Corrupt Super Sailor Columba scribbled away on her clipboard, vacant smile stretched across her face as she checked off names and accounted for the batch of civilians due to donate today. People who were due but didn’t arrive in time would need to be tagged for their warning visit by an officer. Others, who were past the point of warnings, would likely be punished in uglier ways.

She didn’t think about that. The consequences of what happened to the no-shows she tagged for punishment was the furthest thing from her mind. That was out of sight, and not part of her reality. The fate of the absent Mr. Donovan was not a real thing she thought of as she drew a frowny face next to his name with an exaggerated pout on her face.

“Well that’s the third strike for you, mister,” She said in a chipper, playful tone.

Shadows alerted her to the fact there was a presence standing in front of her, although she was too preoccupied cross referencing names to immediately look up. “If you could just wait there a minute, I think all the chairs are fu-- oh!”

She squeaked, nearly dropping her clipboard and holding it to her chest when she finally did look up and see it was a Negaverse senshi like herself and not a waiting civilian she had just spoken to.

“Oh! I’m sorry--... Cha--...” She stared at his face with an almost dull stare, mouth hanging partially open as she struggled against what few pre-corruption memories were still tugging around in her brain. Her entire identity as a civilian had been wiped from existence and the time she spent powered without Chaos was fragmented and few, but the fragments were still obtainable, if she tried hard enough. And he looked so familiar.

“Who are you?”

The Corrupt Eternal looked at the senshi Super without any recognition. Even if he had known her as Chaonis, those memories were gone. His mind had been destroyed in his corruption, and he had nothing left to him but his name and the information he was fed by Painite. She told him all about his family and the team he used to have, and how to recognize them if he saw them, but this senshi did not fit any of the descriptions he had gotten.

He did not know her at all.

“Chaonis,” he replied for her, when she asked him who he was. She seemed to have a moment when she saw him, and he wondered, vaguely, if she had known him when he was a normal senshi. Painite told him not to think about that, though, and to focus on his tasks that she had given him. It was easy enough, and he thought he could not really complain about the lot in life that he had now. It seemed better than being a White Moon refugee, anyway. Terrorists and all that.

“Who are you?”

He folded his arms over his chest, a gesture, at least, that had not been lost in his conversion. He watched her with his dark eyes, though the amusement and daring recklessness that had always been alight in them before was gone. Replacing it was a different kind of darkness.

“What are you doing here?”

Chaonis was sheltered from the way the world worked, by comparison. As a pet of a Negaverse General, he only saw what she wanted him to see, and only participated in the things she wanted him to participate in. He heard people talking about the way things were being run, but he rarely saw it. And what he had known about it before his corruption was gone from his mind.

”Chaonis,” She robotically repeated when he said it, filling in the blanks around the one syllable she’d gotten out when she first saw his face and her fragile and partial memory jogged.

She nodded, feathered blue bangs shifting with the movement. Things started coming back. His bat wings used to be white feathers. She used to be way shorter than him. At least she remembered having to crane her neck all the way up to see him…

A more complete story started piecing together in her head and she cling to the clipboard at her chest harder with an opened mouthed gasp. In a lot of ways her mannerisms were still childish. After all, she could only remember three years of her life. “Yooooou…” She sung out in a teasing voice, but apparently her shattered memory apparently hadn’t found enough to finish a sentence about it.

“I am Sailor Columba,” She chirruped and gestured to a banner behind her. “You’re at the donation center! Are you here to collect the no-shows for punishment?”

She had tagged people to be hunted down, reminded of who was the boss. Names on a list that she had written frowny faces and cute little notes next to like such things didn’t mean awful consequences for the people she named.

“Yooooooou~” She sang again and fluttered around him in a circle before grinning. “I knew you when I was a chibi. You had different buttwings.”

“Columba,” he stated, but the name meant nothing to him. It was not one of the names Painite had told him about. She only new a very shallow portion of his life, and had reported only what she knew would hurt those she hated to him. He knew the names of some senshi, like Ida and Tsui, and he knew the names of his family, Camelot and Shalott. A few more here and there, but for the most part, he was wandering through a very unfamiliar world.

And he found he did not have any desire to attach himself to anyone.

“I don’t do that. I was just passing by. This place looks like a drag anyway,” he said fairly stiffly, but he was still the same as he had been before he changed, if only because that was what his body, what the vessel for this new creature, had known for so long. He was easily bored, and not inspired to do any work other than what he wanted. Or, as it was now, what Painite told him to do.

