Welcome to Gaia! ::

The longer he lived there, the more Babylon liked living in Destiny City's historical district. The stately old houses and storefronts and narrow, tree-lined streets were quiet most nights, with just the occasional powered signature passing through. He felt like the neighborhood's protector by default, working hard to keep any suspicious characters from coming too close to home, but most nights it didn't even seem necessary. There was simply nothing going on.

Most night.

The captain had lingered in his inner sightline for far too long, Babylon decided, rousing himself. He had been perched like a gargoyle in the eaves of an apartment block, watching an intersection, but now it was time to go. He swooped down towards the street, cape billowing behind him - nights like these, he felt every inch the superhero he presumed to be.

As he turned the corner, the first thing he saw was a police cruiser pulling away from the curb, heading in the opposite direction from him. Then, closer, he saw the captain - she hadn't even bothered to hide herself, and she looked... a little bit sad. He expected that she knew he was there - his aura was strong these days, and strange. Whatever damage he'd done to himself with Menachem's starseed, it wasn't healing.

Babylon thought he could piece together what was going on here well enough. "Did you know the deceased?" he asked quietly. Catching someone in crisis was the best time to plant seeds of doubt in them. He didn't mean to be an ambulance chaser, but hello, have you heard the good news about Sailor Cosmos?

Babylon nodded, swallowing a hard knot in his throat at the words white moon fanatics. "I'm sorry for your loss," he said tightly, and tried to think of what to say to separate himself from the fanatics that had killed the lieutenant. No words came: he associated with Gunn, and wasn't that enough? Tolerating extremism was much the same as encouraging it. He wasn't personally a killer, but that didn't mean that everyone who fought under Order's rather broad banner saw eye-to-eye with him.

"I didn't know him, no," he said, shaking his head. The captain's grip on the stop sign didn't bother him much, not unless she planned to rip it from the ground and beat him with it. "I know the neighborhood. I..." he glanced towards the house and frowned slightly. He doubted it would do the parents any comfort to know what their son had been wrapped up in, no matter which stance they took in the war.

"I'm just out for a walk, to be perfectly honest," he said, shaking his head. He did not want to fight the captain. This ground felt hallowed tonight. "Babylon Knight of Mercury," he introduced himself. "To whom do I owe the pleasure...?"

Babylon smiled at her, a little lopsidedly. Perhaps she'd just met all the wrong knights. Hvergelmir and Mistral were diplomatic by necessity, after all. But either she'd met enough other knights or simply expected what he would do next... and he'd tried telling Negaversers the basics of why energy stealing was bad enough times to know that going at it directly never worked. Chaos's brainwashing was strong. "No," he said, "I'm not."

He thought she sounded like she already knew, anyway.

"Walking around in uniform has certain advantages over walking around in my civilian form," he explained, hoping that she could at least appreciate phenomenal cosmic powers. "I cannot, for example, leap tall buildings with a single bound as an average Joe. I'm sure you know the feeling. Our sides have as much in common as they have, uh, different."

That sentence had gotten away from him somewhere, he thought, and reflected on his grammatical awkwardness. She kept looking at him oddly, and Babylon had a suspicion why. Tapping the lines on his cheek, he asked, "You're itching to ask about these, huh?"

She was right in saying that there were none among the Negaverse's ranks with his markings, but neither was there anyone among Order's - at least as far as he had seen. "No, I'm a knight of Mercury," he said, wanting to get that straight. "These are..."

He wasn't quite sure how to explain them. He'd seen high-ranking Negaversers who'd called on too much Chaos magic at once and as a result become merged with Youma (or at least that was how he hypothesized that happened). Were the monstrous parts of them scar tissue? And then, if his altered state came from taking on too much Order magic at once, then weren't the lines on his face scars as well?

Yes, he decided. That was his story and he was sticking to it. "They're scars," he said with a shrug. "Got myself into a bit of a magical mishap. Bit off more than I could chew. One trip to the center of the galaxy later and I'm all fixed, but it takes a toll." The damage showed through even his civilian glamour. Best to keep the perks of the position secret, but... Zircon seemed like the curious sort. Perhaps something about Order magic would pique her interest.

It was a delicate line Babylon walked and he knew it.

Babylon wasn't quite sure what she meant by exhausting. Maybe something was going over his head, and at risk of looking like a bit of an idiot, he said, "No, they're not exhausting. They don't - they don't bother me at all." The scar Avalon had left him with gave him more trouble. But then she continued with a statement about being stitched up with monsters and Babylon sighed and shook his head.

Chaos had strange ways, but directly criticizing it would make him no friends tonight. Instead, he resolved to answer her questions as best he could without giving too much away. That he'd stuck a second starseed in his chest was more or less public knowledge given how many people he'd talked to while it was going on.

Which hadn't made anyone think he was any less of an idiot. "I, uh," he said sheepishly, "I stuck a second starseed in my chest so that I could take it to the space cauldron? Turns out, you're not supposed to do that."

What would she say to that, he wondered, and continued the story, "Anyway, before I know it, I'm blacking out and leaking light from my fingertips and basically on the verge of death? It was really awful and the moral of the story is don't do that s**t or the only person who can set you right is Sailor Cosmos."

Babylon frowned, trying to think if there was anything he needed from Zircon that would make a fair trade. None of what he was telling her struck him as particularly sensitive - what good was information about wonders when the Negaverse couldn't get to space? And if he was the only person who'd ever been so thick as to stick a second starseed in their chest, then what good would it do for Zircon to know the symptoms and how quickly they manifested? He doubted it was even possible to repeat what he'd done.

"It was my ancestor's starseed," he said measuredly. "It had been at my Wonder since the fall of the Silver Millennium."

Well, he was curious about Avalon's whole thing about youma not really dying. That was probably barter-worthy. Babylon planted his hands on his hips, trying to look a bit more authoritative. "Before I tell you anything else, you've got to answer a question for me. What happens to a youma when it gets dusted? Does it die? Or does it go down to the rift and get reconstituted?"

Babylon nodded. He'd - he'd known for a long time how youma were made. Even before the Code revealed the rift's origins, Spinel had told him about the night Bischofite poured Chaos into his sister's starseed until all that was left was a husk, less a girl and more a monster. She'd become Avalon's, hadn't she? Then - what happened to Shay, once Avalon purified? He wasn't certain he wanted to know - best to just be content with Zircon's answer: when the officer dies, so too goes the youma.

"Someone I know says that they all regenerate, every one of them," he said. Avalon could very easily be wrong. Her memory was hazy-to-entirely-gone in most places, so he wouldn't put it past her to remember something about her personal youma and apply it to all of them. He was personally glad to know that his efforts these last few years at cleaning up the streets hadn't been totally futile - he'd been releasing those wretched creatures, not sending them to regenerate and suffer again.

But anyway, a deal was a deal. "I felt okay at first," he said. "Tired. But almost immediately, I started getting headaches. They were tolerable until they weren't. I'd lose time. The - the other starseed could take over. At first I had to willingly cede control to it, but after about a week it started happening randomly. I'd flicker back and forth between my powered and civilian forms. I was leaking light from my fingers, from my eyes..."

He still leaked light from his eyes. Babylon shrugged. "It was more magic than my body was meant to hold."