Things had gone so a** up during the New Years bullshit. Memories had surfaced about a different life and she had been faced with a conflicting reality in the form of a beaten Mars Knight. It had been a blind-siding event, to suddenly get flooded with memories where she had stood beside him, fought beside him, and felt a deep connection to a planet and group of people who served it. Brothers and sisters of spirit, rather than blood. People she had been willing to sacrifice herself for...
Cinnabar had found out quickly how much of a lie it all was when one of her own had pulled the very starseed from her chest. A man she had remembered sharing drinks and camaraderie with. The kicker for it all... she had been trying to help. She had decided to risk everything she had started building in the Negaverse to save the life of one man, and for her efforts all she had gotten was injury and betrayal. Left behind like a discarded doll, like trash... She had been so angry when she had woken up to find herself alone.
Damn them all.
It was a firm reminder of what side she was on and who she was serving. The side she belonged on. She had given so much of herself to Mars, both in those phantom lies and in that fun house, and they had thrown it away, thrown her away... but the Negaverse had reached out for her, taken hold, and pulled her towards something better, lifted her above what she had been. Painite had seen her potential and given her a chance... Laurelite had seen it, through her failure even, and given her another. They'd given her power and now she felt like a fool for turning her back on those gifts for even a moment.
She would not be such a fool again. Cinnabar could see where her loyalties should be. The memories were lies, implanted in her mind by the knights of Mars to deceive her into betraying her rightful brethren. Tanais was a figment of those lies. The River and the City did not exist. It was time that she stopped being a petulant child and started being useful to the Negaverse. It was not just about her any more... there was so much more she had turned a blind eye to. Schörl had tried to tell her, tried to show her, and she ignored it in favor of her own narrow vision of things. She would become a better officer, one worthy of what she had been given, and live up to the potential they had seen in her.
When she became a General, it would be because she had earned that title and deserved to wear it. Order was the enemy and she would see it ripped apart in her claws like prey.
The first step was filling in the giant, gaping holes she had allowed to appear in her training, in her information. She should have known better, letting herself get to this state... she'd been a bounty hunter, and in that was a knowledge of what you were hunting. She was nearly useless if she didn't know what or why she was fighting. She couldn't make proper decisions to support the Negaverse without knowing what their goals were OR who they were really fighting.
Approaching the strange computers the Negaverse kept in the citadel, Cinnabar kicked out one of the provided chairs and flopped down into it, slapping the thick, college-ruled notebook down in front of her. She'd done research before in the pursuit of her job... she'd just have to treat this like that. Ugh, homework though... she hated this s**t. Flipping open the notebook, the Captain clicked her pen and pulled up the branch rosters, the training guide, and the senshi database, and set to work.
Word Count: 662
