Welcome to Gaia! ::

Joy found herself inexplicably a mess of nerves as she awaited Ekstrom at the appointed quiet spot, and had attempted to dispel them in the way she normally did - with sheer iron willpower. Sometimes that worked. It had not worked this time.

The idea of taking anyone else with her to the Garde had left her feeling strangely possessive, as if she was sharing some secret that gained half its value by being unknown to others. But this was categorically silly, and she felt, besides, that she owed Ekstrom the favor. And it might prevent her from receiving the worst of Nail's lectures, in the way that inviting your friend inside after school might keep your mom from yelling at you about your homework.

But she'd been keeping an eye on the database, and the reports of suddenly powering down had alarmed her. It was silly again, but before powering up she'd taken the time to hide her hair under a hat and do her best to put on the most generic clothing possible, right down to pulling on a face mask over her chin and nose - an absolutely laughable move, and one that she felt quietly humiliated over. But she had still not yet mustered the courage to tear down the barrier between who she was and who she'd been forced to become, and every bit, she supposed, helped.

So she waited, in the skin of the Joyeuse Garde, and it was not until she felt Ekstrom's approach that she realized that she had not seen the other knight since she had become a squire, and that she might be surprised in a pleasant and flattering way by the visible promotion that Joy still felt a bit of imposter syndrome over. It made her straighten her back a bit, smooth down the fur on her sleeves, and try to look as though she felt as imperious and confident as her new appearance suggested she ought - and which, in fact, she usually did.

It felt quiet, and it felt peaceful, and she could tell of no one near who ought to concern her. So she lifted her voice a little before Ekstrom stepped into view, singing out with careless and joking bravado: "Now boarding with service to the French Riviera - no wait, it just says 'a French river' here, actually, with a high chance of rainfall and lightning. What a shame."

She felt a girlish and almost irrepressible urge to reach out for a hug. But she did not, instead channeling the energy into giving a little twirl and then striking a series of poses, brandishing her new whip with each. She had her own thoughts about everything that had happened to her, but she couldn't really argue with the outfit, anyway. And then, with a wry little laugh, she dropped the modeling act and spread her arms in a sort of helpless gesture.

"Girl," she said, "I have been busy as hell. I'm pretty sure this is gonna count as a vacation, Riviera or not. I've never taken anyone with me, by the way, but I feel like I know how to anyway. I guess it works like that for most of this bullshit." She wrinkled her nose. "How've you been?" She asked it with a sympathetic sincerity, as if already foreseeing a similar answer.

"Oh," she said, startled. "I met someone else with those - I just assumed they were sort of..." She made a vague wave of her hands, encompassing all the things she did not know. "On sometimes, off sometimes. I didn't realize they were things you got for your trouble." She paused. "I'm not sure whether to say congratulations or I'm sorry," she admitted with a wry laugh. "So I'm going to go with congratulations, because I have faith in you. But I do wanna hear that long story later, in its entirety, either way."

She hesitated. "But since you said later, I guess I should - do this." She made an expressive face. "There's um -" she hesitated once again, and longer. She could not find a way to phrase what Gouvernail was that wasn't distressingly strange to her ears, so she opted for a mysterious pronoun, trusting it would make sense later. "I know he can't actually interact with you but he may try to kiss your hand. Just roll with it. That's also a long story."

This would, maybe, explain why Joy's first reaction to meeting Ekstrom had been to laugh and expect her to do exactly that.

She held out a hand, although mercifully not for that purpose. "Ready? Any questions first, that I probably can't answer anyway?"

“Well,” she said, almost grimly. “Let's go, I guess.”

The immediate sensation was one of fresh air: the kind of air that you only get where a river runs down and meets the ocean, and which seems to require the raucous noise of seagulls to feel complete.

