Welcome to Gaia! ::

Andronicus snorted and watched the group flock to the scroll. She would have, but having a bum foot and not crutch or cane was really unhelpful. Besides, there were stairs. She'd found in her two hours being home that stairs were the bane of her existence right now. She couldn't exactly manuvever steps without something ending up in pain or half falling down them.

Going up was hell. She really didn't want to experience going down. So Andronicus stayed on her bench and watched. She was sure to be able to see something from up here.

---

Bifrost on the other hand, trotted down the group (because everyone massing in it) and decided to stand smack dab in the middle of the incorporeal scroll. Because clearly that was the way to open it, and clearly no one else was going to be as daring (she also just really wanted to stand in that mass of energy. It was warm...).

"It's really warm!" she said to the entire group around her. Well its a scroll that apparently needed opening, correct. What better way to do that then:

"I pledge my life and loyality to Chronos and the Bifrost. I humbly request your aid, in order to reveal the contents of the scroll," not quite the pledge, but close enough surely to invoke some sort of change in the scroll.

Babylon stared at the scroll, hands folded thoughtfully beneath his chin. "Why is this knight different from all other knights?" he suggested - or maybe he was saying night? The only thing clear from his intonation was he thought he was pretty clever. And hey - the time of year worked for the joke, right?

"You know," he called rhetorically to their absent host, stepping a bit closer to Hvergelmir, whose sense of humor he liked. "If you wanted to host a seder, you only had to say so. I'd have brought a dish. So, like, what? Have we got to find the afikomen before you'll tell us what's up?"

He made an eh, eh sort of gesture to Hvergelmir. There was a 98% chance, statically, that no one here had any idea what he was talking about.

"I haven't met a Mars Knight either" Falias admitted. In fact prior to today Falias could probably have counted the Knights that he'd come across on both hands and if he went by the number that he;d actually talked to then the count would most likely be restricted to the single hand.

"And I haven't been a Squire for that long" he added in answer to Aventine's query about his upgrade. In fact he'd been a Squire for so little time that he hadn't even really examined his new 'weapon' and given that his upgrade had taken place on the floor of a burning warehouse he'd had bigger worries at the time.

Before Falias could finish his internal debate about whether he wanted to go into the burning warehouse floor aspect of his upgrade, he was distracted by the sudden sense of a large amount of energy, head turning automatically in the direction he'd thought it was coming from. "Did you feel that?" He asked Aventine, his voice slightly distracted.

He hadn't caught the scroll appearing, but it was hard to miss people suddenly moving towards part of the Coliseum floor "It looks like there's something there" he added perhaps somewhat needlessly.

Falias thought he'd caught sight of what looked like armour - Camelot perhaps - amongst some of the Knights congregating around the area where the energy seemed to be coming from, glancing back at Aventine as he offered "And t least it's something rather than nothing so maybe we should check it out." He waited a moment or so to see if Aventine agreed before suiting action to words and moving closer.

He managed to get close enough to spot the scroll, although that was largely helped by the fact that said scroll happened to be the size of a rug.

”Fancy seeing you here,” Sessrumnir grinned, approaching Palatine, although he did spare a wink to the ladies that were near her. “What do you think?” he asked, jabbing a thumb towards the scroll that appeared out of nowhere. “Maybe it’ll start reading us a story. If there aren’t holograms, I’m going to be very disappointed in Martian technology,” he joked, although he was fairly certain he would be ready for just about anything this planet threw at them.

There were several others already heading towards it, but Sessrumnir remained where he was, shrugging and crossing his arms. “Why have a coliseum if you have to get up close? Hey! Down in front!” he called, really wishing he’d managed to smuggle a beer or two with him.

Eventually he took a seat a row behind Palatine, leaning back to rest against the row of seats behind him. “Someone should try asking it in Klingon,” he suggested, mostly to himself with a laugh. “Seems Martian enough.”

Not that he knew anything about Martians, but obviously no one else did either.

Camelot might have been the strongest, but arguably not the most reckless, and curiosity and the need to punch buttons until something blew up was starting to over ride caution as Kairatos made a move toward the curious crowd milling around the scroll. No one had yet been blasted, but he thought Bifrost might be on the right track.

"Let's see what happens if we go with the non modified version." He suggested to the Chronos Page. "Or.. maybe..."


This was Mars after all, maybe it would work? Or did they all have to swear? He wasn't sure, but he tried to get close enough to take a tentative wave at the mist coming off the strange floating scroll. maybe there was something where it came up? Maybe they were supposed to use their rings?

"Hey, let me check something out." He added, trying to get closer and holding out the hand with his signet ring, nudging it at the curious scroll to see if ring and paper had any form of interaction, adding, because he did think Bifrost's idea was a good one...

"I pledge my life and loyalty to Mars, and to Kairatos.
I humbly request your aid, so that in return I may give you mine."

As fingers, and full bodies, passed through the scroll it ebbed and shifted a little in response, though after each attempt it would slowly reshift to the original scroll form.

However something else did seem to illicit more of a reaction. As Bifrost and Kairatos each spoke their own pledges the scroll pulsed with momentary light.

For a moment the 'scroll' remained floating there, until finally it began to unfurl, revealing a scrawled text. The knights would quickly find, however, that they need not be close enough to the scroll to read it (not that they could recognize the characters on it anyway), because from seemingly nowhere a voice filled the Coliseum or perhaps it was just their own heads...

"Knights of the Universe." Thankfully, and inexplicably, it was English.

"I have been calling out to you all for many years. Perhaps you have felt it or heard it in some way?" Most had at some point, whether they knew it or not. It had not likely been a voice at the time, but more of a feeling. When they first harnessed their powers. Those strange feelings some of them had when their weapons changed. When a knight was lost and in need. Though it might not have been a voice at the time, something had been trying to 'speak' to them all all this time.

"At last, now you have found this place that will let you hear me more clearly."

"I am the Code. I exist in everything, see everything. I observe the balance of everything. Light and dark. Order and Chaos. The universe cannot survive for long when the scales tip too heavily in one direction." Those who happened to be watching the 'scroll' would notice it's shape begin to shift, the mist swirling and shifting in color until it resembled instead a large scale. A scale whose arms dipped and settled in unison with the voice.

"It was the duty of your ancestors to protect The Code and spread it's words across the universe. This is your duty as well, the job of every knight. Protect the delicate balance. Promote peace."

"The balance shifted many years ago towards Chaos."

Babylon was thrilled that Hvergelmir not only got his joke, but was able to come up with a timely response right on the spot, and he grinned at her. Only for a second, though, because then the mysterious intangible scroll started to do a thing, besides just being mysterious and intangible.

"I don't supposed this is what you had in mind when you suggested we were waiting for Elijah," he said to Hvergelmir, more or less literally talking out the side of his mouth.

"Huh," he said, tilting his head to the side as he regarded the Code. He supposed that he understood about having heard it calling before - or else, he was doing that thing you did when someone introduced a concept way too advanced for you and you didn't want to look stupid so you just played along. But everything else, he definitely understood - though he was not about to tell an ancient piece of intelligent magic to tell him something he didn't already know.

That seemed rude, after all.



This was officially way too ******** weird for Megiddo. And besides, she disagreed with all this bullshit about balance, anyway. "I thought we were supposed to wipe chaos out," she challenged. "I thought we were supposed to destroy it before it destroys us."

That was just, like, the law for the jungle, right?