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Bo had already finished one beer and was pouring another. He had been in search of beer when he first stumbled upon the gathering of senshi fighting against Negaverse agents filling crystals. After inhaling smoke and hauling a**, he was still several beers away from feeling totally at ease. He raised his glass and cheers'd the air. "Here's to not being carpet-bombed!" he announced, taking a sip.

What Bo was to brightness, Tanzanite was darkness. He did not miss her.

"There are better drugs out there," he agreed. "Like alcohol!" Another deep sip. Bo clearly had a plan for the rest of his evening, and it involved intoxication.

A lot of the finer points of the Negaverse!drama had been lost on Bo during the mayhem, but he had managed to piece some of it together. That didn't mean he understood. "To be honest, I don't even understand what the Rift is." Bo dragged his thumb around the edge of his glass, smearing the foam. "A giant dark, Negaverse v****a from which all youma are birthed? Like a Georgie O'Keefe painting, but evil."

"Slow down," said Elke to Bo, putting a quelling hand on his wrist. "Neither of us knows where you live, so if you got drunk you would have to come home with me, and while I am sure my Maman would love to meet more of my friends, you do not want to deal with her while you are hungover." She took a deep draw of her own beer, unintentionally undermining her own point.

Finn shook the basket of rolls at her and she took one, giving him a dirty look before proceeding to shred it into small pieces onto a napkin. He had already picked her up and hauled her out of a fight she hadn't wanted to lose (where losing meant Virgo and Persephone came away unharmed). He was not going to micro-manage her dietary choices this evening.

"If I am following, the Academy was taken over and became the Rift, somehow accessible to the corrupted, but not to us, or we would have found it by now," she said, taking another sip of her beer. "Then this General, the one who became a youma, tried to bring the Academy-c**-Rift back to Earth, resulting in almost the entirety of his cohort turning again set him. He was grievously injured, and then... Somehow became a half-youma?" She wasn't sure she understood. At the same time, she didn't think she really needed to. What had happened had happened.

She piled up the pieces of her roll like a small mountain on her napkin and then, gently, smashed it flat. "How is your stomach, Bo," she asked, picking apart the corpse of her roll again.

Finn shot Elke and Bo a curious glance, and he wondered how Elke could have been so quick to write off someone who so obviously adored her - but she was otherwise pretty sure her entire court was AWOL, from the sounds of it. He had to acknowledge that no one he'd seen tonight was part of the Zodiac proper... That, and Bo seemed like he was a bit of a flake.

(Then again: so was Finn.)

He bit his tongue against saying anything to Elke about not playing with her food - even if instinct said something was wrong, he wasn't going to get into it now. Not after she'd just told them not to embarrass her in public. (Was it something to mention to Aysel? He just - he didn't know how to deal with this. Elke was legally an adult and more than capable of making her own decisions for pretty much anything else.)

"Honestly," he said, trying to follow the discussion instead of fretting uselessly over whether or not Elke was eating her roll. "I showed up fifteen minutes late with Starbucks so some of the details escaped me, but that sounds about right. He was trying to open some kind of portal or something, make everything go to hell. Danger, Will Robinson."

He did not actually know what that reference actually meant in context. Moving on!

"They definitely know what youma are, in, like, general terms," he said. "I mean, they make them fresh out of civilian starseeds. But we only found out about the Academy like a month ago, and they don't have access to their wonders or their memories or any of the information we knights have, so yeah, I'd definitely doubt that they know what the Rift actually is."

But if anyone wanted to prove him wrong, they were more than welcome to. It'd be fun!

((******** GAIA. I HAD MY ENTIRE POST TYPED, HIT 'POST REPLY', AND IT SPIT ME BACK TO LOGIN AND ERASED MY GODDAMN POST, AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.))

I refuse to attempt to recreate my post as it was.

Bo gives Elke more beer and seems jazzed about it. Then he tells her, "Stop being pretty, and I'll stop looking. Deal? Deal." Because he is avoiding s**t, etc etc.

Then the waitress comes back with food for everyone. This was where I had this awesome description of what the oysters looked like, which was super detailed because I love oysters goddamnit and now I am angry and refuse to rewrite it. They are on a two tiered metal stand with metal trays on beds of ice. He puts lemon and cocktail sauce on them. He eats one. He asks, "Who's Avalon?" Then he eats another. Then he asks Finn and Elke, "Anyone want an oyster?"

Sigh.

[I UNDERSTAND, AKINA.]

Elke flushed dark red and stared at the table until the food arrived. It was nice of him to call her pretty, and she liked when people were nice to her; but it probably wasn't true. "Thanks, I guess," she said to Bo, and then she shut up for Finn's... very terse... explanation of who Avalon was.

"They were friends," she said to Bo. "Like... as close as the astronomy club used to be." That was her understanding, anyway. Finn seemed to be mourning the loss of Squire Avalon in the same way Elke grieved the losses and disappearances that had come to the Zodiac. "We shouldn't talk about her." She didn't want to talk about Grayson's disappearance, or Eon's death. She understood Finn's reluctance to speak on the topic, because it seemed like Avalon was cruising down that same path at breakneck speed.

She picked at her salad. The sweet vinaigrette was a good match for the beer, it made her stomach rumble in really unattractive ways. "Oh, no thank you," she said. "Thank you for offering."

Finn really had no way of knowing how Elke was going to respond to this nonsense with the oyster, and he wasn't sure if he ought to intervene. On the one hand, he was pleased that the oyster was not being waved at him. On the other hand, it was just generally rude to wave food in grown adults' faces.

"Uh, yeah," he said awkwardly, watching the shell zoom. "This is the biggest thing that's happened in a while." Although it kind of looked like it might be over for the moment. "There was something about shade fairies and doppelgängers right when I got back into town in like november, but I was too busy moving to actually clock any of it." So, some help he was.

"It does feel like things are escalating," he said, peeling the crust off the rest of his sandwich. "Just because the sheer numbers of both sides are increasing. But beyond that I'm not sure."

Seriously, though, he wondered, what the ******** was Bo planning to do with that oyster.

Bo dodged Elke's spoon interference playfully, even while Finn spoke. Zodiacs were weird. When she finally relented, his grin split his face. "You've made the right choice," he said. With extreme gentleness, Bo touched the edge of the shell lightly to Elke's bottom lip. "Give it a few chews, but then swallow. Overchewing can get gross." He tipped the shell up, watching as the oyster slipped seamlessly from the shell and disappeared behind her lips. The shell was returned to the tray, and Bo watched her like an overeager parent might wait for the announcement of which child won the beauty pageant.

Glancing back to Finn while Elke had the chance to eat, Bo said, "Shade fairies? That sounds like a bad trip. I don't think I'd like to meet my own doppleganger. Dude would be seriously uncool." And probably INCREDIBLY evil. No thanks. "I don't like how big the pool of little kid senshi is getting. What's with that? I thought that was something that died with our generation." He said the second part to Elke. After all, he was taken from his family on Neso as a child to be Chronos' handmaiden. That didn't mean he liked the idea of it happening here.

"Verdict?" he asked Elke, referring to the oyster.