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Bell had been invited over, partly because she was the smartest person Tallulah could think of to help get the board updated, and partly because she was the only Basterd who picked up their phone and could spare the afternoon. But mostly because she was smart.

The board had been taken out of the closet and laid on the floor for easy access. Scattered around were six colors of sharpie, four pads of sticky notes, and a pile of newspapers basically amounting to the entire summer. Tallulah had been steadily working her way through them trying to catch up on what she'd missed - here and there she clipped an article for keeping, mostly about the coma wave and about mysterious deaths around the city.

It was slow going, but luckily Bell would be here soon and she'd be able to help make sense of it all. One way or another, the board would be organized. Lost time would be made up for.

She'd had her vacation, and now Sailor Europa was back with a vengeance.

The slightly harried and over-eager way that Tallulah opened the front door implied that she'd just run all the way across the house. "Bell! Hi! Come in!" she said happily. There was a slightly manic gleam in her eye, the sort of gleam she got whenever she was working on something she was seriously obsessed with. "Thanks for coming! How was your summer?"

Tallulah did not need to explain how her summer had been as she led her friend towards her bedroom. She'd spent her summer in a coma, following nursery rhymes and candles and walking around in messy hallways and eating poison licorice and sometimes hanging out in a weird post-apocalyptic version of her neighborhood with Pyxis.

She shooed a ginger-furred cat away from the board as she sat down, "Pssh, Wendy, go play somewhere else. Go find Casper," and indicated a few things she'd already moved around. "I think there's gotta be a few factions we're not accounting for," she said, thinking of some of the strange characters she'd met in the dreamworld, and how the dreams in general didn't seem like something the Negaverse could manage to pull together. "I'm just not sure who they are."

"Yes!" agreed Tallulah, and beamed at Bell. "Ooh, how was it? Your summer sounds so much more productive than mine, I spent it hooked up to IVs and catheters and dreaming about god knows what."

She pointed to the notes Bell was holding. "What've you got there?" she asked, and started rifling through a stack of newspaper clippings at the foot of her bed. "I've been trying to catch up on the news - Not a whole lot on the comas besides that a lot of people were in them, pretty much everyone who was downtown at the time. But it looks like I've missed so much!"

She passed an article over to the other girl.

"Senshi and lieutenants have been turning up dead all summer!" she explained. "And a bunch of civilians, too. It's sort of good news for our side, because it means we're finally starting to take some officers out with us, but I'd rather no one be dying..."

She looked pensive for a moment and then added, "The press doesn't understand any of it, they think it's a gang war and some mutated version of the flu."

Tallulah bit her lip thoughtfully. "I think that, probably, it's just the result of everyone getting stronger. I don't think we managed to off any of their high-ranking officers, someone would have bragged if they'd gone out and bagged Charonite. No, I think it's just newbies biting off more than they can chew."

"Kunzite told us to use deadly force, didn't she?" He? Pronouns got complicated when you had to account for past lives. "I think those deaths were just ordinary fighting between us and them."

"But the comas," she continued, "Those I think were something different. I mean, the only reason I can see for the Negaverse putting all of downtown to sleep is so they could harvest their star seeds. Which they didn't, clearly, because like 95% of the people woke up."

She'd heard a few people hadn't, but she hadn't tracked down the names yet. Tallulah shrugged. "They're weapons users. They're not big on magic, and whatever the comas were, we were having shared dreams. I was with Pyxis for a while, and with Polaris for a bit, and some girls I knew from school. Not dream versions - it was actually them."

No, the comas were decidedly not the Negaverse's style.

"The coma patients waking up was on the front page yesterday morning, I just haven't gotten around to reading it all yet," nodded Tallulah, and pulled a newspaper off the top of her stack. "Alright," she said, flipping the pages carefully.

She read, "Alexander Rasmussen, a student at Hillworth and a coma patient, was found dead in his room by nurses in the late afternoon. Nearby, and also deceased, was Corinna Grant, not a coma patient... They think that one might have been a murder suicide."

Had Corinna been one of her classmates? Tallulah wasn't sure. The name sounded sort of familiar. She creased the paper down the middle and kept reading. "Coma patients Jesse Alvarez and Raymond Gordon also flatlined shortly before the other patients began to wake up.... Oh."

Tallulah set the paper aside and sniffled a bit. "Ray Gordon was my English teacher," she said quietly.