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Climbing into a tree with a cast on was not easy.

Despite the number of times he had done it in the last few weeks, Parker was still a lousy climber. He would have to time it just right so that he could shimmy up the trunk without anyone noticing -- and, more problematically, without busting his a**. He had to balance his weight between the thicker of the branches. He had to conceal himself behind thinning leaves. The camera needed to be held just right to avoid catching a glare from the streetlamps.

Not to mention the splinters.

Had it been worth it? Parker had lost count of the number of trees, dumpsters, and run-down buildings he had opted to use as hiding places for his latest mission of passive revenge. And for what? Two fighters photographed -- one senshi and one Negaverse. He had to hold his breath and watch them fight, praying that they would not notice him, and for his efforts, he had come away with a handful of photos, only a few of them being useful at all. At first, he had felt pleased with himself, but that was over a week ago. No matter how many trees he scaled, Parker was not encountering any other powered-up beings.

The news made it sound like they were running all over town. So why couldn't one do him a solid and run by his tree right now?

Parker glanced to his watch. It was late -- after midnight on a school night, which meant he would need to sneak in through the bedroom window when he returned to Hillworth. Jaimie was cool about it (since he had first been the one to show Parker how to do it), but Parker did not like taking the risk. Oh well, he had no choice that night.

Shifting his weight, Parker watched as a single leaf descended, falling to the icy grass below. It was freezing, and despite his coat, the teen shivered, clenching his teeth to keep from giving away his position. The sky was clear, and from where he sat, Parker could see the glimmering flash of stars dotting the black sky. The lights were too bright around Hillworth, and the small park where Parker hid was not much better. Lifting a hand, he moved a branch out of the way and made out the shape of Orion over the roof of a closed Asian restaurant. It distracted him for a moment, but then the cold returned and his teeth began to chatter.

He would give it five more minutes, and then he was calling it a night.

Just as his a** was beginning to reach his pain threshold, Parker noticed a figure swiftly descending from a rooftop. s**t, she came out of nowhere! He lifted the camera in an instant, angling it to capture the strange girl. The glor was hard to miss, the short skirt even harder to ignore. It was a senshi, like Sailor Polaris, the first of his targets. The girl moved quickly, and Parker could not find a clear shot. She was really fast, damn. His surprise was echoed only by a shifting of his weight -- a slight shift. Featherlight even.

Then the branch cracked.

In a flurry of tangled arms and legs, Parker tumbled from the tree, slamming against the three branches directly beneath him. He might have broken his neck if his pants hadn't caught on the final limbs, his cast hooking awkwardly around a small branch, effectively dangling him upside down like some kind of ornament.

The swinging made the pain in his arm and his head burn hotter. Pinpricks of scratches and burns from the bark pulsated with each heartbeat. "Damnit..." he moaned, hardly conscious of the world around him. Parker was just working on not throwing up.

Oh. Great. Parker was at the mercy of the Pretty Pretty Princess of the senshi.

Everything about her was bubble-gummy, from her little Grecian gown to her wary smile to her denouncing of his "bad" words. If his a** and legs didn't hurt so damn bad from falling, he might have been more inclined to destroy her worldview. As it was, he was a little bit dependent on her in that moment. "I can get down myself," he said, though it was quiet clear he couldn't. Virgo had all but single-handedly removed him from the tree anyway.

Wow, how immasculating.

Feeling like a damsel in distress in his own right, Parker let Virgo get him upright, camera and messenger bag dangling around his neck. "I'm fine," he said sharply, pulling leaves from his hair. His healing arm throbbed painfully, and with a sigh, Parker feared it might have been refractured. It would fit with the usual pattern of (no) luck in his life.

After a few awkward seconds, Parker adjusted the camera again, tugging at the collar of his shirt. "'Nice' and 'good' are concepts that the rich of society have created. They define what those things mean. A word is only bad because someone in a position of power said it was. Words themselves have no intrinsic badness. 's**t' is no different from 'flowers' from a linguistic standpoint." Hiding behind his words, the tall teenager shifted his weight, tossing a glance at her. "So. I didn't curse. From my point of view." And the "be nice and everything will go your way" bullshit? Yeeeeeeah. Parker wasn't even going to touch it.

