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Two months later and she was finally, just finally, getting back to her one-on-one meetings with the less-familiar Jovians. It wasn't that Europa had been purposely putting these off, just that...

"I've been busy," she said to Euanthe, and it was true up until the point where it became blatant lies. Europa had been busy, true, writing term papers and keeping her head afloat and finishing her first semester of college, but she couldn't think of anything specific that had kept her from meeting up with Euanthe in that time. She'd still done her regular patrols, and although Europa was painfully cognizant that she needed to do more to keep her team together (and she scolded herself for the nascent possessiveness)... it was easier said than done.

But now it was half a week after christmas, unseasonably warm and wet to the degree that now that Europa and Euanthe had finally met up, the prospect of patrolling in this unsavory drizzle was positively dismal. Even as she was preparing to leave her apartment, Europa had anticipated this evening might be wasted slouched on benches in a gazebo by the river and not actually trying to accomplish anything.

With this in mind, she'd come prepared. Drawing a thermos out of her bag, Europa inquired, "Tea?" A hot beverage might push back the evening's dampness - or, at the very less, make this meeting seem more friendly. Europa hoped her smile was conveying the warmth she felt towards the less-experienced senshi. She couldn't help but feel fond of the Jovians, even those less familiar to her than, say, Kallichore or Ganymede.

Pouring two cups of steaming tea, Europa asked, "So, I suppose you've had time to get a bit more of a handle on this senshi stuff by now?" It seemed like a good introductory question.

"When I was first starting out?" Europa asked, blinking at Euanthe. It was strange to think that that was a whole two years ago now - she supposed she'd been the same age as the senshi of tragedy was now, more or less! Her seventeenth birthday had been after her awakening, but only just barely. If Europa could have gone back to the innocence of those first few weeks and done things differently, well... she wasn't sure that she would. There was something to be said for running around thinking you were the goddamn batman and sharing dizzy, not entirely unwanted kisses with boys you barely knew.

Europa smiled at the memory as she drank her tea, although it only made her sad about how long ago that had been. "It wasn't... It wasn't as big when I started. But we got stronger, and the Negaverse got stronger. It escalated. An arms race." Setting her cup down for the moment, she continued, "I guess those of us who awoke in those early days are lucky because we had a gentler learning curve - but there's so much information available to us now that I would have killed for when I was just starting out! I mean, not literally killed-"

In two years as a senshi, Europa had dusted plenty of Youma but still hadn't taken a human life. She looked forward to that day with the sort of trepidation that one felt in facing any situation that one hoped would never, ever arise but knew full well might.

"Sorry," murmured Europa. "It's just an expression. I try to avoid that sort of darkness. It's just a slippery slope - the further we get into this war the more we learn about it, the more things become clear..." She didn't elaborate further. Europa was still coming to terms with the implications of what Chibimoon had told her about balance, and didn't want to burden any other senshi with the knowledge that the darkness might never be fully gone from the world until she understood it better.

"Speaking of things we know now that we didn't know before, though!" said Europa brightly, changing the subject. "I guess it's pretty much a given for everyone coming in that the senshi are from space, yeah? We didn't know that at first." This was a happier subject, at the very least. "And, you know, there are perks to being from space! Do you know anything about that?"

Europa did a brief double-take, realizing how her words might have been misleading. She giggled at Euanthe, the birth video story sounding remarkably similar to any number of embarrassing ploys Nellie Cowden had come up with to keep her only child in line. "We're not changelings, if that's where your train of thought is headed," the senshi of the deep corrected. "It's more of a reincarnation thing, as far as I can parse it."

She tapped her chest, roughly over her heart. "Our starseeds - sort of like our souls - come from space. Our bodies come from Earth." That much was self-evident. All of her mom's cousins insisted Tallulah was the spitting image of some grand-aunt somewhere along the line and had for so long that she had no choice but to believe it. "We're from space, and we're equally from Earth. We have just as much a right to be here as the Negaverse does. More, even! And especially more than the Dark Mirror. They haven't even got a right to be in this universe."

