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To be fair, Babylon hadn't been expecting anyone to call at this hour. Hyperborea had no one to blame but herself if she was scandalized by the fact that he appeared, not in his knightly regalia, but in his pajamas. (Finn had no one to blame but himself for the fact that his pajamas were a pair of novelty-print boxers and a summer camp t-shirt.) "Your wonder?" he asked, blinking at the tiny image of the page that now hovered over his ring.

He leaned forward and turned off Chopped, as if to say, you have my full and undivided attention.

"Yeah, sure," he said. "Where should I meet you?"

Fifteen minutes later, Babylon, now fully dressed, met Hyperborea at the location of her choice. "I can't promise I can stay indefinitely," he said, "Work in the morning. But I can at least head up with you for a while. What's up, that we need to go to space on such short notice?"

As his vision cleared, Babylon drank in the vista. Noticing Hyperborea's curtsey out of the corner of his eye, he turned towards her and nodded. "It's beautiful," he said, smiling at the squire. He could empathize with wanting to show off one's wonder - he felt the same way about Babylon. That trip would have to wait until another night - he needed to focus on being here right now.

"Is everything alright?" he asked, forcing his eyes away from the city to Hyperborea's face. There'd be time to sightsee later. For the moment, he was concerned that something bad had happened. Call it paranoia, but usually, when Hyperborea came calling, it was because she'd found herself in crisis. Babylon didn't mind being that person for her, but he hoped that one of these days, she could catch a damn break.

Also, he'd had a conversation a few nights prior that confirmed Hyperborea's continued lack of chill, and he was trying to think of the best way to tell her to take a damn night off and be a kid.

(Babylon had been lucky to not awaken until he was nineteen, he thought. Any sooner and he would have wound up a nervous wreck.)

Babylon stared blankly at Hyperborea. She seemed... honestly, a little bit blasé about all this, but he supposed that was what happened when the universe repeatedly tried to ******** you over prior to the age of fifteen. He was going to try to wrap his head around all this and take her word for it... but without corroborating evidence, that was a challenge.

"Alien kidnapping," he said, after a moment. "Right. Not the first time that's happened."

It was a little weird that he hadn't heard anything about it from anyone else yet, though, if so many people had been taken... But then again, Hyperborea had no reason to lie.

Except for attention, he thought. The way damaged kids do. "How did you get back?" he asked, not because he was trying to seem like he doubted her, but because, well, he sort of did. There was a hole in this story big enough to drive a semi-truck through. "And yeah, sure, let's go look around. You're certain it's safe?"

Historically, knights and labyrinths did not combine well.

Babylon nodded. True or not, he could understand Hyperborea wanting to drop the subject. He supposed he should be flattered by how quick she'd been to bring it up - maybe that was a sign of trust, not a sign of flippancy. And after all she'd been through, he shouldn't have expected her to react to things in a way he'd consider appropriate anymore. (And appropriate behavior was entirely subjective, anyway.)

At the sound of another voice, Babylon jumped a little. He turned towards the stone giant. "This is... your ancestor?" he asked Hyperborea. He was used to more human-looking ancestors, after all - but he was admittedly kind of sheltered when it came to rubbing elbows with the powerful and deceased.

So: he bowed to the stone man. "It's my hope that I do," he said, biting back the urge to ask Theseus if he'd known Menachem, or to tell him about his return to the cauldron. He'd come here to accompany Hyperborea, not pester her ancestor.

"I'd like you to show me around," he said. "If you say the labyrinth is safe, then I believe you."

Babylon laughed - no, he thought, there was very little resemblance between the tiny girl beside her and her giant ancestor. The purple eyes, though, those might have been telling. He'd personally heard Virgo describe his own eyes as being Babylon blue, and she didn't do things without cause, so it didn't seem so out there that an eye color could persist across a thousand years. "I..." he began, and fell silent as they passed through the labyrinth's impressive doors.

It seemed he would be explaining his trip to Hvergelmir sooner rather than later, he thought.

"I had an ancestor," said Babylon. "Menachem. He taught me everything I know about the upkeep of my wonder, about our family's history... And then he told me that he starseed was still at Babylon somewhere, that he'd been standing a vigil for a thousand years waiting for the next knight, and now that he was confident in my training, he wanted to go to the cauldron so he could be reincarnated."

He sighed - his constant fear was that the rest of the story would only inspire copycats. "So, uh, I shoved his starseed in my chest, carried it around for like two weeks while he used my body to finish up some business on Earth, nearly died, and then Hvergelmir helped me call for Cosmos and that's how I got these scars."

He pointed, briefly, to the glowing lines on his face. "Theseus'll probably ask you to do the same for him someday," he said, "That's fine. But the moral of the story is don't go shoving other people's starseeds in your chest. It's a bad time. There are better ways to do things."

But, hey, back to the situation at hand. "This is incredible," he said, falling into step beside Hyperborea. "Dang."

Babylon followed Hyperborea, attention rapt but saying very little. He was going to let her lead this tour and do his best not to interrupt - she seemed to be doing fine hitting all the major talking points and keeping him from having questions. Still, he couldn't keep from asking for elaboration as they passed through the room with the statues.

"What's the creed of the Hyperborean Knights?" he asked, assuming that her ancestor had gone over it with her.

In the next room, he scanned the hieroglyphics and nodded along with her words. It was like getting a guided tour through an art museum - everything was terribly interesting, but it seemed weird to comment on it out loud. That would destroy the space's sacred silence.

That was... significantly longer than Babylon had been expecting, and much more rhyming. He wondered if it rhymed in the original Hyperborean, as well, and what kind of translation trickery had been necessary to make that happen. He wondered if he should applaud when she finished - it had been quite the performance - but decided she might think he was being sarcastic.

So he said, "Wow, you've got that down pat," which was probably not better.

As they neared the end of the known portion of the labyrinth, Babylon hesitated. Nothing at Hyperborea had struck him as explicitly dangerous, but they were in well-scouted territory. If the Labyrinth was hostile to outsiders in places, then he didn't want to be the one to find out (even if Theseus had said it was safe). On the other hand, he didn't want to seem disinterested... (He was starting to get the sense that he was one of the few friends Hyperborea had, and she relied on his support.)

"Your call, really," he said. "I know how exhausting exploring can be. If you'd rather do it on your own time than try to interpret things to me as we go, we can go back."