Continued from Hypothesis.

To put it roughly, Babylon hauled a** against the blizzard, because it was gross and awful and it sucked but the wind was, fortunately, with him. By the time he reached the city gates and the barrier, he was chilled to the bone - but it was at least ten degrees warmer once he was past the city wall than it had been outside of it. The barrier was spoiling him, he thought. How had he managed before? The city was practically uninhabitable without it…

Which was the point, he realized, shaking snow from his cape. He felt like he had frostbite in his brain, which was surely the only explanation for what kind of moron he was being right now. “You came up here on a mission,” Babylon reminded himself, reaching up to dust snow out of his hair. The mountainside twinkled above him, not a gap to be seen in the rows of lights. Thank Cosmos for small miracles, he thought, hardly even registering how ingrained the swear was into his vocabulary by now - he could focus on the task at hand, instead of general upkeep.

Babylon let himself into the knight’s study, the sconces flaring to life at his touch. It was much the same as he had left it, and it was, to be honest, a little bit lonely without his ancestor. Mistral’s regrets about not having Menachem translate the journal while he still could had him feeling a little bit nostalgic. He could have waited longer to put that starseed into his chest… But then, would everything after that moment have still worked out the same way? Would things with Avalon have escalated the way that they did?

There was no point in worrying about it and what was done was done, he supposed, setting his lantern on the table and going over to the cabinet where his ancestor had stored the glass globes. He wasn’t sure if this would work and they’d be able to use a forever lantern to power the device, but it was the only way he could think of to fulfil Mistral’s request.

He frowned at the shelf - when Babylon had first found it, it had seemed like the supply of globes would last forever. But between making lamps and accidentally breaking lamps, he was starting to run a bit low. He’d have to figure out where to get more later. Maybe there would be a useful memory in time - although that might be counting too much on coincidence.

“You can never count on coincidence,” Babylon said out loud, picking up three of the remaining globes. “Except for when you can.”

Life was weird like that.

He assembled the forever lights as carefully as he could - it was easier now than it had been, since he now had a better sense of how to handle and portion the light. Hopefully these would work for what Mistral needed.

Something else occurred to Babylon, something he decided that he needed to check on before he headed back out into the storm. Mistral had suggested that he look on Earth for a compass - but who was to say that he couldn’t find one here? The study was full of old texts and old gear that no one had touched in centuries, and he had even less of an idea of what to do with now. It might add some time to this trip… but it would save time overall.

He called Mistral up on his ring, since she’d been so adamant about him using the new features. “Hey,” he said, “I’m gonna be a bit longer. I think I might be able to find a compass here if I look hard enough.”

That done, he set to work, pulling open drawers and cabinets and trying to not make too much of a mess. The study was a valuable trove of information, even if he didn’t know how to handle it, and if he had memories of things later, it wouldn’t serve him any good if he’d moved them in the meanwhile. But - there had to be something here, he thought determinedly. The knights of Babylon were mountaineers, scholars. If his ancestor had been making maps, then surely he had a compass. Multiple compasses, even--

Finally, he found one. It was a big old silver thing, pushed to the back of a drawer. It didn’t seem like there was anything magical about it, nor was it particularly fancy - and it was definitely no longer functional, so Babylon didn’t think that it would do him any harm if he took it. The compass’s dial was off its balance point, skewed awkwardly to the side. Something was rattling around on the inside. “You’ll do nicely,” he told it, tucking it into his coat alongside the three forever lights.

“I’m on my way back now,” he told Mistral, heading back out to the square. “If you don’t have that tea you promised ready, I will literally cry.”