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This was grunt work, Megiddo knew, and usually she would think it was beneath her - except this was grunt work for Gunn, and to be entrusted with any sort of responsibility by the Eternal Senshi of Wildfires was a major step up. It meant that Megiddo had proven her worth... somehow. Enough that Gunn trusted her with the simple task of going out and finding rookie senshi and telling them to come to boot camp. But, given that this was Gunn's brainchild and she was being very particular about it - well, perhaps Megiddo was making her job out to be a bigger responsibility than it was, but she would still do her duty with courage and grace befitting of her station.

She found the first senshi of the evening as she swung past the library, low-level order signature pinging on her mental radar. Of course, as a page, she was at the same power level as the girl she was tracking, so that really didn't mean anything as far as experience went - but beggars couldn't be choosers.

"Hey," Megiddo called out to the girl. "Do you find your life lacking for direction, experience, and meaningful connections to the other members of your faction?"

Megiddo paused for a moment, stunned that such a brazen opening line had actually worked, and then she smiled pleasantly at the senshi and smoothed out her skirt. Tips, no, she thought. She did not actually have anything that she thought she could easily offer the girl - especially since being a senshi didn't seem to overlap with being a page at all. But she did have her mission from Gunn, and that was... sort of a tip? Right?

If you thought about it in a very specific way, it was a tip.

"You should come to order boot camp!" she said, amping up the excitement in her voice. "April 9th, 10 AM, on the DCU soccer field. Civilian forms. It'll be a big group exercise class and networking. My boss, Eternal Sailor Gunn, will be running it, and she's got a ton of experience. She'll teach you how to fight!"

She rocked back and forth on her heels, realizing she'd neglected to introduce herself in all her excitement. Megiddo stuck her pitcher under her arm and held out a gloved hand to shake. "I'm Megiddo Page of Saturn, just by the way. Nice to meetcha. So what do you say? You should totally come by."

Looking the senshi before her over, Megiddo decided that Megrez's sphere was actually pretty dang obvious. "Oh, cool," she said. Well, at least the senshi had a youma dusting under her belt - that was a good crash course, but it would be up to Gunn to teach her the important stuff. Like killing. That was a super-important skill.

One of these days, Megiddo thought, she was going to come up with a totally appropriate and concise description for what, exactly, a page was, because no one seemed to know. Like, seriously, everyone had some grasp of senshi but member of a magical order of ancient warrior from outer space was totally outlandish? Purified negaverser was hardly a better option to label herself as, considering she'd never been evil to begin with.

"We're just, like, a different thing," she said, shrugging. "It's like the difference between the army and the marines.They're both military and we both fight the same war but we're different." She needed to make flashcards or something one of these days - this was just embarrassing.

"Yup!" beamed Megiddo, glad to have hit upon something that the senshi could understand. "Exactly. Like, you've got your crazy magical attacks, and I've got - this wonderful thing!" She tossed her pitcher in the air so it spun, and then caught it again with a bit of a flourish. "It's good for cracking skulls." Although she had to wonder when she was going to get one of those magical power-ups everyone kept talking about. Her dress was cute, but it was so two years ago.

"We're going to do, like, team building exercises and physical training. Running. Climbing. Push ups. You know, stuff that magical warrior superheroes from outer space should be doing anyway?" Megiddo said. She wasn't sure what Gunn had planned intellectually for the day, but the senshi was a great motivator and she was trained by the United States government to be a certified badass. So, like, that had to count for something.

"Sailor Gunn's been in the war since just about forever," she said. "She'll have a lot of really great insight about how things work - you're sure to get something out of it! So just come and give us a chance, okay?"

Megiddo boggled at the girl for a moment, eyes wide. Just how fresh an egg was she? But then, she thought about what a great opportunity this would be to introduce a new senshi to Gunn's philosophy! "We're Order," she explained, trying her best to sound patient and comforting, and like all the things a good teacher should be. "We fight for the preservation of life and individual autonomy. We fight Chaos - the Negaverse and the Dark Mirror."

