Clockwork Snakes, Group

(March 14th, 7am)

outfit

Too much of her was grateful that Okamere had been too busy to greet them the day before. Amalia had barely been able to hide her reaction from the group; she knew at the very least Zoi had felt it, but she thought she'd been able to block Riya and the others out.

It had hurt. It still hurt, whenever she stepped into an area of the complex she hadn't visited before. Wasn't just the memories flickering through her mind like a film, it was the feelings, the emotions. More pain than just the numerous times Sariah had been hurt by her brothers. The very planet rebelled against those on it currently. There was no life to them as there had been before. Mercurians had always been thoughtful, been intellectual, but they hadn't been this cold, this robotic, this lifeless.

Mercury as Sariah remembered it was lively, seraph cutting swathes through the brown sky, rainbow streaks against the always drab clouds. The people had made up for the plain colors of their earth and sky by dressing brightly, blue and purple and green, teal and yellow and orange, pink and red and indigo. Everything and anything bright and vibrant and startling. Never clashing, or at least such a thing was never seen except on 'rebels' or teens, determined to try their own hand at making a mark.

Art was just as valued as science, legends and fairy tales read aloud by the neuroscientists and physicists to their children. Intelligence was valued, yes, but so was the creativity that went along with the best of genius. The court jester and bard were held as high in regard as the court physician and alchemist. There was none of this idea that everything had to be sterile, cold and flat. Her planet had been covered in trees wide at the trunk, thick branched and solid, able to hold a seraph's weight. Spring and summer had been merely days long, giving way to harsh fall and fairly mild winters. There would be snow, even in summer, but the poison breathed out by the seraph kept the air itself fairly warm despite the groundcover.

The Mercurian had once learned to skate before she could walk. Now she merely stood at a window and stared at the treeless desert, mourning what had been lost.

Moving was sleek, easy, she cut across the pond like Hesham through the clouds, decisively. Her training was going well, and she was glad Kacha let her have this break. Her skirt, a brilliant mix of blue and green caught against her legs as she followed the shoreline of the pond, eying her intended landing spot and finding it perfect. She cross-stepped, one foot in front of the other as she gathered speed, muscles bunching as she pushed up and over, ankles hooked together as she spun in the air, once, twice, thrice. She didn't make the fourth rotation she had planned on, but she landed solid, no wobbling, and considered that a success. It was such a relief to be out of the drab black of her 'training' suit and back into proper colors.

She liked the training, she admitted, slowly twirling on the spot and smiling at the iceflies as they rotated around her, almost like that description of that transformation she was supposed to be able to do. The Moon Queen had the thing that was supposed to allow her to actually be able to do it, whatever it actually was. For now Sariah figured she would just keep training with Kacha and make sure she didn't step into another pit-trap. Her arm still had the scar from the last one. The twelve year old pouted to herself as she ran her right hand over her left arm, feeling the long ridge of scar tissue curving around it.

Snow blew sharply against her bare calves as it danced across the frozen expanse, the mournful howl of the wind blocking out the sharp cracking sound...

Amalia turned, lowering her hand and releasing the water vapor gathered and frozen back into the atmosphere, ending the ice dagger. No need to stab her Pateroto. He was dressed as she was, black sweater, blue jeans, simple low shoes. Boring. Sterile. Nothing like Mercury should be. Good thing she had all the clothing Zoi had allowed her to buy in their hotel room. Today was the only day she would dress like a "true" Mercurian. Beyond this she was going to the true heritage of her people. Her real people - the real Mercury. Color.

"How are your students settling in?" His eyes, the same green shade as Nonere's, looked at her quizzically. She'd been careful, wearing her Venusian ring around her neck today, in case Okamere came by. Okamere would know the cultural significance, even if she couldn't speak Venusian herself.
"Quite well, I think. I was going to make sure they were all up and make sure they all remember to take their supplements." It was odd, speaking Mercurian again. She had spoken it some, here and there with other professors, teaching Zoi and the others basic phrases, but never full conversations beyond with the adoptive-parents she had met when she helped Amora.
"That is a well thought out plan. Why don't you come home tonight, sleep in your own bed, rather than in the hotel?"
"I would rather stay with my fiance, Pateroto." Amalia stated it simply, crossing the hallway back to the door to the small room she shared with Zoi. Her father sighed and left, mumbling under his breath about work.

