[REG] Another One Rides the Bus (Proxima/Astraea/Tisiphone)

[Shazari]

Divine Providence tended to be a fan of Larissa Duncan. Under normal circumstances, the world was her oyster, and every speck of dust along the road merely a future pearl. Life was full of opportunity, a hallway with a hundred thousand doors. Normally her life went well.

But then again, sometimes a person was just riding along on the bus from a day of very early Christmas shopping, minding her own business and her shopping bags, when the bus hit a pothole, gave a snap and a bounce, and landed hard on its flat tire as the driver lead-foot-braked them to a hard stop. Such as today. Such as right now.

Larissa smiled sympathetically at the other passengers as they all stood bunched up in a crowd on the sidewalk, trying to huddle close together for warmth without actually touching each other. It was a brisk day, for autumn, the kind that was pregnant with the promise of a chill and hard winter ahead. Larissa used her free hand to flip up the lapels of her coat, so that her face was ringed at the chin with pumpkin-orange corduroy, but it was still a bit uncomfortable. Some of the other passengers were on their phones with loved ones, "I'll be late for dinner" or "Can you pick me up?" or "Find me the number of a taxi service, honey." Larissa wasn't expected, since she was in the middle of term at Crystal Academy, so she just tapped out a quick text to her mother. 'Stuck on sidewalk - bus has flat tire. Brrr! Miss you. 143'

The pothole did not look like a pothole. It was closer to a sinkhole, but then, it was closer to someone having systematically carved a hole in the street for unsuspecting buses to bludgeon themselves apart upon. That was a silly idea, of course. Still, she couldn't help edging away from the crowd and down the street a little, to try and get a better look.  

[candy lamb]

The sinkhole looked a little fresh, actually. Upon closer inspection the gouged macadam looked as though a hole had been freshly blasted in the road. By what? The lines of the hole were clean, just about smooth. It was a perfect hole, not that Larissa went in for holeology. It wasn't completely round -- that would have been suspicious -- but it was a perfect arch downwards with crisp, clean lines. The Miss World of holes.

Then there was a cat.

It nudged against Larissa's ankles. It was limping -- almost affectedly limping, holding up one paw and strolling along with such a horribly exaggerated I AM AN INJURED CAT gait that it was -- well, it was sad, the cat gave a sad little mew and then limped away in an even sadder I guess that's all the affection I can give, for I am a sad, injured cat manner. It was a very pretty cat. More bafflingly than the injured paw, it had a star on its forehead -- oh, that was mean. Somebody had stuck a star sticker on the cat's forehead. Some kid, maybe. It still wasn't nice. It was probably matting up all of the fur.  

[Shazari]

Larissa wasn't much of a cat person. She wasn't much of an animal person altogether. Animals were nice in the abstract, such as "on a motivational poster" or "in a zoo" or "in the woods" or "on Animal Planet" -- but in reality, in a person's home, they involved things like "shedding" or "litterboxes" or "pooper-scoopers" or "wet dog smell" or "the hermit crab escaped and years later we pulled away the stove to install some linoleum and we found it living there off of crumbs and floor leavings, having gone feral." Tropical fish were nice. In a hotel lobby.

But she also wasn't a person for turning a blind eye on an injured creature, as many people tended not to be. The cat looked like it had had a minor run-in with a future serial killer, if all the TV profilers were to be believed. So she followed the sad, woebegone creature even as it unfortunately began to disappear down an alleyway (why had God forsaken Larissa so?) and called, helpfully, "Here, kitty -- shhh, it's okay, I'm not going to hurt you. Come here -- thaaaaaat's it -- pssss-pssss-pssss-pssss-pssssssss." Trying very, excessively carefully not to accidentally set her bags down all the way onto the ground, Larissa knelt closer to ground level. "Come here, princess, come on."  

