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The city of Babylon was dark and still. The winds that frequently ripped through its streets and stairways had fallen silent a few moment after the Squire teleported in, and had remained so ever since. That wasn't to say it had been still for particularly long - only a few minutes - but it seemed odd that there was not even a gasp of breeze.

Babylon set his lantern on the cobblestones, casting jagged shadows around the square, and gazed up at the dark hillside before him. Not a single flickering ball of blue glowed there, and as he stared, the young man began to understand why the lamps were so important. Mercury had no moons to light its night side, and those nights went on for months at a time. Without the lamps, Babylon was black as pitch.

The squire picked up his lantern - for now, the only source of light in the entire city - and approached the nearest lamp post. Babylon Knight's challenge was to light all the lamps, but it was far to high for him to even consider lighting, and besides - he didn't even know how to open his lantern and get at the light inside.

Babylon bit his lip. He was missing a piece and he knew it. The knight had a rod that he used to light the lanterns - he'd seen it, could picture it in his mind, even - but where could it be?

He sank into a crouch and tilted his lantern in his hands, considering it. Stick first, he decided. Then figure out how to get the thing open. It wouldn't do him any good to open it if he had no way to light the lamps once he did.

The squire tore his eyes away from the lantern and looked back up at the hill. Maybe it was just his eyes playing tricks on him, but he could swear he saw a light moving up there! Babylon blinked furiously, trying to clear floaters from his vision. The light remained, bobbing along as it descended a staircase.

Frowning, Babylon got to his feet. Where had this strange, buttery sparkle come from? It couldn't be the Knight - his lantern glowed the same blue as the Squire's. If there was one thing certain about the Light of Babylon, it was that it always glowed icy blue. The light on the hill was out of place as much for its color as for the fact that the city was supposed to be abandoned.

His interest piqued, Babylon Squire started the long hike up the hill. He tried to talk himself up as he climbed - it was not just curiosity that was sending him up the hill, it was his duty. If there was an intruder in Babylon, then it was his job, as the squire of Babylon, to go and investigate. Naturally. And if that intruder was violent, then he would have to fight them.

Of course this lead to the question of, what would an intruder be doing in Babylon, anyways, and how would they get there? And the answer was that they were either another Mercury knight, or else an alien. Babylon squire steeled himself as he climbed the last set of stairs towards where he'd seen the light. Carefully, he stepped out into the street.

The man in front of him looked a little like a knight, although Babylon did not see the Mercury sigil anywhere and therefore couldn't be sure of how he'd gotten here. Still, it was a relief to not find an alien roaming his city. (He had begun to feel slightly possessive over the ruins, so it was indeed his city in his mind.)

"Hello?" called the squire. "Who are you? How did you get here?"

Babylon glanced up briefly at the gust of wind; it had been quiet for far too long and he'd been sort of wondering when the blowing might start again. "Um," he said, pulling up the hood of his new coat. "Yes, this is my city - Babylon. And the Caloris Mountains start here and go for a thousand kilometers to the north."

This was roughly as much as he remembered from Babylon Knight's introductory speech during his first visit. The squire knew he hadn't delivered it nearly as well, but he hoped he'd done a passable job. That wouldn't prevent his ancestor from likely shaking his head and knocking back another shot of hard liquor in disgrace. The younger guardian of the city was still learning the ropes, and he had a long way to go.

The young man cocked his head to the side and frowned in confusion. Perhaps he hadn't heard right. "You flew here?" he asked slowly. Feeling a bit like he was eavesdropping, Babylon tried to get a sense of the mysterious stranger's aura. What he felt left him even more confused. Undeniable lightness, yes, but not any kind of lightness he'd ever felt before.

Pursing his lips, the squire looked for a delicate way to put this and found none. "Sorry, but, who are you?"

"Babylon," clarified the squire, feeling dumb. Ask a stupid question and get a stupid answer - Kurma had already introduced himself, so he'd been asking Who when he really meant What. Except Who sounded more polite somehow, go figure. "I mean - sorry, what are you? You don't-"

He made a nebulous sort of hand motion.

"Feel like a senshi or a knight?" He didn't want there to be another faction to keep track of - the existing ones gave him enough trouble as it was! The squire took a step closer, holding up his lantern in hopes of shedding more light on this situation, but a closer visual examination didn't really reveal anything he couldn't see from further away. Which was to say: tall, earring, vaguely handsome, clothes... vaguely egyptian?

Babylon gestured with his lantern. "There's an old guy," he said, "I dunno if you've seen him, he told me I have to light all the lamps - as a test? But I'm missing a part."

He looked solemnly around the darkened city. "No idea where it would be, or if it even still exists," the squire sighed.

The squire nodded slowly, trying to keep track of all that. It didn't make a whole lot of sense, but something clicked in his muddled brain. Despite everything that had gone on in the last few days, news that Lina (his idol!) was a reformed servant of darkness had thrown him for a loop. After that announcement, he'd paid attention to everything remotely connected, and something in Kurma's explanation of himself stuck out.

