Welcome to Gaia! ::

Finn laughed - he'd expected at least some poking in response to his changes, so this wasn't entirely unusual. "I know, right?" he asked, rather liking her description (it was more flattering than Glow-in-the-Dork). "As it turns out, you can't go sticking extra starseeds in your chest without permanently damaging the magic that keeps you looking like a bog variety human."

He might have told her that already. He had probably told her that already - the contents of that skype conversation a few months prior were horribly fuzzy, but Finn didn't see any reason to get defensive about that - he'd been busy.

"Anyway, um?" he said, planning to backtrack, as he'd remembered something about the cauldron. "Starseeds make it to the cauldron all on their own as long as they're not damaged?" The only reason his ancestor's hadn't was because it had been close to falling apart. "I don't know if it would cross between universes on its own, but... there's like super strong magnetism on those things."

But that line of conversation had already been wrapped up and abandoned and he wasn't going to spend more time trying to bring it back to life than he absolutely had to, so instead he said, "As long as you're always planning to come back, then it's fine to take off occasionally. I mean. I would want to kill myself if I thought I could never leave Destiny City ever again, ever, for the rest of my life."

Actually, he thought, thinking of Elke, and added, "Hell, even if you never plan to come back for your own personal well-being, that's fine, too. None of us asked for this life."

At that, Finn had to laugh, no matter how serious a conversation they were having. "Well," he said, "They don't exactly cover starseeds and what to do with them in Superheroes 101?" He'd never before considered that in putting Menachem's starseed into his chest, he'd inadvertently become more like the parallel court than he'd realized. Was there an alternate timeline where, instead of returning his ancestor to the Cauldron, they'd ended up merged?

Considering that there was an alternate timeline where he and Avalon had a kid and lived in the woods with a bunch of other refugees from Chaos, probably.

"Cosmos might know," he conceded. But Cosmos was hard to get ahold of - he remembered Hvergelmir calling for her princess, her palm all bloody, and felt a surge of protectiveness. How much blood would the princess ask before appearing the next time? He couldn't give up one friend to another just in the name of inquiry. "One of her knights would know how to get in touch with her," he said, and left it at that.

He paused at what she said next because, to Finn, it distinctly sounded like Zia was trying to pass whatever she was dealing with off to him, to get him to pick up the mantle and figure out what was going on with the prince's starseed - and that, as much as he could help her, was not his circus and not his monkeys.

"I'm not brave," he said defensively, but he realized that was a lie. He hadn't been brave, once upon a time, but he probably was now. And he couldn't say he wasn't good at sympathetic because he was standing here, wasn't he? And he could be an a*****e sometimes but- "Zia," said Finn, "You fake it until you make it. That's what everyone does. Anyone who acts like they've been good at everything since the moment they emerged from their mother's womb is a ******** liar and also not someone you want to be friends with."

He sighed. "Anyway, you've got me. I'm here. I'm still your friend and I'll help you as much as I can? And if you wanted to run away, no one would blame you."

Elke had run away, he thought, and he wouldn't dare blame her. He'd run away, and he could only blame himself for that. "So, um, look," he said, awkwardly finishing the thought. "You're okay? You're gonna be okay and you're gonna get this figured out? I believe in you."

Finn had been through way too much bizarre bullshit in the past six months - nay, the past six weeks - for anything to particularly phase him anymore. If Zia had managed to merge her two starseeds into one and get the reaction stabilized, then more power to her, and he wasn't going to stand here trying to enforce that she needed to act like that hadn't happened. Anyway, it seemed like they were finally ready to move on from magical gossip, which was cool with him.

"Um, yes," he said in response to her question, going distinctly pink around the ears. "Do you remember - Avalon? Crazy Negaverse General, previously my best friend, wanted to kill me? Did I tell you about that whole mess?"

Honestly, that situation had been broadcast to so many people that he wasn't sure who did and didn't know what at this point. "Through some weirdness that I still don't totally understand, she, like, detonated her Wonder and purified herself and completely deleted like ninety-five percent of her memories? It's weird. I don't totally get it. Anyway, she lives here now. Sometimes. When she's not at her wonder. She's there a lot."

This was definitely a one-bedroom apartment.

He shrugged haplessly. "We're, uh, we're a thing," he said, and prepared for whatever lecture was to come as a consequence of <******** the amnesiac.

When she touched her face, Babylon realized that he must have told her - there was no getting around that scar, or the cut that had led to it. It still ached sometimes, but it had healed fairly cleanly for something its size and depth. If anyone thought he was crazy for sleeping beside the woman who had given it to him (the woman who had murdered his father, for that matter), he couldn't hold it against them. He could just shrug and say, well, she's different now.

There was a lot he could forgive, it turned out.

"That's what I'm counting on, anyway," he said, smiling at her suggestion that new memories happened. It was, strictly speaking, a truism, and if Arkady sometimes uncovered her own memories and sometimes uncovered memories that weren't even hers and he had to deal with that then it was just the price he paid for somehow, miraculously, getting her back from beyond the point of no return. She'd been corrupt. She'd hated him.

And then, somehow, that hate had turned to love, or obsession, or something between those two emotions.

"Anyway," he said, tangling his fingers together, "I'm back, I've got no plans to go anywhere for a while, and I made a cool thing that tells me what kind of knights Negaversers would be, so we should take it out for a spin sometime. I'm guessing you can't turn into a cat anymore - how's the interdimensional sorceress look affecting your ability to look for trouble after dark?"

He'd known that Zia would be particularly interested in Mistral's and his invention, but this reaction seemed a bit much. "Yeah, we might have better luck if- hey, uh, Zia? Breathe."

It would be majorly inconvenient if she passed out on his floor.

"Tell you what," he said, watching her closely to make sure she was not doing anything silly and overdramatic like hyperventilating. "You use your infinite web of connections to bring me a willing Negaverser - not to Florence Court, obviously - and I'll give you both a demonstration. Deal?"

Finn followed her with the intent of making sure she found her way downstairs and out to the street safely. "Don't be a stranger, okay?" he asked, waving after her. All that stuff about coming back wrong had him, well, he'd go with mildly worried. She'd merged the two halves of herself and jumbled her memories in the process, and there had to be some people who weren't completely thrilled about that.

"Let's do dinner soon," he called after her, and once he was sure she'd found the front door, headed back to his apartment.

So, that was a thing.