875/I Was There

I Was There
Date of Scene:	11 December 2023
Location:	Administrative Office
Synopsis:	Mamoru is detecting before defecting! He has some questions for Sailor Pluto about what happened when Cyprine died, and gets a whole lot more information than he bargained for.
Cast of Characters:	Mamoru Chiba, Setsuna Meiou

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(PHONE) Mamoru Chiba texts: I have some questions about what happened to Cyprine, I'm trying to clear Sailor Moon's name and Inai-sensei said you were there too. Is that okay?

(PHONE) Setsuna Meiou texts: Yeah, I was there. When/where did you want to meet?

(PHONE) Mamoru Chiba texts: Immediately after school? I mean, I just interviewed Inai-sensei over text, but i guess I could be anyone behind the keyboard lol

(PHONE) Mamoru Chiba texts: and probably your office, since you have the coolest security

(PHONE) Setsuna Meiou texts: If Niti-chan impresses you THAT much, I look forward to seeing how you'll react to some of the things that I hear are coming up in the future. In any event, I shall, as always, be here. I'll see you after class, young man.

(PHONE) Mamoru Chiba texts: Niti-- no, I'll ask after school XD See you then!

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
There's a knock on the infirmary door before Mamoru slips in, his school bag in hand again, but this time with a notebook. "Hi Meiou-sensei," he says with a polite-- if cursory-- bow. "I'm sorry to bother you with this on top of everything else, but I can't have Riventon believing Sailor Moon killed one of his coworkers... he's worried she'll kill me, and I can't actually get him to believe how laughable that idea is." In this universe.

Setsuna Meiou has posed:
Generally, the infirmary's a fairly small office for the nurse and some equipment. At least, that's the general rule. Given the budget Radiant Heart boasts, the infirmary's a bit bigger and more well appointed than most. There are several beds (which are currently not in use) and to an eye familiar with the medical world, there's enough well-laid-out kit that it's quite likely that, in extremis, one could actually do surgery here.

Still, most of the room is broken up with little rolling-wall medical dividers, with the bulk of the area set up for the kind of service one would need for a typical average assortment of students. Reasonably nice chairs, little triage areas, that kind of thing. The walls have various posters one might see in a doctor's office, though most of them are a bit more aimed at student-level things like common adolescent illnesses and the like. One particular poster, however, probably catches the eye:

    It's a black poster with a picture of a skeleton on it, and the text reads 'The Average Human Body Contains Enough BONES' 'To Make An Entire Human Skeleton'

At first glance, she's not visible when Mamoru enters the office, but a sharp eye will spot that the door to one of the supply closets is open, and a few moments later, Nurse Meiou steps out and closes the door behind her.

Upon doing so, she tilts her head slightly and pitches her voice to be extra clear as she says, "Niti-chan? Please engage full security mode."

A moment later a pleasant, if obviously artificial voice responds from a speaker somewhere in a corner, "Certainly Nurse Meiou."

At which point the doors lock themselves and the blinds rotate to block the room completely.

A moment or two later, a soft hum begins to emanate from the speakers...apparently Nurse Meiou wants a white noise cover to this conversation as well. It's easily enough ignored in conversation, but someone trying to eavesdrop will have a rough time.

That accomplished, Nurse Meiou waves Mamoru over towards one of the chairs, "Have a seat. This is going to get a bit complicated."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
Niti-chan. A Device, maybe... the name pulls at him, somehow, and he frowns at it a little before being distracted by the new poster, which distracts him into grinning briefly. It is brief, though, because he comes around to sit in the indicated chair, setting his bookbag down next to him on the floor.

His notebook he opens to a fresh page and folds it over so it balances better on his knee, and then he takes a pen out from inside his jacket and clicks it. "Can you first tell me what you saw and heard, starting from when you got there? Because I'm not going to write down anything you don't want Obsidian to know, which is where I imagine it gets complicated."

Setsuna Meiou has posed:
Nurse Meiou sits down in another chair across from Mamoru, "Yes. Well, complicated IS putting it mildly."

She sighs, then closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, then opens them again, "Very well. I was at the convention to look at some of the VR training tools they're coming up with for medical students."

A skilled prevaricator or interrogator will probably catch a hint that this is not the WHOLE truth...but without the context that at home, Setsuna Meiou is a tremendous nerd, exactly how probably isn't obvious.

