Welcome to Gaia! ::

Something was wrong with her eyes.

Everything else seemed to be fine. The first thing that Daphne had done upon finding herself free was to curl and uncurl her hands, and then wiggle her fingers. She took a few walking steps, and then many more running ones. She wasn't sure how long she'd been held in that tree, but the movement felt amazing.

Her mind was working, too. She didn't know where she was, but she could tell she was on another world, and that wasn't a surprise. When she'd woken up enough to feel the energy tugging at her senses, she'd known that it was calling her somewhere. She'd accepted that call.

She needed to be away from the asteroid Daphne right now.

In this world, she could smell something vaguely acrid in the air at all times. She could hear rumbling sounds, intermittently, in the distance. She could feel a strange chill.

Her eyes were the only thing that were off.

The shadows were terribly dark. The lights that were suspended periodically on poles were terribly bright.

Daphne wasn't sure what to make of it, and after her brief run through the grassy area she'd found herself in, she slowed down considerably and was careful as she made her way through a line of trees and found herself near some kind of road.

There were more of the lights here, and she squinted against them as she made her way down the sidewalk.

Without knowing it, she found herself subconsciously walking towards the warmth of a nearby aura.

She blinked as she found an Eternal Senshi within five minutes of exploring. The energy that had called her here must have been on to something. This was luck.

"Excuse me," she called to him, her tail swishing behind her.

Her eyes had finally adjusted at least somewhat to the streetlights, and Daphne looked over the person in front of her. He wasn't someone she recognized, and that eased a tension that she hadn't even known she'd been carrying.

It would complicate things if she'd ended up on a planet that her people had refused to aid.

"I seek the senshi of this world," she said, tail twitching faster.

Although, she paused at that point and took in a bit more of the scenery. The street was empty. The senshi was alone. This hardly looked like an audience chamber, or any kind of official setting. This senshi might have been a visitor like her, or if he was this planet's senshi, he might have slipped away, somehow, from his duties.

Daphne could hardly be one to judge that.

"I can make an appointment if this isn't a good time," she added, voice a bit softer, "But, I'm Sailor Daphne. I'm here on political business."

At least, that was the easiest way to put it.

Why was he looking at her like that? She knew Daphneans weren't exactly well known, but she didn't think that there was anything about her appearance that should have been startling. His eyes tracked her tail anyway, and she blinked while the seconds passed.

"If you're going to look, look," she said, and turned to the side, sticking her tail out straight and holding it as still as she could so that he could see it better.

She held the pose while she tried to process the rest of what he was saying.

Earth, she understood. It was one of the bigger planets in the Solar System, from what she'd heard. It was busy, too. The Knights trained there. It made sense that it was a place she might have been magically summoned to.

If the senshi was not around, that complicated things, although she understood that the reincarnation cycle could take time. At least she'd found a senshi who seemed willing to listen.

"I am looking for advice," she said. "Maybe help, maybe shelter."

She paused for a moment, then decided to add, "To be honest, I do not fully know how I came to be here. I only know that something is wrong on my world."

The top of Daphne's tail vanished under her skirts. She was hardly going to let a stranger see where it attached, but she wiggled it again in answer to his question.

"You are a traveler, though, aren't you?" she asked in turn, "From Adria?" That only made sense. He might have been here for a while, but he was still ultimately a visitor.

"A hotel would be fine, but I think if I could talk to you some more, that would be better." She wasn't sure that she wanted to become a spectacle in some kind of mass housing situation just because of her tail. He seemed upset about his parents being away, anyway, which made sense. Being separated from family, even for a short time, was awful.

If she went to his empty house, perhaps she could get his mind off his loneliness.

"You're right that I haven't been off of Daphne before. It's different from this." She glanced up at the buildings around them, with their ugly dull gray facades. "There's more life, I would say. Plants on all walls, and rooftops, not sectioned off away from people. It's also much warmer."

He'd been born on Earth. That was fine, except he was a senshi, and he was not Earth's senshi. Daphne blinked. She'd known that other worlds could be strange, but she'd never heard of anything like that.

Daphne blinked again, and she kept blinking until he told her to power down, at which point she bristled. Literally. The fur on her tail stood on end.

"No, of course not!" she said, and crossed her arms, and she was even almost pouting. "Food would be amazing, and I'd be happy to meet with any Mauvians you have around."

In that moment, she realized just how hungry she was. The adrenaline of whatever had brought her here, on top of the new place and the new person she'd just met, had distracted her until just now, but when she let herself think of food, her stomach ached.

It just made her cross her arms tighter, against the feeling. "I'm here on official business, though! I need to look the part, and anyway, if you've got assassins around or something, shouldn't I be at my full strength to face them?"

She didn't think she'd have had the strength to run from those who wanted her dead back on her asteroid if she hadn't had her senshi powers.

"I was running from two armies before," said Daphne, still almost but not quite pouting. She didn't mention that she hadn't been strong enough to face them, and would have likely died if her world had not intervened.

She was trying to make a point.

She was not, however, trying to cause a scene or break the social norms of this world that she clearly did not understand at all. Therefore, with a loud, dramatic sigh to show that she was very much not happy about this, Daphne powered down.

It was still obvious enough that she was an alien. The tail was still there, as were the spots and the slit eyes. She wore thin, flowing pants that gathered at each ankle, a cropped shirt, and a sheer, sleeveless robe that came down to her ankles, not completely unlike the thicker one that Adria was wearing. She had a sandal on one foot. The other had been lost in the savanna of Daphne somewhere.

For one second, she looked over at him, as if to say, all right.

Only, the next second, the temperature hit her, and she began to shiver.

"I hope this army of senshi hunters is truly horrible," she murmured as she wrapped her arms around herself. "Because, I hate this."

The blanket she accepted eagerly. The coat, too. She wrapped up, pulling everything tight to herself against the chill and soaking in the residual body heat from the fabric that had been against him. It took the edge off, and as a bonus for Adria's nerves, the blanket covered her tail, but this was still far colder than anything she'd ever experienced.

Her toes, in particular, were quickly going numb.

She wasn't sure what she was expecting to happen next, but the way he offered to carry her was not it.

It was true that she'd been hoping for some level of hospitality when she'd found a senshi walking about, but this went above and beyond. She wasn't in a state to do much else, though, so she nodded, stepped forwards, and then balanced on one foot so that the bare one did not have to touch the ground.

"That sounds best, I think," she said, and then added, quieter, "Thank you. For your kindness, I mean. Sorry if I'm snippy, it's just been a long-" she went silent as she tried to wrap her wrap her head around what had happened with the tree and how long that might have taken, "Night?"

When she'd found herself on an alien planet, she hadn't imagined herself climbing onto the back of a fellow senshi within less than an hour of landing, shivering under a borrowed blanket and coat, but that was how things were. She was not about to turn her nose up at this aid with the cold of the ground quickly becoming painful. When he crouched, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and her knees around his waist.

"Okay," she said, repeating his phrasing. "Thank you for trying to make it okay."

Then she closed her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut, too, against the cold.

When she was warmer, and away from the prying eyes of people who hunted senshi, she could figure out the rest.