Welcome to Gaia! ::

Sailor Bacchus had spent most of the night in various stages of irritation. So maybe he’d had a tiresome couple of weeks. Months. He had his ways of dealing with the louder nights, more or less. Just find something louder. Or something stronger to muffle it for a while. But it seemed there was nothing strong enough to shut up some of the humans in this city.

OK, maybe he’d intentionally scared that guy. Maybe he’d dropped his glamour to see the look on his face. Maybe that p***k shouldn’t have been running his mouth. A huff escaped the deep space senshi as he walked alone, arms swinging in the cold until the sensation of an allied energy signature nearby. A Mauvian it seemed. Order aligned at least, so probably an ally.

Crouching near some bushes, he scanned the area for the source of the aura.

The small grey Mauvian who appeared from within the bush was not an unwelcome sight. He hadn’t encountered many of her peers since his arrival on Earth, though he hadn’t exactly been inundated with space cats in the silent centuries of his long walk. Approaching her with a grin, the deep space senshi greeted her.

“Hey, how’s it going? Bacchus, formerly of Bacchus. It’s a lovely patch of spores and dust hurtling around somewhere out in space. Excellent tourist destination if you ask me.”

It was probably an odd way to start a conversation, maybe even off-putting, but he was in the mood for a bit of oddness. “All that aside, it’s nice to meet you.”

Bacchus was a bit impressed with the kitten’s efforts to knead the bench, ambitious to be sure. It had been a long while since he’d spent any significant amount of time around a Mauvian, plenty of Earth cats, but how much could they have changed in the past ten or so centuries? Not that he’d understood much about their abilities or technologies back then either.

“Huh? Nothing I can think of. Not unless you’ve got one of those…what do you call them? Bazookas? Don’t think any of those Chaos pricks would like that.” He grinned, aware of the absurdity of the question but harboring a vague splinter of hope that she might have something that could help him pack an extra punch.

Bacchus had known that the Mauvian wouldn’t be able to offer him anything with what he’d heard the humans call “firepower,” but he still felt a twinge of irrational disappointment. Maybe he’d be able to figure out how to get something like that someday. The people on Earth seemed to have no difficulty getting their hands on things to blow each other up, it shouldn’t be too hard. “Heh, thought it was worth asking.”

But for the moment it seemed that Quicksilver had something else she was interested in sharing with him, and from the glint in her eye it was probably something good. He tried to remember what exactly Mauvians were able to do, but found himself at a loss beyond their skills at awakening senshi. A roguish grin crossed his face.

“What did you have in mind?”

He managed to stifle the bitter, mirthless laugh that threatened to spill forth at the Mauvian’s mention of “untapped power.” Whatever power had resided there had been well ******** tapped centuries earlier. No amount of eternal strength had been enough to put him ahead of the absolute s**t that infested his world. Pulling himself out of the magical mediocrity he’d carried when he was a child, the trembling echo of chibi fragility felt like a cruelly absurd joke.

Even if he’d felt a fraction of the grime of Chaos slough off of his soul since he’d plummeted to Earth, it felt delusional to imagine that other planet allowing him any more of its energy.

Not after he’d wasted so much of it.

Still, he called his henshin pen from his subspace and gently laid it at Quicksilver’s feet.

s**t, he’d given something up.

“Tipped his hand,” as the idiom went.

Not that the Mauvian was his opponent, but since Bacchus had arrived he'd swung between the complacency that came with the ancient abandonment of his survival instincts and the hypervigilance that accompanied the leap from centuries of isolation to Earth’s aggressive bustle. Beat the silence at least.

But that didn’t mean that every friendly cat needed to smell the open wounds. For their own good.

The sensation within Bacchus’ chest was jarringly familiar, power welling within his unstable starseed for the first time in longer than he cared to consider.

Alright.

Alright, it was worth a shot.

He gingerly picked up the bossy writing implement, eyeing it skeptically. “Bacchus asteroid power, make-up!”

He felt fabric bloom around his biceps, a newly restored collar around his throat, all too familiar crimson erupting across his body, childish tiara replaced with the mark of a station he’d long since lost any right to claim.

s**t, the Mauvian had been right.

He couldn’t decide if he resented that planet for giving him whatever trust it had left and trying to guilt him into gratitude.

That wasn’t the cat’s fault though, she’d been nothing but helpful. He could be grateful to her.

“I…thank you. This is weird. But thank you.”

Bacchus swallowed hard as he looked at the kitten. Yeah, this was probably a good thing.