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| Infinity Academy ( First appearance: Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon S Episode 120 A private school formerly located in Mugensu, one of the four areas which comprise the triangular region known as the Delta Zone in the Higashi Shinagawa district of Shinagawa-ku near Tokyo Bay. Founded by Professor Souichi Tomoe approximately one year following the accident at the Genetic Engineering Laboratory - which resulted in his possession by the Daimon Germatoid and that of his daughter Hotaru by Mistress 9 - using his enormous wealth and with himself as owner and principal, the Infinity Academy quickly earned a prestigious and highly respectable reputation due to its high academic standards. Little did anyone suspect, however, that the educational institution was merely serving as an elaborate front for a second and far less benign organization that Professor Tomoe had secretly formed known as the Death Busters, a group dedicated to achieving world domination by summoning the planet ravaging extraterrestrial entity Master Pharaoh 90 and purging the Earth of all life by triggering the apocalyptic cataclysm known as the Silence. Once found at the very heart of Mugensu Island, the Infinity Academy was a tower of glass and steel that stood sixty stories tall and offered students a complete education with classes from all academic levels: kindergarten (first to eighth floors), elementary (ninth to seventeenth floors), junior high (thirty-first to fortieth floors), college (forty-first to fiftieth floors), and graduate school (fifty- first to fifty-fifth floors). The remainder was divided between staff and teachers' lounges (fifty-sixth to fifty-eighth floors) and research laboratories (fifty-ninth and sixtieth floors). Additional locations and equipment of note included a combination arboretum and greenhouse, a lecture hall with several television monitors hooked up in tandem to form a single giant viewscreen, a state of the art artificial life supercomputer that served as the center of the institution's vast computer network, and even a helicopter landing pad on the roof. The building also had an intricate video surveillance system as well as security guards, though this did little to prevent Haruka Ten'ou and Michiru Kaiou - better known as Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune - from infiltrating the school as students. In regards to the inherant organization, the Infinity Academy was divided into five separate and distinct sections - philosophy, arts and drama, science, physical education, and technology - and was run by a combination of teachers and high ranking students, the prerequisite for leadership in the latter case being based almost exclusively on academic excellence. One such part time student teacher was Yui Bidou - better known as Viluy of the Witches 5 - who was also the president of the Infinity Academy Science Club, and, this being the case, it is not inconceivable that her teammates may have held similar positions of importance in the educational hierarchy, though this is uncertain. As is the case in most Japanese schools, a dress code was in effect requiring both male and female students to wear uniforms: brown sailor suits with plaid ribbons and dresses for girls, brown jackets with plaid ties and pants for boys. The official school logo was a gold infinity symbol superimposed on a black star with the institute's name printed in capital letters beneath it which bore more than a passing resemblance to the simple black pentagram that served as the sign of the Death Busters. The exact location of the laboratories employed by the Death Busters and Witches 5 remains a mystery, and, while they are commonly believed to have been either beneath the Infinity Academy or perhaps even in the main research division itself, it is impossible to say for certain due to the fact that the organization made extensive use of small wormholes - presumably magical in origin - which linked various areas of their headquarters not only to points in the main building but also to myriad other locales all over the city of Tokyo, Japan irrespective of their actual physical distances from one another. It was the use of these four dimensional shortcuts that allowed Professor Tomoe to rapidly travel between the school and his residence and Mimete to emerge in locations in close proximity to her selected human targets, for example, to say nothing of the vast network of tunnels running under the entire city employed by Eudial for much the same purpose. Mistress 9's throne room, however, was known to have been originally been in the institution's underground laboratory, though she was eventually moved by Professor Tomoe when the Sailor Soldiers learned of its location. The full extent to which the Infinity Academy and its students were being exploited by the Death Busters may never be known for certain, though the school had apparently already earned a reputation for its strange goings on there well before the evil organization's activities first caught the attention of the Sailor Soldiers and Tuxedo Mask nearly two years after its founding. Morever, these occurances - most notably what appear to have been failed early attempts to create Daimon/Human hybrids known as Proto Daimons - may well have been not only what caused Michiru Kaiou and Haruka Ten'ou to awaken as Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus, respectively, but also what originally led them to go undercover as students there in order to investigate. A few other known examples of the group's abuse of academic resources include Yui Bidou's constructing a miniature universe model of the Tau Star System with the help of the Infinity Academy Science Club, her use of the computer network and the artificial life supercomputer as Viluy in order to carry out a massive Heart Crystal theft from individuals electronically writing the pre-high school entrance exams there, and Cyprine's employing her vast magical powers to hypnotize and summon its students to the school in the dead of night and deprive them of their pure hearts. During the final battle between the Sailor Soldiers and the Death Busters, the upper third of the Infinity Academy was consumed in a tremendous explosion caused by Mistress 9 when she and Professor Tomoe departed to initiate the final phases of their master plan. Still more was destroyed after she established the Omega Zone and activated the large scale miniature universe by placing the Holy Grail inside of it, and what little had survived up until that point was subsequently obliterated by Master Pharaoh 90 upon his arrival on Earth. When it was all over, all that remained where the educational institution had once stood was a large crater filled with water and surrounded by rubble. As of this writing, it remains unknown whether or not Professor Tomoe - or anyone else, for that matter - has or will attempt to rebuild the Infinity Academy in either the same or a different location. This entry first appeared on: December
10, 2000 Back
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