Homeworld, huh. Raksha. The place she bore the name of, the place Encke's equivalent of he loved dearly.
She had a world, was supposed to have a world. A whole world to protect. A whole world that was- dead.
Aerin didn't know what to expect there, but. She had to find out.
(There was a sort of incalculable grief, that came with knowing your life should have been very, very different, and it's like that because every single one of the people that should have been yours is dead.)
Aerin pulled her Henshin Pen out of her pocket, staring at it. She should visit it. Tonight, immediately. She had a responsibility to it, a duty- she was the last.
She… should also probably prepare first.
What did you need to pack when visiting an alien planet? It would have to be stuff she could fit into her subspace- maybe just packing up a backpack and shoving everything she needed into that would be best. Hm.
She could also just… bring a regular backpack on top of that. Subspace and a real backpack. Double space.
Ok.
A journal, probably- to document what she found. Maybe one of those old cameras that would print out photos of what she found. She could sketch okay, enough to represent what she saw, but it wouldn't be as good as a photo.
Maybe she could buy one?
Hm.
A quick google said there was one- a Kodak Printomatic, or something, that would do at the local Best Buy- it was like $50, but. A small price to pay to document an alien world nobody's been to in a thousand years, right?
...She'd probably be staying overnight.
Aerin slipped her pen back into its pocket and grabbed last year's empty backpack and put a few things into it- the journal, some pens, her phone, the small solar battery bank she owned, a few snacks, a sleeping bag she squished in there with some difficulty, and a water bottle, as well as her purse, though she wouldn't be bringing that there.
Right, the second one. Aerin quickly grabbed it.
That done, she slipped out of her room.
"Hey, mom? I'm gonna go spend some time at the mall and then spend the night at my friend Aurora's house, okay?"
The lie tasted acrid on Aerin's tongue- she wasn't even friends with that kid, they'd talked one time, but what else was she supposed to do? She couldn't tell her mom the truth. That would never go well.
Her mother sounded kind of… strained, when she answered. Aerin knew her parents were worried for her, after what happened at the museum, and that's what made this harder to sell. "That's… wonderful, sweetie. I hope you have fun. Where did you meet her?"
"Uh. She's one of my classmates. At school? She's nice." Aerin did her best to look convincing.
"Well, don't have too much fun, okay?"
…
"I won't, don't worry."
-------
30 minutes later, Aerin walked out of the Best Buy, camera already in her backpack, and got back into her car. <********>.
Where the hell was she going to put her car? It had to be somewhere nobody would break into it or steal from it or anything.
s**t.
Why is being a magical girl so logistically hard. She had been too starstruck at the museum to really think about it, but it was hitting her now.
There's gotta be a way you can do this. Think.
After some quick googling of "are there places i can park a car overnight", Aerin decides to head to her local Walmart- it qas open very late and by a pretty sizable patch of woods, on account of her being in the suburbs. Also, her family hated Walmart, so there was no way they could find out.
This would have to do. And she'd have to plan better next time, but… luckily, she wouldn't be able to visit her homeworld for a good while, after this, on account of the cooldown.
She should probably plan ahead for that. Yeah mom, I'm going camping every month for one day. My teacher said it was a good way to find inner peace and heal from trauma. Or something.
---
After a quick drive to Walmart, Aerin got there, ducking in to purchase a few things- A small camping grill, some pancake mix, other nonperishable food, that sort of thing.
After she was done, Aerin popped back to her car, hid her purse, then grabbed the backpacks and stepped out into the woods, trekking until she was certain that absolutely nobody could see her from the road. She set down the second backpack- it would be bad if it disappeared during the transformation and the first would go into subspace anyway, and took her Henshin Pen out.
She focused on it briefly. Raksha power, Make-up!
There was a second of light and her normal clothes washed away, replaced by an outfit that- Aerin- Raksha, had to admit was cool as hell and a warm, powerful sensation pooling in her veins.
Being a Senshi was the right thing to do; she had to help save the world. That was the most important thing. She had to help save this world of hers too. The one whose name was also her name. But… it had its perks, too.
She couldn't, wouldn't forget that.
"Well. No use sticking around any longer."
Raksha picked up her backpack, pulled out her Senshi phone, and tapped on the "home" button and closed her eyes, concentrating. A second of weightlessness, and then-
Raksha opened her eyes, and she was not in a snowy forest behind a random suburbian Walmart. It was some kind of- private getaway, with hallways leading out to other areas, carved out of a natural cave, it looked like. A small little place to study and hide away, filled with books and a bunch of dusty little animal figures- some that looked like creatures Raksha had never seen before, some that looked like creatures she was familiar with that had gone extinct long ago.
This was real. She was here.
She was standing on an alien world.
Someone had lived here, once.
It took… considerable effort, not to buckle to her knees at the weight of that, for Raksha to force herself to stay standing.
Carefully, reverently, she picked up the figure of a wolf-like creature, Epicyon, making sure it wasn't too fragile, and slipped it into her bag.
It's not stealing, she told herself, if it was a way to remember the dead.
It was- difficult to summon the energy to leave this small room she could spend a lifetime exploring, and shove open the door at the other end of of it. It was long rusted shut- (it took considerable effort to wrestle the damn thing open, and she probably wouldn't have been able to do it untransformed) and stepped out into the outside world.
This little, private place she had been in was located on the top of a cliff, overlooking a vast, endless expanse of- cracked, dead earth, dotted with these strange glass-topped domes and only a few mountains to break up the horizon.
Her first thought is, "I'm gonna steal a telescope. Look at those stars. Holy s**t. Holy ******** second thought is, "This is mine? This was mine?"
That ws when Raksha's knees buckled under her. She? She had to fix all of this, alone? She didn't even know what it was supposed to be like-
There was a flicker, a ghost, a wisp of a memory, and just for a second, Raksha was standing on this exact cliff, looking over the same landscape, but it wasn't dead anymore. It was beautiful.
And then it was gone, and Raksha was sitting on the cliff, looking over her vast, dead expanse of a world. Over everything that had been lost. Over everything that should have been there, and wasn't.
She laughed, half-hysterical, half-wonderment, the only living sound in a thousand years.
"Well. I have- a lot of work to do. I guess." She looked down at the ground she was sitting on. "I don't suppose you're sentient, going to help me, and whatever the hell that was was some kind of well-timed vision meant to inspire me?"
"...I'm not going down from this cliff just yet. You'll just have to get used to that. If I come home with a mysterious broken leg, my mom is gonna kill me."
"Maybe we can start by getting to know each other a little. And maybe I can text Encke a few photos later."
It wasn't long after that that the first music in a thousand years started echoing across the landscape, played on a shitty $20 speaker and accompanied by the song of someone trying to hope there was something, anything, she could do to help.
🎶Cause we know people who have died well before their time, and it isn't really fair, but how do we set that right?🎶
🎶We have to make a plan and work out what is coming next, and make it out alive with everyone that's left,🎶
🎶That we have left.🎶
