Welcome to Gaia! ::

Sadie liked the spring. Not that she had anything against the other seasons, but the past fall and winter had been hard for her, and cold weather wasn't the best for forcing herself to feel alive again. The warmth helped stir her bones, while the new growth gave her a reason to get outside.

She even came out in the evenings, powered up as Pendour so she felt a little less blind. Even she knew better than to stay too close to her usual spots while wearing another face, so she stayed away from her beloved community garden plot, which was also giving her some sprouts, and she made her way to the park in town with the best flowers instead.

That was where she stayed for awhile, kneeling by a patch of daffodils and admiring how they looked in the moonlight.

She stayed there until an Order aura caught her senses, stronger, but not as strong as some. That got her to her feet and walking towards it. Chaos still has her feeling flighty, but she liked seeing what senshi and knights were around.

It turned out that auras were not an exact thing, or maybe Pendour was just not an expert yet at seeing exactly where they led. The voice came from off to the side. It was her good side, but still far enough over that she had to turn, which she did slowly. The last senshi she'd met had startled at seeing her, which had Pendour's self consciousness about her scars gnawing harder at her mind, but there was little to be done about it, and she met the senshi's gaze with only a little worry in her eyes.

She saw a girl in a sweet little dress, a young teen who seemed bright, although not in the transcendent way. Lively, that was the word. There was something about her that seemed familiar. Pendour couldn't put her finger on it, though she pressed her lips together trying. A lookalike to someone she'd seen in passing, maybe.

She realized that she must be staring and blinked hard to snap herself out of it, then gave a quick wave back. "The senshi outfits area all so charming," she said, her voice soft and smooth. "The feathers on yours are delightful, Anser. My name is Pendour."

She gave the slightest smile, then, and then a nod.

Pendour looked down to her own outfit with a smile when the girl mentioned it. It had felt strange, once, but now it was as smooth and silky as a second skin, and just looking at it always made her think of Neptune. The beads on her wrists made good fidgets, too. Maybe the Code had known how hard it was for her to function without something in her hands.

When she looked back up, the senshi was closer to her, which was fine, and staring up at her almost pleading, which she wasn't quite sure what to make of. She did notice the quick glances to her blind side and ran her thumb over her beads to keep from tugging her hair over it.

"Patrol?" She tilted her head at that, brows knitting. "That sounds so formal. I'm not a police officer. I'm not a soldier." Was that what Anser thought she was? It could be confusing to people, sometimes, walking around with the title of knight and not being a warrior. She didn't know if there was a better word, though. Stewardess wasn't as smooth on the tongue. She would just have to explain herself. She smiled softly and stepped closer still. "But I can walk with you."

The word villain was also a new one to her, but it wasn't one she could really argue with. It hurt her, seeing how broken people were by the Chaos, but it didn't make their actions any less awful. Her voice was quiet and neutral when she asked, "If villains come, what will you do about it?"

She kept in step with Anser, although she remained silent for a moment, trying to wrap her head around what the girl was saying. She seemed very interested in the comic book approach to all this, which was fine, just not something she'd heard before. Things like the Code and Chaos had been explained to her with Star Wars metaphors, instead.

So that was what she meant by villains.

"You're a superhero? I can see it," she said, looking down at the young senshi with a hint of a smile. "I'm still looking for a word for a what my role is, exactly. Maybe something between a Jedi and someone who's just inherited a lovely, but haunted, mansion?" She could ignore the worst of the war, sometimes, if she focused on space and those problems, instead.

Not right now, though. For the first time, she found herself asked point blank how she would handle villains by a teenager who seemed very determined to fight them. "In the end, I want to get to the root of Chaos and heal those who have been affected by it," she said, then sighed with a wry smile. She wasn't sad, not quite, but she was realizing just how idealistic that goal was and how complicated things had already turned out to be.

"In the meantime, they do sometimes need to be stopped. Distracted. With my aura, I can see if they'll come after me instead of someone else. Or, that was the second plan." She had learned very quickly that she did not want to die piece by piece. "It hasn't necessarily been working well." Her voice was soft as ever, but her gaze brushed the ground for a moment.

Pendour was far from an expert gamer, but she knew she'd seen the advertisements for the Luigi game, and she thought a few of her siblings had played through it while she was off at college.

"No vaccums," she said a little sadly, thinking it might be simpler if Irving was just some cartoon spirit that could be put to rest with something simple as cleaning supplies. "One ghost, and a dry pool full of dry bones." It did sound like something out of a horror book in the right context. She could only imagine what all the Saturn knights had to go through.

"At my wonder, I mean," she said, because she hadn't yet, had she? "Up on Neptune. It's maybe a little bigger than a mansion. It's one of the things that Chaos broke, though, one of the things I'm trying to fix."

She was having better luck with that, even arguing with her ancestor and having very limited access, than she was having fixing much of anything down on Earth. She listened to Anser talk about how monstrous Chaos was and once again felt very conscious of her prosthetic eye.

