W/ lizbot




There were certain things one grew accustomed to growing up in Destiny City. Clover, herself, was absolutely not a stranger to the idea that there were more reasons beyond the usual not to go out by yourself at night.

Horror movies were all well and very good, but to live in the middle of one - or worse, to live in the middle of something between a horror movie and a creepypasta and an urban legend and a constant ******** inconvenience - was decidedly less good. You learned to do certain things.

You learned to travel at least in pairs. You learned to carry pepper spray. You learned to keep your phone charged and your ears sharpish, and you learned not to trust strangers.

Clover, stumbling out of the party early when her so-called bestie had bailed on her for the sake of someone neither of them had ever even ******** met, had fallen down on all of the first three, and was about to fall at the last hurdle as well.

She saw a figure, and she called out to it, unthinking.

“Hey. Do you know where I could charge a phone this late?”

It would have pleased her to see herself through the eyes of a stranger in that moment, looking quite appropriately like a pretty girl that would spend the next seventy-odd minutes bathed in picturesque gore - some of it from a Spirit Halloween tube already artfully applied - and emerge triumphant at last over the ambiguity of end credits and, presumably, a lifetime of trauma that might yield you a sequel, if you were lucky. She looked vulnerable, compelling, angelic, in her skimpy gold plastic armor and gilt-feathered wings, the light haloing in an especially cinematic way through the latter and reflecting off the burgundy and gold facepaint smeared across her face with the corn-syrup blood.

She looked like a final girl, if she could have seen it. One of the better final girls, actually.

But before one could be a final girl, one had to be a victim.

The figure was petite and moved in a slow, almost gliding motion, long long hair swaying like a silken banner. It was maid, and there were many maids of many flavors out and about this night. But maybe none were quite like this one. Giving a small curtsey, the maid intoned, “Miss. I have a power bank, if you’d like to take a seat.”

Straightening, she gestured to a nearby picnic table, sitting underneath a tree that still held at least half its leaves, with a nice view of the neighborhood’s small duck pond.

There was a hole in the maid’s forehead, cracked and bearing a tiny abyss.


"Dude," she said, obediently following her to the table with a decided lack of self-awareness and self-preservation instinct. "Your costume is amazing. The -" she gestured at her own forehead demonstratively "- is such a cool touch. It's really convincing. Did you do that yourself?"


“No, it was the gift of someone very dear to me,” came the solemn answer. The small maid helped Clover settle in first, careful hands making sure the girl didn’t stumble or sit down too hard. Like placing down a teacup, thoughtfully ensuring no drop was spilt, nor harsh noise made to disrupt the atmosphere.

The powerbank appeared in her hand, along with a cord, and the maid handed them over before sitting down beside Clover, tidying her skirts and apron as she did so. “It’s dangerous to be alone so late,” she commented softly, hair shifting in a wind that wasn’t there.


"Tell that to my own so-called dear friend," she said, in a tone that appeared to invite commiseration. The movement of the hair, noticed only in the periphery of her vision as she hooked up her phone and set it down to wait, she absently noted only as a warning that maybe she should have brought a coat, or an umbrella. "Ditched me for some girl she only met, like, three hours ago. But you're out alone, too," she pointed out, and then, with sympathy: "Did you get abandoned too?"


“That was careless of her.” The tones, though still soft, held the weight of deep judgement. It was possible that Clover had a bit more to drink than she’d thought, or maybe one of them had something unusual in it. Sitting up began to be something she had to struggle for.

“When something or someone is important enough to you, it will become clear that you’re never truly alone anymore.” Reaching out, a small hand once again steadied Clover’s back. “Even on the dark and friendless nights.”


Clover began to suspect that the maid had been smoking something very effective. But the thought was somehow hard to hang onto, slippery.

"I mean," she said, struggling to get to the end of a coherent reply, the phone clutched uselessly in her hand, "it's not like I'm alone in like - the - the like... sense of the..."

She looked down at her useless, still-charging phone, with a sense that she would be panicking if she had more energy.

"Boy," she said, as if to demonstrate to the world exactly why Clover Argento was never going to be cut out to be a final girl, "I'm glad you're here. I think someone might have spiked my drink."


“Don’t worry.” The hand at Clover’s back made a soothing, almost parental motion and the air turned to quicksand, weighing her down, sinking her consciousness. “The worst thing that will happen is a little tiredness. It’s late, after all. But you’re not in danger.”

