GDoc log.
Backdated to November 10th.

The winds were calm when he passed through the city gates, although it was still snowing softly. It was a nice change, thought Babylon, adjusting his cape. He raised his lantern against Mercury’s long night, and set a course for the patch of light at the bottom of the hill. Mistral had requested his help today, and although the task at hand seemed dangerous, it was necessary.

The doll that had killed like half a dozen of their compatriots still roamed the labyrinth, operating separately of the wonder’s security systems, and that meant it had gone rogue. Babylon was keyed to the labyrinth, but the doll… the doll could still seriously harm him, and that meant he was helping Mistral at great personal risk.

But he owed her this. Their wonders were twinned, and they were of the same blood. Babylon owed service to Mistral - or at least that was his instinct on the matter. He didn’t know if anyone would agree with him.

He entered the wonder and shook off the chill, sweeping snow from his cape and onto the plants in the lobby. “Hey,” he called, certain that she was watching over the labyrinth’s many cameras. “I’ll be down in a second.”

Thank Cosmos they’d found that elevator to the knights quarters, was all he had to say.

“Okay,” said Babylon, as he left the elevator. “Do you have any idea where this thing is, or are we just going to start walking and see if it shows up to attack me?”

Shibrogane
Mistral didn't know how she felt about the doll. She could still hear it in her head, chirring softly--not any kind of voice but instead the accumulated sounds of machinery, reflecting data usage. Sometimes she heard it when she was working in the labyrinth. It must have helped her with the... Remains... She knew she didn't carry the fullness of Ankh or Degrasse's remains on her own. Yet somehow they'd gotten to the lobby, to the neat square holes she’d dug for them. Questioning the doll’s indubitable connection to her seemed ungrateful somehow, and to her it did pose no danger... Only she wanted, someday, to bring Mistral's labyrinth back to what it had been. She needed it brought back under her control, and there was no one she trusted as much as Babylon to help her do the deed.

She turned away from her most recent sheet of conductive metal and smiled at Babylon, a little tiredly. "Thanks for coming," she said. "I know where it was a few minutes ago, but it moves fast and the wonder can't key in on it. So we're going to head up to the last level I saw it on and hope to draw it out."

For the occasion, she had changed. The uniform she wore whenever she transformed was for ceremony; in airtight containers she had found working uniforms, casual clothes with her sigil worked into intricate patterns. Today she had pulled on one of the close-cut black jumpsuits, having shed the flowing silk and dense microfiber of her ceremonial skirts the day before. "Is there anything you need before we go?"


The outfit was new. Babylon wondered for a moment whether he should ask if she had one in a men’s medium, since it might be more suited to the task at hand than his uniform. He unclipped his cape from around his neck, leaving it on the floor at his feet. “I can go like this,” he said, but then reconsidered. If this was a laboratory, surely there was clothing enough for all the staff. Acolytes? Staff.

“Actually,” said Babylon, “do you think I could get something like what you’ve got on?”

He got something like what she had on, and they cut a pretty impressive pair of figures if he had to say so. Which he did. “We look good,” said Babylon.

In the elevator, he touched the stone tiger pendant at his collarbone and called Reut to their side. “She’ll defend against any ambush,” he said. They were close enough to Babylon that she’d be able to keep her form indefinitely, and he could use whatever warning they could get of the doll’s approach.

“I didn’t tell Arkady I’d be risking my life today,” Babylon added, as the elevator slid to a stop. “So I’d better not die. She’d be all alone in a foreign country and it would be really bad.”

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“You’re probably perfectly safe,” said Mistral, leading them out onto the eighth floor. Past the inscription on the wall and the hole in the ceiling where Bifrost had detonated an ancient battery, she could see the pale, teallish glow of Mistral’s native light. “But having an early alert system will probably be helpful.” The sooner they knew the doll was coming, the sooner Mistral could use that ancient connection to shut the damn thing down. All she had to do was yell stop, no, and it would stop. Just like it had all that time ago.

She leaned against Babylon. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s probably not really a risk at all.” Her voice sounded clear, confident, but as they walked through the silent crypt of the Knights of Mistral, her shoulders hunched ever inward, tension knotted up her back.

“I hate it here,” she said, suddenly, as they took a few low steps onto a tiled path between the slow churning of hot, sulfurous water. “It’s like being buried.”

Behind them, she thought she heard the dull scrape of metal on stop. She stopped and turned, one hand clinging tightly to Babylon’s arm. “Nothing there,” she whispered, and she faced downhill again.


