Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was already quite late by the time Gigi left the university library and picked up a terrible coffee at the late-night kiosk. It was easier to stay out late than to go home. Home had become strange, with her mother fluttering about so worried-happy, trying to do things for her, take care of her, make everything ‘better’. Gigi hadn’t really talked to her dad yet. She was dreading the look on his face. And even if she did go home, it wasn’t worth trying to sleep, her nightmares were just that much worse after the subway attack. Eventually she’d drop down on the couch or maybe her bed and just pass out, but that was okay. She’d never been much for sleeping. There were always so many things to do.

A slow awareness crept up on her as she downed her bitter drink, a little nagging sound that wasn’t really a sound. Someone was sending her a message? Her senshi contacts were few and far between - in an emergency, she was hardly the first person anyone should be calling.

Gigi ducked down the nearest side street, out of the lights, and set the empty paper cup down on the gutter as she powered up and pulled out her phone. Her eyes widened as she read and re-read the message. She remembered Chara vividly, his bravery, his determination, the damage he’d taken in the fight. She’d been pretty sure he was concussed or something by the time the paramedics reached them, but still, it seemed like a long time for him to be in hospital. Her own bruising was down to faded yellow patches. But if he had a ‘bad feeling’, then she was so there. She wasn’t sure how long the message had been waiting for her before she twigged. Chara could be there already, and he hadn’t seemed like the type who would wait for back-up before going in.

'On my way', she texted back quickly.

Binning the cardboard cup, she took off with long bounding strides, building momentum, and made the leap up onto a dumpster, a fire escape, a rooftop. The wind rushed around her as she jumped and ran, cold and crisp, chasing off the last tired thoughts that the caffeine hadn’t cleared.

Eventually, she dropped down from the rooftops a block away from the subway entrance, a quiet landing and cautious movements as she scanned about for Chara. No chaos auras lingered, no trace of the youma that had taken over the tracks below, but that didn’t stop her feeling uneasy. She walked a little closer, quick sharp steps, hard to keep truly quiet on the pavement. Here was where the ambulance had waited for them, and police cars over there. She’d travelled from this station so many times, but now she could barely recognise it without the flashing lights and sirens, the stench of the youma stomach acids eating away at the station tiles.

She summoned her phone again, holding it loosely in one hand in case another message came through. Her other hand, though, had lifted unconsciously to press against the ruffles hanging from her collar, the centre of her chest.

“I’m here?” she called softly. Hopefully she wasn’t too late.

Sailor Subamara drew a quiet breath of relief as she sensed the other aura, similar in strength to her own, and heard Chara’s voice calling to her. It was amazing how much creepiness could be dispersed by just one friendly voice. Thank goodness it seemed he hadn’t got impatient waiting for her and gone off exploring alone.

She smiled back, but it quickly turned to a little worried gasp when she got close enough to see the bandages still gracing the other senshi’s poor face. Clean of the youma gunk, his bruising stood out. They’d really beaten him badly.

“Me? Yes, I’m doing okay,” she said, touched that he’d thought to worry about her. Hers were mostly incidental bruises from standing in the wrong place. Which was everywhere, with a youma that big. She hadn’t really been targeted by agents , at least not the same way he had.

“But what about you? You said you just got out of hospital? Should... is it okay for you to be powering up?”

She lifted her hand to gesture at the bandages. She didn’t mean to mother, but it seemed like a terrible idea to go out patrolling injured. Not that she was an expert. Not that she patrolled much at all. But even a small youma could do a lot of damage if you weren’t ready for it, and strong as Chara seemed, the thought that something might make those bandages a target was more than a little worrying. But if it was an emergency? The last thing she wanted was to see him more hurt.

“P-permanent?!” Subamara repeated, eyes widening in even greater concern. Hopefully he was exaggerating, she thought. Surely he was exaggerating! But the concussion had been real enough, and the bandages.

But he kept talking, telling her it was fine, and right there was why the young Senshi of Chocolate was already a better senshi than she had ever been. She’d been battered, frightened, so she’d what? Hid in her room for days and only come out because classes didn’t attend themselves. She needed to pull her socks up if she wanted to help save the world.

His words were too sweet, and she took more encouragement from them than she maybe should. She didn’t want to disappoint him. He was awesome, she was a pretender, just barely hanging on. No, that wasn’t right. She was support. And she could sure as hell support Chara, even if it was by dragging him back to the hospital again. It wouldn’t hurt to take a look around, and far better they did it together than letting the injured boy go in alone.

“Right, yes. Good plan,” she nodded, pulling herself together and smiling at him, before turning to examine the subway entrance too. “But let’s go carefully, okay? It might not be very stable.”

The mimed glasses brought a little nervous giggle to Subamara’s lips. Chara sounded almost proud. He was making light of his injury, but it really didn’t sound minor to her. It could have been so much worse, she knew, but eye damage was nothing to joke about. He needed those!

“There are senshi with healing powers, maybe you could find someone to help you magically?” she suggested. But no names sprang to mind, and she wasn’t sure if that was something she’d read about in the Primer, or something remembered from the darkened dream future. She knew there had been healers, but she didn’t know who they were, or if they even existed now. But they could ask around.

