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There were always knights prowling the city. There were always senshi. Quartz was usually good at avoiding them.

There wasn't any point in engaging them, not at his rank: teleportation was an agent's ace in the hole, the one thing that granted them more latitude than anything else in their work. Without it -- as lieutenants -- they were sitting ducks. They were good for grunt work, and little else. Energy collection. Basic observational patrols. Practicing their simple skills and building their nerves for when they'd have to face opponents that weren't just helpless human beings.

Quartz was one of the little grunts. A mewling puppy, compared to a third-rank knight's aura, like this.

And this one had begun moving right toward him at high speed.

He did not like this.

Naturally, therefore, he did the only intelligent thing he could: he tried to make a break for it, running as fast as he could toward a place where he could power down without being seen and then safely blend away into a crowd. He didn't make it far enough before he was in her line of sight, though . . . and she was on him before he could make enough of a course correction to get some visual separation again.

Knights were so goddamned fast. Galena was right: he was going to have to find a way to make it to the relative safety of captaincy soon. It was the only real option for ********," he answered, trying to tuck the energy orbs he was carrying away into a pocket for safekeeping. He'd put his hands up afterward, and try to explain -- and maybe . . . "Look," he said, with what he hoped was a literally disarming smile, "I don't want -- "

Probably Megiddo's night would've gone a lot better had Camlann not been shadowing her. Not for any particular reason, really. He wasn't ready to make another attempt on her--for one thing, he wasn't sure how he'd make it ******** stick, since she was apparently literally immortal. Anyway, he was mostly just... practicing? Maybe there was a better way to get her dead than dragging her to his wonder and doing it there. Either way, he wanted to be a knight before he tried for her again.

He'd even talked himself out of attempting to waylay her from the lieutenant she (they) were tracking. That'd lasted until he saw her target was Quartz. Even then, he tried to reason himself out of it. Quartz was, technically speaking, an enemy combatant. He was also inclade, and as far as Camlann knew he hadn't committed any particular crime against the others within the inclade. All he'd done, if he was telling Camlann the truth, was be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Anyway, he cloaked himself in his planet's Aspect and dropped down behind Megiddo, gathered up her cape in his hands, and yanked. She fell, sprawling on her back, and he darted over her, placing himself bodily between Megiddo and Quartz. "If you want to play games, you should remember I am much better at this than you," he spat.

A number of things happened very, very quickly.

First, her pitcher connected with the lieutenant's face with a totally satisfying clang. Like, ********, she was awesome. The lieutenant went down - a few more hits like that, Megiddo thought, and he'd breathe his last. Mission accomplished. She took a step towards him, grinning wickedly. "You talk too much," she said, adjusting her grip, and then--

--And then someone yanked very, very hard on her cape and she tumbled backwards, feet flying out from under ********," Megiddo wailed, hitting the ground with a heavy whump, her breath forced from her chest. She blinked stars out of her vision and pushed herself up onto her elbows.

Camlann, she thought.

"You ******** traitor," she snarled breathlessly. "Protecting him. Let me guess - are you sucking his d**k, too?"

This was very surreal. It involved a Megiddo and . . . someone whose voice he knew. Someone -- a knight.

Camlann? Was this a weird hallucination? Why were they talking about taking each other's pants off?

He waited, confused, while his brain semi-informed him that he was being picked up and carried somewhere. The last time this had happened . . . the last time . . .

Quartz shivered in the squire's arms, not trying to struggle. He supposed if his head weren't pounding and he didn't feel woozy and tired, the fear he was feeling would resonate with greater immediacy. Instead, he remained mostly docile.

The snapping fingers in his face were a call to attention, such as Schörl might give, and -- good soldier that he'd been learning to be -- his mind struggled to come to attention, alive with one faith: I have to do my best or I'll be in trouble. He tried.

"Camlann," he said, which was a slip-up when he told himself he wasn't going to say that name out loud, wasn't going to get used to it. Quartz offered a sigh and a weak smile. "I don't suppose I'm correct in thinking you transformed from a knight with lots of armor and a giant pitcher into a squire with a fashionable haircut."

It took a while for Quartz to respond -- for two reasons. The first reason was that thinking, and then speaking, came with surprising difficulty. He felt like he was mentally wading through oatmeal, which might have been good if he'd had some kind of mental chicken pox, but had no actual relevance in the current circumstance.

The second reason was that who to call was a difficult question.

Schörl was the obvious choice -- she could teleport him to wherever she was with nothing more than a thought -- but that was a very small number of degrees of Kevin Bacon between her and Camlann, in that case, and even his pounding head knew this was somehow a bad idea. He couldn't have Camlann sending letters to Schörl. That would probably result in Quartz getting in trouble for traitor friendships and in Camlann becoming dead in a mangled heap of flayed skin or something.

Galena was not much better, as an option. He wasn't sure he could call her trustworthy -- no one was trustworthy -- but what was more, he was pretty sure their current lack of animosity was largely contingent on neither of them asking the other one to do anything they didn't want to do, even picking them up when injured.

No one else in the Negaverse was even likable.

Still. He really didn't want Camlann sending messages to Schörl or Galena. No.

Quartz blinked wide-eyed at the squire sitting very close. He was probably mostly looking Camlann in the eye, when he wasn't trying to think. "I might throw up some time soon," he warned tiredly.

He reached out, trying to pull his comm crystal out of subspace. Yes -- that was it, that was what he needed. He could call for help on his own, there was no danger. His first attempt failed; he appeared to be making weird gestures at something invisible.

His second attempt produced, instead of the comm crystal, his pinecone-on-a-stick weapon. "Not you," he sighed dramatically, dropping it in annoyance. "Give me a minute, I'll get it."

Quartz shook his head in refusal of Camlann's offer, an emphatic sort of side-to-side lolling --

-- which was --

-- a bad --

-- idea.

He lurched sideways and did, in fact, throw up: managing only to lean far enough to avoid literally voiding the contents of his stomach onto his protector's shoes. "Sorry," he coughed, both hands bracing his weight above the ground, long hair falling in his face. "Sorry. You can't stay. She'll kill you."

Quartz held admirably still when Camlann touched him: his flinch was confined to his face alone, a slight pinching of the eyes, a flickering grimace. "I don't want you here," he hissed, waiting till he was sure he could balance himself on one hand before pressing the other to the side of his forehead. In it, he held the successfully produced communicator crystal. "I'll be well taken care of. Go away and . . . don't put me in this position."