Part of her felt bad about it, the rest didn't. He hadn't been there, really, when she was younger, he hadn't even stepped up when Nonere died. Okamere had ruled their family, and he had never once tried to overrule her, to comfort his daughter when she was told crying made her look ugly or that she shouldn't be so shy, or to stop stuttering, it made her look stupid. He had never asked her how her day went at school or if she was having any trouble or even offer to teach her to play his instrument of choice, the flute. Nothing. He had been more absent than Okamere, and that was saying something.

The woman slipped back into her hotel room (they were actually old Jovian military barracks remade into hotel rooms - cheaper, less attention paid to the inhabitants than the ritzy hotels - and to a point, fairly large for Mercurian standards) and rested her back against the door. She wrinkled her nose at the thought of nutritional supplements, already missing the solid food of Earth, even though they had eaten some form of solid food while on the ship. She was making them all use the supplements for the sake of "authenticity" according to the paperwork she had filled out for everyone - realistically it was just to keep it less obvious they were there, or what their likes/dislikes were - she'd at least made sure they all had the chewable children's supplements. Multiple, instead of just the one-per-child, but between the fact that they required chewing, and actually had some flavor, if chalky and rather fake.

Even the fairly large double room felt cramped after the shared apartment back on Earth, shared and strikingly bland in color, boring, even compared to her own apartment, Avetea's apartment now. White and gray, contrasting sharply with the traditional black apparel, yes, but boring all the same.
I want to go back home, she confided in her husband, already grumpy. The day wasn't likely to get any better, even if the planet stopped screaming in misery at her. At least she wasn't stuck over the toilet like she had been all last night, wracked with cramping, nausea and vomiting from its sheer presence banging around in her skull.

hotel rooms

Zoi Wynne was not a man to get nervous. He was handsome, intelligent, charismatic... He knew this. But when it came down to his actually visiting Mercury, meeting his snow dove's parents... It was completely and utterly illogical, but he was nervous. Amora had told him that she expected him to relay her greetings to her new grandmaman and grandpere. Of course, he wasn't sure how that was going to work either. He'd spent the good chunk of the eighteen hour flight worrying and fussing over the tiniest details. However, the moment they'd landed, all thoughts of his own state of mind were forgotten. Amalia was in quite literal pain – the two of them had spent the night in their tiny, suffocating room, her sicker than he ever wanted to see her again.

Zoisite had mentioned things about his Sariah to him. The way she talked, smiled, walked... Those tiny details that made him love her all the more. He'd told him about his adventures with Hesham, about the stories she told of her home planet... And absolutely nothing that he'd seen so far matched up with the stories that Zoisite had decided he needed to remember on the way. It was dull, cold... Suffocating.

He could hardly imagine her growing up here. His Ama, his love, his life – she'd grown up, somehow, on this shell of a planet. Even Venus, with it's uncountable number of prostitutes and slavery and overall lack of human emotion when it came to others as more than sex toys – even that amounted to some sort of emotion. Rage, hatred, disapproval... But Mercury, from what he'd seen so far... It was as though the White Regime (or maybe even before them) had suffocated all the life out of the planet and tried to make it into something that had failed. It somehow reminded him of what he knew of Mars – it was that... inhuman.

Between the pair of them, they hadn't slept more than thirty minutes. Not in any life would he ever be the type of man that would go to sleep while his love was sick – even if she was just awake for no reason, he wouldn't sleep unless she did. He was snapped out of his thoughts by voices in the hall – quiet. Ama and a man. Judging by the sound of it – yes, it was her father. Pateroto was father, right? He was nearly certain, but the complexity of the language wasn't lost on him.

He was in the process of changing out of the clothes that he'd spent the night on the floor with her in when she opened the door. He slid the shirt over his arms, buttoning up the bottom three buttons as she took the small number of steps to get into the room. Her mental statement brought a small frown to his face – so did he. I know, my sweet. Me too. He thought to her as he took that last step forward and leaned down to wrap her in a hug, pressing a kiss to her temple.