Parker's expression did not change during Sailor Virgo's rant. He had no problem hearing out the other side of a debate. In fact, he liked it. Of course, she was horribly, terribly wrong, and he intended to show her that too. "You are operating on an assumption that there is such a thing as good. The definition of 'good' can change based on any situation, any place. Murder is bad, conventionally. But if a woman kills her husband because he is beating her and molesting their child, is it still bad?" He lifted his good arm and picked another leaf casually from his sleeve. Despite his awkward entrance, Parker appeared otherwise completely casual about the situation.

"Take you, for instance, and what you are. Sailor Virgo, Senshi of Innocence, yeah?" He made a mental note of it so that he could write it down later. "I've seen people like you battle -- fight tooth and nail, injure, strike, hit. Don't you hurt people? Don't you intend to destroy the opposite side? You say you do it in the name of good, but you are doing bad things to get there. So is it really good?" Parker surveyed her, taking in the intricate detail of her costume. She was not the first senshi he'd ever met. Not even the second. Or the third. Her little costume looked different, but he couldn't put his finger on it. "The truth is that there is no good and no bad. Just different perspectives. The uniformed people want to destroy you. You want to destroy them. It's no different." Though Parker's grasp on the senshi/negaverse situation was still spotty, he knew enough from his personal experiences and the news to understand that they were opposing factions. Yet they were both choosing violence as a means of reaching their goals. In Parker's mind, that made them just as bad as the other -- more obsessed with getting what they want than anything else.

Maybe Virgo should have left Parker in the tree to spare herself this discussion.

TOO LATE NOW.

Sailor Virgo could have said far worse things in her response, though Parker was still largely unimpressed. His reasoning made sense (very much so to him) and he could not see enough logic behind hers to change his worldview. But he could throw her a bone for the kernel of sense that she made. Parker had no problem acknowledging when someone made a decent point in a debate. To do otherwise would be weak and illogical. "Yes, every creature has the right to defend itself from harm. That is survivalism. But those efforts do not make that creature good and the other bad. It just makes them animals, just like you and me." Humans tried to rationalize the things that they did out of animalistic urges, but at its base level, Parker considered the impulses to be the same.

A few moments passed and Parker let his ears catch up with something else Virgo had said. "Princess." Beat. "Wait. Go where?" STRANGER DANGER. STRANGER DANGER. STRANGER DANGER.

So long as Virgo kept responding, Parker assumed she still wanted to debate the issue. "The attack might appear unprovoked to the prey, but to the one attacking, there is certainly a reason. It satisfies some kind of need, even if it is something trivial. Like boredom. That is very much so a component of survivalism," he said. "Everyone plays for their own side, and neither one is more justified than the other." There was no judgment in Parker's voice, no scathing condescension. He believed that he was telling Virgo something that she needed to hear.

When Virgo referenced his near death fall, Parker simply turned and glanced up at the tree. People could die at any moment. Falling out of a tree was just as good as any other end, probably, though Parker would certainly rather die later than sooner. And he had had closer brushes with death than a little tumble from a tree anyway. He stared at Virgo in her little outfit with her little glow. And sadly... admitted he would probably be a touch safer with a senshi around. After meeting monsters and a handful of Negaverse, Parker was beginning to doubt his ability to survive another battle.

He certainly wasn't going to tell her that though. Just... he'd keep silent.

But her share-time about Zodiacs and Princesses did not keep him so silent. "There's a Princess? You people get stranger to me with each encounter," he said, sighing. He might have feigned exasperation, but he was actually quite intrigued. This was an information-gathering expedition after all. All this information could be useful for his goal. The stalking comment went ignored. He didn't want to detail her from her previous train of thought.

And Parker was well aware that most people considered him mean.

OH NO SHE DIDN'T.

