.

Below her was a slope covered with flowers, purple and pink and white in riotous profusion, with fir trees, and a lake at the bottom of the slope. It was so beautiful. Tears welled in her eyes... not from the pain this time.

"Ohhh.... I never knew the Earth... was so beautiful," she murmured, swaying as she looked down at the beauty of nature. How many places she had been that had been full of this beauty, and all she'd cared about was building another stupid Main Beam Cannon for Sosai? She thought of all she'd destroyed, and shame stung her eyes. "I would have destroyed this beauty, and turned it all to ugliness... I'm so ashamed. I can never make up for the terrible things I've done." Every breath was agony, rasping against broken ribs, blood bubbling in her lungs. A rib must have torn its way into a lung. Every step tore at the stab wound in her gut. "If I could, if I could be allowed to live... no." She closed her eyes. She wasn't going to live. She didn't deserve to. She'd killed so many people, just because Sosai had told her to. So many families she'd torn apart, the way she'd been torn from her mother. "If it could be allowed when I'm next reborn... I want to make up for what I've done. I want to protect this beautiful world..."

A sunbeam broke through the clouds, and she heard a voice she'd thought she would never hear again.

"Oh, my Sammie," she heard her mother say.

Gel Sadra looked up into the clouds. "Mama?"

Her mother's face shone down at her. "This world isn't the only world. It's not the only world full of beauty, full of love and friendship. This world has Gatchaman and the Science Ninja Team to protect it... but there are other worlds that need protecting."

"Mama... I don't understand...."

Her mother – Sylvie Pandora, her nemesis, her opponent, her mother, beloved mother, lost forever – was standing in front of her, translucent, holding out her hands. "You have a choice, Sammie. Sosai X hasn't been defeated; you and the Science Ninja Team tore him to bits, but one of those bits fled to another world. You can choose to let go... to stay here, and join me. No one would fault you; you've fought so hard, you've lost so much. You don't need to keep fighting."

"I can join you?" Gel Sadra whispered. She had known she was about to die. She hadn't known it meant she would be reunited with her mother – not really. She'd hoped, but she knew very little about spiritualism, just a vague belief in reincarnation.

"Or... you can live on, and fight, in a different world. A world that has champions, like the Science Ninja Team, but they don't know about X. They aren't prepared."

"Another world... full of people like this one?"

"Full of people that don't look like humans. They look like animals to us, but they have minds and hearts like humans, and they love like humans." Her mother gazed down at her. "But you don't have to. That world has champions. You can let go, Sammie. If you want to. You've already fought enough."

"I can never fight en—" Gel Sadra's emphatic declaration was cut off by a coughing fit. She dropped to her knees in agony as her own coughing shredded her lung further. When she finally had it under control she whispered, "I've done terrible things, Mama, such terrible things. I nearly let this world be destroyed by Sosai. I let you die. If – if I'm allowed to live – to fight X somewhere else, to protect innocents, to help the champions of another world—" More coughing. "—like I wanted... to help... the Science... Ninjas..."

"You did help them, Sammie. You stopped the Solar Shift Plan. You destroyed X in this world, for now. It's because of you that Condor Joe is still alive." Mama smiled sadly. "I'm selfish, Sammie. Part of me wants you to stay here to join me... I miss you so much. But if you want to live to fight... then that's just what I would have expected, from the woman I always hoped my daughter would become someday, when you were small."

"Will I ever see you again? If I go?"

"I don't know," Mama said. "I hope so. But I will always love you, my Sammie. Wherever you go, whatever happens to you, always remember that."

"I will!" Gel Sadra staggered to her feet, reaching out for her mother. "I will – Mama—"

And then the darkness rose up to meet her, and she fell.

She never hit the ground. The butterflies flitted over the flowers where she had been standing, and all was as it had been.

When the Science Ninja Team searched, they never found Gel Sadra, alive or dead.

Author's Notes:

While all you kids are out there doing your crossovers with video games and modern anime, here I am, crossing over with an anime that's older than most of you. Gatchaman II came out in 1978 or so, and is relatively obscure, unlike the much better known series it's a sequel to, Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (translated variously and terribly as Battle of the Planets, G-Force, Eagle Riders, and finally came out on DVD with subtitles.)

The title is Japanese, "For The Sake Of This Beautiful World". See, I can weeaboo as hard as any of you youngsters.

I love Gel Sadra. No one writes about her, and the few that use her name turn out to be writing stuff from Gatchaman Crowds, which I have not seen but I hate just because it stole names from Gatchaman but had nothing to do with it.

If you're curious, this is how that scene went in the actual show: Death of Gel Sadra. She has a man's voice because they were deliberately trying to make her seem as if she was dual-gendered, but we saw her naked when we saw her creation, so physiologically she's definitely female, and she never behaved as if she identified as male so much as she identified as weird. When she dressed up to meet her mommy, she wore a pretty dress and brushed her hair. The voice actor was an onnagata, a female impersonator from Kabuki theater, and much of the time Gel Sadra speaks as an onnagata -- meaning that she's putting on a very stylized and artificial performance of femininity. There are subtitlers who identify her as male, but I think they plainly didn't actually watch the show and were just working off scripts. That being said, the Japanese language allows you to never refer to a person's gender, ever, and it's pretty clear that no one in the series but Gel Sadra herself and her mother actually know what her gender is.