Even as it hurt her, it helped her. The planet supported her through the pain, toning down its urgent message as it felt her pain. Simply being on it gave her strength. The core of the planet, not its physical core, but its magic core had awoken after millenia of being ignored, shunned, twisted, as the Mercurians inhabiting the planet went on with their daily lives. Her being on the planet now, awake herself, had awoken it, reminded it of its pain. As the only one in contact with it now, unlike in the Silver Millenium, when magic was known by many of the planetary inhabitants, even though few were powerful, she had been the one screamed at.

In Sariah's time a team of mages would work with the castle alchemist and the current senshi to soothe the planet should some calamity come to it. She could feel the places where it was the most wounded, the most ill. They were not areas of drilling or digging, physically. Spiritually they were cesspools. Eddies flowed across the entire planet, but pockets of wrongness stood out the most in her mind. They were all, as she had assumed they were, in areas she could not get to. She did not have the clearance necessary to gain admittance. Nor did she have the power in this current life to stop what was going on in them. Certainly she had it as a senshi, but not as someone recognized by the Regime, not in a way that would not get them all arrested.

She relaxed into her lover's arms, hearing his words in her mind and drawing strength from them, even as she drew it from her planet and gave it back some of her magical purity. It was not Sailor Moon's Healing Escalation or anything with an identifiable name. Just her magic, pure and powerful as it was. Not enough to tip any scanners or sensors, but enough to provide the planet with some relief. A light coating of ointment on a sore, not the large dollop needed to really soothe.

It hurts so much, Zoi. The pain - I - my poor planet... she trailed off, unable to find the words, even in her mind, to express what she meant. He would understand, she was sure. There was no way to put it to words, a pain unending, it barely faded to a continual headache and light nausea if she begged. She had never been more grateful for solid food than she had the night before, choking down crackers and rolls and whatever else Zoi had thought to smuggle off the ship in order to have something to throw up beyond water and stomach bile.

Her reflection in the mirror on the toilet-stall door gave her some hope. Despite the terrible lighting and her dark clothing washing her out, she seemed to have some slight color to her cheeks. Even if she was just fooling herself about color, she was not green. That was a relief; for all she still felt nauseous, she didn't look it to outsiders. Good, because that would involve too many questions, perhaps taking pills that would do little good, or a trip to the medical wing that would merely make her more of an oddity. She just needed to get outside.

To be outside, on the true desert, the physical one, not the emotional one that took up the entirety of the complex. She had to get out there, to touch bare hands to the sand and soil, to take and receive strength on a greater magnitude than could be done mentally. For the same reason that all the senshi had needed to travel to their home planets at least once every two years, they needed to reform their bond, the focus, between guardian and planet. It was not just being known to their people, it was assuring that the magical core of their planets remained stable, or as stable as they could be. A single hand to the ground, just a touch, that was all that was needed. Amalia couldn't see how she could manage that, not now. Even the bottoms of the garden beds in the hydroponics laboratories were covered in steel, all part of the attempt to keep the poisons of the planet out, to keep out contamination. There was no where in the complex she could touch a plant and know that its bed went down to touch the true soil.

Perhaps she could work a tour of the outside of the complex into the myriad tours she had set up for her 'field trip'. Today was to include a tour of the entire complex and several laboratories. Tomorrow was to be more laboratories and the schools. Friday and Saturday were also set aside for more tours in the schools, time to sit in classes and answer questions about how Earth was for the Mercurian students. They were also times, all these tours, for gauging who to talk to, if anyone, about the Alliance, about the revolution. To at least sew the seeds, perhaps just make some of the children change their way of thinking. That was all, in truth, that Amalia had thought of to plan.

Amalia sighed, slipping out of Zoi's arms and taking the few steps to the end of what was supposed to be her bed, the bottom of the two bunks. She hadn't used it last night, and was looking forward to using it tonight. Curling up into her Zoi's arms had been comfortable, yes, more than. She just would enjoy actually sleeping between sheets, rather than slightly on the steel floor.

