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Rakovanite's question actually made sense, and Sylvite nodded, her eyes flicking back towards him for just a second. That was the kind of thing she could start asking about. Relationships could be used to lure someone out, to distract them, to do all kinds of useful stuff.

Still, what she really wanted to know about was what this girl could do.

"What's your name?" she asked, loosely gripping the starseed as she reached that hand out, like it was a prize. She looked over the sheer amount of pearls on her dress and squinted, double checking the aura just in case, because she wasn't sure if something as little as whatever she was holding would be a Squire's weapon, but she felt strong enough.

She could just ask. "You're a Squire, right? You've got magic? What is it?" She jiggled the hand with the starseed. "Just tell me and you can have this."

---

The first Knight that Pendour had ever met had told her to never make deals with the Negaverse.

They'd offered him protection, once, and then ripped out all of his teeth anyway. They had cut off his arm, too, maybe as part of the same bad deal. The details were fuzzier on that one, but it was still the mental image that came to her mind as the Captain held the starseed out to her like a dog treat. A hard lump formed in her throat.

She processed the Lieutenant's question first. She glanced down at the stranger. "No," she said, shaking her head, before she realized that this might get dangerously close to trying to figure out her true identity. "Maybe?" That, though, was getting dangerously close to lying, and she swallowed. "No."

There was no reason to think the Negaverse would honor their deals, no reason to think they would give as much as she took, but maybe she could try something here. "Um, Pendour," she said. "That's my name."

And then she brought her ocarina to her lips and began to play. The calming magic never worked on her. She was tense as she took a few steps closer, closing the distance between them even as she did what they wanted.

When she got close enough, she reached out for the starseed, trying to pluck it from the smaller girl's hand.

Rakovanite knocked her hand out of the way, and Sylvite scrambled back a crouched step or two farther. She curled her hand a little bit tighter around the starseed. Yeah, she'd been about to hand it over, but that had been as part of a deal, not some... some...

...some trick?

Sylvite could tell that Pendour was using some mind magic, and she could tell that she was trying to take the starseed without really spelling things out or giving the full deal, but she wasn't nearly as annoyed by that as knew, deep down, that she would've been on any other day. Everything was just kinda muffled, kinda soft.

It was really nice, even if it was also all wrong. Sylvite wasn't even in mood to argue with Rakovanite as he asked her to leave. She had no idea what his play was gonna be, but okay. He could get some field experience. He could try.

Sylvite had gotten what she wanted, more or less, and so she crept up just enough to press the starseed back into the woman's chest, and then with a nod to her trainee, she teleported away.

She didn't go far, just to behind a shed that was down the path a bit, and then she quickly powered down and peeked out from around the corner. Her head cleared up right away, and she found herself wondering what he was gonna do, overpowered and without any bargaining chip.

---

Pendour watched the girl return the starseed and then vanish. Well, that was a better outcome then she'd be expecting, even if there was still a lieutenant there, staring at her in a way that sent shivers down her spine. She had no idea how close the other one was, but she couldn't shake the feeling that she was caught in a pair of jaws that were about to snap closed.

Then, maybe this lieutenant was one of the bullied ones. There was always a chance of that. Either way, she stopped her magic about halfway through its time pool, and she simply looked over the lieutenant before meeting his eyes.

No, he looked hard, somehow, not scared. She'd have to tread carefully here.

"And what is it that you want?" she asked, voice much softer, even though she still gripped the ocarina tightly.

The stiffness in Pendour's shoulderblades went even tighter when he crouched down next to the woman. She didn't need her soul removed twice in one night. With a sudden decisiveness, Pendour stepped forward and hoisted her up with the ease of someone lifting a small child, not a fully grown adult. It meant that she had to let the ocarina vanish, but that seemed worth it right now.

She took a step back, and it was only then, with the woman cradled protectively against her chest, that she considered his question. "Is it that strange to care about other people?" she asked. Her voice was as soft and nonthreatening as she could make it. She'd found that agents tended to listen a little more when she phrased things as questions.

She glanced down the path, although only for a moment. She didn't have much peripheral vision and she still needed to watch him. "It would be sad if she didn't meet up with her friends, yes. Is it so strange to want to live in a city with less tragedies?"

He was cold, but as a lieutenant, he shouldn't be so broken as to not care about people's lives. Not yet.

"So, as an answer, deontological ethics? I think that's the word. Um, the one where you try to do the right thing?" She didn't look down at the woman in her arms, but she could feel her breathing. Maybe she was part of them, too, part of whatever trap was about to spring closed, but even so, Pendour couldn't help but feel a little comfort in the fact that she was safe. "And empathy. Maybe a little of both?"

There wasn't quite a textbook definition of her morals.

"Are you arguing that this would be euthanasia?"

Pendour blinked, her eyes narrowing back at him, and while her voice was still far from harsh, it lost a bit of the carefully maintained softness. "No," she said, flat out. "That's not the kind of choice you can make for someone else." Maybe she didn't have to be so careful, now. She could run from this lieutenant if she needed to, and if there was something more going on, it was already too late.

