Welcome to Gaia! ::

1-16-11

She’s prepared this time. There was only the one day and then Hestia would again have to wait weeks. There would be no scrubbing away with her uniform, not ever again if she could help it. This was a situation that called for planning and efficiency and perhaps the former included a series of poorly drawn feats of heroism, but as to the latter she was a professional. On her back was large container of clean water, possibly borrowed from one of Mr. Lee’s offices. In one hand a bucket full of scrub brushes and many, many gaudy orange Sham-Wows along with a roll of garbage bags. In the other hand was a simple broom. Possibly the most impressive part of the image though was the look of ready, ruthless determination on Hestia’s face as she surveyed the ruins of her world once more.

She looked ready to kill a man. She looked ready to kill a man with a toothbrush and a can of those weird tiny corn cobs if she had to. She looked like she was hoping she’d have the chance.

Setting down her supplies at the base of the temple steps, she walked upward as the view shifted back and forth, the past flickering insistently across the present until the empty shell of a world is filled with bodies going about their tasks.





It takes some time to map out the big temple and adjust her plans with every passing room full of debris and the few that, thankfully, are simply dirty but relatively intact. The furniture she finds is all stone and while maybe it won’t do for Algol to be shown the entire place, maybe if one of the entry rooms was cleaned up first. There was one with a singularly pretty basin, its sides covered in fine carvings. Somebody important must have lit a flame there once.

Somebody important should do so again.

2-27-11

It looked nicer this time. Not nice as in acceptable, but Hestia felt a little bit more satisfied on arrival than she’d been upon leaving. The circular chamber she’d decided to start with was finally showing a glimpse of the somber elegance only hinted at before. The chamber wall held one long frieze, but unlike some she’d noticed on her last few visits, this was abstract and composed of symbols. Full of shapes and rays all wonderfully, gloriously symmetrical and evenly placed. A perfect sight for a perfect person.

Once they were fully cleaned and repaired, of course. Fortunately, it seemed less cracked than she remembered.

With a pleased little sniff, Hestia turned her gaze to the black and white marble furniture, some of the most intact she’d found so far and the other half of why she was starting here. The ragged bits of remaining upholstery had been taken out on her last visit, along with the loose rubble and dirt from the ceiling. What was left felt like solid, well made bones that just needed a good polish and a bit of comfort to be an appropriate representative of Hestia. World and person both.

4-10-11

You ask and she agrees, because she’s curious and lovely like that. The cat agrees too, and if he seems eager at first he soon gets a little more hesitant the more eager he sees you being in turn. Even after a year of living together, your tastes haven’t exactly aligned.

Because he insists on having bad taste. Clearly.

She gets a little quieter as the weeks go by, whenever the trip comes up. Her own world is something they don’t speak of and you don’t know if it’s because the world was awful or incredibly special, so much so that it can’t be mentioned casually. You tell yourself it must be the latter, how could her world be anything other than amazing? But sometimes you catch something akin to sadness and what’s unmistakably frustration whenever the topic looms close before abruptly vanishing. A ghost topic for the ghost senshi.

You can tell she’s being careful with you though. Usually she’s at her boldest with you, her ideas and words and gestures at their biggest, full of a momentum that doesn’t need to slow and stop, waiting for you to catch up. But now there’s moments where she treats you with a certain caution, even delicacy. It feels so strange and warm, to be treated with care. Like the you in this moment is particularly precious.

Neither you nor she consciously understand that you’re incredibly vulnerable right now. But understanding isn’t necessary when care has become the long cherished habit between the two of you.

You try to make sure they both stay in the chamber you’ve prepared, but the cat saunters off to explore with a flick of his tail. Instead of trying to chase after, you settle for the fact that he seems more curious than suspicious about this world and what you've been doing here. Later, you’ll have the pleasure of his scathing critique, the kind he’s honed through watching reality TV competitions and taking notes from The Mean Judge. But that’s later and literal worlds away.

She looks at the giant frieze that sweeps across the chamber wall as you arrange a pair of cushions on either side of a shallow basin. The vessel is lustrous and intricately carved, its design a mirror of that on the room’s wall. They hold beautiful symmetries, not rigid, but rather flowing with undeniable order. You don’t tell her that you picked these things because they make you think of her. This is simply always the case.

