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Rhona had been closing up shop when she felt it. A breeze in the night, which in and of itself wasn't terribly strange, but became strange when she factored in how cold and localized the breeze was. It rustled her skirts, the plants around her, but nothing else. And then it hit her again, this time from a different direction. Like the feeling of a door shutting suddenly. on a cold winter's night. Rhona searched around her but found nothing out of the ordinary, which only served to make her more nervous. Destiny city was either normal on all fronts or deeply steeped in high strangeness. There was never any inbetween.

Another breeze from behind her caused her to whirl and she swore she saw just the briefest of shimmers, like the flicker of dark water. Were they... surrounding her? She powered up, readying herself for whatever was coming for her just in time to feel another breeze from father away. She hesitated but followed. A moment later another rift opened up further down the road and she followed. Again and again until she found herself in the abandoned shopping district. With all of the shoppers gone home for the day, it was just her and the strange cool breezes that seemed to be popping in and out of existence around her.

Another glimmer like the surface of a mirror painted black and her heart sunk into her stomach. No. This couldn't be...

It was hot but that was nothing new since it was summertime, Morpheus was out and he sensed others like himself, he didn't normally seek out others but he decided to go see what was going on and groaned as soon as he drew close. Not again. He had not long ago dealt with a strange distortion and had been trapped with a number of other dark moon senshi and forced to fight a strange mirror creature that broke through from the other side. So he was not hopeful when he saw the strange appearance before them.

He was the dark mirror of surreality so it was no wonder that strange things always happened around him. "Now what is going on." He said in an irritated tone. He had regained some of his memories and was starting to remember more people he had forgotten. It would likely take time to rebuild his memory but piece by piece he was rebuilding his life. Not everything would be the same for Morpheus but how could it after the beating he had received from the nega captain? He looked between the pair his eyes staying on the one a long time. "Have we met?"

Huh, a third senshi from their team was joining the fray, it seemed. Well, that made this a regular party, didn’t it. Politely, Murikabushi gave the new guy a little wave and a shake of the head. “We haven’t, but don’t take it personally. I’ve only been here—well, not Destiny City here, but……y’know, in the Dark Mirror Court here? For a few weeks? So, I haven’t met……very much of anybody. Murikabushi, by the way.”

Counting these two, Reiki was up to a grand total of five (six, if one counted Haruhi/Volterra, but ne was Reiki’s cousin, so……no, he didn’t count nem, not for these purposes).

But—ah, Sailor Onee-san had ideas for what this disturbance in the fabric of reality could be. They all sounded very serious, and bless his heart, Murikabushi wanted to take them seriously. However, he perked right up, like a puppy, as soon as she mentioned—“Mirrorspace? Of course I know it. I haven’t been since Elsa took me to get Awakened, but……yeah! Let’s go!”

If something was wrong with Mirrorspace, then……surely it was their duty to investigate, right?

The smaller of the two new senshi, the super he proclaimed, had his hissy fit and Acubens let him, her lips in a straight line. At least the other senshi had been genial enough. This one... this one ad something to prove. And Acubens was as unimpressed with him as he was with her.

However, she was not one for infighting. They had it hard enough as it was being so small. There was no need to make it worse for one another. And so, when the super senshi finished his tantrum, Acubens crossed her arms over her chest and stood watching him for a long quiet moment, weighing her words carefully in her mind. When she finally did speak, it was softly.

"My apologies for not having a roster of everyone's names and ranks memorized, Morpheus. But as a word to the wise, if being mis-ranked ruffles your feathers this much, then you might want to sit down with yourself and figure out how to fix it." She didn't even bother addressing the nega trying to take his head off. If you weren't almost killed at least once in this line of work, then you weren't really doing your job. Acubens tried to count the number of times she'd nearly died but gave up.

"Second, if making connections is your goal, maybe coming out claws first isn't the best way to do it, Morpheus. I've known a few like you in the past. All tough and ready to fight anyone and they all end the same way. They fizzle out and we don't hear from them again." She thought of Laverna who was so intent on shitting on Acubens had yet hadn't been heard from or seen in years.