But on a Wonder, of course, there were no gulls to wheel over the expanse of ruffled silver water before them, which stretched down between primeval banks towards an unseen sea. The sky overhead had the restless, heavy greyness of an impending storm - that sort of half-lit bank of clouds that makes the trees swaying in the wind before it almost unnaturally green. The lack of bird calls felt ominous and eerie, paired with the endless rush and susurration of the wind in the trees.

They arrived on a broad spit of stone, which a moment’s observation showed to be the remnants of a curtain wall, running alongside what might have been a courtyard once but was now overgrown to the point of wildness, from which there rose, to one side, the still mostly-intact keep with its towered corners. Fragments of white plaster still clung to the stony walls in scraps, and the high arches of the windows had been stripped of nearly all of their glass, save for one or two lingering panes painted with figures in bright and translucent colors, the towers still bearing the empty poles that had once flown massive banners - all of which suggested that while the Garde had always been small, it must once have been very beautiful.

They did not arrive alone. Only Joy had the moment to catch Gouvernail’s expression of surprise - almost alarm - at her having brought a visitor. She pretended not to have seen it, in her usual deference to his dignity, and wasted no time in making introductions.

“Gouvernail, This is Ekstrom, a Knight of Mercury,” she said immediately. As Joy had suggested, she engaged in a little pantomime: Joy lifting her hand, as if supported in his, to let him pretend to kiss the signet ring on her finger - a formal little greeting, unsmiling and detached. The movement was exchanged like it was old habit, without either needing to ask or offer. But Gouvernail - tall, greying, sober-faced - did not move as if to do the same for Ekstrom, instead bowing his head at her with more the respectful air of a soldier greeting an equal and allied combatant. “And Ekstrom, this is Gouvernail - the former Knight of the Joyeuse Garde. Ekstrom has come to - to learn things. About the storms, like I told you last time,” she added. She had a flush in her cheeks, a flustered uncertainty, or possibly a rising anger, at this difference in his way of addressing the two of them. Her warning to Ekstrom thus rendered useless and unnecessary and also embarrassing, she paused, apparently lost for direction, and turned towards Gouvernail a look of unmistakable expectation, as if expecting him to take the lead.

“It is good to see the Garde welcoming visitors once again,” he said. He made a movement as if to rest his hand on a sword that was not there, instead folding it over his side in an attitude of formal watchfulness. But he said nothing else, and Joy, again, looked a little at sea as to how to proceed, apparently having not expected to find herself, and not Gouvernail, in the position of host and guide.

“Well,” she said, with a little clap of her hands. “Let me know what you wanna see. Some of it's still too overgrown to get to.”

She started moving along the curtain wall towards the keep even as she answered.

“All the way to the roof. You can see the ocean from up there when the weather's clear.” As if hearing her and spiting her, the rain began to fall in slow drops, hurrying her along to get them under said roof quickly. “So not today. But there's a lot underground, apparently, and I still can't get to most of it - there's a chapel down there.”

She was in a slow jog by this time, ducking through an empty doorway and into the main body of the keep to get them out of the approaching rain. She glanced back, an expression of confused relief flickering over her face as she realized that Gouvernail had stayed where he was, impervious, of course, to the weather, his back to them in an attitude of watchfulness, as if there was any need to keep an eye on a river that would never yield any boats. His absence perceptibly relaxed both her body language and her tone.

“There's crypts down there too, but I don't know if they're empty or if there's anyone in them. I haven't been able to get in without him around and it feels… I don't know. Insensitive, you know?”

There was a little pile of supplies by the door, and she scooped up a flashlight, tossing a second - kept as a backup, but now useful to a guest - to Ekstrom, an invitation to her to poke around. The empty windows were tall to let in light, but the clouds blowing up sank the room into a gloom. Scraps of painted plaster still clung to the walls and even the ceiling, suggesting that it had once been covered in murals; the single surviving pane of painted glass somewhat incongruously depicted a man and woman in flirtatious but chaste embrace. Ivy had crawled in through the open arches, and along with rotting threads dangling from empty tapestry bars was being tossed in the wind. Joy had to lift her voice over the sound of the rain.

