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It had been a fairly fruitless evening for Hopeite, with no one out because of the sudden chill in the air. This was why she preferred to move in the daylight. More people around. Easier to do her job. Less senshi likely to be out at that time too. With the sun out and shining, Hopeite was free to warm her face in uniform and do her job in comfort and with ease. At night it was... inconvenient. It was too late for anyone to be out -- in truth she had maybe an hour of good time -- and it had a habit of getting chilly without the sun in the early months of spring. No, Hopeite did not understand why the rest of her kind made gathering at night their habit. After all, who in the daylight would stop them?

A cold blast of air hit Hopeite suddenly, sending a chill from her toes to her crown. Yeah. Screw this night bull crap.

The last rays of the sunlight threatened to go out soon, and Hopeite was thinking about wrapping up her hunt. She'd have to do double duty tomorrow, but whatever. It was at least a bearable evening, strolling through Destiny City's antique district. The buildings were old, haunted with past lives and memories. She gazed up at them, peeking into windows to have a peek at the vintage wares within. Porcelain and lace, all manner of glassware, some silver candlesticks and a gaudy tea pot. All things that Hopeite coveted and made a note to come back for.

The soft tap tap tap of footsteps drew Hopeite's attention from the treasures locked away in the empty buildings to whomever was approaching her. She leaned lazily against the building and inhaled slowly on her cigarette.

"Hey there, girlie," she purred at the passerby. "What's got a nice looking thing like you out so late?"

"Schoolwork in the Antique Disrict," Hopeite clucked suspiciously, not buying that story for even a second, and pushed off of the wall she was holding up to stand erect beside the woman. "Fibbing is so... unbecoming." Another hungry pull on her cigarette before she spoke again, grey puffs of her exhalation erupting around her words like smog. "Of anyone really. Never could stand a liar." Through her speaking, Hopeite never lost that silver purr in her voice, the one that she'd tried so hard to cultivate over the years as a saleswoman. This wasn't really so different, after all. Hopeite was still buying and selling, it was just that the stock and commerce had changed some. She was buying and selling trust. Words were the money exchanged between lips. Everything else was the same.

She moved like water over rocks in a riverbed, falling into step beside the woman, and dropped her cigarette on the concrete. The cold early spring would suffocate the ashes in no time. Instead, she busied her hands adjusting the bow in her hair with a fake air of vanity, checking herself in passing windows when in all actuality she was judging her prey. Was she slouching? Walking too fast or too slow? Was her hair done so that it would be easily grabbed, or would Hopeite have to reach for something else.

The pedestrians around them began to clear away, ducking into cars and buildings for the night.

"You really should get home," Hopeite grinned, an otherwise friendly expression twisted almost undetectable by her hunt. "Wouldn't want to be out with the jackals." Hopeite touched the woman's elbow in an almost loving caress and when the first energy bubble vanished into thin air, Hopeite knew she'd made a mistake.

Well, <******** hadn't been expecting a fight that night, much less from the girl that she had happened upon. Maybe that was why it took Hopeite so long to recover from what had happened. For a long moment, she just stood there, choking on nothing and wondering where it had all gone wrong. One moment she was a snake coiling up a branch to offer an apple to an innocent passerby and the next she had been stepped on. Once her brain did catch up to her, however, the ache in her windpipe spide webbed out and the silent choking turned into a rather sickly sounded gag.

When the girl proceeded to "request" a chat with Hopeite, she had no choice but to relent to it. But she kept up her own airs and graces, smiling faintly despite her choked off sputtering and watering eyes. She stumbled backward with the girl, helpless against the stronger of the two, and watched the scene unfold before her.

Well, ******** she was let go, Hopeite sucked in a frantic breath of air before coughing from the force of the strike against her throat. It took her a moment to recover, but when she did, Hopeite recovered her easy, slimy posture and her snakey smile. When she spoke, her voice was calm, soft almost, like a nursemaid's. No harshness or anger in it at all. a by-product of working with children for so long.

"I was doing my job, senshi," he drawled, summoning her own weapon and taking a greedy drag on it. It was more an exhibit of nonchalance than anything. A way to show that Hopeite, while outranked, remained unimpressed by...