He watched her as she danced around him, arms still folded over his chest. When she finished her little sing song he lashed his hand out and caught her by the head to stop her spinning around him. He frowned at her.

“You knew me? Who was I?”

He knew that was not a question he was allowed to ask. Painite did not want him to know anything but what she told him. But he needed to know more. About that man, the one Painite was hell bent on breaking, and the family he was setting out to destroy. He just wanted to know, it wouldn’t stop him. He had no emotions that would get in the way, after all.

But how could he be told this Knight was his father, that Knight was his mother. Those senshi were his teammates and friends. How could he be told those things and not want to know more about them. If he killed them that would not hurt him, he could not be hurt, but he was curious and yearning for more than he was. There was a hole much larger than the one in his chest that needed to be filled, even if he did not admit it to himself directly.

“Columba…” He searched his memory, but there was nothing there to search.

One of Columba’s legs splayed in a small kick when she was suddenly halted by his hands on her head and she let out a noticeable chirp of a yelp, but when she regain her balance to stand in front of him, she didn’t seem put off. She was not deterred or dampened, she just smiled at him again with that vacant, dull smile that reeked of ignorance and didn’t quite reach her eyes, which were bright and pleasant under fluttering lashes.

“You were Sailor Chaonis just like you are now, sillypants,” She laughed and shook the end of her pen at him. It was all very ‘oh you’ even though between their two lost memories there was a stagnant nothingness, no connection between them.

“A badass,” She said with one firm nod and went back to scribbling things on her clipboard. It was a random phrase to her, but one that resonated with a weird memory of his voice.

Buttwings are for badasses.

Yup, he still had a pair of those! Even if they were bat wings now.

“Maybe you were taller, though,” Which was not only a stupid, nonsense notion but she didn’t even seem to notice how nonsensical it was. She just hummed a little tune as she wrote her notes and nodded at people who came in. When everyone donated on a schedule as strict as this, it was easy to remember the regulars.

“I still don’t have mine yet,” She said, “I don’t deserve them, probably, because I used to be on the other side too. So I just work here. People are soooo nice!”

The donation center did have a tranquil, comforting air about it. People were given promotional prizes for participating in the new, ramped up schedule and the propaganda posters assured everyone they were being generous and wonderful citizens. But it was all a thick veneer over lies and any imbecile could see it, especially as the names of no shows were handed over to be punished, or worse, if they were repeat offenders.

Columba’s smile was part of that veneer too, but she didn’t want to see past it, and didn’t mind being an imbecile if it meant not facing what was really happening.

“What do you do, then, if you aren’t here to get the names?”

Chaonis looked surprised, looking at her as she spoke, his eyebrows lifting as she spoke. It was one simple word, but something in his shuddered at the way she said it, as if he was hearing his own voice, sharing that small glimpse of a memory with her. Buttwings are for badasses. He could not remember the words, it was more a feeling he got. Familiarity. It was like recalling it but only seeing shadows moving over a warped surface. It was there, it wanted to show him something, but he could not make it out.

He reached back and touched the wings attached to his costume. They were leathery and strange, and not the feeling he had been expecting. Plastic. He had been expecting plastic.

“I don’t do anything,” he snapped, but he rethought his angry answer and shook his head. Returning his arms to their crossed position over his chest, he shifted his feet and leaned the other way to what he had been doing before. “I serve a Negaverse General and do what she wants me to do. I kill senshi and knights, mostly.”

And it was as easy as that. He felt nothing for them, and they hardly mattered to him. He could see he was not going to get any of the answers he wanted out of this senshi. She was more broken than he was, he thought, which was strange in itself as he was not sure he was broken, per se. Just different now, and he knew and understood why. Painite told him, plain as day. He was brought to her to serve, and he used to be a White Moon Senshi hell bent on stopping the Negaverse. Since he could not remember it, he could not care about it.

He had proven a number of times over already, through bodies and blood, that he did not care about his past. As long as Painite was happy with his results, she would not care about his questions.

“Do other corrupt senshi work here?”

Maybe they had the answers. If they could remember more than he could… the Negaverse would never tell him, and he could not speak with the White Moon. The Corrupt Senshi were all he had to reach out to, at this point, though he had to be careful about it.

Her vacant, smiling expression didn’t change much, but her brow looked worried for just a second when he snapped, and she held her clipboard to her chest again as she backed away for half a step.

Cracks were showing in the careful mask.

