Welcome to Gaia! ::

The city spun into view, and Babylon rose from his crouch. He looked down at the petite senshi beside him, and gave her hand a squeeze. “So,” he asked Virgo. “How does it look? I know it’s probably in a lot worse shape than you remember it…”

He’d been looking forward to Virgo’s reaction to his wonder for a long time. She was the only living person who could recall what it had been like during the silver millenium, and as her childhood home, it had special significance to her. With the lamps lit and the barrier restored, he’d been even more eager to show her his work - although, once they’d set a date for the visit, he’d started to feel some trepidation. What if she was disappointed? What if he made her cry again?

Above them, the city glowed blue. Babylon scanned the mountainside, looking for lamps that looked faint, or gaps in the light. He spotted one or two, and made a mental note to take care of them later. “I, uh, I got everything up and running about a week back,” he said. “The lamps. The barrier.” Beyond the blue dome, a storm raged - but in the knight’s square, the snow was falling gently.

“Where do you want to go first?” he asked, smiling down at Virgo, searching her expression for any sort of tell. “And are you warm enough? You can wear my cloak if you need to.” The barrier, it seemed to him, kept Babylon more temperate, but it was still cold enough that the high snowbanks didn’t melt. And Virgo’s dress was… well, he’d seen people wearing more whine about the weather.

Well, Virgo seemed happy, Babylon thought, breathing a sigh of relief. She always seemed so serious, and so her peaceful expression was a nice change of pace; he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her wear anything quite like it before, and he wanted to keep her looking that happy as long as he could manage - taking her to see his ancestor, who he wasn’t even sure was still around, had the strong possibility of ending in tears. “Menachem, uh, he kind of comes and goes,” he said. “We can look for him, but there’s no real guarantee if he’ll turn up.” Or if Virgo would be able to see him - Kurma hadn’t been, from what he recalled. Though that had been a long time ago.

That, and he was a little bit worried that Menachem had done the whole ascend-to-a-higher-plane-of-existence thing after their last meeting, and he didn’t want to spring that on her if it was true. From what he gathered, they’d been close.

“Let’s go find your old house in the meanwhile, okay?” he suggested. “There are a few lamps I need to check on, and they might be on the way. And you can tell me about what it was like to live here. You know, point out landmarks and stuff?” Maybe, he thought, it would be easier to be a reincarnated knight. Vindemiatrix’s visions on his homeworld seemed more in line with seeing actual scenes of the way things were, and he imagined it was similar for knights who shared souls with their predecessors. But then again, he’d learned a lot from his ancestor - would he be willing to give that up?

“So, uh, you know that thing I was looking for last time we talked? The wick?” he asked, trying to see if she’d follow him if he started up the stairs. “I found it. It’s - look.” He held up the lantern and plunged his fingers through the glass surface, pulling the lion-headed rod from its core. “And then, watch.” He dragged his fingers along the surface of the lantern, gathering light, and fed it into the lion’s mouth. Then he tipped the wick up to the nearest streetlamp, and it blazed a little brighter.

“I figured that out all by myself!” Babylon beamed at her.

Babylon glanced down at Virgo and decided that she was holding herself like she was freezing, and she looked a little blue. Which may have just been the lighting, but whatever. He unclasped his cloak from around his neck, reached over, and settled it around her shoulders. “Humor me?” he suggested. “I would really hate to be known, forever, as that a*****e who gave Soldier Virgo hypothermia.”

Not that hypothermia was, like, contagious. He’d lived in Alaska. He’d studied wilderness skills. He knew this. But he thought the point was clear.

“Okay,” he said, following her down the street. It was sort of hard to grasp what the different neighborhoods would have been like back when the city was flourishing, but the houses here seemed sort of large, with little walled courtyards and yawning, empty windows. He topped off two lanterns that looked a bit dim and one that was out entirely, and then trotted obediently beside Virgo, looking at the houses and hoping she knew what she was looking for, because he certainly didn’t.

“So, what was it like to live here?” he asked, hoping he wasn’t being too distracting. “Or were you too young when you left to really remember…?”

Babylon looked up at the tree, remembering the graveyard on Virgo’s outpost, where every tree meant a dead Virgon. “So, she’s, uh…” he said, trailing off, because he definitely understood Virgo’s meaning. “Right. Got it.” That was kind of touching, really, and who was he to judge anyone’s burial practices when modern humanity had decided that putting corpses under rocks where you could visit them once a year and pretend to be sentimental was the way to go.

Then again, the tree was dead. But it had grown, once. “Do you think,” Babylon posited, following Virgo into the home’s foyer, “That if we transplanted trees here from your outpost, they would grow?” Not that he was really roaring to try it, because he had a lot of bigger issues to deal with than trying to grow things, and he was pretty sure that Sailor Europa had gotten sick from weird alien plants and had no desire to repeat the experiment.

