Welcome to Gaia! ::

Hvergelmir could count on Negaverse agents of all ranks coming to her bench for one reason or another. That wasn't surprising -- some came out of curiosity, wanting to understand the oddly stationary aura that hovered there for hours at a time; others, perhaps, came looking for an easy target, or to spy; and some, of course, came on purpose. To visit. To talk. To be listened to, perhaps.

With the Negaverse, there was some variety. With a friendly aura, though, it was usually that first rank. Sailor soldiers. Pages. The more veteran soldiers didn't tend to bother with idle curiosity, or they knew who it was they were passing near and didn't have a need to seek her out.

This one had a page's aura. Hvergelmir sat with her distaff propped against her shoulder, spindle unhooked and spinning on thread beneath her fingers; she kept spinning, but looked up to observe the newcomer's approach.

"Good evening," she called out, her eyes catching shades of movement flickering under lamplights in the dark.

It was impossible not to smile at the knight who arrived. She was a page of the Cosmos, she wore a cheerful dress, she had lovely manners, and she was the kind of tall that resulted in legs that seemed to go on until morning. It made a positive impression.

"Oh, I don't know," she said with confidence, "I think you'd look lovely in just about anything. I'm just lucky I didn't end up in heels -- I'm not sure I could survive all the ankle fractures."

The spindle dangling beneath her hand slowed to a stop; rather than spinning it again, she wound up her work and hooked it into its place on one of the antlers of her distaff again, setting the whole thing to one side against the bench. "Hvergelmir Knight of the Cosmos," she confirmed the other woman's suspicion. "You're out here all by yourself?"

Hvergelmir laughed merrily at the notion that she was like a princess. "Ah," she giggled, "Well, you must be sensing my general aura of martial incompetence. A knight I may be, but a badass I'm very much not."

She studied the page in front of her, the warmth and confidence of her. That, if not her rank, signalled that she was fairly new. Most knights and senshi lost that shine after a time -- all but Pharos, that she'd met. It was hard to avoid it: the war weighed heavily, the more entrenched in it you became.

"I'm afraid I can't have bodyguards," Hvergelmir explained. "My position is a little unique -- and requires a certain level of, ah, disarmament. Would you care to sit? I'd love to hear more about how you became a knight."

Hvergelmir crossed her legs, folding her hands over one knee. "If it's any consolation," she said, "most people don't handle it well at all. I mean, it's a lot to take in, and usually it happens in terrible circumstances. You're not exactly sitting down when it happens."

She'd been lucky -- she'd been with Tara, and Laney had always known she could get through anything with Tara on her side. It had made all of it easier -- and Tara had done her best to make sure Laney was prepared to face life afterwards. Not everyone had their best friend to help them along.

(Tara hadn't.)

"As for the bodyguards -- I swore an oath not to raise arms against Negaverse agents -- that's what this mark on my shoulder means. But there's no point in having an oath like that, in purposely disarming myself, if I'm just going to supplement it with other people around me arming themselves instead. I'm taking a risk being so unprotected -- but that's the point. The mission I've chosen is diplomacy, not warfare."

It wasn't that Hvergelmir purposely went into storytelling mode, trying to connect the various answers together into one narrative, it was just that -- it just sort of happened. It was a force of habit. She was so used to sitting here on this bench, listening to other people's stories, trying to pull the right concepts and ideals out of them to form a picture of a human being.

"The first time I ever gained my powers, I was walking home at night with my best friend, eating M&Ms. We heard noises -- screaming -- and I didn't really know what was happening when these youma suddenly attacked us. We fought them back -- she was a senshi, so she knew how, and I learned once my distaff appeared -- and she told me what she knew about what was going on. At the time, it seemed like she knew just about everything . . . it was a long time before I began to understand the truth."

She frowned, looking down at her lap. "Most of us know almost nothing at all."

Somewhere, crickets were chirping nearby. Hvergelmir could hear them. Somewhere farther way, someone was probably screaming -- a youma's victim for the night. It was always probably happening. Just not where they could hear it.

"The first time I met a Negaverse agent wasn't until much later. A youma had attacked me -- but the agent didn't. He saved my life. I didn't really understand, at the time, that we were enemies. I don't think he entirely did either. And that was the first time I think I really saw a glimpse of it, to be honest. Of the fact that we're fighting this war over nothing."

She looked back over at Verona, to see if she was following. "They tell their soldiers, in the Negaverse, that they need to fight us because we're aliens sent to conquer Earth in the name of a moon queen -- though no one knows if any such person even exists anymore. They convince their soldiers that they're under attack and need to protect their homeland. That's what they fight in the name of. And none of it's real. None of that exists. We're only fighting them because they're attacking us, and they're only fighting us because they think we're attacking them. There's no cause we disagree on, no actual conflict. It's all a fiction."

Hvergelmir considered the distaff still leaned against her shoulder, tracing her fingers against its gold paint. "This is a glorified arms race, Verona. We're fighting each other, raising the stakes, only on behalf of fear. We're all living that way -- not just me. But the only weapon we can combat fear with is trust. When I swore my oath, I never asked my enemies to do the same. That wasn't what I spent my safety to buy. I traded all my strength of arms in exchange for one thing -- to purchase their trust. That trust is the only shield I carry," she said. Her lips turned up at the ends in a faint smile. "But it's much stronger than you imagine. Please don't worry for me."

Verona's reaction was, in the grand scale of things, about the middle of what Hvergelmir usually got in terms of responses.

You'll get yourself killed was the popular standby, and the bottom of the heap. She was well aware of her own mortality. The possibility of death had not escaped her, when she'd given herself such a huge vulnerability.

Well, good luck with that was the more politic response -- and though most people didn't seem to hold much more faith than the first group did, at least they were a little more supportive about it. That made a difference.

It was a rare person that appreciated any validity in what she was doing. Few and far between were the people that believed that a wild and brave act of love could actually effect any real change.

Few indeed . . . and most of that rare number, as far as she knew, were those that knew what it was like to live under the Negaverse's rule.

It was easier to believe something you wanted to hear, she supposed. People who'd mistakenly fought for the Negaverse needed to believe it was never too late to change. People who fought against the Negaverse needed to believe it was.

It would go on that way, she guessed. Everyone needed to believe in one thing or another to get through the day. (Except Umber, maybe, she thought with a tiny note of private amusement. What a strange man. I haven't managed to find what motivates him at all.)

"I've met Sailor Cosmos a few times," she answered Verona, waving a hand in the air to elaborate. "Briefly. I wouldn't say I know her well -- but I don't know anyone else who does. She's given the impression of being very busy with her duties at the Galaxy Cauldron."

Verona, Hvergelmir was beginning to notice, had a bit of a tendency to jump around. She didn't particularly mind -- it was easy enough to follow her train of thought as long as Hvergelmir paid attention to what she was saying -- but it was sort of a cute quirk, in her opinion. It was genuine. Genuine people always struck a chord with her -- there was a purity in them that was so admirable.

"Okay," she said, instinctively matching her general energy level and tone somewhere closer to Verona's. "So. The Galaxy Cauldron is like . . . this big primordial soup at the middle of the galaxy? It's like a factory where starseeds go when we die, and they get melted down to slag, and in a thousand years they reform into starseeds again -- like they're, like -- recharged -- and then when they're fully juiced up, they go out into the world to be reborn as people? Like, you know how they used to tell kids babies were brought by the stork? It's like a big cosmic stork -- every starseed's a soul that's going to come back as a baby. Our starseeds are kind of our souls, and they go back to the Cauldron when we die to be reincarnated."