"What was it? Warhol power make up? So Sailor Warhol then. Eternal too, how charming," she took another lung full of acrid smoke and blew it into a grey, billowing mass above them. It hovered like a stormcloud for a several brooding seconds before disappearing into the evening sky.

"How was I to know that you were a senshi at all? They don't give out rosters of that sort of thing and besides, how many times do you suppose this sort of thing happens anyway? We can't all know one another, right? Think about how many agents you've drained while doing your job. And how many lashed out?" she smiled, sucking on ehr cigarette for a long moment in the silence before she spoke through her exhalation.

"This is why your kind need tighter leashes, love."

Ah, of course. A senshi masquerading herself as something more powerful. The corners of Hopeite's lips twitched up into a small, mocking smile and she nodded, parroting the name pensively.

"Chrysocholla..." Hopeite took a moment to rolled the name around in her mouth for a moment, testing the weight and density on her tongue before she spat it back out. "Take a mineral name if you wish, it doesn't hide what you are, sweetling." A child dressing up in momma's high heels. An infant mirroring his father's actions. A ruse. A sham. A lie. Chrysocolla circled Hopeite, but the older woman hardly batted an eyelash. Let her circle. She was a sparrow, not the vulture she wanted to be.

"I show children all the respect that they warrant," Let the senshi garner from that statement what she wanted. Hopeite would not expound. Instead, she stood at the center of the senshi's circling with one hand lazily curled around her hip and the other moving back and forth between space and her lips, listening only half to what the senshi was saying. Honestly, Hopeite didn't have the time for this. Once this child was done circling her, Hopeite would make a point to see who was in charge of her tether. See if something couldn't be done... then again what good would something like that do. Chances are the actions the senshi was taking were learned behaviors. Her general would be no different.

She would have to deal with it herself.

"So by that logic you're either weak or just stupid," she tossed unceremoniously. "To be drained, I mean. No taking the proper precautions, traveling alone, making yourself a target like you have. Things of that sort." Hopeite waved her cigarette as she gestured while speaking, voice light and betraying nothing of what she was accusing the senshi of being. She may as well have been reciting a grocery list. "After all that's why we're here isn't it? So that you can have your tantrum because you got mixed up in something that displeased you." She took a long drag on her cigarette, pausing in her speech.

"But as for your general, no, I think not. your behaviors your... weaknesses... they're learned. Not inherent. Someone this... Schrol has taught you that you are more than the tool you truly are. Deluded you into thinking yourself above your station." She dropped her weapon then, crushing it out with the toe of her boot and watched it vanish from the ground, silent for a long moment before she turned suddenly, shooting her arm out to catch the senshi and stop her in her circling.

"But in the end, your tantrum has done nothing but bore me. All talk and no game, that's all that you little things are." With contact made, Hopeite made to finish the job that she started in the first place. She watched the first violet orb rise and vanish like smoke with a smile.

"Porcelain dolls that we break to meet our own ends, but a broken thing is truly of no use to anyone, isn't it? We break and we shatter until nothing of you remains, and then we toss aside the carcass and move along to the next beautiful thing in need of tarnishing. You're a tool, Warhol. And taking a name that isn't yours to take will not make you any more a craftsman than wearing the uniform will."

"A queen is a queen no matter the age, darling," Hopeite countered coolly, "Queen Victoria took the throne when she was but a girl. Unfortunately... I see no throne beneath your feet nor crown upon your head. A hammer wielded by a blacksmith 100 years ago deserving of no more respect than a hammer wielded by a blacksmith today. You keep using faulty logic to support a claim that has nothing to stand on."

She released the senshi then, straightening out her uniform and her hairbow. She had gotten her quota and it was time to feed her pup back home. Amanda would be wondering where she had gone, after all. And this was growing tiresome. Let Warhol think she was better than she was. Delusions of grandeur never hurt anyone but the deluded after all. Hopeite waited for the girl to circle behind her and then she stepped away, heels clicking on the pavement as she left.

"If Schrol is your superior, then I have no choice but to assume she is as inept as you are. Pity. The negaverse has the potential to be something truly grand. If only it's soldier would learn the meaning of the word choas."