Quickly she pressed and opened the quick release seal on the bag, removing the smaller pouch of nutritional supplements inside before sealing the bag again. When she had requested to give all her students (and friends) the supplements, she had been put in charge of them. It took time to get used to not feeling full but being nutritionally satisfied, she had heard, from those Mercurians on Earth who had switched between physical food and the supplements. Amalia could only hope that the others had thought to smuggle food off the ship like they had. She worried about what would happen to Ushriya otherwise. Her Princess generally was always hungry, and since the sensation would not be abated by the supplements, she was a bit worried.

Still, it was the price to pay to keep the senshis' list of liked and disliked food from Regime eyes, at least as much as possible. The Mercurian stepped back to Zoi's arms, standing on her tiptoes as she hugged him. Close quarters had made his pheromones as pungent as they had been to her when they first met at the cafι, almost an invisible cologne. Their bond kept her from being quite the same level of stammering mess as she had been then, but the near-scent of his pheromones was still there, drawing her in. She released him from the hug and turned so her back was to his front, fishing into the bag of supplements.

Her hand came up with four and she tossed two in her mouth, lips forming a moue of dislike at the mixing flavours of grape and cherry as she chewed. The remaining two, both orange, she gave to Zoi. The orange had always been the most palatable flavour as a child, probably what had helped cement her love of orange sodapop, beyond it being one of the few flavored sodapops Nonere ever got. The one good thing about the grape was how it turned the tongue blue, Amalia recalled, sticking that organ out to stare in the mirror again.

Satisfied it was in truth blue, she took a deep breath. Wait.
Even before her magic whispered at her that something was wrong, she knew something was wrong. The scent had changed; or, really, the not-scent had changed. The unmistakable feeling or whatever word one wanted to put to Zoi's pheromones, it was gone. Completely gone. She rolled her tongue around her mouth before turning to face her fiance, craning her head up to look in his eyes. It was off, she finally noted, the flavors. Something was in the supplements that she had never noticed there before. It had to be because of her magic.

Her eyes crisscrossed his face with worry, trying to pinpoint any sign of distress.
Are you feeling alright? she asked urgently, I didn't notice until too late, but there was something in the supplements. I don't know what it - wait. She couldn't feel his pheromones. Sex was nigh unheard of on Mercury, children assigned to proper parents by the government, unless one went outside the norm as hers had done. Sometimes parents went as far as dictating everything about their child's appearance and mental abilities, but even then the babe was born from a tube or a donor, rare enough it was the actual egg and sperm of the parents. Most merely filled out the form asking to become parents and then their requirements and just waited until they were given a child. Hers were oddities, she was considered a freak, she knew precisely who her parents were, who her grandparents were in true blood, and could trace back much of herself to them.

Normally it was a joke if someone said in school "I must have gotten my abilities from my parents" because it was generally untrue: she had meant every word. Sex. That was this came down to. Sex. Her parents had partaken in it - how or why she still hadn't found out from them - though she wondered at perhaps a conference off-planet, now. A place where they had been required to eat real food. Perhaps then; though that meant that at one point her parents loved one another. Most Mercurians would argue that they still did. Amalia knew better.

That was what it had to be, something to do with sex. A libido inhibitor, or something to that affect. She just, she didn't know what it would do to her Zoi. Her lovely, Venusian, sex-pheromone producing Zoi. No one had ever told her that supplements - or maybe just the children's, or just the ones they had been given - contained libido inhibitors. She threw her arms around him, ready to support his weight should he stumble; she had no idea what the loss of his pheromones would do. The hand holding the bag of supplements glowed as her magic raced through the pills, recognizing the inhibitor as a poison and eradicating it, much as it nullified the selfsame compound in her bloodstream. At least he would be safe after today, and Amina would be safe when she received her own.

It - there was a libido inhibitor in the supplements. Are you alright? Please, love.

She was in pain, and there was nothing that he could do. The whole planet was in pain. Shouldn't the inhabitants be able to feel that? On Earth, it was well known that the planet would right any sort of ecological unbalancing itself – be it setting loose a plague to stop overpopulation or to let loose a massive hurricane to rebalance a portion of the ocean. Earth took care of herself, though he could remember the pinpricks in his head and in his heart as the Dark Kingdom had inhabited part of it. Dark magic had a whole different feeling of pain. And yet this planet had a whole other kind of pain – not ecological or purely magic-based, but... Something more that he didn't even understand. He couldn't do anything, for her or for the planet – in this situation, all he could be was a pillar to lean on when she felt weak.

