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“I’ll let you know if I need to stop,” she said. This expedition was, um, a little unexpected, and she was having a bit of trouble orienting herself to the fact that she was now on Mercury. (If she looked, she could see the bright red star that was Venus overhead, and that was unnerving.) “I am very sorry for all the s**t I gave you about deep arctic survival gear,” she told him, flipping her hood up. Her gloves felt like they were made of something sheer, like a thin felted wool lined with… something slick, it didn’t feel like any glove lining she knew of. Space linen. She didn’t know. “I’m okay for now, and I’ll tell you if that changes.”

There were definitely not emergency services in Space City. Like, hell, she’d been some pretty desolate spaces, but she could hear the wind through the streets and it unnerved her on a level that didn’t bear examination. It set her teeth on edge.

What she really wanted, she reflected irritably, was a piggyback ride. That was just a little bit too undignified for her to go for it right now, so she dealt with it, following Babylon up to the first street. “So this is… your space house? Space city?” All she’d wanted to know was why she wanted to pledge her power to herself. Like that wasn’t a thing she already did? She scowled at the city and tried not to question why it felt so very, very much like coming home. There was a part of her that wanted to shed a tear at the sight of the square they’d arrived in, and another part that wanted to scream. Why? She didn’t know.

“This page thing is so inconvenient,” she lamented, “I want to do all these things, and I don’t get why.”

A space city, well, okay. It still was setting her teeth on edge and she had the stupidest desire to, like, fix the hanging shutters and close the open gates. It seemed disrespectful to her, that they were left like that. She felt like… someone would be disappointed. Mistral tried to put it out of her mind and pay attention to Babylon, but it was like being told not to think of elephants. She couldn’t help but think of the elephants (the crazy space cities).

“There is a weird space city like this waiting for me,” she said, doubtfully. “Babylon, I can’t walk for more than thirty minutes at a time. My weird space city is screwed if I have to do anything like this on my own. I cannot achieve speed objec--”

There was a bad visual effect walking down the street. Mistral felt, all at once, both heartened and terribly sad. For what reason, she did not know. “My name’s Anabel,” she said, fighting the urge to add now. “It’s nice to see you, Menachem.” And there, she very deliberately did not-- what-- being a Page was confusing. Really, really, really confusing. “I guess I’m Mistral when I look like this,” she said, pulling on the hem of her long sleeveless parka thing.

She was making a really really awful impression. She put her face in her hands and sighed and realized--

“Home,” she asked. She looked over at Babylon. “Home?”

Nothing the Force ghost was saying made any sense at all to Mistral, who felt like she had a really killer headache and she did not have any of her pills on her. She had only expected to be away from home for, like, an hour! Just sussing out Finn’s new digs and then getting an answer about swearing her power to things and, and. She’d had a weird urge to cry whenever she looked at the stupid journal she’d found and still hadn’t had any luck deciphering. She was going to ask about that too.

At Menachem’s prompting, she turned to look down the mountain. There was a… a… “No, I, I,” she said. “I go… I go northeast from the gate. And there’s a door.” So much snow, she thought. How was she ever going to find a door in the valley floor? Wilderness survival did not train you for finding things. And that snow looked deep! She took a breath, in and out, and as she turned back to the two Knights of Babylon, she said, “Can I borrow your cloak, Babylon?”

“You’re telling me I’m your… your niece,” she said to the ghost of Menachem. “How d’you know it’s me?”

Mistral wrapped herself in Babylon's cloak and the warmth helped. It was a little distressing to be called someone else's name and have someone referring to memories she simply didn't possess like she ought to know what he meant was Not Fun. Mental strain was not fun but it wasn't hiking the whole city.

"I'm sitting," said Mistral, and so saying, she sat, tucking Babylon's cloak beneath her. "Okay. So. I am a magical knight of a space object and I persist in being incapable of walking up a hill and now--now a ghost is telling me that I'm basically reincarnated? Am I following?" What the hell was a Galaxy Cauldron? Why did she want to hug the ghost? Why could she not see whatever her city was? Could she just ask these questions?

She didn't think so, somehow. "If you have to go do the lights thing, I'll be fine here."

Mistral watched Babylon go, feeling slightly forlorn. It wasn't that she didn't want to learn about her apparent Ghost Uncle, just that she had been expecting to not have uncles beyond Steve and David. It was her understanding that dead people stayed dead and did not become ghosts and also that these ghosts would never speak to her if they did exist.

She took a breath. Survive and adapt. It was key to long term survival in any situation to be able to look away from the emotional concerns and look only at the physical. "Uh," she said to the ghost. Natural desire to appear competent warred with logical need to disclose and she finally said, "I actually don't have some really important internal organs. And my muscles are messed up so I can't do a lot of stuff. I'm not sick, just disabled."

Mistral pillowed her chin on her hands and looked at Menachem, like, really looked. He didn’t look much like Uncle Steve, but he was almost a paler version of her Uncle David. She thought about it, and decided that maybe it’d be okay, having a ghost uncle. “A mountain fell on me,” she said. “If I’d been here on Mercury, during your time, I’d probably be dead.” The only reason she wasn’t dead now was she’d stayed conscious long enough to call the rangers, and had had her cellphone in reach. And, uh, hadn’t had her arms pinned under the rock and snow.

He looked real, sometimes, if he didn’t move too fast. She could see through him if he tried to do that, but if he stayed still, Menachem looked about as real as she did. Which… was probably what drove her to do something really, really insensitive, which was reach out and try to touch him. “Sorry,” she said, drawing her hand back under the more modern Babylon’s fur cloak and shivering. “I was just curious.” He hadn’t felt like anything. For some reason she’d always thought that if she touched a ghost, you know, a fake thing, it would feel like something. Something cold, or hot, or indescribable? But he just felt like air.

“All I wanted to do was wander around in the woods and take notes on bear populations,” she said, “and instead I am going to have to excavate a laboratory...” That didn’t really make her feel better. She sighed. “There’s nothing out there,” she told Menachem, gesturing. “Just a lot of snow.” She’d always thought… she’d never thought about Mercury before, what the hell was she thinking.

When in doubt, fish for more information, Mistral’s dad had taught her. Except in this case, she was worried she was experiencing a psychotic break, or Finn was playing a very unfunny joke. “My mom’s in Massachusetts,” she said, eyeballing the snowy plain. “Probably doing whatever it is horticulturists do. If she’s dead, I’ll be really surprised.”

Did she want a piggyback ride? Hell yes she wanted a piggyback ride. She was twenty-three, not dead. And also, perhaps too prideful to ask, but not too prideful to nod firmly to Babylon’s offer. She climbed on Babylon’s back and carefully looped her arms around his neck. “Wait,” she said, realizing… something. “D’you know anything about a book? My mom found this book while cleaning out the attic. Well, okay, she found a box with a book and some old papers in it. I can’t read anything but it had this--” she pointed to the symbol on the back of her glove “--all over it.”

She put her chin on Babylon’s overly-padded shoulder. “We can try to go. But it looks like it’s gotta be dug out of the snow, and I don’t have the energy.” Did Mistral feel like s**t? Yeah. Yeah she did. All this stress wasn’t good for her. But she really wanted to see the place that Menachem promised was waiting for her. She needed it, just like she needed to say the words that promised her personal power to Mistral. One of the impulses made infinitely more sense, though…