Everything got very soft and strange around the edges, a pleasant smell filling her nose, like going to bed in freshly laundered bedding.

“STOP BEING A WIMP AND GET UP!” Something was batting at Clover’s face, insistent and…furry?

She was laying down on the picnic table’s bench, phone charged and a folded white piece of fabric cushioning her head. On her chest…Clover would open her eyes to see a pair of baleful blue eyes glaring at her.

The cat opened its mouth and yelled again, “YOU’RE GOING TO JUST LET THAT VAMPIRE DRAIN YOU DRY? NOW SHE’S OFF DOING THE SAME TO OTHER PEOPLE!”

The paw slapped at her again, “DON’T YOU WANT TO QUIT BEING LOSER? DON’T YOU WANT TO FINALLY DO SOMETHING?!”


She gave a little jolt, attempting to collect herself as one might to find out that they'd slept in by two hours and their manager was calling to ask where the hell they were. "******** yeah," she said in some confusion, out of obedient compliance with the apparent expectation that she react to this pep talk.

Which was being delivered by a cat.

She gazed at her in stupid indecision. There was a strange sensation in the air, as if she ought to be doing something and couldn't remember what. Talking to a cat did not seem plausible. What the <********> had been in her drink? And what was she supposed to do about it?

Well, she could try what usually worked, and be compliant. Complying with a hallucination did, to be fair, seem unwise, but it didn't seem any more unwise than any other option available to her. <********... yeah?" she tried again, more timidly, attempting to sway to her feet, picking up the cat unceremoniously by the middle to put it aside as she did so. She felt very odd, and slightly sick. Maybe she'd feel better if she puked, she thought distantly. It certainly felt like something was clawing its way out of her gut - or maybe her chest - in an insistent fashion.

"Nope," she said, to nothing and no one in particular, in response to the feeling rising up to a panicked pitch as she found her feet, somewhere beyond all the fuzz in her head and her mouth.

"Nope," she repeated again, more quietly, pressing her hand to her mouth. "Nope, nope."

It became a frantic, whispered mantra: the drip-dripping of a slow leak that heralded the bursting forward of the flood, which came abruptly.

Her greatest talent as an actress had always been her scream. It had always seemed to come to her so naturally, so easily. It came out of her now like every scream of a thousand lifetimes had piled up behind it, finally scrabbling its animal way out of her throat and into the open air, and it felt very much as though her mouth was the fracture through which the vessel of her body spilled out a sudden and awful power, turning her inside out and yielding, at the end of it, someone else entirely.



The claws that had appeared upon being picked up like a bag of groceries retracted once the cat had been let go. Anyways! This wasn’t about that!

At the very first nope, came a firm counter, “Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Yes. Yes.”

As the scream burst out, the cat’s hair bristled but then the creature began practically dancing from paw to paw, and Clover would feel her finger wrap around something, slender and not too long. It felt like it belonged there, in her hand, just like that powerful rising scream belonged in her throat. Just like…

“Alekto Power! Make up! Say it! Say it!” The furry gremlin was urging, and those words belonged too. Those words belonged to her.




The scream needed to complete itself, but it did after a few seconds, staggering off into a ragged, hoarse exhale of the words she hadn't even needed to be told because they had risen unbidden somewhere behind that scream, and completing the process of being vomited up out of her own mouth in the shape of someone new.

She wasn't even waiting for instruction. She did not even pause to look down at herself and gauge her odd new body and all its odd new finery. She was seized by a sudden indignant rage and was scrambling in the random direction of a horrible presence in her head. She did not know what it was; she only knew that it throbbed like an aching tooth and that she wanted to extract it, by force if necessary.

"Where is it?" she demanded raggedly, reaching out to ungently grab the cat under its arms as if she were a weapon that could be pointed. In some distant corner of Alekto's head, Clover, as if someone else, watched in stupefied silence and thought: I'm Regan. This is some Exorcist s**t. I'm being possessed. "I'll kill it."


It was a good thing that Sailor Alekto looked cool. Like, really really cool! And a little scary! Because otherwise Creedence would have had to like, assert her dominance. Because she wasn’t about to be picked up and swung around by some wimpy baby girl looking senshi, okay? Were her own eyes a little wide? Maybe! Was her mouth open to either screech or curse? Yes! But it also highlighted how sharp and pointy her teeth were, okay?!

