[Solo] Sailor Thuban/Charlie Boyle Solo Story Repository

[Shazari]

I think diaries look unattractively cluttered when they have solo stories right in them everywhere, so instead I'll have a thread just for solos, and I can link to each one separately. biggrin

[Shazari]

Solo #1: How to Succeed In Superheroism Without Really Trying

Charlie had discovered that being a sailor senshi did not involve a great deal of training. There had been none from Astraea, the talking cat, just a hurriedly spewed pen, an exhortation of "Go! Fight things! Don't ******** it up!" and a quick disappearing act. He didn't know what to make of her. She was cold, cold and businesslike, and though he told himself he liked these traits in a person, the truth was they left him feeling confused and nervous.

Her seriousness he was a little more comfortable with; he tended towards seriousness himself, brooding and worrying at problems until they broke under the strain, until he solved them somehow. Char wasn't a genius by any means, wasn't dazzlingly intelligent, but he was stubborn -- and stubbornness, he found, had a way of bearing itself out. Sticktoitiveness was rewarded in the end. But the plain fact was, in the plainest way of putting it: he had no idea what he was doing, and to that end, the cat had been no help.

Charys hadn't been much more help. Their job as senshi, as she'd described it, entailed 'getting youma,' a process which she had described thusly in the most questionable four-part plan Charlie had ever heard:

1) Seeing the youma rollin'. (Charys spoke her own special language known only to her.)
2) Hatin'. (He really wasn't sure this counted as a step.)
3) Patrollin'. (The steps also didn't seem to follow in sequence -- this was more like step one, he felt.)
4) Trying to catch them ridin' dirty. (He could only guess.)

So he had gone out and patrolled, which had been terrible. 'Youma' was an innocent-sounding name for 'huge as ******** deathmonster,' and Thuban had found himself facing his own huge as ******** death more times than he cared to count. He'd avoided the deaths, narrowly, but he didn't always win; sometimes he pivoted on one heel and ran for his life, and was grateful that that life had involved a lot of running track and generally being in very good shape. As far as he knew, there was still some kind of monkey-monster inhabiting the parking deck under the First Destiny City Savings Bank -- and though he was glad the Boyle family didn't bank there, it made him feel guilty to think about it, and eventually he had pressured Charys to come with him to deal with it.

She was experienced, and that was intimidating. She had a magical attack power that seemed to crumple up youma with ease, and an easy nonchalance that said this sort of thing actually bored her, and he wondered, but does it really?, and couldn't bring himself to ask. She was Charys, and unlike Astraea she did not value seriousness. He felt stupid standing next to Super Sailor Nerissa with a wet floor sign held like a baseball bat: CUIDADO! PISO MOJADO! She spent a few days referring to him as Sailor Janitor ( "Oops, I mean, Sailor Maintenance Technician!" ) and asking him if he was going to "clean up crime," and he hated her a little bit for it. Not for embarrassing him, because if that was going to be the sort of bone a person had to pick with Charys Murphy, they had no business being friends with her, but for the way it all rolled off her back like a duck or a freshly turtle-waxed car. He envied her for not being scared shitless. For not carrying it around with her all the time, this duty-fear knot in his stomach that made food daunting to eat. For not flinching at strange noises and every time a shadow looked like it moved.

This whole orientation program left something to be desired.

[Shazari]

Solo #2: Two Girls, A Guy, and a Pizza Place

"Meet at 9 pm at the abandoned tanning factory!" Sailor Walküre had suggested. Sailor Thuban hadn't gone.

Oh, he'd considered it. He'd sat up a good hour considering it, weighing the pros and cons in his mind. On the one hand, he hadn't exactly gotten along with these girls, particularly the one with the suspicious ice-white hair all spun up in uneven braids and cropped short. But on the other hand, they did seem to be his allies; they'd all worked together against the youma. Could he afford to be choosy about who he fought alongside? He didn't know, it was much too soon to know.

There was a slim possibility that it was a trap. He couldn't say what had actually transpired while he had been unconscious, only that when he'd woken, he was alive and the monster was gone. Not dead -- just gone. No proof of what had happened, just their word for it. Did they have any reason to be dishonest? Well, probably not -- but you never did know.

