581/O Rose Thou Art Sick

O Rose Thou Art Sick
Date of Scene:	14 November 2015
Location:	A pleasant local nursery!
Synopsis:	Makoto Kino wishes more people learned the lesson of Little Shop of Horrors: DON'T FEED YOUR PLANTS BLOOD.
Cast of Characters:	Makoto Kino, Kunzite

---

Makoto Kino has posed:
It's a nice, clear Saturday afternoon, sunny and pleasant - a perfect day for shopping. Makoto's already made a pass through some of her favorite bargain-hunting spots, without much to show for it other than the usual wistful admiration of cute things that don't come in her size. Now she's changed direction, with a passing thought that since Mamoru's potted rose bush has temporarily taken up residence in her apartment, she might be able to pick up some supplies to help care for it.

The idea has her heading towards the far end of the shopping district and the small local nursery that's provided a lot of her own plants, and there's a cheerful spring in her step as she makes her way along the sidewalk. Even if she doesn't find anything suitable, it's always nice to spend time among that many green growing and flowering things. Maybe she'll pick up another potted plant for herself while she's at it. Something in a hanging pot, maybe.

(Makoto does not need any more potted plants.)

Kunzite has posed:
('Need' is such an overly complicated word, isn't it?)

The lovely thing about nurseries is that there's always a flow of plants in and out. The lovely thing about nurseries in November, when one's considering supplies for a rosebush, is that November tends to be the time of year when rose owners are fretting over the upcoming winter. Nurseries are always happy to help people with supplies for their fretting. Really, it's excellent timing on Makoto's part.

November is not, mind, usually the time when the nursery has miniature roses lining displays. Miniatures are lovely, and they're cold-tolerant so they handle winters well, but November isn't a time when they're usually top sellers. But there they are, anyhow, whites and yellows, pinks and reds, those in the brightest bloom showing pride of place at one side, trailing into a line of green leaves without blossoms, trailing into a handful of faintly wilted plants (tsk) and even some brown dead leaves not yet trimmed (double-tsk), and last at the far side a group only just put out. Makoto can't see that in detail; there's three or four other browsers clustered around the new display.

On the other hand, there are a number of lovely hanging pots that seem to be less popular, and also less, well. Rose-y.

Makoto Kino has posed:
Roses being on her mind already, the miniatures certainly catch Makoto's attention, with a certain amount of vague surprise for their prominence given the time of year. It makes her pause for a moment, considering the display and the people grouped around it curiously from a distance before she remembers why she's there.

She definitely doesn't bring back another rosebush. Supplies first, Mako tells herself, and then she can look at new plants - even as she's thinking it, of course, she's already getting distracted by a row of lovely little potted cyclamen. Which are not even in hanging pots and thus nothing to do with anything she is here for, but who cares when they're so pretty? Maybe she can make some space at one of the windows...

Kunzite has posed:
Space at a window would be perfect, wouldn't it? Look at the patterning on the leaves! When the light hit them just right ... if she could find the space. Or coax the space into existence. Or ...

There's a faint little unsettling jolt through her that has nothing to do with the cyclamen. A moment later, a couple walk past, each carrying a pot of their own - one hand on the pot, one hand unnecessarily steadying the plant within. Miniature roses, leaves healthy and dark and glossy, blossoms a red so deep as to verge on black.

In their wake, the cyclamen Makoto was just looking at is now quietly drooping.

Makoto Kino has posed:
She's deep in contemplation of just how she might rearrange the plants at her bedroom window to make room for one more pot when the couple walks past behind her and abruptly Makoto stiffens, eyes widening as she feels a snap like static electricity crawling up her spine.

Something's wrong.

She looks, sees only the couple with their chosen purchases. The roses are lovely, but...

Looking back at the cyclamen, Makoto frowns to see it dropping. It was perfectly healthy only a moment ago. Nothing should've caused it to wilt so fast--

Still frowning slightly, brows drawn together in concern, she leaves the cyclamen and turns toward the display of roses for a closer look, at them and at the plants lined up the closest to them.

