Even without having very many concrete ideas or expectations about how such things should have gone, though, Lete had to admit: she felt somewhat let down by how the process here……seemed limited to her sitting at a picnic table and watching the clever kitty tinker with the pen. Powering up didn’t change her outfit any, either, the way that Hybris’s fuku had changed when he’d leveled up. Although she didn’t want to seem ungrateful—especially when, her perpetual upset with Murikabushi notwithstanding, he had taken time to warn her that Chaos Mauvians primarily worked for the Negaverse and only helped Mirror senshi out of the goodness of their feline hearts—Lete had to allow herself room to slouch and pout about it when she called out the new henshin phrase she’d been given (Lete Star Power, Makeup!) and saw………
………the exact same outfit that she’d been wearing the last time she powered up.
Per the Mauvian’s instructions, all she needed to do was Mirrorwalk to see the effects of her power-up—and sure enough? Lete found a mirror hidden in an alley near the park where the Mauvian had found her, and as soon as she walked through it, she watched her fuku shimmer and transform before her eyes.
Glancing around herself, she got the idea that it looked really nice, her souped up new outfit. The gauzy overlay seemed longer, she’d gotten a fine lining of black lace around her skirt, and some beautiful inlay had developed on her silver bracers, some kind of seafoam green gemstone that matched the seafoam highlights throughout her fuku.…… Without a mirror, Lete couldn’t entirely tell how she looked, what sort of effect somebody would’ve gotten from seeing the full effect of her new fuku—but oh.…… Oh, that thought contained the fruitful seeds of an idea, didn’t it?
An idea that, incidentally, just so happened to liberate Lete from the need to either make nice with Murikabushi before he ******** off from the Court, or be really annoying about trying to beg Hybris or another, more powerful senshi for rides to Mirrorspace.
She’d never gone on her own before, but as she lingered in the space between the mirrors, Lete tried to remember what Murikabushi had told her about how to get to Mirrorspace. This was honestly very difficult, considering how over-talkative he was—never mind how often what he had to say sounded like little more than “blah blah blah, I’m big, you’re small, I’m smart, you’re dumb, I’m right, you’re wrong, and there’s nothing you can do about it, and that’s why *I’m* allowed to make big, sad, sparkly goo-goo eyes at a General-Sovereign but you can’t even say that Negaverse girls are CUTE without me making a whole Federal case about it”—and frankly, Lete deserved a medal for putting such genuine effort into concentrating on recalling Muri’s instructions about how you had to just……linger, and focus, and try to slow yourself down instead of simply passing through one mirror and heading for another one somewhere else in town.
She closed her eyes to try and help that happen. When she opened them to see the pale, mirrored walls of the common room around her, Lete……absolutely definitely did NOT gasp, or squeal in delight, or pump her fist in the air while joyfully spinning around and thinking to herself that <********! Take *THAT*, Murikabushi!! What are you gonna do with all your useless simpering when people learn that they don’t need you anymore!!!
(Lete did not do these things because it would have been undignified—certainly not the aura of Knowing What She Was Doing that she wanted to project at a Dark Mirror senshi who had now achieved Super status for herself—and because nobody else was around to call her out on how she had absolutely done them. As far as anybody else who heard about this trip would be concerned when Lete told them about it later? She had reacted to reaching Mirrorspace on her own with the utmost solemnity and the deep, abiding seriousness that accompanied unlocking such power. She had absolutely conducted herself in a manner that recognized how important it was that Mirrorspace trusted her with such phenomenal power! Even if she wasn’t as powerful as Prince Remarque, any kind of power-up was still very important and deserved to be taken seriously!!
And you hadn’t been there with her when she’d first made it to Mirrorspace on her own, so how did YOU know that Lete hadn’t behaved in that exact fashion!!!………… Plus, some little part of Lete felt like Demeter probably wouldn’t have liked Lete being so arguably mean about Murikabushi, even within the safety of her own head. But what Demeter didn’t know about Lete’s fight with her soon-to-be-ex-Mirror-bro wouldn’t come back around to hurt Lete, so everything was fine.)
Somewhat more importantly, however, the common room had mirrors practically everywhere, like almost every surface in Mirrorspace (it was, after all, kind of the Dark Mirror’s Thing), which meant that Lete could get a full look at herself. She didn’t need to search too long before finding a mirror that struck her as The Right One and……oh.
Oh.
She looked <******** *gorgeous*, didn’t she?
