Welcome to Gaia! ::

Antares disliked winter, she hated the cold, so it was no surprise that she was bundled up in a dark sweatshirt and pants. Her uniform was most definitely not made for this cold environment. If she was still a street kid she would have already been in one of the warmer states but that wasn’t an option now, now she could actually visit her homeplanet if she wanted to get a blast of dry desert heat. That was probably one of the best things about her planet, that and the lack of people.

She shifted slightly on the rooftop she was using as a lookout, chafing her hands to keep them warm even as she read the aura around her. Order. A lot of order from what she could tell. She wasn’t in the mood to deal with others politely. What she was hoping for was a fight, a youma or a negaverser to punch but apparently they even they didn’t want to be out in the cold night of fall.

Except…. That…. Could it? The blonde frowned slightly at the flash of an aura powering down then back up just on the edge of her senses. Chaos but not negaverser. Could her desire for a fight be granted? Curious but leery of a possible trap, because honestly who would through their power that fast if they weren’t doing something sketchy, Antares headed towards that dark aura.

She ended up ditching her rooftops for a park towards the end. This was feeling more and more like a trap of some sort since not even civilians were out wandering in this park so why would a chaotic fighter?

As she got closer it was easier to figure out that the ‘not negavers’ chaotic aura she was sensing was a Dark Mirror Senshi. One of the faction that was not ‘good’ nor ‘bad’ and was as much of a mixed bag as pretty much everyone else in the city. She really only knew one and he was a very poor ‘bad’ guy. Hell, he would be a poor ‘good’ guy too in all honesty. He was more like the puppy who always stuck to the corner of the rooms and looked like he was about to get kicked. Someone like that really irked Antares’ very soul. Mostly because she was torn between the urge to protect them like the scared child they were and the need to walk away like the person she was. She wasn’t some sap who collected broken stuffed animals because ‘everyone needs love’ or some such crap. She was more of the grit and the grime of life that was inevitable in this world.

“For christ’s sake!” The surprisingly tame curse, for Antares at least, slipped out as she rounded a few trees and spotted her ‘quarry’ currently stuck in bushes. She wasn’t to terribly close but she definitely knew that particular little birdy. “Seriously? You seem to have a problem there Butt-wings,” She teased him as she approached the mirror senshi who was tangled up slowly. “Nice addition. Who’s birdy did you have to pluck for them?” He wasn’t a bad kid, more of a marshmallow really. He was actually the one she had been thinking of earlier, the bloody stuffed animal that she picked up once. Bah.

She honestly wasn’t one to poke fun at others uniforms since her’s was so skimpy and gold laden. It was eye catching and sparkly and she absolutely detested it. At least she didn’t sport those annoying wings like Maia… or Kiuchi for that matter. Apparently Dark Mirrored Senshi also sprouted feathers from their a** when they hit a particular level of strength. Go figure. “Hold your feathers there Alice. A few issues here,” Antares held up a few fingers and began to tick them off.

“First, why in the hell would you hide a mirror in a park let alone in a bush. Second, how would you actually fit in through a smallish mirror? And third, hell no. There will be no way I’ll voluntarily step through your little looking glass.” It wasn’t that she distrusted the kid, he might have been stronger then her in magic, maybe even older than her, but he still acted like a scared child as far as she was concerned, but she didn’t trust anyone… well, almost. There was a few exceptions to the ‘no trust’ rule and he was definitely not on it. “I’m not interested in a trip down the rabbit hole or whatever you call your little hidey hole.”

Of course he would be the rabbit! Antares mentally rolled her eyes at Kiuchi’s comment, at least he got her reference. Personally she thought the rabbit as weak and timid, she much prefered the cheshire cat who didn’t give a damn about anyone. He did what he wanted and went where he pleased. He could also disappear without a trace which would be a really handy skill. Which was suspiciously like teleporting since the mirror senshi mentioned that little habbit of the negaverse… bah.

“Why not carry one with you?” She asked as the kid bent down to pick up the smallish mirror off of the ground. She assumed they had the same restrictions as she did but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t slip a mirror into a jacket pocket and ‘change’ with it. He was wearing a winter coat after all so that meant he deliberately pulled off his civilian coat to put it on after he powered up. “Does it have to be a certain size? Or material?” Not that she thought about it could he just pass through glass that is reflecting or did it actually have to be a real mirror? What about those kid’s mirrors that were just reflective foil or something so there was no fear of breakage. Could a silvered piece of plexiglass work? Not that any of that would help her, she was limited in her trips to her home planet. Knights had it worse since they needed to meditate in order to go to their wonders, definitely not something easy to do in an ‘escape’. Out of the three of them Antares would say that Kiuchi had the better deal, even if he didn’t have his own ‘world’ as he called it.