But that wasn't really the point of this evening, and she'd rather talk about far lighter topics with Euanthe than toss her right off the deep end in their first conversation. Furthermore, Europa still didn't trust herself to remain even-tempered in regards to what had been done to her cousin. Bile still rose in her throat at the prospect that there was a parallel walking around with Kat's body, making a mockery of all Leto had ever stood for.

Flattening her palms against her ruffles, Europa evened her temper. She picked her tea back up. "But yes," she said pleasantly, changing the topic. "There are perks. The Negaverse can teleport like a bunch of cheating bullies and the DMC can mirror-walk, but we've got the best trick of all, because we can go to space!"

Grinning, she flipped out her senshi phone and held it up. "What do you say? Up for a bit of moon-walking?" Europa certainly hoped so.

Europa giggled at Euanthe's naivete, though she didn't dare specify out loud that was what made her laugh. "No, no," she corrected gently, waving the phone around a bit. "More of a teleporter. Star Trek-ish, I guess." Not that she was too familiar with Star Trek to be sure if that was really how it worked. Crime dramas and superheroes were more her style.

Setting the phone aside for a moment, she packed up the thermos and stuck it back into her bag, then draped her bag over her shoulder. Offering Euanthe her arm, she explained, "I can show you how it works right now if you're up for a bit of travel." Quite honestly, she couldn't think of a better place to take your first space trip to than Europa. The vistas were breathtaking, and there wasn't anything unsavory like carnivorous flora or too harsh a climate to worry about.

"You just - take hold of my arm and hold tight, okay?" ordered Europa, not eager to leave Euanthe behind when she made the jump. That would just be rude! "Then you take your phone, you concentrate - there's a connection you need to make, between you and the universe, you know? Kurma, the man who taught us to spacewalk the first time, he compared it to listening, because the universe, it sings, and there's a part of it that sings just for you."

Europa smiled and shut her eyes, seeking among the stars for the frequency that came almost second-nature to her now. A bit whale song, a bit military march. "Then, when you've made the connection," she held the phone out demonstratively, "You hit the center button and make the jump."

After a moment of concentration, Europa did just that, pulling the pair through space and into the grand foyer of the Europan capitol building, stirring up dust towards the high, arched ceiling. Opening her eyes, the eternal senshi gave her younger companion a giddy smile. She loved bringing people here! "This building was the seat of my moon's government," she explained, gesturing to the art nouveau glasswork outlining a doorway behind them. The door itself was gone, and the empty frame opened to outdoors and the icy surface of Europa.

"I love it here," whispered the senshi of the deep to her companion. "Any questions?"

"Yeah," answered Europa with quiet reverence. She motioned for Euanthe to follow her out the door and onto the plaza beyond. While her first visit to the moon had placed Europa in a small village several kilometers away, she'd scarcely left the capitol building since first arriving at it. "As far as I know, all of the home worlds are abandoned."

There was a large, toppled statue at the center of the plaza, too covered in snow to really tell what it was supposed to be of, although it was human in shape and the way the ice covering it curved suggested it was female. Europa shrugged at Euanthe as they stepped around it. "Would you like to look around the city with me?" she suggested. "Or would you rather go back inside and have a look at the capitol?"

Europa gestured back towards the building, and turned to gaze upwards at it. It glowed bronze in the gas giant's orange light. She studied the facade - art nouveau mixed with something else, turn of the century European and utterly alien at the same time, porticos and spires covered in what the senshi had come to recognize as a Europan sense of functional decorativeness.

"I mean," she said to Euanthe, "I've explored the building a lot, but I've hardly seen any of the settlement-" She gestured to the jumble of buildings before them, which hadn't preserved nearly as well as the one behind them. The nearest was crumbling and snow drifts blocked the streets, but it still seemed like there might be something worth investigating out in Europa's capital city. "Unless you're too cold out here. Then we can go back inside."

(It was a bit chilly, Europa had to concede.)

"Glad you're feeling adventurous," replied Europa, giving Euanthe a fierce grin. She valued gameness in teammates, a willingness to go on adventures and learn what there was to be found out. Adventure is out there!