"I'm also well aware of what happened last time. I was there. Which is why I'm hesitant to bring others that I don't necessarily know with me to investigate. This also answers your other question with no. I do not know you." Nor did she really want to, given this first impression. "So are you going to come with us and help investigate or are you going to stay out here and pout because someone called you a basic and not a super?" To punctuate her statement, she held out her hand to Murikabushi and addressed him now alone.

"I know Elsa, he's my brother in law. If you're training under him, then you're in good hands. But we'll have to stay together like this if you're coming with me."

Morpheus rolled his eyes he wasn't annoyed she had miss-ranked him and didn't know his name, so much as he was annoyed she had assumed that he was new without bothering to ask. He stayed silent, he was terrible in social situations. Always had been, he had always been a strange guy. "I am not now or have I ever pouted." He said and rolled his eyes once again. Morpheus shrugged his shoulders. Morpheus laughed "I suppose you could put it that way, but I don't have an evil twin brother I know of." He nodded "Mirror space is always my priority, I have been trying to gather energy in order to make repairs on my space. The last event worries me since it seems to me it means the mirror world is growing more unstable."

“Acubens,” Murikabushi repeated, partly to commit the name to memory, partly to make sure he got the pronunciation right (as someone who regularly had his civilian name mispronounced, or else shortened in ways he didn’t consent to so Westerners would find it easier to say, he wanted to avoid doing the same to anyone else), and partly to avoid paying too much mind to Sailor Poutyface’s insistence that he wasn’t pouting. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Thankfully, Acubens gushing about her wife brought the mood up. It was a struggle not to audibly awww at hearing such an unreserved expression of queer love during Pride Season—but even if he kept the sound to himself, Murikabushi’s eyes communicated it for him, going all earnest and sparkly. “Your wife sounds amazing, and honestly? I’m sure she’d say the same about you.” In Reiki’s experience, the effusive love was rarely ever one-sided with people who gushed about their spouses like this. Warmed his gay little heart to see it.

But with a nod, he straightened his posture, gave a quick look from Acubens to Morpheus and back again. “I’m ready, onee-san. Lead on.” He did have a lot of questions about what Altea was and what had apparently happened with mirrorspace some time ago? But he filed them away to ask Acubens and Levi about later. Right now, time was of the essence.

The other senshi had gone quiet, which suited Acubens just fine. Maybe she was an idealist, but she believed that if you didn't have something kind to say, then there wasn't any use in saying anything at all. Instead she grinned at Murikabushi and squeezed his hand affectionately.

"I hope you're right," was her only answer to his reassurance that Lavender spoke as highly of her as she did of Lavender. Acubens did try to be as good to her wife as she was to Acubens but Lavender made it such a high bar and Acubens was only one woman. But she pushed aside the butterflies in her stomach for a moment and led both of the senshi to the mirror she had in mind.

Mirrorwalking, at Acubens age, was was easy as breathing. She no longer had to push through the barrier, no longer braced for the feeling of cold water flowing over her shoulders. It was all par for the course for her, and she'd even come to like it. Not just the sensation of arriving, but the arrival itself. The familiar look of the common room and the large doors leading to Mirrorscape and the Throne Room. She liked the milky white walls and ever shifting nature of the space. And right now, as she stood with her companions in the Common Room, everything looked pretty normal.

But things had started out normal before, as well.

"So you said you haven't been here since your awakening, Murikabushi? And Morpheus, you are working on your Realm, you said?" If Morpheus was as used to Mirrorspace as he was, then she'd have to rely on him to do the heavy lifting of the attack, since her focus would be on protecting Murikabushi, who would be less capable of defending himself.

Morpheus nodded "Yes I am able to go on my own now since becoming a super senshi and go to my mirror space when I get the chance, with everything that has been going on it has been tricky and after that battle, I didn't travel for a while fearing being trapped in the space once again, I don't want to be attacked by one of those things on my own." He was pretty sure if he tried he would end up dead. He shivered at the thought. He had been a fool in the past but he had survived and learned. He intended to never do something so foolish again. "So let's go see what's going on this time." He said simply.