Welcome to Gaia! ::

The sky was violet.

It was bright, almost as bright as daytime on earth, but with a color just a few shades softer then its senshi's eyes, and with a few small lights visibly flickering in the distance, possibly stars, but more likely the other asteroids.

On the ground was a thick forest. The trees were giant. All but the smallest were big enough that it would take a few people to wrap their arms all the way around it, with the biggest visible from this point maybe requiring three or four. Even Earth trees are more gray than brown, but these had bark of a true, pale silver. They were also very dead. Their skeletal branches stretched up towards the strange sky. The only sign of life in this place was in the undergrowth, where occasionally small purple flowers grew among the roots of the biggest of the trees. They had a strong, sweet scent to them that was noticeable even from a distance.

There was a small ripple and Cybele and Tama appeared on what appeared to be the remnants of a path. As there was no park bench or anything to sit on here, Cybele's first move was a stumble to catch her balance. She then spent a good minute just taking everything in. She tried to stay cool and analytical, but that wasn't how this worked.

"Wow," she finally whispered. "This is really beautiful, isn't it?" She couldn't help a smile at the little flowers, and it was a true smile, reaching her eyes, the kind that very few people saw from her these days. "Well, my outfit makes a bit more sense now." She pulled one of the flowers from her tiara and held it out at arms length so she could get some sense of a comparison. It was the same color, the same size. Of course.

Walking over to the nearest tree, she laid delicate fingers on the bark and closed her eyes. "It looks like this place didn't escape all the destruction, though."

She opened her eyes from her reverie to take a closer look at the bark of the tree in front of her. It was true silver and smoother than birch. She then turned back to Tama.

It was hard to not feel at peace here, with a decent amount seeming to fall into place, but there was still a little part of her that was resisting and Tama's question brought it to the surface. "My true form?" she asked, looking down at her outfit. It was difficult to argue with that when she was wearing a crown that matched the trees and sky, but she still stepped away from the tree and started twisting some of her ribbons.

"I don't- I didn't want to be connected to any place other than Earth," she admitted. "That's what it most important right now, and maybe it's the Negaverse rumors talking, but I thought having a planet would make me less loyal, almost? It would make me fight like an alien, for a dead planet instead of something that matters."

It was hard to tell, but she thought she could see a faint path beneath her and she took a few cautious steps down it, still staring at the beautiful beautiful trees. "But I do love this place, and I do belong here."

"You're right," said Cybele as she just kept looking up and down the rows of almost identical trees, although she didn't quite sound convinced. On closer inspection, the trees up ahead appeared to be thinning out a bit. "No matter which place I'm fighting for, my goals would still be the same."

His second question made her actually crack a soft smile. "Everything I love is on Earth," she said. "There are the simple things, like singing in the green room before I got onstage for a show. Sunrises. Dogs. That sort of thing." She looked down at him. "Cats make the list, too. Don't worry. Then, there are my allies. There was the senshi who talked me out of corrupting, the two cats who helped me when I was stuck in a fire, all those sweet idealistic girls I was with when we got into the Negaverse castle, and so many more. Really, a lot of times they're what i think about when I think about what I'm fighting for, and they all live on Earth, too."

Yes, there were definitely buildings of some sort up ahead. They weren't so big, and they were square. Well, the ones that were still standing upright were. They seemed to be made of similar wood to the trees around them, and a lot of them had crumbled. However, what really caught Cybele's eyes was the in the center of all of them, which was the biggest that she'd seen so far. Gnarled roots piled up around it, providing support for the backs of some of the buildings.

People. Friends. Of course those were the things she was really fighting for, not just some patch of land floating through space. Something finally clicked inside Cybele's mind as she looked down to the bases of the trees, where little purple flowers pushed their way up through the roots. Little signs of life.

She nodded. "I think I understand," she said. "What you're fighting for can be more than a place. Should be more, probably. Intentions matter. Relationships matter. Fighting for a place for no reason, that sounds like something a conqueror would do."

They had gotten to the edge of whatever this settlement was. Everything was so collapsed that it was still difficult to make out much detail about most of the structures without getting closer, but one thing that still stood was an arch of wooden branches that connected two larger trees across the path. Cybele thought she could make out remnants of string tied off on the lower branches. One still seemed to hold a bit of carved antler, another something that caught the light. She peered at it for a moment and then stepped through.

Tama would see her stop in her tracks, eyes going wide.

To Cybele, everything changed. The dead camp in front of her came to life before her eyes. The dead trees were covered in large, soft green leaves. The shelters in front of her stood sturdily, their wooden frames supporting loose cloth walls. Closer to the entrance, a girl in a simple white garment knelt to tend a crackling fire pit. She looked up as Cybele approached, a wide grin slowly appearing on her face. "Faroth!" She was up in an instant and she ran over. "I mean, Lady Cybele." She giggled, but gave a small bow. "You made it back!"

Then, she vanished without warning, leaving a heap of the fallen wooden beams in Cybele's peripheral vision. She shook her head and blinked, then turned to the guardian cat. "Did you see that?" She wasn't too panicked. She'd had visions before, but she still wasn't quite sure what was going on this time.

So she wasn't really fighting for Earth at all, or for this dead asteroid. That didn't mean she couldn't appreciate what they both had to offer, and she nodded. Tama was saying exactly what she needed to hear. She should really try to talk to cats more. It seemed they were called guardians for a reason.

It still didn't explain what she'd seen, and as he said he hadn't seen anything, she squinted at her surroundings. Cybele had been involved in this magical war for long enough that she wasn't a stranger to visions, but she wasn't quite comfortable with them either.

"I saw this place alive," she told him. "It must have been a vision, then, but that's strange that I would see something like that just coming here. Usually that sort of thing means that something big and magical is happening."

Cybele wasn't sure that she fully understood the cat's excitement, but he had been spot on in his knowledge of space and that sort of thing so far. As she stood surrounded by the giant trees, she managed to push away the thought that the vision had been some sort of terrible omen.

Also, the sight of Tama pushing up his glasses got a little smile out of her.

"It was here, but it was different, too," she said. "More alive, I think, is the best way to say it. The trees were healthier, the tents?" She narrowed her eyes and waved a hand at the scattering of collapsed structures. "Those. They looked semi-permanent, they were fixed up, and there was someone here."

She took a few steps forward to where a few stones poked out of the dirt, all that remained of the fire pit. "There was someone here to welcome me home."

Cybele couldn't stop the hint of a frown that came when Tama put away his glasses. She wished that there was something simpler here than shaows of memories, something that the cat could see. He would know what to make of it much more than she did, that was for sure.

She scratched at the dirt near one of the rocks in the fire pit with her shoe until another inch of silver-streaked stone showed through. It was the closest to revealing something that she could get.

At least he was asking questions she could answer. "I didn't see myself, really," she said. "I think I was myself. The girl called me Cybele, as if it was a title, and Faroth was the name she used."

The more Cybele thought her vision through, the her head started to spin, especially with what the Guardian was saying. It had all seemed natural when it had been in front of her face, but if that had tea been so long ago, there was no reason that she would have been there.

She tried to follow Tama as he broke it down, though. “Of course,” she said. “I’m Cybele.” That much made sense.

“And I know it’s more a title than a name, or even an alias.” Back so long ago when she was new and even excited, an asteroid probably wouldn’t have been her choice for her secret name. She’d always known that there was something deeper to it, although it was definitely a different experience seeing that reason face to face.

“Were there more senshi, then?”