Kunzite has posed:
The display's its bright spectrum, blooming miniatures at one end -- now that she's looking more closely she can see where the petals begin to fall, where plants that were in tempting blossom when they were set out are not now; then where the leaves begin to wilt, all the way to a row of outright dead tiny roses before the ones drawing all the attention. With the couple gone, with only a mother and daughter inspecting the plants now, it's easier to see: those glossy leaves, the jet-black petals of the perfect flowers.

As she's watching, the daughter -- not that much younger than Makoto, eleven or twelve -- puts her hand out tentatively to the smallest of the black roses. The branches shift and spread, welcoming her fingers, then settle around them. The girl flinches for a moment, but doesn't make a sound, and her chosen plant's flowers begin to flush with a slow, deep, perfect red.

Makoto Kino has posed:
"Excuse me--!" Alarmed, Makoto moves without thinking, heedless of manners or how strange it's going to make her look to the woman and the girl. She all but lunges to grab the pot and lift the miniature rosebush up and away from the girl's hand, out of reach of her fingers.

Only in the next moment does she realize what she did, and then she blinks and turns a little bit red in the face, flustering her way through some kind of explanation. "Sorry, but it looked like you'd pricked your finger - you should really make sure that's cleaned right away, it could get infected--"

Kunzite has posed:
The girl doesn't even register Makoto till she has her hands on the pot, and then it's only to reach up after the plant. It's not much of a tug-of-war; Makoto is taller, and Makoto is easily stronger, and the girl makes a muted complaining noise as the branches tug free. Her fingers are unsurprisingly bleeding, and the shock of the parting sends a little spatter across the display. Tiny roses lean in toward the droplets hungrily; those plants that they landed on brighten a little.

The mother is likewise staring hypnotized at the plants, but sharp movement in the vicinity of her daughter is enough to catch her attention all the same. She blinks blankly for a second before focusing on Makoto. And the plant Makoto's holding. And her daughter's hand. And she gasps. "Oh, you shouldn't be holding the thorns like that!" she scolds the girl, as if she were a five-year-old, but the girl's ignoring her and straining after the plant Makoto's holding. Which, if anything, embarrasses her mother more. "I'm so very sorry," she says wholeheartedly to Makoto, and puts her hands on her daughter's shoulders to try to steer her away. This is ... not an entirely successful endeavor, but she manages to drag a few steps. "I'm sorry -- miss -- do you have a first aid kit?" the mother calls to the nearest of the nursery's apparent employees ...

Makoto is familiar enough with the nursery to have a good idea who works there. She is pretty sure that, while she has seen two middle-aged women working there, she has never seen this one, and she has certainly never seen a middle-aged woman working there wearing a lab coat before.

The 'employee' glances up from a clipboard, and clicks her tongue disapprovingly. "You really shouldn't interrupt the feeding schedule," she says to Makoto with a frown. "It's very important, for the best results."

Makoto Kino has posed:
"It's okay!" Mako hurries to assure mother and daughter, with a bright, only slightly awkward smile. "I was just concerned--"

The response from the woman with the clipboard has her stopped short mid-sentence to stare at the woman in surprise and incomprehension. She's here often enough to be pretty familiar with the workers - well, they might have hired someone new, although it's hardly a busy season, but since when do they wear lab coats around here? And-- "Feeding schedule?" Makoto echoes incredulously, still holding the pot up over shoulder-height like she's been caught playing keep-away with it. "Listen, there's something really wrong with these flowers!"

Kunzite has posed:
The woman in the labcoat sighs, and nods back to Makoto in sad commiseration. Or at least it looks like sad commiseration. "I know," she says. "I just can't seem to get them right. I'm sure it's a nutrition problem, but I can't figure out what we're missing. No matter how much we feed them, or what quality, we just can't get the right color, and they don't last properly. I've seen it done! So I'm sure it's possible! But none of my test batches so far have worked out. You're the first one to have noticed, though --" She brightens, and reaches out to try to clasp Makoto's hand. The one not holding the pot, anyhow. "Do you study them, too?" she asks eagerly. "Do you have any ideas?" And an instant later the eagerness changes to suspicion, her eyes narrowing. "Wait. Do you study them?" she demands. "Are you trying to steal my research?"