[candy lamb]

Everyone made the 'psss-psss-psss' noise. It was unknown who had thought that up, and more to the point thought that it attracted cats by making oneself sound like a water sprinkler, but it stuck in people's minds. At least Larissa had followed immediately to the alley: there were a horrifying number of sailor senshi who looked at her doing the sad cat routine and immediately walked on. Assholes. Did none of them watch ASPCA ads? ASPCA ads were aimed directly at making you feel guilty.

Astraea sat down instead, suddenly on all good paws. "I have to give you props for actually following me," she said. This was not preferable to the feral hermit crab. "Nobody cares about an injured cat, especially when it's cold. No, they go the 'cynical, practical' route of well somebody else will take care of it, it's got a collar."

The pretty cat was eyeballing her now. "Look, let's not patronize each other," she said. "I'm a talking cat. You're a sailor senshi. And I hate going through the entire 'no, you're not on drugs, yes I am real, no stop acting as though I just told you you had cancer' rap."

Feral hermit crabs didn't tell you you were sailor senshi (depending on what they were eating).  

[Shazari]

To her own credit, Larissa only spent about three seconds glancing around in the event of a surprise revival of Candid Camera, and that was probably human nature: the human instinct that cats did not talk, did not speak any of the known human languages (well, maybe Esperanto), did not get uppity with well-meaning humans they lured into alleyways. Well, alright, no, all evidence from media portrayals of cats suggested they did get uppity with well-meaning humans just about all the time. But otherwise, her reaction was fairly normal.

She'd heard of sailor senshi -- everyone who lived in Destiny City had heard of them by now. But their magical powers had been the stuff of tabloids, right up there with Bat Boy Experiences Awkward Puberty. Nothing in the actual news had suggested they were anything associated with talking cats, or that Larissa could be one without knowing it. "What exactly is a sailor senshi?" she asked instead, more to the point.  

[candy lamb]

This was looking up. Larissa Duncan was not apparently the type of girl who needed to wring her hands and bemoan her sudden onset hallucination, or her mental illness, or how this was all a dream. This pushed her to the upper quartile of People Astraea Had To Deal With. The bottom quartile contained people who shrieked and Charys Murphy, who had suggested they "go on the road" for "the circus."

"It's a long, long, long explanation," said the cat. "I can tell you that they're not terrorists. Look, try to think of them as -- freedom fighters. Magical freedom fighters. Who're fighting against an organisation. An evil organisation. And I'm not just saying 'evil organisation' to make you look better, I am literally talking about a group who would kill children to meet their ends."

Kill children was a little passive-aggressive, as in: WOULD YOU REALLY SUPPORT A GROUP WHO KILLED CHILDREN. What if the children were unattractive, or bad. Astraea dwelled on how she probably should have said 'old people'.  

[Shazari]

Larissa was slightly distracted with looking at Astraea. At first this seemed like a bad sign, like underneath her nonchalance she was really thinking, 'am I on drugs?' But then the blue-haired girl reached into her pocket, pulled out a folded-up paper napkin, and spread it out in front of Astraea on the ground. She gestured with the flat of her palm: help yourself, no need to sit in that oil slick from where someone parked their knockoff Vespa earlier. Clearly this sort of preoccupation was capable of vying for the high schooler's attention even against killing children.

Larissa waited a few more seconds, clearly expecting Astraea's soapboxing about child murder to be the preamble to her main speech. She was expecting a main speech of some kind, that much was clear -- but when the cat wasn't forthcoming with one, she frowned. "How do we go about fighting said unnamed evil organization?" she finally prompted, her conversation-steering instincts from a few weeks of cheerleading for Miriam Jacobs starting to kick in. She felt, personally, that she'd gotten fairly good at probative questions.  

[candy lamb]

Astraea gladly parked herself on the folded-up paper napkin, and her goodwill to Larissa Duncan went up about twenty points. Had life been a game of Harvest Moon, Larissa would have been well on her way to marriage to Astraea (something not a lot of people would have wanted: the guardian cat would have been hard to court, expensive to marry, and then probably carped at you for the entirety of your wedded existence. Better to try to level up with Sailor Flora, who you could court with weeds and rocks).

