The visit to Fang's homeworld to rid it of the Chaos influence that was plaguing it really had a lasting effect on Parsifal. He had learned that not only did Senshi each have their own homeworld, they could visit them! Since then, he'd wondered what his own homeworld was like. Did it have great ravening creatures like Fang had? Were there birds or trees or knights? (Not like the Order-aligned Knight faction, more like those from fairy tales or history.) He hoped his homeworld would look like something out of Arthurian legend, since his Senshi name was that of a Round Table knight. A really cool and fun Round Table knight too!

So one afternoon Parsifal the Senshi decided he'd like to find out for sure what Parsifal the homeworld was like.

Sitting in his room at his parents' quarters at the boarding stable, Perrie felt the effects of the mushroom sandwich he'd eaten begin to kick in. He pulled his henshin pen from his pocket and looked around, making sure he wouldn't be disturbed while he powered up and tried to figure out how to get to his homeworld. Then he waved the pen like a wand and said the magic words Hania the talking cat had instructed him to say, and just like that he was Parsifal. It always felt a little funny when he powered up, but he was beginning to get used to it. And the magic mushrooms helped a lot too, easing some of the overall weirdness of this whole Senshi thing.

"Now," he muttered to himself as he summoned his Senshi phone from that subspace place (something else he'd just learned about!) and studied the front of it. The background of the brightly-striped phone looked like an old castle; this further reinforced the notion that his homeworld might be medieval looking. There were all these apps installed, with very simple, straightforward imagery on them – this one was clearly contacts, this one a map app, this one first aid or rescue or something. But there was one with a star on it that he couldn't figure out. Was that the right one?

Closing his eyes, his finger hovering over the icon with the star on it, Parsifal took a deep breath. He had no idea what he was doing, or what might happen. Releasing the breath slowly, he sighed, "Here goes nothing…" and pressed the star.

A slight whoosh and a second of disorientation later, Parsifal felt himself standing ankle-deep in water, a squidgy slimy sensation beneath the soles of his bare feet and oozing up between his toes. The scent of wet and green filled his nostrils. What the ********? He opened his eyes quickly and looked around. The distant orb of the sun shone orange in the dim purple-grey sky, overlooking what appeared to be a wetland world, scrubby trees poking out of a veritable sea of sedge and other plants interspersed with shallow rivulets of surprisingly clear, fresh water. Was this it? Was his homeworld a swamp?

Cool, really, but something of a disappointment too.

A hulking, shadowed shape rose in the distance, not too far away. "Huh," Parsifal grunted. That looked like someplace to explore! He trudged through the swamp – no, more like a marsh, or a fen – toward it, feet squishing softly as he went. The closer he got to it, the more a sensation of this is right, this is mine washed over him, a sense of being abundantly clear that this was where he was supposed to be. That, and a weird sense of familiarity. Had he been here before? Maybe, in the distant past, he had. Or maybe in his dreams.

The closer he got to the low structure, the more excited he grew as the shape of it became clear. It was a castle! A real, honest to goodness stone castle! With turrets and parapets and everything! He grinned and broke into a wet slog of a run to get there quicker. Sure, it was in ruins, but a castle was what he had hoped he would find on his homeworld. Something to tie him to the legends of his namesake.

Finally he reached the castle. Parsifal stepped out of the muck below the water's surface and onto the castle grounds, which seemed to have been built on the only bit of solid earth on the whole sodden, marshy rock. Wide-eyed, he stretched his hand out to touch one of the moss-encrusted walls of the tower he stood next to. It was real, all right! He beamed happily and looked up; the tower was maybe three stories high, connected to battered stone walls and low structures that looked like living quarters. Yeah, this place was a wreck, but it looked like Cinderella's Castle at Disneyland to him. And it was his wreck!

With a gleeful giggle, he ran down the dirt corridor between structures in the castle, poking his head into the occasional opening he discovered, entrances crowned by low stone archways. His fingers touched stone and ivy and moss as he ran, and he sang a happy little tuneless song to himself. "I got a castle, a real live castle…"

He rounded a corner and discovered himself at the foot of a staircase, apparently leading up to another tower. Laughing, Parsifal mounted the stairs, taking them two at a time, his bare feet slapping noisily on the stone steps. A doorway at the top, the wooden door long since rotted away, led into a large chamber, the floor covered with bits of broken stone moldings and dust and dirt. Eyes wide, he carefully entered the chamber. There appeared to be the remnants of a carving on one wall, evidently the source of the molding fragments; a heap of moldering refuse against the opposite wall may once have been a bed, as it was vaguely bed-shaped. This must have been the living quarters of someone…

An image flashed through his mushroom-touched mind: a four-poster bed draped with luxurious fabric, an elaborate if somewhat shabby rug on the floor, and something swirling in the frame of the decorative molding on the wall. It all felt strangely familiar….

Shaking the imagery and the feelings it evoked off, he backed out of the room. Had that been a hallucination? He really didn't hallucinate on mushrooms; they just enhanced things, made him feel happy and relaxed, took the edge off the stress of his civilian profession. So that must have been real, then…. He'd have to find someone to ask, maybe Hania, if he could find him. And he'd have to remember how to get here again.

Maybe it was time to go back.

Parsifal focused hard on his home back in Destiny City and pressed the star app again. Almost instantaneously, he was standing in his room, feet covered with muck and silt and dirt. "Wow," he breathed to himself. He quickly powered down and dropped unceremoniously onto his bed. That was really something. Perrie stared at the ceiling and, lacing his hands behind his head, grinned hugely.

He'd have to do that again real soon.

(wc: 1197)