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One of the great joys of powered life was that it was almost obligatory to spend time haunting old ramshackle buildings and empty construction lots and rooftops, all of which were places where Maus in his civilian life felt especially at home.

He leaned back on his palms and enjoyed indulging in all three: a ramshackle roof overlooking an empty construction lot. A lollipop stick, long since spent and becoming somewhat disgusting, was traveling from side to side in his mouth as he regarded the view and awaited this Bacchus-figure, a name he vaguely recognized as having overheard at some space festival or another - Joy's? Tempesti's? Both? - and for whom he had only vague, nebulous, badly-formed questions. It would have been better, maybe, to organize his thoughts, and yet he had not, and not only because between one thing and another he'd not been in a position to have his thoughts especially orderly.

Optimistically, he considered that shooting from the hip might make his earnestness a little more obvious, and thus help to smooth over any accidental insult. It was hard to know how to talk to these cosmic wayfarers, sometimes - hard to know what was taboo - but even Maus knew that there were times where a polished lie was not the most respectful course of action, and he was feeling more respectful than his wont, when it came to this particular topic.

He turned, slightly, as he was approached, glancing over his shoulder. "Hot as ********, don't you think? Maybe I shoulda picked somewhere with AC."

He reached out and accepted this gift - unexpected in both form and actual substance - with an expression of vague surprise.

"Well," he said, commencing activity, "we'll probably get along, I think. I get along with everyone, though," he added in the mild tone of someone dispatching a self-deprecating bit of sarcasm. "Social butterfly."

There was an occupied pause.

"Thanks for coming to see me. You're gonna be annoyed at how little ********' prepared I am for this conversation but I'm better at, like, improvising. Gonna play a little Daniel Molloy here but without the tape recorders and bloodshed and - well." He dropped this without elaborating. "If you don't mind letting me interrogate you a little bit. I don't even know what I'm trying to accomplish, really," he added, sounding a little too cheerful at this lack of preparation, and having in general the demeanor of someone who was awfully chipper a lot of the time, "but I feel like there's way too many of us that get dropped here into a blank life and told to figure it the ******** out in some way or another, and I guess I'm trying to fill in the blank, somehow. I've been talking to this girl - she's not from here, like you, you know - and I guess, like - she made me realize there's s**t some of us could be doing in that respect that would be mutually beneficial. Like. I guess what I wanna know is what would help, when you're having to do the day-to-day s**t. Socially. Whatever."

"I need help with helping," he said simply. "It sucks to not have - like - I had to start over from scratch with filling up the contact list in my phone. But I had - something - I had - knowledge of how this world works. I can talk to people at the bus stop and they're not gonna start asking me a bunch of questions about where I'm from and why I don't know what Sesame Street is, or whatever. But there's - there's logistical problems. I don't know if it's possible to have that much trust in a group - to know each other civ-side. You see what I'm getting at." Did he? Hard to say.

Maus had, generally, a voice that was surprisingly mellow - sometimes even a little sleepy - and had the air of someone intentionally smoothing down sharp edges on something that was unpleasantly - or unmanfully - crispy. But he was speaking at a rapid clip, and the more so as he went on, with the improvisational flow of someone accustomed to speaking a great deal and off the cuff. Someone who liked to talk maybe a little too much.

"I don't know. I felt so ******** - what's the word - isolated and weird, I guess, when I came over. From Chaos," he added, with a certain stoniness as he pushed past it and did not elaborate. "And I got as lucky as you can with where I landed. But like I said, I've been talking to this girl, and she made me realize that like - if we could find some way to network - people who came over and people who crash landed here - I think it'd be, like. Mutually beneficial. Like we can teach you guys what a ********' Star Wars reference is and you can know who we were and why we don't have a long history to draw on when we're making friends. I just figured, like - maybe we both get tired of inventing fake 'us' for the sake of going out to drink and dance. Everything that gets us together is for fighting or grieving. Maybe it'd be nice to be able to drink and dance and sit in the AC and not have to worry about it."

He paused, uncomfortable. "Some people - I don't know. Maybe they wouldn't be comfortable with who we were, given - given - well." He made a vague motion of his hand, as if this little gesture could encompass intergalactic cataclysm wrought by a name he'd once served under. All the grief and misery and destruction of Chaos, felt more by people like Bacchus and Kua'kua than anyone else. "Maybe it's a selfish ********' pursuit, now that I think about it. Would it bother you? Would it be ******** terrible if I'm trying to pretend like there's some sort of - ******** - brotherhood or shared problem between you guys and people like me? ******** hell. How did I not think of this before right now? Am I barking up the worst tree possible? You can tell me. I wanna know."

