Welcome to Gaia! ::

Babylon sat on a retaining wall, perched carefully so that he didn't squash the carefully arranged landscaping behind him. He had his lantern to one side, a to-go tray of iced lattes and muffins to the other, and kicked his legs back and forth as he looked up and down the street.

"Ready when you are, Ida," he said into his ring. "Let me know if you're running late. Coffee's gonna get watery."

It wasn't hard to pick out a transcendent senshi's approach. Bright energy radiated off Ida in gentle waves, and Babylon stood to meet her approach. He shook her offered hand (after deciding that kissing it would have been too corny), and then picked up one of the iced coffees and offered it to her.

"I keep my promises," explained Babylon, sitting back down. "I've been well. That dust-up on Maia was interesting, to say the least." It made him wonder if there was Chaos lurking on other worlds as well. He doubted there was anything dark at Babylon, but the surface of Mercury was dotted in wonders... and most of them were abandoned. Untended wounds were the most likely to fester, weren't they?

"And that's quite alright - duty calls." He picked up his coffee and took a long sip from it, then patted a spot next to him on the wall. "Sorry if this is weird. I - I feel like we're already friends. Those dreams... I mean. They were real, in some timeline... if not necessarily this one."

Definitely not this one.

Babylon nodded. "It definitely complicates things," he said. Fighting Chaos on Earth was difficult enough. Did what had happened on Maia mean that any one of their side could be eaten way from within by Chaos? "We were lucky that there were as many of us there who were transcendent as there was. Otherwise. things could have gone very differently."

What was becoming clear to him was that transcendence might have been one of the strongest weapons available to them in the war against Chaos. Being immune to corruption definitely made life a lot simpler. It had kept them safe in the fight against the tree. If they'd failed, well... he doubted he and Ida would be here, having this conversation.

He frowned slightly. "I'm not sure what kind of magic would have caused that, whether they were hallucinations, or an aborted future of some kind." His biggest worry lately was that it was the foreshock of some bigger disaster, as such dreams tended to be. There was a historical precedence that there was something worse waiting in the wings... but it had been nearly a year.

"We can rest assured that it won't be coming true," he said. "Too much has changed... but I think there's some truth to them. For good or for bad, we all have the potential within us to be the people we saw. A princess. A leader. A royal knight."

He hesitated. He wasn't proud of what he'd seen himself do as Order's darkest hour approached.

"A coward. We create our future. We can live up to it. Or defy it."

Babylon smiled - the change of subject was welcome, given that the topic at hand seemed to have run itself out. It wasn't hard to imagine Ida as a nursing student in her civilian life. She'd had her whole field hospital setup in the future - medical care must have come naturally to her in any timeline. "I bet that's never a dull moment," he said, with regards to her housing situation. "It's good to stick together. Safer. I lived with a Negaverse general for a few months and only found out like, waaaaaaay later."

He laughed. "That was awkward."

"She purified," he added. "I'm dating her now. Avalon." He wasn't totally sure what the punchline to that story was, and it probably wasn't worth lingering over.

"I'm a park ranger," he supplied. "And I'm eventually gonna quit the outdoor outfitters retail gig, but the employee discount is really good. And I manage an apartment building. Sailor Gunn put me up to that one. Things ever start to feel too cramped in your apartment, let me know, I can set you up in a building where the neighbors are guaranteed to be on our side."

Not that he was trying to make a sales pitch or anything like that.

Babylon laughed. "It is exactly like the movies," he said, "but I'll be the first to admit that I look pretty good in khaki." The uniforms certainly had the potential to be dweeby if you wore them wrong, but he was fit and understood the importance of proper sizing. Pretty much anything could look good when you had nice enough biceps.

"But really," he added, "It's mostly wildlife censuses and school field trips right now. We have different projects for different seasons."

All of a sudden, he went wide-eyed and fumbled for the bakery bag at his side. "I almost forgot!" exclaimed Babylon. "I brought muffins." He held it out to her. "Here."

"I work as part of a team," he answered. "We get a lot of school groups through, or camps in the summer. Campers on the weekends."

Confronted about the coffee, Babylon laughed. "I wanted to make a good impression," he said bashfully. Ida had cut an impressive figure in his dreams, while he was less than proud of his own actions. when it came down to the wire, Babylon had stuck true to his nature - and run away. If it came down to that again, he wanted to believe that he would stand and fight.

But hopefully, the future had changed enough that it wouldn't come to that.

"If you want to," he added. "I won't say no. We could make a regular thing of it... It's always good to have friends."

Babylon smiled - although he would do his best to avoid saying so, he was always flattered to hear that others had spoken well of him. It was only natural to want to be liked, and Babylon was the sort to seek validation from his peers. I was afraid I'd made a bad impression, he thought. Abandoning everyone in those future-dreams, running off to my Wonder while the Earth burned.

Maybe he'd escaped Ida's notice.

"I think it's only natural to get a little jaded. Or a lot jaded," he said, looking for the right words to reassure her. "I know I did. Back in... 2012, must've been, this knight I'd really looked up to corrupted. I couldn't handle it, ran off to Alaska for a year and a half and studied... animal husbandry. Salmon migration. Nerdy stuff. And while I was ignoring this war I never asked to be a part of, bad s**t was happening back in Destiny City."

"So," he said, breaking his muffin in half. "Valhalla and Ganymede dragged me back here, one thing lead to another, and I helped a corrupt senshi spring his bonds and leave the dark side for good. Now I try to do that for more people. It's kind of working?"

He shrugged, self-effacing as ever. "Sometimes you just need a vacation to get you back on track. But from what I know about you, Ida, you're doing just fine. It's normal to be tired. Take a few weeks off, go somewhere nice, and when you come back, you'll be able to look at all this with new eyes."

Maybe some people thought of running away to their homeworlds as breaks - to Babylon, it sounded more like a working vacation, which was a complete oxymoron. Maybe she'd found it relaxing - if Babylon were to spend a few weeks on Mercury, he knew he would spend the whole time working - he still hadn't gotten around to replacing the windows in his ancestral home. It was a disgrace.

"I heard about that," he said, her description jogging his memory. "Hyperborea said to ask you for more details - I must admit that her description of it didn't really make any sense. But it sounds like it might be better to just let the matter rest." He didn't want to force Ida to bring up bad memories just to satisfy his curiosity. "I don't really need to know."

Babylon inhaled through his teeth, thinking her last question over. Duty was a good word for it - his connection to his wonder ran deep, his actions spurred by a sense of familial devotion as much as by anything else. "I like the kind of person being a knight turned me into," he said, after a long moment of thinking it over. "Before I was Babylon... I was immature. I was a brat. People didn't like me. I didn't really like me. But being a knight made me grow up. Now people look up to me. They see all the good parts of me, the guy who's a great listener and a good teacher and a good friend. Take all that away and - I don't want to go back to being that moron kid who thinks that unseasonal Christmas decorations in terrible places qualify as art."

He shrugged. "I mean, I realize that's not a terribly helpful answer. I'm sorry."