Babylon recognized Mistral’s crypt instantly. It was so different from the one at his wonder, and yet their purposes were both immediately clear. “The doll was here?” he asked, glancing up towards the hole in the ceiling. That had been a rough day, and in the end, they’d been looking on the wrong floor entirely. Cove and Degrasse’s deaths had been needless.

But they hadn’t been in vain, he thought determinedly, following her towards the water. “Hotsprings?” Babylon asked, thinking out loud. “If the doll’s not here, then we needn’t stay.”

Like being buried, she said, and he wondered - because of the crypt? Because of the rubble? Or did she - did she mean the whole labyrinth? “Oh,” said Babylon awkwardly, looking down at Reut. He didn’t know what to say to that.

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“It comes here a lot,” said Mistral tightly. “Constantly. It’s never not here, to be honest. If I can find it, it’s in the crypt. Waiting.” How she knew that, Mistral didn’t want to explain. It was just… true.

They kept going, down the spiral of the eighth level. Near the bottom, she heard--a low scraping of stone. But it stopped half a moment later, and she didn’t think she’d even really heard it. It’d just. She was hearing things, that’s what it was.

That high-pitched grinding noise came again. “Ana,” she called, soft and low, stopping where she stood. “Ana, is that you?”


Babylon hadn’t been on level six, so the noise, when he heard it, did not bring back any terrible memories for him. Yes, it was mechanical, like a machine long left alone, but at Mistral’s question, he paused and looked around. He didn’t see anything, but Reut circled alertly, which was sort of worrying. She sensed something, even if he didn’t.

It was sort of weird, he thought, that the doll’s name was the same as Mistral’s in the present. But it was probably a coincidence. There was no reason for Anabel to share her name with an ancient robot.

Speaking of prehistoric robots--

The mechanical sound was suddenly much, much closer. Babylon spun on his heels to see his summons lunge to intercept the doll - its claws plunged through the leopard’s snowy flank and she vanished. “Mistral!” Babylon yelped. s**t. s**t ******** s**t. He was going to die.

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It lunged out of the shadows, clawed fingers reaching for Babylon. “Ana,” shouted Mistral, reaching out to grab the knight’s arm before remembering--all she had to do was tell the doll to stop it. She stopped, putting herself between Babylon and the attacking monster. “Ana,” she said, putting up a hand. “Stop. Okay? Stop.”

The doll caught itself on its forward foot, one hand reaching poignantly--or threatening--for Babylon’s throat. “Okay? You have to stop now. No more.” It collected itself, standing still with its arms by its sides.

“Now what,” she asked Babylon, dropping her arms.


Well, that was terrifying. But now it was over, and Babylon had a strange ache in his chest where he felt his summons’s dispersal. “Uhh,” he said, taking a step back from the doll. It was a crude-sort of automaton, not as elegant as he would have expected, just a metal shell shaped vaguely like a young girl.

“It’s - it’s a servant, right?” he asked, rubbing his neck. “You could - you could give it an order?”

Damn, he’d been expecting to have to, like, wrestle with the thing!

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“Right,” she said, feeling a bit like an idiot. They’d suited up for like--nothing. She smiled at him, a little embarrassed, but no one was hurt, and really what was she supposed to do? Be sad that no one had gotten deathly injured? She was definitely not going to do that. “Ana, let’s go,” she said. “Follow us, please. No funny business.”

The doll followed them, docile, as they returned to the elevator. “At least Arkady isn’t going to have to deal with wondering where you went. How’s she doing, anyway?” Ana stared out the crystal pane as the elevator descended, or it directed its eyeless faceplate that way anyway. What the hell was she supposed to be doing with a weaponized child’s toy?... it could be useful, she thought, it could be--if she had the doll, she could make it do the things she’d usually need another knight to do…

First she’d have to fix its murder programming, though. Who knew how that would go over?


It was a little - no, a lot - uneasy standing in the elevator with a machine that had singlehandedly caused a huge bloodbath, but Ana seemed perfectly behaved now. “She’s doing really well,” he said, glad to talk about things that would get them off the topic of the omnicidal robot in their midst. “She’s working in the daycare at the research station. All the kids call her Miss Kady and she’s super-popular. And I sent you her birdwatching blog.”

