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Genevieve Prideux was staring at a plate of cheese fries and lamenting her life. Her awful, horrible, heartbreaking teenage life. If she was the type of girl to curse – and she most certainly was not – she would have been tweeting '******** My Life' from her iPhone. It would have been followed by an emoticon that included no small number of semicolons. She was, after all, the type of girl who tweeted. It was a dark secret which she kept shamefully hidden on the very last application screen, behind shopping apps and math apps and every other app you could think of.

As Charys Murphy said: Only twits tweet, kid. As Ray Gordon would say while looking over the rim of his glasses: Two step it to my office, Murphs. Have a weekend, Jenny-V.

Never have a good weekend. Never a great weekend. Just “Have a weekend, Jenny-V.” Ray Gordon was a master of saying something without saying anything. Especially when talking to seventeen year old girls who hid their notebooks whenever he came too close.

Ray Gordon. If only there was an app for that.

It was Saturday morning, only a few months before graduation. Senioritis had hit the teachers almost as hard as the students, leaving her free time... well, absolutely free. There were no final book reports, no last minute research projects, not even a 'What I Want To Do After High School' essay to be written. There were only Saturday morning cartoons and a big plate of cheese fries to be eaten on the patio outside of the type of place that would serve you cheese fries at eight in the morning.

“Two step it to my office, Murphs,” Genevieve mumbled, her annoyance made difficult to maintain by her friendship with Charys and her inability to think of Mr. Gordon's quotes without also thinking of how handsome his eyebrows looked when he raised them over his glasses. Her jealous muttering rattled on for a few moments, interrupted by cheese-fry-to-mouth maneuvers, before winding down to a punctuating string of, “Mehmehmehmehmeeeeeeh,” that made her sound like nothing so much as Beaker from the Muppets.

It was all insincere, of course. Genevieve Prideux could only ever halfheartedly dislike someone, and even then it lasted only until her plate of cheese fries had been devoured. In truth, she knew as well as anyone that her silly high school crush was, in fact, a silly high school crush. She also knew that Ray Gordon was more likely to come to school naked – oh, how she wished – than to cross that line.

Denial was a powerful tool for a teenage girl who fell in love with practically every boy she met. Maybe it was reading too many romance novels and longing for her White Horse Moment.

Maybe it was just being a seventeen year old girl.

Genevieve was just about to shovel another fry into her mouth, already open with a long sigh, when Grendel made his move. She jumped a bit, shocked out of her bitter reverie by the sudden contact. She leaned over the arm of her wrought-iron chair and-

“Oh my GOD,” she all but squealed, dropping the fries onto her plate and reaching for Grendel with a gesture that could only be properly described as 'Grabby Hands'.

If Jenny wasn't busy cooing at the cat, her laughter would have melted into one low, continuous, “Heeeeeeeeeeee.”

Letting him settle into her lap, she took to scratching behind his ears and down the back of his neck. Her fingernails snagged on his collar, putting a quick end to her thoughts of bundling his fuzzy butt up and carrying him home. He was clean and free of fleas or ear mites, meaning he already had a home. Much as she would have loved to carry him back and hide him in her room, she couldn't abide the thought of taking him away from someone. What if someone else was looking for their kitty?

No, she would just have to settle for a Saturday morning.

She noticed a blue eye roll towards her plate, and a coy smile turned up the corners of her lips. Cheese-covered fingers plucked up a fry, one slathered in half-melted cheddar, and plucked it from the plate. The cheese trailed behind in long strings which broke as she lifted the fry high into the air before holding it out towards Grendel.

“Now, you're not going to die if I feed you cheese, are you? Dogs die if you feed them chocolate, you know.” Jenny said this with the air of someone talking about Very Important Things.

It took only a moment before Grendel's folly became apparent, and Jenny's finger stilled against the back of his head. Her blue eyes were focused on his forehead, their previous glimmer now replaced by an unmistakable sadness. The pause was brief, before her fingers took to scratching beneath his chin. Some senshi might have thrown him to the ground, other might have choked him then and there. Perhaps she should have – Astraea would have said that perhaps was a word used by pussies and poets, and that she didn't see a beret on Genevieve's head – but such was not her nature.

For a senshi, Genevieve was one hell of a pacifist.

The star was similar to the one Ophelia had, but black in color. It was only by virtue of the blonde guardian cats explanation that she understood what it meant. Corruption. The mark of the Negaverse. These were all things still new and shocking to Genevieve. The idea of taking the very essence of life to sustain evil was enough to make her stomach knot in sickness. Still, she could not feel that fiery spark of anger and hatred that seemed to fuel so many of her fellow senshi. She couldn't dredge up the intensity which seemed to fill the dark-haired Kunzite.

She felt only the same deep-seated pity, the need to understand the how and why of it, and the overwhelming doubt that anyone could be so corrupted, so twisted as to be unfixable.

