[takes place in late october 2021]
Guinevere had been a Senshi for a very long time. Years, actually. And sure, she wasn't the best at it--but it was something special, perhaps the best thing she had in her life right now. Being a Senshi had gotten her a team, after all. Friends. A place to go when she was scared or alone. And she was pretty sure that if she had never met the other Arthurians, she would still be a lonely street kid, stealing wallets and doing magic just to scrape by in a world that neither cared for nor actually wanted her. But that was just how it had been for most of her life; she took care of herself, did her best to get by, and worked to stay out of the way of anyone that might make that harder for her.
Becoming a Senshi had upended all of that. Suddenly, she had responsibilities; she belonged to something greater than just herself, and that was....nice, honestly. It was good to feel like she was a part of something, even when that something kinda sucked sometimes. (The scar across her gut throbbed, where that massive shard of glass had slashed her open. She probably should have died there, but her team had saved her. Her friends had made sure she got out, and got to a hospital, and was actually taken care of, and didn't bleed out in some space between spaces, or in an alleyway after she got back to Earth.)
(It was nice, to have people she knew she could rely on.)
She could even attribute a lot of the positive changes in her life circumstances to that magical power up; Guinevere had a new job, a new apartment, and a really nice life because she'd been able to use the springboard of having a place to stay to parley into having a real, actual existence.
But the thing was, for all the good being a Senshi had done for her, she wasn't actually very...good at being one.
Among other big, glaring problems with her general ability to do Senshi things was the fact that in all her years as a Sailor Soldier, she had never actually once been to the world whose name she bore. It was important, she knew. It was part of what made her what she was. But it had never seemed more important ot her than the fight on Earth, where she actually lived. So she hadn't bothered.
She intended to finally change that now.
There was a whole world out there for her to explore. Far be it for her to waste that opportunity.
She pulled out the phone Hania had given her, and opened the app that would take her to space, and closed her eyes.
When she opened them, she was somewhere else.
It was a bedroom, obviously, a beautiful one--all in pink and cream against dark, rich wood, and the bed had clearly been large and elegant, and there were tatters of a delicate, sheer canopy that had clearly hung over it, thoguh the centuries had made it crumble away. She gasped, softly--even decayed, even half-gone, this was luxury of a kind she had never seen in her life. A room fit for royalty--
Had this been her room? Had this been where she had lived, a thousand years ago?
For a brief moment, she heard a laugh, bright and cheery like bells, and she couldn't help but follow it--out wide double doors and onto a beautiful balcony, that even though it too was decayed with time was still lovely. Leaning on it was a woman, in a beautiful dress, pink and deep red-violet, with dark skin and dark hair and--
Guinevere reached up, pulled forward her own dark waves.
Looked back at the vision of the laughing woman with her glass of something that looked like champagne-but-not-quite, that seemed to literally sparkle--
That was her.
A soft gasp passed her lips, and she took a step towards the apparition, and she vanished like a memory, but Guinevere was still sure she knew what she had seen. A vision, of who she'd been before.
Beautiful, confident, elegant. Everything she wasn't now, but that was okay. She jsut had to know that there was a rightness there, in who she was and who she had become.
She went to the edge of the balcony and leaned carefully against the marble wall around its edge, and looked down, and for an instant, she saw the garden below as it had been, manicured and full of people, and in the crowd--
A head of lavender hair that felt familiar, that drew her eyes--
She surged, and nearly lost her balance and fell, and yelped as the vision of a thousand-year-old party faded away, stumbling backwards.
There was something familiar about the figure she'd seen, but she couldn't quite place it. She wished she could trace out the memories, figure out what she was seeing--but there was nothing more.
She sighed, quietly. The garden below was dead, now, the result of a thousand years of neglect, she supposed.
She stepped back inside, and there was another whisper of a vision--herself, again, or she-who-had-been-Guinevere, shoving some kind of strange item into a box on top of her dresser and locking it. She looked towards the door, frightened--and then that vision, too, ended.
She knew, instinctively, that was not the night of the party she had seen before. That was something else, much later; she couldn't be sure exactly what, but she went over to the dresser, and there was the box, still where her past self had left it. It took a little digging through rotting silks and ancient clothes, but finally, buried, she found the key.
Unlocked the box.
Made a thoughtful noise of interest at what was inside.
It looked like a bone, with a crack running down it, but there was something...odd about it. Something important.
Whatever it was, her past self must have hidden it for a reason, so Guinevere took it. She wasn't sure what, exactly, it was for, but she was sure it would be helpful.
She sank down on the bed, and waited, but no further visions came--it was just her and the eerie silence of an empty planet.
So she shivered, and pulled out her phone. She would have to go home for now, but there was plenty more, she was sure, that she would be able to explore.
[wc: 1079 words]