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So, like, she hadn't had a senshi phone since giving hers to Mistral, and that had been literally a year ago. It hadn't been that big a deal for a while - she'd been out of town for most of that time and had no need for a senshi phone - but now she was back, and it was turning out to suck to go out on patrol and meet people and have to admit that she was lacking a really basic piece of tech.

Oops.

Operating on the theory that if she walked around long enough, she would find a cat, Europa took to the streets. So far tonight, she'd skirted a couple of captains and dusted a low-level youma, but hadn't seen any guardian cats. Maybe her hypothesis was about to be disproven?

Ugh. How disappointing. And her feet hurt - what was it with senshi uniforms and having to walk several miles in heels every night? Europa sighed, sank down onto a bench, and began to wrestle her boot off.

Europa looked up suddenly at the approaching commotion and - OH, HEY, LOOK, A GUARDIAN CAT! And, fortunately for both of them, something no more ferocious than a labrador mix, its huge paws betraying that it was only half-grown. Still, it had teeth and a very loud bark (and a thick leather collar around its neck - if not for the cat, she would have grabbed the dog and returned it to whatever back yard it had escaped from), so it needed to be dealt with.

Non-violently.

Europa dropped her boot, which had finally slipped free of her ankle a moment before, got to her feet, and grabbed the cat. "Hi," she said. "Hang on."

She hopped up onto the bench, scanned the street quickly to plan her jump, and then launched herself towards the roof of an auto-repair shop.

The dog, meanwhile, busied itself with chewing Europa's abandoned boot.

Landing on the roof, Europa set the cat down carefully in front of her. "Would you believe me if I said I'd been looking for a guardian cat all night?" she asked. "I'm Sailor Europa... I'm not sure if we've met." (She'd been around a relatively large number of guardian cats in her tenure, but unfortunately, she'd caught the names of relatively few.)

Europa nodded, watching the cat as she recovered. "I've always been much more of a cat person," she agreed. "Even before the senshi thing - lucky for me that you're our animal overlords. In an alternate universe, we probably have guardian chihuahuas."

She was willing to bet that that was a terrible universe.

"It's lovely to meet you, Ash," she added.

Carefully taking a seat across from the cat, Europa explained, "I gave my phone to a knight about a year ago. She wanted to do science to it? Anyway, I've been needing to get a new one since - please tell me I'm eligible for a free upgrade and it's not going to be like, four hundred dollars, or however it works at Verizon."

Europa blushed, trying to decipher Ash's tone. "I don't actually know what Mistral did with my phone," she confessed. She knew for sure it had been taken apart, but if the knight had ever found out anything from it, well, Europa didn't know - she'd been out of town by that point. "I could see about finding out for you. She did do some really cool stuff with their rings - holograms and stuff."

She picked the phone up from beside the cat, turning it over in her hands. The new models were certainly a lot fancier than the old ones, but they seemed to upgrade with the times. "My first one of these was a flip phone," she said with a slight laugh. "Astraea gave it to me. Well, I guess she was Luna at that point..."


What had ever happened to her, Europa wondered, but recognized that was completely off-topic.

"Thank you," she said, slipping the phone into subspace with practiced grace. "I.... I don't think I have that many contacts that would be worth saving. I've been in the business so long that I've outlasted most of my friends one way or another."

Which sounded pathetic. "You can count on me," she assured the cat, getting to her feet.

Europa grinned suddenly - she hadn't expected Ash to want to linger, but she was happy to spend more time talking. She sat back down, spreading her ribbons carefully out beneath her. "Okay," she said, exhaling with a bit of a nervous laugh. "Yeah, we can do that. I don't meet a lot of guardian cats, to be totally honest? I knew a couple when I was a newer senshi, but I've been out of town a few times and it seems like every time I come back, there's a whole new cast to meet."

She sighed - that just made her sound like a slacker, but truth be told, maybe she was a slacker. She hadn't been to her moon in going on three years. The last major fight she'd been in was against Leto, over a year ago. She was just... a mess.

