Welcome to Gaia! ::

"What are you?!"

Her shrieks were meaningless to youma, Bazzite smiling as he pried open the minivan's driver door to grab at a middle-aged woman. She had pulled over to check her phone for something or other. It didn't matter to the youma - he was hungry and he could smell children in the back seat. Shrieking, the woman tried to unhook her seat belt, movements fumbling and tears pouring from her eyes. But he didn't care. Lions never cared about what the gazelle thought before crushing their windpipe.

And that's exactly what he intended to do - the youma reached into the minivan after tossing the driver's door aside like a piece of paper. She was shrieking, the children were screaming and crying. Children didn't bear nearly as much energy as a full grown adult but their souls were tastier because of their innocence. For whatever reason, innocence was one of the most delicious things about children's starseeds. Power was the only thing that dwarfed in.

While the woman struggled, she tried to claw at the youma, tried to earn his complete attention so her two boys in the backseat could get away. Sighing, Bazzite decided to drain her and devour her later, after he caught and digested the children. Leaning in, he dislocated his jaw and in poured the energy, a soft, white light lifting off the women like smoke and filling his belly.

Bazzite's ears perked visibly when an eternal senshi's aura flared to life in his peripherals. Finishing off his draining of the woman, the children shrieked and cried, hiding somewhere in an alley nearby. Now this senshi's signature eclipsed the energy Bazzite could have gained from all three family members, making her a much better target.

The trick was to kill senshi and to kill them quickly.

Leaning back out of the minivan, he found the blonde girl to be quite tall for her gender, a foul mouth that offset such a sunny outfit. The youma smirked at her. "When you're hungry, you go get food. You do that with supermarkets, senshi. But you give me an interesting offer." A hiss escaped his clenched teeth and he smiled. "And who might you be, by the way? Usually you all introduce yourselves before interrupting someone." He took a few steps closer to her, head low and wings outstretched to make himself look bigger. They were dreadfully close in height, the two of them.

The woman was, blessedly, still alive, moaning quietly and turning over in her car seat like an infant in their sleep. She was completely unaware of what had happened to her children or what was happening just outside her door.

There had been children, Iris knew that. However, she wasn't expecting any of them to shout out towards her. Perhaps she had been focusing too hard on the oddly conversational youma, for a small aura had slipped past her attention.

It was only when the youma seemed to gurgle out the girl's name that Iris seemed to notice the chibi senshi's presence. The yellow-suited senshi could only vaguely recall mention from the cat of a Sailor Hypnos, but any details beyond that were beyond the blonde.

Where as the youma seemed to be trying to reach for his more humane side vocally, Iris seemed to grow harsh. "Hypnos, was it?" she practically barked out, no hint of sympathy in her tone.

With her free hand, she reached down and grabbed onto the youma's hood, lifting up so she could get a good look of the beast that had been attacking. The rainbow which had been guilty of slicing his leg was still brightly glowing from her other hand, laying against the ground like a loose piece of rope. With a youma around, there was no room for relaxing.

She continued to look over the youma's scaled face, but asked a very direct question to the child. "What do ya want?"

As soon as the tiny, innocent little soul latched onto the rainbow-wielding terrorist, Bazzite smiled to himself and scrambled to his feet. His leg was effectively crippled so the youma slumped to one side, clearly unable to put any weight on the affected limb. The wound gushed black tar and Bazzite felt himself lucky that his leg wasn't seared right off by that damned rainbow ribbon of hers.

Leaning back against the van, the youma bared his teeth at Iris. "You see? I could have easily killed them and I didn't. Hypnos and I have an agreement..." he wheezed. Youma did not heal, not like other magical beings or at least, not that Bazzite was aware of. He'd been nimble enough in the past to avoid serious injury, but not this time. This time he was just about leaking all over the street. "Surely you understand, Senshi. Youma have to eat too, you know."

Iris was his equal in terms of power and usually the ability to talk bought Bazzite some time. Some things had to change, evidently.

The chibi senshi soon enough had started to try and pry Iris off of the youma, though the tugging and yanking was being met by force on Iris' part, if only to keep her arm steady rather than to accidentally behead something prematurely.

"...Hypnos, was it?..." The youma had hissed out the name upon occasion, so now the eternal senshi was going to assume it was the child's senshi-name.

"...I wouldn't suggest doin' that, or yer probably gonna kill that youma quite quickly..."

The blonde was concentrating upon the youma, and his pleas did not even remotely resemble an answer to her question.

"...and since nobody seems to want to answer my question, I'll ask it again... I guess I'll open it up fer debate in general."

There was a pause, as if to signal to the child that she might want to listen to the repetition of the question. "...what makes'im different from the others?"