expunger | video; BACKDATED to Wednesday

[Raphael, this time, looks less like the bleeding pile of shit she did last time and more like a meditative businesswoman with dry skin who hasn't slept in a while. She is seated Indian-style on the floor of what is obviously a run-down house; her normal illusions of nice drawing rooms and furnished libraries are gone. Forgotten, even. There's a tenseness around her eyes, a flickering darkness and she has the distinctive sallow-faced, corrosively-dry-skinned unhealthy look of Lucifer himself.]

I have heard talk and complaints about this latest event. People think they have been robbed of their identities, stripped of their selves.

[She looks vaguely disdainful at the concept, but so contemplative.]

The empty places within us call for something to fill them. Can you not wait a week? If you insist on squandering this.

[A blade emerges slowly from one sleeve until Raphael is holding a short sword in one hand. She brings it up to chest level and holds it gingerly between her two index fingers, so it rotates slowly in the air like a rotisserie.]

We do not know our own families. [One hand returns to rest on her knee, and the sword turns up until it's turn in mid-air like an impossible basketball, the sharpened point hovering centimeters over her outstretched finger.] I find it difficult to divine my motivations for my own actions.

But we have no ties that bind us from action or blinders to shield us from essential truths.

[The sword touches her finger and she looks to it slowly- curiously, like she's never seen it before. It presses down harder until drops of bright red blood well around the blade-tip. Raphael seems fascinated when her blood shimmers and tiny but dazzlingly white beams of light strobe from the small wound. Anyone looking at the sword can see creeping veins of rust spread slowly up the blade.]

In the absence of prejudice, clarity is easily grasped. The irrational contradictions we tolerate fall away.

We are not stripped. We are free.

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I mean action in our own lives. This is a glimpse of clarity. The chance to look at our paths of action without bias.

I wonder about that. I feel sort of like I don't have a reason to do anything lately.

Surely you have made decisions and taken actions since coming to Adstringendum.

[Yes; but she had her friends - and her friends and family to go home to.]

I guess so. But it just feels like... I must have done it without a real reason.

Of course you had a reason. But think of this as a chance to examine those actions for their rationality, stripped of context.

[You underestimate, or overestimate, her, Raphael; this is a girl who does everything because of her loved ones, who cannot go forward without them. Luckily, she has loved ones in Adstring. But without the senshi, without Mamoru, without her family from home; she's lost.]

But if it goes back to normal next week anyway, why?

Your actions and thoughts this week will stay with you. Make of it what you will, or don't.

You make me feel like I should have learned something more.

There is no "should" to this place. It is random and petty.

It has to have some sense to it. Everything does, somewhere. Even if we don't know what it is yet.

That is ridiculous. If we have no reason to believe it or evidence supporting it, then believing it is foolish.

[Yes, the angel just called you stupid for believing in something you don't understand or can't see.]

I don't think so. [She is entirely undisturbed, which says something when there are so few topics Usagi has confidence in herself.] Because we'll come to understand it eventually, like before.

Even if it's something we wish we didn't have to learn, it will become clear.

video; BACKDATED to Wednesday

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