He could do that. He could do that and he could hold her. She was so tiny – he was larger in this life than he had been in the last, and she was smaller. That thought was somewhat amusing. He was still trying to wrap his mind around all of the things on the list of things they were supposed to do. Mercurians weren't a people for stopping and relaxing. He'd known that. But somehow, he hadn't known that.

He was mentally prodded by Zoisite to recall times that he himself had been so obsessed with an experiment or the solving of a problem, back in the time of the Silver Millenium, that he hadn't slept for days on end until he'd reached the best possible solution. Tainted well water, lack of space for housing, sanitation, irrigation – he'd solved a great number of problems (often with help, he'd admit, some seemingly simple thing said by someone else that had triggered something in the back of his mind that had started the wheels turning.) in the same manner that these people did every day.

It was still irritating that they lived like this all the time. It was irritating that their way of life was hurting her planet, hurting her... if there was anything he could have done, he'd have done it in a heartbeat.

She stepped away from him, but not before he managed to lean down and inhale the very smell of her hair. He'd always been enamored with the way that she smelled, and this time was no different. He'd never been able to place it – three lives, you'd think he'd have thought of something to compare it to. But alas, despite his best efforts, he'd never found anything that smelled as good to him as her. She was pulling those curious little pills out of her bag, popping two in her mouth and making a face.

It might have been the face that she made, such an interesting cross between a grimace and disgust, that made him wary of the little pills. She had come forward to hug him again – that he was pleased about. But as she handed him those two little tablets that were supposed to feel him for the day, they felt off in his hand. He grimaced, popping them into his mouth. Indeed, the taste that accompanied the little pills was sickeningly bitter and quite nearly made him gag, but he wasn't going to be embarrassed by having to spit out children's nutritional supplements. He swallowed them without chewing, one at a time, the chalky feeling on the inside of his mouth not going away.

Almost immediately, it felt like someone had drawn a scratchy wool blanket over his brain. It was as though someone had hit a button on his brain that said Do Not Press. His eyes went to Amalia, recognizing that he should smile at her sticking her tongue out at herself in the mirror and the odd shade of blue that it had turned. He did, but he was nearly certain that it came out as uncertain as he was that he was supposed to feel this... strange.

And then she was there, wrapping her arms around him, telling him something was wrong. It took him a second to really figure out what she was saying, and then, nearly as quickly as it had come, the wool blanket was gone, replaced with something thinner and less irritating. It didn't stop the headache that had managed to start, nor did it rid him of the absolutely vile taste of the nutritional supplements. But at least it was a step in the best direction he could think of going.

It - there was a libido inhibitor in the supplements. Are you alright? Please, love.

Oh. Well.

That certainly explained everything. He was dealing with a massive loss of pheromones – chemical imbalance of his brain was probably what had just happened, and whatever it had done to try to right itself hadn't really worked. He certainly didn't feel like himself, that was for sure. He nodded at her, the second plea finally clicking in his head. He swallowed, once more becoming aware of the taste of artificial orange in the back of his throat. He had the feeling that he wasn't going to be a fan or oranges for a while.

I'll be fine, my sweet. This might just be a long day for both of us. He leaned down and kissed her forehead. He didn't feel like he was going to fall – it was stranger than that. He felt like he was taking a stint in someone else's body. Was this really what non-Venusians felt like all the time? Well... Probably not to this extreme. If he knew anything about Mercurian culture, which he'd admit he didn't know much of, but what he did know was more than enough to tell him that the effects would probably last for exactly twenty four hours, and that they'd more than likely stay strong.

Damn Mercurians and their efficiency. Fast acting pills, that was for sure. He sighed, smiling slightly. Zacharie had taken a physiology class, among his rather impressive list of other classes. Best the French man could figure, the worst that they'd be dealing with for the day could be symptoms of extreme depression. Lethargy, not being hungry (that he could happily deal with), loss of interest, concentration problems... As long as he didn't go insane over this and start beheading Mercurians, he was positive he'd be okay. The pills would already be dissolved in his stomach, and it would be too late to just throw them up.