"They're murderers. They want to take over the universe and rule it with an iron fist," she explained. "If they win, then everyone becomes their slaves and they usher in some kind of dystopian nightmare. They're basically magical fascists with an army of nightmare monsters - you've fought a youma, right?"

"Anyway, if one of them ever gets ahold of you, they won't hesitate to kill you. So you either have to not let them get you, or you have to be ready to fight," she said. "Gunn says there's no room for mercy in this war. That's how she's survived this long."

Megiddo hoped she'd made a convincing case.

Fresh, fresh, fresh! thought Megiddo as the senshi spoke. "Well, it's good that you've dusted youma," she said, chewing her lower lip. Only two? Well, the sooner she got to new senshi, the better - before they had time to form bad habits; like letting people live.

"The Negaverse and the Dark Mirror kill people all the time," she said, thinking of the homeless man whose starseed she'd watch Zippeite crush, but also of the senshi and knights who undoubtedly filled the alleys of Destiny City, of corpses coming to light now that all the snow had melted. Of every girl taken advantage of by a skeezy rape metaphor of an officer. "They steal energy from civilians. They can take a person's entire life right out of their chest and not think twice or feel any guilt. They don't care about life. Only power."

"Every one of them we kill," she said, remembering Gunn's speech, "Is a hundred civilian lives we save. And it sure beats letting one beat you to the punch. I hear being dead's not much fun."

Hopefully, she thought, Megrez would take her words to heart, and not turn chicken at the thought of a little blood and justified murder.

"So, like, come to boot camp, okay?" Megiddo suggested, pep rushing back into her voice.

"So you work your way up to it," said Megiddo, gladly letting Megrez drag her back to the topic. Gunn had made herself abundantly clear: they didn't need any more soft, wussy senshi going out and getting themselves killed. Now, Megrez seemed reasonable. But it was a lot for a teenaged girl to take in, and Megiddo could sympathize with that. Just a few short months ago, she'd been making every effort to avoid her knighthood - but things just got so much easier when you stopped fighting and went with it.

"Go out. Beat up a few lieutenants. Save some drunk girls, and then see how you feel when you realize that it's the same ******** assholes over and over again," she said. "Every time you let one of them go, you're letting them off to go drain someone else, or kill someone else, or drag more youma up to ruin your day. Everyone's day. Forever."

Megiddo shrugged, with false nonchalance. "I'm not saying you've gotta go kill a dude, like, your fifth night ever as a senshi, but you will probably, eventually, want to kill a dude. And it's not murder if it's war - it's just the rules of engagement." She smiled grimly. "So," Megiddo asked. "Any questions?"

Megrez had a solid, smart head on her shoulders, and Megiddo could respect that. She could respect that a lot, and if she could bring the senshi to Gunn and get her proper training before anyone came in and told her some bullshit about singing Kumbaya until Chaos just shut up and went home, then Megrez would make a great addition to their side.

"Yeah," she said. She'd killed. She'd watched the light go out of a lieutenant's eyes and it had been the greatest rush she'd ever felt. She'd helped Gunn dispose of a part of dark mirror senshi, burned their miserable corpses until all that remained was fine ash. "I've killed. Brained an a*****e lieutenant with my pitcher. He deserved it. The negaverse, they've all killed. They pop starseeds out of people's chests like it's nothing."

Megiddo frowned. She couldn't name specific names from personal experience, but she knew who Gunn had told her about - Ares. Leto. Wolframite. "You have to watch out for all of them," she told you. "Every single chaos signature you sense could be waiting to kill you." Some she'd met had only wanted to talk, but that was the minority. "Or convert you. That's worse."

"And we've got to tell them, no, ******** that, go die," she finished. "Make sense?" She hoped she hadn't scared the girl - but overcoming your fear was part of becoming strong, wasn't it?