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Pendour couldn't say that she was surprised that the strange fireflies made the air jolt with static whenever they got too close. There was something electric in the air these days. She carried the fading mark across her shoulder and chest from where she'd been struck by lightning a week or so ago.

Everything had shocked her for days afterwards, and although that had began to stop, she was sitting here, watching these buts made of literal, colorful lighting buzzing and flitting around, and it felt like a continuation of sometihng bigger.

She hoped it wasn't a harbinger of something awful, but she didn't know how to be a judge of that.

Instead, in the trying to figure out what it could mean, she found herself sitting cross legged on a grassy hillside, stopping everything else that she might have been doing. She stared, but really she wasn't doing much figuring.

She was staring, watching the small dots of lights overhead as they darted and twirled, and not minding the brush of electricity against her skin if one got too close.

When the man came into view, Pendour shifted from watching the lights to watching him. She watched the determination with which he dashed after the bugs, or whatever they where, and she saw the line that started to form on his forehead when one, then two, then more of the dots of lights slipped through his fingers.

She saw the wings on his waist, and that was interesting. He wasn't new to this, and yet she'd never met him before.

"I don't think they're, um, insects," she told him. "Not really. I think it's some kind of magic. Lightning energy. There's been a lot of that around, the last week or so."

The lightning mark across her chest was almost faded now, and her hair only had the faintest crackle of static to it instead of floating out nearly sideways from all the energy.

She looked to his face, then, her head only tilted slightly in the weakest attempt to hide her scars.

"And I don't think anyone knows quite what they are, but I like watching them, anyway."

The instinct was still to flinch away when she saw him looking at her scars, but there wasn't much use in that. She knew that at this point, just as she knew how to tell the difference between people who were gawking or rude and people who were simply curious.

He wasn't being unkind about it in any way, and so she turned to face him, even going so far as to tilt her face so he could see the marks a little better.

When he called her a warrior, it got a sad smile out of her. Once, she would have bristled at that, too, but now she only shook her head. She was a Knight, a true Knight, in a war. She was missing an eye, covered in other scars. It would make sense that people might think her hard-fought, hardened.

She would just have to gently show them the truth.

"It's not like that. I'm a pacifist. I won't harm another person, but-"

That wasn't always enough to stop the others from hurting her.

"I've made my mistakes." She ran a thumb over the bumpy scar tissue over her cheekbone. "When I was a new Page, I tried talking to a half-youma General. I told him everything that I'd learned, told him that he was broken, infected by Chaos, that he needed our help. Of course he took offense."

She'd told the story a dozen times now, but her lips still twitched a bit. She moved her fingers higher, to tap on the prosthetic, just enough to show that it was clearly something solid and not flesh. "He was one of the sadistic ones, too. Took my eye instead of my starseed so he could watch me suffer."

"I don't think he got pacifism, got peace, in the end, if it makes you feel better," said Pendour. "I never saw him again. I think someone else got him. Maybe Sess," she mused, because the Jupiter Knight had seemed to be the one who took it the most personally when he saw her scars.

After all, he had a matching set on his own face.

Things had been different back then, hadn't they? She hadn't cared about the choices others made, hadn't known about the complexities of the situation, hadn't tried as hard as she did now to stop the violence her own side provoked. Of course she still found it hard to care about the fate of the one who had taken her eye, but the rest?

She wondered, if she'd done more back then, would things be in the state that the were now? No, she knew. That wasn't the way to think, but she still found herself having to bite her lip to keep herself from going down that path.

"I don't think you're being rude," she said instead. "I, um-" her laugh was short, sad. "I know when people are being rude about it."

When he rolled up his sleeves, she reached out like she was going to touch his skin, too, but at the last minute, she stopped, like she remembered you couldn't just do that, and her hand hovered there instead.

"This is, um, bad, maybe?" she said, "But I like it, seeing other people who have scars. It makes me feel less like I'm something strange."

With permission given, Pendour gently ran her fingers across his skin. Maybe it was strange, but the way that she could feel the raises and divots and all the rest of the texture on his skin made her soft smile go wide as wide.

"You arms feel like mine," she said, like she didn't quite believe it.

She was constantly rubbing at her own skin, at her scars especially, and when she touched other people, which happened often enough, their skin was always such a different texture. It wasn't something she thought about consciously, but now she was here and nearly giddy over such a simple similarity.

"I'm sorry you had to block a sword, when you were just young," she added. He didn't say it like it was something he minded, and by the way he carried himself, she thought that maybe he truly was the brave and fierce warrior that people mistook her for, sometimes, but still. He hadn't deserved to go through that.

"But then, um, I think I might count as someone who would worry about you. Even already." She tilted her head so she could look up at his face with her good eye. "Even though I don't, um, even know your name."

"Alastor," said Pendour, trying out the feel of it on her lips and then nodding. "I like that. It's, um, sophisticated."

He seemed to embody that, with more than just his name and his outfit. He was kind in a polite kind of way. She wondered, briefly, how he'd managed to keep his manners after a thousand years when her ancestor hadn't.

It wasn't a helpful train of thought, though, so she pushed it away.

"I'm Pendour," she said with a smile.

She glanced sideways as she spotted a real firefly flitting around near all of the false ones.

She reached out, catching it in her long-fingered hands and then offering it over to Alastor. "Did you want to hold one?"

"I can show you Neptune sometime," she said, easily and almost automatically, because she liked having people at her Wonder. It made the place fel more alive, and more useful. Then she hesitated, though, lips pressing together in thought. "Although maybe you wouldn't like it, if you don't like water."

That was something you couldn't escape, not up there.

"It's in the sea, yes. Um, in a glass dome, so you can breathe, but then there's water features on the inside as well. Waterfalls, and an artificial cove, and then I've got the garden going."

It was beautiful, and it was her heart's pride after all of the work that she'd put into it, but there wasn't any getting around the fact that there was a reason her dress and her Transcendence markings made her look like she was a mermaid.

"And it was partly a guess," she said, nodding at the firefly that was now crawling in Alastor's hands. It had been a bit of luck, too, since her depth perception wasn't there, but she was glad that the little bug was giving him a memory of a summer night.