After a moment, she goes on, "So things are wrapping up for the day when I feel...something...probably one or more people throwing an attack." She shrugs a bit, "I can't say for certain...I never really had an opportunity to build up my magical senses beyond the most basic."

She shifts in her chair a bit, "So I ducked into an empty room, henshined, and headed out...to see Moon scrambling for the mcguffin...the arrogant bint with the staff looming over her. About that time basically all of us threw our attacks at her...which given that Uranus AND Neptune were both there as well meant that there was a LOT of sparkly magical Death headed her way."

She pauses and waves a hand, "As an aside, given our job, we Outers' attacks were supposed to hit a fair bit harder than the Inners' did. I'm not sure of specifics on the Dark side...but I can say that when Uranus and Neptune blindsided Ironbutt with their attacks together, it put her on her ass."

A slight frown as she digs in her memory, then she smirks, "Oh! And one you may be better able to judge...when I fought Riventon during that whole thing with the ship wreck, I managed to hit him with a Dead Scream that he had to tank. As I recall, it shattered not one, but two shields. He obviously survived, but I believe the phrase is 'he knew he'd been kissed'?"

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
Mamoru takes notes in a neat shorthand, swift and idiosyncratic, and glances up every time he's finished writing after a pause on Setsuna's part. It doesn't matter to him why she was at the convention -- he's a terrible liar himself, but being upper management dealing with a lot of liars for almost two and a half years has made him pretty good at telling when someone's leaving things out. He definitely doesn't call her out on it, he doesn't think she was planning a murder.

* At con looking at cool stuff,

he writes. He continues,

* Senses 1+? attack thrown
* Saw: Moon going for Thing
* Saw: cyprine looming over moon
* Neptune and Uranus were there
* 3 outers threw attacks at Cyp, v powerful

Mamoru looks up, pen poised over paper, and he asks in a way that isn't really asking, "Did the arrogant bint with the staff know she'd been kissed, then? If you alone slammed through Riventon's shields and it was all three of you against this girl." He doesn't share any information that he's gotten from anyone else, though he desperately wants to ask whether Neptune was talking to Firefly, at this point. He'll get there.

Setsuna Meiou has posed:
It's at this point that Nurse Meiou lets out a tremendous sigh, "Sadly...no. Apparently she had the WORST ability for most mahou to fight against. She could absorb magical attacks and throw them back."

A scowl, "Actually, at some point she split in two." She shakes her head, "Sorry. It was a bit of a blur at times. Anyway, they absorbed our attacks and threw them back. Some magical girl I didn't recognize managed to shield Moon but got the worst of it. Neptune got caught I assume while trying to scry their weakness...but Uranus, silly girl, took the shots meant for her AND Neptune."

She rolls her eyes, "I love that girl like family, but SOMETIMES..."

A sigh. Nothing is going to meaningfully change Uranus anytime soon.

The nurse shifts in her seat a bit, before waving a hand, "I managed to block most of Moon's copied attack with the Garnet Rod, but that just meant I took all the hits on my extremities...which was very much NOT fun."

She trails off, looking into the middle distance as she thinks about how things went down, "...and then one of them grabbed that little girl who was on their side...Firefly I think I heard her called?"

She leans forward and looks at Mamoru intensely, "...something happened. Something came out. And it vaporized both of the two in less time than it took me to sayt this sentence."

Nurse Meiou scowls and sits back, "...and then her Device started going on about Dark Energy Supression, Firefly collapsed, some redhead teleported in, grabbed her, and bounced back out."

The greenhaired woman frowns and crosses her arms, "...and I'm not sure WHAT you're going to say...but...well...THIS is the part where you need to be VERY, VERY, *VERY* careful."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
The tenth grader continues to write:

* Cyp bouncing attacks & split in 2
* unknown girl (Stellar?) blocked attack on Moon
* Uranus tanked 2 rebound attacks
* Neptune got attacked
* Pluto blocked rebound Moon attack
* Cyp or twin grabbed Firefly
* something came out of Firefly & vaporized Cyp and twin
* Device beeped about dark energy suppression and Firefly passed out
* redhead (kao) teleported in got Firefly

Mamoru's eyebrows lift and he passes the notebook over to Pluto. "If this is about the missing one of you, I didn't want to salt the site. I know about you thinking she might be her. But my sister is friends with Firefly, and once I get her back out of the death void she stepped into, she can probably help more with that."

