Welcome to Gaia! ::

Sailor Scylla was sitting on the bakery sign (she'd gotten there from the roof), looking at the piano store across the street and tapping a pen in her teeth. Clenched in her left hand was a notepad, and her legs were crossed neatly. This was a relatively quiet place, she'd found; apparently youma were lacking in desire for homemade cheesecakes and pies. Or pianos. Then again, maybe another senshi patrolled the area. Either way, it was here that she'd found herself, seated comfortably enough. The notepad in her hand was decorated in curliques and scribbles, and the beginnings of an essay for her Religion class that she was taking at DCU. It was a paper on Jung's theory on Religion as a Fantasy, and goodness knew it was taking her longer than the one she'd been dared into writing on the Klingon religion. (That had gotten her asked out on a date when the Professor read it out loud to the class. Twice. She'd politely declined.)

She probably shouldn't be out and about in public dressed as she were, but what better way to be dressed? If she went out as a civilian this late at night, some Negaverse agent could pick her up, and then she'd have to henshin and her identity could be neatly blown. Is she went out 'powered up' then she didn't have to worry about the little details. There was the additional benefit as well of not having to take a few extra seconds to henshin; who knew when she would run into the enemy doing some bit of harm? A few seconds were precious.

But it was time to focus on her paper. Not the details of how long it took her to turn from the gorgeous Jada into the scintillating Scylla.

So engrossed in her essay was she, that Sailor Scylla was an open target for anyone who was walking by to snap pictures, or flip her skirt, or- oh no! Her notebook fell off her lap as she shifted her weight, hands pressed firmly to the cold of the sign. Clang! came a sound from behind her, and Scylla fell from the sign in pursuit of her notebook, landing in a crouch. (It surely looked impressive, she decided, and no need to tell anyone that it was because she'd let herself fall from to high up and lost her balance. She'd been doing that a lot lately, for a girl who never lost her balance when she kept her feet on the ground. She should do that little more often than she had been lately.

There was another person here now, someone she had missed in her distraction- and she would have deserved it were it a Negaverse Agent coming to snatch her life away... Sailor Scylla, bringing her homework on patrol; Ares would kick her a** from here to next year. The trash can was knocked over, a foot embedded in it, and whoever had knocked it over was face first in the snow.

She couldn't help it. Sailor Scylla began to laugh as she bent to pick up her notebook. How silly this situation was! "Are you alright?" she asked finally, the first to speak between the two.

"I'm sorry I was laughing." Jada said finally, when she'd finished of course, and reached with her left hand to brush some of the snow off of the other Scout's shoulders. "You just so happened to startle me right as I dropped this," she held up the notebook, decorated in purple ink, "and I was getting ready for a fight, but..." her palm covered her mouth, eyes sparkling with laughter. "It was just what I would have deserved if you had been an enemy. Me unprepared, just hanging out in plain sight like a ninny, waiting for something to happen."

The black-haired girl held out her hand to the stranger, relaxed. Well, one couldn't be rude! "I am Scylla, Senshi of the Kraken." she told the other girl, glancing her over curiously. Scylla's own hand went to the shaped brooch that hung at her bosom, obviously trying to find some token clue to the other senshi's identity in her costume. Hmm, what was she? "A pleasure to meet you, Denebola. No worries on the clumsiness, we all have our moments. Believe me."

Jada waggled her notebook and debated between truth and fiction. "It could be full of my plans to take over the world." she told her fellow Sailor finally. Mischievously. "I'm sure that would be a more interesting read than the other option." Which was actually what was in her notebook. "I probably shouldn't have brought it with me on patrol, but I was hoping for a quiet night, and it was hard to focus cooped up in the house." Why hadn't she just sat on her own roof, instead of staring out over the city? ... Maybe she had been hoping for a little action after all.

When the other senshi shared her sphere, Scylla clapped her hands in delight. "Dragonflies! That must be fabulous!" she tucked the pen into her hair, rolling up the notebook and stuffing it into her left glove; the action made it difficult to move her left elbow, but she didn't really need either notebook or bending elbow at the moment.

It wasn't as easy as some people made it look. Scylla nodded, commiserating in her own very special way. "It does get easier, with practice." she said finally. "The hardest part is keeping the two worlds in balance. It is all very precarious, stuff sliding around in your life like papers on a tray." In Jada's case, a silver tray.

