So now that she was a Page of Mars, Colchis didn’t exactly know what she was supposed to be doing with herself? Like… it wasn’t like there was some kind of all-encompassing evil to fight, and besides, she had to be in bed by ten or Dada would have a conniption fit. No one liked it when Dada had a conniption fit, especially not Colchis, because when Dada had conniption fits, Dad got in on the game real fast. It was probably Colchis’s least favorite thing about living with her parents, to be honest.

Still, she’d finished her homework early, and the problem of the branch of flowers (they were called gladiolas, according to the internet) had been sitting and niggling at the back of her mind, like a tiny… giggly fairy or something. With her mind made up, she’d poked her head out of the door to her bedroom and yelled down to her parents that she was going to bed early and they had to knock before they came in, okay. Once her door was carefully blocked with a big heavy encyclopedia, she reached out for the branch of pink flowers and became Colchis, Page of Mars!... which was a pretty lame superhero moniker, if she thought about it, which she definitely was.

She could call herself Collie, she decided. But that wasn’t much better.

Her dismount from her second-story window was rather ungraceful, as such things went, and it was frankly astonishing her parents didn’t come to investigate the thud of her hitting the ground. Actually, she did hear them stop talking, and hid in the bushes beneath the kitchen window. Holding her breath probably didn’t help her whole situation, but no one opened the window or called her name, so she cautiously skirted the house and booked it to the sidewalk, where she at least had plausible deniability.

Who, me? Sneak out of the house? Never. You have some completely different fifteen-year-old daughter. Definitely. Pleased with her own cleverness, Colchis took to the streets and considered--maybe next time she’d bring a hoodie. It was cold out here. But it didn’t seem to matter, because she was walking really fast, and that seemed to warm her up faster than it might have otherwise. She experimentally broke into a jog, and found that yes, she was faster there too. She turned a cartwheel and almost gave herself a concussion, unused to the greater speed that this superhero form seemed to grant her. But she bounced back up after only a moment of nursing her wrist.

She smiled, wide and bright. “This is so massively cool,” she whispered, and just for the fun of it--just to feel the wind in her hair--she broke into a run, as fast as she could go.

That was how she found the pink-haired girl in the dark clothes. Something about her made Colchis’s skin crawl, but… supervillains weren’t real. Colchis just didn’t like being out after her personal curfew, when her fathers didn’t know where she was. “Hey,” she said. “It’s not safe to be out after dark.” It was different for her. She was a superhero, after all. “Are you lost? Do you need someone to walk you home?” Start the superhero thing off on the right foot, she figured. Do some good. Dad would be proud.

Silverah
Astrophyllite sensed the knight as she approached, her signature sick-bright and sweet-floral and blood-rust in the back of her throat, and she turned around quickly, before the girl had even finished her introduction, whipping her ouija board towards her. “Stay back, alien scum!” she hollered, but then stopped short, her weapon only lightly tapping the page on the arm. She quickly realized two things:

First, that this girl meant her no harm.

Second, that this girl was younger than her, probably only as old as Astrophyllite herself had been when Zinkenite plunged his hand into her chest.

Astrophyllite withdrew her ouija board quickly and took a few steps back. “I’m sorry,” she said, a bit of a tremor in her voice. “I thought - I thought you were going to hurt me.” There had been a lot of lost lieutenants lately, and she’d heard her superior officers talking about some big special senshi who was back in town. It was all… very scary, and seeing as Astrophyllite didn’t want to die, it had made her patrols even more fraught than before.

Usually, at least, she had Melanite or Kerberos to cling to, but Melanite was busy and Kerberos had gone and gotten a promotion and she felt weird around him now. He was too pretty. He made her heart beat too fast.

“I’m not lost,” she said to the page. “I’m--”

She wasn’t supposed to be fraternizing with the enemy, even if the enemy turned out to be pretty okay and really pretty some of the time, like Hvergelmir. “Um,” said Astrophyllite, her voice dropping to a whisper. “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”


Alien scum? That was definitely new. Colchis flinched away from the mild contact of wooden Ouija board to her arm, and lifted both hands up to shoulder height like sorry sorry sorry I’m completely harmless! “Why would I hurt you,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “Why can’t we talk?” Like, sure, the pink-haired girl had tried to hit her, but what did Colchis expect, sneaking up on people that way. It was nothing different than Colchis herself would have done, although she supposed a flower branch wouldn’t hurt anybody in the long run.

