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It had rained most of the afternoon and well into the evening, and when Babylon took to the streets, they were slick and smelled like petrichor. He expected it to be a slow night - without many civilians out on the streets, Negaversers and youma had very little to hunt - but all the same, he wanted to make a quick circuit and make sure that all was quiet on the western front.

He circled the several blocks of the historical district that he was rapidly beginning to consider his quote-unquote turf, and, seeing nothing terribly amiss, started back home. He didn't feel any chaos signatures nearby, but he did feel a page - so that was a thing.

Babylon turned towards the signature and set off across the rooftops, making his way towards the bright little signature. Thunder rumbled in the distance - another storm band rolling in.

The page came into sight, and Babylon exhaled unsteadily. She appeared to be in some kind of conflict with a basket that he could only assume was her own weapon... so that was weird. He could only assume she was new to all this - maybe she'd awoken this same night? "Um, hey," he said, jumping down from the roof to join the page in the alley.

"I'm not trying to intrude or anything," he said, "But you seem confused, and I think that I can help with that."

A cosmos knight might have been better, he thought. Hvergelmir or Teide. But he was here and he was going to have to suffice, if she would let him.

"My name's Babylon," he said. "What's yours?"

Babylon nodded sheepishly. Yes, he glowed. He got that a lot lately from people who seemed very surprised to find themselves face-to-face with a glowing dude in a cape. "Yeah, it's a long story involving a lot of magic I shouldn't have been messing with," he said sheepishly. "I'm sure we'll get around to it. Anyway. You. Basket. Dress that appears when you touch it, I'm assuming?"

So he'd been right in pegging her as a very new knight, he thought. If the first person she'd met upon awakening was Hyperborea, no wonder she was confused - the little squire could be, well, intense was putting it mildly. "Like the hanging gardens, yeah, kind of," he said. Not at all like the hanging gardens, really, but that was just more detail than the moment called for. "I know the girl you're talking about. She... has no chill."

He pulled a face at Verona, like, he'd tried, okay? He was still trying. "She's young," he said, "Very young. And very enthusiastic. And more than a little traumatized, so I'm sorry if she came at you like an overexcited poodle because I can see where that would be disorienting. So, yes, to answer your question, I am a knight. Of Mercury, to be specific, but I think that that's splitting a few more hairs than we need to right now." <********, he thought. He was rambling, like, so hard.

"More chill in the mojave desert," supplied Babylon, smiling gently at Verona. Obviously, she was having a hard time adjusting - but he was prepared for moments like this. "Hyperborea is the youngest knight I've ever met," he said. Though not the youngest senshi. "And in the couple of months I've known her... she's been through a lot. I'm sorry that she was your introduction into this world. She was likely only trying to protect you."

As for realizing that it wasn't all rainbow and s**t, Babylon was willing to bet that Hyperborea had realized that a few months ago - that was likely the problem. He hefted his lantern. "My first weapon was a glow stick," he said. "Like, one of the stubby ones that are two for a dollar at camping stores. A basket's not the most unusual thing I've seen. Let's - let's sit?"

He gestured to some stacked shipping palettes. They looked clean enough.

"So yeah, like that Mercury. I know, the uniform's a little bit incongruous," he said with a laugh, taking a seat. Mercury was a little incongruous, all ice castles and glowing flowers - but morning had come to Babylon, and now the barrier crackled against the heat instead of the cold, and the crater below his city was in bloom.

"I'm not sure what Hyperborea told you, so I'm sorry if this makes things even more confusing. Knights are... sort of an order of cosmic peace keepers," he said, setting his lantern aside. "We're bound by duty to places out in the universe that have... power. Some kind of magical purpose. And in return for serving the power at our wonders, we're granted power ourselves. What we do with that power is our choice. And as for Cosmos... It means that your wonder isn't bound to a planet, and the princess you serve is Sailor Cosmos."

"She's as close as this whole crazy cosmology has to a god," said Babylon. "Saved my life once. You're lucky. Her knights are a good bunch. I could introduce you to some besides Hyperborea."

Babylon laughed at her question about weapons. "Yeah," he said, "It seems like that sometimes." Page weapons weren't really meant to be weapons at all - they were trinkets. Practice. Knight weapons weren't really weapons, either - they were more like talismans. Something to channel magic through. If you could hit people with them, it was really just a bonus. "You'll get magic with your first promotion," he said, "and then it won't seem to pointless."

