Welcome to Gaia! ::

Petalite might not have been old enough to get into the bar. But Bo Hanley was. He was about three sheets to the wind, and it was barely 1AM. The music thudded against his ear drums. Bo stayed close to the DJ booth and swayed lazily to the beat. He had come out that night with another boy from the swim team. His name was Phillip, and he was world famous for his willingness to pick up the tab for anyone who ever went out with him.

Needless to say, Phillip and Bo went drinking together a lot.

Polishing off the last of his rum and coke, Bo decided to hive up his post by the DJ booth and went in search of Phillip... and a bathroom. He didn't spot the familiar brunette crew cut of his drinking buddy anywhere. That was to say... Phillip was not in the line to the bathroom. After spending all of half a second in the line, Bo said, "No, thanks!" to no one in particular and stumbled drunkenly out into the chill night air.

He looked left, looked right, and then casually began to pee on a bush. Somewhere mid-stream, Bo noticed Phillip stumbling off into an alley with this hot chick. "Highfiiiiive," he slurred, air-fiving his teammate from several feet away. It was not until the cute girl turned that Bo recognized her. It was a fleeting glimpse as she dove back into the alley, but the senshi of summer remember the leopard skin quite well.

It was the Nega from the snowball fight.

Half-drunk and all-worried, Bo circled behind the building to quickly henshin and then made his way not-so-stealthily to the alley. Sailor Neso fully intended to sneak up on the girl. Unfortunately, his knee felt a bit like jelly. He tried to crouch low, but tripped instead, faceplanting in the center of the alley and knocking over not one, but two metal trashcans in the process.

"Phillip, man, that lady is bad news!" he said, voice hedged with slurs.

Well, this certainly wasn't going to end well.

Sailor Neso stared in confusion as Petalite lifted the orb of energy from Philip. It didn't look like a starseed, but the Senshi of Summer could only assume that it was something nefarious. "Heeeeey," he drawled. "Put that back inside him, okay?" It was hard to be commanding from the ground.

Dragging himself to his feet, Neso batted away Petalite's high heel. He stood, through not particularly straight, and leveled his gaze on the girl. "You shouldn't be doing evil, man," he said, shaking his head. "You seem like a nice girl." Everyone seemed nice to Neso, granted. He gestured vaguely in Philip's direction. "Just put that back in him, and we'll all go get a drink, okay?"

Apparently this was Neso's idea of diplomacy.

Neso swayed to the left, then centered himself, then swayed to the right. If any of the Zodiacs saw him now (maybe even Andeon!), they would be thoroughly disappointed. Senshi were only useful when they were in control of themselves. By stampeding drunkenly after Philip and Petalite, Neso had put himself in an incredibly dangerous situation.

One hand raised and crossed over his chest. Apparently this was his anti-starseed-stealing shield. The other raised slowly, crept toward the bustline of the Nega, and then froze. "It needs to go back in him," he said finally.

And then Neso slipped his hand into Petalite's cleavage and began to forage for the energy orb.

Sailor Neso hadn't really put much thought into the whole hand-down-the-dress thing. He didn't think about anything in advance really, definitely not while intoxicated. The Senshi of Summer simply knew that the orb in her cleavage belonged to Philip, and, therefore, it was his duty as a civil servant to retrieve. Tonight, that meant hand-diving all over some Nega chick's breasts.

His fingertips had just brushed the orb of energy when Petalite pulled him suddenly towards her. One diving hand was caught between them and slid farther down her top inadvertently. And then she was kissing him. For a second, in spite of himself, in spite of Chronos and Adira and all the other senshi, Neso let himself kiss her back. It was a natural reaction that was normally pushed away by the sick pulse of dark energy. Under the sway of alcohol, that resistance was dulled, lessened.

So Neso kissed Petalite back, if only or a moment.

Then the Nega broke it and pushed him back, freeing his hand but not the orb of energy. "Hey, I need that orb--" he started to say, but his words were cut short by the swing of Petalite's frisbee. Neso ducked -- not quickly enough. She clocked him in the side of the head with the frisbee. He staggered backward, flailing one hand out to grab the frisbee before she could hit him again.

In one quick motion, Neso snatched the other side of the disc and tugged it toward him, bringing the Nega along with it. He caught her awkwardly in his arms, and then swayed unsteadily, collapsing into a heap of trash a few feet away from Philip with her in tow. "Look... you! Girl. Negagirl. Give me the orb, and then we can figure out how to uncorruptify you." Neso tried to pin her arms to capture her, but ended up just sort of wrestling her deeper into the trashbags.

Maybe it was the stink of the garbage, maybe it was the creeping realization that the pretty girl rubbing all over him was not Adira, or maybe it was the first sign that Neso might be headed down the road toward sober thinking -- whatever it was, Neso sat up suddenly with Petalite more or less in his lap. He grabbed the bustline of her dress and pulled it outward, blatantly staring down to her bellybutton.

The orb wasn't there.

"It's gone," he said dumbly. Apparently he was still too drunk to keep a secret, not that he was good at doing that anyway.

In a tangle of limbs, Neso unceremoniously dumped Petalite out of his lap (and back into the trash) and then began frantically searching the ground for the hint of a green glow -- for the thing that she had taken from Philip. "Hang on, Philly-boy," he called, throwing a bag out of the way.

The two powered teens ripped through the bags, pulling and shifting. Neso stumbled forward on his knees. One hand ripped toward a green glow, but it turned out to be a discarded glowstick. He made a displeased noise and then chucked it aside, kicking at another bag.

Another glow! Neso leaped forward, chin scraping the ground painfully, only to realize that the thing he was grasping so fiercely was actually just a lightbulb stained in some yellow muck. The more he dug, the stronger the trash began to stink. Neso turned up his nose, but kept on trucking.

The alcohol made his head fuzzy and blurred the bags in front of him. Just as he stood to look somewhere else, Neso caught a churning glint. It would have been prudent to slyly grab it, but the Senshi of Summer was too intoxicated to think that clearly. He dove headfirst into the trash with his hand extended in the hopes of catching the orb -- or at least crushing it so that the Nega couldn't have it.

Sailor Neso didn't like unpleasantness, but he was relatively okay with wading through trash, as it was. He spent so much time living in his own filth and stepping in animal crap while camping that a little foul trash odor did little to tickle his sensitivities. Still, it was never nice feeling to accidentally plunge your hand wrist-deep into an unidentifiable container of sludge.

His fingers fought to reach the energy orb, all six feet, five inches of him sprawling forward. Petalite grabbed him around the waist and yanked him backward, but he still managed to grasp it in his hand. A triumphant laugh poured from him vodka-soaked lips. And then... confusion. He had it, but he also had a Nega wrapped around him and no clue how to put that energy back in Phillip.

"Play nice!" he said dumbly, wriggling free of her and sprinting toward Phillip. Perhaps he could make him eat it? Maybe force it in his eye. God help him if it was a suppository...