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Europa arrived, impeccably punctual as always and clothed in what was definitely a new, gleaming-white set of fuku. Well, new to Polaris at least. Europa had been breaking in this gear for weeks since awakening from her coma and realizing how much time she'd lost. One by one, she was re-establishing contact with her team and putting together a better picture of what had happened while she was asleep.

Polaris had been the hardest to get in touch with - between school schedules and spotty cell-phone service, the other girl was practically unreachable. Europa had finally resorted to text messaging, and it had worked like a charm because a familiar teal-and-purple clad girl was waiting for her by the swings.

"How long did it take you to figure out it was all a dream?" she asked her friend as she approached. It was just an optical illusion that her new uniform glowed, the combination of unearthly ice blues and bleached white catching the moonlight and turning blinding. "In retrospect it all kind of reads like the plot of Inception - Did you get to see that movie yet?"

"You-" stammered Tallulah, suddenly engulfed by Polaris's rather enthusiastic hug. "You thought I'd really died, the whole time? God, god, Polaris-"

She managed to place a hand on her friend's shoulder, and looked the other girl in the eyes. "This is me, and this is you, and we're both alive, and could you - could you please let go of me because it's kind of hard to breathe."

She was let go. "It was an okay movie, I mean," she added. "It was basically Ocean's Eleven but inside Leonardo DiCaprio's head." In the basest of terms. She'd make it required viewing later when she was trying to get everyone to understand how the comas had worked, as far as she could tell. "I haven't quite figured out what was going on," she added, "But we were all basically having the same dream."

"When I died I went to a kind of limbo-place and-- Oh, it would be so much easier to explain if you'd seen the movie!"

Dreams were a difficult metaphysical concept to explain - it was best to reply on Christopher Nolan movies as metaphors. "Anyway, there was this other faction messing around and they caused the whole thing - I'm still working on getting the details, we're going to have a meeting soon and I'll tell you the whole story there."

She looked expectantly towards the bike trail that circled the park. "We're going to patrol, right? You've been practicing, haven't you?"

Europa sighed in exasperation. She wasn't exactly fond of her new power, particularly because she hadn't yet figured out under what circumstances it would actually be useful. "It's like my old one but less useful," she sighed as they strolled down the bike path.

"I make it hard for enemies to move," she explained - this was standard fare for the senshi of the deep's attacks. "But now I make it dark, too. And then--"

She tapped her broach and sighed heavily as she kicked a pinecone down the trail. "And then I glow like a lightbulb. My broach, my tiara, the stones on my boots... It makes it easier to see but it also makes me a target."

Europa looked very seriously at Polaris. "Lame, right?"

"Pffffft," snorted Europa, and pointed first to her bare forearms and then to the swimsuit-like bottom of her uniform. "And what do you call this?" she asked. Really, she didn't mind it, was just making noise for the sake of making noise - you didn't swim competitively and have issues with scant amounts of clothing - but it made dealing with Castor unbearable.

"Castor's off the team," she sighed, since her train of thought had gone that way. "I spoke to him a few days ago - either he's on to bigger and better things or he's being an a**."

With Castor, of course, it was hard to tell the difference.

"Everyone else says they're still game, though," she said with a shrug. "And we have a lot more supers, now, so losing Castor's not such a big deal."

Even if he was the only Eternal of their bunch.

"I'm just worried they might have gotten it anyway," replied Europa, stepping ahead of her companion. She was edgy, just a few weeks out of her coma and it seemed like the Negaverse hadn't taken a summer vacation. The bike path didn't look too shady, but you had to have constant vigilance if you wanted to catch the bad guys.

"Have you been following the obituaries?" she asked, peering around a bush. Was that a youma? No, just a cat, and not even a very interesting cat. "Lots of senshi," she said dryly. "The kids don't even henshin down when they die. Lieutenants, too."

It made her feel cold just imagining it, could see the television detectives pulling her costumed body out of a dumpster, stripping her down and even then the glamour wouldn't wear off. She'd be a Jane Doe, locked in the morgue unidentified and unmourned. Europa swallowed, hard.

"You notice anyone go missing?" she asked. "Any classmates? Friends? Teachers?"

Europa shook her head - she didn't know Nerissa, might have heard the name in passing but certainly had never met the other scout. Lots of people were moving away. She had a complete list of the coma victims and coma deaths stashed away in her desk drawer but plenty more of the missing could be accounted for simply by urban abandonment.

"Kunzite's dead?" she asked the other girl quietly. Europa hadn't known Kunzite, either, not as well as Polaris by half - just knew the hear-say from Regulus and Castor. She'd seen the girl at the meeting, all gleaming white uniform and polished steel. Kunzite was dead? It didn't seem possible.

"But Kunzite was always so... so strong," she winced. How could Kunzite be dead? And if Kunzite was dead, then what did that mean for the other rumored Cavaliers? Maybe the Negaverse really had gotten the upper hand over the summer, even if the comas hadn't been their doing.

"I think we ought to try and talk to Astraea soon," added Europa, biting her lip. She'd have to try to find the cat - she'd know what was going on.

Europa couldn't help but nod in agreement. The cats were notoriously hard to find, unless one had taken a liking to you or else had decided that it needed to have a word with you now and there was no negotiating it. They came and went in a manner that was, in fact, rather befitting of a cat.

"They're impossible to get ahold of," she groaned. "I mean, I can't even find Abel most of the time, and he's on our team."

This was a mild exaggeration. Abel was strictly Pyxis's cat, and if he helped out the Basterds it was because he was in the mood to, and not because he owed it to them. "Yeah," she sighed. "There's a memorial at Meadowview, too. Our English teacher died, and some classmates."

But her suspicions about Corinna Grant could wait.

"If we haven't found a youma or a lieutenant by now, I don't think we're going to," she added quietly. It was never good to tempt fate.