Welcome to Gaia! ::

Glitnir was doing an early afternoon patrol round before he went up to his planet later. He was going to need time to spare for whatever Cornelius had in mind, so an early round could help him catch someone. You didn't commonly see powered people in broad daylight, but it happened, and so it was worth a shot. Besides, earlier meant more people meant more targets for the Negaverse.

Curiously, instead of finding a Negaverse aura, he could feel a Page somewhere nearby instead. Pages were great; he could pass on his knowledge to them, and they could pass it on in turn. It was like practice for being a teacher, in a way. Extracurricular practice. He was going to get enough curricular practice starting in the fall. He approached the Page, looking to investigate the new aura.

Glitnir heard scuttling and scrambling from somewhere nearby and scurried over to investigate. There was indeed a Page of Saturn having a tussle with a youma. The question was, did he have it enough under control that he wouldn't have to step in. "Do you need help there?" he called out. Though he needed to do his share, it was important to let the less powerful ones get experience too. Not that there were experience points to dole out, of course, but the point still stood. He still went closer and positioned his hands for a good swing at the youma if something got out of hand.

Well, something did indeed get out of hand; the youma was now running off with the Page's weapon embedded in its back. Making use of Squire speed, Glitnir dashed in front of the catrat youma and swung his scales at its head. The hit was solid, and with a squalling cry, the youma crumbled to dust right there. When the dust settled, he picked up the pen and held it out to the Page. "I take it this is yours?" Glitnir considered himself lucky for a moment; he had a vaguely useful weapon at Page stage, and he had gotten a lot of information from a reliable source early on. He needed to be there for Pages like this one that were floundering.

The poor Page reeked of shyness and embarrassment. Someone was going to have to relieve him of that reaction eventually; the meek seemed to have trouble being Knights on their own. "Nice to meet you, Mont Blonc. I'm Glitnir, Squire of Mars." Glitnir nodded understandingly when Mont Blonc gestured to his pen. "I can't believe the youma ran off with your weapon still stuck in it. I think you could just dismiss it and then re-summon it to get it back? I haven't tried something like that, but if you do it first, tell me if it works." He didn't lose his weapon often, since he kept such a tight grip on the chain, but something was bound to happen eventually. If Mont Blonc ran that little experiment, he'd be doing Knight science a service.

"It's all right. You don't have to think of everything as a Page." Glitnir took the pen from Mont Blonc and inspected it briefly. "Good idea! Better to test it now when it's safe than when it's stuck in a big, nasty youma." He gave the pen a quick underhand toss, and it rolled into a wall a few feet away. "All right, try it, see if you can dismiss it and call it back." A cautionary idea occurred to him shortly after. "There's probably some sort of limit on this, though. Like, maybe if you do it too many times, you can't call your weapon back? You should probably be careful with this little trick."

Glitnir stood and awkwardly watched as it took the pen a full minute to reappear in the Page's hand. Did it really take that much concentration to summon a weapon? Yes, right, maybe it did. In his early days, it once took him three tries to call his weapon to hand in transform. If he was going to become a good teacher, he was going to have to stop taking these skills for granted. When the pen finally appeared in Mont Blonc's hand, he shared the Page's delight. "You did it! Now you just have to keep practicing till you can do it faster. That youma would have been down the block with your pen if you'd tried to do that before."

"Maybe that's it," Glitnir said. "You overthink things and don't just go with the flow. Maybe you're looking for something where there isn't anything to worry about. But sometimes it's hard to tell what you should and shouldn't know, especially as a Page." He gave Mont Blonc a pat on the shoulder that was intended to be reassuring. "I think you need to relax a little. Maybe you could take a day off and cool down."

"Sometimes it takes time. Sometimes the universe drops things on you whether you're ready or not, sometimes it waits till long after you're ready. It's unpredictable, but after a while you learn to appreciate it." Glitnir nodded as he continued. "Good is good. You don't have to be an amazing shining star to do your part. Sometimes it's good to just act from the wings of the stage instead of the center." It made Glitnir think of his own "greatness;" sure, he was helping to train Pages and working on something interesting on his Wonder, but did it make him stand out? He didn't particularly care about standing out, but it was an interesting question either way.