“You should say thank you, you know,” she said, and made a point of scratching the star gently.

It seemed like an eternity passed between them, blue eyes on blue eyes, mouths pressed into quiet lines. It was a moment of tension and indecision, each evaluating the other as a potential enemy. A sworn enemy. Something deep inside said that people who fought for the opposite ends of the Good-Evil spectrum should not be enjoying cheese fries and sharing scratches. They certainly should not be doing so in broad daylight where anyone could see.

The scandal.

For her part, Genevieve smiled quietly. It was not the kind of smile that said 'I don't care'. It was the kind of smile that spoke volumes about just how much she did care, and just how sad caring made her. Her brows were arched upwards, her fingers still moving to scratch his chin. She could have pleaded with him, tried to make him see sense. She dared not henshin, lest she give away that identity. Of course, she could put him in a burlap sack, toss him in the river, and save so many lives in the process that Astraea would hand carve her a trophy out of ambergris.

Instead, she reached over her plate with those pink-polished nails and let that sad smile have reign over her features.

“You're going to have to help me with these. If I eat them all myself, I'll get fat as a house. Of course, Tracy Turnblad was and she got the man of her dreams. Maybe that's the key.” Genevieve shoveled a fry into her mouth and made a bitter scowl that did not suit her. Her face knew this, and eased back into a gentle smile only a moment later. She grabbed another fry and held it out for Grendel.

“I donf hafta change nams n'moof to anuffa shity now, do ah?” Jenny mumbled around a mouth full of cheese fry, licking some melted cheddar from her thumb.

“Well'n dat caysh,” she swallowed, “You can call me... Tracy.”

Genevieve was doing this because she didn't know what being part of the Negaverse really, truly meant. Sure, there were stories. Sure, Astraea and Kunzite insisted that each and every one of them were out to kill and harvest the energy of hundreds of thousands of people. Ophelia said much the same. She did not doubt the Negaverse as a whole was wrong and bad and blacker-than-the-blackest night or what have you, but that didn't mean that every single one of them were unredeemable, did it? It didn't mean that there wasn't a shred of good anywhere inside of them.

Jenny believed, at her very core, that such thorough corruption was impossible. Everyone could somehow be forgiven. People were good, and that was a belief which Genevieve would cling to until reality pried it from her.

Clearly, she had never met Queen Beryl.

She plucked another fry off the plate, her mind a world away from Ray Gordon, Charys Murphy, or any other such thing: “So do you know a guy? Red hair, green eyes,” Genevieve scrunched her nose and lifted a hand as though to indicate how tall. She quickly realized she could not do so while sitting, and dropped her hand back to her side, “Looks like a pirate.”

“You have a few pirates?” Jenny marveled, her blue eyes wide. She crunched a fry between her teeth, chewing it in thought. The senshi had princesses and zodiacs and talking cats – well, the Negaverse had talking cats too – but they didn't have pirates. Genevieve's heart was already aflutter with the prospect of saving a dashing, pirate-like man from the grips of evil. He would be so overjoyed with his salvation that he would sweep her off of her feet and whisk her away to his ship. There, they would sail the high seas, living a life of action and adventure!

Jenny sighed happily before dragging her mind back to the real world. A world in which Grendel was still a ball of anxiety, all fluffed fur and flattened ears.

“You can relax, you know.” She lowered her voice, “I might be a senshi, but it's silly to be afraid of a seventeen year old girl.”

Jenny spoke around a mouthful of cheese fry, moving the half-chewed mass to one side. Apparently, this was as far as her manners went.

“Well,” she said, still thinking the whole senshi business to be a Cartoon Heroes world of silly people in silly outfits. Genevieve, like many, had yet to realize the importance of their situation. She had also yet to realize the danger of it. She had yet to see someone killed, only put into a sleep from which she had convinced herself they would eventually wake. Surely they would someday find their Princess – Jenny's hart swelled at the thought – and all of those people would be fine. The Negaverse would be defeated, all of their evil doings undone, their black hearts cleansed, and they would all be fine.

She would be fine.

The cat would be fine.

The world would be fine, just like all the stories said. The good guys win, the bad guys lose, and they eventually return to life as normal.

Everything would be just fine.

“It's not like they're going to know just seeing me here,” she smiled, pressing a finger to Grendel's nose and making a soft squeaking sound, as though she were pressing button, “I don't think I look very much like a senshi.”

Her laugh was high pitched but soft, with only a little bit of squeakiness as she choked it off towards the end.

“Only the one!” she exclaimed, not bothering to hide the relief in her voice. Her tone added the unspoken thought, 'and thank God for that.' “The redhead. Big sword,” Jenny held her hands up to mimic the size of it, realized again that it was bigger than her arm span, and dropped them back to her lap once more. She frowned, and looked awfully upset about this apparent pattern.

“You don't think I'm too short, do you?”