Welcome to Gaia! ::

Grilled cheese.
' I believe you have been well acquainted with Acrucis at one time?'
Only Hannah and Delilah. Delilah.

The call had been pleasant and succinct to the other senshi, arranging details and times and leaving the broader aspects to go over in person- the months, no years, since the first months of 2014 when he'd come home from the hospital.

”I think it’s time we go. We have imposed long enough.” ....I run on. Always. So much has changed since then, with such small glimmers of Enough between to keep the teeth of despair at bay. Years since last we spoke. Lives can drain, poured out thicker than water, through our own hands in so long. Friends could be gained. Scars bloom. I can only wait and see, and hope looking through the window of this meeting that not so many bodies of wolves or wounds lay on her. Her or Acrucis. I wonder if they still talk. If she would bring the other. Or some other senshi or knight entirely? I don't know the usual social conventions other senshi follow.

Concerns on the threat of security and surveillance, proximity convenience and hours all aligned to 1 a.m. at one of the Sciences Library, a flatiron with a roof lined by neoclassical statuary of Boyle, Linnaeus, James Clerk Maxwell and tens of others. They would blend in as figures silhouetted, standing or sitting, from the ground view. Or even other buildings around out from windows. As it were, arriving, Thraen chose a seat on a crenelation next to Alessandra Giliani to wait. "They say you did not exist these days. We said and knew as much of ourselves, a lifetime ago. "

Statuary offered no answers. At least not in any unusual magical surprise this night. What likelihood for a magical prosector: a person, construct, book or tablet coming to light to help their collective understanding was as dim. An aura flared in feel approaching, interrupting the march of melancholia. The Eternal stood and looked out at the walk paths, streetlamps and trees of the South Oval, "That will probably be her. Your Pardon, Giliani."

It was Delilah. Guised by magic as Phact, a senshi clad in the colors of white and crimson. How the magic hides eyes, even from eyes that know. Between siblings, children, parents, friends.

Unspoken and unacknowledged, but there, floated the word and memory 'lovers'.

"We gather moss as stones by riversides, or oil slick, Styrofoam and detritus as more commonly Chaos would have it. But I do not drown of it, yet. How do you fare, in so long, and so many byways to earn scars? Are you well— well enough?" The correction came on quick, staccato and gravel addition. Thraen showed neither positive nor negative reaction to her scrambling, but offered a forearm handshake by way of greeting.

It took a moment, and nearly he thought the greeting was denied, and wondered by what he’d caused offense. But she did take it at last, and with clever commentary. “Involvement in this war, no matter for good or ill, changes the value of accurate memory, or of histories we have in classes.”

“ We cannot wholly trust what is written: Magic hides and distorts the very presence and accessibility of whole places on Earth and in space. We cannot trust our will as individuals: Chaos asks no permissions and needs none to corrupt and shatter us. We cannot trust our friends or family, as glamour can hide espionage as easily as an enemy. Reality is as science fiction always predicted- a thing uncertain and mutable. Identity, of individuals, cultures, of the world as we understand it are null, and no more authentic than any fantasy in a comicbook. And all can be taken away with Chaos. Irreparable, once shattered, unrecoverable. Sobering, and makes the senses we gain, of auras and the ability to see and enters such hidden places. The solid answers beyond religion that reincarnation and starseed-souls exist, and are in danger, feel more permanent. It ascribes a solidity to our second lives as ‘reality,’ and a ‘mask’ to the normalcy of civilian life. “

“We wear masks long enough, and can no longer tell the difference which was the mask and which was the individual. They all are masks. The only solid reality, is the starseed, with it’s many lives and names through the millennia while it moves through evolutionary rungs towards a purpose I can’t say I’ve heard anything more concrete about. Maybe Cosmos knows. “ Thraen looked out at the warm golds of the campus lamps at the last of the words, trying to find something less dour in the human affection for light. Street lights weren’t too dissimilar from stars in some ways. “Spending more time, you say. Alone? Or have you found a partner? A team? “