"It's a physical battle," she said. "The Negaverse -- that's the evil organisation -- like to take innocent hearts" (any kind of heart, actually, but) "to fuel their own disreputable ends. Your mission, and you must accept it, is to take them out. By whatever means necessary." She was really singing to the Larissa Duncan choir now. "You've seen all those people who they've said were put into comas by that new strain of flu? It's all lies. When you remove a starseed, your special essence, you die or become a monster."

Astraea swished her tail, and then her mouth was suddenly full of orange-and-cyan henshin pen; she delicately dropped this down into Larissa's waiting hands (you wouldn't let that kind of thing drop on the dirty ground) and watched as the girl took another paper napkin out to wipe it. This was probably going to be followed by a spritz of hand sanitizer.

"Your name is Sailor Proxima, senshi of the Nexus. That's your henshin pen."

Charlie Boyle would be bitching about how much better Larissa was getting informed.

"You say 'Proxima Power, Make-Up!' to access your soldier form."

Was Larissa Duncan a bad enough dude to save the President?  

[Shazari]

Antiseptic wipes, in the side pocket of her purse, were a staple of Larissa's daily wardrobe. She accessorized with them every morning the way some people did their wedding ring, or their father's dog-tags. She wiped down the pen, then folded the wipe over itself and tossed it into a nearby dumpster (all too nearby, in Larissa's opinion).

"This is a lot of responsibility," she said, trying to be matter-of-fact about it. In reality, on the inside, she was thinking, this is a lot of responsibility!!!!!!!!!!!!!, but that was hardly the way to impress a magical cat guru. "How do you tell who's a sailor senshi and who isn't? What gave me away?" She did her best to make casual conversation, while she carefully lifted a sheet of tissue paper out of one of her bags and set it on the ground. Once that was done, she set the shopping bags down on their makeshift landing pad, and was ready to try out her henshin pen.  

[candy lamb]

"Your shining heart," said Astraea a little dutifully, as this seemed to be the answer that everybody liked. Your shining heart! As though it were a beacon. Truth be told, everyone had a beautiful, sparkling star seed, and senshi star seeds were just prismatic, especially shining ones. Coloured. Radiant. "There are many sailor senshi all over Destiny City, many still walking around who don't know about their senshidom." Mainly because she was only one cat and most of the others chronically sat on their asses. It seemed a little hard to tell Larissa that. She'd given her a sitting napkin. The sitting napkin soothed her into being 'less of a b***h.'

At this point, they suddenly heard screaming.

"Proxima," said Astraea, a little more urgently. "I think you'd better hurry."  

[Shazari]

Larissa didn't hesitate, but this time it wasn't out of a desire to make nice with her newest acquaintance. Some people were just born with the ability to take decisive action, and in this case, maybe a bit of sailor senshi instinct. She nodded at Astraea, and closed her fingers tightly around the henshin pen.

"Proxima Power, Make-Up!"

It was a bit more of a to-do than she was expecting, but the energy came up and around and through her, and she felt like someone had injected Red Bull directly into her left ventricle. She didn't just feel alive, she felt immortal, impossibly strong and fast and focused. Larissa was bathed in energy, shrink-wrapped in it -- broken and remade and refined into something altogether more powerful than just a human being. It was true magic.

And then Larissa Duncan waited inside that cocoon of magic, and on the outside of it stood Sailor Proxima. She felt capable of changing the world. She was capable of changing the world. It was a rush.



"You'll help me?" she asked of her gray-furred advisor, but she didn't stay to wait for an answer; she turned and ran out towards the screaming.  

[Lady Mist]

Sailor Tisiphone stood amidst a sea of chaos. People were scattering like bugs, the bus that stood prone before her now bore a clean hole in the middle, the people who were inside had scrambled to the door where they were now each folded limply over one another, not one of them so much as twitching.

