Nick’s transformation pen had gone mostly untouched for the past month and a half. It moldered in the bottom of his unpacked suitcase, gathering dust under the bed of the furnished apartment he was renting with Tallulah.

He didn’t think of it, in the day-to-day; it was easy to forget about Oenone when being Nick was so exhausting. Work in the mornings, practicum in the early afternoon, more work, and home for dinner… It was the sort of life he’d always expected, growing up. Tough, definitely. Tiring, of course. But fulfilling, because he could see the effects of his work. There was always another monster, always another Negaverser doing their dastardly deeds… but the trauma ward was always something new and challenging. The difference between those challenges and those that Destiny City’s secret “war” presented him was that he had the tools to address a collapsed lung. He had nothing--nothing--when it came to fighting a superpowered war.

The practicum wouldn’t last forever, though. Eventually he would have to return to Destiny City, and his job at the University hospital, and the constant danger of finding a Negaverse agent around the corner. And--he’d been having these dreams--

He had to find some way to make himself… not that. If he really was destined to become a Prince, or whatever he’d been, he wouldn’t be a gibbering, pathetic wreck. He needed to be… alive. And awake. And fighting. So he needed something more than Tallulah, more than the simple joys of playing piano and just continuing to exist.

That circled him back to the transformation pen, one night when Tallulah was out at the library. He sneezed his way through the few things remaining in his suitcase, warm-weather things he hadn’t bothered to unpack, and unwrapped a t-shirt from around the black-green-bronze stick. It looked like nothing so much as a child’s toy, a sparkling wand one might tie a few ribbons around to let someone play at being a fairy or a princess. Nothing like a serious weapon a grown man might use to fight a war, or to access cosmic power. Life wasn’t a comic book, unfortunately. If it was, it would be a lot easier.

He transformed into Super Sailor Oenone, and summoned to hand his phone. Green, black, and bronze. He was never going to escape those colors, was he?

In the dream, he had never stepped off Earth and gone to his world. He didn’t think he’d even considered it. If he was going to make sure that never happened, he could start there. Couldn’t he? Oenone tucked his heels up on the bedframe, closed his eyes, and listened. Tallulah had said something all senshi about being able to hear their worlds, which sounded like a lot of bullshit to him--but her world was obviously real enough to kill her, so she had to have something there. He shifted on the bed to find a more comfortable position. Bells, probably, he thought, adjusting the heavy weight of his bandolier. His homeworld would probably sound like bells, if it had a sound at all.

It crept in at the corners of his mind, without the dignity of announcing itself. The sound of his homeworld wasn’t bells, but a clear ringing like the sound of someone playing a water flute, just a little too high for him to properly hear. He didn’t notice he was listening to it until he began humming along, little snatches of atonal melody, and that was when he pressed the ‘home’ button as he remembered Tallulah doing in that dream.

He didn’t blink, he didn’t open his eyes: there was simply a moment where he was laying on his bed in his apartment in Hanover, and then a moment where he was standing upright, surrounded by the smell of rich, loamy earth. Stepping forward, he heard a distinctly leafy crunch. Now he opened his eyes.

It was a station of some kind that he was standing in front of, he supposed. Perhaps an exterior plaza. There were cracks in the paving stones, through which green grass, brown roots, and flowering vines punched. The walls around him were a morass of climbing ivy, though the windows were stunningly clear--they hadn’t seemed to have suffered the same aging blight as the rest of the plaza, with its toppled lamp posts and mounds of plant life. And that, of course, was the puzzle--everything he’d heard indicated that these worlds were dead. He’d seen Gunn’s destroyed, dilapidated planet. He’d heard of Tallulah’s, and he’d experienced the chill of Mercury… but this was different. This place was gloriously, completely alive, and the station before him was more greenhouse than dilapidated wreck. Panes were cracked, true, but most of them seemed to have held.

No one could get him here, he reassured himself. No matter how eerie he found the place--with its complete, total silence--it was his own place. The fear of encountering a Negaverse agent or some awful Chaos source was misplaced. It was the artifact of a chemically imbalanced mind, and he didn’t have to put up with it. He could just stop thinking about it. He was going to stop thinking about it… right… now.

Inside the station, the light was dappled gold and green over mossy floor. He moved from puddle of sunlight to puddle of sunlight, listening to the crunch of glass under his feet and the rustling of branches and vines in a listless wind. Maybe if the place weren’t so eerily perfect, so completely untouched… he’d feel more settled. He’d come expecting ruin, and this… wasn’t it. They’d all said, some calamity wiped out our worlds. And he’d expected to see evidence of the calamity.

Nothing. He stepped off the edge of the platform and found--well, it wasn’t train tracks. It crunched beneath his boots, and he knelt down to scrape fallen foliage away. There was a golden sheen to the stone beneath it, which was peculiarly unbroken. “Mysterious,” he said to himself, kicking away a few more branches as he walked along the golden stones. He kept going, into the far tunnel, feeling his way along the smoothness of the--it had to be some kind of transport. A train. Or a trolley, or…

He stopped when his foot encountered something distinctly organic. The floor had gone from crackling with branches, a smooth coat of that gold, to soft. Squishy. He jerked forward, a hand pressing over his mouth for a moment as he fought back the urge to vomit. Hesitantly, he reached down to feel… whatever it was. Hopefully not skin. Except it was soft, velvety… like skin…

Oenone pressed his hand over his mouth, and--ran his fingertips along the bottom of a mushroom cap. Questing forward, he found--more mushrooms. And when he stood up and kept walking, the floor remained buoyant, like he was walking over dead flesh. Every branch he stepped on after felt uncomfortably like the snapping of bone. He had to find something, though his stomach churned at the images his mind supplied in the complete darkness.

He was not walking over bodies. It was mushrooms and branches. He knew that.

His far hand encountered something made of metal and glass. His nails tapped against the glass, the glass, the glass--and then something different. Oenone fumbled at the… lumpy plastic? The… what was it? He pressed a hand against the plastic, and heard a clicking noise. So much of this was luck and stupid guessing games, he knew that, but the things he would do for just a little light right then were truly ridiculous--he frowned. He could come back later… he could come back later with a light. Maybe then this place wouldn’t be so… eerie.