His body was apparently finding a new rhythm to deal with the sudden loss of the most prominent function of most of the glands in his body. He was certainly feeling a bit better, despite the lingering headache. A glance at the mirror told him that he looked worse than he felt. He chuckled, then cleared his throat, disturbed at how... different the sound was.

He stepped away from her for a moment, turning on the water in the sink and cupping his hands underneath to make himself a drinking dish. It washed away everything but the memory of the taste of the pills. He grinned, eyes meeting hers in the mirror, before he turned around and hugged her, picking her up off the ground in the process. Don't worry about me, love. I'll be fine, and you have bigger fish to fry in the next few days. He released her, setting her down on the (as they had learned last night) unforgiving floor with a grin, a wink, and a short kiss on the cheek. Just because he didn't quite feel like himself (in any way, shape, or form) wasn't any reason to worry anyone else. Including his beautiful nymph, who was dealing with far more pressing matters. He glanced at the door, still half leaning over. ”Shall we?” He had to clear his throat again. Thank god for Ama's being able to clear out the inhibitors of the rest of the pils.

Outfitttttttttttttttt!!!!!!!!

The hotel rooms were so small.

That was Riya's first thought when she saw the room. However, she was quite aware of how small it really was until she remembered that she'd be rooming with Amina. Wonderful.

And then they became even smaller when she banged her head on the top bunk trying to get in the bottom, and the effect was repeated when she banged her head on the top bunk getting out of it the next morning.

Overall, Mercury was very quickly turning into her least favorite planet.

But it was obvious from the way Amalia took it in that it was a far cry from the way the planet had been during the Silver Millennium. Serenity never journeyed from the Moon other than her little side trips to the Earth, so Riya had absolutely no memories to compare the current standing of Mercury to; nonetheless, it was obvious that it had changed.

For a while as she stumbled through the tiny hotel room, possibly waking Amina with all her trips and banging, she wondered how the planet had been before. She hoped that it was nearly the opposite as it was now. The fact alone that it had produced people like Heinze Casler and that she had to wear black of all colors meant it was a terrible place.

Riya grumbled at her outfit for the day. Granted, she didn't want to stick out like a sore thumb, but she sincerely missed all the pink she would wear at home. Wearing black reminded her of a funeral, but everyone here wore it, so she might as well try it at least, even if it went against every nerve in her body.

For a moment, she wondered if she would hate the Moon as much as Amalia seemed to despise this planet. Serenity's memories of the Moon were that it was mostly a very white place, almost sterile, and that it had a lot of rules. However, there were balls and dances and people seemed to get along quite well. Riya pondered coming to the Moon and seeing it like... this. The thought made her blanch.

Now that she was done getting ready, Riya nodded to Amina, telling her that she had finished with the shower and everything. Instead of waiting on her bed during what was bound to be an awkward silence in a small, cramped room, she walked out into the hallway, hoping to find a balcony or something so that she could breathe some fresh air and remind herself that there was more to the galaxy than this stifling planet.

Outfit. : |

So, since they'd arrived, she'd slept and gone exploring. She'd gotten up at a nearly unholy hour to wander around, avoiding the clicking of heels and even waving at the cameras as she passed them. She'd scared the hell out of two of the little people already - give them a dose of excitement for their days. And now, as it was time for them all to meet back up and start the real adventure for the day, she was trotting back down the hall towards the room that she'd vacated that morning.

She turned a corner to find none other than their own Moon Princess, looking around the hallway as though she had just stepped outside her door. Of course, since she had just stepped out her door, that made sense. The tall Plutonian woman clad in bright blue walked over to the blonde with a grin on her face. "So how'd you sleep, love?" She asked,

She'd had a question on her mind for at least three hours the day before, though she hadn't bothered to ask it because she'd known that there would be time today. She intended to ask Amalia what the actual definition was for a 'home planet' - her genetics were Plutonian, yes, but she'd been born here. She had to wonder if that technically made her the tallest Mercurian recorded or if she was something else. Perhaps Venusian or Saturnian, as she'd spent many years there. Jovian, possibly. She was entertaining those thoughts as she leaned agains tthe wall, grinning down at the girl.