Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was like the world was going back in time, making attempts to right the terrible wrongs that had occurred in previous months. The coma lifted, loved ones awoke, school renewed. Life was moving again, and the citizens of Destiny City were all too eager to find normalcy again. To have their lives back. Normal was far from the truth however.
The dead walked the earth.
To be fair, Parker hadn't been dead, he'd just vanished. No one knew where, no one knew why. Well, Elzo had a guess. Derp, the most...special of the guardian cats, (kitten really), had apparently been living with the senshi of sand and his other cat. Just after the grand meeting with the queen of the anti-moon or some s**t like that, the cat had found Elzo the next day, bawling like the kitten she was.

Parker had disappeared. Late that morning the senshi had apparently run into his house, threw his pen at Derp, abandoned his s**t, and took off. The next morning paper also held a clue. Taranis had been photographed at the hospital. He'd brought in a girl who was brain dead, fought police when they tried to take him in for questioning, and then fled. The girl, unidentified, was currently in the coma ward with head trauma. No news on the senshi but he was assumed to be dangerous.They at least got the dangerous part right. ******** sandy balls could hurt.

Elzo guessed something had happened. Parker wasn't the type of guy to run away from s**t. Something had gotten to the guy and drove him nuts. Maybe it was the girl he'd brought in. Maybe she was a victim of his attack and his own guilt prompted him to abandon his post. Maybe it was the coma. The city did have an air of death for the longest time after all. Still, after a few nights of searching, it was pretty obvous. Parker had vanished. His pen abandoned.
Elzo held onto it under Derp's advice. She would have lost it or something. So, as with Elke, Elzo turned to be keeper of a senshi's transformation pen. This was made better when the senshi of course, came back from the proverbial dead. Or decided they were going to come back from where ever the hell they were for the past few months. The text from an unknown number had been stranger, but the second made Elzo freeze.
This is Parker.
The illuminated message was all it took for him to cut the brunch with his brother short, (Marlo just assumed it was another girl friend related issue). Running to his room, Elzo yanked out the small tupperware bin from the back of his closet. The pen wasn't even dusty.

The car was obnoxiously flashy sometimes, and as Elzo drove up to the rustic styled diner, he figured he should have taken the bus to blend in more. This notion was washed away as he reminded himself why he was now skipping out of his Italian class from Sovereign Heights. Parker was back, and that was a tad more important then another lecture on word structure. A more pressing matter then 'where not to drive your shiny car'.

The dinner was as Parker described. 'Shitty'. Still, in Elzo's mind it was okay. The fact that the pretty OK dinner had been called 'shitty' gave more validation that Parker had indeed, sent the text. What wasn't like Parker at all, was the beard. It had taken a total of three minutes of Elzo squinting at the guy hunched over a plate of generic food before his trademark smile broke out. He'd thrown himself into the unoccupied half of the booth. "Dude, when was the last time you bathed? You look like the offspring of a lumberjack and yeti with the fuzz."

"Are you always so off putting to potential customers or is that just reserved for me? If so, I feel all tingly special." Elzo did not care that he very well might have just pissed off the waitress. He also didn't care if she spat in the coffee he ordered right after. He wasn't going to drink it anyway.

Not while his brain was focused on the fact his 'not quite friend or ally but a rather good fellow menshi fellow' had suddenly chosen to come back to town after what had been a really long spell of 'I don't know where the ******** hell you are you never call and not even a single letter'-itis. "Stop petting your fuzz like you're some kind of mastermind killer. Which you might be. Beards are almost always worn by the villains after all. " Elzo hunched over the table, and his body language was obviously now in 'whisper mode'.
Parker might know Elzo's whisper mode was rather more like mildly quite mode. It was a marvel that the hail senshi didn't spill secrets with the loud mouth he had.
"We need to talk."
He made it sound like they were stars in some kind of action mystery movie. With spies, explosions, and sexy girls in swimsuits.
"About the you know what and the you know who."

Elzo probably considered life an action movie. Just with less girls in swimsuits.

When Elzo failed, (as usual), to get any sort of reaction out of Parker, he sat, (more like fell) back into his side of the booth. "Well, last I checked, a handful of people didn't wake up, but most did. More 'terrorists', " Elzo rolled his eyes, "are around, but so are the 'suspicious occurrences'." More eye rolling. Elzo wasn't the best and hiding the fact the terms given to senshi and youma destruction were pretty damn pathetic.