"Cosmos," he said slowly, trying to bring this conversation down to a speed where he could follow it better. "Who's Sailor Cosmos?" If there was some crazy chick running around with the power to purify negaversers, Babylon wanted to know more about her. Maybe he'd even find out something to take back to the court that they didn't know yet.

"Yeah." He crossed his arms uncomfortably across his chest. The lantern thumped against his side - it was far more awkward to work with than his old glowstick. Muscle memory was a difficult mistress. "I was going to go look for it, but weird lights in my city... I had to check it out, yeah?"

"Anyways," he sighed, "The thing I need is a sort of a staff, maybe five feet long, kind of a torchy-bit on the end?" It seemed silly to say all this to Kurma, who was even more a visitor here than he was. "I don't suppose you'd have any ideas about where to look?"

Babylon's first instinct was to think that anything important would be at the top of the mountain. However, he recalled from accompanying the knight to light the lamps that he started at the bottom and then worked up. It wouldn't make sense to go all the way down to the bottom of the mountain and climb back up to the top... so maybe he started down there? The square he'd started out in this morning had looked pretty nice, although it was hard to tell in the dark... It certainly hadn't looked like a slum.

"I think we have to go down," said the squire, after giving it a great deal of thought. It wouldn't do to hike up and down the mountain all night, but he was pretty sure he'd reasoned it right. It would be so much easier if the knight were here, but he seemed to have made himself scarce tonight. Maybe Kurma had scared him off. (Although Babylon was just kidding about this last notion.)

"Are you going to go look with me?" he asked, realizing he was making assumptions when he was already halfway down the nearest flight of stairs. "Or did I interrupt your sight-seeing?"

Although what an ambiguous cosmic entity could want to see in a dangerously ill-lit city in the frigid regions of Mercury, Babylon wasn't sure.

Babylon raised an eyebrow at Kurma's flagrant disregard for the laws of gravity. "See?" he asked, gesturing to the space between the man's feet and the ground. "Why don't we get any cool tricks like that? Negaversers can ******** teleport!" It was true! He'd seen Painite do it! Boy, did he have a surprise for that crazy lady next time he saw her. After what she'd done to his glowstick, he wanted to see what he could do to her face with his lantern.

It was actually kind of creepy to walk around Babylon without the old knight as a guide. The squire was just now realizing that, while he'd still never been truly alone in the city, this was the first time his traveling companion was someone even less familiar with it than he was. It was all he could hope that he wouldn't get hopelessly lost on the way back down...

"So," he said, making small-talk to try to cover that he only sort-of knew where he was going. "You just kind of... bounce around the universe? Doing stuff for this Sailor Cosmos chick?" Which was a kind of weird way to put it, and Babylon had a feeling he was lucky no senshi had heard his expression. He reached up and smacked himself in the back of the head, figuring he was saving either Europa or Kallichore the trouble. Cosmos sounded important - purifying negaversers, employing Kurma - and he felt suddenly sheepish for calling her a chick.

If the way down was slippery and cold, the squire didn't notice terribly much. In addition to being brand spanking new, his uniform seemed like it had been designed especially for frigid weather like this. It did get darker as they went further down, though, as the mountains blocked out more and more of the feeble starlight. All the way down at the bottom of the narrow valley, they were very lucky to have two light sources.

"It's probably around here," said Babylon, holding up his lantern to splash blue light against the walls and doorways. They stood vacant now, but surely they'd had doors and windows once...? "The lamps run uninterrupted up the whole side of the mountain." He was thinking out-loud. "Maybe follow them back to the very first one...?"

He looked up. There was a single streetlamp in the center of the square. Babylon stomped over to it. "Well then," he said to Kurma, pursing his lips thoughtfully. "Somewhere around here. Do you see anything?"

Babylon had a lot of questions - practically every other word out of Kurma's mouth had him thinking of something else - but the suggestion that he look in the lamp seemed especially sound. After all - it was clearly a special lamp. After all - it was the very last one. (Or the very first one? Depended how you looked at it.)

"You got it." He flashed Kurma a thumbs-up and shimmied up the pole. The lamp opened easily - one of the clear panels just swung away - and Babylon clenched his legs around the lamppost as he tried to get a look inside. This suddenly struck him as a really dumb idea - there was no way that the torch was in this lamp, the torch couldn't possibly fit in the lamp - but Kurma had suggested it, and Kurma was a reasonable authority figure.

Babylon was all for listening to reasonable authority figures. You never knew when impressing them could come in useful. So he stared into the empty fixture of the lamp - and found that it wasn't quite so empty. "Hey!" He called. "There's something in here!"

The squire was losing his grip, so he stuck a gloved hand hastily into the lamp and grabbed the strange object within. And then he fell flat on his a**.

Babylon pushed himself to his knees, thankful that at least he hadn't cracked his tailbone, and held the mysterious item out towards Kurma. "Why would someone put this in a lamp?" he asked.