It was always quiet on Mercury, except for when the wind howled through the mountains and blizzards buffeted his city. The barrier helped with that, the blue crackling brighter against the storm’s force. All this was built by someone, thought Babylon Knight, as he climbed towards the top of the mountain, his lantern held high. Someone long ago had first placed the lamps and created the barrier and carved the city out of the mountainside.

Time away from Destiny City had given him a chance to really solidify his perspective on things. So many of his compatriots seemed to think of magic as being this stable thing, like their wonders had just always been where they were and how they were since the dawn of time - but they’d been built, and magic could be adapted and changed and created, even. That was what they’d done at Mistral when they made their upgrade to the rings. That was what he’d done, when he returned Menachem’s starseed to the cauldron and emerged… changed.

Pulling the wick from his lantern, Babylon set to work on a series of lamps that had gone out. He was still not quite sure what their inner mechanism was - were they linked underground? And how were they connected to the barrier? They didn’t function like a string of holiday lights, where if one went out, they all would…

It was strange.

Magic was often incomprehensible, yes.

But it was not immutable.

Camelot had told him that he did not know of any way to find out what sort of knight a Negaverser would be without Chaos’s influence. But that didn’t mean it was impossible - it just meant that no one had done it before. Why would there have been any reason to? From what Babylon knew of the Silver Millenium, it had fallen in such a fashion that no one would have ever needed a device that could do that.

But magic was not immutable, he thought, sliding the wick back into his lantern. Looking up and down, he saw the whole mountainside lit up with evenly-spaced blue globes. It was so easy to imagine his city as eternal, and yet Babylon knew - it had not always been here.

There were no rules keeping him from creating something entirely new, and that thought was thrilling.

He headed down to the bottom of the mountain, a spring in his step. Babylon didn’t know the first thing about magitech. He could make the little forever lanterns, but those weren’t his invention. They were Menachem’s. He didn’t know anything about how they’d been created, and wandering around until a relevant memory hit him seemed utterly foolish. He was new to recovering memories, but he at least knew enough to know he couldn’t force it. Memory was fickle. It came from atmosphere. Sentiment.

Babylon did not know about magitech, but Mistral did, he thought, and somewhere in her disarmed labyrinth she would have the means to build anything he designed. From there, it would just be a matter of making it work…

Well, there was a first time for everything, thought Babylon. He needed to go home and brainstorm.