Welcome to Gaia! ::

Without the glitz and grace of her senshi form, or the fact that she'd really just been standing there, it quickly became more obvious that Brielle was, in fact, sill injured.

Her steps were heavy. Walking, it turned out, pulled at your chest, and the whole situation wasn't exactly helping her feet. She had to slow a few times and do her best to cover the fact that she was catching her breath.

She made it, though, and no worse for the wear.

There was no getting around the fact that the apartment was a mess, but it still looked a thousand times warmer than something like the Negaverse barracks, so she wasn't about to complain. Instead, she sank into an afghan covered couch, eyes flicking to the high chair and then to the cabinets.

"Water, please," she said, back to her polite smile, and not feeling like demanding coffee from someone who was still half a stranger. A moment later, she added, "Does anyone else live here?"

She was used to children. The Gallos had plenty, but if one was around, it would change the way that she chose her words for talking about the war.

Brielle perched forwards on the chair and held the wine glass as if she was at a fancy dinner and not a cramped apartment with crayon on the walls. The answer to her question wasn't what she was expecting.

There was an awkward half-second of a pause before she said, as with true sympathy in her voice, "Oh. I'm sorry to hear that."

Her thoughts had turned to death quite a bit, recently. She'd thought plenty about oblivion, and some about reincarnation. She'd also thought about loss, though, about what happened to survivors. When Beau had died, and it hadn't even been long after she'd been adopted, she remembered the waves of grief that had shaken the whole family, herself included. Eventually it had felt like things had gone back to some sort of normal, but there was still something missing.

It had been worse for some of the others, but she understood it, all the same. In the hospital, she'd been thinking about how she needed to live because she didn't want to do that to anyone. Now, she was thinking about how she didn't wish that on anyone.

Armchair archaeology, then. The could offer, and maybe it would help with getting back to that semblance.

"All right. We can talk about magic," she said. "What should we start with? Cybele? Chaos? Earth?"

Earth.

Brielle nodded, sipping at her water. That was the most logical place to start, since it was where they were sitting, and since it was crawling with monsters that her new friend had already seen a few times. It was also what she felt most qualified to talk about, funnily enough.

"The Negaverse," she said. "You want to know about the Negaverse."

Her smile was thin. "I served them for a while against my will, which was awful, but at least I know a bit about their inner workings."

It was that story that she used as a jumping off point to talk about how agents were people with Chaos in their souls, about how they could be corrupted and purified, and about how they took other people's starseeds sometimes as well as just their energy.

She kept a straight face while she spoke of it, even though her mind flicked to the amount of starseeds that she'd crushed under her own teeth, or handed off for storage.

They'd already talked some about youma, but she mentioned that they were the Negaverse's loyal servants.

She did not mention the Dark Mirror court. That seemed like another can of worms, best suited for another day.

"And while there's a more history to Order, to us," she waved between the two of them, finishing up, "What it comes down to is that certain people have the ability to awaken to magic within themselves and stand up against that evil."

Brielle considered the notes briefly, and then shook her head and gestured for the magazine. Patting around a nearby table revealed what looked to be a washable marker, which wasn't ideal, but then again it wasn't like Brielle was taking paper notes on the daily.

She flipped the model to reveal a pastel ad for some sort of perfume, pastel enough for the marker to show. Good. If Kaðlín wanted a visual for all this, than Brielle was going to do what she could to give her something substantial.

She spoke as she wrote. "When someone's starseed is stolen, they die," she said, in the matter of fact tone of someone who was half preoccupied and had also lived and breathed war for as long as she could remember. "Not immediately," she added, glancing up. "If you ever find one, there's a chance to return it. The body can sustain its basic life functions for a bit, so if you get one off of an agent, look for an unconscious person nearby."

She handed the magazine back over.

"They come in different strengths, which is something you want to be mindful of. You should be able to feel it in the back of your mind, when they're around. If something's too powerful, you run."

Which left the last question, something harder to answer. "We fight back," said Brielle, because that was the ideal. "It's situational, and harder because none of this is public. Some people go for diplomacy, some more proactive approaches, but," with a grim smile, she nodded towards her chest. "It's war."

"No and no," said Cybele, shaking her head even as the completely innocent question about starseeds made her kin crawl a bit. "You can guess if it's a starseeding mostly by the lack of other symptoms, but there's no way to be sure about it that I know of."

Perhaps there were others who were a bit more scientific minded than she was who would b able to make a device or something. It was worth looking into. "And a starseed isn't like a heart or something where someone doesn't have a use for it after they're dead. It's an essence, a soul. I know I said I was going to try not to be overbearing with the information, but," there was probably no getting around dropping another bit of potentially worldview shifting information at this point in the conversation.

"Reincarnation is real." There it was.

"And best I can tell, starseeds are what make us," she trailed off, feeling very in over her head, "Ourselves? From one life to the next? Again, not an expert."

She was suddenly even more aware that she was sitting in a dead woman's house, and that Kaðlín might have answers about what came next that she was not at all equipped to answer. Yet, musing, she added, "Perhaps, and this is a big maybe, for a mad scientist with questionable ethics out of a movie, it would be possible to use someone else's body to host a starseed, but that's what it would be. Hosting. The starseed is the person."

She shook her head without trying to.

"But, for the easy answer, I know plenty of people who could teach you to fight, myself included."

Something necessary, because the Negaverse was a military, and a relentless one at that.

Brielle saw the other woman's reaction to the concept of reincarnation, to the realities of a war that went farther than flesh and bone. She watched her listen to all of the things that Brielle, herself, did not truly understand.

For a while, hands in her lap and eyes downcast, she decided not to speak any more. She wasn't any good at comfort, or at subtlety, or dealing with these delicate moments of human emotions. It still felt sometimes like she was learning about her own emotions and her own humanity, like when her starseed had been damaged and manhandled, that was the part that hadn't quite fixed.

She could give facts, and histories. She could be direct. She could answer questions. She could, of course, fight.

"Friday," she said in the end, after mentally going over her schedule. "I can teach you to fight on Friday."

She looked over, gaze steady. "So we can get those starseeds back where they belong."