The application was finished, and why shouldn’t it be? She’d gotten her letters and her transcripts, written her essays, printed the whole thing out and proofread it six times. There was nothing wrong with it. It was perfect – grammatically, academically – it had a perfect essence of Tallulah. Her personality dripped from her essay and short answers. Her activities demonstrated leadership and a varied array of interests.
“It’s perfect!” said Tallulah, and hit send.
“Thank you for your application!” said the web page. “You can expect an update about your admission status the first week of December!”
Tallulah logged out and leaned back in her chair, feeling accomplished. It was a good feeling, one she liked to bask in, but then there was that niggling, pessimistic voice at the back of her head, the one that said she wasn’t good enough to dream of an Ivy league, that she’d missed her AP exams and her finals last year, that her near-perfect SATs and ACTs wouldn’t count for anything, that her family couldn’t afford it anyway, so why bother-
And then, louder than all that was the protesting voice of reason, the sense of duty and responsibility. Europa’s cool authority quieted all the other doubts and very seriously declared, “You can’t go to Hanover for college. The fight is here.”
“But,” interjected Tallulah hopefully, interrupting the senshi ideal of soldiery, “College is ten months away – surely in that time we could defeat the negaverse—
She was being silly and she knew it, and the responsibility she held to the Basterds, to the moon kingdom, and to the princess wouldn’t listen to her hopeful babble. The negaverse wouldn’t be defeated in ten months. Here was a foe more powerful than any earthly threat. The war had stretched for millennia before it fell into the hands of the Destiny City scouts, and if America couldn’t find Osama Bin Laden in nearly ten years, she had to doubt, deep down, that they’d be able to defeat the Negaverse in ten months.
She needed to assuage her doubts with productivity, though, so Tallulah went to her closet and pulled out the board. Organization was therapeutic. Putting pieces together helped her to find her zen center. And right at the center of the board was the note about the parallel moon. She felt instinctively that her guess was a good one and her chronology correct, but without a confirmation it was just a guess.
“Are there any of them left?” Tallulah asked, tapping on the notebook paper. Surely the prince and princess couldn’t have come without backup, without a faction. Where there was a princess there were senshi, and perhaps cavaliers.
“I think it might be time to find an interview,” said Tallulah, pressing a finger to her lips and nodded. Yes, an interview with one of these mysterious parallel senshi was definitely in order.
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