His lip moved. Then he casually switched sides of the booth, getting all cozy and cuddly next to Parker. "Okay, dude. You need a shower, badly." But still, the young man was very close to Parker. It looked really, really awkward. But then, for Elzo it was the only way he could talk without risking behind loud and overheard. "Derp freaked out when you left. Kitten damn near had a heart attack. I've been holding onto your pen. Couldn't risk leaving at your place for your roomie to find or some s**t like that." He sighed.
"We've been worried. You didn't leave anything. After what the papers said, and then you went and pulled a Houdini... I mean ********, that's not like you man. You're not a guy to just leave s**t half done or run away. What the ******** happened?"

Elzo backed up a few inches at the idea that it was a date. Some reactions never changed. Like how Elzo's eyes narrowed and a frown set in as his mind attempted to figure out why Parker of all people was not aware of things. Parker had always been aware of things. At least five times more aware then Elzo was in any case. "I dunno, does the headline, 'Senshi Rampages at Hospital' ring a bell? It showed you over some girl's body. I went over and tried to snoop, but, even with the coma they wouldn't name any names for fear of mixing patients. Which happened anyway but that's another story. POINT IS" Elzo poked Parker in the arm.

"You vanished. Why? I just- What happened? No phone, no pen. Parker, man, you're one of the last people I would expect to ditch town when we needed you the most." The we being the senshi. Elzo almost winced at saying it. How many senshi had died due to the sudden rise in youma, in new lieutenants? The cats may have done a fine job awakening newbies, but they were almost always unprepared. Death was becoming a very real aspect to their 'secret' war.
"Some of us wondered...we wondered if they'd gotten to you somehow."

As if he felt it coming, Parker lifted his coffee cup from the table just in time to avoid Elzo’s fist thump. He looked at it as if to take a sip, but then set it back down. His eyes roamed across the opposite side of the booth before finally coming to rest on the blonde boy beside him.

Elzo had a point. A few of them. It was true that Parker was more dedicated to patrolling than he had been to much of anything as of late. It was true that he donned his super shorts night after night despite the beat downs he faced on a regular basis. It was even true that Parker cared about people. One person in particular. Who was now dead. Parker clung to that thought until a dark frown burrowed into his lips. It took him a few moments to return to his impassive facade.

“Don’t talk to me about loss,” he said sharply.

Parker turned his cup in a circle. “Logically, no fighting would mean no death,” he said, almost absent-mindedly. It was philosophical babble that wasn’t supported by reality. Both sides would have to stop fighting for it to work, and Parker was not so delusional that he believed the Negaverse would settle for a firm handshake and a promise to be real sorry in the future. “But I have no desire to be picked off like a fish in a barrel,” he finished, tapping at the coffee cup’s handle. “I never said I had no intention to fight. But I’m nobody’s hero. None of us are heroes. We are just people trying to kill the other people who want the thing that we do: power.” It was not his most eloquent turn of phrase, but the beard helped him look wiser. He lifted his cup to his mouth and took a sip.

Parker set it back down and then turned to gaze suddenly at Elzo. “I came back, didn’t I? I lost someone important to me, but I still came back. We have things to accomplish, and that’s why I needed to see you, not because of some desperate need to reconnect, or to share my problems, or to, I don’t know, apologize.” Was this entirely true? Parker wasn’t sure himself. He had started down a road, and it was where he knew he had to go.

One finger jabbed into the counter. “I’m done waiting for glittering princesses to fall from the sky and deus ex machina our asses to safety. I’m done believing that a Moon Princess exists, let alone that she is some benevolent figure who is watching over us. Nobody was watching over Dani when--” Parker stopped himself. He couldn’t make this about her, though of course it was almost entirely about her. He needed to say what he wanted to without blurring it into his own personal turmoil.

He began again, “No more meetings run by airy czars who have done nothing but lead us by the nose for a year. I don’t care about Astraea, or Kunzite, or whoever else the ******** they want to tell me I need to listen to. The only voice I want to listen to is my own. We all need to start taking personal responsibility for this war. We need to organize independently, and tell the royalty to go carry their banners elsewhere. There is no such thing as the divine right to rule.” His voice was low and hushed. A passerby might think they were discussing some sort of upcoming gang fight. In a way, they were?