Makoto Kino has posed:
The look of incomprehension on Makoto's face only grows more and more alarmed as she tries, and mostly fails, to make sense of what she's hearing. Wide-eyed, she instinctively steps back when the woman reaches for her hand. "That's not the issue here!" she insists, voice rising urgently. "Since when do roses drink blood?"

Kunzite has posed:
The woman in the labcoat gives Makoto a genuinely shocked look, her hand still held out; and she reaches to her clipboard, flips to the bottommost sheet, and turns it around to let Makoto see it. "Well! How else would you get that?"

The bottommost sheet is a full-page photo, a closeup, life-size or a little more: a battered cut rose, crimson and vibrant but half-crushed. Even so, still intact -- it's propped up in a laboratory flask on a counter, leaning against the crystal (no water to distort the stem) and none of the bedraggled petals seem to be falling. Clean white walls, clean black countertops. A display behind it reads '36:00:03.'

It is not, thankfully, one of her roses. But she of all people can recognize it.

It's one of Tuxedo Kamen's.

Makoto Kino has posed:
Now it's Makoto's turn to look utterly shocked. She's actually speechless for some moments, eyes darting from the woman's face to the photo on the clipboard and back again.

Still holding the flowerpot, which by this point she's almost completely forgotten about in the face of information that her brain is grinding gears to try to fit together, Mako finally finds her voice enough to ask the obvious Stupid Question:

"Where did you get that?" A beat, then her thoughts skip back a little to latch onto another part of what she just heard that makes no damn sense at all-- "And what the hell would give you the idea that it would grow on blood?"

It's possible that she's kind of missing the most important points here.

Kunzite has posed:
"Well, it doesn't grow on anything else, does it?" the woman demands back in turn. "Not one nursery or botanical garden on the planet admits to growing roses like that! So it must be getting the energy for that unnatural lifespan from somewhere! Where else but -- wait." She lifts her chin and fixes Makoto with a narrow-eyed look again, which would be more effective if Makoto weren't two inches taller than she is and several times more fit. "Wait. You know where it comes from. Don't you. You were one of the ones hiding it --"

Maybe it's not that ineffective. Not with her nails lengthening into thorns, her hair curling into hardening vines, her labcoat becoming white-enameled armor over a rush of glossy green leaves from her skin. Not with the roses in the pot Makoto's holding stretching their branches in a sudden rush to stab down at her fingers.

"This is my discovery!" the youma shrieks. "I don't care if you had it before me! This is my discovery and you're not taking it away!"

Makoto Kino has posed:
"Wha--" Reflex takes over; as thorns rake her skin, Makoto hurls the flowerpot full-force at the youma's face. Ignoring the blood that wells up from her hand where the thorns tore her skin, not waiting to see if she hit her target, Mako dives and rolls, scrambling under one of the tables holding potted plants on display and out the other side.

Another roll carries her across the walkway and lands her on her back underneath the next table as she digs hastily in her skirt pocket for her transformation pen. "I'm never going to be allowed to shop here again," she laments under her breath, before raising the pen as much as she can manage in this limited space.

No help for it now-- "Jupiter power - MAKE UP!"

Kunzite has posed:
The youma howls in what sounds startlingly like dismay, behind Makoto, and there's a flurry of something behind and above her, but her roll and scramble takes her clear out of the way of the attack, and the table she went under gives her enough cover it can't locate her immediately. At least, one might hope, a demon-thing in a labcoat is not going to be filing any complaints with the nursery's owner about customer behavior. Or if it is, then Makoto has an even bigger problem.

Lightning flares out from her pen. If it chars the bottom of the table she's under, if it sets fire to a few of the drier leaves, well, that's really a secondary issue. The important thing is what it does to her.

