Welcome to Gaia! ::

There was something different about his lantern. He'd sensed it at his wonder, as soon as he finished lighting the lamps, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what the change was. It wasn't the physical shape of the thing - he'd counted, and it had exactly as many gold-tipped points now as it had before. Nothing had changed about the handle, the fine gold wings that held it steady, or the sigil of mercury that hung from it. The light was the same blue glow as ever. It weighed the same.

But it was different. He was certain of it. So he took off to a high rooftop where he could investigate the changes undisturbed. On earth, the lantern's surface was unyieldingly solid. Even with his gloves off, he could not slip his fingers through the glass. Nor did dragging his fingers across the surface have any effect - whatever mechanism was involved in working the light, it was limited to when he was on the surface of Mercury.

He sighed through his teeth. This was frustrating - if the lantern was going to change, then why didn't it come with instructions about how it had changed? Did everyone have to figure things out on their own the way he did?

Perhaps, he thought, turning the lantern over in his hands, it was the magic. He'd never found much use for his lantern's power before, as he couldn't use it on himself, and it was so much more effective to just hit people with the thing, anyway. But it couldn't hurt to try now, and see if anything happened...

Babylon stood, and carefully raised the lantern to eye-level. He reached inside himself, and willed the magic to flare up from wherever it was it lived - and the lantern's light blazed brighter, casting a wide circle of light around the knight.

"Huh," said Babylon, to his lantern. "That's new." But what did it do?

Hearing the cried obscenity behind him, Babylon spun, his cape whipping around behind him. "You!" he exclaimed, spotting the captain just inside the ring of light cast by his lantern. He was no closer to understanding what this new magic did, but at least now he had a test subject. Which made the knight feel a bit like a mad scientist in the worst way, but whatever. He wasn't going to hurt the kid if the kid din't hurt him first.

"You're the captain from a few weeks back," he said, recognizing the black and yellow uniform, along with the long staff. When you crossed paths with negaversers as infrequently as Babylon did, every one became distinctive. He narrowed his eyes, wondering what Zippeite was doing behind him in the middle of the night, and how he'd gotten so close without Babylon noticing.

"Were you trying to sneak up on me?" he asked, disliking the prospect. As a knight, Babylon had the upper hand in power as well as strength, but that would do nothing if he were concussed before the fight even properly began. "Are you looking for a fight?" Because Babylon had already bested this kid once and he wasn't particularly interested in a rematch.

Babylon looked at his lantern, and then at the captain in front of him, and then at the circle of light around them, and then once more to the captain. "No," he said. "I'm not attacking you. I'm pretty sure we're just talking." Unless the definition of attack had been amended to include casually existing in the same vague area of space, which he was pretty certain it hadn't.

Still, it wasn't like he hadn't noticed the fist. "Are you thinking about attacking me?" he asked, raising his eyebrows. "Because we both know how that went last time." And maybe, he thought, this time he would actually break that fancy staff over his knee: it would certainly prove a point.

Although he was hardly sure what point that would be.

"If I let you go," he posited, eying the captain. "Are you going to go straight home? Or are you going to go terrorize innocent civilians? Because if it's the latter, I'm going to have to take issue with that." The kid really didn't look like he had much fight left in him, though, Babylon thought. Despite the fist, he mostly just looked miserable. And maybe a little bit lost. Babylon sighed - curse his bleeding heart.

"Look," he said. "I don't know what your deal is, but I'll hear you out if a sympathetic ear's what you're looking for."

"Okay," said Babylon, and the light around them flickered and faded back into the lantern. "Then let's not fight, because I don't want to, either." He still wasn't sure what the lantern had done, but he had a strong feeling that the captain had been more honest with him just now than he was likely to under normal circumstances. The kid looked dead tired, like he was in no condition to be roaming the streets, and Babylon felt bad for him. Really. He did.

"There are more ways to eliminate an enemy than by destroying them," he said, lowering the lantern to his side, hopefully in a way Zippeite would perceive as being non-threatening. This was a kid, he thought, who honestly had no idea what the ******** he was doing, and he thought he could identify that because he'd been there himself. Maybe not in quite so bloodthirsty a way - but yeah, he could empathize. Kind of. Not on the murder-y parts.

"If you turn an enemy into a friend," he shrugged, "Then they're not your enemy anymore." Not that he was eager to emulate Valhalla in making friends with members of the chaos factions to the point of overlooking their flaws,but this kid didn't seem nearly as far gone as Avalon. She was beyond saving, but maybe this kid wasn't.

"So," he said. "What's up?"

