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Six months was a long time to be gone. Of course, Europa had been away for longer before, but she still felt like Destiny City had changed a lot in her absence. The balance of the war felt like it had tilted subtly - perhaps that was Castor's doing? Old buildings had been demolished. New ones were being constructed. The park had all-new landscaping...

...But she was certain she could still see the scars of an old battle. There was an unevenness in the sod, even now, where a plastic elephant had once stood. Europa bit back a smile and kept walking, her senses on high alert. She felt a super senshi nearby. White moon. Stationary. Alone, but... it was worth checking out. What if they were injured?

Europa hurried towards the signature - if she'd felt it, that meant that Chaos could have felt it, too. As she got closer and the senshi came into view, she did a double-take. Polaris? No. The colors were all wrong, and her friend had worn boots... This girl bore a resemblance to Polaris, but they weren't the same.

She was lying curled up on the ground, and Europa hurried over. She couldn't begrudge anyone wanting to take a nap on duty - she'd done the same plenty of times - but what if this girl was hurt? She didn't look bloody, but one could never be too careful. Europa would never forgive herself if she accidentally passed up on the chance to save someone's life.

Stepping carefully, she moved to kneel beside the sleeping senshi and lightly shook her shoulder. "Hey, I don't mean to startle you, but - are you alright?"

Europa waited the whole five minutes, because coma waves were a thing that she was familiar with, and if she'd fainted in the middle of a public park, she would have wanted whoever found her to have the good sense to make certain she was okay and not just, like, stolen her starseed and been done with it. She continued to gently nudge the senshi, hopeful that it would eventually pay off and she wouldn't have to literally carry her back to Florence Court to have her checked out...

Fortunately, it didn't come to that. Europa leaned awkwardly to accommodate the drowsy girl's embrace.

"Um," she said, cheeks going faintly red. "Eternal Sailor Europa. I'm glad you're okay - are you normally so difficult to wake up?"

Five minutes just seemed like an awfully long time, she thought. "Sorry to wake you," she sighed. "It's just - a lot of times when senshi are passed out, it's not because they're okay. What's your name?"

Europa bit her lip - she'd gone and woken this girl up, and now she was realizing that she hadn't really had a good reason to do it. She was plenty guilty of sleeping on patrol - so why did seeing someone else doing it give her so much cause for alarm? "Corrupted senshi, yeah," she said quietly, momentarily distracted. Then, she doubled back to the topic at hand and shook her head.

"A few years ago," she said, "There was a coma wave. People were dropping like flies. I was... caught up in it. Anyway, it's been years, I shouldn't have worried about it..." But old trauma didn't rest easy, did it?

"That or they've had their starseeds pulled," she said, pursing her lips. "It takes people a while to die after that."

She blushed, self consciously pulling one of her ribbons away from her leg. Being pretty, as Methone had put it, meant spending a lot of time tangled up in your own frills. "You weren't in any trouble. Sorry. I just - I get kind of anxious sometimes. I've been at this for almost six years. Seen a lot of s**t, you know?"

Europa shrugged slightly. She was being silly, she knew, worrying about ancient history and getting Methone all worked up over nothing. She'd be better off sharing her fears with a therapist, but finding one who was hip to super powers was difficult to do. "Castor has a few months on me," she said, focusing on the change of subject. "We're - we're friends."

Sort of, she thought. She'd only really seen him once since his return, and she'd left town right afterwards. It was hard to call yourself friends for certain under those circumstances.

"I - I used to think that he had a lot more experience than I did, but I guess it's all relative."

She pursed her lips and tilted her head towards Methone's touch. At least physical intimacy was a language she spoke.

"Do you know Sailor Polaris?" she asked. "You look a lot like her."

On second glance, the resemblance was fading. Polaris was all silver and crystals and fur where Methone wore gold and coins. "Your colors are kind of similar," she said, shrugging at her own sentimentality. It was silly. Her old friend was long gone. "Your uniforms are cut the same. The two-piece thing. She's, um, senshi of magnetism, but I haven't seen her in literally years."

With any luck, Polaris had had washed her hands of all this weirdness and escaped to, like, college, thus accomplishing what Europa had been trying and failing to do for ages.

"As for Castor... I don't know. Hard to say about experience anymore. When you've been in it as long as he and I have, you wind up taking all kinds of hiatuses in the name of self-preservation. Uh." That had maybe gotten a little bit inappropriately self-reflective.

"Anyway, do you usually sleep on patrol?" she asked. "Because, you know, it's okay to take a night off when you need to catch up on your sleep. People think oh, I'm a superhero now, with great power comes great responsibility, I'd better be ready to give my whole life to this, and, um, no. The forces of good and evil are not worth having a nervous breakdown over."

Or, that was the conclusion she'd reached, anyway.

Europa gave Methone an odd look, wondering if perhaps she was boring the younger senshi. Best to wrap this up, she thought - she'd already interrupted what was clearly very important business. "Yeah, well..." she shrugged. Whatever training Castor had Methone doing, it didn't seem like it was very healthy. "When you need to take time for you, take time for you. We lose too many senshi to burn-out," she said, thinking sadly of all the comrades she'd seen walk away from it all.

"It would probably do Castor some good to be told where to shove it, anyway," she added, tight-lipped. "He's kind of... intense."

As for a massage, well, Europa wasn't sure what she was getting into here but she was just going to go with it. "Um, yeah, sure," she said. "Do your thing. Please."

Methone wasn't wrong, after all: she was a little high strung.

Europa leaned into Methone's touch, head rolling on her shoulders. "Oh," she sighed, "that's good." She was definitely glad that she hadn't excused herself from this conversation. Maybe she could convince Methone to come home with her another night? She'd have to raise the idea with Nick first - he liked to have at least some involvement in planning that sort of thing.

"I went toe-to-toe with a dark mirror princess once," she said conversationally. "I mean - I had help." Wolframite, she thought guiltily. Last time she'd seen him, he'd been demoted and chained like a dog. What had happened to him since them? She had no way of even contacting him... "Almost finished her off, too," she said, closing her eyes. She could remember Leto's hands on her ankle with perfect clarity. Drown, b***h.

"Powered life," said Europa, considering the question, "and trying to finish up with school." Even if she studied all through the summer, she still wouldn't finish until spring. "I've been sick a lot. It made me miss things."

Life was hard. Life would have been easier if she'd just kept her head down and never gotten involved in all this superhero stuff in the first place - but she'd made some good friends and learned a lot along the way, so that wasn't to say it was all bad.

"If you want to learn some fighting techniques sometime," Europa volunteered, "I could give you some pointers. My girlfriend's in the Air Force. She's taught me plenty of tricks."