“O-oh…” Her eyes cast down to the tile for a brief second at his answer, and then snapped back up to meet his, insipidly happy as ever. “Are you sure you’re not here to get the names of the bad people?”

Her head cocked at the strange way he felt at his buttwings. All of his mannerisms were strange, really. She had a very careful set of steps in her head for dealing with people of all kinds. Angry people, happy people, sleepy people, sick people. They all needed a different kind of mannerism to be correctly dealt with and she had careful steps in her head for all kinds.

But he was being difficult. He wasn’t fitting into any of the categories and it made her nervous, although that nervousness was only portrayed slightly in her brow and a mild twitch in the corner of her mouth when she smiled too hard. That was what the majority of her handler’s social training had been: If you don’t know what to do, smile harder.

She had an admittedly sheltered life in the three years since her corruption. Her handler hadn’t socialized her much and she never saw battle since her magic was healing magic and it had a use here in the hospitals and donation centers. Chaonis was an anomaly in the very carefully painted set of her lifestyle with his snapping and aggression.

“I could get you a list of addresses nearby, I think we have some at the reception desk…”

Chaonis looked at her as she smiled at him, not much caring for the expression. He did not smile much any more, except when he was grinning wickedly at someone because that was what he had learned to do while hunting. He watched her and wondered about her expression, though. There seemed to be something… off… with it.

More off than what seemed to be normal for corrupt senshi like them, he supposed. Where they all as broken as he and this Columba seemed to be? Being forced to change sides by having chaos poured into ones starseed probably left a lot of people feeling a bit empty and strange.

Chaonis, for his part, did not think much about that sort of thing.

“I’m sure,” he grunted.

He supposed he had the capacity to go out and find these people, and make them rethink their decisions to avoid their duty, but he was not told to do that. Painite was the only one who could tell him to do something and he would do it, without question. Any time anyone else asked him to do something, or told him to, he got edgy and angry. It made him feel something he did not really understand, perhaps a shadow of who he used to be.

But he would never really know that for sure. And that was what bothered him about it.

“No, forget it, I don’t want a list. I’ll just go look for some more to talk to. You just… do your job, I guess. Is this all you do? Read lists and send people out to fix problems?” It seemed boring, compared to his job. He hurt people for fun, for the most part. For someone else’s fun, maybe, but still.

At least there was no paper work.

Columba nodded her head, the cascade of hair pony tailed out the back of her hat shifting behind her with the furious bobbing.

“Yessir! Sometimes people don’t want to pay the energy tax and they need a visit to remind them who they owe all of their great stuff to! It’s very important to keep the files in order, or we would have tooootal anarchy.”

She recited her mission statement like a parrot. Something she was told to delude herself into having a purpose but in the back of her mind knew wasn’t true. “Sometimes I monitor the patients, though! My magic is really good for recover after a draining, picks you right up and makes you feel all better.” At least that part was true, and she was useful there. It was one of the reasons she was dropped down in this job in the first place. Opening the small packets of paper she magically formed hit someone with a burst of energy, endorphins, and a brain rush of happy, euphoria chemicals. A small offering to some patients that seems especially weary after a draining, and a big ego boost for Columba who couldn’t remember ever being in a battle or being helpful in the war.

With a flick of her wrist she summoned an envelope and held it out to him. “Would you like one for the road?”

Chaonis did not look too impressed, but he supposed someone needed to take care of that kind of work. He imagined he would rather be part of the brute force team than the paperwork team, but if he had that sort of choice he would just go with doing something else entirely. If he was left to his own devices he would just go and find something more interesting for himself to do, even if he could not think of what something like that would be.

He would probably not know what to do with himself, truth be told, if Painite told him he no longer had to listen to her, and he could go make his own decisions.

Recording names and keeping track of who was paying what, though, really did not seem all that fun and definitely not suited to him. He was brainless and a grunt, definitely, but he could at least accept that part of himself. He wanted to go out and cause trouble, get into fights. At least that helped him feel like he was a part of something.

Not just a tool.

“If I’m ever tired, I’ll remember to drop by,” he said stiffly, almost rolling his eyes. He did actually mean it, though. At her offer, though, he shook his head. He was a moody sort these days, and did not much want to feel upbeat or picked up. “I’m alright but thanks. I’m just going to go and see what i can find out elsewhere. Keep up the good work, I guess.”

”Right…” She murmured, retracting her hand back. Her smile dampened, but just for a moment before it was forced back into its original position. “Have a nice day!”