Sappy bullshit. Babylon couldn't help but smirk. Called out in the act, was he? Well, that was perfectly fair. "Yeah, okay," he admitted. "I'll spare you the platitudes." Not like they'd get through to this kid, anyway, he had to figure. They wouldn't have gotten through to him at that age, when he'd been keen to disrespect anyone and anything who even supposed to know more than he did.

The kid seemed nervous, he thought. Full of a twitchy sort of energy that Babylon couldn't quite coax out of him. But there was uncertainty there, he thought, He could hear it in how Zippeite kept second-guessing his own actions. Was his conviction waning? He'd met - he'd met negaversers curious about purification, those who were uncertain about their alignment...

Best not to push too hard, thought the knight.

"Okay," he said. "I'm not going to fight you. You're not causing any trouble, so where you go's really none of my business." He took a seat on top of an HVAC pipe. "But I'm told I'm a good listener."

He could practically hear himself at eighteen sneering Laaaaaaaaaaaame.

It took Babylon a moment to realize what Zippeite was referring to, but they only had so many shared experiences to call upon, and that narrowed things down significantly. Her could only mean Megiddo, the bloodthirsty page with murder on her mind. True, he could have left that fight to its rightful end, let the page's zeal be crushed. But he hadn't. "When there's no one telling you what to do, you have to decide for yourself who you want to be," he said to Zippeite. "I'm not someone who lets people get themselves killed over stupid decisions."

He wanted to kill Avalon - but she was different. She was too far gone, stupid decision or not.

"I wasn't going to let that happen to her. Or," he continued, "If things had gone another way, to you." He remembered the page's cold resolve, her quiet fury at the interruption. "After she left, she told me she would have killed you if she'd had the chance." No doubt that page had found someone else to kill. Ruthlessness tended to find a way. But he'd had a chance to put a stop to it for one night. "One wrong move could have spelled the end for either of you."

Which, he had a feeling, was overly preachy. Oh well.

"What would you do with your life if there weren't a general-king breathing down your neck all the time?" He asked. "Would you still go for your energy quotas?"

Babylon nodded thoughtfully. Zippeite had gotten a rough hand in life, and it was exactly the kind of rough hand that the Negaverse preyed upon most effectively. He hated to come off sounding like a door-to-door missionary, but the captain's convictions didn't exactly sound solid, and plenty of his problems had just as much a solution in purification as they did in a further descent into darkness. And maybe, Babylon thought, considering the facts that he had, some of Zippeite's complaints would be even better served by joining Order than by pursuing his general's stripes.

"You don't have to owe anyone any quotas," he said. "You can have power that comes from within you, that no one can ever take away from you because it's yours." Chaos might be a bigger boost, but Babylon would take not being beholden to some shadowy greater force any day.

It was a risk, he knew, to be so forward with the captain, to suggest purification as an option so brazenly. But he could be convinced to take a chance on high risk, high reward, and to one so disenchanted with the Negaverse, the time might be right. "As a knight," Babylon said, "You would have a new face and a new name to go with it. You'd have your Wonder. You'd have your lineage. You'd have your magic - all these things the Negaverse has robbed you of, to make you into its slave, you'd get back. And no more energy quotas. No more energy gathering, period."

He shrugged. "And you could go to outer space," he said. Well, of course, unless Zippeite was secretly destined to be a knight of Earth. But the odds were against that. "There's no general who's gonna offer you that. I guarantee it." Unless the Negaverse had both an in at NASA and no scruples at all, in which case consider Babylon seriously impressed in the worst way.

"Yeah there is," Babylon replied, trying his best to dismiss Zippeite's pessimism. "Chaos tamps it down and covers it up. It makes you think that you're not worth anything without it. That's the corruption talking. You have your own power." He thumped a hand against his own chest, corny as it might have been, and then he shrugged. Who knew why knights awakened when they did? "The Negaverse just got to you first," he said. "You would have awakened on your own, in time-"

He stopped short of saying in an hour of need, because this kid sounded like he'd had lots of those. "No quotas," he said instead. "No bosses. I promise. You decide your own fate. The lineages are just..." He shrugged. "Maybe don't even have one. Maybe you're reincarnated. I don't know just from looking at you, but it'd be a good thing. You wouldn't have to answer to anyone but yourself."

This didn't seem to be selling the captain on anything. Well, Babylon supposed he'd had too easy a time so far. It was time to bring out the big guns.

"I can," he replied, grinning. The best way, of course, would be to grab Zippeite right now and take him, but those damn limitations on his powers. "I can go to the city of Babylon, on Mercury. And I can go to the Surrounding, on the edge of the Solar System. And you could go to space, too. You could get there on your own power and go more or less whenever you want. Well. You could go once a week."

"I've already been this week," he confessed sheepishly. "Another night, maybe?"