Welcome to Gaia! ::

Wolframite wasn't the only one adjusting to changes in power level. Not far away, Hvergelmir had arrived in North End Park for her customary night's vigil, and had been planning to get in some practice with using her new magic -- but her expanded senses alerted her to a Chaotic aura in the area before she could even get properly settled in. It was nice, to be a squire -- the world felt a little less overwhelming.

Normally, Hvergelmir was content to sit her bench all evening and wait to see if anyone cared to make the approach. It worked better that way -- no fear of hostility. In this case, though, the officer in question had already been there. If she sat as usual, would it look like she'd been lying in wait?

Resolved not to put off the issue, Hvergelmir set down her book and water bottle at the bench where she usually sat, then followed the dim, gloaming pulse of the aura toward its source -- a lieutenant.

"Excuse me," Hvergelmir called out, coming up as slowly as she could, hands interlinked demurely in front of her stomach. "Do you have a minute to talk?"

The new Negaverser reminded her of Zippeite, a little.

It was the particular way in which he had his guard up, in spite of his professed confidence: there was some tenseness there, though nothing else was terribly obvious just from a few words. Maybe Hvergelmir was projecting too much into first impressions -- maybe the need to sometimes run for her life from them had made her apt to try and start figuring them out from the first moment.

Still, it never hurt to be cautious.

"Negaversers aren't my enemies," Hvergelmir said, hands still kept folded just as they'd been. "As a knight, I swore a vow against harming you while your cause is noble. There's no reason not to be polite."

She tilted her head sideways, considering the young man before her.

It was hard to tell his age for certain -- his size and dress gave off a distinctly slanted impression of them. He was small, with a charming face, barring what she imagined with some sadness was likely a missing eye. His outfit was the usual Negaverse blacks, but peppered here and there with distinctly cute decorative bows in and among its green accents. She supposed they'd gone recruiting children again. Zippeite was young, too.

And around his neck was . . . something that didn't seem to go with his uniform. She puzzled over the collar a moment, before deciding it could wait.

"Will you talk about the war with me awhile? We can compare notes -- information can be hard to come by."

Hvergelmir followed where Wolframite led, readjusting her hands to clasp them behind her back. His comments struck her as curious -- the way he'd stuttered on some other word when giving his name, the desire to seek cover because he was on poor terms with his superiors. She found herself interested to know what he wasn't saying . . . but hopefully she could learn his story, in time. Everyone officer of the Negaverse had been recruited individually. If she wanted to understand them as a whole, she was going to have to learn about them the same way.

"Hvergelmir Squire of the Cosmos," she returned his introduction with her own name. "I've been at this for about a year and some change, now. How long have you been with the Negaverse?"

Three years?!

Hvergelmir looked at Wolframite, eyebrows raised in obvious surprise for his answer. Three years as a lieutenant -- what was wrong? How could he not have advanced through the ranks in all that time? Was it, maybe, some complication to do with his missing eye, an injury that kept him off the field for a while?

"Thank you for the courtesy," she said, sincerely appreciative of his offer. She'd spoken to a good handful of officers of the Negaverse by now, but none of them had ever really mentioned what might happen if they were found talking to her. The nearest any had come was Titan's oblique concern for her well-being in being out alone at night. If my lord had found you, he would not talk. He would have killed you. What he would've done if his commanding officer had shown up, she didn't know -- but she was afraid she could guess. Hvergelmir was glad for Wolframite's offer of warning. "I'll try not to do or say anything to get you in trouble."

She looked down at her dress, an expression of fond bemusement coming over her face. "Ah -- it's not so bad, really. I mean, having a train's going to be miserable to try and fight in, next time I have to, but it's actually a lot better than the dress I just evolved out of. That one was a lot like this, about two feet of extra fabric, but instead of having cuts in the sides to make it runnable at all, it was all one big cone. I tripped constantly."

Of course, all that only mattered if she actually had to do combat -- and if things had come to that, Hvergelmir tended to think she'd already failed.

"How much do you know about what started the conflict at the beginning of this war?" she started out, sticking to the broadest form of the question. "Who began all the fighting, and why?"

Hvergelmir nodded. It was about what she'd expected, but she wanted to know what he knew. How much they'd bothered to teach their people, even after three years. Either Wolframite was wildly summarizing, or the answer was: still not much.

"We learn it a little differently. At more length, for sure." She shifted in place, folding one arm across her body and raising the other hand to press it to her cheek in thought. Hvergelmir looked at the dappled black leaves of the canopy overhead.

