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Babylon didn't exactly know Bifrost well, so he was surprised to hear from her so soon after the meeting at Olympus. Actually, he was surprised to hear from her at all. They'd been on the same level of the labyrinth, but that did not actually make them fire-forged friends. They were more like... vague acquaintances with a horrific shared trauma, and that hardly qualified him to be telling her how to live her life.

But she was asking his advice, and the very least he could do was go talk to her - he knew a bit more about transcendence now, after that strange dream dumped five years of memories into his head from, well... he wasn't quite sure where they were from, and he wasn't sure they appreciated them since he'd spent the better part of the last week convincing Arkady that they should totally not have a baby, just because she'd had a dream about one.

Like, thanks, Universe. He supposed.

The surrounding looked the same as ever, perhaps a little dustier. He wasn't sure that Bifrost understood exactly how big the place was, given that she told him that her wonder was "an outcropping with a pedestal" and nothing more useful for locating it, but after what felt like an hour of wandering around (but might have been closer to fifteen minutes), whatever magic governing the place that let there be a magical rainbow road in space that was somehow both traversable on foot and yet encircling the entire solar system eventually brought him to the squire.

"Uh, hi there," said Babylon awkwardly, noting the pillows. "Are we - are we sitting out here? I mean, I'm the first to admit I know jack s**t about how chronos knights work." For all he was friends with Virgo... it didn't make him any more knowledgable about the knights she served with.

"Sorry if I'm late," he added, taking a seat on the empty pillow. "This place is a bit hard to find."

"Well, no harm, no foul," shrugged Babylon, cheerfully enough for a guy who had probably walked like seven astronomical units in the last fifteen minutes. For those keeping track at home, that was like 1,047,185,090 kilometers? So it was, like, totally far. After hiking a distance roughly equivalent to most of the way from the sun to Saturn, it was nice to have a place to sit down.

"It is an honor, ma'am," he said, nodding to the shimmering shape on the third cushion. His own ancestor had always looked a bit more solid to him - but was this what Virgo and Mistral had seen? He wondered how Bifrost's relationship with her ancestor was - he hoped it was more amicable than his and Menachem's had been, though that turned out alright in the end, didn't it?

Someday, he supposed, when Bifrost was a knight, perhaps she too would guid her ancestor back to the cauldron. He could only hope she would have an easier time of it than he did. But anyway - there was business to attend to.

His right hand went to the glowing marks on his cheek. "So, you had questions about these?" he asked. "Because honestly, if you'd asked me a few days ago, I'd have told you I was basically totally clueless, but I had this weird dream a couple of nights ago - and you know, I'm not one to put a whole lot of credence in dreams, but it was a really weird one. But the weirder part is that my girlfriend had - it was a different dream, from her point of view, but all the details matched up. So I think it's probably got something to do with this big, all-encompassing galactic conspiracy theory we're all part of and you're probably familiar with what I'm talking about."

He bit his lip. "I'm not wrong, am I?" asked Babylon.

Babylon nodded, but bit his tongue lightly against telling her how his dream had ended. His had ended with him safe on his wonder - but for how long? He'd been counting on his and Mistral's joint wonders being able to sustain them, but it was a stopgap measure and he'd known it even as he slumbered. He couldn't admit to Bifrost that, even in the future, his natural tendency was towards cowardice. She trusted him enough to ask for his help, and he didn't want to squander that.

"Mine are a bit more extensive than you can see," he said instead, tilting his neck so that she could see where the glowing circuits disappeared beneath his collar. He'd taken his coat off and seen how they covered his whole body, once, but he didn't think Bifrost would particularly want to see. "I haven't met anyone else in the present with them, but I know that in the future, there were - there were a lot of people with them."

That senshi princess, for starters. Ida. "I think that at a later date it might be good if we saw if everyone's dreams told the exact same story," he said - his and Avalon's certainly had. "But for now, it's not the subject at hand." They could very easily get caught up in comparing their stories, but it would ultimately get them no closer to talking about the marks.

"In my dream, of the future or whatever we want to call it," he explained, shifting a little on his cushion and squaring his shoulders, "we were calling it Transcendence. It has some advantages, which I'm not sure are all the same across the board, but in my experience, I can visit my wonder twice as often as I used to be able to be, I can heal - within reason - anyone I choose to, and perhaps most fortunately, I'm completely beyond corruption. A general tried to stick her hand into my chest, and this - force field or something just kind of pushed her back."

