Welcome to Gaia! ::

The oddly revealing black and pink outfit wouldn't have gotten a second glance out of Brielle in most situations. People worse things like that in the mall all the time. There were even stores that seemed to cater to that sort of fashion sense, ones with dim lighting and heavy, musky perfume wafting out of the door. Even the feathers she could have justified. They were a bit more eye extreme, but Brielle had never actually gone inside those types of stores, so could not say that they didn't sell that sort of thing.

The cracks, though?

Cybele had had the same cracks in her chest once.

The cracks could only mean one thing, and it made Brielle's blood run cold.

She hadn't wanted to think about the Negaverse right now. She'd just wanted to pick up a few things. Unfortunately, Chaos was inescapable, and that meant that Brielle was leaving her food court lunch on the table and speedwalking to the nearest bathroom.

She found a stall, shut the door behind her, clicked the lock, dug through her bag for her pen, and was grateful that she'd figured out how to henshin without having to shout out any phrases loud enough for a group of people in an enclosed space to hear. There was still a slight silver glow as the guise of Eternal Sailor Cybele came over her, but hopefully no one was paying attention.
If the were, hopefully her glamour would save her.

Cybele shoved the blouse and makeup she'd just bought into subspace, and she shoved her antlers and wings into the small menstrual product trash can as well as she could, so that she wouldn't attract attention.

Then she strolled out of the bathroom and out towards the Chaos aura that she still felt, her arms crossed in front of her. This senshi had interrupted her lunch. They'd made her power up in a bathroom. She wasn't in a good mood.

There were certain rules that needed to be followed when draining energy in a crowded place like a mall. Cybele knew that. She even knew the specifics, since Sylvite had been an aficionado of mall draining, and so she'd spent a few afternoons in an overly cushioned chair in the General's office going over the finer points of it.

The main finer point was not to make a scene, and so Cybele was not really expecting a scene.

Unfortunately, it seemed that this particular corrupt had managed to cause a scene without even trying. His outfit had drawn the attention of more than just Cybele, which meant that even once she had tracked him down, which wasn't hard at all between the aura and the ostentatious clothes, she was stuck standing sort of awkwardly to the side while he received a lecture from a red-faced mall patron.

It meant that Cybele, still not exactly happy about being pulled from her lunch or having to henshin in a bathroom, was finding herself in a situation that she had never found herself in before. She'd thought about a lot of philosophical things lately, but she hadn't thought about this.

Like she'd told Anser, everyone in the Negaverse got a single chance from her before she started turning to extreme violence, in case they were feeling trapped and miserable and there was a possibility for a quick purification.

Did giving them a chance mean saving them from awkwardness, though? Cybele chewed her lip. She glanced at the senshi.

He didn't seem to be trying to get out of the situation with draining or starseeding. That was a point in his favor, she supposed.

Fine.

She took half a step towards the angry man. "Are you quite done?" she asked him, her voice almost but not quite polite. She then turned towards the senshi. "Don't worry about him, Anthony," she told him, softly, and with a smile, because underneath a lot of things, she was an actress. "Let's go get our food. It's finally ready, and I'd hate if it got cold."

He followed along with the act, which was convenient. That act allowed her to return to her small table, only a few feet away past a bit of food court crowd, and to sit down in front of her half-eaten grilled chicken wrap. This was even more convenient.

There was still the problem, however, of figuring out exactly what it was that she was doing.

Even in the short time that Cybele could remember, and in the shorter time since she'd purified, Cybele had met plenty of agents. Once she'd branded herself a traitor, most of those meetings had been violent. The people who hadn't attacked her had seemed lost and desperate, and those conversations had quickly turned profound.

This didn't seem like the best place to get profound, and it certainly wasn't a place where she wanted to get violent.

There were no fries to share, but she nudged over her bag of apple slices in case he was interested.

"Cybele," she answered him, and a moment later, she added, "Senshi of the Hunt."

Her tone was even. If there was any threat there, it was subtle, although instead of eating her food she was watching him.

"But, I have to ask," she said, her eyes flicking to the crack in his chest. "What are you doing in the mall in broad daylight in that outfit?"

The apple did not taste like bitter almonds, or rat poison, or really like anything else suspicious at all, except perhaps the tiniest bit of fridge funk. They tasted exactly the way that food court apples always did. Cybele reached into the bag to take on of her own, although this was mostly because she was hungry, and not at all because she was trying to show anyone that her food was safe.

"You're not a cosplayer," she pointed out. "You're a Corrupt." She supposed he might have been a cosplayer out of uniform, but that was beside the point.

She took a bite of her wrap at this point. Her eyes were still on him, but he was hardly doing anything that was making her feel the need to go defensive. A moment passed, while she chewed it, and then she added, "My General? When I was a Corrupt?"

There were already entries on all of this in the Database. Cybele saw the way that his eyes widened when she said her name, and she wondered what it was that he'd read about her. At least she knew she couldn't really give the Negaverse information on her that they didn't already have.

"That's it's own story, but anyway. She game here in uniform to drain. She loved it. I don't think she ever got caught, and she tried to get me to do it, too. Taught me her tricks."

She put the wrap down and folded her hands in front of her.

"And now that I know those tricks, I'm keeping an eye on the place."

This was only tangentially true, but she said it with confidence anyway.

Cybele froze halfway through a bite when a certain name came out of the boy's mouth. It was good that she had to chew before she said anything, because it would have been, Jet killed my father. I couldn't care less what he wants me to call anything.

Having to swallow her food gave her the seconds she needed to push down the thoughts of Empyrean's starseed glittering in Jet's palm, and the events that had followed. She sucked in a breath through her nose, and refocused on the face that was in front of her right now. This one probably hadn't been involved in any of that.

She was giving him his own chance, the same as she gave everyone else.

"So, you're draining," she told him. Gently, like Sylvite had done, but still. It didn't matter what he called it, or what stories he was telling himself to make himself feel better about it. The Negaverse's stores of energy ended up causing so much violence and ruining so many lives, in the end.

"You should stop." This was said with a bit more force. "Tell Jet I was, what's the word? Persuasive." She interlaced her fingers and folded her hands back until the knuckles cracked, and finally let a hint of threat creep into her voice. "He knows my record," she said. "He'll believe you."