As for actually traveling with the little fellow… nope. She didn’t trust it, or him, that far. Yes she wanted to know exactly what he was using that energy he was gathering for. There was that other DMC senshi a while back who also said stuff like using it for ‘good’. But she had no idea what she would be getting into by going with him, not that she couldn’t handle herself. Wait a damn moment, she mentally halted any thoughts about slipping through the mirror as a particularly annoying memory sufficed. One with giant mirror shards falling and a annoying race through a void, that ended with her being grounded and annoyed as hell. Was that the same place that Kiuchi went to every damn time he mirror skipped? How in the hell did he survive that every day or however often he went to the hellscape. But he said they created their own worlds so maybe the gauntlet run was someone’s twisted personal world.

“Did someone make a twisted game of Rainbow road in there and shove a bunch of powered and civilians on it to race?” Her question was maybe a bit more hostile than it should have been but she was still pretty sore over that particular nonsense. It's one thing to get powered mixed up in s**t like that but dragging civilians in was just not right, and she did see a few. Ian chuckling at her grounding didn’t help any.

Antares eyed the mirror and once more asked, “Why would you hide it in a bush? Wouldn’t it make more sense to find a park with a bathroom in it or storage shed or something?” It just boggled her mind that someone would hide a full blown mirror in a bush. Something that was fragile was hidden in a object that not only dealt with natural phenomenon but also human interference, like trimming and kids. They were just begging for the glass to get broken.

They were basically going around in circles and even he seemed to realize it some. He even pointed out the danger of them just standing there chatting. A chaos aura and a order aura this close together was bound to get someone’s attention, if only to see if any assistance was needed. But she still didn’t trust him enough to jump down the rabbit hole as it were… however she was curious about what he used the energy he gathered for, and she was certain she could wipe the floor with his a**. So what was the danger really? That she couldn’t leave? If it came down to it Antares was fairly sure that she could just travel to her homeworld or to the moon to get out of the mirrorscape, maybe. That or force him to let her out. Make him cry uncle as it were.

With a glare she warned him, “You do anything, and I mean anything, funky I will hurt you so bad that they will write about it for a Darwin award. Got it?” With that she grabbed his hand and muttered, “Don’t make me regret this.”

The trip was surprisingly short, then again so was the time it took to get to her homeworld, but the stark white hall was not what Antares was expecting to see in the mirrorspace. It was almost like they were in a institution or something. White walls, white floor, white ceiling, white everything… their outfits stood out starkly in the hall, like mud on a clean floor. It reminded her of the little cell she had been briefly before it spit her out into that void and the subsequent race. Apparently Kiuchi had been dealing with his own hazard at the same time. “If it tried to kill you then why come back?” It was an asinine move as far as Antares was concerned. It was like touching a open flame, getting burned, and then doing it all over again just because. She could understand the desire for a place to call their own, but thats when you make it yourself. A place you can feel safe in, not this twisted fun house of death he called mirrorscape.

As he continued his story about meeting a Queen who dealt with mirrors Antares just stared at him with her pale blue eyes. She knew where this was going. It wasn’t surprising at all. “Let me guess… she tried to kill you?” The senshi rolled her eyes at the nativity of the boy in front of her. “Just because someone gives you food and says they are nice doesn’t mean they are. What are you? Five? Your like one of those kids in the Grimm tales… and just as likely to be killed.” Many of the younger kids on the street disappeared because they trusted the wrong person. It was safer to always assume someone wanted something from you, that they always had their own interests in mind, that the world wasn’t sunshine and daisies. People are only interested in themselves. Hell, even now Antares figured Kiuchi wanted something although in his case it was likely something simple like training or some other stupid thing. She wanted an explanation on the whole energy usage and the experience to build her own reason behind the rather suspect actions of the dark mirror senshi.

Antares remained silent during Kiuchi’s tale, following him into a giant room that held little but a giant mirror. A bright spot of color that drew her attention even as she listened to the mirror senshi. She took it all in, the whole story about the bat s**t crazy queen and the way it all turned out to be an illusion, even the little tidbit at the beginning where he absently mentioned that the mirrorverse or what ever it was called had drawn them in before. However when the young man once more held his hand out and offered to show her the mirrorscape her blue eyes snapped back to him.

“If this is not the mirrorscape then where exactly is this?” She asked skeptically, once more eyeing the huge mirror that was the dominant feature of this room. The kid hadn’t done anything suspicious but the idea of stepping through another mirror seemed sketchy to her and not something she particularly wanted to do. Especially not after his little story, or the mention of a chaos seed. Nothing good came from a chaos seed, not in her experience.