He glanced around the house they’d entered into, thinking about how, really, it didn’t look horribly ancient. It was a sort of weird thing to take into consideration, that a thousand years ago actually wasn’t all that long ago, but it also was. Roughly five centuries before Columbus sailed to the new world and Galileo mapped Jupiter’s largest moons, humanity had been part of a vast, intergalactic civilization, and that was seriously blowing his mind right now. “So you’ve got, uh, all of your memories from your last time around?” he asked. He’d debated the phrasing, but he sort of figured that might be a good way of putting it. “Are all senshi like that eventually? Or just you?”

Were there any keepsakes here, he wondered. Was Virgo looking for anything in particular? Or was she just looking, for, like, old time’s sake?

“Okay,” said Babylon, pausing in the foyer. He knew he’d never understand, precisely, what she was feeling right now, but that was okay with him - Virgo, as an entity, was far more grand and powerful than he would ever be, and he accepted that. Embraced it. Marveled at it. “Yeah, we can turn around, go look other places, if you want,” he said, and followed her back out to the street.

“Do you want to go back down to the Knight’s Square,” he said, falling into step beside her. At the very least, it would give them a destination. Wandering the city aimlessly was not a very good plan - he still didn’t know what most of these buildings were. “Maybe you can tell me a little bit about some of the neighborhoods while we walk. Or, like, whatever you want, really.”

All he wanted to do was give Virgo a little homecoming, to try and make up for making her so sad the first time they’d met. Pressuring her to do anything she didn’t want to do would probably just defeat the purpose of this visit. “We can go look at Menachem’s study. Or - I don’t know if you would have been allowed into the crypt, but I’m the proper knight now and I can make the rules, so we could go there. It’s neat.” In a sort of spooky way. Maybe his choice of adjective had been… lacking.

“What was my ancestor like?” he asked. “I mean, you said you were friends with him, but the guy I know - he’s just kind of cold and prickly. He seems sad all the time. But you know him better than me.”

“Oh, okay,” said Babylon, as they started the journey down to the Knight’s Court. She seemed to have forgotten his question about the city, but perhaps her memories were stronger in some places and weaker in others. Like she’d impressed upon him before, she left home very at a very young age. “Yeah, off to the crypt.” If that was even the proper name for it. If he ever saw his ancestor again, he’d ask for the proper terminology for everything.

“Was he already old by then?” he asked, glancing over at her. He couldn’t help but wonder what that hand on her face meant, but he tried to focus on the new information instead. His ancestor had had daughters - in all likelihood, he was descended from one of those girls that ancient Virgo had been friends with. “I mean, he just always seems so melancholy and serious to me, and what I’m trying to figure out is if he was always like that, or if something made him that way.”

He glanced up at the blue barrier that arched across the sky, meeting the mountain somewhere far above the city’s highest street. Maybe it was the fall of Babylon that made his ancestor so sad. Or maybe - something before that. He couldn’t quite figure out what, but then, he knew hardly anything about the fall of the silver millennium.

“I don’t know if you’ll be able to see him,” he warned her. “Or if we’ll find him at all. Will you be okay with that?”

By Babylon’s guess, his ancestor looked to be in his early sixties. That meant there could be going on twenty years between when Virgo had last seen him and when the city finally fell. Twenty years when who knew what had happened - Menachem surely wasn’t telling. But maybe, Babylon thought, he stood a better chance of opening up to Virgo. They’d been close. How close, he wasn’t exactly sure - she was choosing her words very carefully.

“I’ll let you know,” he promised, and he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to find his ancestor or not today - part of him didn’t, but part of him realized how much it would mean to Virgo if they did. Even if she couldn’t see him. Even if he had to be their medium.

The door to the crypt was fairly unassuming, flush with the stone around it and tucked between two of the buildings circling the square. It was inscribed with the sigil of Babylon, and opened with a touch of his signet ring. “It’s a bit of a hike,” he intoned to her, as they stepped inside. He held his lantern high to light the way, and kept close to Virgo. “It’s, um, I guess they buried all the past knights down here,” he explained. “They’ve all got statues. It’s kind of like - have you seen Game of Thrones? It reminds me of the tomb under Winterfell.”

“Anyway,” he continued, as the passage widened into the great cavern. “Here we are.”

He was charmed that she’d taken to wearing the light, now that she’d recovered it, but that was neither here nor there in terms of importance. The conclusion she reached about the missing statue was much the same as the one he’d drawn - if Menachem had, as he’d always maintained, fallen with the city, then there would have been no one to build a statue for him. Who knew if he was even interred here, or if his body had been destroyed by the invading forces?

He bit his tongue at that idea. Better not tell Virgo - it would only upset her further, and she already seemed, well, somber.

“You don’t need to apologise,” he said instead. “I don’t mind. You two were obviously close. It - it makes sense.”

He stared off across the room, towards the light in its well, and then his eyes drifted gradually back. He tried to count the statues circling the walls, but they faded into the shadow and were too numerous to grasp. How ancient was their order? Did anyone know when the light of Babylon had first been lit?

From the far end of the hall, there came the sound of footsteps. Babylon snapped to attention, and saw his ancestor emerge from the gloom.

“Aria,” said Menachem, his pace quickening, the tone in his voice soft like nothing Babylon had ever heard before. “Aria. I’d know you anywhere.”