The white-haired girl, Sailor Polaris, had a bad attitude. She seemed to be unable to keep from taking the tiniest little things -- such as perfectly reasonable battle suggestions! -- agonizingly personally. Thuban wasn't like that. He was a bit of a joykill, sure, he'd been told that -- but only when he needed to be. Only when being a joykill was a perfectly reasonable response. Or, well, he'd always thought so, anyway. If Polaris wanted to be a little oversensitive about some perfectly reasonable criticism, that was her prerogative. He didn't mind.

He wondered what sorts of smug comments she'd have for him if he met up with them at this abandoned tanning factory liaison at 9:00 the next evening. If he went, that was. No doubt something about his battle effectiveness, and while that was admittedly fairly enough earned, it was also needless and unproductive. If he'd had magic powers like they each appeared to have, he'd certainly have used them, and he wouldn't have stood around waiting all day for an engraved invititation to do so while someone else was trying to fend off the monster with a metal walker.

Walküre was a bit more enigmatic. The girl had spoken little, and stuck fairly conservatively to her battle tactics. He didn't really mind that per se, since conservativeness was definitely a positive trait in his book, he just couldn't get a good read on her. What did she value? Could she be trusted? Were the two of them in on this together?

He had a lot of questions, and if he went, that was definitely one thing: he could try and get some answers. He'd like to have found out more about their senshi duties, what they could do and what they should be trying to accomplish, and it was possible that one of these girls knew. He hoped they did, if he bothered to show up. And maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

By the time he went to sleep, Charlie had resolved to try the 9:00 meetup at the abandoned tanning factory after all, to take a bit of a risk in meeting these people. But when he woke up the next morning, he was sick to his stomach, and he ended up not going after all. Getting thrown into a car had really done a number on him.

[Shazari]

Solo #3: I Believe I Can Soar

Ellie Spectre worked on motorcycles. That had never really been Charlie's scene, none of that leather bomber jackets, greased jerry curls, I got chills, they're multiplyin', when you're a jet you're a jet all the way, west grease story stuff. He'd never been cool. He was a jock, she was right about that much -- if anyone who played a varsity sport qualified as a jock. But track runners weren't, in his opinion, football players, and whatever Charlie was, he was pretty comfortable with it.

He was a decent student -- the B to B plus sort of student who did his homework assignments when he got home, then devoted a reasonable amount of time to studying, then ate dinner and forgot about school for a few precious hours and went to bed about 11:30.

He ran track. He'd always liked running, even just out in the park with his father. When he got to high school, they had an Activities Fair, and he'd walked, slightly in awe, past each table, reading their Mission statement and resisting the compelling urge to sign his name onto every membership list. For a week or two, in addition to signing up for track-and-field tryouts, he'd been a junior golfer, a mathlete, a Model UN member, in the TV/AV club, and part of the "Dead Poets Society." He'd quickly ended up dropping most of those, other than the Dead Poets Society, which had disbanded after just one week, removing the need to quit.

But he'd liked track, he always had. Not just the running, either -- he liked the long-jump and the high jump, and he loved the pole-vault. It was, he decided, the closest he might come to feeling like he could fly: sure, you were upside down and twisting like a salmon madly rushing upstream, but just for a second, time and gravity let go of you and you were a thing apart. Then the world longed for you again, wrenched you back to its floor, curled you tight into the cushioned landing pad. People didn't understand until they'd tried it.

He'd avoided auto shop. Cars were nice, he liked it when they ran like they were supposed to, and he was fairly pleased to have gotten his license two months back -- but he had no desire to be a car's designated health care provider. It was enough that they worked, and they did seem to -- he didn't ask them to be comprehensible as well. This Ellie -- he wondered if she'd go to college for engineering, or something. One of those kids that took apart their parents' toaster to see how it worked, that sort of crap.

Or maybe it was just that riding a motorcycle was the closest thing she did to flying. Maybe he'd ask her next time.