But that sort of overlooked the biggest development with Arkady lately. “We went to her wonder - to Avalon?” he said awkwardly. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to go into this with Mistral - but what affected one knight could very well affect all of them. “It looks like a nuclear bomb went off. Whatever happened to purify her so traumatically, it decimated her wonder.”

“And she’s seeing memories that definitely aren’t hers, because she had an ancestor before who is nowhere to be found, so there’s that,” he added with an awkward shrug. “So it’s weird and we’re still figuring it out but I think we’re okay.”

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“That sounds adorable,” she said. “A real step up from being an omnicidal maniac.” She smiled at Babylon and patted his shoulder gently. It was good to hear that Avalon was settling into her new life well, it honestly was. The bird-watching blog was full of commentary that was, frankly, half astonishingly astute and half incredibly childish--but such was only to be expected. Arkady was, in practice, only as experienced as a precocious child.

She led the way out of the elevator, and gestured to one of the flat lab tables. The doll laid down, and Mistral leaned over it to pop open its chest cavity. “Okay,” she murmured, “Let’s see here…”

Babylon was still there. “How’re things going between you? With the dating thing? You’re not having sex with her, are you?”


Babylon stood awkwardly behind Mistral, watching her work on the robot. “Well,” he said, “anything is a step up from an omnicidal maniac,” which wasn’t meant to diminish Arkady’s progress at all. The cold, hard fact of the matter was that she was adapting incredibly well to her new circumstances. He’d seen people do worse with more memories, and not everyone could be Nick and pass through with a strong support system and the mildest touch of PTSD.

“Uh,” he said, caught off-guard by her next question. He couldn’t well lie, but he doubted she’d be pleased with the answer. “Actually,” Babylon winced, “I am? We are?” He felt like the kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, except probably worse. Mistral, as far as he knew, came from the Kaatje van der Weydin school of Don’t ******** the amnesiac, seriously, don’t do it. “If it makes you any less scandalized, she insisted, not me.”

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“Well, as long as she’s the initiating party,” said Mistral, probing at a small column of silverine discs. “And you do the whole are you sure are you really sure rigamarole before you start getting down to business. Be nice to her. I know you are, but I’m salving my own conscience by instructing you to continue doing so.” She looked up to offer him a smile, and tried, ineffectually, to yank at the disc she’d determined contained the on/off switch.

She stepped back. “Can you pull this one out,” she said, pointing. “Ana, let him do it. That’s an order.”


Well, her reaction wasn’t as bad as it could have been, and Babylon breathed a sigh of relief as he reached carefully into the doll’s chest cavity. It seemed perfectly willing to follow Mistral’s orders, and went still beneath his hands. “I think I actually annoyed her with how many times I asked her if she was sure she wanted to,” he said. The disk pulled away from the doll’s inner workings, and he held it out to Mistral.

“I slept with her once while she was still General Avalon,” he confessed awkwardly. “She was leaving for England. I thought that if she was convinced I loved her, it might contribute to me convincing her to purify later. I - I do love her.”

He shrugged.

“I’m not sure why I just told you that,” said Babylon.

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As she’d predicted, the doll went completely slack. Mistral accepted the power disk, and set it aside. “I don’t know why you told me that, either,” she said. “But that--I’m imagining General Avalon had more than, like, three months of memories to work on. It’s different.” She frowned at him, and then shrugged and wiped her hands on a nearby rag. She knocked the doll’s chest cavity shut nonchalantly. “Does she make you happy, Derouen,” Mistral asked, hopping onto one of the high, cushioned chairs. “You love her, but does she make you happy?”


Babylon gave Mistral an odd look. Yes, General Avalon had had more than three months of memories, but the memories she did have were skewed enough that she’d somehow misinterpreted what had been a determinedly platonic relationship as one of lovers. Perhaps it was easy to read it that way, when you only had memories of Avalon and Babylon to go by, and not of Finn and Tate.

Perhaps they would have reached this point naturally, given another year or two. It was an odd thought. Tate had been like a sister to him, but… perhaps.

“She does,” he confirmed, watching Mistral take a seat. “I mean, I’m the happiest I’ve been for a while.”

Granted, he’d had a pretty s**t run of luck in the previous months, and some of that unhappiness was General Avalon’s fault - but Babylon was just going to conveniently overlook that. “Looks like you’ve got plenty of work to do here without me hanging around,” he said, lifting two fingers to his forehead in a short salute. “I better be getting back. Let me know if you need anything.”

He didn’t bother going all the way up to the surface before he let the gentle pull of magic carry him home.