Sitting across from her, you pause because there’s more to this, you know there is but the vague fragments of memory only let you know that there’s more to this. Not what more could actually be. So instead you have to rely on that vague sense of a person and their presence here. That flame of self as a kind of inevitable point in existence. She is here, you are here. She is here, and you’ll be able to care for her shining self in a way both new and ancient.

You cradle her hands in your own, holding them over the basin as a sweet scent moves up and up and up through the world and surrounds her fingers. You whisper that this is her, and you do not tell her that she is the brightest and clearest focus of light and life you could ever imagine. Your hands shift a little as the chant and swish of long ago fills your ears. You tell her that there’s a certain debris in life, that can block paths and obscure thought.

And then you fumble. She’s alarmed and tensed at the idea of magical dirt bothering her on top of everything else and you’re struggling to say that you want her to leave this flame here, this small piece of her presence. You want her to know that even on this far away world, maybe especially on this world, you could tend to her. You want to sweep away her problems, polish her presence, and bask in the light of her existence. You want your world to have this. Have Her.

It takes a while. The mysterious extras of the ritual probably make it easier, but it’s not impossible like this. It’s just a little rough and it takes a while, but this time she gives you an infinity of patience for you to get it right.

A flame springs up within the basin and then floats up a little higher, peeking over the brim. Everything in the room is suddenly richer, more luminous. The world is burnished by her light, as everything always has been. Another inevitability.

You intone, “May you burn ever brightly.”

But she’s already searching for the mechanism that made that ritual work and talks about testing natural gasses. She thinks the design on the wall might be some kind of math problem. She tells you that one side of the room is slightly taller than the other but that it’s okay. Ish.

You wonder aloud if trying the ritual with the cat would set him on fire. Are magic cats even flammable? Is her reply and a sudden clatter comes from outside the chamber. An eavesdropper runs away, his suspicions that something awful awaits here are clearly confirmed.

5-22-11

Walking up the stairs of the main temple, Hestia sees the three large basins that had greeted her on that first visit. The smallest of them, the World Keeper’s…hers, had grown into a fat, bobbing thing. Looking at it felt like being startled by her own smile in the mirror. A little awkward, but nice.

Cleaning it was the same. Sometimes it’s hard to slowly think about her own self and just care. To the exclusion of everything else. Even if only for a little while. It’s uncomfortable enough that she ended up rushing a little, and almost didn’t notice the change in one of the other basins, the largest.

A small flame, no bigger than that of a matchstick, flickered in the air above it. Unsure and trying its hardest.

Frozen in place and overwhelmed with hope and questions and so, so much fear that she doesn’t want to understand, Hestia never noticed her tears. Barely even registered leaving her world until she was standing in front of Mindy's bedroom door, knocking hesitantly.

7-27-11

Next time was in London and she nearly died for it. The move was sudden but not entirely surprising. The Lee family had money invested around the world, there was no need to stay in a place as rapidly deteriorating as Destiny City. Moving to an entirely different continent was a bit much, but why not be thorough? While Emily was quietly sad to leave both friends and idols behind, she would still get to stand beside Miss Mindy, and that was home enough. It wasn’t the end of the world.

Hestia had heard that things were different outside of DC. She’d heard that it was dangerous to power up at all. She thought she had taken it seriously, had taken the necessary precautions. But in the end it was a child’s precautions against an impossibly large world of powerful adults.

Phone out and ready to travel to another sort of home, she’d barely had time to register the presence of another power signature when the attack hit. And with it, the sudden, breathtaking sensation of so many more on the way.

The next moment, she was greeted with the sweet smell of incense and taste of cold marble. Somehow she’d made it over. Panting, unable to move from where she sprawled, Hestia thumped her head lightly on the ground. Grateful to be alive. Frustrated with the memory of helplessness and burgeoning realization that she wouldn’t be able to come back again. At least not for a long time.

She took her time. First to heal and then to tend.

It seemed she was going to end up homesick after all.