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 Posted: Sat Aug 21, 2010 1:24 pm
Tallulah Cowden pressed her forehead to the cool glass door of Apollo's Coffee and squinted at the darkened interior. "Closed closed closed," she grumbled, and turned to Kaatje. "This is a college town," she deadpanned. There were big, dark circles under her eyes. "With college students, right?"
Well, sort of. DCU didn't resume classes for another week. But Tallulah wasn't in the mood to pay attention to that. "So why do all the coffee places close at five PM?" she asked, and turned back to bump her head against the glass. It was closed, closed, closed... Tallulah had gotten out of her coma and run back into her caffeine addiction's open arms. She needed to make up for lost time, not to mention she wasn't back up to speed. Tonight's patrol had her tired out.
Henshined down, Tallulah seemed to be dressed in what might have been her pajamas: knee length sweat pants, old athletic shoes, and a sweatshirt that said "DARTMOUTH" across the front. She rubbed her eyes and looked blearily at the redhead.
"No big deal," she decided. "There's lots of coffee shops in this neighborhood, right?"
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Posted: Sat Aug 21, 2010 2:24 pm
Sailor Europa was Tallulah Cowden. Well, all right, that was cool. The name didn't really mean anything to her; she wasn't from around here, wouldn't remember the other girl's struggles to get into Crystal. So Sailor Gunn really had no compunctions about powering down into Kaatje van der Weydin--she had to scramble to grab her BlackBerry before it hit the ground, but nothing was really harmed and the redhead was able to sling her purse onto her shoulder with little to no problem.
"Yeah, but term hasn't started yet," she said, hands shoved into the pockets of a pair of cute and undoubtedly trendy capris. In fact, there was little of Kaatje that didn't scream privileged; her clothes all had the look of a high-fashion label. Even her hair seemed styled specifically to inform people that she was far too much car for them. "So they're probably still on summer hours."
She tilted her head, shrugged. "I dunno. I don't usually come down this way, I go to the Apollo's up on Kingston Boulevard." There was a vague gesture in the direction of Kingston Boulevard and Crystal, then she shrugged one shoulder. "We could try Shufflepuck?"
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Posted: Sat Aug 21, 2010 4:24 pm
"We could," nodded Tallulah. She'd ceased her banging and was now nibbling primly on a hangnail as she considered the proposition. Shufflepuck's was an odd combination of Hippie Love Nest and 24-hour-eatery that Nellie Cowden favored on the principal that she and the store had roughly the same fashion sense. They also had vegan muffins.
"Is the Apollo's on Kingston Street nice?" she asked, trying to make conversation as they trooped up the sidewalk. Your didn't have to tell Tallulah that Kaatje went to Crystal - No one who could afford to dress like that went to Meadowview if they could help it. "Er, I mean- All Apollo's are probably more or less the same, aren't they?"
An uncomfortable laugh. She dug in her sweatshirt's kangaroo pocket for her orange senshi phone and checked the time. "Why do you carry your Blackberry when you're henshined up?" she asked, squinting at the brightly-lit screen. She waved the phone at Kaatje. "Didn't the cats give you one of these?"
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Posted: Sat Aug 21, 2010 5:29 pm
She was grateful for her (expensive) sneakers as they started off down the road; they kept her feet a lot more comfortable than heels would have, or any number of her pairs of shoes that were lying scattered around her bed. Sure, they weren't exquisitely stylish, but they were a lot more practical, she thought. "Nicer than that one looked," she said, tipping up her chin a bit. "More booths." Kingston Boulevard was in Old Destiny City, which meant the shops had a certain older aesthetic. She was pretty sure her 'home' Apollo's had once been a bank, judging by the setup of the counter and the marble flooring.
Much, much classier.
"Franchised Apollo's are all the same," she said, sliding into something like a lecture mode. The family owned stock, so she had to care. "Most franchised locations are built after the license is bought so they can adhere to the usual floor plan. The Apollo's on Kingston was originally called Leaf ampersand Bean, they just got bought out so they kept the historic fixtures."
There was a pause at the question about the phone, and she dug in her bag for her phone--it was just as orange, but more on the yellow end of the spectrum. "Yeah, sure," she said. "Just don't know what to do with it, you know?"
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Posted: Sat Aug 21, 2010 7:05 pm
"That one just got renovated," said Tallulah as she walked. "It got trashed back in February, Youma attack." She didn't volunteer how she knew this, but something about her matter-of-fact tone suggested she might have been involved.