Parker relaxed back into the booth. “We need to organize. We need to plan attacks. We need to actually schedule patrols and hold people responsible when they don’t show up. We need to install our own safety nets for senshi in peril: warning signals, escape plans, complimentary power teams. Most of all, we need to start building a database of intel on our enemy. Who are the individual players? What do they look like? What are their weapons, their typical attack strategies? Who are particular enemies we should look out for?” His plan was punctuated by hand motions.

It occurred to Parker that he had been talking for quite awhile. The booths around them were empty so there was no threat of someone overhearing. Still, it was evident from their body language that a very serious conversation was being had. A few patrons of the diner had thrown leery glances their way.

Once more, Parker took a sip of his coffee and let his eyes stray forward. “We,” he began, raking his hair from his eyes with a free hand, “all of us have been too reactive to their plans and their initiatives. It’s time for us to make a strike.” But what strike? Parker did not say. He merely fell silent and waited for a reaction.

If Derpraline was the chief guardian cat, something was horribly, horribly wrong. It wasn't that Parker couldn't appreciate the little kitten's tenacity, but she was several crayons short of a full box. Several. Crayons. Short. He didn't care much for what he heard of Astraea, but there was little doubt in his mind that she had to be a better option. Still, she was gone. Derp was apparently the next best thing. Lovely.

Something Elzo had said stuck out. "Eternal? You've gone eternal?" His eyebrows raised upward, but he shook the skepticism away. No time for it when his casual friend was spouting some nonsense about dreaming of Serenity. Who cared? Certainly not Parker. If she wasn't on this planet ready to help, then she was of no use to him.

He propped one elbow up on the table and leaned forward. "Look, I don't care if there are 100 girls in dresses claiming to be moon princesses. I only care about results, and so far, no one has produced any. What has Chronos done? I have heard of Zodiacs dying, not saving the world." It was a crass statement, but Parker did not back off of it.

"It isn't a game," he said sharply, again. "But I am back. I'm no leader, but I can organize information. And information is key if we are going to have any success. I'm serious about this database on the Negaverse. We should create it, but..." He straightened up. "I can't do it alone. And I'm not charismatic enough to call people together and unite them." Parker gave Elzo a stare that said don't make me say it.

In his time away, Parker had a lot of time to think. He found Dani's death to be the most constant thing on his mind, but second to that were the fantasies he had about how he could have prevented it. That was the wellspring from which this database idea was born, fostered by his own tech-savvy tendency to organize information in accessible tables. And of course, even deeper than that, Parker planned to use these means to identify, track, and destroy the blue-haired Negaverse agent who had taken Dani away from him.

His eyes dropped to where Elzo was poking him in the leg. He could sense his henshin pen, even if he didn't understand how. Parker reached out and took it into his hand. It felt strangely heavy, but he thought little of it. "I don't know people like you know people, and if this is going to work, we need people. Lots of them. I will organize our database, but the other things? Those are things that we would need help with, people who could handle the responsibility." There was more he needed to say, but Parker was finding the conversation draining.

So he took a moment to sip his coffee.

"I'm trusting you to get the word out, but I'm also trusting you to tell the right people. We need eternals showing us how to increase our power. Even though," he eyed the blonde boy warily, "the means by which we change might not be plainly evident to me... there must be a reason. Greater power means greater force means greater success. I'm not going to watch anyone else I care about die." The last sentence was perhaps too honest. Parker dropped his eyes to his coffee. It was his port in the storm.

Parker didn't mind being called a douche. He could argue it, sure, but he knew why people saw him the way they did, even if he didn't agree. From Elzo, the insult felt like nothing so it treated it the same way. "'God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him,'" he murmured. It was a quote from Nietzche. He felt it applied to Serenity too. "You can keep your head in the clouds. I'll stay rational. I don't care why you help. I'm just asking that you do."

One hand tucked his henshin pen into his pocket. His other dropped a few bills on the table. "You aren't getting your coffee. Let's go." Parker ushered Elzo out of the diner and on to the street.

The pair of boys started off down the street. They turned down an alley and walked down it until they were under the cover of several dumpsters and even more debris. Only then did Parker pull out his henshin pen. "If you are waiting for a miracle, Elzo, then you are going to be sorely disappointed." He raised his pen up.

"Miracles don't exist."

And then he transformed, but it felt different. He felt stronger.



Sailor Taranis felt changed.