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Babylon liked the roofs. They made him nostalgic for a time when he was younger and more naive and still thought that putting inflatable snowmen in stupid places was a valid form of art. God. What a ******** idiot he'd been. Maybe Babylon didn't miss it so much after all. But he did still like being up on the roofs! It gave him a good lay of the land.

So there was that.

He was surveying the roof of the biology labs when an order signature pinged on his mental radar. Mid-level. Moving fast. Babylon whirled around, watching the white-haired senshi land. Not one he'd met before, but then he'd only been back since relatively recently. There were a lot of people he didn't know.

Babylon frowned slightly. It didn't look like there was anything pursuing the senshi, so what was the rush?

"Where's the fire?" he called, jogging over. "Need any help?"

Babylon stepped carefully along the apex of the roof, and he looked the senshi over (as one did, when meeting an unfamiliar superhero in the dead of night). The boy's dialect was odd, and he caught himself wondering if he spoke like that all the time, or if it was sort of a Batman voice thing. "Of a sort," he replied, not consciously meaning to play along, but darn, it was kind of infectious.

"I'm known to do some damage," he said, dangling his lantern at his side where it did absolutely no good. He was also known to get his a** kicked by girls a rank below him, but that didn't really need to be said. The senshi, he noticed, had a scar across his face that made the one Babylon sported look... somewhat less impressive.

"Babylon Knight of Mercury," he supplied, nodding to the senshi. Pageantry could be fun sometimes, he decided, if they were in no true hurry. "I do my best to keep the university grounds clean. Who do I have the pleasure of speaking to?"

When Thraen mentioned his sphere, Babylon suddenly made sense of his unusual, colorful uniform. It suited him, he decided, more than some other senshi's uniforms suited their spheres. Nothing was ever guaranteed to be self-evident. "I've met... a few," he said. "Pages, knights, squires. Someone mentioned a Templar to me recently, but I've never actually seen him in the flesh." Well, once, a long time ago, before Templar was even part of the war's vocabulary.

"We're an ancient order," he explained. "Sworn to protect the ancient royal houses. Polaris has knights and a senshi. So does Chronos. I've never seen reason to seek my princess." He didn't know why.

He had others to serve.

"I'm the latest in a long line of Babylon Knights," he shrugged, hefting his lantern demonstratively. "We keep the light. See that it never goes out."

He was starting to think this was a metaphor. Somehow.

"Were you looking for a fight tonight, Sailor Thraen?" he asked. He gestured to his own face, tracing the line of the senshi's scar to where it would have intersected with his own. "It looks like you already found one."

"Sort of," said Babylon, glancing at his lantern. He'd never found much use for his magic, and always hoped he might grow into something stronger. What he could do just didn't match what his ancestor expected him to. "It does an accuracy boosting sort of thing, but it's not much use. I have to keep it steady, and it doesn't work on me, only on allies."

"I do use it as a flail," he admitted, watching Thraen land. "Which I agree is poor use for it. I'm certain I bring shame upon my ancestors." Well, he was certain of that anyway, for reasons totally removed from his misuse of a sacred knightly relic.

"Mercury would be a princess," he agreed. "I mean, I think she would be. I think she was, when she lived. A thousand years ago, perhaps. I've got no reason to wait for her to appear. If you wait for princesses, you'll waste your whole life. Or worse, you'll find a false prophet." That was the Jovians' teaching, anyway. Ares had been a false princess. And Europa had been so sure of Chibimoon only for Chibimoon to abandon them all...

"I don't need her in order to fight," he shrugged. "My light is an unbroken chain." His grandfather had smuggled family documents about the order of Babylon out of Nazi-occupied Poland. That seemed like as good a reason to fight as any long-dead Princess.

"Yours is a worthy quest," he said to the senshi. "I'm delaying you from it, aren't I? I'm sorry."

Babylon nodded slowly, trying to absorb everything Thraen was saying - and he was saying quite a lot. "No one has enough power to," he said, after considering it for a long time. "There are princesses, but they don't assert control. Chronos has her court and doesn't assert power beyond the Zodiacs. The other royals..." he shrugged. He didn't know them well enough to make a judgement. "There are teams. Large ones, even." He was part of one, but the Jovian court swore allegiance to no princess and no true leader, even - they swore allegiance to themselves.

Which, if he understood Thraen correctly, was part of the problem.

"As for the knights, I don't think any of us know our true place in this war, besides that the Negaverse is what we become should we fall. With so much of our order consumed by Chaos, it's hard to organize."

And then there was just the issue of everyone having too much ******** ego to get behind one leader and go with it, and he, personally, was as much contributing to that issue as anyone else.

"That and the majority of Order is a bunch of ******** prima donnas and I include myself in that number," he admitted. "But I know confusion and defection and death."

Babylon tapped the scar on his cheek. "I've lost a lot in this war because I was selfish and because I was cowardly," he said. "So it's about time I stop being both those things."

"You'd have to find the princesses first," said Babylon, frowning, because finding the princesses seemed to be half the trouble. "Or short of that, if you're looking for someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of everything, find Zirconia. She's like Switzerland, but a person. If you want to improve your chances of her liking you, she's super-partial to scotch."

He was all for organizing - should someone come up with a way to do it. Order was so sprawling, and with no reliable infrastructure or leaders, it seemed daunting to even conceptualize how to bring everyone into step. The Negaverse seemed like they'd had that infrastructure

"I know the Jovians," he said. "They're um, mostly they're senshi from the moons of Jupiter, couple of Jupiter knights, handful of miscellaneous senshi, at least one cat, and me, for as long as they'll tolerate me." Which honestly boggled his mind, that Valhalla hadn't dumped him on his a** yet and told him to find a new team to hang onto.

"I know there must be others, but they're breaking up and forming all the time, and to be perfectly honest I just got back into town a few months ago after a lengthy absence, so I'm not the best person to ask," which was embarrassing to admit, but it was going to come out sooner or later.

"I could bring it up with them," said Babylon, which was easier said than done with a group as large and spread-out as the Jovians "I don't think they're against unification as a whole - they're always talking about allying with other groups, but it's not like they have a true distinct leader." Were Princess Jupiter to appear tomorrow, he didn't know how the Jovians would react. It was impossible to say - they'd gotten this far by not counting on her ever appearing.

He noticed he was talking about the Jovians like he wasn't part of them. And then, having noticed this, continued to do it.

"They call their philosophy Many-as-One. They make decisions as a group, act as a unit. It keeps the egos in check, as far as I can tell, but then you've got your thing about polyarchy and this might be exactly that."

He shrugged. Babylon had always felt like his position within the Jovians was tenuous at best, even though Ganymede and Valhalla had made the four thousand-mile trek to Fairbanks just to bring him back. "I've got to warn you, you probably won't meet the whole team because it's like over ten people and getting that many senshi in one place at one time is begging for an ambush. Best I can probably do is score you a meeting with two, maybe three, tops. Probably senior members. Buttwings, you know?"

Least he could do was try.