"Do you have a senshi you call yours?" she asked. She didn't think that attached cats usually wandered without their senshi, so it seemed unlikely - but it also seemed worthwhile to ask.

Europa settled her hands on Ash's back, rubbing her gently between the shoulder blades. "I awakened in 2009," she said, "Right before my seventeenth birthday." Putting it that way made her feel old - she was halfway to twenty-three now, with nearly six years of superhero work on her resume (granted, she'd taken some significant breaks).

"I've met a lot of cats over the years," she added. There'd been Chloe, who awakened her, and Derpraline, who'd handled one of her upgrades. Abel, bonded to Pyxis, who she hadn't seen or heard from for years despite their adolescent closeness. Tomlin and Horatio were both Jovian cats - but she hadn't had the energy to track down either of them since returning to Destiny City this time around, perhaps out of fear that they'd met some terrible fate...? And, of course, Astraea-Luna was long vanished. "But none that I see on a regular basis anymore. Maybe it's because I don't have any promotions left?"

There wasn't anything above Eternal besides Princess, as far as she knew - and if there was anything that Europa was certain of, it was that she wasn't a princess. She didn't think she very much wanted to be one - it seemed like a lot of responsibility for one person. She'd seen what the pressures of royalty had done to Castor, and she was decided - no, thank you.

"I do wish I knew more cats," she sighed. "It would be convenient. I guess I'll have to start with you - you are now a cat that I know, after all."

Europa laughed uncertainly. "Maybe," she said, liking Ash's attitude. Maybe she'd just had bad luck so far - perhaps life was different for senshi who could count on the steadying presence of a guardian cat. Maybe they made fewer bad decisions, or were caught in binds less frequently. "I can't presume to speak for other cats."

Kallichore, though, that was a name she recognized. Europa's eyes lit up. "I know her!" she exclaimed. "She was - um. I tried to make all the moons of jupiter that I could find team up," Europa explained, "but it was so much work, and I got sick, and... I haven't really seen anyone in a long time. I feel like I failed them, because I was too sick to run meetings and I had to go out of town and... It's stupid. I wasn't calling myself captain but I was doing all the work of a captain and it was exhausting and... kind of thankless."

What had she been expecting, though? She'd never asked for appreciation, and she'd probably never done anything worthy of it, either.

"I'd love to try to help you," she said, scratching Ash behind the ears, "if you're okay with the fact that I'm kind of a loser failure of a senshi."

Europa thought otherwise: it had sort of been her fault that she got sick, messing around on her homeworld as she had been. But Ash was being very nice to her and she didn't want to ruin that by admitting to being a complete moron who ate untested alien vegetables. She smiled slightly, running a hand over the top of Ash's head. "Thanks."

She was glad for the change of subject. "I was awakened in, um, November 2009," she said. "Like two weeks before my seventeenth birthday. I think the first senshi started awakening a few months earlier, at the start of the summer?" She wracked her brain, trying to think of who was still around from those days. "Castor or Polaris might know more about the really early stuff. Or... Regulus awoke in October that year, I think?"

"There was a meeting early-on," she continued. "February or something, in the high school gymnasium. Astraea set it all up and explained to us that she'd been the guardian cat to a group of senshi in Japan back in the early 90s under the name Luna, and that the Negaverse had wiped that team out really quickly. Their leader's name was Sailor Moon... we were supposed to be looking for her reincarnation, but no one's mentioned that to me in years. Personally... I've stopped waiting on Moon Princesses. They're not going to help us."

Chibimoon sure hadn't.

"It was all pretty routine for a while - dusting youma, fighting Negaversers. They were pulling starseeds at that point, not harvesting energy, so people were dropping like flies. It was bad. They were all murderers, not like these officers now who pretend they've never done anything wrong. The Parallel senshi started to show up around then, and then at the end of the school year, the first coma wave happened. A lot of us wound up having this shared dream in a place called Tartaros, and when we came out of it, the Parallel senshi were gone... except for Ares."