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Things had been busy lately. Hvergelmir had been away on interstellar jaunts or failing to purify people or having other purified people fall in her lap, and had had to cut down on her youma patrols for the time being. Currently, she was down to once a week: manageable, but it left her a little sad that she was less in touch with the beating heart of the theater district than usual.

People on the streets were starting to recognize her when she'd go by, the regulars of the show-going circuit. They thought she was a street performer -- so, often, she'd pretend to be a ghost, wistful and sad, and sometimes people would hand her dollars. Mostly, she was fairly sure, they liked the costume construction. When there were no youma, she sort of enjoyed herself.

Having not been back in a week, though, Hvergelmir was eager to see what new shows had opened up: there were bound to be one or two. She wended her way through crowds till she arrived at the daily discount ticket booth, then checked the marquee.

A new musical about Madam Bovary, and McDonagh's latest -- A Behanding in Spokane. She'd been hoping Destiny City would do a production of Behanding -- Laney would have to get tickets.

Wandering past the theater doors for Madam Bovary: A Musical, she thought she detected a Chaos aura, almost.

Almost. It felt -- dark, definitely Chaos-dark, but sort of indefinably not-the-same as Negaverse officers or corrupted senshi or youma. She couldn't place it.

"Hello?" she called out, following the aura toward its source. "Is someone there?"

Hvergelmir stared hard at the senshi before her. That was what she was, Hvergelmir was fairly certain -- the sailor collar and the rest of the uniform seemed pretty obvious -- but she neither felt nor looked like Sailor Ate and Sailor Persephone. There were no eerie black hollows in her skin where her body had been cracked open to get at her starseed, no little black bat wings. This senshi was all avian, instead: black with bead details and a sheer, silvery surcoat, trimmed in feathered scallops. She seemed to be some kind of corrupted senshi Hvergelmir hadn't yet encountered.

"I don't fight," she said with what she hoped was a disarming laugh, putting her hands up in surrender. "And no, it's not easy to maneuver around in at all -- though my page dress was worse."

Hvergelmir took a step forward. "Are you with the Negaverse?" she asked, brow furrowing with uncertainty.

Hvergelmir offered a smile and a shrug -- she was getting used to people's eyebrows-reaching-upper-stratosphere reactions by now, and here in the middle of the theater district, it was less likely that things would come to fighting. There were still too many people out and about at this time of night. "I don't usually see the need," she said, hoping her matter-of-factness would make it sound all the more logical. "The Negaverse fights to protect the Earth from conquering aliens. I've got no objection to that -- I just think there's been a misunderstanding about whether or not there are any conquering aliens or not. I can't think of anyone where my punching them in the face would clarify the misunderstanding." She raised her hands at her sides. "So rather than get all sting-like-a-bee, I like to hear my opponents out. With my oath -- on my life, only to raise arms against a Negaverse agent in self-defense -- to prove my goodwill."

She pointed to her shoulder, to the glittery gold and iridescent white of her sigil: the star-from-the-well. "'As a seal upon your arm,'" she quoted, taking a bit of biblical license with it. "'For love is strong as death.'"

And there the other woman had it -- Hvergelmir's philosophy and oath, summarized. Hvergelmir didn't think it sounded too bad, put like that. She might try this version again sometime.

"I've never heard of the Dark Mirror Court," she admitted without hedging. "Does your group have leadership? A goal, I'm guessing?"

"You can touch it if you want," Hvergelmir offered, pressing a finger hard against it to prove it couldn't be smeared. "It's way down in there, like a real tattoo, but only when I'm powered up. But you can feel it's just a little bit warm -- it glows when I'm at my Wonder." She pointed at the extensive tattoos covering the dark mirror senshi. "Yours are stunning, though -- are they real? How long did that take?"

She listened to the senshi's answers with interest, trying to lay down a few pieces of a new puzzle in her mind, one labeled 'The Dark Mirror Court.' Things were still mostly fuzzy. "Oh. Save them from the Negaverse? How, by taking them to space with you? Are you inviting them as refugees to your homeworld with you -- are you all from the same planet?"

None of this made any sense with the inclusion of destroy he ones we can't, though. She wasn't sure how to work that in. They were -- Chaos, right? How were they defining 'saving?'

"Hvergelmir Squire of the Cosmos," she introduced herself with a little curtsy. "And you're... Sailor...?"

Hvergelmir nodded her understanding -- at least, she thought she got it, this time. They wanted to avert the war by finding a peacable solution to the conflict and yielding the contested territory (which, in this case, was the entire planet) to the Negaverse? She wasn't sure how Chaos was involved in that, but she supposed it was an admirable goal, on its face.

Maybe not a viable goal -- but its heart was in the right spot.

"We can never go back to living in the past," she said. "Humanity marches on, going forward no matter what we do, no matter what we once owned. This world doesn't belong to us -- but it doesn't belong to the Negaverse, either. Will you really abandon it to them?"

It was a start. Hvergelmir had to think about things like that: it was a start. There was no point in lamenting that you couldn't get someone to reevaluate their life choices and the company they kept within one little conversation. The best you could hope for was to give them enough interest to talk to you again. Make some kind of a connection, however thready it was.

A spider's web, after all, was so faint as to be invisible to the human eye: but no less powerfully strong, for that.

And friendship, of course, could be just such a powerful strength.

"Oh! Well, in that case, you've come to entirely the right person. I know, like, ninety percent of these shows. Tell me a little bit about your lady love, let me advise you. What kinds of movies and things does she like?"

Hvergelmir, on the other hand, had always been a flowery words and romance type person.

"Okay, that is so, so cute. I can totally help."

She tapped a finger to her chin thoughtfully. "Does she do musicals, or just straight plays?"