"Before the war, the galaxy was divided," she said. "There were two great empires -- the Moon Kingdom and the Earth Kingdom -- plus all the galaxy's independent and allied worlds -- but the galaxy existed largely at peace.

"The prince of Earth fell in love with the princess of the moon," she said, glossing over the parts of the tale the Code hadn't elaborated on. "But a sorceress here on Earth -- Beryl -- had fallen in love with the prince herself, and she became jealous of the moon princess and everything Beryl believed she represented. She set her sights on the knights Training Academy -- which, I understand, was sort of a favorite pet project of the prince and his entourage, and which brought in people from across the galaxy, something Beryl must've greatly mistrusted.

"She made some kind of a pact with Chaos for great power, bringing people over to her side -- and then they launched an attack on the Academy. The people there fought back, but there were only a few full-fledged knights living there at the time, plus the people who worked the land, and the children still in training. The Academy fell -- and it and all its inhabitants were trapped, becoming the place that we understand you now call the Rift, and the people in it transformed into the monsters we sometimes see in the city.

"I don't know what happened after that -- but something changed, leading into the thousand years' quiet you described. We were all reborn here, on Earth -- and somewhere along the line, the war started up again." She looked back at Wolframite, to see how he seemed to feel about her version of the story. "That's the history we know -- or as much of it as I've managed to assemble so far, anyway."

There is too much there to be an academy.

Hvergelmir wondered what that meant. Was he only saying that out of some defensiveness -- or had the great cataclysm that had created the Rift drawn more than just the Academy itself under with it when it was taken? Perhaps the Rift stretched broad and seeming-endless, for acres upon acres, all the Academy's old lands gone alongside it. How many youma, then, could it be holding? How many countless monsters did the Negaverse have waiting to be unleashed -- and how was anything supposed to combat that?

"Yes. Some of the youma in the Rift were once knights, like me." Hvergelmir laced her fingers together, watching him. He was a wary creature, this Wolframite. They both were. "But if they were punished, I don't... it couldn't have been by the White Moon? That's... not how youma are created. Everyone I've ever talked to -- from your side or mine -- has agreed that youma come into being when a body's fed more Chaos energy than it can handle. Only your officers possess Chaos energy, or can infuse a starseed with it. If turning people into youma is wrong -- and I'm not saying it isn't -- it's your people who are the only ones who have the power to do it, from everything I've been told up until now. It doesn't seem odd to you that those roles are reversed in the telling? I just... I don't know. It doesn't make sense to me, the way you tell it."

His sincerity lanced at her heart, though. He'd been with the Negaverse three years. He must keenly believe everything he said. And after three years, no doubt he'd want to. That was a long time to fight for a lie. That kind of a betrayal would definitely be hard to accept.

"I don't know what most knights fight for. The ones I happen to know, they're mostly interested in protecting the people of Earth, I guess? That's why I hate seeing us fight. I... I feel like we want the same thing, if we could just understand each other."

Some things she was skirting. The youma-killing issue was an obvious non-starter; there was no real option for people to respect a youma's desire to protect Earth when a youma was attacking them, and youma were permanently beyond their previous human capacity to reason. Where the monsters were concerned, it remained (unfortunately) a kill-or-be-killed scenario. While that was an easy enough argument to make, it wasn't the right direction to steer the conversation. Hvergelmir wanted to keep things to topics of 'why things came to be this way' -- 'how it's appropriate for people to react in war' was not the debate she wanted to have. It wasn't her responsibility to justify the decisions of other knights. She didn't necessarily agree with those decisions, even. Her goal was to get him thinking about what he knew about his own people -- and the best approach to that had to be facts, not feelings. She had to stick to facts.

"Reincarnation..." She paused. "All senshi are reincarnated, but it's not a guarantee with knights. Some of us are that way -- we have souls that lived lives a thousand years ago, and were born here to live again. But others aren't reincarnated at all. The knighthood is passed down along family bloodlines. They live as normal people, unless some pressing need comes along for them to take up that power and become a knight -- but unless that happens, they're not knights, not even secret unknown knights. They're just normal people who lived and died that way. We don't have cats who come to Awaken us. Knights have never been forced into knighthood. We've always had the choice. But we're told..." She said this last part delicately. "We're told a different answer for your origins. All Negaverse agents are said to be our brethren, pledged in service to Metallia. Knights like us, reincarnated or descended -- but found by Metallia before they could come to their full knighthood in their own time." Sensing she should hedge a bit more, she added, "That's how it was taught to us, at least. Whether or not it's true -- whether you're a normal person who could've become a knight or a normal person who couldn't -- I respect what you're trying to do. To me, that says a lot about you."