The other important thing is the vaster rustling from the direction that that display of vampire roses was in.

"My discovery!" the youma is still ranting, letting Sailor Jupiter hear its location as it prowls through the plants. "My publications! My techniques! My roses! Mine! My pretty samples, what did she try to do to you --"

Makoto Kino has posed:
A tactical thinker would take advantage of this opportunity, while she can hear the youma moving and the creature doesn't yet know where she is. Unfortunately, Sailor Jupiter is not a particularly tactical thinker.

"Hey!" she calls out loudly, popping up from behind one of the displays of potted plants to point an accusatory finger at the demon-thing. "How dare you treat something as beautiful as flowers so shamefully by corrupting them for your own pride? Sailor Jupiter, the Guardian of Thunder, will make you regret this!"

On the last words of this declaration, before she's even finished speaking, Jupiter charges forward towards the youma with fists clenched.

Kunzite has posed:
'Hey!' gets the demon-thing's attention, and it turns in Jupiter's direction. Writhing thorned vines for hair, glossy rose leaves for flesh, clean white lines of the armor that are themselves somehow wrong against the organic thing behind them. And where a name tag might have been pinned to the lab coat is a sequence of characters etched into the thing's armor: LINNAEA.

It flings its arms out to greet Jupiter, and she learns an instant later why that armor looked wrong: it explodes in a flurry of paper, pages slicing at the air around the oncoming senshi.

The problem for the youma is, paper does not wrap fist. There's a sharp crack as of breaking wood at the first punch Jupiter lands, and the creature's slammed backward a few feet. It doesn't snarl in pain. It curls green fingers and pulls its hands up.

And a solid wall of greenery comes flooding out of the display of the black roses, across pathway and tables, trying to catch at Jupiter's limbs with a thousand twining branches.

Makoto Kino has posed:
"Whoa--!" Sailor Jupiter's green eyes widen as the torrent of greenery comes rushing at her. She has just enough time to throw her hands out in front of her, scattering fragrant pink petals into the sudden gale of wind that answers her call and rushes forward to meet the flood of reaching branches.

Some splinter outright against the battering force of the wind; more are pushed askew before they can reach the Sailor Senshi. Powerful as it is, though, the Flower Hurricane is no solid shield, and some of the grasping branches manage to snarl around Jupiter, entangling her arms and legs.

Snared thus, Sailor Jupiter looks at the youma through the profusion of glossy leaves--

--and grins fiercely.

Kunzite has posed:
The clever thing for Linnaea to do, in answer to that grin, would be to bolt. It might be able to get enough distance. Maybe.

Maybe Linnaea is not clever; maybe that pride is interfering with its tactics, too; maybe it's just the monster's nature to put down roots. The green creature lifts its head, gathers itself upright as if reaching toward the sun, and begins to close its hands. Despite the tattered and empty places where the Flower Hurricane tore through it, weakening the knotted wall of roses -- the branches around Sailor Jupiter's entangled limbs begin to tighten, thorns trying to dig in to her the same way they did to the little girl. "Maybe that's what I was missing!" Linnaea crows. "Maybe your blood will finally be strong enough!"

Makoto Kino has posed:
The branches tighten, dotting Jupiter's legs and the white fabric of her gloves with bright red where the thorns dig in deeply enough to draw the blood the monstrous roses seek.

Jupiter just laughs, a short, scoffing sound.

"You've got it all wrong," she throws back, as the air around her begins to shiver with the dry tingling of a gathering charge. "No matter how hard you try, thinking like that... you couldn't possibly understand that person's power--"

The crackle of energy that flashes across the metal arc of Sailor Jupiter's tiara is the only warning that Linnea gets before the charge that she's been building releases, bright threads of quicksilver electricity searing along with tangled branches all the way to the root. "--or mine!"

Kunzite has posed:
Black petals begin slowly to flush with red. The blood gives the thorns more strength to seek deeper, questing after larger arteries, hunting for the greater veins.

Which means that there's all the more of them to take that charge.

