What is this place?

Penelope looked around her to find her bearings and immediately gasped. All around her was the blackness of space, sprinkled with stars, but what made her stomach flip flop was the large planet that loomed nearby. It was not Earth… no, the planet had none of the blue, green, and white that the teenager had so often seen in her school textbooks. The planet was large, filled with strips of tawny browns and creamy whites, and with a giant spot that made the planet as distinct as its size. Jupiter. She was by Jupiter? But… how? How had she gotten there, how could she stand and breath? What was going on?

Half in a daze, Penelope bent down to take up a handful of dirt, but it was unlike any soil she had ever seen. It had a strange, pinkish hue and was cold, chilling her fingers as she ran it between them. Yet, as alien as it was, it also felt… familiar, as though she had seen it once long, long ago and had merely forgotten. A urge overwhelmed her to transform, an action which made no sense to her. She had just landed on this planet—no, moon, she corrected herself. It was more like a moon, craterous and lifeless. Either way, the action of transforming made little sense to her, but she went with the dream logic of why not? before raising her henshin pen into the air, “Pasiphae Power, Make-Up!”

The henshin felt different, and Penelope immediately began to panic. The two strings of beads that laced across her chest shot down into this new, pink earth and held her tightly, far more tightly than they ever had before. She jerked against them, but they would not budge so much as a centimeter. As the beads multiplied and pressed against her skin they burned, and it was with a gasp of relief that she finally emerged from their hold, fully in her fuku but shaken to the core. She fell to her knees, giving a yelp when an even sharper pain came from her side, as though she had been freshly pierced by the Negaverse agent’s javelin, as she had in real life.

Instead of rejecting or fighting the pain as she thought she would, Penelope instead embraced it. The gloved hand that rested on her side, warming in blood, did not defend the wound from harm, did not act to avoid further pain. It just… rested there. When she looked down she saw that her bodice was ripped, much like it had been when she first got injured by the javelin. The wound itself, however, looked nothing like its original. Instead of leaking blood, tiny, shadowy fingers stretched out from the gap and ran along the length of the wound, sometimes pressing inside the gash, sometimes pinching the tender flesh in order to stretch and compress it. Their touch ground into the wound like particles of sand, like dust, as though the remains of the youma she had defeated had come to seek some sort of revenge. It hurt. It hurt more than she had ever hurt in her entire life, more than she even thought it should hurt, but she could not bring herself to stop them. The very thought made her sick, and her body, as if determined to allow them to continue, remained rooted to the spot where she had knelt down. Because... she deserved this punishment, somehow. For something she had done... or something she had failed to do. Something... lost to her conscious memory but whose influence was brimming over at this moment. Something... or maybe someone... that she had failed. And for that failure, or maybe for forgetting what that something was, she deserved this pain, to endure it all alone, in this desolate place.

Even as part of her accepted this punishment, the larger part of her personality cried out against it. Desperately, the Shame Senshi cried out as loud as she could, until her voice cracked and her throat ached, “Please… someone help me… SOMEONE HELP ME!” But no one answered, no hand appeared, and she began to sob violently. Someone was supposed to come! Someone… she knew, relied on, but even as she realized that she realized that they would not come. O one would come to help her. She was all alone… so alone... and to realize that made her struggles cease. She had to accept it; she had to accept that because she had failed… no one would answer her call.

Penelope bolted upright in her bed, her hand still extended and tears running down her face. She hissed in pain from the fierce ache in her side but brought shaking hands to tangle in her hair. A dream? It had all been… a dream? She pushed back the blankets and quickly lifted her pajama top and checked her bandages, but they had not shifted during the night and had only a little blood on them. Residual pain from the dream, then. Dream... nightmare... somehow both and neither at the same time.

The teenager struggled out of bed and headed towards the bathroom to redress her wound, still half in a sleepy haze. Normally she didn't remember her dreams or, when she did, she could laugh at them or somehow otherwise dismiss them. Now, however, her fingers shook as she unwound the bandages that needed to be discarded. As she worked, she couldn't help but wonder. The pain in her side... had it started in real life and made its way into her dream, or had it started because of the dream? More importantly then the physical pain... why did she still feel guilty, feel like she had failed? What was that place she had been, and why did it feel like a part of her while simultaneously feeling like some distant place?

Penelope had no answers, not now, and she didn't think transforming into Sailor Pasiphae would reveal anything either, even though she had been henshined up in the dream. She briefly considered pulling out her phone and calling Chaonis, who had proven her best teacher so far in relation to being a Senshi, but almost as soon as the thought entered her mind she rejected it. He did not seem like the appropriate figure... and like so many other mysteries this night, she couldn’t have said why even if pressured to do so. Too much that she didn’t understand, too much that she wasn’t sure about. There were two things she did know. First, while she might not know at the moment what this dream meant, it had to mean... something. Second, she promised herself through clenched teeth as she rewrapped her wound, that she was going to find out what it meant. No matter what it took… no matter who she had to talk to… she was going to find out.

[OOC Note:
Participant: Penelope Seneca
Player: Quicksilver the Archangel
Word Count: 1,154 ]