Having met Kairatos Knight and General Avalon, she had no real doubts on that score -- but since Wolframite obviously did, she thought it was fairer to give him the benefit of the doubt.

"Can I ask you, though...?" She looked down modestly. "Your -- collar, it doesn't seem to match the rest of your uniform. Is there, um, some reason you choose to wear it?"

Hvergelmir bore a tattoo on her left shoulder as the symbol and the living deal of her sworn oath. She supposed Wolframite's collar might be the same -- a symbol of some promise he'd made, some power he wielded.

His reaction was immediate -- and where normally she would've backed away, step for step as he advanced, instead she stood her ground. Just as she had so long ago with Bischofite, when he'd accused her of foolhardiness for not marching to her colleagues' drumbeat. When, innocently, she'd told him no one deserved a cruel fate like his.

Tens, hundreds would disagree with you, Page - half on my own side, no less!, he'd told her.

I don't remember asking what you have or haven't done before now, she'd answered him in turn. You're the one who decided that mattered -- you and a hundred other people who also don't think for me.

She found herself, once again, cornered by someone in disgrace with the Negaverse, yet still furious that his reputation had failed to precede him. You should be scared, his posture seemed to say. You should be impressed. You should listen to the warnings that people give you.

Well, she was scared. She was always scared. But giving in to that impulse wasn't wisdom -- it was just cowardice. And cowardice still -- always -- wasn't a good enough reason to play fast and loose with her decisions when people's lives hung in the balance.

I am a knight of Hvergelmir, she remembered the old oath from her past life. I am a being of free will.

I will seek no refuge in convention, but strive always to move forward with honor. I will not rest on my laurels. I will not venerate the past for its own sake. Tradition is the enemy of progress and of free thought. Doctrine is the tool of oppression.

I am a knight of Hvergelmir. I am a being of free will.

I will follow no order blindly.

This I swear by my Code of Honor.

She looked back into Wolframite's glass-bottle-green eye, flinching only slightly as he moved into her space, close enough to feel the heat of his breath as he forced out the story of his fall from grace in angry tones. Terror rose up sure as anything in her throat when he grabbed her hand, but she forced herself to swallow it down, not to pull away. It was hard. Her voice sounded chalky and distressed even to her own ears.

"No one who comes to me is judged by their reputation," she insisted. "Why should I let others speak for you, and deny you the right to speak for yourself? My colleagues have their own opinions on the officers of the Negaverse. I prefer to judge for myself." With great focus, she forced herself to relax her frightened face enough to raise her eyebrows. "An officer who would devour someone's immortal soul just for not recognizing their name has nothing to be proud of. That is no mark of nobility."

She was playing with her life here, she thought fearfully. Hvergelmir was, as a rule, cautious about how she spoke to Negaverse agents. Mollifying. Compromising. She took care not to say anything that might sound too firm, too confrontational -- afraid that at any moment, one of them might take umbrage with being argued with on principle, and either abandon all hope of peaceful conversation forever, or -- worse -- decide to stamp her out of existence right on the spot.

It was always a risk. It was always a dangerous game. She was usually much more careful than this.

The last time was with Bischofite. She'd thought of the old oath then, too. I am a being of free will. I will follow no order blindly. Why was she having this urge to keep digging in her heels again? Why did this feel so incredibly important?

"Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it. William Penn. You did what you felt was right, because you felt a responsibility not just to blindly do what you were told. That's all I'm trying to do. That's why I ask so many questions. A great white spirit called The Code tells us what we know, as knights. I can either take the easy way out -- accept what I'm told without question -- and bear the guilt of my complicitness if I turn out to be wrong... Or I can learn and decide things for myself. I can accept that I have a responsibility for my own choices and actions, no matter how difficult that is." She swallowed. "So I have no leader. If that's a crime -- if anything I've said is a crime, in your eyes, I can't pretend to be sorry. I won't risk the lives of innocent people just to follow a leader too arrogant to allow themself to be questioned, or who turns a blind eye to injustice and punishes those who pursue a just course."

Hvergelmir was still shivering in his grasp. "Please let me go."