The Teahouse. Sakura had "officially" moved out a while back, and had maintained that outward appearance. Her personal belongings, such as most were aware, sat in a room in the crew quarters proper. What she kept here these days were necessities and strategic supplies, along with the journal she didn't want people reading casually. If they could slog through the code, it said more about what she did and thought about this place than she was comfortable having people know.

Not that it mattered. She frowned, staring off at no particular point of the house, feeling Sta'c as a suffocating presence all around her. The sensation hadn't been this bad for weeks, but in the wake of Marco's repodding, and the events happening right before it (the events leading into it), it'd been coming back strongly in waves.

She wanted to tear something down to work the frustration out. Instead she systematically familiarized herself with the aresonal available to the crew. Anything as distraction. Anything in addition to the rest of what she did.

Showing the rest of the crew what she and Barbara had seen felt like progress, if she didn't know exactly to where. It made her think, and thinking had both upsides and downsides. Right now she was exploring an avenue that might be both. Talking to Jake, who admittedly, she mostly knew through Marco and a handful of casual direct conversations of their own, was a step outside her ordinary.

Sakura breathed in deeply, eyes closing for a brief moment. The door was unlocked, the room lit by the soft artificial light of whatever time of day the city was generating. Her eyes opened. She expected he'd be here any time now.

Sakura sat in one of the chairs at the table in the Atori Teahouse, holding her own mug of tea between her hands and leeching the warmth out of it. She really didn't need to, not with how generally warm and humid the atmosphere was, but it held some sort of simple comfort that the rest of the environment lacked.

The place was looking tidy, tidier than it ever did with Phillip and Ren both in residence. (Not for a lack of Ren trying.)

A pot of tea stood in the middle, next to a journal and hardcover book. The book was an older volume on medicine from out of some Earth-like culture around the turn of a century, far from relevant or up to date with most all medical issues. She had a certain wicked fondness for it nonetheless, if she never got a chance to tell the one who'd given it to her why it was amusing.

She probably never would, now. Yet those weren't the thoughts she wanted to linger in, so they were brushed aside, sitting with her worries about teammates she hadn't seen for so long, for her sleeping shishou, and all the rest that she couldn't directly help. Sakura blew on the surface of her tea, focusing her mind back to what she wanted to communicate to Setsuna and his comrade. Lockon? Yes, Lockon.

She was expecting them any time now.

They'd gotten back. In the end, that's all it felt like. A group of thirty had gone to a planet, have things gone poorly since being greeted, then found themselves lied to, exploded, and abducted in the same twenty-four hours. Then they'd set up a confrontation that'd taken days to reach fruition, broken into teams to achieve mission objectives that were, at heart, still not entirely the mission, and ended up in a fight involving clones of themselves, clones of people on Galilee, and the clones who ran everything under the guise of not having been clones at any point at all.

Here she'd thought Orochimaru had come up with a convoluted way of attaining immortality.

Still, they were back, she didn't have any official duty to file anything, she ached and hurt like hell, and after the shower she'd just taken (she'd discovered far more bruises, nicks, cuts, and really taken a look at the big burn on her upper thigh) she was ready for some selective downtime before reporting back in for duty at Medical Bay proper. She figured she needed to look at the Active Crew registry, too, after hearing mention of a recent pod release.

It just felt like effort she wanted to postpone spending for a good half hour nap or something, to take the edge off the uncertainty of walking into open combat with this group of misfits in the future. They'd survived, but they'd been lucky. No one'd been unscathed, and they weren't even facing the Ohm. Four days on one world, and this is how they'd come out?

Walking gingerly into her room, towel wrapped around her, she contemplated reviewing the files Kanner had left on the datapad she'd found in her medical kit. Different from any of the ones they had on ship, but there none-the-less. Actually...

Sakura looked over to the medkit itself, part of what she'd dragged back without paying attention once everyone had been sorted out to where they needed to be. It reminded her to do the responsible thing and finish dressing her wounds, if part of her grumbled and knew that the only reason she wasn't doing this in Medical Bay was a stubborn wish to be disassociated from the alien (familiar, she couldn't lie anymore) environment for a little while longer. "I hate breaking new boots in."

Yes. Focus on the simple realities. "The blisters you get are so annoying." She moved toward her bed after closing the door firmly behind her.

It was a quiet day in the Atori as it were, with Philip scribbling on his white boards that now dominated the front area as well.

Philip was thinking about something. With time being so screwy on the ship, he thought he had forgotten about something important...

As promised, Hoshi went over to the Atori Teahouse with the needed items in hand: the vinegar to get Philip out of the can he was stuck in and the two items she picked up for him as well. They were as wrapped as they were going to be, what with not having any wrapping paper on board. Not that it deterred her, though! It was the thought that counted.

She dismounted the HardBoiler when she reached the Atori Teahouse and then went inside, seeing her partner in the main room.

"Let me get a glass," she said, going into the kitchen to get a glass for Philip, the two items she brought over laid on one of the tables. When she returned, she poured him a glass of vinegar and handed it to him for him to take.