Distracted as she was by the other senshi, she didn't catch the flicker of light reflected in the glass of the bakery window behind Denebola, cast from somewhere around the piano shop across the street. Two lights, to be more precise, that blinked brightly for an instant, then dimmed.

"Well," Scylla eyed her notebook pensively, "I suppose you don't need to be too worried. I somehow don't think any of my particular plans for world domination are particularly feasible." it was with a dramatic sigh that she finally shrugged, giving Denebola a sheepish grin. The violet-eyes senshi tilted her head back, flakes of snow white falling from her dark hair as she shook her head vigorously. "It is nice to get out, but goodness it is cold!" She stuck out her tongue to catch a few of the flakes, a childish gesture at odd with her tone of voice and apparent age.

The 'older' senshi (she didn't know how old Denebola was, but Jada apparently had been doing this longer than she- almost a whole year already?) looked at Denebola with a wry grin. "Simple?" That was a loaded question if she had ever heard one. "No, I don't think it ever gets simple, especially the more you run into people."

Scylla had been shot at, screamed at, almost arrested, hospitalized; she'd balanced it with her debut, and the personal expectations of her (highly disappointed) wealthy family. And she couldn't make an excuse to her parents, to try and make them understand why she wasn't the perfect daughter that a year ago she had been set up to be. She couldn't explain that she was more than just the spoiled heiress that had been planned. She couldn't imagine trying to hide all of... well... Red lips curved downwards, and dark lashes swept closed on pale cheeks.

This.

Destiny City was beautiful, and dangerous, and hated the very people who were trying to help it. "No," she repeated herself. "Never gets simple. Before I became Scylla- No, before I was awakened to the fact that I am Scylla- I was nothing like who I am now. It is hard to explain that to curious, frantic parents."

There wasn't anything more to really say about the weather. Jada shrugged, sighed. "Global warming messes everything up." she said finally, and eyed her signpost again. There wasn't too much of a point in climbing back up there. It kept getting colder and colder, and she was eventually going to get the flu or freeze to death if she kept this patrol up. Not to mention it would be hard to focus, thinking of how silly she'd been, and how lucky. No more homework on patrol, she reminded herself, and black hair was pushed back out of her face.
'
"It is life-changing," she said finally to Denebola, and offered her arm to the other girl with a thoughtlessness that revealed how 'touchy-feely' a person Sailor Scylla actually was. Wouldn't it be nice to just go for a walk with a new friend? And with linked arms, it meant more body heat- at least one side of each of them wouldn't freeze. Teamwork. "I've been mugged so many times, and robbed, and was in a terrible subway accident. I even got hit by a car! Fabulous excuses, all of them, and the only legitimate truth was the subway."

Something flashed the edge of her vision, and habit had her turning to look at it. When she was a kid, she'd been told that those things you saw on the edge of your vision, that you could never see when you looked at where they were, were fairies. Not all of them like Tooth Fairies, either. Geoffrey- how she loved him, still- had told her about Brownies, and Goblins, and little things that went bump in the night. Nothing was there. Scylla shook her head, turning away.

The sound of glass shattering and a heavy weight flinging itself into her back, something clawed ripping at her hips and shoulders and violent tugging on her hair, startled her. She went face down in the snow, screaming.

On her back was a creature with rabbitlike ears, and a long, snakelike body. Four paws, scales, and it was latched onto the senshi like a hungry thing, trying to claw its way through her hair.

Scylla shrieked as the youma was being pulled off of her, as it had dug its claws past her black hair and was working its way through the upper layers of her skin, aiming for her heart. When Denebola yanked the beast off, it took hair, fuku, and skin with it.

The beasts ears were smooth, not furred, more like leather. When it opened its mouth, it showed shark-like teeth to the senshi holding it, raising its hind legs and starting to scratch at the other senshi, trying to wrap its long body around her like a snake.

Scylla was suddenly very, very cold, and her back was very, very warm. She could feel the blood, but she could feel the burning best, where she'd been injured. It wasn't as bad as some she'd had, but the surprise of it was making her ache all the more. She shoved to her feet, watching the youma scrabble, eyes blurring from the shock of blood loss, combined with the icy weather. She stood up, and felt herself fall back down, landing on her back in the snow, eyes widening at the chill and the pain that seeped into and shot through her open wounds.