The relief of Bacchus not choosing to remain hung up on the sudden crisis unfolding in real time for Maus was enough to push him out of it immediately, latching greedily back onto the point.

He was aware that he could be a little exhausting even to people with the frame of reference to process his constant skittering from thought to thought and allusion to allusion. It was probably worse for someone without that context, and although Kua’s patient tolerance had spoiled him a bit, even for her he'd started to feel guilty enough to self-edit when he could remember to. The tangent about Star Wars, again, made him a little too ashamed to even inwardly pretend that this was just helping Bacchus do immersion-based learning, and he accordingly made a silent promise to himself to do better, or at least try.

The thought, though, was accompanied by the sudden idea that this harebrained desire of his could be turned to even better use. What movies could you screen that someone could get without much context and give them some sort of pop cultural footing? Star Wars, certainly. Probably Lord of the Rings. Some of the earlier Disney films, but expecting someone with no context to grapple with something like Aladdin was probably cruel. A sort of cultural introduction course, without the insult of actual instruction. What if -

All this darted through his head and back out again.

“I don't think we need to stage any get-togethers in walk-in coolers,” he said. “Although I don't know. As we know, it's hot as ********. It's the doing it right that I'm stuck on. But like - do you think - like - well I guess my question is: do you think it's even a doable project? Like what if - what if I tried to get some people together to hang out - you'd have to like. I don't know, maybe if no one is saying who they are it's less dangerous.” This, skeptically. “But just to know that the people in the room with you don't need you to - to invent someone to be while you're there - no one springing questions about where you grew up and what you studied in school and all that s**t - would people be willing to risk it?”

He turned eyes on Bacchus. He had an expression, at times, of dangerously boyish earnestness: dangerous because it was a rare note of complete sincerity in his character and dangerous because it made him seem more naive than he was. He had that expression now, sitting in a strangely childlike way on a grown man's face, eager and a little anxious and seeming to indicate that he could want nothing more than the wise judgment of this person he'd only just met. “Would you? Would anyone? I would. If I thought it'd help. But it's different for me. Would you? How would you do it right?"

"Can't imagine you could get more handsome," he said, immediately and mildly. Not that Bacchus was even his type - and he was discovering that he had a hard time conceiving of a scale of attractiveness when it came to powered Senshi anyway, for some reason - it was only that to flirt came as naturally to him as breathing, especially when the object of that flirtation was someone larger than him and in some way scarier, which helped take any whiff of creepiness off of the interaction.

"But that's also what I mean." He hated to speak clearly about this. It felt in a bizarre way like he was breaching some sort of taboo. It felt wrong, and he wasn't even sure why. That, too, only made the mountain of mistrust that he'd have to climb to get this off the ground seem the higher. "I don't mean hanging out like this. With energy signatures. That's why I'm - I mean hanging out in - like - as civilians. There's too much to help us when we're - when we're being senshi and being knights. And I know it's different for senshi - your names are different than ours. But like - don't you have a name that isn't Bacchus? Like I have a name that isn't Maus. And I know it's good to be Bacchus - everyone tells me it's good - and it's a name you have to - well. Sorry, sorry." He barely paused, despite having nearly touched the even greater taboo of acknowledging that a name like Bacchus's was important because there was no one else to remember it. It went without saying. It wasn't his place to touch it, and he felt a pang of shame, not unmixed with a fear of Bacchus becoming so justifiably angry at him that the conversation ended here. It was this that pushed him into a speedier torrent of words.

"But... And don't you wanna be able to just ******** - hang out with people - when you're that other name - and not have to pretend like you're someone else entirely? No one outside that circle would have to know, so you wouldn't have to be secret and move it around - you could just - just walk into someone's house, or whatever, and let the disguise go, and just -"

He took a breath, frustrated, not by the conversation but by the fact that this did not already exist. And then he did something potentially very dangerous, not recklessly, but in some desperate move to show that he, at least, could put his cards on the table, risks be what they may. Or at least he could pretend to.

"When I was on the other side - they have that. I can't remember being - being that. But I know that I knew people - roommates - I can't remember them but I remember that I had it. It's ******** bullshit that we can't have this. It's ******** bullshit that we've got to ******** - like - wall off this entire half of ourselves and pretend and invent stories for all the gaps in our lives. You know? I hate them. I hate them so ******** much," he said, with a sudden explosion of vitriol. Bacchus, of course, had no way of knowing that such an explosion and such hatred was very odd in him - had no way of knowing that very, very few people knew that he was even capable of it. "I don't want to act like they do things better. But they do some things better, and don't we have the deck stacked against us enough? I'm sorry," he added immediately, deflating. "But you see why I can't get this moving. I guess I just want someone to give me some miracle solution that makes it all safe and easy, and I don't think there is one."