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Checking his senshi phone for messages had become something of a nightly ritual, although if he was being honest Athene was beginning to lose hope that there would ever be a response in his message box from Ida.

And a part of him hated himself for it...

But Ida was still missing and as the days continued to slip by with no hint or sign of his friend and team mate, he couldn’t help but start to think the worse.

Because even if she was away on Ida for a protracted length of time then surely she would have called or messaged back by now.

But he had messaged the team and Liryn had messaged the small list of people who they had come up with from their pooled contacts who also knew Ida, only to have had it turn up nothing.

And turning up nothing was a dangerous thing in Destiny City, where so many ended up disappearing because of the war that played out underneath the day to day city facade.

Athene pulled up messages and scanned through them.

Liryn refused to believe that Ida was gone, the small bobtail still spending time looking - sometimes with him and sometimes on his own, slipping out during early evening and coming back in the early hours.

Athene didn’t have the small mauvian’s level of faith, knew that much as he wanted Ida to be safe and that much that he wanted his friend, flat and team mate to just be simply on her asteroid, that he just didn’t have Liryn’s level of blind faith.

Because this was Destiny City and too many people disappeared because of the war…

And there was the fact that Ida, like Ganymede was what she had called transcended and whilst he didn’t know that much of the ins and outs behind it, Athene knew enough to know that it meant that the Negaverse was not able to corrupt her.

Which completely ruled out the chance of her strange disappearance being down to her having been corrupted…

But it also significantly upped the chance that if Ida’s disappearance was down to the Negaverse, then it was because they had killed her.

At least it did on the face of things it did, however Athene had taken to start trawling through newspapers when he was powered down as Arian and as yet hadn’t come across anything that seemed to point to Orah.

But still despite his dwindling hope he continued to check his phone for messages and (whilst not on the daily basis of previous) he also continued to search.

And he had also paid both his and Orah’s share of the rent and bills on the apartment as they came due.

He finished checking through messages and closed the app, slipping the phone back into subspace as he got to his feet and then he hesitated and pulled the phone out again.



He stopped and actually read the message and then after an embarrassed pause deleted it and re-wrote it.



Athene hit send this time round as he’d done with so many messages. However as with all the previous messages that he’d sent to Ida’s phone, once again there was no reply.

-- 626 words --