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It had more than once occurred to her that it would be nice to run into Encke - and maybe Viatrix - again. She owed them, she felt, more gratitude than she had correctly shown. Even her having attained the rank of squire seemed, in some way, a manifestation of her gratitude, and one that ought to be shared. But while it was possible that she could simply have asked for the meeting, she had rebelled against it, and in her newfound and distressing propensity for reframing her inward lies to herself as things other than lies, she had stubbornly asserted to herself that she was not prowling around hoping for it, and merely entertaining the idea that it would be awfully funny if it had occurred.

Of course, that had been weeks and one near-miss apocalypse ago, and she'd long since relinquished the hope of it happening, and certainly had abandoned her suspiciously-self-deceptive habit of lurking around where they'd first met with unnecessary frequency.

It was true serendipity, when it happened. She was only powered up out of an abundance of caution, having been keeping her eye on a prowling pedestrian who had struck her eye oddly - recently drained? a youma? - and had in fact just ascertained that he was in fact only extremely drunk. But she hadn't yet found a convenient place to slip away and power down, and she felt besides the pull of another like herself nearby, and had meandered towards it almost nonchalantly, more to ask if anything was worth tending to than out of any desire to a chat or a schmooze. It did not require lying to herself: she had, truly, not been expecting or hoping for the encounter this time.

Normally she would have given a little twirl, shown off for a bit. Encke was vaguely worth flirting with, or would have been had Viatrix not alluded to the uselessness of doing so, and the uniform was increasingly seeming like the best part of the bargain. Instead she only spread her arms, giving a sort of half-hearted “look at me” wiggle. Between the fur and the belts and the braids and her general abundance, there was a lot to wiggle. But there was not much enthusiasm in it, nor in the grim smile she returned his greeting with.

“As well as can be expected,” she said. She turned to keep walking, with a queenly absence of mind that seemed to indicate that she expected them to fall into step without asking - without even thinking about it. “Where's that useful little cat of yours?”

"Her senshi outfit?" echoed Joy, with a half a smile that, if subdued, was a little more sincere. She made a dismissive gesture when they pulled out their phone, shaking her head. "Don't. I don't wanna rain on her parade, in that case. I'll just rain on yours instead," she added with a laugh.

"Lucky girl," she added, after a moment. Whereas Encke had looked skyward, Joy seemed to be intentionally avoiding doing so. "I wish I had a teleportation ability. To - Barbados, or Bali." She paused, wrinkling her nose. "I guess I do, actually. But it only goes as far as something like Brittany, which isn't exactly the same vibes. And I've been swimming there, but I'm not exactly sipping mixed drinks with little umbrellas in them and getting my feet rubbed by beautiful pool boys. I'm generally swilling airplane vodka out of subspace and getting lectured by an angry old man."

This last was borderline untrue at this point. She clung to it stubbornly anyway.

"You ever been to a beach without seagulls or sandpipers or anything?" She shuddered. "Gives me the ******** creeps."

She was silent for a moment. "The Garde is beautiful too," she conceded at last, albeit with some reluctance. "You can sort of - imagine what it looked like once, when you see it. Now it's just beautiful in the way that a deer carcass that's half-overgrown is beautiful."

She sighed, giving her whip an idle twirl in her hand as they walked. "I've had some come back. Crickets - it's less quiet, thank god. Some other things. But I don't know what it is, to care for it. I just clear old ivy and debris out of stairwells and - and last time I made a sort of bed room, but I'm not going to lie, that was me treating the place like a bomb shelter." She made an expressive face. The reason she might want a convenient bomb shelter, given recent events, didn't need explanation. "I'm not sure what else to do. I don't mind cleaning," she added absently. "It's good for me. Keeps the head clear, you know? But I don't know what I'm doing that's bringing anything back."

She hesitated. What she wanted to say felt somehow embarrassing, and she had not quite verbalized it to anyone. She was clearly teetering on the edge of speaking, and had spent so many long seconds on it that when she did finally continue, it was in a bit of a blurt, and came out in a confused way that indicated her thoughts had gone on ahead of her. "He misses - he wants seagulls. I told him I'd bring him seagulls - I was joking; he was joking; he was sort of - he was sort of being, playful I guess is the word," she grimaced. She did not explain who "he" was, and probably did not need to, and to her unutterable shame her voice got a little thick as she continued, although she pretended it didn't. "I have this weird feeling like if I could figure it out the seagulls would come back, and I know we weren't serious but I feel like I made a promise I can't keep. I hate it. What a miserable shitty existence he has, and I made a promise to put some kind of little dent in it that I can't even keep."

She was mortified. It was more than she'd meant to say to anyone. But without her meaning to let it happen, Encke had sort of cast themselves, in her head, in the role of a superior figure who might be made into a mentor whether they offered or not.

"I'm sorry," she apologized, looking straight ahead. "I'm not normally like this. I guess the world almost ending makes you a little touchy on the feelings front. That's why I need the pool boys."

"What did you do, exactly?" she asked, after a moment. "Was that it - just - clearing debris and - and -" she laughed suddenly, almost a little hysterically. "Good god. Do we just manifest it, girlboss style? Did you manifest cats?"

"I wouldn't mind cats, glowing or otherwise," she said. "Maybe I can gaslight him into thinking he wants cats. But I guess instead I'll start making seagull mood boards or whatever it is you do when you're girlbossing. I guess I get a bit of a headstart, in a way - the plants are already there."

She paused. "My mama told me once -" and with the phrase, a bit of an accent slipped out, a thoughtless half a second of a drawl "- that you can tell when people love a place. A city, a house, whatever. She says if you don't love a place it falls apart. I think sailors used to say that about ships, too. And I always thought it was a bit bullshit, to be honest, but I don't know. Sometimes you go to a place and you can just sort of feel it, that no one loves it. That dead mall feeling. And other times you go somewhere that ought to feel so rundown, but you can just tell it's loved, so it feels good. Almost smells better than it should, you know? I still think it's bullshit, but maybe it's true bullshit."

Another pause. "I know you can love against your judgment. Can you love against your will, though?" She shook her head. "I guess you can, if you try."

"Ugh," she said, her voice thick with disgust. "I hate depth. I don't want to be around anything deeper than a good infinity pool with a nice view. Give me shallow artifice any day of the ******** week." The disgust was real, but the glibness was, too.

"I guess love and I have never been much in the way of friends," she said after a moment. There wasn't any bitterness in the comment; there wasn't any trace of resentment or regret. It was a bald statement of fact. "I don't think I'm much cut out for it. Friendship, yeah. Lust, sure. Love? Not so much. But maybe it's easier to love a place. I'll give it a try, and I'll let you know if it yields any results - cats or seagulls, or whatever."

“I'd love to visit one day, after it's calmed down a little. I wanna see these glowing cats. And I'd love to have more visitors to the Garde, eventually - maybe when there's more to see. I don't - I don't know if it was the storms or -”

She hesitated. Why, oh why, was she unloading on poor Encke? And yet here she was.

“He doesn't have much to say when I have people there, and I can't tell if he doesn't like it. You'd think he'd be ******** ecstatic for some novelty but maybe he's just miffed about not being able to b***h at me in front of strangers.” Well, low bar for decency, but at least he cleared it. She shifted uncomfortably as she walked, giving herself a little shake as if to fill herself with resolution again.

“Well, he's not the boss of me and he's not the boss of the Garde anymore either. So if you ever wanna come out, let me know. Bring Viatrix,” she added, with a sudden, sunny smile. “If she has any desire to go prowl around a dusty old castle, I mean. And I'll make us drinks - with little umbrellas - and we'll just have to imagine the pool boys.”