Welcome to Gaia! ::

Hvergelmir was on her own to host this meeting once more. It was a bit less nerve-wracking now that she'd done it a few times . . . but only a bit.

She set up the small table of water bottles and granola bars just as always, and moved around the room attempting to dust off the stall plates she’d hung up around the amphitheater a few visits before, the plaques Titan had collected on his trip into the Rift.

That was all the preparation there was to be done. Everything else — the topics to discuss, the things to say, the demonstrations — Hvergelmir had gone over those things backwards and forwards. It was all memorized, practiced.

For better or for worse, she was once again ready.

“I think that’s it,” she said aloud to the cloudy presence of the Code, trying to quell the fluttering of nerves in her stomach. “I guess it’s time. Go ahead and send the call, if you would.”

Olympus was, on this occasion, cast in daylight: the distant sun glowing hazy through the Martian atmosphere, casting long shadows between the theater’s huge columns. At the center stage of the area stood a lone knight: a woman dressed in white, with an antlered golden staff at her side and iridescent hair piled on her head.

“Welcome,” she offered to some of the arriving knights in turn. Sometimes it was “Thank you for coming,” or sometimes, “Please, feel free to have a seat.” She pointed out the refreshments, then waited till it seemed like most of the knights who were planning on attending had gathered.

Eventually, when they were all assembled and mostly seated, the woman in white looked out over the small crowd. “For those of you who have never been here before,” she began, stilling a small tremor in her hand as she raised her voice to be heard, “we’re currently standing on Mars. This is Olympus — a thousand years ago, this was the place where we, and our ancestors, gathered as knights. We’re here again because we’re knights again. I’m glad you all could be here.”

Her eyes moved between familiar faces in the group, settling on them for affirmation. Her grip was a little tight on her distaff. “I’m Hvergelmir Knight of the Cosmos,” she said.

“I’ve called you here today because, unlike the sailor soldiers, we don’t have any guardian cats to provide us with guidance. As knights, we rely on each other to share information and advice — and when we don’t know something, we try to figure it out on our own.”

She held out a hand to gesture at the Code, an indistinct gray presence floating nearby. “This entity is a part of a larger construct known as the Code. It can speak, it can change shape, and some piece of it exists at each and every one of your Wonders. The Code can help you, at times, giving you information the rest of us might not have. It’s thousands of years old — perhaps even older than our order. It relies on our protection — but just as we can help it, it can also help us. Although in past months, it’s gone through some difficulties, and you may want to take its words with a grain of salt, we have reason to believe that the Chaos which was infecting ithas been contained and dispelled, and the other pieces of the Code are no longer being influenced by the piece that was housed in the Rift.”

Hvergelmir paused. “For some of you, if you’ve never been to a meeting like this before, this may seem like a lot of new and unfamiliar information. Don’t worry, that’s the main purpose of this meeting — to go over the basics of what we know about being knights. For some of you, this may be old information. While we welcome any new information or fresh perspectives you can provide, I understand if your time is precious and you need to leave. That choice is yours.

“For today, I’m going to go over the basic information, then open up the floor for any questions, or any new information some of you might’ve come upon.”

She took a breath. “If you’re here,” she said, “then you’ve awakened to your powers as a knight — and as knights, we’re each tied to our own ancient piece of land that allows us to command a certain amount of what we think of as magical ability.”

“Yer a wizard, Harry!” someone in the crowd — probably the same person as every time — shouted out.

Hvergelmir raised her eyebrows and smiled again. “Yes,” she agreed. “That’s more or less true.” Pausing only briefly, she went on, “For some of you, the land you share a connection with is a place somewhere here on Earth. For many of the rest of us, that land is somewhere deep within the reaches of space — either within our Solar System, or outside it. We each have the power to visit that place and see what our ancestral land once looked like, just like we were able to come here to Mars today . . . but remember that these places — we call them Wonders — have had to survive for thousands of years, often without human protection. They may not be safe to you or to any strangers you take with you.”

She’d decided to leave out the homeworld oath for this part of the speech. No matter how much they stressed ‘don’t try this now,’ it was entirely too likely that someone was going to accidentally or purposely try it anyway, and wind up disappearing from their meeting to parts unknown far too early. Practical applications of knowledge were something they planned to do later, after the rest of it was finished.

“As knights, our connection to our lands is unique, and it differs somewhat from the connections we see in the people we refer to as sailor soldiers. We’re tied to our land both by our blood and by our souls, for lack of a better term — which means the power we wield is an inheritance that we can either pass down to future generations of our bloodlines, or that will pass down to us once again in our next incarnation. Some of you,” she said leadingly, “are what we call Descendant Knights.”

Hvergelmir took a bit of a pause for this one. “Some of your ancestors passed down their knighthood through their lineage — but that’s not always the case. Whatever faith system you subscribe to, we have a fairly clear understanding that reincarnation exists, that it happens in thousand-year cycles — and that, for many of us, this is not our first lifetime.” She gave it another moment.

“When I’m at my Wonder, memories from my other life tend to come back to me. As a page, our first level of power, it was just snippets here or there — bits and pieces, flashes of instinct or images that meant something to me — but when I became a squire, our second level of ability, I was able to recall more. As a knight, I know there are still things I haven’t remembered yet, but the things I do remember have a lot more context. They’re generally complete narratives, when they come.

