-Back Dated to: January 11, 2017

The dust was slowly fell, sprinkling around her feet as the physical form of a youma disappeared into nothing. Every night for the past month Phact had been out. Alone or with others. Rain or shine. It didn't matter. She had to be out. She had to be doing something pro-active in this war. No longer could she just sit back and...think. She needed to be moving, to be out in the heat of things.

Youma and fresh, young agents had been her most common challengers, higher ranking members seemed to be in short supply lately. Still, Phact was putting her training to the test each time she stepped into a battle. Every fight showed flaws and the need for improvement. Tonight she had seen she was slow on the left blocking of her face. The cut from a claw under her eye was the price she had paid for not responding quickly enough. She would have to ask Mathias to help with her speed. He had always said she was quick on her feet! Liar.

However the bets still favored the senshi as she watched the night wind blow the dust into the shadow of the city. “Back to the depths you go….” She sighed, taking a moment to relax and look up at the sky as she sensed the world slowly growing lighter around her.

A full moon shown down on the senshi of doves between the breaks in the clouds.

Phact suddenly felt her body tense as she realized the truth of what held her attention. One hand quickly smacked herself in the forehead, wincing as it hit the jewels around her brow, while the other rested on her hip. “Has is already been a month? Where does time go around here?”

With a flick of her wrist, the super senshi summoned her phone and looked down at the small glowing white orb. The Moon Pearl. Truth was she didn’t need that orb anymore but something about that soft glow just made her...happy. “Well, I guess it has been. Time seems to have a way about it doesn’t it...a thousand years could be like the blink of an eye.”

The shift had begun to feel almost normal to her. To teleport from the land of her birth to the land of fate. This quiet land held secrets and mysteries older than the age of the modern man that refused to believe possible. As always, the view of the blue planet in the sky brought a sense of wonder to the young woman. How many people ever got to see this...really and truly see the view as breathtaking as this. Proof they were really so small in the grand scheme of things. “A fallen world in sight of a living one.” She whispered as her eyes slowly began to lower. A sharp twinge of pain flashed through her chest. Phact’s body reacted as her right hand gripped tightly over her heart and she winced as the pain shot through her entire body.

“No.” The word was a hiss between flashes of jaw dropping pain. “Don't take me back there.” She could feel her legs shaking, both wanting to give out from under her. Red eyes shot open and up to the blue and green of Earth. For a split second, the colors blurred and she felt as if she saw sand...miles and miles of nothing but sand. That vision alone was enough to drop her to the ground.

“No. Stop. I am not her…” the woman snapped again, her left hand closing around a piece of fallen rubble. She could feel that woman’s voice...that blame creeping into her mind. The rage and anger that her world...their world was dying. The fear that her life was next. The desire to kill...her.

“I AM NOT HER!” Phact screamed at the top of her lungs. Rolling back on her knees, Phact chunked the rubble as far as she could, panicking until she saw it land.

It landed with a soft clatter somewhere off in the distance. Phact could hear it bounce once, then twice then something else joined it in the slow thud. Alot of somethings joined with it as she heard the clear sound of a large piece of shifting rubble.

Eyes refocused, now cleared from their haze as her mind came back to figure out what was the cause of the noise. A pile of moon dust seemed to hover the ground some distance away from her marking whatever she had manage disturb from its thousand year slumber.

“Oh s**t...” Phact whispered, both hands dropping to the ground as she rolled forward to balance and rise back to her feet. The pain in her chest screamed at her to take an extra moment to calm herself before she investigated. Phact ignored it. She wouldn’t fall into that spiral.

Slowly, the white and red adoren senshi moved over other fallen items towards the now settling dust. At first she couldn't tell what had been knocked out of place as nearly everything seemed to have been on the ground for ages. Yet as she finally climbed over a piece of what she guessed to be broken column, she saw the center of the area of disturbance.

The remains of what appeared to have been a bench were the victim of her attack. It had broken where the stone had found it, shifting the weight of itself and the stand that had held its place for years. Now, nearly all of it was rubble. Phact had to admit she felt a little guilty about breaking something so old…

That was until something clearly not gray caught her eye.

Crossing the rest of the way over the rubble, doing the best she could not to get a heel stuck in broken stone and nearly face planting into another stone, Phact moved towards what once had been the back of the bench. She couldn’t be sure she had seen anything after moving. The sight of it had all but disappeared.

Until she was right on top of it.

There, hidden under centuries of dust and rubble, was something she had only had the pleasure to see once before and that had been at the base of a statue of the former Queen of the Moon. Now, here, this made no sense. It completely defeated her theory that life was returning around the supposedly most powerful woman in the universe.

“There is no power source here so how is it possible? Unless…” Phact felt a small smile trickle across her face. Gloved hands reached for the dirt and dug as far as they could into the petrified soil. Little by little dust gave way covering the white dove in a layer of gray. The lifeless nature of the moon had been so clear to her but every now and then a small trace of something...a small element that proved these were not always ruins.

