Welcome to Gaia! ::

“I got the thing working, by the way,” said Babylon, setting down a bag of chinese takeout as he took a seat beside Mistral. “Ran a couple of tests. It’s accurate to, y’know, those weird dreams everyone had about the future? Titan read as a Earth knight, anyway. And I scanned Camlann before he purified and it said Saturn, so that was accurate, too. Anyway, I’d say it’s safe to say that the thing works.”

Which meant he probably owed her dinners into infinity, because she’d built the dang thing for him. All he’d done was figured out how to sync it to his wonder. “So, I was thinking we could eat, and then we can see about figuring out your magic?” He was trying to be for Mistral what he would have wanted someone to be for himself. At the time of his own promotion to squire, he’d been busy idolizing Lina - but in retrospect, she hadn’t been that great a teacher.

“There’s, uh, lo mein, vegetarian fried rice, and some szechuan vegetables,” he said, popping the take-out containers open. “And plates in the bag. And some Milk Bones for Mendel.”

He leaned down to scratch Mistral’s dog behind his dumb, floppy ears. “Couldn’t forget you, buddy.”

Babylon sat, thinking very little of her snapping at him - it was just how she was sometimes. The Anabel he’d always known was undoubtedly frustrated by her limited physical capacity post-avalanche, and even her super powers didn’t bring her up to human baseline. He couldn’t say what he’d do in her place - he’d already thought enough times about how much it would suck, and he was certain that Mistral was tired of being pitied.

“If you’ve already got an idea, then you’re better off than I ever was for, like, literally years.” He couldn’t even recall having ever even had cause to use his magic before lighting the lamps had changed it. He’d known he had it, yes - but it had been roughly useless. He’d never used it. Being able to make people tell the truth had much more versatility.

He fished one of the milkbones out of the bag and held it out to Mendel. “We can practice and come up with some strategies for how to apply it in battle,” Babylon said. Not that Mistral ought to be doing much fighting, but like, in case of emergencies? Right.

If Babylon showed his affection through food, it was only because that was the way he’d been raised. When he cared about people, he wanted to demonstrate that. If he demonstrated that by offering them Chinese take-out, or burritos, or home-cooked dinners, then what was the harm in that? “It’s obviously meant to be a distraction of some kind,” he said, considering. “How realistic does it look? Would someone actually mistake it for you? Maybe you could use it to get, like, a flanking bonus.”

That was totally a thing in real life, right?

“Or to stage a quick escape,” added Babylon. “Either or.”

Her question about how he’d been doing personally caught him off-guard. Babylon had never told Mistral about his ordeal with Virgo and Orianna, and now it seemed so far past that it wasn’t even worth mentioning. The fewer people he brought in on that the better… and talking about babies with someone who was missing literally half her internal organs just seemed like a bad idea. “I’m fine,” he said. “Mom’s closing on the house in like two weeks. I’ll miss her, but I’m glad she’s getting out of Destiny City. It’s safer in Florida - besides, you know, alligators.”

“Let’s get up on our feet,” suggested Babylon, turning the subject from their families. He was certain that his mother would have never considered leaving Destiny City if not for his father’s death the year previously - not even her parents’ advanced ages. “And we can see if we can figure out how to employ your magic for maximum confusion and surprise factor. Can you call it multiple times if you turn it off and on again really quickly?”

Based on what he knew about his own magic, it seemed a fair guess that Mistral’s work work similarly. “What I’m thinking is that, if you want to use it for anything other than running away, your best bet is going to be confusing your opponent over which Mistral is the real Mistral, and then getting a good strike in.”

(This was probably a little bit silly, he thought. Mistral would never be an offensive lineman and they both knew it. But it was still important that she learn to fight.) “It can’t be combined with your aspect, can it? I know mine can’t be.”

He’d seen Mistral’s magic before, but it was always a little uncanny to watch two identical versions of her standing in front of him. “Yeah,” he said, frowning at the second, false Mistral. He could tell that she wasn’t real based on context, and because he was close enough to see the sparkles at her edges… maybe that could be tuned away. Mistral’s weapon blurred the line between magic and technology.

“Lovely,” he repeated, glad to see that the illusion activated and deactivated with ease, relatively speaking. Mistral had to stop to catch her breath and Babylon wondered exactly how taxing the process was on her. “So I’m sure there’s definitely something we can do to weaponize that.” They’d just have to mess around and maybe spar for a bit. He doubted Mendel would like that, but they’d make it work. Still, he was concerned by how much the magic seemed to have taken out of her. “Are you - uh - are you okay?”

“Yeah, I think it’s that way for everyone,” frowned Babylon as her magic gave way to her aspect. “It might be something we can fix with technology, but it might also be a hard limit. I don’t really know - but we’re into some pretty crazy magitech already.” They’d invented a device that could do something that, a few months ago, everyone had said could never be done. Who was to say that all the other limits on their magic weren’t also just arbitrary rules?

Which brought him, in a roundabout way, back to how to employ Mistral’s magic for maximum impact. “Can you summon her in the exact same place as you?” he asked. “So that instead of a second Mistral appearing nearby, it would look like you suddenly turned into two copies of yourself? That might be more disorienting. It could let you get the jump on someone - or get away.”

Babylon could see how much Mistral’s power use was draining her - the shadows beneath her eyes seemed to get deeper each time she activated her double. “Okay,” he said. “Unless you’re feeling up to it, I think that’s all we should do with the magic for tonight? But you’re definitely onto something with summoning her in the same place as you - that was disorienting.” It had taken him a moment to grasp which one was the real Mistral once they’d begun to move. It was a cool trick.

“If you’re feeling okay, we could go over some basic self-defense? See what kind of stuff you can do? Hold breaks and sucker punches and whatever?” As much as they tried to never send Mistral on patrol alone, he thought, there was bound to be a time when she was caught by herself. She was too much of an asset to risk losing to a Negaverse attack.

She looked like she was flagging, though. “Let’s take a second before we do anything else,” suggested Babylon, “and have something to drink. There’s water in the takeout bag.”

It was super weird to have Mistral say come at me, bro. It was even weirder to actually come at her like in some kind of stupid gangster movie. Babylon said, “Uh, I’ll go easy on you?”

This was super awkward, he thought, as he put her gently into a headlock.