Which brought him to how he'd done it. "I had an ancestor, sort of like yours," he said. "Menachem. He mentored me in the upkeep of my wonder and taught me about my family's history, but he also told me that the one thing he wanted, more than anything else, was to end his vigil and return to the cauldron."

Babylon glanced to Prena and all her shimmering finery. "Your starseed is here at Bifrost, isn't it?" he asked. "Anyway, I wasn't even trying to do this. I was just trying to take his starseed back to the cauldron, the only way I could think to do it. It was damaged, so I put it into my own chest and carried it around for almost two weeks, before I could figure out how to get it to the cauldron - I almost killed myself, to be honest."

He shrugged - he hoped that Bifrost didn't see to copy his example and go sticking Prena's starseed in her chest. "Before I had that dream, I just thought I'd damaged my glamour, that the changes to my powers were the result of overloading my starseed with too much magic, but now... I think there's got to be another way to do it. Senshi don't have ancestors, and I remember seeing some of them who had done it."

If he'd expected anyone to ever try to repeat the feat, he'd have tried to pay more attention to what he'd done - but as it stood, he'd been kind of busy having a near-death experience.

"Some knights are reborn, and some are like us," said Babylon with a shrug. He was thinking, specifically, of Mistral, who had known his ancestor personally in her past life, and who was always catching glimpses of her former self around her wonder. He wasn't sure where Bifrost stood with Mistral, though, so he refrained from making that comparison. Lina had been reborn, too, he thought... But Lina was long gone, back into the Negaverse's arms, and he didn't think she was a very good example.

"Anyway, I don't know what determines it," he shrugged. "I think it might just be random, which knights had to stand vigil and which were reborn." Anyway, how would one go about getting that information? It just seemed like far too momentous a task for anyone to undertake, even if it did probably boil down to just go ask Cosmos. "The senshi are all reborn, though," he clarified. "Virgo has all of her memories. She remembers my ancestor from her past life."

Besides, starseeds were supposed to go to the cauldron on their own, weren't they? The only reason he'd put Menachem's into his chest was because it had been damaged. "I think the starseeds are kept at our wonders by some kind of restraining force," he said, "But if no damage has been done to it in the last thousand years, then you might be able to just release it into the universe and it will go on its own." At least, that was how it had been explained to him? People died on earth all the time and their starseeds made it back to the cauldron without being personally ferried there. "Not that I'm suggesting you do that if Prena's not ready to go," he added. Ancestors were useful to have around, if you had one that didn't hate your guts.

"But I don't think the transcendence has got anything to do with relieving him of his duties," Babylon clarified. "If it were that specific, then senshi wouldn't be able to do it. I think it's more about..." He steepled his fingers in front of him, deep in thought. "It's about service to your wonder," he said, after a moment. "Or your planet, for Senshi, I guess. It's about doing something to prove your dedication, so it will give you more power. And for me, that just happened to be nearly dying to take him to the cauldron."

"Sir Babylon?" The knight raised an eyebrow - that was a new one, but he'd accept it. It had a good ring to him, something he could be pleased with being called. "I'm not really sure I'd call them tattoos," he said, touching his fingers to his cheeks. "I mean, I don't know what it's like for anyone else - I've just been thinking of them as magic seeping out of my skin."

Which was probably giving himself too much credit. He shrugged to Bifrost and, sensing that this meeting was likely winding down, got carefully up from his cushion. "It might be hidden. It might be somewhere in plain sight," he told her, sorry that he couldn't be more help. "Prena will show it to you when she's ready to go."

He would have never thought to go down into the well until the exact moment when he did, after all.

"And..." he trailed off, smiling haphazardly at her. "I'm glad the business in Mistral hasn't soured you on Mercury knights forever. She feels terribly about what happened, as do I, but we're a nice bunch, I promise." And it had been heartening to see so many people working together towards a common goal, even if some had lost their lives in the doing.

"I'll be back in Destiny City in December. If you like, come by Florence Court sometime and we can catch up on my home turf," Babylon added. He hoped the building was being kept up properly in his absence.