Welcome to Gaia! ::

Puck was beginning to like his homeworld setup. He'd visited a few times, cleaning the place up as best he could given that most of the surfaces were covered in layer upon layer of dirt and dust and the main square wasn't paved. The tree that he had chosen initially – the one where he'd had the vision of a youth playing with giant bugs – had become his base station while visiting, a place he could call home while exploring the dense forests. All he had managed to find, though, on these explorations was another, much smaller village, with the same tree houses and what looked like an overgrown field used for farming. That field, which still contained ridges from plowing, was now covered with forest undergrowth and ivy and much smaller trees than the rest of the woods consisted of. There were no signs of life, not even the carapace of one of the massive bugs he'd seen in his vision. Everything was dead and gone except the trees.

Though he had found something weird once, a structure that didn't look like anything that fit with what he'd seen so far of the small world. For one thing, it wasn't carved from a tree; it looked to be some manner of white stone or something, and it was rounded and curved in a way that just looked… alien. He hadn't approached it – in fact, it kind of freaked him out a bit – but he noted its location relative to the main village and knew he could find it again. If he wanted to. Which he didn't.

A sound from outside the living area of his tree startled him out of his reverie, and he stood bolt upright and dropped his makeshift broom. Usually the only sound he heard was the creaking of branches from a breeze. What was going on?

Cautiously Puck poked his head out the door and looked around. "Hullo?" he said, his voice falling dead in the still air. "Is, um… anybody there?" He felt immediately stupid for saying that; of course there was nobody there, it was a dead world. Right?

Puck blinked stupidly at the being in the tree. What was Kurma doing here? How did he get here in the first place? The Eternal Senshi had of course seen the strange, floating man before, most recently at Caedus's return with reinforcements in tow, but he didn't know much about him. Seemed like that was about to change.

"Um, hullo," he replied with a wave. "You're the um… doughnut guy, yeah?"

Stepping outside the tree, he scratched his head. "Why are you here? Nice zither, by the way...."

"What I remember?" Puck asked, brow furrowed. "What, about this place?" The zither strings sang gently through the air, and he felt he could sense the life that had once thrived here. Like that one vision he'd had…

His eyes lost focus as he thought. "This was one of the bigger towns, I think. Lots of people, lots of… very big bugs," he blinked, looking at Kurma. "They kept them as pets, used them as beasts of burden, farmed them for stuff they could trade with Uranus." He nodded his head at the massive blue planet taking up most of the sky. "I… don't remember much else. Except I think I lived here, in this tree, or former-me did, or something." Patting the tree in question, he tilted his head at the strange man.

"D'you… d'you believe in like reincarnation? 'Cause that's what it feels like…"

"Puckish?" Puck asked, trying not to laugh. "Is that what they called themselves, the people who used to live here? That's a silly name. And what d'you mean, that's how things work? Knew what about me, the starseed thing? Is that what they're used for, starseeds? Reincarnation?"

There was a slightly testy tone to Puck's voice as he questioned Kurma. He wasn't angry, just uncomfortable and awkward. If there was one thing he hated, it was being kept in the dark about important things like… well, being reborn time and time again to the same purpose, for one. And what the former people of this world called themselves, for another. It all just raised more questions that he didn't know the answers to.

"Is there anything else about this place I need to know? So far I've been clattering about on me own, coming across things that I have no clue about, feeling like I've been here before. It's kind of creepy."

Puck listened to Kurma's brief but succinct explanation of how starseeds work, and nodded in comprehension. He'd never known, had never really had it explained to him just what a starseed was – he only knew that the Negaverse stole them from people, civilian and Senshi alike, to give to their master Metallia. Or to eat themselves in some kind of horrible power-charging way or something. He shuddered at the thought.

He came out of his reverie to find Kurma floating in front of him. "Nah, I can't possibly know more than you do," he said with a shake of his head. "Unless this little rock was more insignificant than I think it was. You seem to know a lot about a lot of places," he grinned.

A puzzled look crossed his face then. "Wait, what? What kind of thing? There's mostly just farming villages here- oh wait, I think I know what you're talking about…"

Puck strode into the forest, expecting the doughnut guy to follow him. A few minutes of stomping through undergrowth later, he came upon the weird structure he'd been studiously avoiding since he first found it. "There. I don't know what it's for, nevermind what it is." He looked at Kurma. "Do you?"

Puck stared at Kurma like he had lobsters crawling out of his ears. "Destroy it?" he asked incredulously. "I don't even know what it is!"

Despite the creepy feeling he got off the thing, he went over to examine it more closely. There were what appeared to be creatures carved in low relief on the surface, weird looking creatures with long necks and pointed wings and painstakingly depicted fangs and claws. There were also apparently symbols that resembled eggs near the creature; the tableau implied that it was protecting a nest. As he circled the stelle, he also saw carved in low relief what looked like a star chart, Uranus clearly identifiable by its vertical ring. And just outside that ring, a small moon was marked to make it stand out. Puck shuddered; he knew somehow that it was his little world that had been singled out.

He came around the other side and looked soberly at Kurma for long moments before he spoke. "What is this thing? More importantly, how do I destroy it?"

Puck's stony determination softened a bit as Kurma spoke of the creatures depicted on the stone and what became of them. "Bloody poachers," he grumbled. "Not gonna use my world as an outpost for their dirty work." It was both sad and angry-making how the creatures were hunted to apparent extinction in the galaxy. And all because somebody decided their eggs were a path to power.

"My magic's not anything close to being destructive," Puck shook his head. "Entrapment, yeah, but not destructive. As for a hammer…" He mentally went through the inventory of stuff he'd brought to start putting things right. "Wait here."

The Eternal Senshi trotted back to the tree he'd claimed as his own. He'd left a bag of tools in the lower part of the dwelling, and when he rummaged through it he found a heavy mallet. Clutching the implement, he returned to Kurma and the marker stone. "Will this do?"

With a smile, Puck waved back, then just as quickly as Kurma had turned up, the strange man was gone, leaving the Eternal Senshi standing alone in the forest next to the marker.

He sighed heavily and turned to face the stelle. "Welp, best get to it then," he said to himself, bouncing the heavy mallet against the palm of his hand. "The sooner I get rid of this ******** thing, the better." Stepping up to it, he took an experimental swing, not knowing what it was made of. The sound of concrete hitting stone echoed through the trees, and a small crack appeared on the surface. He ran his hand over it tentatively, and a few bits of stone flaked off.

Puck grinned. This was going to be fun as well as cathartic.