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"Oh, we took it away," said Tallulah, grinning wickedly. It wasn't often that her eyes got this sort of gleam in them. "This was, oh, about a month ago, before Valentines day - Sailor Libra and I-"

She laughed. "We tied him up with his own jumprope and-"

More laughter. It took her a moment to regain her composure. "Ran him up a flagpole with it!" she exclaimed. "He wasn't happy to see me again, of course, threw rocks at me-"

She trailed off for a moment, and then added, a dizzy laugh still in her voice, "I wonder how long he stayed up that flagpole?"

"Yeah," sighed Tallulah, leaning on him again. "I figure he must have gotten down on his own eventually since we didn't hear about it in the paper--" Would the Destiny City Post report a teenaged boy being found run up a flagpole and bound with a child's toy?

"Everything sure makes a lot more sense now that I know that was you that night at Meadowview!" she added. "I'm gonna assume that was your first night, right?" she asked. "And you weren't just playing dumb to humor me?"

This was that conversation that had been promised at Apollo's. It had practically been pencilled into Tallulah's personal planner.

"Really?" asked Tallulah. "I mean, I'd sort of gotten the whole 'all this happened back in 1980 in Japan' thing from the meetings," she said thoughtfully - that whole list of names on the board at the meeting! The first ten were decidedly Japanese. (For all of its diversity, Destiny City had a questionably small Japanese population.) "And then there's that whole moon princess thing."

She bit her lip, deep in thought. "So Pegasus and Kunzite, they've lived before, a long time ago? More than two-hundred years ago? It would be weird, to be someone else and not even know it..." She pulled one of her legs up onto the swing, choosing to sit on it.

They did, of course, need to take their jobs more seriously - in that respect Kunzite probably had an advantage. Wouldn't it be better to just reincarnate your warriors instead of training them? That was an eerie thought- "What if they're not the only ones?" she asked. "What if more of us lived before and just don't know it?"

Tallulah had, somehow, in the course of this conversation, wound up with her legs draped over the side of the swing and her head in his lap. She sighed. "I got really into it for a while, I had a routine and everything," she confessed. "And, I mean, it did seem really normal. Once you suspend your disbelief enough and all-"

When the cat gave you that pen and told you the magic words, you tended to suspend disbelief pretty fast.

"It wasn't until my parents locked me up and made me act normal again that I realized how weird it all was!" she confessed. "Gosh, I'd never really thought about it before."

"So what's new?" she asked, changing the subject. She knew they'd talked about other stuff before they had entire conversations about the existential quandary of vigilante caped crusader-dom. "Anything terrifically exciting happen this week? Or something funny? Or something lame? Tell me something that doesn't involve talking cats or teenagers in spandex."

"They do that in Africa," said Tallulah unhelpfully. "Machine guns without instruction manuals, I mean-"

Knowing random facts about random conflicts all over the world was an occupational hazard of being in the model UN. You got used to it. "Your sister, right?" she asked cheerfully, tangent accomplished. "She's abroad, right? Where? Wow, it would be so fun to go to Europe for a semester! And at our age, too! The drinking age is way lower..."

If this seemed like an odd thing for Tallulah to care about, it was because she didn't - it was more tangental information. "Sorry, I'm off-topic," she laughed. "Model UN kind of has that effect."

Tallulah was about to say something about how the body count seemed to indicate they were in Africa, but clamped a hand over her mouth. "No more talking about Senshi stuff," she admonished herself out loud, and then said, "She's lucky! France would be so much fun! We were trying to raise money for a Model UN conference in The Hague this summer, but it's not going too well - we don't even have enough money to go to the one in New York at this rate..."

She sighed. "Oh well." There would be other conferences. She had another year of high school to look forward to.

"The Hague's in the Netherlands, anyway, not France," she clarified as an afterthought. It was sort of close, though.

"Supposedly selling cookie dough," said Tallulah in an exasperated tone that indicated they were not actually doing much selling, cookie dough or otherwise. "It's tough to get things organized - the seniors are all freaking out about college applications, and have been for months, and AP exams are coming up..." She heaved a sigh. Tallulah was the sort of overachiever who would be sitting APs in English, biology, and history later in April - maybe she ought to use her newly cleared nights to study. That was an idea.

"I mean, it would be such a cool trip to take- New York City! Or the Netherlands! Just think of it!"

She didn't think they had youma and things requiring senshi outside of Destiny City, so it would be a true vacation. Unless trouble had the tendency to follow them. This was unclear and hadn't been tested.

The lights on the back porch flipped on, causing Tallulah to sit up abruptly. Nellie opened the back door and looked out into the yard. "You two still out there?"

"Yeah!" Tallulah called back. "Wow, I didn't realize how late it was," she winced to Jaimie, "Don't you need to get back to Hillworth?" (She suspected he would be climbing over the wall, anyway, and it was not a matter of how late he got back.)

She hopped up from the swing and offered a hand to Jaimie. "Sorry," she emphasized, "I don't mean to sound like I'm kicking you out or anything like that. I'll call you later? Or tomorrow?"