Sure, a lot of her fuku had the same basic elements that it had had before—the black bodysuit, the lilac skirt and chest-bow, the seafoam green overlay—but something about the whole picture felt more grown-up, more glamorous, more like some kind of highborn princess who could’ve been lounging around on some fancy, plush sofa in the middle of a sexy party, drinking a bottle of ice wine that would’ve cost more money than some people made in their entire year. The bangles on her upper arms had gotten more intricate, growing little whorls of metal that matched so nicely with the bracers. If anyone asked Lete (and no one had, but she didn’t care), the arm-bangles only enhanced the image her fuku seemed to be going for, this visage of some opulent princess who had so much everything at her disposal, all the time, always, that she could only really feel bored and half-alive.……
Lete’s tiara felt like the biggest change, as far as she could tell. All the little gemstones remained in place, both in the main band around her forehead and in the bubbly cauldron-looking hairpiece, but more silver sparklies had grown in around the bubbly hairpiece. Silver beads that framed the gemstone bubbles……silver threads, containing more silver beads, connecting the bubbles to the base of her tiara……silver leaves that looked so delicate, Lete felt afraid to touch them……even ghosting her fingers too close to the leaves while she traced them along the silver threads, it made Lete’s heart leap up into her throat……
And Murikabushi wanted to ******** simp for those White Moon sluts in fluffy wings instead of staying where he could be a real ******** princess. Idiot. That cruel huntress princess from the Negaverse bank hadn’t had a tiara and hairpiece like this, had she? No, of course she hadn’t. Because Mirrorspace loved its senshi more than the White Moon or Order or whatever could even dream of loving them.
Taking a few steps back from the mirror—and honestly reluctant to look away when she was so ******** pretty, but also kind of getting bored with inspecting her own appearance—Lete thought about what she could do with herself in here.… Mirrorspace was her playground now, and she didn’t have to deal with any ******** chaperones telling her to behave herself, or to play nicely with the other kids, or to let Jimmy have a turn on the swings, or to stop running so fast because she’d fall and die and maybe put her eye out or whatever. But as she glanced up and around at all the corridors that she could have gone down, Lete didn’t know what she really felt like doing.……
It would’ve been helpful, she thought—and massively so—for there to have been rules written down all official-like. Maybe she’d need to bring it up with Remarque or Tantalus or some other senior Mirror senshi, because not having rules written down felt a lot like Lete might mess something up without realizing, which would have been terrible.
Personal preference and all, but Lete liked for her assorted adventures in breaking rules to be deliberate. That way, she could look cool and rebellious instead of ignorant, stupid, and probably kind of pathetic.
She took off toward a hallway without much concern for direction or where she thought that she was going. She could trust Mirrorspace to take her somewhere fun and overall safe, to NOT let anything unfortunate happen to her. Mirrorspace was good to its senshi when they met it on its level, when they gave back to it by doing their part of gathering energy instead of wringing their hands about how it might make their ******** White Moon senpai stop thinking they were cool or whatever. (For which there was a pure, simple, and perfectly easy solution: just don’t tell them. Order cops couldn’t act like cops all over you if they didn’t know you were doing things that they considered cop-worthy!! Such a clean, elegant answer, and it was honestly intellectually offensive to Lete personally that anyone could possibly struggle with the idea.)
Lete’s adventure, however, did not last very long. In the middle of the hallway, she stopped in her tracks, staring down at the floor—and, more specifically, at a crystal that seemed to call to her.
Which felt incredibly silly as soon as Lete crouched down to pick it up, because it wasn’t like the crystal was anything particularly special. One of the gray ones that Mirrorspace coughed up for its senshi sometimes. Not that Lete was going to look a gift horse in the mouth or prove herself terribly ungrateful, like *SOME* people would have happily done, no matter how many presents Mirrorspace gifted them with (because *SOME* people were rude-a**, selfish bitches with *NO* ******** manners). But there hadn’t been a reason for Lete to feel like the crystal was something special for her and her alone.
As she put the gray crystal into her subspace, though, Lete gave herself pause.…… During their last trip here together, before Muri had stormed out and abandoned her and left Lete to find rides to Mirrorspace with other senshi as she could, he’d thrown a whole barrage of Mirrorspace crystals on her. Thrown them out like ******** garbage, even though Muri’s realm didn’t have hardly anything on it, and he could have used those crystals to make his realm into something special, an ideal world entirely of his own creation, the way that it should have been.…… Among the handful of crystals that Lete pulled out, two crystals glimmered at her, annoyingly and pointedly different than the others: a dark, rich violet, edging close to black but too vibrant to really get all the way there.
Murikabushi had explained those crystals to her once, when he’d taken her to his realm. One of them had been sitting out in the open, begging for his attention, and he’d mostly acted annoyed and inconvenienced that Lete had even wanted to see his realm. Per what Muri himself had said, the almost bruise-looking crystals were, like, uniquely special to him and his realm or something, and they grew black roses when you cracked them open? (Which??? Aside from the obvious point about how perfectly that fit Murikabushi’s ******** aesthetic, who the Hell was so flamingly arrogant that they could look at Mirrorspace giving them a special gift, unique to them and them alone, and just toss it away like they didn’t care at all?!!!)
Positively fuming, Lete turned on her heel. She didn’t really know how long it had been since she’d come this way, but it didn’t matter. She made it back to the common room more than quickly enough, and immediately felt even sillier than she had before for allowing herself to think that the gray crystal had been uniquely for her alone. A new crystal sat on the floor before the mirror that Muri had taken her through before, the one that led to the Mirrorscape and the Mirror City. This crystal shone in seafoam green, with whorls of lilac contained within.