Parker did not react to Sailor Virgo's little comment about Hillworth immediately. He wasn't temperamental enough, though a few choice names to call her did flood right on into the lobes of his brain. Instead, he pursed his lips, working the muscles of his jawline for a few brief moments. "I'm surprised," he began, tone edged with condescension, "that someone who claims to be so good and nice would choose to attack an entire school of people she doesn't know based on an ugly stereotype, a blatant generalization. Based on what -- low socioeconomic status? You believe you are better than the boys at Hillworth, that they are inherently bad or something? Tell me, Sailor Virgo -- of Innocence, was it? -- how many Hillworth boys have you met in your life? How many of them have you held a conversation with? And what exactly is it that enables you to be so cruel to people who attend a school for disadvantaged students?" Parker did not confirm that he attended Hillworth. It would only derail his point. This was still a debate, but suddenly the calculating teen felt as though he had more at stake. "Are your parents still together? Were you brought up in a loving home? Did you get to go to Disneyland as a kid? Do you get to have your own bedroom? If you needed help, would there be someone there to bail you out?" His eyes narrowed, tongue dragging across the roof of his mouth. He wanted to point a finger and accuse her of being a Crystal Academy girl, but Parker knew it would only weaken the point he was trying to make to her. "Not everyone has the luxury of a good life freely given to them, Sailor Virgo." Parker relaxed his jaw, keeping his eyes on the senshi's.

Sailor Virgo was clearly the kind of person who believed that being "nice" and "good" only extended to certain people, in Parker's eyes -- namely, not the students at Hillworth, not him. Idle hands touched at his camera. He heard what she said, and would remember both the name of that Princess and the Surrounding, but he allowed himself to be derailed from his main task. He wanted to show her how hypocritical her thoughts about Hillworth boys were, when he should've just continued to focus on learning more information.

Parker would scold himself for that later.

As an afterthought, he lifted his camera. "I was trying to take a photograph of one of you," he said, gesturing idly to her fuku. That probably deserved more of an explanation, but Parker was having a hard time caring in that moment.

Virgo had pushed a button. Bad, Virgo. It wasn't like his feelings were hurt, or that he exploded with anger. He just exploded with words, as was his way. In his eyes, Virgo was just looking down on the rest of the world. She was there to save them all! That in and of itself implied a superiority, at least in Parker's mind. That was the problem with these powered-up people clogging the streets of his city. They had an unfair advantage over the rest of the population, and no matter what Virgo said, Parker was certain that he and all the other humans were just expendable chess pieces in their game for keeps.

Maybe if he had seen Dani today he would not be such a grumpy gus. Or... at least less of a grumpy gus.

The names that she spewed were familiar to Parker, and that, too, surprised him. The idea that this Sailor Virgo could be someone he might have seen before -- at least underneath the fuku -- both alarmed and intrigued him. His eyes bore across the skin of her face, looking for a sign of familiarity. But there was nothing. She was just some pretty, totally unrecognizable girl. They all were, each one he had photographed. Pity.

"You can't say one thing and then try to immediately say the opposite. It isn't me overthinking what you said. It was you not thinking about what you were saying before you spoke," Parker said, voice losing its edge of condescencion. It was almost as if he were trying to give her some kind of life lesson, to handle her with kid gloves so she could understand better. Those motives of helping her self-improvement were secondary, if even thought of at all. Parker simply felt they were still debating.

Parker tried very, very, very hard not to point out that she used the term "meanie-faced jerks" as a part of her point. And these were supposed to be the great saviors of Destiny City? Pfft. Parker had his doubts.

For a moment, he thought to tell Virgo that she probably had already compromised part of her identity, even if he hadn't put the pieces together yet. Saying that she knew Simon well enough to know that his roommates tease him could have been enough -- under the right circumstances. Parker thought of that meek bespectacled boy, the one whom he would always feel a certain connection to because of what happened in the park with the Negaverse agents and the Senshi. As the fight broke out all around them, the humans were the ones cowering on the ground -- just him, Simon, and that bag of crazy named Franz. It wasn't that they were friends, or that he even liked the guy, but they had shared a moment of terror, a near-death experience perhaps. There had to be something kind of bonding about that, right?

Maybe.

Parker's digital camera dangled around his neck like an oversized chain. He slipped the loop over his head and stared down at the viewfinder. It was angled at Virgo's shoes. Then, without asking, Parker lifted the camera to catch Virgo about waist-to-head and tried to snap a photo of her. At this point, he doubted she would be cooperative, but he wanted the photo. It was what he was there for in the first place.