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When Perry Westerman was growing up, he always knew he was destined to be an adventurer of some kind. As a kid he idolized movie protagonists like Indiana Jones, and his large family seemed to have spent more time going on long trips outside of his hometown of Chicago than actually living there. Over the course of his youth he'd made many trips to Italy, visited Australia while he was in high school, and ultimately ended up able to live out his dream as a field zoologist wandering around the Andes Mountains. He felt like a pretty fortunate man. He'd even returned to the States knowing that he probably wouldn't stay rooted there for too long.

What he never would have guessed is that his next destination for his travels had ended up being goddamned space.

And that his job description meant he would be interacting with a lot of teenagers, for reasons other than him being a high school teacher.

"I think you'll be fine so long as you don't add a white pointy hood to your ensemble, kiddo," he said, while lifting the bun off his sandwich so he could add another dollop of hot sauce to it. It had taken a great deal of repeated explaining to get him to understand why it was necessary, but after a handful of meetings like this Kurma had been finally convinced to power down when they were going to Steak & Shake, or public establishments in general. So the sizable beacon of cosmic energy was no longer something Sidra had to worry about. Unfortunately, the trade-off was that Perry sometimes had about as easy a time following these conversations as Kurma as a whole was followable.

He was at a table. Alone. With an 18-year-old girl. Perry was remarkably good at acting like there was nothing odd about this. At least they were related, technically, in an extremely esoteric and ultimately incomprehensible sort of way, so there was that to hang on to. That, and along with the quasi-familial-ties, they were both technically older than could be measurable in years or decades.

Then again... wasn't everything?

"Okay, well there's question one," he said, putting even more hot sauce on top of the cheese fries. "What's the deal with the whole Elysion thing? We couldn't make heads or tails of the place, and that was before the space beer."

Talking about drinking with a minor. Classy.

"Wait, so is this the Serenity that everyone has their panties in a twist over? Or is this the old one? Or some other one I haven't heard of yet?" Perry asked, giving a puzzled frown over his own shake (his was banana). "We got a few too many Serenities running around and it's starting to give me a headache." Or maybe that was from the ice cream. "Don't the Zodiac kids have a Serenity in their club?"

He pondered the riddle while sprinkling a pile of french fry seasoning over his food. It was rapidly becoming apparent to Sidra that Dr. Westerman probably spent his undergrad years subsisting off of condiments alone, and never truly recovered from it.

The oversized locket was regarded with a quizzical eye as he took another long (and most likely headache-exacerbating) sip from his shake, an unhealthily large forkful of cheesy, saucy and salty fries at the ready for him to chomp down on next. "I think you'll need to check the back of the book for that one. Or you could ask your cat, if she could stand to stop being a b***h long enough to take a question." Astraea had yelled at Kurma for being a 'migraine-inducing riddle fountain' a couple of times. He had since decided that she was not a very helpful individual.

"All I have figured out about senshi is that they say a few magic words and then Chris Hansen's suddenly able to arrest a bunch of people. But I'm guessing you tried that part already."

"Yeeeeah, I don't blame you putting that one off," said the teacher. "Like I said." Giant b***h.

He devoted himself to polishing off his sandwich as Sidra talked, occasionally pausing to add yet more tobasco. At a certain point he ended up giving up on the bun being able to support enough and ended up pouring a bunch of sauce onto the plate, dipping the remaining bites on it like the American man he was. If Suki had been here, he probably would have been gaping in abject disgust.

"And there's question three," he replied. Now he was using forkfuls of condiment-overloaded fries to mop up the tabasco sauce he hadn't dipped his sandwich in. "Quiet observation only works when you're only around to take notes... and I don't think we showed up just to sit around and watch. You got any thoughts there, kiddo?"

Then he grabbed some of Sidra's not-cheesy fries, and dipped those in his shake.

Perry had ordered some sort of obscenely unhealthy hot fudge sundae on top of a brownie. Perry Westerman ate like a real man and had no regrets, and before the evening was over he was bound to buy something else: it always felt wrong for him to go home without a dessert for Allie. Lately he'd also gotten into the habit of picking something up for Suki as well. Even if the exchange student didn't outwardly accept the gift, it always ended up disappearing from the freezer the next day.

"I don't exist to fight. That's what senshi are usually around for." This was stated as a simple, cold fact, as much as it sounded like it should have been an opinion. Steel-toed boots would have just ended up making his feet heavy, at the end of the day. "I'm here because there is a void where knowledge should exist."

Even as a scientist trying to explain earthly things, he had always known that.

"You might be here for a reason, but there's more to all this than fighting or watching," he said. It took another couple of moments before he continued talking, because his sundae was delicious and he wanted to enjoy it before it started melting, god dammit. "There's other voids to fill." Nomnomnomnomnomnom. "So what do you think it means to be you, and at this time?"

"There's a tipping point in Elysion?"

Now he was using fries to clean off his ice cream plate.

"But we just established that it's outta bounds for us both. What's that tell you?"

"There's supposed to be a balance to these things, I guess." He wiped his hands off on his napkins, and began running his fingers through the loose locks of hair on the right side of his face. Perry used to firmly tie the whole thing back and carried no remorse for stragglers, but like his companion letting some of it stay loose was a compulsion he couldn't ignore. It just looked weird to wear it otherwise.

"Or maybe a balance is what the universe is trying to achieve. It's a changing, learning thing." There was still a bit of his shake left in the cup, which he noisily eliminated through his straw. "Nothing is perfect, not even you. Otherwise there would be no mistakes, and the universe wouldn't be as quiet in those places as it has become. But look at what this all has led to. There has never been this many senshi gathered in one system at any given time... ever."

The waitress came and picked up their plates. Perry gave a good-natured thanks, and reassured her that everything was just fine. She might have blushed a little. He didn't notice.

To be fair, asking him if he was worried was kind of a pointless question, no matter what state of being he was in. Dr. Westerman was not, by virtue of his own nature, much of a worrier, and awakening as Kurma had magnified this tendency a hundred-fold. He had never fretted much. Cosmos was the fretter. Kurma could lackadaise his way through an erupting volcano.

"Good sign or bad sign, it's definitely something," he replied, leaning back in the booth a bit and resting his elbows on the table, his fingers steepling together. "But setting aside how it came about, look at what it means. Think about where this is going."

Perry paused for a sip of water before continuing on. And then, his answer to the unspoken question he had raised was pretty simple.

"This gathering has closed the distance."

While the two of them had opted not to sit by the windows, the one on the far wall closest to them still did a fine job of showing the bits of sky that weren't obscured by streetlights and buildings. Above Destiny City, there was a familiar collection of stars winking at them -- and they all had names, may of them ascribable to senshi that had been tasked with patrolling the streets below. "One obstacle we have always faced was how far apart everything was," he explained. "More of our travels were spent in the searches than they were in the destinations. But now, things have suddenly gotten a whole lot simpler in that regard."

The circumstances behind which were incredibly, depressingly grim. In spite of this, Perry offered a small smile.