Sakura sighed, pushing her hair back off her forehead. The time inconsistencies were troubling, but there was little she could do with the Time Dragons officially back in place on Era. MedBay didn't need her for the moment, which left her for time to do something she'd wanted to since picking up his broadcast on the Omnicomm. She sent Ren a brief message, letting her know she was on her way home. Taking the grav tubes up to the proper level, she didn't even bother pretending she was working at normal speed. Not that anyone she passed was likely to notice for long. There was no one even to pass on her chosen pathway through the ship, humid air clearing only slightly as she entered the City proper.

She didn't slow down until she found herself on the short expanse of street in front of the Atori Teahouse. Windblown hair fell more or less in place as she smoothed it down, walking the last remaining distance. There was a lot more she needed to understand about all her roommates, and to be fair, that they needed to know about her. She might as well start with Ren, her concern for him and the events linked to the clock being very real.

She called out as she slipped in through the door. "Ren?"

There was something that was good about having her as a partner - she was dedicated when she was given a goal to work towards, and that current goal was unlocking Xtreme. She had woken up early that morning, worked out a bit to get the blood flowing and then left the Masaki home with leaving a note as to where she was going.

She rode to the Atori Teahouse and then got off the motorcycle, walking up to the entrance. She knocked on the door and waited with her arms at her sides, rocking back and forth on her feet while humming a small tune to herself.

There was something wrong with Ren. It was becoming more and more clear to him. He didn't know just what it was, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized things just seemed...off. Like collapsing the week before. There was no reason he should have fallen or why his heart should have stopped. Sure, he'd had an intense training simulation not long before it, but he'd fought much harder than that back home, during the battle. He must have.

In one hand, he was clutching Eri's ring, desperately clinging to it though he knew she was gone...though something in his memory didn't seem to add up, and he couldn't figure out why he'd gone out during Shore Leave and bought a new chain for the ring if he knew everything was beyond hope.

In his other hand was an Advent Card deck. But it wasn't his Knight deck--the one he'd given to Phillip just after he'd collapsed, agreeing to take it easy until they could figure out what was wrong with him. This deck was golden, emblazoned with a phoenix.

It was the strongest deck in the Rider War, the greatest power of any Rider: Kamen Rider Odin.

And it was Ren's.

Compared to what he’d gotten used to back home, Ren found mornings at Atori on Stacy to be relatively stress-free. His roommate didn’t snore so badly that it was impossible to get even an hour of sleep, he wasn’t picking fights with anyone over their stupidity, he didn’t have a landlady pressuring him to help out in the shop…all in all, it was pretty nice.

But the universe doesn’t like to be tempted, and apparently, neither did the Melting Clock. As Ren stood at the kitchen counter, he suddenly felt a horrible, dizzying pain in his head and neck. In a moment of horror, he remembered why: he’d saved Kido from Kamen Rider Verde’s Final Vent, and the impact had broken part of his neck.

But it didn’t make sense. There was no way he could have gone all this time on the ship with those injuries. Why were they affecting him now?

Any conclusions he came to wouldn’t matter. He needed help, but he barely had the breath in him to call for one of his roommates. Losing all coordination, he collapsed to the floor with a heavy thud.

(OOC: Continuing the time loops, Ren has just gotten hit by his death in the 13 Riders special.)

There was another pile of books all over the floor at Atori.

Actually, no. "Pile" would imply that they were stacked, that there was some semblance of order. These were just lying all over the floor in the cafe area, and Ren could only imagine the looks of shock on his former housemates' faces back home.

"Where do you keep finding these?" Ren asked Phillip.

If anyone were to walk through the door, they would find an incredulous young Japanese man trying to pick up a small library that had covered the floor.

Someone on the omnicoms had seen that according to the calendar set up on the ship for all this time, it was nearing Christmas. Christmas had only been a couple of months ago by Ren's personal calendar, dated to when he'd left, and it had been a bittersweet affair, with him and Shinji forced to watch as Yui began to fade away.

Call him a Scrooge, but Ren was feeling rather "bah humbug" about the holiday right now. Still, there were cake ingredients that hadn't been used yet for Yui's birthday, and he had a feeling that if he was going to mope about Yui, then she'd at least want him to remember her over the cake she'd never gotten the chance to eat.

He lit a candle and placed it in the center of the frosted cake, watching it burn out for Yui. The door to Atori was open, since if there was anything Ren had noticed over his past few months here, it was that people tended to drop by when he had something cooking.

Ren's life had been hell for the past year. He'd watched more people die than he cared to think about and had lost one of his only friends. The Ohm had destroyed his world, and even if he did get everything restored, he knew he still had to kill his only remaining friend if he had any hope of saving his fiancee.

The thing about death is that it's over. Torture, though--he could only imagine what Kanzaki Shiro would have thought of such tactics, given all the people he'd killed and manipulated in order to save his sister.

Normally, Ren would grab his bike and ride around for a while to try to forget everything, but he honestly didn't feel much like searching the hangar for it. So instead, he went to his fallback plan--start boiling the water and break out a can of tea leaves, if only to get the bad taste out of his mouth.

The door to Atori was open, as if he expected guests.

Phillip had long since discovered that his association with Ren would be one of peace considering they they could spend time in the Atori reading. And it was easier than spending time in the Detective Agency that stood just a few blocks down.

Somehow, Councilor Olsen had talked Ren and him into taking care of two kids for the time being. And as such, he was reading a book and not really paying attention to anything.