Welcome to Gaia! ::

Mistral was loathe to leave the ancient city for the snowbound wasteland she was sure they would find, but there was also that weird impulse driving her from the city where she had, apparently, been born a thousand years before. She tried not to cry as they left the ghost of her space uncle behind, unsure why someone she’d spoken to for maybe an hour had made such a great impression on her; maybe she could chalk it up to being a reborn ghost girl or something. Either way, she cried, burying her face in Babylon’s furry shoulder on the off chance that she wouldn’t freeze her tears to her face on a whim.

They trudged through knee-high snow for thirty minutes before Babylon stumbled. A sense of urgency flooded through Mistral and her arms tightened around Babylon’s throat before she could stop herself. “You need to stop here. Let me down.” He did, and she cautiously tried to brush snow away from whatever it was that he’d hit with his boots--because she was sure, though she didn’t know how she was sure, that he had. When she became winded, and her muscles gave a warning twinge, she stopped. “There’s something here and I need to find it,” she said to him. “It’s important.”

She looked up at Babylon from where she knelt in the hard-packed snow. “I will owe you so ******** big if you help me dig out my ancient laboratory homeland,” she said. “I will buy you so many fish tacos.”

Mistral took a deep breath as more and more of the door was exposed beneath Babylon's questing hands. Each swipe of his glove peeled back more of the snow. But when he stepped back, she received no magical hunch. "No clue," she said, levering herself back down to kneel by the door. The mercury sigil stared back at her, mocking.

"Open sesame," she joked, and was not surprised to find that that did nothing. She touched the crystalline porthole set into the center of the Mercury sigil, gasped-- and then, sheepishly, said "It's warm." Likely heated geothermally, she thought. She wished Babylon hadn't been there to see that. Either way, it didn't matter if they couldn't get in. "Have you tried turning your magically locked and handle-less door on and off," she quipped to herself, but this was definitely a liveware problem. There was something here she had to remember, something...

She closed her eyes. Space uncle had said that things would return to her in time... That the wonder had been locked and was awaiting her return. She smoothed her hands over the door. Waiting for her, she thought. This would be so much easier if she could just read the damn book. Mistral looked over at Babylon, quirked a nervous smile. "It doesn't normally do this," she said, because erectile dysfunction jokes were always appropriate to hide when one felt like a magical girl impersonator.

The door stayed just as stubbornly shut. "Hey," she said to it. She spoke so quietly she could barely hear herself, but it was... Embarrassing... To beg a door for anything. Especially when it wasn't going to work. "It's me. Mistral Page. I want to come home, but you're making it hard. Please, what do I do?"

As if she’d been heard by some divine providence, Mistral heard a voice. A familiar voice. She turned and, over her shoulder, saw a much younger version of Space Uncle and a woman with deep blue hair. "Asi," called the vision-woman. "Asi, have you shut it? Remember, it's--" and she said a string of syllables. Asimov didn't see why it mattered, they were never coming back. Not unless something changed.

Then the memory was gone.

"I found the hunch," she said, and she leaned down to whisper those syllables to the door. There was a click, and Mistral scrambled off the surface of the door as it creaked and groaned and then slid open. A gust of hot air came up, and the scent of flowers and steel and dust, and Mistral leaned over. "It's a ladder," she said to Babylon, and she cautiously descended into the pale predawn light of Mistral, the wonder.

She moved away into the mouth of the tunnel, looked down an undisturbed and dusty hall. "It looks safe, Babylon," she called up to him. "Come down?"

As they walked down the hall--Mistral had, after about three steps, pushed down her hood and passed Babylon's cloak back to him--she tried to find something, anything, to tell her what she was doing. (She heard the door groan closed above them as they walked.) Nothing showed up, no force ghost and no memory, so she just kept walking, and took a left when an opportunity presented itself. She considered the door they came up against, a thing of frosted glass, beautiful in its simplicity. Except it, like the door above them, had no handle and didn't open at a push in either direction.

It is sealed. It waits for you. Yeah, it was, except she didn't know how to open the doors. Frustrated, she stepped back and wondered if yelling at the door would help. "Babs, you can't yell at me for what I'm about to do," she said, and she turned to the door. "I am the knight of Mistral, and--" and she never got to finish her poorly-thought-out threat. The door slid open, jolting back into a groove and then sliding into a wall.

The hall beyond was dark, except for a faint blue glow in the distance. She was glad that she'd come here with Babylon, who seemed to be sort of the Light Guy; she led the way into the dark, down the hall and into a cavernous room lit by flowers. A field of flowers. "I am Loras Tyrell," she said, stepping gingerly into the field. The flowers (the ******** glowing flowers) came up to her a**. "The knight of flowers. I thought Menachem said this was a laboratory." She could see, not far from where she stood, a bench of stone.

"You can call me Ser Loras," she instructed Babylon as she waded towards the bench.

She knew all that, she thought. Why hadn't she remembered it? Probably, she considered, because she’d ended up in a ******** space laboratory devoted to growing the perfect weed.

Something in her recoiled from that thought. "My mom worked for years on this," she said, and then she stopped, because her mom was making pest resistant carrots in eastern Massachusetts, where she had been for the past forty years of her life. Had she meant something else, she wondered, had she meant the mystical space mom of a thousand years ago?

"They're really pretty," she said, finally, lamely. "Don't you think?" Genetic impossibility that they were, the roses and hydrangeas and the climbing vines--blue wisteria?--were lovely. They phosphoresced blue as the circuitry on her waistband and she just--why? It made no sense.

"Is this all it is," she asked, like Babylon would know. "Just a bunch of impossible flowers?" She was... Disappointed. But also, unconvinced.. There was more if she would just look for it, but who had time for that? She could come back later, she thought. "If my quest is to clean this place up, I'm sorry, but Mistral is ********."

“There were paths here,” she said. She’d felt them as they walked to the bench--places where soil gave up the ghost to cracked pieces of stone--but that was besides the point. Much like the lack of pollinators and the impossibility of the blue roses, she hadn’t put together the same pieces as Babylon had. Maybe she was just shocked by the sight of her own Wonder, a still and silent place--there wasn’t even wind, though the stones on which she sat were comfortably warm and once she’d taken off her hood, she was perfectly comfortable.

She didn’t want to deal with the weird space heritage of her soul or whatever. Mistral tugged on the end of one of her pigtails and sighed, because… she really should take advantage of Babylon being available and do as much as she could now. “I want to go home,” she said, “I really need my painkillers, I mean, my head feels like it’s going to explode… being a space ghost is kind of stressful.” She leaned forward and pinched the stem of one of the impossible blue roses, then tucked it behind Babylon’s ear. “You’re a pretty princess,” she informed him, patting his shoulder.