A beat. "If not, then sorry for interrupting. It's just that Neptune has caused a problem for her before, and because Riventon knows at least that I'm friends with Moon, he told me to tell Moon to stop bothering her-- it was Usa who figured out from the description that it was Neptune. Then one of mine, Zoisite, caused a similar problem -- where the dark energy alarm on her Device started going off, and Riventon had to come get her and calm her down."

He clicks his pen a couple of times before realizing he's doing it, then stops. "Zoisite has no idea what he did to make her freak out. The two of them both have memory problems. I know for a fact that Zoisite's are due to moments of mind control and memory redaction by the demon, but I don't know about Firefly's. So, it sounds like it happened again, and that she doesn't remember any of it, which is the least helpful thing in the world."

Setsuna Meiou has posed:
Nurse Meiou pinches the bridge of her nose, takes a deep breath, then gives Mamoru an intense look, "Okay, I take it you've noticed that there is a conspicuous gap when we talk about the Senshi. There is a VERY GOOD reason for it."

She takes a moment to center herself again, "...okay, as I said, this is where we have to be VERY careful. There is, as you seem to have surmised, also a Sailor Saturn...but you might have noticed that NONE of us mention her. EVER. There is a VERY good reason for that."

The nurse pauses, then leans back in her chair and upside-down reaches to a nearby cabinet that she opens with her fingers and manages to fish out a little bottle whose label is easily read to have 'EXCEDRIN' written on it in english. Nurse Meiou opens the bottle, grabs two pills, dry-swallows them, then waits a moment for them to go down before putting the bottle back.

She then looks back at Mamoru, "We Outer Senshi were the Guardians against external threats...and thus so was Sailor Saturn...but in a slightly different way."

She takes a long, slow breath, "...Sailor Saturn is the Guardian of the Silence. She is, in effect, the ULTIMATE Magical Weapon of Mass Destruction. To give an example...when the Queen gave her life to power her final spell and catapult her daughter and her court forward in time to be reborn in the now? Right after that, the final failsafe went off and Sailor Saturn awoke to unleash the Silence on the system...which then proceeded to scour the ENTIRE SOLAR SYSTEM clean of ALL LIFE."

She waves a hand to kind of indicate the world outside, "...if it weren't for this thing attempting to drag Tokyo into the dungeon dimensions about to happen, we'd probably have been prioritizing this more, since, while we SUSPECT Firefly is Saturn...we don't have a lot of proof."

She then leans forward, "...but if she *IS*, we very, very, VERY MUCH do NOT want anyone fiddling with her magic anymore until we can get her the HELL out of there. What happened to those two? That's a fraction of Saturn's power that's so infintesimal it counts as a ROUNDING ERROR."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
Mamoru leans back a little bit -- a very little bit -- when Setsuna gets so intense, like he'd like to avoid some combination of sunburn and frostbite, maybe. It's probably reflexive. He takes his notebook back.

Instead of doing anything dumb like talking again, he listens, with his whole attention.

That attention has a weight to it, like there's more than just a sixteen year old boy listening and watching, but it's a benevolent vastness, a welcoming thing, warm and bright and as slow-moving as a summer day. Maybe--

--he's also a sixteen year old boy. He listens carefully and doesn't take notes, just committing things to the memory that not even four months ago he couldn't trust at all. He doesn't comment on any of it. He doesn't comment that the Princess's court weren't the only ones reborn -- that much is obvious. He doesn't comment on 'clean of all life'. He doesn't comment on--

No, he's got one. "I had a dream about some kind of Messiah of Silence," he says, reaching up to put his pen back inside his jacket pocket after clicking it closed. "I was standing in the wreckage of a city, looking up at someone with very, very long hair-- someone in silhouette. I remember that was the phrase in my head when I woke up."

He sighs, reaching down to put his notebook in his bookbag. "I can at least help more openly once I'm free. The sooner we take care of the Midnight Tokyo Project-- and, well, the demon that Beryl answers to, Metalia-- the sooner you'll have more backing for dealing with the Silence. And the sooner I get my sister out of her shrine, the sooner she'll be able to help with Firefly. Probably."

