Welcome to Gaia! ::

She had her assigned patrol route drawn on the back of a Crystal Academy science worksheet, and a pen in her hand. The street names were carefully labeled in cramped handwriting--a caveat of space, not time or inclination. Bolton wanted to make Zircon proud of her. Zircon was her touchstone, her safe place, and she did not want the Captain to have any reason to turn Bolton out.

It wasn't that she was afraid of being alone. She liked being able to walk around the city in the quiet of night, when cars passed only rarely and the urban noise settled down into almost nothing. What she feared was losing access to the awesome cathedral-space of the Negaverse. Not what lay on the other side of the Hall of Shadows, oh no. But the crystalline caverns, where everything was quiet and no one could find her if she needed to hide. She did sometimes, when things became too much. Bolton would acclimate, but for now... for now she had her little corner in the rat's warren beneath the earth. She would hold onto it with everything she had.

Her aura-sense was unrefined, easily confused or confounded. So when she rounded a corner to see a senshi, she was surprised, but not entirely put out. She knew her duty with regards to senshi that didn't have that same darkness in their aura as she did, and it was attempt to destroy.

Zircon said so. That's how it would be.

She was little. Something in Bolton balked at that, and incongruously something floated into her head, not a memory but more like a rule, or any instinct. Back off, that instinct said. Child. Back off.

That wasn't how it worked anymore. That past self, whoever she had been, had died in the hands of a General-Sovereign. Bolton steeled herself and balled up her fists. "I'm sorry," she said, closing the space between them and throwing an absurdly natural punch, the sort of thing that came more from muscle memory than any sort of training. The right hook flowed smoothly from her shoulder right towards the girl's face.

The girl was a senshi. This was how it had to be. Zircon said.

"You're a senshi," said Bolton, from where the senshi's kick had thrown her. She pushed herself off the wall and pressed her hands to her mask--it had prevented most scraping damage from making face-first contact with the nearest brick building. "It has to be this way." Zircon said. Zircon said so.

This is how it works, she thought. She tried another punch, stepping into the senshi's personal space again.