Lightning sears through the plants, withering branches, burning thorns away. Corrupt blossoms burst into flames, dried and consumed in an instant. The charge burns straight back to the soil, killing the monstrous roses in a single stroke.

"My SAMPLES!" Linnea's vine-hair weaves in agitation, but the youma isn't quite foolish enough to try to use it against the one who's just annihilated several times her own body mass in greenery on contact. Instead, the creature shrieks in frustration, and casts another rush of blade-edged papers at Sailor Jupiter. Because that worked so well the last time. Because if it had any new ideas --

-- it wouldn't need to try to steal someone else's, would it?

Makoto Kino has posed:
Charred twigs crumble away into ash and Sailor Jupiter is free to move again, just in time for that barrage of paper blades to come rushing at her. *This* time she knows what to expect - without hesitation she swings an arm out in front of her, tracing little whipcrack arcs of electricity from her fingertips. Just like before, some of those paper fragments might get past to slice a few more tears in her skirt and draw a few more thin trickles of blood where they graze bare skin, but the bright energy that surges out from the snap of her fingers burns the worst of the assault to ash.

This time when Sailor Jupiter launches herself towards Linnea on a collision course, her upraised fist crackles with voltage.

"Take this--!"

Kunzite has posed:
Lightning burns paper, and even more effectively than it did leaves -- though not as much as those flowers. It clears her way, all the same. Leaving her momentum intact as she lunges --

-- there is a flurry of leaves at the impact, green fading in an instant through yellows and oranges into winter-dead brown --

-- and then they hit the table behind Linnea, collapsing it in a shower of potting soil and plastic, and it's a human woman under Jupiter, short and plump, bruised and unconscious, in a shredded labcoat and with a clipboard whose papers seem to have spontaneously combusted.

Some distance down the road, the couple walking glazedly home with their new 'houseplants' wake from their trances, yelping and shaking inexplicably injured hands.

No more static at the base of Jupiter's spine.

Makoto Kino has posed:
Sailor Jupiter scrambles quickly up from the mess of overturned table and spilled pots and unconscious woman. She was expecting Linnea to retaliate, has to check herself as rational thought engages and she realizes that all that's left of the youma is a perfectly normal-looking (if pretty roughed-up) human being.

It's kind of unsettling, to be honest. Has that ever happened before? Not that Makoto can think of. She opens and closes her hand as the last sparks of electricity fizzle, and feels suddenly very glad that she didn't go so far as to unload the full force of Supreme Thunder.

The ruckus will be attracting attention soon, and she has no idea what kind of excuse she could possibly make for what just happened, but Jupiter takes a little time to kneel down and at least make sure she hasn't seriously injured this poor lady.

Kunzite has posed:
Pretty roughed-up, yes. Jupiter can punch hard, and the lightning charge she put into it redoubles that. But not all of that seems to have filtered through the green and the vines to the actual woman underneath. Bruises, yes. Electrical burns, no. Heart still beating, pulse regular.

Then there are the preexisting injuries: her fingertips are covered with pinpricks, and there are bandages on the insides of her arms, as if from blood draws. But given the 'experiments' -- really, the surprising thing might be that she didn't skip straight to involuntary donors.

The important part, though: her body is actually composed of flesh, not plant material. Which may make the entire fight to her advantage, on the whole.

Makoto Kino has posed:
The breath leaves Sailor Jupiter in a relieved sigh once she's assured herself that the woman doesn't seem severely injured. Those bandages and pinprick marks are troubling - the whole thing is troubling, really - but the bad feeling that began when that couple first walked by her carrying potted roses has vanished and Makoto feels pretty safe in believing that, with the youma's influence gone, she'll probably recover just fine.

Which means it's time for Sailor Jupiter to get out of here before she has to explain herself to someone.

Straightening back onto her feet, she dusts herself off and takes a last look around at the damage with a bit of a wince. Well, she supposes, it's not *too* bad.

Really, considering how these things usually go, the place is hardly trashed at all!