Although discovering this new crystal in her own colors helped soothe Lete’s nerves a little bit, she didn’t want to entirely let go of the anger and determination keeping her motivated at the moment. Screwing everything she could muster to the sticking place, Lete stormed into the Mirrorscape. Sure, she had all the time in the world—or, like, however long it took for Mirrorspace to kick her out for a while and be like “Sweetie, no, you need to go eat a meal and hydrate” because unlike what *SOME* people were hellbent on thinking, Mirrorspace really, genuinely ******** CARED about its senshi and their wellbeing—but nevertheless, Lete didn’t want to waste a second. Not when she had so many THINGS that she wanted to do, now that she could bring herself to Mirrorspace and play to her heart’s content.
Stomping into the Citadel, Lete allowed herself a moment to pause, mostly because she decided to glance over at the guest book……thing? She’d read the note that Eternal Big Sister Acubens had left there for him, explaining what the guest book was and what it did, but……did Lete dare?
Did she dare disturb the universe by pulling a pen out of her subspace and scribbling a message to Acubens that Muri was a treasonous little b***h who was going to ABANDON THEM for the White Moon because he didn’t ******** understand—categorically refused to ******** understand—how good he had it with the Dark Mirror, all because White Moon senshi could go ******** around in outer space or whatever?
Taking a deep breath, Lete shook her head at nobody in particular. No, she did not dare. Not today, anyway.
Tonight, Lete had work to do. She had a giant floor-mirror to climb on, and when it transported her to her own little field of white—this blank canvas of sand that she had been gifted—Lete had a realm to cultivate. Someday soon, she’d need to bring Demeter here, to let her see what you could do with a Mirrorscape realm, and how good she could have it in Mirrorspace.…… Even if Demeter didn’t want to join the Mirror herself, Lete could still create a refuge where her girl could come and be safe from anybody who’d ever dare to harm a hair on her precious, ginger head.
Something that Deme would like, when she came to visit…… The idea struck Lete like lightning, almost leaving her breathless. Including the one that she’d just found, and the several crystals that Muri had thrown on her before leaving, Lete had six each of the gray crystals and the green ones.…… She had plenty of space around here, and Muri had said that you could sometimes combine the crystals, even though he personally hadn’t bothered trying anything because he was a <******** idiot who simply did not understand how much better Dark Mirror senshi had it than literally everybody else, and how much room and opportunity they had to be themselves, to create the reckless abandon and perfect freedom.
Holding a deep breath, Lete cracked open one of her green crystals and one of her gray ones. Letting them onto her white sand together, she created a plot of soil, lush and ready for tilling. Even though it didn’t have any plant life on it yet, Lete felt like bringing seeds from outside would prove a good idea, like maybe they’d grow faster or more easily.…… Moving a bit away from that plot, she repeated the process once, then twice, then thrice.…… As she worked her way down to her last green and gray crystals, Lete decided to get really wild about the combinations here: Muri’s crystals had allegedly created the thicket of black roses on his realm, so Lete took out the two of those that he’d thrown at her, and cracked those open alongside the green and gray crystals.
Just as the crystals had done before, these ones combined to make a sizable plot of soil, ready to be filled with seeds—but the addition of Murikabushi’s unique crystals changed the game up somewhat. Although Lete still had plenty of room in which to create—to plant seeds from outside, or maybe to crack open some green crystals (at least, whenever she next managed to find some, since she’d used up her whole supply to make these plots) and see if any of them would outright grow new plants—part of this soil-plot was taken up by her own thicket of black roses, already in full bloom. Same as the ones from Muri’s realm, they were pure black. No matter which angle Lete inspected the petals from, she didn’t catch a single hint of bloody reds or rich purples. Despite her enduring outrage at Murikabushi for being a heartless, selfish slut who was going to abandon the Court when there were barely enough of them to survive as it was, the flowers that his crystals made were positively entrancing.
But the seafoam and lilac crystal—the one that must have been a special gift for Lete and Lete alone—it was practically burning a hole in her palm, begging Lete to crack it open. So, standing around the center of her realm, between all the plots that she’d set up, Lete took a deep breath and cracked her special crystal open.
As she did, the crystal poured out little bubbles that looked so much like the glass balls Lete had gotten from that dragon merchant guy back during Star Festival. They floated in the air before her, dancing aimlessly and giving her realm some pizazz and sparkle. Peering more closely at one of them, Lete gasped softly at what she saw: an opulent ballroom, decked to the nines and tens and well beyond that, and herself in the center of the dance-floor, waltzing with Demeter to a tune that Lete could imagine but couldn’t hear.……
Lete probably could have watched that vision of a dance all night, if not for knowing that she needed to get home and help with preparations for Thanksgiving dinner. Yet, even though she felt like Cinderella as she went to leave her realm, she also felt, somehow, more at peace……as if something inside of her had settled, and now, nobody could ******** around with her……as if she’d never punch herself in the face with her own magic again.…… That was a good feeling, and an even better one came with it: the eagerness vibrating through Lete at the thought of getting to bring Demeter here to see what she’d created, and to maybe give her some space in here as well, if she wanted it.
Maybe she wasn’t one of Mirrorspace’s senshi, but Demeter was still Lete’s girl, and didn’t that mean she deserved the best?
wc: 3,268.
