Students were trickeling back into town, brown from their summer vacations. Sugilite sat, staring out the window of the coffee shop, as girls skipped by in twos and fours, their powder blue uniforms making them look like unseasonal snowflakes drifting accross the ground. Last year, she reflected, she had been one of them. Heart pounding, head full of hopes, imagining that she had, at last, arrived in the promised land. And then, she had been shown that yes she had reached her haven, only it wasn't the tall sparkling walls of the school, but a dark underground kingdom, crawling with shadowy nightmares. It wasn't exactly what she had pictured when she had sat in her room back at the youth home, painting a picture of her future in her head. No, it was nothing she had ever dreamed of, in fact it was much better than anything she could have conjured up. Sugilite loved her job, loved her responsabilities, loved the Negaverse more than anything else in this world.

The problem now was, as always, with Bebe. Bebe was getting in the way of Sugilite's happiness more and more often. Expecially now, when she was out of school. Now she had no bursaries or scholarships coming in, instead she had to work a job. Serving people. Like she was some kind of well, servant. And no longer could she stay in the beautifully airy and clean rooms of Crystal Academy's dormatories, instead she was the reluctant tennant of a rather small and sad looking set of rooms in a place that perhaps in a year or two would begin to become a transitional neighbourhood. They smelled of dead rodents and drudgery, it was all Bebe could do to sleep in them. When she wasn't at work now, at her job in one of the city's higher class dress stores, (attitude really was everything), she would spend her days wandering the cleaner and better class neighbourhoods, stopping at cafes for as long as she could, poking her head into the public library, wasting time.

It had all been very well to decide to devote the rest of her life to Sugilite, but she still had a stomach that needed feeding, a body that needed rest, and a nose that needed the scent of something other than mothballs and dust. And it wasn't like she could gather energy in broad daylight. Besides, she was supposed to cut down on mugging civillians in bus stops now, or something like that. Apparently they had worked out the equivalent of an eco-friendly energy donor. Sugilite had inwardly protested when the news had gotten out. Civilian hunting had been, if not fun, then at least something to do. Now she stalked the nights with rather less good humor and grace, eyes peeled for something glittery and dull-witted to alleviate her bordom on. Perhaps new orders would come soon, but in the mean time, she had nothing to do but sit around all day as Bebe and be bored.

Yes, she had made a vow to devote her life to Sugilite, but then her superiors had done the equivalent of slap her on the back and tell her to take a few weeks off. And there was only so much training a girl could do a day before she became terminally sick of yelling 'hai-yah!!' and hitting a stuffed bag. She really loved her job, but sometimes the people standing on the podium and telling her what to do made her fists itch. Enough energy indeed. If they had enough, why hadn't they built a giant ... energy cannon and blasted the darned senshi off the planet already? And now there were those other ones with the weapons, whoever they were, running around. It really was unfair, she had been waiting for a chance to show off her ideas, to really start raking the starseeds in, and now that she had the power to go behind the plans ... she was having to be dull boring stuck-in-a-rut Bebe. Stuck in a dull unimportant grey oatmeal soup of a life.

She wondered, if perhaps, she showed them just how useful she could be, they would forgive a bit of under the counter energy collecting. Surely, if she did something big enough to really make them consider her in the big leagues, they wouldn't punish her. After all, she was doing it for them. And if she made it look like it was pulled off by the senshi, that would be good pr for them as well. Weren't they trying to improve their public image or something like that? Yeah, if she made it look like a senshi job, then there would be nothing wrong with it at all! And it was easy enough, what with the majority of the city firmly believing them to be some kind of psychotic youth larp gang. She even had that awful yet tactically perfect dress she had created earlier in the year. Sugilite and Bebe were both in bad places right now, but perhaps, just perhaps, Sailor Sparkles could be having the time of her life.