“I’m… Collie,” she said, chiding herself. Of course she had to keep her civilian identity secret, to protect Dada and Dad. If she went around telling everyone she met that she was Clark Kent, eventually whoever the bad guys were would catch on. “Page of Mars, I think.” She nodded to herself, long straight blonde locks shaking fervently. “I don’t know what that means. I only figured all this out today! There were these flowers on my mother’s grave and I picked them up and then it was like, you’re Colchis Page now! but like, I don’t know.”

She shrugged, and then smiled at the pretty pink-haired girl. “You have a nice face,” she said. “What’s your name? If you don’t need someone to walk you home, maybe we could wander around together?”

Silverah
Astrophyllite frowned slightly. Glitnir had been a page of Mars, and he hadn’t known what he was doing, either - but then, Gehenna certainly had a lot of experience! Maybe the planet didn’t really matter. “I’m Lieutenant Astrophyllite,” she replied lowly, flicking her board away into subspace. “Don’t they - don’t they tell you pages anything when you get made?”

Apparently not. Colchis had just said she found the flowers on her mother’s grave and magically powered up. Astrophyllite thought that it must be awfully lonely and disorienting to awaken all alone like that, without knowing anything about who you were or what you had to do! Bischofite had been a super mean teacher who did a lot of bad stuff (she knew it was bad now), but he’d been better than nothing. He’d made sure she at least knew the basics!

“We’re in the middle of a war,” she explained. “I’m an officer of the Negaverse, and you’re - you’re a knight. We’re supposed to fight each other.”

Not that she really understood why anymore, especially with regards to knights. Knights didn’t serve the moon queen! Knights just kind of served their own stuff! And besides, she had the ever-increasing feeling that a lot of people in the negaverse weren’t very good people - and they had to steal people’s life force to keep operating! She’d never heard of knights having to do that. But thinking about this was kind of scary - so she wasn’t going to.

“Um,” said Astrophyllite. “We don’t have to fight if you don’t want to. But I don’t think we should be seen together. I have - I have bosses? They’ll get mad if they see me with you and we’re not fighting.” She was pretty sure that Natron was a good guy? But Colchis was a little page and she was even younger than Astrophyllite and it would be really bad if someone decided to hurt her.

She pressed a hand to her mouth for a moment, blushing at the compliment. “Thank you,” Astrophyllite added, “but my teeth and my eyes are too big. Everyone says so.”


“Get made,” she asked, shaking her head. “I told you--I just found these flowers on my mother’s grave and then, poof! I turned into Collie.” Granted, she was glad she hadn’t found a bad Negaverse officer, or whatever Astrophyllite was. Or someone who really was going to fight her. Colchis wrinkled her nose and propped her hands on her hips. “I don’t really want to fight you,” she said. “But we can be really sneaky.”

She cross the space between Astrophyllite and herself, critically examining the other girl’s eyes and teeth. “They look fine to me,” she pronounced. “I mean, if you don’t like them, that’s different. But they don’t look any weirder than mine or my dads’.” And they were definitely a lot better than her bio-parents. They’d had black teeth. It had been mildly terrifying. “So how come knights and officers of the Negaverse are supposed to be fighting,” enquired Colchis. Astrophyllite’s uniform looked so much warmer than Colchis’s. She felt a little bit envious, really.

Hm. Maybe she’d better get a plain hoodie, so she didn’t go around wearing one that said Crystal Academy Class of 2019. She didn’t have enough classmates that she’d be able to pass that one off as a mere coincidence. “I mean, if you want me to go I totally can. I’m not really even supposed to be out right now.”

Silverah
Astrophyllite shrugged: she’d never been given such an open minded perspective on her teeth before. Most people just wrote her off as unfortunate-looking and said that maybe she’d be a bit more pleasing to the eyes if she had braces, but there was no money anywhere for braces. She bet that if she went to Boston to live with her dad, Beatrice would make him pay for her to get them, but…

Boston was its own can of worms, and she’d already made up her mind not to go. Trixilite didn’t love her at all.

“People just tell me they’re all wrong and stuff,” said Astrophyllite quietly, feeling like she’d said something bad. “They’re too big. I’m a beaverface.” Kids were cruel. Maybe even the cruelest, except for Bischofite and Zinkenite who’d both told her she was useless in their own little ways and that left scars, okay? Like, actual, literal scars on her shoulder where Bischofite decided to cut her up her first night.

“So you just - you just transformed? All of a sudden? Out of nowhere?” Astrophyllite stepped a little closer to Colchis, looking for signs that she might have been replaced by an alien pod person or a robot doppelganger without her knowing. Man, knights were weird! “Even senshi need cats to do all their stuff,” she said, her brow furrowing into a deep frown. “That’s just weird. Like, how does anyone figure out what they’re supposed to be doing if you’re all like that!”

