Welcome to Gaia! ::

"Unexpected to you, maybe, but I spent a very long time looking for it." And longer still making sense of it, at least sense enough that she could guide someone to find their own worthiness there. It reminded her that she needed to find Haumea; she knew he had ascended, she had heard the rumors and at times could feel something glimmering on the edge of her senses. Even now, her eyes swept up and stared into the distance, knowing.

She just didn't know if she was ready for that, yet.

"And then I decided to spend a long time looking for something else."

A something else that was currently throwing a temper tantrum over a little cloth and elastic. It would have been almost amusing if Alkaid were the type to laugh - or if Tanzanite weren't the type to punch someone for it.

"Tanzanite, if it wasn't you, are you telling me that Metallia herself sent me ghostly images in the crystals? I would think just telling the Queen to rip you out of there would have been much easier."

“Fair, we all perhaps search for things that might seem surprising, or strange. Haumea seems…pleased though, or satisfied at least. He was quite driven to become as you are. I wonder how many others will be the same.”

He took a breath and let it out slowly, turning to Tanzanite again as Alkaid turned questions to the one time General Queen, and fumbling to catch the sling-shotted eyepatch.

“If you prefer not, it can wait. Perhaps we can find you a spider first.” He gave her the quirk of a smile, just a hint at the edge of his mouth though it was swept aside quickly enough as she revealed what had happened.

Betrayal - how many people had taken it on themselves to betray their fellow officers, to chase some self serving cause? To hear such a familiar name added to the list?
His fingers clenched and unclenched for a moment, tangling elastic cords around his fingers and then letting them fall loose again, dangling precariously at the tips of his fingers before he pinched it between thumb and fore finger to snap at the rubber band himself. The snarp –thwack- of elastic rebounding against his fingers, the memory of scorching flesh as he branded some of those traitors, the coup that had led them to work side by side with white moon senshi… just one more name for a list in his personal files of those to watch carefully.

His mouth was dry with scraps of things that were harder to remember than he would have liked. But there were enough pieces there, patchwork with what he knew now.


“Well… then perhaps we should follow the words of Holly Black, the pair of you at least suit a quote by her, very well.”

He reached out with the eyepatch offering to try and put it back in some more comfortable arrangement
“They wore their strange beauty like War paint.” He quoted.

It seems to me that there are more senshi, and more children on the battlefield then when I was last fulfilling my duties. They could stand to loose a few.”

“Oh come on,” Tanzanite all but pleaded with Alkaid as she let the General King put the eyepatch into place, “Don’t make me eat my own words. I’m nauseous enough already.”

She was, after all, still upheaving bit and pieces of solidified crystal on a semi-regular basis.

“We start with the Generals, bring them in line,” she spoke, a sudden sternness to her voice, “They need to be held accountable for the failures of their subordinates, as I was held accountable for the failures of mine.”

Tanzanite uncrossed her ankles to reverse which one was on top, looking down at her own mangled legs, and spoke steadily as she crossed them again, “Perhaps that will motivate them to stop ******** up and focus on training their teams. Those who can’t accomplish the task have no place in the Negaverse.”

And as far as Tanzanite was concerned, the only way out was as a seedless corpse unceremoniously flung off of a cliff.

“We cannot attack until we have a weapon, and our weapon is a united, single-minded force.”

It was obvious that Tanzanite was annoyed by the furrow of her brow and the way her voice rose and fell in intensity with every other sentence.

“We begin by retraining or removing those who can’t grasp that concept.”

Alkaid laughed. It was a strange sound that echoed behind her teeth and died without the air it required to expel it past her lips but it was a laugh none-the-less. Tanzanite, per usual, was drawing out emotions and reactions that Alkaid hadn't felt in years and while it was damnably strange, it was almost a relief. Maybe she wasn't too far gone to do this, to help them.

"And we have Generals that would rather die than follow the orders of the General Sovereigns, we mustn't forget that."

Alkaid's fingers flexed and curled where she had twined them together and settled them at the small of her back. The energy within her was itching for something and she knew in that moment that she would have done anything to lessen the stress this knowledge put upon her and upon them. They were her equals, these Generals, and she could not have fathomed their actions herself. To refuse orders was to balk command and the repercussions of that once been severe enough that Tanzanite had been killed for it. Why hadn't Metallia punished them in kind? Another question without an answer and perhaps not best posed in present company.

"To be stagnant is to lose ground. All they need to do is wait for us to degrade to the point of no return and then they can overpower us like they did the last time - but what will they take, then?"

What if they had gotten into the depths of the rift and sabotaged the tower or, worse, found Tanzanite? They didn't know what they stood to lose. She shifted and began to pace slowly around the space the two sovereigns occupied, fretting quietly to herself for a moment. When she glanced back up her face was as impassive as ever but she felt the heat gathering around her starseed and recognized it for her passion. Something else she had Tanzanite to thank for.

"I can help. I'm no use gathering energy but I have years more knowledge than most of our active Generals and what I don't know I'm sure I can find in your old records, Zink, or provide people that do know."