Not that this senshi even noticed! This girl was ready to do some murder! Which was a little much, but it like, really fit with the Alekto aesthetic so Creedence wasn’t about to put a damper on it. “Follow the taint!”

One paw tried to flap in the direction they were already going in. “The aura of foulness! The…scent of fabric softener…” Weird. The corrupt maid was so, so weird. Creedence hadn’t dared some close while the woman was doing her evil energy draining thing. Wouldn’t have come close even now, except the cannon fodder npc had turned out to be like…

The female protagonist?? And this was her big awakening!

In the distance, they would find the maid once more, this time sitting beside an elderly man in a Freddy costume, holding hands with him as he began to nod off. Glancing up at them, she clearly didn’t recognize Alekto as the girl from before.

“It’s unwise to approach me,” she cautioned them, quiet and still, save for the slight shifting of her hair.



Later on, Alekto would come to understand that the churning turmoil of whatever it was that was surging around in her veins was only white-water turbulent because of a lack of stability that she could, with time, fix. She would also come to learn that it was unstable in both directions, which would come as an unfortunate surprise given what she was about to do.

"Wisdom is my dump stat," she hissed, almost as if to herself and therefore for the cat's ears only as she leveled her finger at the maid, her voice still hoarse around the edges but level and very quiet.

"How do you live with yourself, knowing your aura stinks like that? Don't you want to scream?" she demanded calmly.


The cat in the new senshi arms cheered quietly, “Yeah! Be stupid as heck! But strong as hell!”

At Alekto’s questions, the maid clearly felt something shift within her. A strange, insistent pressure. Slowly, she put aside the sleeping man’s hand, and then began to reach toward his chest. Even to Alekto’s inexperienced eyes, the gesture held a sense of immense danger.

And then the hand paused, and began to shake, then retract to cover the small woman’s mouth. Her whole boy was, in fact, shaking, first minutely, then with increasing violence. Red eyes turned glossy with tears and then, she stood up and the screaming started. Long, loud, and wildly keening. It was, possibly, years worth of screams, forced to burst out of a single, fragile looking frame.

Hair dancing and eyes wild, the maid turned her head up to the sky and kept screaming, as if the sound could reach up and take a bite out of the moon.


Alekto stood, calmly observing the outcome of her words, the cat shifted to something slightly more dignified - and comfortable - in the crook of one arm. The fact that it was the arm covered in leather that might absorb some clawing was probably irrelevant.

She walked with unhurried steps towards the tableau, as if to put herself between the maid and her victim.

"You will want to leave now," she said, barely audible over the continuing, horrific noise.

The magic faded, leaving the maid wide-eyed and panting with her whole body. Eventually she turned that gaze back to the Alekto. That look was brighter than before, clearer despite the shock in it. There was also, for the barest moment, what seemed like…relief.

She looked at the senshi, the cat, and then the man at the bench, weighing and measuring lives upon a scale invisible to all but her. And then, slowly, she nodded.

And was gone.

“YEAH! Now THAT’s what I call a freakin’ Awakening!” Excited paws began to flail at Alekto’s arm.


She did not answer, instead turning and half-stumbling back towards the picnic table.

"My phone," she mumbled stupidly, only thinking to put the cat down several seconds into the journey. She felt light-headed and as though she might, possibly, still be dreaming, although some instinct told her that it was not Wrong that the cat was speaking, and not Wrong that she had been able to do what she did, nor even entirely Wrong that she was leaving that hapless Freddy alone to recover on his own time.

She fumbled over towards the phone, picking it up and turning it on, dropping abruptly out of this strange new body and into one that still felt drunk and exhausted in some way. Her hands were shaking, but she suddenly laughed a little weak laugh, turning the clock on the home screen towards the cat in an almost hysterical way.

"Oh," she said. "It's my birthday."

Landing with the fearsome grace of an apex predator (aka: not like a discarded pile of laundry), Credence followed the senshi back to the table with her phone and stuff and watched her power down into whoever she’d been before (aka: someone way less cool than Sailor Alekto).

“Yeah? Well!” A kitty paw slapped a second, way cooler, way magical phone down onto the table, “Happy Birthday!” Oh man, no that was way too enthusiastic. “This is like, yours. Time to have a much cooler rest of your life.”