It wasn't something she could argue, and although she blinked hard when Anser cracked her knuckles, she didn't mention that, either. She'd clearly had her own experiences. Pendour simply asked, "When you fight them, does it keep them from hurting others in the future, or does it give them a reason to come back angrier?" There was no judgement in her voice. She knew there were no easy answers.

Pendour nodded as Anser grumbled about Chaos. She was a person who tried to be careful about her emotions. She didn't like the cold, spiky feeling that hate left in her chest, or the burning heat of anger, but they tended to creep in when she thought of all the broken things, of almost every world, and people's twisted souls and piecemeal bodies.

"We have to be careful," she said, the thought of Irving also fresh in her mind. "We can break things, too."

Not that Anser's other answers disgusted her. It was the answer that society liked to pour down people's throats. It was sometimes called fighting for peace, or beating the bad guys. It looked nice on the screen, the hurting people until they couldn't hurt anyone else. It was nice to think that it would be that simple in real life, too, to think that if you could just win a battle everything would be fine. It was just untrue, from what she'd heard of other wars and what she'd seen from this one.

"I understand," she said, still soft. "It's just that violence tends to be a cycle, and I can't see the Chaos doing anything but fanning the fire." She did smile at the way Anser thought she could take everything on herself, all of the anger that the Negaverse brought. That was where she saw a common thread between them.

"And they might find someone else when they look for revenge. Sometimes, people lash out at whoever's closest." Pendour reached up to her prosthetic eye, and she had it halfway out to illustrate her point before she thought the senshi might take that as something to fight the Negaverse for, instead.

She settled it back into place and didn't mention it, although even not quite facing Anser, it wasn't subtle. She didn't want anyone fighting on her behalf.

"I don't just stare, and I'm trying to think of something beyond just talking, but, well, talking's a tool," she said, then summoned her ocarina. "I've gotten attention with this, before. I was thinking if I can get them to chase me, they'll spend their energy on that instead of something else."

It held some of the same problems, with the coming back angrier, but it was an idea, and Pendour's voice was quiet but serious as she presented it.

"Some are, in theory, willing to talk," she said, although any edge at all to her voice was gone. People had been healed from the Negaverse before, she knew that. She also knew that it was probably the harder road to walk, and sometimes it felt too idealistic even for Pendour.

It was why she'd mostly been focusing on space for a few months now. That was something concrete that she could fix with her hands.

"I know I'm not, um, saving lives as a warrior," she said with something that was not quite sarcasm but more the very words tasting wrong in her mouth, "But I have a few projects-"

Anser asked about her scars. Pendour stopped talking and stopped walking, a tingle of static seeming to fill her entire body for a moment before the fading, and she took a few quick steps to catch up with the girl. Her cheeks were still buzzing and growing warm, not that it showed so much on her skin. It still hit her like a ton of bricks, sometimes.

She just stared at Anser for a few seconds and realized that no one had ever asked, before, who would be able to know the truth. She took a deep breath, and then said, "I had been told very gently about the war, and then a little less gently, so that I knew the risks, but I wasn't afraid, then."

The fear was almost worse than the vision loss. She kept jumping at shadows, lately. "I met a man in a garden, a man from the Negaverse. I tried to offer him help. It turned out he was a General, a half-youma." The most broken of them all, and she hadn't even known.

She popped the prosthetic out, all the way this time. "I didn't dodge fast enough, but no. I didn't fight back."

Pendour's eye did not stay out long, just long enough to show the truth. She still didn't love how false it felt, and she kept it out at home, sometimes. It wasn't recommended, even now that she was past most of the risk for infection, and outside she risked it even less, so after a few seconds, she settled it back into the socket with her long fingers.

She then occupied her hands with twisting the beads on her bracelet, instead, which she was rougher at than usual. She spun the beads so fast that they rattled against the others and the little Neptune charm, making a little clicking should. It wasn't an easy thing to think about, and it still felt like she was carrying a bit of electricity in her body.

Bluntness didn't bother her nearly as much as the half-stares and the euphemisms that went over her head sometimes did. "Well, he destroyed my eye. I think the doctors took most of it out," she said with a bit of a head tilt, voice quiet but clear. "And I think I did struggle some when he was choking me. If I'd fought more from the start, maybe he would have just killed me. I don't know. He let me go, though, said something about needing to learn a lesson."

She wasn't sure what the lesson was, exactly, but his demands were burned into her mind. "He was sick as sick. Maybe beyond saving. I think he liked causing pain." It wasn't a judgement call she liked to make even now, but deep as deep she did carry a burning anger with her. Part of her knew that Anser might try to hurt him after hearing this story, and although she didn't like that either, she kept speaking.

"Then, it's not just him. There's a Negaverse strategy of marking the living to show what they're capable of," she said. It wasn't a strategy she understood, exactly, but they did have her scared, now.