Tisiphone was staring contemplatively at a small, dark circle above the palm of her hand. Once it was made, she couldn't retract it. Once she threw it, there was no stopping it. She couldn't undo what she had started. Black eyes glanced over at the unmoving innocents. She hadn't been instructed to do something this bold, to attract attention or potential danger, but all she had done was sit around for months. Normally she wasn't so reckless, but she was bored and curious. And hey, she was still a senshi, so if anything it was helping to boost their cause by making senshi get a bad look - which was long since done, but a refresher couldn't hurt any.

Really, though, everything seemed always subtle. People would read about them in the tabloids and dread them, but they didn't truly understand what it was all about. Tisiphone didn't know what it was all about. She did, however, know that power was involved, and she was going to show them that. Dozens of glowing seeds sat about her, and she pondered what she wanted to do first. Would the seed disappear in her void like everything else? Perhaps she could try mix 'n matching people's seeds to see what that would do. Or maybe she could try corrupting it as her own had been. So much to choose from, she sighed to herself.

That was when she felt a flash of energy in the area. Another senshi? She frowned, not really sure if she was in the mood to actually have a proper battle. Tisiphone scooped up the seeds, black eyes sweeping the area to see who wasn't running away.  

[Shazari]

There was no more screaming. They were all dead. No, wait, not dead -- they were slumped over each other as if comatose with weak vitals. Their bodies were curled as though in some strange, unknown agony, but they were neither conscious nor moving. It was as though they were robots whose batteries had died, wind-up toys whose keys needed to be rewound.

And in the middle of them all, cradling some kind of light-sucking hole in the world over her hand, was -- another sailor senshi?

"Hold it right there!" Proxima shouted, flabbergasted but still with the logical awareness that something was very rotten in Denmark. "What do you think you're doing?"

Little glimmering shards of crystal floated, of their own accord, in the air around where the other senshi was standing. They had faint, pale colors, like a very old string of colored Christmas lights whose gel paint coating had mostly worn away. The temptation to reach out and grab one of them was powerful, but it didn't seem like the time to be losing focus. She held her stance, like the pose came naturally.  

[candy lamb]

"Sailor Proxima!"

Astraea had come bounding out of the alley after her, which Astraea would not do for a hell of a lot of people. Practically no people. Very few people. Larissa Duncan had impressed on Astraea greatly. Also, she was up against Sailor Tisiphone, which was like wandering into the first level of Mario and finding Bowser there over the first jump. "Sailor Proxima! Be wary! That's Sailor Tisiphone, a corrupted senshi!"

One of Astraea's terrible failures, but she didn't know that. "Call 'Chain of Consequence' to find your weapon -- hurry!"

Somewhere Charlie Boyle now swore.  

[Lady Mist]

Sailor Tisiphone gave the other senshi a long, blank stare before finally responding, "What am I doing?" She frowned, ignorant of Astraea's silent praise of the new senshi and wondering if she had met the idiot of the village, "Either your observational skills are lacking or you're new. What's it look like I'm doing?"

She paused when she saw a cat come leaping out of the alley, giving a small smile when she realized the creature spoke, "The infamous Astraea, perhaps? I don't remember ever meeting you, but I'm sure that whenever we met before that it was a pleasure."

Should she try and catch the little furball? It would be fun, but Tisiphone had no idea what abilities the cat had (there had to be some reason that none of the others in the Negaverse had caught her before, right?), and really her own power was more for obliterating, not trapping. Not really wanting to get into trouble with Charonite for leaving without her keeper, Tisiphone gave a light shrug.

Well, might as well make use of the situation. She was curious about star seeds, and they assumably wanted the seeds back. Tisiphone pocketed half of them with a quick swoop of the arm, then threw the rest of the seeds at the other senshi, "Ever play the game Perfection as a child? It's where you have to put little shapes into the correct slot before the timer runs out. If you're too late the whole grid pops. I read it in an ad before, sounded interesting."

She took a step back with a neutral face, "Enjoy your playtime." With that Tisiphone leap backwards, twisting into an alley where she became the human ping pong ball up the walls. She peaked out from her vantage point on the roof, wondering if.. what had Astraea called her? Proxima? if Proxima would choose the chase or the lives of the few pitiful humans below.