New Years Eve finds her patrolling with McCarthite and Bowerclase, their coats pulled close against the late-night chill. The captain carried a hammer, the head of which was, for some totally unknowable reason, shaped like former president Richard Nixon. The lieutenant wielded something that looked and sounded exactly like a ukulele, but which he insisted was a guitar so many times that Astrophyllite decided she didn’t actually want to discuss it.

It had been a successful night so far. Their pockets jingle with collected energy from a dozen dozen revelers, young men and women walking drunkenly between bars and parties and--

“Do you feel that?” asks McCarthite, her red eyes bright despite the darkness of the alley. Astrophyllite reaches out, past the pair of dark signatures beside her (one warm, old leather and smoky cognac and electric noise, the other crisp tweed and aftershave and the acrid burn of cigarettes and lies like promises glinting in the night) and tries to find what the other captain is talking about. What she feels is a page, bright and sweet as buttercream icing, red as the sun when it dips low on the horizon, gritty sand and the taste of rust in her mouth.

“A Mars page,” says Astrophyllite quietly. Beside her, Bowerclase nods. McCarthite gives her an odd look.

“I was just going to say a page,” she says. “You can tell how they’re aligned?”

Can’t everyone? thinks Astrophyllite, momentarily thrilled at the possibility of being special. Then, she considers things more realistically - she’s not special. She’s a freak. “Sometimes,” she says measuredly. “The Mars ones… they taste like rust.” She’d met enough of them to know it was a recurring theme.

McCarthite gave her a look like she’d grown a second head. “Whatever,” she said, hefting her hammer. “Let’s go see what’s up.”

The page was not far from them, and whatever attempt she may have made to flee when she felt three Chaos signatures converging on her was short-lived. They caught the girl in a dead-end alley, the walls rising too high to mount in a single jump and offering little purchase for a second bound.

The girl - and she was just a girl, fourteen or fifteen at most - looked at the three of them as they approached her and Astrophyllite saw the fear in her cherry-red eyes. She was a page of Mars, sure enough, dressed in a red tunic-dress and gladiator sandals, her blonde hair long and loose, clutching a sprig of willow like it would save her, and-

And-

And she looked like Colchis.

Intellectually, Astrophyllite knew that this was not the same page, that Colchis wore an entirely different uniform and lived in an entirely different city and she couldn’t be here, but this girl looked so similar, and carried herself practically the same age, and she was young like Colchis was-

McCarthite stepped to the front. “Well,” she said, her voice steel and acid. Predatory. Shark-sleek. “Look what we have here. I don’t suppose you know what happens to knights that we find on our turf?”

“N-n-no,” stammered the girl. Her eyes were moving fast between the three of them, like a rabbit in a trap. Astrophyllite looked to McCarthite and bit her tongue. They could make this girl perfect and pure in Chaos and it would be a gift. She’d have her life. She’d serve Metallia.

She’d lose her memories, the way Avalon had when she’d lost her knighthood. And she’d be stepping off Aludra’s right path.

The captain clenched her fingers awkwardly around her club.

“Bowerclase,” ordered McCarthite, thudding the head of her hammer threateningly against her opposite palm. “Contact Neoline. We may just have a convert for him.”

“I - no!” exclaimed the page. “No, I-”

“We drive a hard line,” said McCarthite. “You can join us or you can die.” She glanced at Astrophyllite and smiled a bit, as if to say, see? We’re so much more hard core than you fools in Destiny City. There were next to no senshi in Boston. Karloffite skinned guardian cats for fun.

“I’d sooner die than join with you,” said the girl.

She tried to fight.

It did not go well. They brought her to her knees, and Bowerclase held her down.

McCarthite looked to Astrophyllite. “Would you like to do the honors?” she asked. “I bet that club of yours would do wonderful things to her skull.”

Astrophyllite stared down at the girl, who looked so much like her friend and so much not, and she tasted rust and blood hot in her throat. Her fingers twisted around the narrow handle of her weapon, turning its crystalline head towards the light. She didn’t - she couldn’t. She refused--.

She disappeared, slipping through space the way Bischofite had done and told her she would be able to do, too, one day. One moment, she was in the alley, the next, her bedroom in her father’s house.

Astrophyllite exhaled shakily, letting her glamour fade from around her.

There would be hell to pay in the morning.