“I need to bring a machete or something. I couldn't get one into subspace - it spat out a gun and mace, too,” she added nonchalantly, as if certain that everyone had tried this,of course, “and I haven't tried just - bringing it with me yet. I don't know if there's a point. All we do is talk. I ask a bunch of questions, he asks a bunch of questions, I get lectured, and then I go home.”

She made a beeline for the window, sweeping the flashlight around in nearby nooks and corners, searching for something, and then made a satisfied sound, aiming the beam at a large spider which crouched in a web. “The only living thing around besides me. And you,” she added. “Although I imagine she has to be eating something. They're all like that, right? Yours too? Everything is dead? Haunted by the ghost of some a*****e?”

She had been mentally preparing for the effort of deflecting the idea of what Gouvernail might or might not want, when the idea was thrust entirely to the side and instantly forgotten by this revelation, which actually had Joy turning towards Ekstrom in open incredulity. She had moments before been allowing the spider to crawl onto her hand so that she could deposit it somewhere drier before the rain blew in more than it already was. She stood there in the gloom for several seconds in astonished silence, and was only moved by the spider making a run for her sleeve.

She retrieved it, gently returning it - she, apparently, had no fears of spiders whatsoever - to a slightly more sheltered corner.

"What was - what's wrong with it? Can they be - like, broken somehow?"

It was a genuinely disturbing thought. To hell with spiders: it was this that made her skin crawl. The idea of there being some more literal form of ghost - some inertia-slogged echo of the past going around in meaningless silence - was making her feel vaguely ill.

Joy was silent for a long time. She was never much good with other people's displays of emotion (post-session outbursts notwithstanding), and she stood awkwardly, incapable of knowing how to respond until a sudden, especially violent peal of thunder shook her from her paralysis.

She spoke plainly, then, the only thing that she knew to say, which was - as it always was - the unvarnished truth.

"No. It's never necessary. ******** the Code," she said.

She had startled at the peal of thunder, and she had in fact made a sudden movement as if to see to something, quickly aborted.

But she had recovered, now, and she was simply looking at Ekstrom with a very strange expression.

"There's nothing here to save," she said. "There's nothing here at all. Just a dead man."

She hesitated, but she wasn't about to let her courage fail her in the face of a little lightning, magical or not, and stepped to join Ekstrom at the ruined window. Her eyes wandered up to the fragile, ancient glass pane, with its incongruous little piece of romance painted on it, and then back out to the skies. Nothing she could do to save a pane of glass, if the storm decided to take it.

She was looking out, down towards the curtain wall where it stretched to the water, and where there was no longer a ghost standing with his back to them. But if this put any uncertainty into her, she kept it out of her voice and out of her eyes, which were trained on the lightning as another bolt struck out with angry violence.

"It hasn't been nothing but kind to you," she said after a moment. "Messing with your memories isn't kind. But I'm not gonna argue with you about it." She said it with a bit of the dismissiveness you might find in an old friend who, disgusted with your shitty boyfriend and your excuses for him, was washing her hands of warning you anymore. It was a moment of looking past her easy, friendly exterior, and even past the frank empathy she'd offered her seconds before, to something a little uglier, and a little colder. Perhaps, if Ekstrom had problems getting attached too easily, Joy had problems in the opposite direction.

She stood for a second in silence, still looking out to the empty curtain wall and past it to the sudden and violent turmoil of the sky. "It looks like the end of the ******** world," she said at last, flatly, startling slightly at another peal of thunder that shook a chunk of plaster loose from the ceiling. "It's weird, isn't it? That it can come and find us here. I thought the Earth wonders were sort of - outside of reality, you know? But I guess they aren't, somehow. Or it wouldn't be able to find us." And then, without looking at her: "If I power down I'd appreciate it if you didn't look at me."