Mariner Castle

[waterfell]

The room is enormous, a chamber large enough to house a planetarium. It's reminiscent of one, with its high domed roof and the abundance of computer equipment. Dark windows show the outside, but the view is like nothing from Earth. The wrong planets are closest and the pattern of the stars is off. All of it's empty except for the control panels

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[waterfell]

She shows no surprise at his arrival, just as he shows none at finding her here. That, Mercury finds, is more interesting. She has a little smile for Kunzite as she turns around.

"So you remember this place?" she takes the guess.

[waterfell]

Mercury nods slightly and glances towards the screens, then back to Kunzite.

"I heard that they existed in the past, so I thought it'd be possible to find out something." She grins almost mischievously, or perhaps with nothing more than the deserved pride of a sharp mind solving its puzzle. "I can access a lot of the Moon Castle's data and records from here, too."

[waterfell]

Oh, that hadn't been a discovery. That had always been intentional from the first. She smirks.

"You still don't understand? Just watch a little while, then." She types in a few more commands, smiles cheerfully as she circumvents a password, and soon a file opens.

"Information about the Dead Moon. From the Moon Castle."

[waterfell]

"Now you see," Mercury says. She closes the files and documents she'd been looking at, and turns to face Kunzite.

"It'd be rude for me to stay there while I have such a rare guest," she tells him. "Let's go."

[waterfell]

Her attention being tugged away from the computer by Kunzite's arrival is making Mercury realize just how long she'd been standing there fixated on the computer. She tries not to show the slight stiffness as they walk.

Outside the command center of the castle, they come to an atrium several stories tall. There's an ornamental pond in the center, where koi swim lazily in a large group. She likes that about them; a single fish is only very rarely left behind or left out.

[waterfell]

Only Mercury would utterly fail to recognize that as a pick-up line and miss the joke she could have at Kunzite's expense. Instead, she answers him seriously by shaking her head.

"Not often. But the research will be easier here. My mini-computer only accesses a portion of what the computers here can." And that's still incredible computing power. She loves having tools like that at her command.

[waterfell]

"When they need to. The water can support them. It was an experiment I conducted for my world. It's been helpful." She realizes midway through that she probably needs to explain a bit further.

"The water is perfectly balanced to encourage life there. It's the same way the oceans have started to be purified on my Earth."

[waterfell]

She smiles at some private thought of her own, but it's a natural, almost nostalgic smile instead of her usual smugness and overly bright smirks. "It's both."

"My power keeps it at the perfect pH and temperature and stocked with the proper nutrients. Plankton, too - on Earth; it attracted life, and it spread again from there."