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It had been a while since Pendour had just allowed herself to walk through the city streets, seeing who she could find.

She'd been spending a lot of time up in space again. After hours and days of work, and trips and trips to bring up supplies, the knight's quarters were finally clean, and restored, and beautifully furnished.

Beyond that, she'd been answering letters from squires who had heard of her and the benefits of her Wonder through world of mouth of some other kind of destiny. She'd been making the rounds and checking in on the mental health of those people who she already knew about. All of that had led to a few adventures of its own.

Now she was here, though, walking down the sidewalk in between a neighborhood filled with the nice kind of apartments, the kind from before architecture had become all white with angles that looked like they would cut your hands. The bricks were well maintained. There were sculpted seashells over the arched windows.

On the other side of the sidewalk was a sweet little park, complete with the older, prettier type of lamp posts.

There was a chaos aura not too far away, and Pendour headed towards it, hoping to catch up before anything dangerous happened.

Oh, there they were.

They were on a park bench, looking which was better already than a lot of situations that Pendour had found herself in. It was always so much harder when she came across someone draining and she had to diffuse a situation before she could even do anything else. Or, sometimes it was worse. She'd had people chasing her, before. She'd had them jumping off rooftops to cut off her paths. She'd had them laugh at her scars.

This kind of thing was always so much easier.

"I don't want much," she said. "It's not like I'm, um,-" she looked at her hands, "Selling something."

People might try to argue that she was selling purification, but she didn't think she was. She didn't advertise it, try to shove it down throats. She'd learned early on that that didn't work, and she'd lost an eye in the discovery. It was a choice that people could make on their own, something that she could help them through.

"I just wanted to make sure that nobody is getting hurt," she said. "You know. Um. War. It gets a little harsh sometimes."

Luckily for the corrupt, Pendour hated eye contact, too. She didn't even look like she was trying to manage it. Her good eye skimmed across the horizon before settling on some trees in the distance.

"Oh, um, there's nothing you need to apologize for," she said, with a little shrug. "Like you said, nobody is getting hurt."

That let Pendour breathe a bit easier. Even with the newer members of the Negaverse, she couldn't always assume that she wasn't going to come across some sort of crime scene when she walked into them. It was always a relief when that wasn't the case, when fresh-faced really and truly meant not so deep into Chaos.

Standing at her full six foot height felt a little much, so Pendour moved to sit right there on the path, legs tucked to one side with her mermaid skirt folded over her lap.

"How did you get involved?"

Talent. Oh. Okay. Pendour had heard that one, a time or two. It was the more insidious way that they did their recruitment, when they tried to get people invested with compliments and a sense of camaraderie instead of trying to control them with fear.

Probably the more effective tactic, she thought, but for all the disgust she felt for the Negaverse, it didn't show through in her face. She just kept staring a little blankly off into the distance. Her fingernails went tap tap tap on the ground.

"Because of your magic?" asked Pendour, and nodded, because she wasn't going to disagree. "It's true. Being a senshi does make you talented, and I'm sure what makes you special goes deeper than that."

She smiled, although she still wasn't going for the eye contact.

"Do you know anything about it now? The Negaverse?"

"Photography?"

Pendour's serene countenance lit up just a little at that. "Oh, I love that. It's not my medium of choice, but I always love seeing what people can capture."

It was its own sort of magic, really, just as important as whatever fire someone could shoot out of their hands, if they were a senshi, but Pendour did not speak that. It sounded almost too cheesy, and she could see that the corrupt was already starting to squirm.

"I just mean people can get tricked into the Negaverse, sometimes," she said, because that was what she was getting at. "They get told they can be part of something bigger, but people often don't mention the price, um, the starseeds, or what Chaos does to you."

"Gardening?" repeated Pendour, her good eye lighting up.

She didn't know if she was going to get anywhere with the talk of trickery, of the problems that the Negaverse had t hat this senshi hadn't yet had the time to see with their own eyes.

Plants, though? Plants were easy to talk about.

"Me too," she said. "That's what I do when I'm not working, really. It takes time, but it's so beautiful, watching things come to life."

"Oh, I'll try to grow anything," said Pendour, and the tense thoughtfulness melted out of her voice, just like that. Her gaze was still distant but it went softer, almost dreamy, as she thought about her plants.

"Peppers, and onions, and tomatoes, those are the staples of my vegetables. Other than that, it's whatever looks the nicest in the seed catalogs, or at the garden center." By the end of it, there was almost always so much in her garden plot that she had leaves and vines spilling over the sides. Back when she was learning, she'd sometimes put so many plants in together that they started to choke each other out.

"Oh, and flowers," she whispered, smiling softly. "All of the flowers. I have a soft spot for coral bells, though. Those were the first ones I planted up on my Wonder. That's where my nicest gardens are, now."

"No," said Pendour, who technically had her civilian phone on her, but who wasn't about to get it out.

"But I can show you, sometime."

Not tonight, she didn't want to get pushy in front of this person who already seemed unsure about her presence.

"I should probably go home," she stood, "but it's always nice to meet another plant person."