Taking hold of her new friend's hand, Europa started carefully down the icy capitol steps towards the city proper. Because of the gas giant's light, the town had a rosy sort of glow. "It's sunset all day long," remarked Europa, taking stock of the orange, icy roofs. "Can you imagine what it would be like to live here? I wonder if we can learn anything about what people's lives used to be like-"

She felt like an archeologist on Mars. Their feet touched down on the street level, and she pulled Euanthe along towards what she could only presume was the main avenue. Peering into the long-collapsed buildings, Europa asked Euanthe, "What do you suppose these were? Shops? Houses?" She kept her eyes peeled for ghosts, but none jumped out at her. Europa gritted her teeth in momentary frustration - they were less than a block from the capitol. Signy must have come here! But no helpful visions of the past appeared, and she couldn't will them to.

"We'll have to visit Euanthe next time," she added, stepping carefully around a place where the rubble had spilled into the street. "What does this look like to you?" Europa asked, gesturing to the ruins. Of course the question of how the moons had come to be abandoned had crossed her mind - how could it not? "A battle? A plague? The weather, natural decay?"

More questions to ask. Europa clenched her fingers. She always had more questions.

"You're right," nodded Europa thoughtfully, kneeling for a better look at a rubble pile. Euanthe made good points - A battle would have left signs, and the city looked more abandoned than destroyed. A plague would have also left some sort of indication, though perhaps less than a battle. A climate like Europa wouldn't have allowed bodies to decay, she didn't think - after all, she'd heard of bodies mummified by extreme cold - even if Europa had been abandoned for a thousand years, it didn't make sense that she hadn't seen a single body.

"What if something made them leave the city?" she asked, rising to her feet again. "Like, an evacuation?" It couldn't have been a natural disaster, though. This city had the look of one that had decayed naturally - maybe it had been smashed up a little, but not to the extent she'd expect to see from a major storm or an earthquake of some kind.

"It's not really... I can't ever know for certain," she sighed hopelessly, giving Euanthe a shrug. "It's frustrating, isn't it?" the senshi of the deep added, hoping the other girl sympathized. She was a student of the universe, a child with an open mind who thrived on figuring out how the world worked. Here was a huge mystery laid out before her - one that she could never hope to solve. It was enough to make her want to tear out her hair.

"There's a library back in the capitol building," she added wistfully, "But none of the books I've checked so far are in a language I recognize." And why should they be? Modern English hadn't existed a thousand years ago, and there was no reason for ancient Europa to have written with the latin alphabet. Her memories she assumed were translated for her benefit, but the same trick didn't work on text.

"We're locked out," she said sourly, staring at the rubble in front of her that may have once been a bakery. Or a clinic. Or a daycare. Or a general store.

Europa's expression lit up. She turned to Euanthe, giving the other girl a curious smile. "You mean Kurma?" she asked, considering the suggestion. Europa still wasn't entirely clear on who or what Kurma was. Truthfully, she hadn't even seen him in perhaps over a year and wasn't sure how one went about tracking down a phenomenal cosmic power. "I guess I could try asking him," she decided. "I mean, that's a really good idea."

It was. Enough that she wondered why she hadn't thought of it first. Europa took Euanthe gently by the arm and pulled her further down the street. There was a small square at the nearest intersection, and beyond it the buildings looked to be somewhat more intact. She paused for a moment on the corner, staring long and hard at the row of Art Nouveau-style buildings before them. The curving facades were worn smooth by wind and snow, but it was still possible to see faint traces of ornamentation.

Europa prayed for a flash of memory. A peek at what this neighborhood looked like in its heyday, a burt of light and sound - anything to give her a better idea of what this place was and how its people had lived.

No memories came.

"I'll try to find him," she decided, thinking out-loud. Pointing towards a building in the middle of the block that looked pretty sturdy, she asked, "What do you think about going inside if we can?" There was always the possibility that whoever had left had locked the door as they fled.

As their shoes crunched against the ice on the sidewalk, Europa thought more about the homeworlds and how everything on them was utterly unhelpful. At one point she'd thought they might be the key to defeating the negaverse, but between the heavy knowledge she carried about Balance and the fact that she could not read the books and would likely never know what had happened here, she was having serious second thoughts.

"So," she said, gesturing to the rounded door in front of them. "Do you want to go in?"