Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was some effort for Hvergelmir to pick her head up from off her shoulder. Too much energy taken recently -- not enough sleep, and no food for days. Her stomach rolled hard with churning acid. She didn't want to have to try and concentrate on surviving another interview right now, not in the state she was in.

"What exactly is it you need to know?" she asked on a resigned sigh. All Cinnabar's pacing was making her feel dizzier and more exhausted.

Hvergelmir forced her eyes to focus on Cinnabar. It wasn't easy -- the dark-haired woman kept blurring in her tired vision. Her back hurt.

"My Wonder is a well," she said, tilting her head sideways slightly to indicate her left shoulder. "As you can see. Camelot's is a city. Babylon's is too." She shrugged. "It's on Wikipedia, this stuff."

(In a better state, she might've lamented her answers, which reflected the glibness of sheer exhaustion and the fact that Cinnabar had admitted to never knowing or caring what the knights and senshi she killed even were. She'd have remembered that her role was always to accept, to take people as they came to her and not require they meet a standard of improvement before they started asking her questions. To be gentle and soft and nice. Today, she was just sleepy.)

"Tell me how this happened to you," she suggested in a light voice, feeling a little floaty. "And I'll trot out the story of the Knight Academy and where we come from." She sighed. "You're such a strange woman."

Hvergelmir yawned. "Places on Earth were probably named for foreign Wonders -- or the other way around. I haven't remembered that yet. I don't know which." She blinked a few times at Cinnabar, trying to read her expression when she described herself. Was there any regret, there, in horrifying and monstrous? Any bitterness?

It would've been easier if the room weren't so dark and Cinnabar weren't so blurry. Rude.

"The Knighthood was established through the kingdom of Earth over a thousand years ago. It was based here on this planet, which housed the Knights' Academy where new initiates could come to train. During the war, Queen Beryl and her army of ex-knights laid siege to the Academy, defended only by a few knights and the children studying there, and ripped the entire structure down into the Earth, creating the Rift and the youma who live there. But the Knighthood was as much based on Earth as it was in Earth's alliance with other worlds. Knights could study to serve their posts at other worlds in the galaxy, each serving within an Order and a set of traditions for their world. The Order of Mars -- " An epithet came to her from a memory she'd had before, an encouter with one of them. "The Red Brethren -- was one of the orders of knights. A ferocious lot, the Martians."

She furrowed her brow quizzically. "Is there some reason you didn't ask Kairatos? Is he still alive? Hurt?"

Cinnabar was . . . growling? The sound shook her out of her exhaustion, a little -- nerve-fueled adrenaline responding immediately to stimulus in order to get her heart and her senses going at a better clip. The half-youma-half-woman came sharply into focus in the dim.

As far as I'm aware, he's still alive. Beyond that, who knows?

It was painful to think about Kairatos. He had a passionate disposition; he was a fighter, a scrapper. And he was fierce in what he did -- he would draw their ire in captivity even more than he already had outside it. And he was what she'd egged him on in becoming: a visibly proud example of someone happy and free in their choice of leaving the Negaverse. They would make him pay dearly for it. They had to.

Cinnabar wouldn't say his name. Hvergelmir thought there was something in that -- from a woman she knew full well to have been a part of Royal Knight Kairatos's wolf pack, as it were, the great and wild knights he'd run with. There was confusion there in the way she paced.

And the whole situation -- Cinnabar having come here, of all places, like a man buying a prostitute so she can listen to him talk about his day for an hour, comfort his ego, hear him confess all his dirty little secrets he can't tell to his wife -- it smacked of a deep inner conflict with no comfortable means of expressing itself.

Still, it was an opportunity. And not difficult, not compared to all that Schörl asked of her. She could take Cinnabar's anger, her confusion, and give them back to her gentled in the form of answers. Some people were well served by learning what it felt like to be listened to. Some people needed a confessor before they could understand sin.

Well, the Negaverse is your wife, not me. I'll listen without judging.

"I know a few," she said. "Each is their own -- no knightly order requires you lose your individuality, they'd never function. But they're similar, at heart. Driven. Relentless. Reckless. I got in a fistfight with one of the knights of Mars once to protect one of your lieutenants he was trying to kill." She smiled with sudden pride at the memory. "He punched me in the face -- I had the biggest black eye for days, and cuts right across my cheek. Mars Knights -- they run hot, if I had to say. A commonality of temper."

Well, that was it. She'd gotten whatever it was she wanted to know, and now she was leaving.

"I hope you found what you came here for, then."

I hope you found Tanais of Mars. I hope you start to see her shadow when you turn corners and the light catches you just right. I hope you realize she's been there all along with you, whispering quietly in your heart.

I hope, someday, you begin to understand that she's the thing inside you that fights, the thing that keeps the youma at bay.

"Good luck, Captain Cinnabar. If you need anything else -- " She smiled wryly. "You know where to find me."