As for being aliens, Babylon wasn't sure. His own ancestors had come from Mercury and as far away as the original Virgon homeworld, but he didn't think he was discernibly inhuman... "Depends who you ask, really," he said. "We were all born here on earth. Our recent ancestry is human. All of your ancestry might be human, really - there's two ways to be a knight. If you're reincarnated, you've got the same starseed as the last knight of Verona. Your starseed is, like, this crystalized representation of your soul? Think of it like a literal metaphor. You can't touch it, it doesn't show up on x-rays, but when Chaos-aligned people try to steal it, it'll be there."

"The other kind of knight is descended knights. They're actual blood relatives of the last knight. I'm like that. I've got ancestors from Mercury and Virgo, but I don't think of myself as any less human." He didn't look any less human... besides the glowing lines on his face, anyway. "The only way to really know if you're descended or reincarnated is to go to your wonder. It'll get obvious pretty fast. Either you'll meet your ancestor, or you'll find the last you's memories."

He laughed at her description - sparkle princess. It certainly fit Hvergelmir and Teide. "The girls are," nodded Babylon. Then he thought of Sarras, and added, "The boys are, too."

Babylon laughed - now that Verona was a bit more comfortable, she was getting feisty. It was a good attitude to have. "Chaos is the bad guys, right," he said, nodding. "Typically, they wear black, but it's tricky, because knights can wear some pretty dark colors." He'd worn black from head to toe until last summer, and Lina's uniform had been even darker than his - but they were both knights.

"You'll feel it," he said, trying to put auras into words. "Like - you can feel me right now, right? Like, this extrasensory kind of brightness? Or, like, maybe some kind of warmth or goodness or comfort? It differs. Different people describe it differently. Anyway, Chaos feels... different. Dark or cold or foreboding or wrong. You'll know you're dealing with them because they'll set your teeth on edge, or make all the hairs on your neck stand up, or send shivers down your spine - or something."

Honestly, he didn't mind that she had so many questions! It came as a relief that she was inquisitive about all this - he'd met far too many reluctant knights. Babylon grinned and adjusted his signet ring. "To go to your wonder, you have to concentrate and say an oath, and then to come back you do the same thing. I'll write it out for you later and send it to you - once you get there, you'll find a ring. Like-"

He slipped his signet ring off and held it out to her. "Something like this, with a symbol of your knighthood engraved in the face. It's important, because it's how you communicate with other people. You can send notes just by writing the other person's name on the paper and stamping it with the face of your ring, and once you get it, I'll give you an upgrade that lets you send holograms and voice calls."

Babylon had never heard auras described like that, but he was going to take it as high praise. "No, Chaos gets it, too," he said. Babylon had never been quite good enough with auras to pick up on the differences between them, beyond ranks and factions. "But that doesn't make it any less nice to know who's lurking around the corner."

He held his hand out to her so that she could get a better look at the ring. Nodding, Babylon said, "Yeah. Kind of. It lets you use post-it notes as instant messages if you're so inclined."

For example: Hvergelmir was so inclined.

"So I'm like a good week at the club?" he asked after a moment. "Huh. I like that. That's probably the nicest thing anyone's said to me all week."

"They can teleport," said Babylon, so flatly that it almost sounded like a joke. It was such a fact of life that he didn't really feel like whining about it. Just, it was unfair, but it was a thing, and everyone just had to deal with it. (But really, <********> teleportation.) "They can reach their hands into people's chests and ******** around with their starseeds. They can summon youma pretty much whenever they feel like it. The dark mirror ones can mirrorwalk, which is its own, entirely separate nightmare."

He shrugged and offered Verona a tight-lipped smile. "I hope that doesn't make the whole situation sound entirely hopeless," he said. "We have magic that they don't, and access to our wonders and our history, and a lot of them are willing to talk... a lot of them are just lost kids looking for somewhere that they belong. It's the grown-ups you have to watch out for. They're assholes."

He'd never met a teenaged member of the Negaverse who he'd describe as beyond saving. Those in their early twenties could go either way - Avalon had come back from Chaos. Titan was making the change.

"I'm glad I ran into you," he said. "This was a good chat."