"If you truly felt that life was pointless, for yourself," she pursed her lips, "Well, I'd recommend therapy, but if that didn't work, that would maybe be one thing." Although that got complicated, too, too complicated to easily discuss when she was still holding someone vulnerable. "But how can you judge someone else's quality of life? Many people think it's all worth it, even with all the bumps."

The words about loosing something, loosing ability and normalcy, hit her hard, harder than he might have known, and she winced as if it was a physical knife that was twisting in her innards. She took a quiet breath to steady herself, then said, even quieter, "You talk about 'my kind.'

"I try not to generalize, but it was one of yours who did this to me." She turned her face so that her scars were obvious, three pale and jagged gashes that cut across the right side of her face and over the eye. The prosthetic eye, although that was harder to see unless he could tell that the pupil hadn't dilated.

"Um, when he could have killed me instead, because he thought it was harder to live, and because he thought it was, um, interesting to watch me suffer?" There had been no other logical reason for it that she could think of, and she had turned that night over and over in her mind many times.

She took a few steps back, trying to get the woman away from whatever he was doing to her back, even if it meant her shirt ended up ripping. She wasn't liking this talk of paralysis, not at all.

"So, I'm sorry, but as a group, I find it hard to think you have much interest in mercy."

In that moment of silence, Pendour wondered if it would be rude to just walk away, or if that would be enough to trigger whatever might be waiting for her. She didn't mind talking about philosophy, she really didn't, but it was hard to give the conversation her full attention while trying to keep a finger on the pulse of nearby auras and trying to make sure that nothing worse happened to the woman in her arms.

It was the agent, though, who ended up ending the conversation. Pendour blinked at his retreating back, not sure of what was going on, not sure at all. She didn't complain, though. "Okay," she said. "Um, you too."

She turned in the other direction, ready to find a place for the woman to recover. She was already trying to stir. Under her breath and mostly to herself, she added, "Try not to hurt anyone, please."

A Captain's aura flaring back to life sent her sprinting, and before long she had vanished into the treeline.

---

Sylvite popped out from her hiding spot as Rakovanite started walking in her direction. "Hi," she said, waving at him. "It's me. I'm still here."

She'd been watching them the whole time, obviously, although from her vantage point she hadn't really been able to tell much besides that the knight had continued to look kinda nervous and that Rakovanite's back looked exactly the same as it had before. Nobody had gotten punched, and that was probably good. Sylvite really hadn't been looking for a fight, especially since they'd already gotten a firsthand look at Pendour's magic.

She bounced over to him, still high on the thrill of actually finding someone to interview.

"So? How'd it go?" She tilted her head, waiting.

Sylvite folded her hands in front of her as she listened. She was strangely still and silent as she watched him, nearly mimicking his stoic expression right back at him except for the fact that her cheeks were sucked in the tiniest bit in focus.

Then, when he finished, that all broke apart into a huge grin.

"Woah, you're good at this," she said, rolling back and forth on her heels. "Like, really good. You notice stuff. That's like, pretty much what I was gonna say about her, except three times as articulate." Sylvite could usually make things sound okay in her reports, but not that smooth, even if she spent big chunks of time planning it out beforehand.

"As far as Pendour," said Sylvite, glancing down the path where the squire had vanished, "She was smart about things, like using the magic to get closer to us, and I would actually put 'concern for human life' as a pro, if we're talking recruitment." The agents who let the power get to their head and started eating starseeds all the time or being bullies tended to give the Negaverse a bad name. "But extreme pacifism, probably a con, since the whole 'needs of the many' thing can get kinda, uh," she pursed her lips, "Messy."

The Order aura off in the distance vanished. Sylvite chewed her lip some more. "You're right that she's kinda passive, probably not a threat on her own. I wonder how passive, though. I was thinking about what you said." She glanced back over to Rakovanite. "When you asked if she knew that lady? I was thinking, while you guys were talking, that I bet someone knows her."

Random strangers had been decent bargaining chips so far, but they did have their limits. "I was wondering how hard she'd be to catch, and if she'd be decent bait for a bigger fish." She'd need more information to be really sure, but it was a thought.

Was that- was that a little bit of emotion in Rakovanite's voice? Sylvite did a double take, but as quickly as it had happened, it was gone. Still, for just a second there had been a glimpse of a person under all that soldier, and Sylvite's grin went even bigger.

Obviously, she was gonna have to break out the well-thought-out compliments a little more often with this one.

For now, she nodded at what he had to say. She hadn't been lying. He had seemed to figure all this out pretty quick. "Yeah, you're right. I wouldn't put her down as an ideal recruit. Probably a low level threat, by database terms." She squinted one last time at the spot in the distance, then nodded. "Using her as bait, that's just kinda a brainstorm idea I had. There's not much we can do with it now, but let me know if you see her with anyone else, okay?"

She'd been using the same starseed trick for bargaining for awhile now, and she though it might be time to step up her game. That wasn't the point of tonight, though. Tonight had been about training, and the training had gone about as well as possible.

"Yeah, you're welcome!" she said, trying to bring herself up to her full height to look like a superior officer. "You did really good, like I said, and it was nice to meet you." There was a beat before she added, "Um, you're dismissed?"