She followed Chara down the steps, relieved he was going slow and using the rail. The blackness was oppressive, as if it remembered the crush of commuters trying to get out, the phantom whistle of the youma train. She wasn’t so much scared of whatever youma the subway might cough up now - it was empty of civilians, a less serious target. But she was deeply worried about her companion and his unconcern about his own safety. Even if investigation was the right thing to do, she would never forgive herself if Chara got himself hurt.

“Honestly?” Subamara paused in the darkness. She didn’t think it was a good idea at all. She couldn’t sense any auras… but chaos could teleport, come out of no-where. “I don’t have a light either,” she said.

She bit her lip, looking for an option that would satisfy Chara’s sense of duty without letting him put himself in further danger.

“Would it be enough to keep an eye on the entrance? If something’s going to come out, it will probably come out there, and we can jump it straight away. Or if we sense an aura we could head down then?"

Subamara smiled in the darkness, relaxing a little. He seemed pretty enamoured of his war wound, so if he really believed it wasn’t going to do any lasting harm to his sight, she would let it go. It could have been so much worse. “It does sound pretty cool when you tell it like that,” she admitted.

Hopefully, hopefully Chara didn’t catch her sigh of relief when he agreed not to go deeper into what was left of the subway. “Yes, they should sense our auras,” she said, nodding. There could be anything down there still, and they were just a pair of basic scouts, and her magic was largely decorative. She scanned the area again as the conversation lapsed, waiting for any hint of a dark aura to ping her senses. Chara’s request caught her off-guard. Up until that very moment she’d assumed he had a pretty solid handle on the whole senshi deal, despite his youth.

“A cat told you that?” she asked, feeling a shiver run down her back. Which cat, she wondered. When she found out, they were getting no treats from her ever. They started out with so little information. She still remembered how many questions she’d had for Athene, and how much his help had meant to her. She could definitely pass on as much as she knew.

“I mean, of course! I’m… not the best person to ask, I’m not an expert, but I’ll absolutely tell you everything I know! Obviously you got the ‘war’ bit. But, we don’t have to kill them. I mean, it’s not the only option. Sometimes they can be purified, where they get rid of the chaos in their starseeds. But I heard it’s hard to do. Our job is to stop them from hurting and killing people. And stay alive ourselves, obviously.”

She remembered the magic he’d thrown at the youma train, some kind of chocolate bombs. “You’re ahead of the game, you have offensive magic. You can hurt them. You can save people!”

She trailed off, unsure where to even really begin beyond that. She was probably telling him stuff he already knew. “What sorts of things did you want to know about?”

“That’s awful!” said Subamara, though she had to wonder what exactly Chara had said to the cat to get that reaction. His uniform wasn’t that bad - actually, she thought it was pretty cute, though that probably wasn’t what an angry teenage boy wanted to be told. But suddenly Senshidom was a shock for anyone. The cat had no excuse.

“I wonder if anyone has a real attack? Everyone I’ve talked to doesn’t like their magic.” Not that she had a huge sample size, but how were they supposed fight a war with coffee and chocolate? She shrugged. “Yours looked pretty effective from where I was standing.”

Chara was asking the big important questions, and not ones she’d put a whole lot of thought into. She only powered up because people were in danger, because random bystanders were getting floored by bits of train. ‘The War’ was too big and frightening to look into.

“Okay. Well.” She gathered her thoughts and focused on the answers she was sure of. “So as far as I know, Senshi and Knights are Team Order, the good guys. And the Negaverse is Team Bad Guys. They have Senshi with them too, the ones in black. And then there are Dark Mirror Senshi, who are different again. They seem to be on their own team entirely. They were working with the Negaverse once, but apparently they broke up. Sometimes they’ve been helpful, but not everyone on our side trusts them. I guess they’re Team Neutral?”

“I… don’t think we have a leader. We never really have, and that’s one of the problems. I think there was supposed to be a Moon Queen, but as far as I know, she never showed up. There are princesses, and I think a prince, but when one princess tried to hold a meeting and get organised, everyone just argued.”

And then the Fire Nation Negaverse attacked. Subamara bit her lip. That meeting had been ambushed, the biggest bloodbath she’d seen, though she’d hid through most of it. She couldn’t have been much older than Chara back then.

“There’s an intro document you can get on your phone, did you find that?” she changed the subject with artificial brightness.

Oh, the uniforms! Subamara didn’t know why the senshi battle gear was what it was, but she could imagine it would be a bit of a surprise, if you hadn’t seen other ‘terrorists’ wearing it before.

“You have pants,” she pointed out, brushing her hand over her skirt in demonstration of the ways it could be worse. She’d seen enough fuku in action to know how lucky Chara was, even if he didn’t. She liked her own uniform, but practical for battle it was not.

A brighter smile crossed her face when it became clear he hadn’t been told about the Primer. She didn’t know if it would answer all his questions, but it would definitely be clearer than any explanations she could give. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to mind her babbling so far.

“It’s no problem! There’s so much we don’t get told going in.”

They depended so much on the cats to explain things, she thought, but at the end of the day, they were cats. It was hardly a surprise if they got weird or wandered off.

She leaned over Chara’s shoulder to watch as he located the Primer. “It’s kind of long, but it’s in sections, so you can skip around.”