Welcome to Gaia! ::

Night had fallen, and Hvergelmir was at her usual bench in the park. She had just been working her way through a Cryptogram in a puzzle book when she heard the screech of brakes on asphalt and the loud bleating of a car horn, startling her out of what she was doing. Her hand jerked across the page as she was crossing a T, leaving a long line through two adjacent puzzles.

She frowned and set her book aside, looking up when she heard someone calling. A sailor soldier -- Order-aligned. She didn't recognize the voice.

"Hello?" she called back, waving a little from her bench to indicate where she was as she felt the aura get closer. "Is everything okay? Are you hurt?"

Hvergelmir was excellent at memorizing the written word. She'd been a competitor, once, in the children's spelling bee circuit, and she'd learned lots of tricks for memorizing thrings. She could do words and meanings backwards and forwards, rattle off lots of poems, blurt out song lyrics at inappropriate times... But in among all these not terribly useful skills, she didn't have an equally powerful ability to memorize faces. The cream-and-goldenrod senshi before her looked vaguely familiar -- but if Hvergelmir had said she'd met her from her visit to the moon, this would've only been because it was literally the only place she'd ever seen more than one senshi gathered at a time.

"The Blackwatch meeting, yes," she agreed. "Hvergelmir Squire of the Cosmos. Nice to meet you."

When the senshi seated herself, Hvergelmir scooted over to afford her more space. "Stay as long as you like. It gets kind of dull around here when I don't have company," she offered.

Hvergelmir crossed palms with the Sailor Megrez, offering her a smile. "Senshi of Eggs, huh? I bet you really poach the opposition." She raised her eyebrows in an 'eh? eh?' expression. "Sorry, I couldn't resist a little yolk -- sorry, okay, I'll stop. In all seriousness, your realms of magic are fascinating to me. As knights, we share sort of -- broader magics. There's something special about having a magic that's truly yours alone."

She didn't know that many senshi. Their powers were curious and exciting to her. Surely, she thought, they had the potential for quite a few applications outside the realm of just the combative. It was worth learning more about.

"Um, I patrol for youma sometimes," she acknowledged. "Once, sometimes twice a week, over in the theater district? But I'm not actually on patrol right now. This is actually what I do just about every other night. I hang out in one place and wait for Negaverse agents who'll come and talk to me. I'm not actually a combatant -- except against youma."

She waited a few minutes for the beginnings of this to sink in.

Hvergelmir nodded, the topic of magic one she had some enthusiasm about. "Whether it's out magic or not, every one of us is unique. If you've got Eggs -- no one will ever know eggs in the way you will, no one will ever be the living embodiment of what they mean, what they represent. There's so much symbolism in an egg. Think of it -- a microcosm of a whole world, inside this thin little shell. And inside it, something alive with all its potential but unborn, unrealized... Eggs are cool, they're like -- birth; sustenance. And the universe entrusted that to you.

"Or for me -- " Hvergelmir held up her distaff to show what she'd been working on. At the base of the long thread hung a spindle that was wound fat and nearly full with newly spun thread. "The universe didn't give me a sword or a cudgel. It could've, right? If fighting was all we were born to do? So this is what I've been working on since it upgraded with my knight rank. Since it isn't a weapon, it's a tool, you know? I think there's probably more I can do with it than just fight. But we'll see. I've been making a lot of thread."

That was the more interesting, the easier topic. The other one -- the subject of what she did here -- had more potential to end badly. "They lie to them, you know. The Negaverse soldiers." She set aside her distaff, folding her hands in her lap to give Megrez her full attention. "They tell them that we're all aliens invading Earth, planning to conquer it. They tell their soldiers that only they can protect the earth from us, and that everything they do is to help keep their planet safe. I try to tell them the truth. They're being tricked -- and I can't fight someone who's just trying to do good. Some of them don't know any better."

Hvergelmir looked away. This was a difficult conversation, and she'd been avoiding having it with anyone on her side. People in Chaos's ranks didn't tend to quibble about her inability to try and murder them -- but Order's ranks might understandably be more concerned.

"I can't do anything about those kinds of people. This mark on my arm is . . . I swore an oath not to harm the officers of the Negaverse. No one would talk to me until I did something to buy their trust."

The... huh?

It was funny. It wasn't that the notion of dishonesty was something Hvergelmir had never heard of. She could conceive of the notion of lying to the enemy to save one's life -- if the enemy's demands were untenable, certainly, for one. It was just that -- even if her oath wasn't sealed with her very life, she'd never have considered going back on it. That stood to do even worse harm to their chances of ever reaching a peaceful disarmament than simply leaving circumstances as they are would've done.

Erring on the polite side, she gave a soft, self-deprecating chuckle. "The honor of a knight is a sacred thing, I'm afraid. Whatever the circumstances, I swore my vow on my life -- my Wonder will hold me to that."

It would, too. That much she was sure of.

"The Negaverse feeds its soldiers lies and propaganda. I want to give them the opportunity to know the truth and to choose for themselves. Someone has to."

Hvergelmir looked down, twiddling her thumbs nervously in her lap. It was never fun to be reminded by people that she was probably going to die after not-too-long; the prospect was terrifying. Mostly she tried not to think about it.

"Because the Negaverse wouldn't listen for anything less. Because no one else was doing it -- and the first person to lay down their arms is always vulnerable, but someone has to chance it, or we'll all stand around in this horrible standoff forever, Hatfields and McCoys till the last victim bleeds out. And, I guess, because -- because that's how conviction works. Believing in something enough to actually back it up, even when you know backing it up will cost you something."

Her hands were playing with the fabric of her dress now, scrunching creases into the cloth. "It's not as bad as it sounds, anyway. I can defend my own life, still, if someone tries to hurt me." Hvergelmir sighed. "I don't expect you to understand. It's okay."