She held her phone up next to Kaatje's and leaned over to look at the girl's. "Astraea-Luna explained these to a bunch of us when she first started giving them out," she explained, "But I guess the cat who awoke you forgot to mention how it works?" The cats were always forgetting things like that.
"So this here," she explained, clicking what on most phones would be some sort of camera option, "is scan. You point it at a Senshi and you turn it on, and it tells you their name and what their sphere is. And I'm pretty sure it registers their number but you can also do that by hand."
She flipped the phone closed and open to turn scan off. "You following so far?" she asked. "Someone really ought to talk to the cats about explaining all this better, but I suppose they forget in the heat of the moment."
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Posted: Sat Aug 21, 2010 7:35 pm
She wasn't quite sure what a youma was, but figured it was a specific kind of monster. Probably. Anyway, she wasn't going to ask, so she just nodded knowingly. Better to be thought a fool than open your mouth and prove it, anyway.
A pair of names she didn't recognize. "Yeah, it was a fluffball kitten," she agreed. "Isn't the subway running right now?" Her attention wasn't really on Europa, but more on the lit sign over the public transit system. She preferred busses, but they didn't run from eleven PM, and... well, it was closing in on midnight now. Tonight was a pretty big bust, really.
"Scan," she repeated, "point and hit the button, tells you their name and sphere." She shrugged a shoulder as to the note of talking to the cats. It didn't really matter to her, she'd already been awakened and all.
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Posted: Sat Aug 21, 2010 7:50 pm
"That sounds like Derp," acknowledged Europa, and scrolled through the phone's menu ("Contacts - self explanatory"). "Really, the only thing fancy about it is the scan feature - And oh, we've got unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling, but only within the network. If you call anything that isn't a senshi phone, the person on the other end will apparently only hear random pop songs?"
She hadn't tried it. Tallulah had incurred the wrath of Astraea once and it was enough for a lifetime.
"I don't know about the subway..." she shrugged. "I mean, I'm pretty sure it runs twenty-four seven, but at this time of night..."
Who knew what was lurking in the tunnels? It would be pushing their luck to go down there. "Shufflepuck's not too far, and the streetlights are on. We can walk."
It was nice out, late summer. Better than patrolling in January, brrr!
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Posted: Sat Aug 21, 2010 8:08 pm
She shrugged. "It had a hat thing," she agreed. Unlimited mobile-to-mobile, but only in network? How could magical schoolgirls really have a network? Questions for another time, she decided. What network would they even be on? Could she put this piece of crap phone on her Verizon plan? Would it even be worth it, she wondered.
Questions for another time.
"True," she said. "I heard about subway salamanders, or something. Pretty gross, my friend." So the rest of the way, she walked in relative silence, magical-soldier-phone shoved into her purse. "Anyway, this whole... 'senshi' thing." Normally she liked to call it a magical soldier thing, but. "Are we all magical schoolgirls, or are there magical professionals, too?"
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Posted: Sat Aug 21, 2010 8:25 pm
"Magical schoolboys, too," Tallulah was quick to reply. "I've never met any Senshi much older than us, but there are adults out there who are in on this-"
She lowered her voice a bit. "They aren't good guys, though." She was talking very quickly now- "There's us, the sailor senshi, we're the good guys. And then there's the Negaverse. They're kind-of sort-of military. Sometimes the uniforms get a bit blurry, but senshi don't use weapons and they do - look for something like a sailor collar, we all wear them, the Negaverse doesn't, except for a few but don't worry about that, there's only a couple like that- And then the cats, they work for us, but they're their own faction, too-"
She stopped, breathless for a moment, and said, "I'm so sorry, I must be confusing you! I can explain this a lot better, my team - I have a team, we call ourselves the Basterds, with an E, like the Tarantino movie- we collect information. I have a board-"
She gestured vaguely, indicating a cork board, and yawned. "I think I need that coffee. Shufflepuck's gotta be close now... Do you want me to keep talking? Or I can explain this another time, with visual aides!"
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Posted: Sat Aug 21, 2010 10:41 pm
...So she was on the upper end of this cosmic joke's age scale? Tallulah had to be kidding her. No way was this shitty war or whatever fought entirely by teenagers.
...was it?
This disturbing question preoccupied her for the rest of the trip to Shufflepuck. "Uh, thanks, let's skip the visual aids," she said as they skulked into the deserted coffee shop, hands deeper in her pockets now. The attendant looked as tired as Kaatje felt. She stared at the board for a minute, ordered her hazelnut coffee and then skulked over to a far-away booth to wait for Tallulah.
