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When lifting her arms over her head made her less liable to want to die, she arranged meetings. Zinkenite first--he was a known quantity, she wanted to know if she could trust him. Then, armed with the knowledge he'd given her, she contacted an unknown quantity. Sitting on the second floor of the Celtic Cafe, her back to a corner mirror, she wrote:

Leto--

You don't know me, I don't know you. But I've heard you can tell me about the Blood Moon Court, and what they call Operation Rota. If you would do me the courtesy of meeting with me to discuss this, I'd appreciate it. On my honor as a Knight, I won't raise a hand to you.

She wrote the place and the time, and took a deep breath before sending the missive, her signet in black ink at the bottom of the letter. Not every time she closed her eyes, but often, she saw the horrified, haunted look on Wolframite's face--he'd stabbed her, almost killed her, wanted to kill her. But she remembered him protecting her, too, and had to wonder what the Blood Moon Court had done to him to cost him whatever had been left of the good person she'd known.

She would start with Leto, she told herself. Then Remarque. Then Requiem. She'd find out what had happened, and that... would be that. Right?

Waiting had never been Avalon's strong suit, but it wasn't exactly her worst virtue either--she could wait a while when she was really devoted to it, which in this case, she was. She tapped her fingers on the table in no particular pattern, examined her nails (chewed down to the quick, she was so anxious lately, how was she going to deal with all this--at least she was ******** graduated from college and didn't have to worry about that any more), and when someone tapped her shoulder, she reacted very badly.

To her credit, she would later think, at least she didn't scream. She did, however, shout "<********>" and throw herself away from the table, sending her chair clattering down. The chaotic aura that suddenly permeated the air around her had her reflexively bringing her wand to hand, for all she still had no clue what exactly her magic was or how it worked. She wheeled to face the Dark Mirror senshi, and then... paused. Black wingbow thing, camouflage overlay thing, black ribbons, unsettlingly red eyes...

"Sailor Leto, I guess," she said, a red-violet flush suffusing her face. Wow, way to make a good impression. Only not. "Sorry." She dropped the wand into its stupid hyperspace pocket, righted the chair she'd knocked over, and listened for a moment--when it seemed no one was coming up to investigate, she sat back down. "You surprised me," said Avalon, a little redundantly. Captain Obvious, that was her.

She neatened the table, set her hands over the small stack of printer paper (there was a halfhearted paper crane close to her left hand--she'd been bored!). Her shoulder throbbed and she pressed one hand over the wound--at least there was no blood, so the skin hadn't broken again. "Um. So. I recently had an... altercation?... with General Wolframite... he mentioned the Blood Moon Court, and... General-King Zinkenite said you might be able to tell me what they did to him." Hopefully dropping enough Chaos-aligned names would do a little to convince Leto that Avalon really didn't mean any harm. Or... that was the logic.

The Eternal senshi cringed at the name. Why? Avalon leaned forward, as if that would make Leto more likely to talk to her about this--more likely to just read her mind and give her every scrap of information that she could. Unlikely, but it was a stupid reflex, anyway. She waited, practically holding her breath--like breathing too loud would make Leto change her mind. Yes? It was not a yes or no question. Or a rhetorical one! It was an explanation question.

"I've been out of the loop," said Avalon. "For a while." Months and months and months. And she'd been new before that. "I think I awoke after the Blood Moon Court did whatever they did." And then there'd been the Surrounding… It'd been a busy time to be awakened as a knight. There hadn't been time to play catch up.

Avalon wanted the information Leto held, badly. She was impatient for it, to understand… She took a deep breath at the question Leto asked, acknowledged there had to be some level of exchange, and said, "I only awoke… recently. Before that, Wolframite and I were… close." Close? It was the only word she had. "He protected me when I was a civilian, and powerless. He wasn't like... Zinkenite, who tried to kill me, or any of the other Negaversers. He looked out for me." Was that too much information? Probably. She doubted Leto would be asking Wolframite for names, at any rate, if Wolframite's reaction to the gray-haired senshi's appearance had been any clue at all. She traced patterns on the paper beneath her arms with a fingertip. "So you understand, I was shocked when he attacked me. I hadn't seen him for a while, even in civilian form, but I hadn't expected him to be so... vicious. I want to know what happened to make him that way."

And then, quieter, "And I'm trying to decide if I'm on the right side of the war. Order is so... disorganized. People are advocating purifying Negaversers or just killing them, and I don't know where I ought to stand, or even if it's the right side to stand on."

The immediate response was surprising in some ways, but really… what else would someone on the side of Chaos say? Avalon prepared herself to just ignore whatever the senshi across from her was about to say, but the entire thing… it didn't sound rehearsed. It didn't sound like Zinkenite's carefully considered evidences. It sounded like bile, like it was too acidic to keep back. And that, more than anything, caught her attention and gripped it tight. Her breathing turned shallow, her lips pursed, and she struggled to keep her judgment from her face--this person had hurt Wolframite, had ruined him. And she'd been able to do nothing about it, hadn't even known until now.

Order senshi had thought this up. Operation Rota had been the brainchild of Order senshi. Had the Negaverse ever done anything so crude? Not that Avalon could remember.

When she trusted herself not to shout, she said in an oddly strangled tone, "What did you do to him?"

If Leto hadn't had Avalon's attention before, she did now. Her focus was nigh-laser like, murky dark eyes fixed on Leto's face. A good word might have been rapt. "Yeah," she said. "I can see how it would be." If she could turn invisible, she'd probably patrol a lot more than she would otherwise… just saying.

And she listened to the rest of it and felt sick to her stomach. Was this what she'd been defending? It must have been--she couldn't think of a single thing the forces of Order had done. A food drive, once? Caring for the civilians on the Surrounding? But they'd had to. That wasn't goodness, that was merely decency. There was something at the back of her mind, something that she knew she could bring up against this, but she remembered only the sound of terror in Wolframite's voice as the white and red senshi carried her away and blood dripped down her arms--

She rubbed the stitches under her shoulder and exhaled, thinly. "So what happens when you switch sides," she asked. "Zinkenite told me that I'd lose some of my memories, and that it would hurt, and that no one who knew me before would know me now. Was he lying?"

It was… compelling. To hear it from someone else. She didn't want to be swayed, and yet… Avalon had seen the things that Leto had described. Not Operation Rota, but she'd seen a senshi unleash a maelstrom of fiery death on the Surrounding, seen civilians die there. The candid discussion Leto gave… It did more to sway her than a thousand dry recitations of facts would have. "I know," she said. Even if Wolframite had changed, he'd once been the sort of person who looked out for a girl he hardly knew.

"Can you really say you've lost something if you don't remember it?" She wondered which would be better: to forget her life as a civilian, the good and the bad, or to forget this life as a Squire of Earth. Consideration brought her the answer in short order. Remembering Parker, Giselle, Jan and Kess, Ladon, Wolframite, all of them--that'd be worth the rest of it. She took a deep breath. Why remember something that'd only caused her hurt? "Thank you," said Avalon, "for talking to me about this. And for not ripping out my starseed and feeding it to a monster. I don't know if that's something Dark Mirror senshi do, but I appreciate it all the same."