Welcome to Gaia! ::

Almere was here on a very important mission. So, she probably shouldn't have been staring at the girl who had brought her up here just because she had stars in her eyes, but on the other hand, she had stars in her eyes. Almere knew better than to stare, but she kept stealing glances.

What kind of magic did you need to have star eyes, she wondered? The only other senshi she'd really talked to was Lysithea, who was a unicorn princess, so maybe that made Urania a star princess?

She was definitely talking about stars.

"Gemini, huh?" said Almere. The Twins. She liked that. It made her think of her twin cousins. Although, if they were trying to come up with challenges for people, they would probably make them pretty hard, so, maybe that wasn't a good sign?

"What do you think it does?" she asked, nodding towards the sphere. "I can't say that I'm that strong, either. I've been training as much as I can, but," it was obvious that she was still just a Page, and she summoned her spoon weapon, which was all she could really bring to the table. "I'll do my best to help you though, okay? And I brought some cookies for when we're done."

Almere respected twins! Maybe that meant she would do okay at the challenge.

"I'll introduce you to my cousins sometime," she told Urania. "They're identical. It can almost be hard to tell them apart, but they know a lot about knight stuff." And they'd probably be interested in meeting someone from a place like this, even if they'd worry about Almere going up to space with a stranger.

She was fine, they didn't have to freak out about something like this.

"Anyway, we should get started, right?" she asked.

The ball was asking if they were ready, over and over again. She hoped she wasn't going to annoy it by keeping it waiting.

She put her hand on the ball and then looked to Urania, waiting.

"A past life?"

Urania was talking about it like it was no big deal, but Almere didn't think it was some casual thing for someone to have a past life. "You mean, like reincarnation?"

That sounded like something you only heard about on the astrology part of YouTube. Of course, she was finding out that all kinds of things were real that she only could have dreamed about before, but she hadn't been expecting any of that stuff to go past lifetimes.

She had so many questions. Mostly they were about how you knew if someone had a past life, but she tried not to get to carried away.

The challenge was starting, and she had a job to do. She stared at the two crowns for a long second, but it wasn't a hard choice.

"I think sparklier is better," she said, and reached out a hand to touch the ornate crown.

Almere listened to the crown's riddle with all of the attention of a girl who had read lots and lots of novels about princesses unraveling mysteries in crypts and ancient castles, and who had a basic idea about how this worked. Also like a girl who had grown up on princess books and who had watched the coronation scene in Frozen too many times, she immediately blurted out, "A scepter!"

She smiled and waited for an answer, but then she blinked, sucked in her cheeks, and tuned back to Urania.

"Is that too obvious?" she asked. Her brows scrunched up. "It's not going to kick us out or something if we get it wrong, is it?"

The book character usually figured out the riddles, but there were scary threats for if they didn't. The Sphinx even ate people if they were wrong!

Almere didn't see any Sphinxes here, but there was still a whole planet on the line!

"Oh! Nice! I wasn't wrong," said Almere as the scepter showed up and the techno-narration seemed happy with her answer.


The next riddle didn't get an immediate response, though. She blinked, and scrunched her nose. Stone and bone? It probably had something to do with regalia, but the riddle was talking about wolves, and what did wolves wear? Nothing. Real wolves didn't real clothes at all. Cartoon wolves could, or maybe furries dressed like wolves. She could think of a wolf furry costume with bone earrings, and maybe an entire prehistoric theme going on.

That left the question of if people on Urania knew about furries. Maybe they didn't. Maybe they just had really fancy wolves.

For some reason she didn't think that was the answer.

"Regalia," she murmured to herself. "Royalty."

Royalty. That was what she needed to think about more. Suddenly it seemed obvious.

"Oh! It's a throne, isn't it?"

Oh, good! That had been right, too.

That just left the last thing. An offering.

What were they supposed to offer? Urania didn't have anything.

Almere was asking herself that, but deep inside, she already was pretty sure she knew the answer. "An offering is supposed to be a sacrifice, right?" she asked. "Like, not in a weird way. I just mean, something that you wanted that you give up."

With a small sigh, Almere summoned the cookies from her subspace pocket. They were in one of those leftover Christmas tins, one with cartoon polar bears in little knitted hats on the lid. They were fresh enough, though, that she could smell them even through the metal.

She'd read Percy Jackson. They gave offerings of food all the time.

"I really did wanna share these with you at the end," she said. "But, if you think it might help now, you can try."

She offered the tin over.

As Urania started talking to the sphere, Almere clasped her hands in front of herself and squeezed until her knuckles started to turn white. "Please work," she whispered to it. "Please. Come on. I gave you cookies!"

She could make more cookies, true, but it was the thought of it. It was the instant gratification.

Beyond that, though, she really did want to see what this place looked like with the lights on, and for Urania to be happy with her world. From what she could see so far, this place really made her feel like she was in space, even more than other places that were technically in space, like Earth, and Lysithea, which she loved but which didn't really have many stars to stare at.

Although, like at the end of some myths, the little star orb seemed to be accepting her cookie offering. The fog was lifting.

"It's working!" she said.