Well, she supposed it was her job to tell Colchis all about this war, then. Her civic duty! “We’re supposed to fight because you’re Order and the Negaverse is Chaos. We’re, like, the natural way of how the world’s supposed to work, and you’re all trying to fight that and control natural processes and bend nature to your will and stuff? There’s a moon queen but none of the knights I know serve her so I don’t know how she fits in besides that she wants to rule the earth and make everyone her slaves and that’s bad, so the negaverse has got to collect energy from civilians so we can keep fighting her! It’s like paying taxes.”

Clearly, this had not been explained very clearly to Astrophyllite - or, if it had been, she hadn’t retained it very well.


“A beaverface,” said Collie, incensed. She reached up and put her hands on Astrophyllite’s cheeks, pulled the other girl down to her level and really scrutinized the other girl, red eyes all squinty and wrinkly with concentration. After a moment, she let go, pursed her lips and nodded, firmly. “I checked,” she declared. “There’s nothing even slightly beaverish about you. You are one hundred percent the cutest, okay? And if anyone says otherwise, you can direct them to me, and I’ll get my dad to kick their butt.” It--it pissed her right off that people had to be assholes like that, not that she’d ever say those words out loud where anyone could hear, because they were hecka rude.

She looped her arm protectively through Astrophyllite’s. “Yeah. Like one second I was me, and then I had superpowers, and now I can run soo fast. Dad’s gonna be really impressed.” As for what she was supposed to be doing… “Maybe the reason no one tells us anything is because we’re supposed to forge our own paths,” she said. “That’s what Dada tells me, anyway. If you’re not given explicit instructions it’s because you’re meant to figure it out on your own.” Which made a lot of sense, sometimes, like with math, but other times not so much sense at all, like with the other girls at school.

Astrophyllite’s whole moon queen story sounded really questionable, actually. “How do you know all that,” she said. “Does the moon queen have a manifesto? Where does she live on the moon? You know that, like, people have been to the moon and it’s definitely not made of cheese and there’s no, like, jade rabbits or anything up there.” Colchis paused, tapping her chin, and added, “I don’t know. This all seems really unlikely.”

Silverah
Astrophyllite was a bit confused by now whether Dad and Dada, as referred to by Colchis, were two different people or not - and at this point, she was a little bit afraid to ask. Instead, she blushed beet red at being called the cutest, which was not something she got called very often. Actually, it was not something she ever got called at all. “Um, okay,” she said, looking down at their now-linked arms. “Thank you.”

As for her moon queen story being super suspect, well, Astrophyllite had never claimed that it made any sense or that she was any good at telling it. “I don’t know,” she said, shrugging helplessly and mostly with the shoulder that Colchis hadn’t commandeered. “It’s just a thing that my commanding officer told me. That the senshi serve the moon queen and the moon queen wants to take over the world.”

Then again, her commanding officer had gone crazy and turned himself into a youma, so it wasn’t clear how trustworthy anything he’d told her was.

“Maybe it’s just a story,” said Astrophyllite. “We’re still, like, on different sides.”


“But why,” said Colchis, and then it occurred to her that Astrophyllite may be just as clueless as she was. “You’d think if we were supposed to be fighting some kind of war, there’d be like. Something real. Like, I guess, the imminent threat of Germany invading Britain or harming American trade routes.” Sure, the popular story was that America got involved to stop the genocide of Jewish and Rromani people, but Dada didn’t believe that and neither did Colchis. He’d shown her articles disproving it, so of course he was right. JSTOR never lied.

She sighed. “We should look into this more,” she pronounced, nodding. “And we can meet up here in like, a week, and share what we find out. What do you think?”

Silverah
Astrophyllite didn’t think that anyone was going to like her poking around and trying to find stuff out. Once upon a time, Avalon would have encouraged her to do it… but Avalon was gone, and now everything seemed a lot more serious and nose-to-the-grindstone. “I’ll try,” she said, slipping her arm free of Colchis’s. “I don’t know how much I’ll be able to get. I’m not… I’m not very important. I’m not supposed to know a lot.”

She forced herself to smile, though. Nobody liked a Debbie Downer, Astrophyllite reminded herself. “But I’ll try,” she assured Colchis. “But we should - we should go, or I’m gonna get in trouble.” And punishment with the Negaverse was never just a slap on the wrist.


“Thank you,” said Colchis seriously. She let Astrophyllite pull away, even though it made her a little bit sad. They were comrades in this… not-war, weren’t they? She smiled back at the Lieutenant, and waved a little. “I’ll see you around, Astrophyllite!”

With that, she decided it was definitely time to go show Dad and Dada what she could do now. “Be safe going home,” she added, before barrelling off towards home at full speed. Pchoo!