"So weapons are a no-go," she repeated when the other girl had joined her. "Military uniforms, but look out for a sailor collar. Right?"
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Posted: Sun Aug 22, 2010 6:13 am
Tallulah grabbed her double-shot expresso cappuccino and joined Kaatje at the table. "Yeah, the sailor collar," she nodded."Besides that it's pretty much fair game, some of the costumes are crazy." Like Libra. Libra had what Tallulah considered to be a pretty crazy costume, but its victorian poshness suited Giselle just fine.
"Senshi is," she continued, verging into s**t no one cares about territory, "As far as I can figure, is a Japanese word meaning something approximate to 'Warrior' or 'Soldier.'"
She gulped from her coffee and grimaced as she burnt her tongue. "Basically, twenty-five years ago in Japan, there was a girl named Usagi Tsukino, and she died." These were the extreme spark notes. She lowered her voice and leaned in before continuing - experience showed you could never be too careful when discussing sensitive material.
"The Negaverse killed her and her whole senshi team," Tallulah continued quietly, and sipped her drink. "And they've killed a lot more people since."
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Posted: Sun Aug 22, 2010 6:27 pm
"You're veering into s**t I don't care about," said Kaatje, predictably if you knew her, not-so-predictably if you were Tallulah Cowden. Her face was deadpan, one corner of her mouth pulled into an irritated scowl. "I mean, I don't mean to offend you, this information is really useful and everything, but... I'm American. Well, technically I'm Dutch. But all the same, I speak English, and calling myself a 'sailor soldier' makes me feel marginally less ridiculous than calling myself a 'sailor senshi'." The same with 'henshin'. Why not just say 'transformation'? These were all words the media had assigned, weren't they?
Jesus Christ, they were already widely called 'pretty-suited sailor warriors'. Why not just add to it with some Japanese detailing?
She shrugged, wrapping her hands around her paper cup. "Yeah, the other guys without sailor collars. They take, uh... What is it they're trying to do, anyway."
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Posted: Sun Aug 22, 2010 8:57 pm
Tallulah shrugged forgivingly. "I don't know, it's just the words I picked up from everyone else. Who knows where they came from - probably the cats. Luna used to work in Japan."
The immediate goals of the Negaverse were thankfully a bit more straightforward.
"Starseeds," said Tallulah, and cleared her throat. "Life energy. Your entire existence bottled up in a little crystal about the size of a USB flash drive." She'd seen one once, Bellatrix's, seen the sick glow of it as it lingered outside her friend's chest. It made her feel a bit ill just thinking about it.
"If you lose yours," she said, "You go unconscious pretty quick. Eventually, if you don't get it back, you die. Sound familiar?" This pretty much explained a good majority of the homicides in Destiny City. "So don't let people go sticking their hands in your chest."
She tapped her sternum. "It's not so pretty."
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Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2010 8:00 am
Well, that made a little more sense. She supposed, anyway. Maybe it was the late hour, but... yeah. Cats.
She sat through the lecture on starseeds, somewhat perturbed by the idea that everything that made her who she was could fit into something the size of a flash stick. She liked to think she was a little bit bigger of a deal than eight gigabytes of memory. (Twelve on the larger sticks but all the same.) "Yeah. All those weird comas? The superflu thing, I guess. That must be people who've lost their starseeds?" After all, there was no medical reason for those people to be as they were, they just kind of... faded.
Sad, really.
"I imagine it would be kind of bloody," she said, glancing out the window. Not because she actually thought there'd be blood, but because she was pretty sure there was some kind of secret mechanic to it she didn't know about.
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Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2010 12:33 pm
"The superflu?" asked Tallulah, wrinkling her nose. She wasn't quite up to date with current events yet, but she was pretty sure the coma epidemic was something completely different from a bunch of starseeds getting yanked. After all, almost everyone had woken up from those. "The one where people were under for four months?" she asked, just to make sure they were talking about the same thing.
"No," she said, shaking her head. "That was something else. I don't totally understand what happened, but whatever it was, I had it and I'm still here. If someone steals your starseed, you die in a matter of days."
She thought back to that night in the alley with Bellatrix. There'd been sickly light and two demonlike negaverse girls, but mostly... "There's surprisingly little blood," she answered, and took another swallow of expresso. This was a great conversation to be having over food, wasn't it?
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