Luna took the moth pendant and turned it over in her hands as Yuri gave the people another show, fluttering away into the morning light as a swarm of moths. Was he expecting more monsters to pop up or what? Shrugging, she slipped the pendant around her neck for safekeeping and tilted her head at Gou. "Whelp, he has somewhere to be. What about you, you gonna turn into a pack of wolves and head off somewhere?"

It only took a little bit to establish that Gou, in fact, did not have anywhere pressing to be. In fact, he hadn't even arranged for a place to stay yet. She supposed she could recommend him a hotel or something, but...

"Nope, can't be having with that." She said, shaking her head. "You showed up in my town to protect it from aliens. What kind of daughter of Coral City would I be if I just pointed you as some cheap hotel? Nah, I'll put you up. It's safer, cheaper, and a great view. Hop in!" She straddled her scooter again and tapped the sidecar insistently with her palm. 

They road down the ever filling highway for a while, sloping gently downward as the got closer and closer to the beach. Luna took a little unpaved sideroad, almost unnoticeable unless you were looking for it, that snaked its way through a grove of palm trees. Just as the sound of ocean waves began to hit their ears, she found it.

Casa de la Luna was a modest, unremarkable wooden building. Kind of shabby, really. The walls needed a fresh coat of white paint to cure their peeling, enough of the roof tiles had cracked to be noticeable, and the place where she parked her scooter was little more than an overhang to keep the rain off of it. A hammock swung between two of the nearby trees, and around the back of the property a few wooden training dummies had been set up and had mean looking faces scrawled on their wooden heads. 

As she stepped up to her door, bag over her shoulder, she turned the nob and frowned a little as it made a jamming noise. "Ahhh, Guru." She said, opening her bag and rummaging about for the key. Unlocking the door and opening it, a small post card fluttered down from where it had been wedged in the door. She picked it up and read it. "He took off for Hawaii while I was gone. At least he locked my door this time."

As she stepped in she put her oar in an umbrella stand beside the door that was otherwise full of finely crafted fishing spears. The living room was dominated by a big blue couch that took up two entire walls. A tv sat against the other wall, and around it were various framed photos of Luna with many other people. Men, women, young and old, obviously from many different countries based on their dress and the eclectic backgrounds of the photos. To a one, they all held themselves like someone that could handle themselves in a fight. She walked over to the middle of the room and, with her foot, shoved a wooden coffee table laden with National Geographic's into the corner before turning and lifting up the cushion of the couch to show him the handle underneath. "This is your bed, pull it out when your ready to go to sleep. I'll get you some fresh sheets, all right. In the meantime make yourself at home."

Luna walked off down the hall, tapping a door in the hallway with her knuckle on her way. "This is the bathroom, btw." She said, before turning and walking through a bead curtain into another room. If one looked around they would see that the bathroom door was, in fact, the only interior door. The living room and the kitchen were separated only by a metal strip in the floor where the carpet ended and tile began. The other two rooms down the hallway only had curtains of brown and blue beads the draped down like the stingers of a jellyfish. 

After some rummaging sound she retuned with a pillow and big blue and black [b][i]Wave Body[/i][/b] brand comforter she set on the side of the couch. Then she flopped down next to it, leaned her head back, and breathed in the familiar air. There was no place like home. 

[hr]
[h1][center]One Week Later[/center][/h1]
[hr]

Luna had ordered pizza that first night, seeing as the only things left in her refrigerator were a couple of frozen juice pops and a bunch of drinks called [b][i]Alova[/i][/b], which were made by mixing Aloe Vera and various fruit juices. Guru was a practicing breatharian, or at least he claimed to be, but she was beginning to find that claim very suspicious. 

After a few trips down to the ocean, though, she had restocked her stores of fresh fish. That was the thing about her little house, if you walked just a little ways toward the sound of waves the dirt very quickly turned to sand and you emerged from the underbrush onto one of the less popular, more out of the way stretched of Coral City's famed beaches. Luna relaxed here, did some of her daily training here, and sometimes just wandered down into the surf with a spear on her back and swam out until she found that nights dinner. 

Her focus for the week was spilt two ways. The first was practice, trying to find the correct form for her Salmon technique. Every day she took some time to go out back and swing the old Oar around, picturing the Salmon. It's movements, it's form, what it had to have felt like swimming upstream. She tried to be the salmon, shape the water into the essence of the salmon. It was slow going. It was hard getting into the headspace of something with that kind of single minded drive. The other was getting Gou acclimatized and showing him around if he wanted to. She was used to seeing new places herself, so the opportunity to play guide for somebody else was excruciatingly exciting to her. 

The only marring bit of the week, to her anyway, is that when she tried to watch tv a lot of her shows were getting preempted by footage of civil unrest around the world on account of the aliens. They really seemed to be throwing people into a tizzy, to the point where the news was seriously threatening to harsh her vibe. "We should film a monster fight if we get the chance." She mused one night. "People wouldn't be freaking out like this if they saw how we'd handled it."