“You are trying to reach out to us aren’t you?” Phact whispered, her hands finally breaking away the last of the frozen soil to dig out the small roots of the vine. It was unlike anything she had ever seen! The plant itself was clearly not from Earth and the senshi had to wonder if it was always looking this close to death or if that had to do with the struggle it was facing. The vine and leaves reminded her of something she had seen at her aunt’s home when it had been left in the heat without water. That poor tomato plant. Never had a chance.

But this...this was fighting for a chance. After all these years…

Cupping her hands under it, Phact lifted the small seedling from its home. As she knelt back and began to brush some of the dirt off the roots, the leaves seemed to suddenly shiver. “What?” Phact felt herself saying as the dirt slipped through her fingers. “No! Wait!” Her voice cried out at the plant. With each clump that fell to the ground, Phact watched the life slip out of the little plant. Finally, it gave out completely and returned to the dust from which it had came.

All the senshi could do was stare at what had once been alive die in her hands. Open palms closed into fists as she closed her eyes. “Breathe Phact...you couldn’t have known…” She whispered over and over to herself. How could she not feel a bite in her chest? Only a month ago she had been made aware that she doomed her ‘world’. Now this?

To be the cause of such cherished life being taken after such great struggle. How many years had that little vine pushed through this frozen rock to break free? And she had destroyed it in mere seconds!

Throwing her head back, Phact gazed up at the blue and green planet in the distance. So full of life. But even then, history had taught them that long ago, life struggled to survive on Earth. It had to fight as well. And it succeeded…

“Where the conditions were right…” The words shook Phact out of the despair as quickly as it had begun to set in. Her body picked up once more and she allowed her eyes to return to the spot on the ground once more. Reaching out, she touched the spot where they plant had been. It was loose and easy to sink her hands into even gloved. Rubbing it between her fingers, the senshi rose and clicked her heels back over the fallen ruins away from the area she had dug up. Once she was clear of the fallen column, Phact dropped once more to her knees and reached for the ground.

She was met with a strong resistance.

Try as she might, it took a great deal of force to get through even the top layer of what was once ‘earth’...in the loosest definition of that term possible. “The soil…” Eyes flickered back to the area she had come from. So that meant the places she had now seen things were...different. The conditions were not the same as the rest.

“But why? What made those...different?” Phact questioned, her hands going to her hips as she rose back to standing. Dirt and dust covered her now from head to toe but it was nothing a shower couldn’t handle. The truth was that her mind didn’t even registered it. So focused was she on the ground under all this rubble that Phact almost felt herself slip into a near dream like world.

“Okay, think logically, Phact.” She turned and looked back at the spot she had just come from. “The ground...no the soil is different over there than here. That has life. This does not. If you put two and two together then that means…”

Turning then, Phact started to walk, then run back to the area she had seen the statue of the Moon Queen. The place she had first seen life attempt to fight for the right to live. Breathing through the dust, she fought tripping as her speed increased. Phact wouldn’t stop until she stood back in front of that statute. Back in front of the woman whose power could change the universe.

And there, at the bottom of the statute was what she expected: a little piece of life fighting to survive “In soil.” Even standing there, brushing the dust stuck to her sweat from her face out of her eyes, Phact could see the change in the ground around the statute. It was loose, darker and appeared as if someone blew across it that it could blow into the darkness. It was a ring around the statute before stopping at another ring of hardern stone. It was just like she had seen at castles and in private gardens. “A flower garden.”

The words drew a smile from her face. The pieces fell into place. “The places where the soil is different were gardens!”

“Which means...if this was a palace.” Phact turned with a quickness, spinning back to look at the ruins of the building behind them. “Then there had to be more. Much more!” Her heart was racing and not just from the sprint she had taken. The very idea that there were more places that could hold life, life hiding from their view, excited her.

They just needed to be found!
Finding it was proving to be quite a bit harder than Phact expected.

Nearly the entire night had passed before Phact had caught a glimpse of anything that could even remotely be considered a formal garden. Hope had started to run out for the senshi as she stumbled around the back of some part of the building. Her hand had been stuck on the structure for support as she tried to climb up onto another ‘rock’. Breathing was hard but Phact hadn’t wanted to give up. There was so much potential in this world.

“There has to be some…” The words didn’t make it out of her mouth before her foot slipped on a cracked piece of stone and Phact dropped. Her tailbone was going to have words with her in the morning, that was for sure. What wasn’t for sure was where she had landed. Looking upwards, Phact realized that where she had been climbing, where she could not find anything, had been a second floor of some sort. When her foot had slipped, she had managed to crash through it and land on…

Phact looked down at the spot where she was sitting. The ground was soft, dark and malleable. Stones were littered throughout but what caught her attention most was that there seemed to be an edge to it…

“A barrier?” She whispered, standing up and dusting her behind off as much as she could. The ground gave with her steps as she inspected the edging. There was no need to guess anymore.

As she approached the small wall that surrounded the patch she was standing in, Phact felt the smile return. She had been right…

She had found a garden.


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