“I had a flash of memory like that when I was first looking for my signet ring — before I found it, I had an idea of where to look. Memory of this kind doesn’t work like the rest of your memory does, since it’s not well connected to your current life, and that means it’s not something you can easily force . . . but the right memories seem to be connected in places we can’t always see, and they seem to often surface when we need them, however much they can. Don’t give your brain a hard time . . . let things come to you.”

She turned back to the audience. “Everyone here will have already found their own talisman, if you’ve managed to power up before, but I’ll tell you what I can about them.”

Hvergelmir held out her staff to indicate it as an example. “Your talisman, your magical item, or weapon, depending on what term you like to use, is a magical object you received when you first came upon your powers. It’s tied to your powered-up state, and you can summon or de-summon it as you please. It starts out simply, when you’re a page, but over time, as your powers grow, it evolves in its state and usefulness too.”

Hvergelmir looked up at her staff. “I don’t think you’d enjoy the demonstration very much, but my distaff, when I use it, can emit a very bright light. Another knight has a lantern that can compel people to tell him the truth. Typically, we’ve seen that these magical abilities don’t manifest themselves until you’re a squire. The greater your powers grow, the longer you can sustain your magic. That’s true for all your magic — for example, each knight also has what we call an aspect, related to their planetary order.”

“Aspects,” Hvergelmir explained, “are an ambient magic — something you can turn on and leave on while it lasts, rather than having to keep any focus on it. As a squire, I had access to mine — I just touch my signet ring to turn it on.”

She did so; in a moment, a glittery sheen of starlight had come over her person, soft and twinkling with a faint full-body glow. “Aspected magic is the same for every person within a particular order of knighthood, as far as we know — so for knights of the Cosmos, this is what ours will always look like. Mine’s chiefly useful if I’m stuck in hand-to-hand combat. While it’s active, anything Chaos-based will find that it burns them to try and touch me. But, for an ally, you won’t have any trouble. My magic’s not dangerous to anyone else.

“Mercury knights have a sort of glitch effect — a visual magic that makes them harder to see. Mars knights get a sort of second wind, in combat. Saturn knights, like Mercury, get a camouflage effect — theirs makes them silent and stealthy. For many of the others, I don’t know what they do yet. We’re hoping that some of you will be able to help us with that.”

She brushed her finger over her signet ring again. “And a touch to turn it off again,” Hvergelmir confirmed. “It’ll also stop if you try to call on your talisman’s magic at the same time. As a knight, my aspect will hold up for about ten minutes if I stand around sparkling non-stop,” she said. “As a squire, we’ve noticed it’s about half that.”

“The other Chaos faction is the Dark Mirror Court. The Dark Mirror Court are a group of senshi — like the Order-energy-powered senshi some of you might choose to work with — but who’ve chosen to swear their allegiance to Chaos in exchange for a different form of power. They look similar to the corrupted senshi who serve the Negaverse — both wear black uniforms — but the Negaverse’s senshi have cracked holes in their chests and foreheads, whereas the Dark Mirror Court’s servants wear gauzy uniforms.

“The Dark Mirror Court are less actively violent — and they advertise themselves as being unaffected by the Chaos that powers them. They claim that their goal is to gain access to their homeworlds in space, and repopulate there — but we have no evidence this is the case, and it’s counter-intuitive at best. Senshi already have access to this ability without needing to forge any kind of a pact with Chaos. In fact, they lose this ability on conversion to the Dark Mirror Court. We encourage you to make your own decisions as to who you ally yourselves with, but please exercise extreme caution in this regard. Guard your civilian identity closely, even with those people in other factions that you personally trust — remember that you might trust an individual, but that doesn’t mean we know whether we can trust the Chaos that they serve.”

Soapboxing aside, Hvergelmir returned to more pertinent information. “Their magic works very similarly to Order-powered senshi magic — they cast it using incantations, and it has limited uses. Dark Mirror senshi can’t travel to space, but they do have a particular ability to walk through mirrors, to some extent, and some sort of headquarters within the mirrors themselves. Like the Negaverse, they steal energy from people. They use shadow-looking creatures to do so. They work quickly, but the creatures are generally less dangerous than youma and easier to defeat.”

Wanting to lighten the topic a little, Hvergelmir moved on to their next point. “Fortunately, as knights, we’re not alone in this war. We have frequent allies in a group of people called sailor soldiers. They’re powerful warriors, and where we use a combination of magic and the items we wield in combat, they command raw magical power that we can’t match, even from the moment they awaken. They dress in at least partially white uniforms, and they look like — well, most of them look like they’re wearing some form of sailor suit, frankly — like you might imagine. Their advantage is in their magical expertise. Our advantage is in our ability to function and expand our abilities independently. In order to unlock greater power, sailor soldiers need the help of Mauvians.”

Hvergelmir took a breath. “I don’t know how else to put this,” she said. “But Mauvians are talking cats. However you choose to make peace with that idea, that’s the basic gist of it. They’re alien creatures that were reincarnated, like many of us, and while some of them can assume a partly human-looking form, the majority of the time they look like fairly average housecats. Usually the sailor soldiers will partner with them, since the Mauvians can provide them with some guidance and access to their higher power levels, and sometimes create items for them.”

Hvergelmir took a long breath and smiled. This was exhausting. “That’s about everything I had to go over,” she concluded. “I want to thank you for sitting through all of it, and I hope some of it helps. At this point, I’d like to open the floor up for any questions people might have, or any new information people have learned that might help us all. Let us know how we can help you.”