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She would ask, but she wrinkled her nose in instinctive and unspoken confusion as to whether it would do any good. It had been hard enough to get him to talk to her about those things, but then again, sometimes it was easier to open up to a stranger than someone you were obligated to spend a lot of time with.

And, she reminded herself, whatever he had to say about his obligation to her or anything else, she still strongly suspected that he despised her, even if it was less than he used to. Maybe he would not despise Nis. She had a hard time imagining anyone could despise Nis.

She did not say what she was thinking, which was: he didn't have any friends. She didn't even know if it was true, exactly. But the aloof contempt with which he often spoke of his fellow Academy members - whom he clearly considered as some sort of soft-handed pretenders by and large - did not bode well. Maybe afterwards, though - on more equal footing - he had had something in the shape of friends. She'd asked, but it hadn't done much good.

Nis's follow-up question was a blessed relief that prevented her from having to find a way to reply that wasn't just a reiteration that she'd ask him without sounding too skeptical while she sat there fidgeting with the ties of the swimsuit still folded up in her lap. So she suddenly laughed, looking a little sly.

"Petitcru hasn't met her yet. I'm keeping her in my vacation home," she added airily, with a flippant sarcasm as if to make it abundantly clear that Elaine did not have a vacation home to speak of. Unless, of course, one considered a crumbling castle on the river in some place very like Brittany as a vacation home. Abruptly and without ceremony she again assumed the guise of the Garde.

"Her name is Pal," she said, and as she spoke, there was a sort of shift in the air behind her, an image accruing, wispy at first and abruptly settling into clarity. "And actually, I think she was a friend of Nail's, in a way."

The ghostly form looming over her was only a dog in the loosest sense of the word, looking something more like an LSD-fueled nightmare of a giraffe: leopard and deerlike, her magnificent manuscript tail trailing behind her. But the many pairs of eyes turned towards Nis, opening like flowers all along a snakey neck, certainly opened beneath canine eyebrows, and when the creature opened her many toothy mouths, they were unmistakably houndlike.

Before she could begin her godawful noise, Joy held up a hand. "Don't bark!" she said hastily. And then the creature seemed very doglike indeed, releasing a disgruntled, whispering wuff from a dozen throats at once and tapping its front feet anxiously on the sand.

Nis had once said that Joy seemed more like a Golden Retriever owner. Whatever the godawful monster was, it certainly seemed to have the general disposition of a Golden.

She laughed, pleased that Nis recognized what she was looking at but more than a little baffled at the intensity of her response. She had expected this to be met with familiarity.

The thing couldn't exactly be touched in its current state, but Joy was not opposed to using up her power for the day. “Be careful. She thinks she can sit in your lap. It's easier to pet her when we're back - on the Garde,” she said, letting the monster extend an eager forehead, distracted from sneezing at the wisp by the prospect of pets. She became solid as she did so, with many foreheads to choose from for scratching purposes. “I can't keep it up very long,” she added, and she wrinkled her nose in confusion. “He said it was - a thing knights can do. I thought maybe you could too. It felt instinctive - you know how some of it does?” This, almost apologetically, as if to convey that she hadn't intended to gracelessly flex on her.

Joy, after all, only flexed on people gracefully and on purpose.

Pal, as warned, wisped back away into insubstantiality, and seemed to understand this, as she almost instantly turned from Nis to again engage with the wisp, as if it were the red dot of a laser pointer.

Joy, in response to Nis’s question, laughed somewhat incredulously and waved a hand at her own clothing, and then at the cove they were in, and then made a sort of general gesture that seemed to encompass the entire world. “Girl,” she said. “What's impossible?” But she took on a more businesslike tone, giving her a curious look. “As to how I found her - well. Like I said, he tries to be helpful. It was in a bit of a tight space, but we had a Mauvian over and she dove right in for it.” It didn't much matter that she didn't say aloud that ghosts had their advantages after all, since it was implied by her voice despite her best efforts to the contrary.

She reached down to the chain hanging from her waist, and from the furs there she drew out a string from which hung a few unremarkable links of metal, which she jingled. It looked, in truth, like a bit of refuse or garbage. “She comes from this, somehow - like a Pokeball, I guess? And she hangs out on the Wonder, between, I think. Anyway - maybe there’s something like this here. Maybe you can remember it, and find it,” she added, and while before she might have been battling an urge to say I told you so, that had vanished: there was only the genuine hopeful suggestion, accompanied by a searching look as if she was hoping to discover that Nis had already, in fact, found something that might fit the bill.

This had been one of Joy's earliest points of Mental Crisis, and so she felt herself pretty adequately armored - pun intended - against the vagaries of reconciling mythology with fact, at this point.

She powered down once it seemed that Pal had lost interest in the wisp, the beast wisping back away - presumably to the Garde - and she stood up to walk a little way off and begin the process of changing into a swimsuit, which she did quite shamelessly out in the open, apparently not caring whether Nis opted to get an admiring eyeful or give her respectful space. This, and Nis's question, gave her an excuse to avoid dumping her own Grand Unified Theory of Earthly Mythology just yet, although her brow wrinkled for several long and confused seconds, the answer not coming to her quite as readily without the thought of a giant monster at the forefront of her thoughts.

"Ach," she said at last, in what, it must be said, was an extremely poor Scottish accent. "Not the loch?" And then: "Good God. Do you remember our first conversation ever was about Bigfoot. Seems appropriate in hindsight."

"The Joyeuse Garde," said Joy, as she procured a towel from subspace, spread it on the sand, and deposited her clothes onto it, "wasn't invented until - oh - I reckon a couple hundred years after the last Garde bit the dust. It's where Lancelot took Guinevere, you know, when Arthur tried to burn her at the stake. I figure - I don't know - stories are persistent." She was wading into the water, now, closing her eyes. "So maybe there were a whole lot of creatures like Pal, and some of them ended up in a story that stuck around after the world fell. Or maybe someone looked at Pal once, and told someone about her, and it got all distorted up and ended up in a story. Or maybe it's a coincidence, and stories just want to take the shape of a big ******** up giraffe thing that sounds like a bunch of dogs in the same way that they wanna take the shape of - of heroes and prodigal sons and doomed lovers and all that sort of bullshit. And maybe there needs to be a Joyeuse Garde, somewhere, somehow, in some way. Like there needs to be a Loch Ness. And wherever or whatever they were originally, the stories had to be, somehow. And they had to be on Earth."

Submerging herself up to the shoulders, she exhaled a blissful little noise. "Or that's my theory, anyway."

Joy had expressed a great deal of angst about the existence of Destiny City bullshit in general, but she seemed to be quite at ease and unconcerned with this particular bit of chronological headache. But Joy, after all, was Elaine - and Elaine was a person whose first love in life had always been for a type of story that seemed to have a persistent, living need to be told, changing shape constantly as it went until, Ship of Theseus style, it was both everything it had ever been and something entirely new.

Stories were easy to reconcile. Ghosts, less so.

And then, belatedly: "I'm not any better with a French accent, to be honest."