SOLO: The Unworthy
[Backdated just a bit.]
Fomalhaut was notoriously flaky about the whole senshi thing. She’d heard that she had a planet, and she wanted to go to it, but every time she set a date “something” would happen and she just wouldn’t go. This tendency had delayed her first world visit for a year or more. Finally, she’d cleared her supposedly busy schedule and found a place where she felt comfortable beaming up. Doing a heavy inhale-exhale, she held the planet transfer app until the world blurred around her.
When everything came back into focus, she stood on a broken stone path. This path proceeded forward for a while, and it led into the ruins of what had to have been a great city. The frameworks of towers loomed overhead, with other buildings crumbling between them. As Fomalhaut walked down the lost city street, she found herself staring at the desolation, looking for any sign of the past. She knew better than to expect a sign of life, but she was desperately grasping for even a kernel of knowledge about what this city was. Clearly, it was somewhere advanced and prosperous (why else would there be towers?), but after a while she felt like the buildings were staring back at her, telling her to go away as they would offer no answers.
At that moment, Fomalhaut became aware of the murmur of a crowd all around her. Soon, people popped into existence around her, lining the sidewalks of the city’s past self. The gaps in the buildings filled in, revealing a beautiful cityscape formed from softly glittering stone and a glassy material. Everything seemed to shine around her. When she looked back in front of her, she saw a shock of pale blonde hair and a girl’s thin frame from behind. She was hunched over, clinging to something, and when Fomalhaut realized this, she was suddenly gripped by a chest-squeezing anxiety. Her hand flew to her chest and she gasped; she had never been an anxious person, so the sensation was new and alarming. Suddenly, it all seemed to connect together: she was staring at her past self’s back, and her past self was terrified of the people around her. Yes, she was wearing the same uniform, though it was harder to recognize from the back.
Beside the Fomalhaut of the past was a tall man clad in a black and gold coat. He looked to her and grunted, “The least you could do is stand up straight,
Hynna.”
Fomalhaut’s own heart rate accelerated in time with Hynna’s. “Y-you’re supposed to call me Fomalhaut while I’m powered up,” Hynna said, her voice thin and timid.
The man next to her scoffed. “I would, if you were worthy of this world’s name.”
As quickly as it appeared, the vision was gone, and Fomalhaut was left alone to catch her breath. What even happened…? After pausing to ensure that it wouldn’t happen again, she tried to piece together what she could based on such a brief flash. It seemed that the Fomalhaut of the past was not respected by her people, to the point that merely being among them gave her great anxiety. Why? There was nothing in that instance to answer that. Had Hynna done something to make herself a pariah? Had she done nothing at all and was simply deemed unworthy by everyone around her for some other reason?
With a disgruntled hum, Fomalhaut continued forward, her pace quicker this time. She looked left and right, stopped, thought really hard to try and trigger another vision, and got nothing. Most of the buildings lacked doors, so she stepped inside of what appeared to be a few houses, but still nothing came to her. It hit a point where she was scrambling from building to building, tilting the remains of furniture and turning over stones in the hopes of finding clues. Normally, she was a patient person, but she also was used to getting things quickly when asked for (or at least with a reasonable ETA), and so this was driving her up the wall.
She thought she had zigzagged through everything she could get to along the entire main street after a while, and with an exasperated grunt, she leaned up against a wall. Her planet was not forthcoming about anything except the fact that Fomalhaut’s people hated their senshi. That was not what she expected to see, even with having no expectations. She wanted to know more about who she was and why she was hated. She could turn the questions over and over and over in her head a hundred times, but nothing new and concrete would come of it.
In that moment, she felt a keen desire to go home. Her planet was lonely, she suddenly felt cold, and there was nothing obvious left to do. Shaking her head, she pulled out her senshi phone and pressed the transfer app to return to Earth. Once again, the world blurred around her, and when everything refocused, she was back in the little nook she’d chosen to leave in. Slumping over, she powered down and made her way back home, disgruntled with her whole experience.
Marta wished there was an easier way to put a question out there other than to have to hunt another senshi down and hope they had the answer. Maybe she could pitch the idea of some anonymous board app where people could post senshi-specific questions out to anyone who would answer. Then again, it would probably disintegrate into memes, garbage, and trolling like most boards of its kind did.
When she collapsed into bed that night, she tried to put her efforts into letting everything go, but she couldn’t. If she slipped too far, she would hear the distaste in that man’s voice all over again, feel the tightness in her chest and the critical eyes of people on her.
Why did it have to be like this? Where was that wondrous feeling of rediscovering oneself that she had heard about? All that was left was a million questions that would remain unanswered.
[Word count: 1014. 2x solo bonus.]
Fomalhaut visited her planet on 5/21. She can visit again on 6/11.
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