Intimidating was a kind way to put what the undergraduates regularly tittered to each other about Mr. Marinus when scheduling their recitations. Then it was menacing, draconian, and terrifying, but what way he’d never been entirely sure. Leniency about deadlines did none of them the boons they daydreamed it wood in learning punctuality and responsibility. And they weren’t paying the college tuition for him to be wasting their class time as a jester. But Phact, as a fellow senshi , was another matter. She had seen him as a civilian in all but one case, and had seen him at one of his lowest points of health after the misfortune of two Negaverse Generals and a miracle rescue. What about being doped on hydrocodone and rickety like a leaf is intimidating? Scarred. Scars are stories that others interpret, and make up to go along with the mark. Maybe she thought I didn’t lose when I took them. ‘Imagine the other person,’ only they got away, like Zircon. Like Xenotime. How few the battles I’ve fought that I have ‘won’ in any sense of getting back the starseeds stolen, or removing the Officer. Well, it is ‘found’ anyway, in the past-tense. Wiser now? Of paths and directions.

“The White Moon Court, often, in the primer or when things of the Silver Millennium have come up. Courts in the historical sense as those held forth by aristocracy. More than that, no. It doesn’t seem to match your intimation, though. What is a Court, as you term it?” This was something possibly new, and that drew flamed-eyes from the distance succinctly.

There was a third of his mind that was immediately distracted by the statements of the etymology, and ‘modern’ understanding of the word ‘court’. What was modern to her? Considering the very word traced back to Old French, and then further to Latin, cour and cortem respectively, meaning very specifically sovereign residences, enclosed yards and possible of the ‘curia’, the sovereigns assembly, or company, in his plot. There was no earlier tracing or meaning to the word than the Latin. The Latins and their earliest language was developed between estimates in the 6th to 9th centuries. That was older than the so called Silver Millennium. This hidden cultures, then, and not so much the Earth word? A word of her own homeworld, or some other homeworld, in some other language not accounted for by history? Or it could be in a language glamoured out of Earth’s lore. Our own history, and locations, are hidden to us in this charade. It is less important. Attend.


The second third puzzled the strange gesture, the lift and grasp at air that led to nothing, produced nothing, and wondered if it was some ingroup salute made, like the sign of the cross in olden days, in certain cultures, during specific topics of conversation. This same part echoed with the word Youma. ‘Return youma … to human,’ like a magazine citation in brief from an interview.

‘Return youma … to human,’

years later. Never would have made it. Too Late. Attend.

The final third spun the codex and found no name in his memory that matched the one given. He did not know Lysithea or their sphere. It was possible he’d know none of their court. He knew Phact, but it was no guarantee of her court. Questions formed up rank upon rank and the eternal of gardens fast drew up his own hand to cover over his mouth. It was a gesture like thinking, but served as much the purpose of a forced pause. “Do you know how many they are? How they are formed? What...denotes them instead of just a team? If let fly I could have a hundred questions, and waste all your night…on night on night. Have you *done* this thing? Have you purified a Youma?”

Thus, as an adverb indicated that exemplification or consequence. The manner now was that of consequence. The only difference of actions or words that could indicate something strange, attempted and failed or just mocked and known to fail, was the strange motion she’d made. There were other possibilities, but that was the most obvious outlier, but suffered the usual problem of not counting the entire population of two courts known or any unknown within inductive reasoning. Her shift was one of getting comfortable, a generosity in preparations, but it prepared a more important question than others, “Have you already covered all of this, and made the information generally available...and I’ve made mistake in missing it, via the old primer or some newer source?”

“Likewise, the words you use for things—Court, Wand, Sailor Teleport—come off your tongue as definite articles. Are they terms your team alone has come to use commonly, or is there some source of it? No slight meant in that, only chasing ancient lore. Is there a stone tablet or an ancestor spirit that provided it? Or...given our natures as senshi I suppose dreams and visions also enter the mix as sources of information. “ The latter were less reliable by definition of Memory, its known bias, and the failures of interpretation, but sometimes it was all they had as Senshi.

Thraen clenched and unclenched the fingers of his right hand slowly. The last knuckles bounced lightly against his thigh.