He glances back up, snapping his bag shut, leaving it next to him for now. "I believe you, but I also-- it sounds like someone grabbed her and she reacted poorly. Considering how poorly I react when grabbed, I find this perfectly reasonable. Riventon's not trying to mess with Firefly's magic -- he's trying to keep her from having a crisis, so that's at least... that's at least something, for now."

Setsuna Meiou has posed:
Nurse Meiou rubs at her temples, "From what I gather, I imagine so...it's just that he's someone soaked in Dark Energy...which is NOT a state to be in conducive to GOOD long-term choices. I'm just afraid he's going to poke at something he shouldn't."

After a moment, she leans back and sighs, "As for the rest? Well, as I'm sure you're aware, there is SOME utility in letting Obsidian think that Moon was responsible, after all."

She holds up a finger and declares in a way as if she is quoting something, "'Your name is in the mouth of others. Be sure it has teeth.'"

She then shrugs, "I dunno...maybe you can blame that absorbing that particular mix of energies caused some kind of magical backlash? Off the top of my head, most of Moon's attacks seem to have associations with the Concepts of Purity and I think Light, though that's a guess. Dead Scream's magical associations are Death and Darkness...maybe tell him that it was the twins unwisely trying to mix the two and set off a bit of a backlash?"

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
"Inai-sensei thought the same thing, but... Usa doesn't want people thinking she did something like that when she didn't, and I don't blame her," says Mamoru slowly, and then he adds, "And I don't think it's a good idea to send the message that escalation is fine and good and they should feel free to kill us--"

Us.

He doesn't notice.

"--if they feel threatened. It's a really delicate balance and nobody can afford that crisis right now, either." He lets out a short breath. "Now, no, Riventon's really not capable of good longterm choices. I mean, he's better at it than others there, but that's not saying much. I personally am not great at them right now, but that won't be an issue after Monday. On the other hand, after Monday I'll visibly be a defector-- or a traitor, depending on who you ask, and my word won't be worth anything, even to Riventon. So I have to tell him it was Firefly, give him the reasons I think it's true, give him the accounts I've gotten... and I have to do it before I quit."

A beat. "I am an atrociously bad liar, and he'd be able to tell in a third of a sentence. We've known each other since grade 2."

Setsuna Meiou has posed:
Nurse Meiou hrms, then sighs, "...still, maybe convince him that it's in his best interests to NOT poke the Silence...but get him to help privately spread around to Obsidian that it was those two getting arrogant and not paying attention to what they absorbed before trying to mix energies that DO NOT play well with each other?"

She shrugs, "...I get a feeling that a lot of the people there DO NOT play well with others, so I imagine convincing people those two were just arrogant and incompetent should be an easy enough sell."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
"It should be. And he's a much better liar than I am. I'll try and convince him..." Mamoru starts, then stops and frowns. "What attacks did Sailor Moon use? I meant to ask that and forgot. If it was something you caught on your arms and legs, it probably wasn't her tiara, and aside from that I only know of one that gets rid of ghosts and shadows, and then Moon Healing Escalation. Neither of which should have hurt you."

Setsuna Meiou has posed:
Nurse Meiou shrugs, "If I recall, it was something along the lines of 'Moon Twilight Flash'. My gut says they did something to it before sending it back rather than just redirecting it, given the distinct pause between when they landed and when they came back...but it kind of felt like a hard punch in a couple of places on each of my arms and legs."

Another shrugs, "Nothing that really 'HURT', but more in the way of 'gonna need a few seconds to get feeling in my extremities' kind of thing. If the fight hadn't abruptly ended right about there, I'd have been fine, but I'd have been scrambling for some breathing room for a few moments."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
Mamoru blinks. "Oh. Wow. I'll... endeavour to avoid getting hit by that, I legitimately thought it only worked on ghosts and stuff."

He seems to recall, finally, that he's got a self-appointed name-clearing task ahead of him, and thereupon takes his schoolbag once more in hand and unfolds himself from the chair. "Thank you very, very much, Meiou-sensei," he says with a bow. "And I'll continue to be very, very careful. I'll-- I'll see myself out. Thank you again."

Niti-chan...

Setsuna Meiou has posed:
Nurse Meiou then does that tilt and pitch thing, "Niti-chan...back to normal mode please."

And with that synthesized voice responing, "Certainly, Nurse Meiou." The door unlocks itself and the blinds rotate back to normal, "Have a good evening, Mister Chiba."