Welcome to Gaia! ::

To say that Gevaudan was in a great mood was a flat out lie. Ever since his first knight meeting, Hawa's words and actions stuck with him. He wanted the man on HIS side, but instead he sided with complete strangers. Didn't giving up everything for a new life also mean he would at least be a little more prone to be on his side? Seemed he was a lone man standing. Even worse, he seemed to be the ONLY person who was worried about this Code. He blamed Knight ignorance on that one.

Hawa also was mean enough to not even come home to sleep on the couch like he wanted him too, and instead he had to prolong his bitterness until he came home - which he didn't even want to be in when Hawa wasn't there.

So instead, he went on patrol, trying to feel comfortable in a life he adopted and now was questioning too early in.

He felt the aura up on the roofs and for the sake of entertaining himself and because he really had nothing else going for him, he started heading that way. Coming closer, he landed down on the roof with the same ease of someone who had done this WAY too many times, and stopped.

That.......outfit looked familiar.

"You didn't bring your dog?"

Yes, that would be the first thing he would think about.

Oops.

Mistral smiled wryly - she could try to be a good sport if Gevaudan could try to be, too. "I can be very funny," she assured him. "However, I'm not sure that I consider unwarranted attacks against my character to be a laughing matter." He was right that they didn't know each other, but he was peppering his speech with enough clues about his past that their lack of history was rendered irrelevant.

"You purified," she observed, which explained how Ganymede had a knight-ranked follower so quickly. "So perhaps you don't understand - I have enough reason to worry about people slandering me without people calling me names in jest. I'm Mistral, by the way, in case that rings any bells."

Maybe it didn't, but it was her understanding that the story of her murderous Wonder was making the rounds well beyond her control.

"And no," she said, holding the book up so that he could see the title - Handbook of Imaging in Biological Mechanics - "I only come here when I need to get some reading done."

She sighed.

"I get it. You're mostly just here for my dog."

Mendel got to his feet, and Mistral leaned forward so he could climb out from behind her and go to sniff at the semi-familiar knight. He wasn't exactly friendly, but clearly he was willing to forgive and forget if Mistral was moving on from being pissed at him.

"I got a lot of people killed," she said, setting the book down in her lap and marking her place. "My Wonder has a body count. That... doesn't tend to endear me to others."

Scholomance had known, and he was relatively new to all this... but it was looking increasingly likely that Gevaudan simply wasn't up-to-date on the latest gossip. Well, okay.

"Anyway," she said, "from some points of view, I'm singlehandedly responsible for the deaths of nine of our compatriots. Not intentionally, but it's difficult to be rational when assigning blame for a tragedy. I'm sure you can imagine how word gets around. I'd might as well be the bogeyman to some people."

Mendel began to cautiously circle Gevaudan's knees.

"Oh, Wonders aren't typically dangerous to their knights," she said, twisting her signet ring on her finger. "They're smarter than that. What they are is dangerous to intruders. My wonder was decommissioned. Purposefully locked. I hadn't anticipated the creativity and depravity that went into booby-trapping the lower levels."

Grown men atomized. Young girls ripped apart by razor wire. A whole room massacred by a toy. She hadn't known.

"When I built the first upgrade, my past self had done most of the work. I just needed to recover her manufacturing process and finish what she started - but the pieces were hidden in my Wonder. Part of the decommissioning. I recruited a team of knights to help me search."

She shrugged. "I never promised them safety. But I couldn't have anticipated it would be that bad."

Mendel, having apparently decided once more that Gevaudan was okay, nudged the knight's nose with his hand.

"And there it is," observed Mistral. "The seal of approval. I can daresay my dog cares who you were before. Nor do I. The past is past. Purification works. Except when it doesn't."

But he probably knew all about the one who'd gone back, and Mistral didn't have any personal investment in that story. Not like Babylon did.

"I stand by my decisions," she assured him. "I'll leave it to other people to wonder how I sleep at night."

Mistral nodded - what Gevaudan had said was about as much as she told herself in order to sleep at night. "I can't say I knew you before this," she said, watching him pet her dog. "So there's not much for me to remember. You'll have to settle up with everyone else over your legacy. That's not something that I can take care of in a mass text."

As for the Negaverse and the knights having fundamentally the same goals... those didn't seem like the words of someone who'd tried to pick a fight with the Code over being too fundamentally similar to Metalia. Certainly, the Negaverse's goals were the same in writing... but once you factored in their means to an end, or even their definition of victory...

Maybe it was just what helped him sleep at night. Like her and the greater good.

"If you keep them close at hand, you likely won't have any problems," she said. The worst thing that had happened to Babylon while accompanying her was he'd been drenched with tepid water. The tragedy at her wonder likely could have been prevented if she simply hadn't let people out of her goddamn sight.

Lazy, she thought, although she was trying not to.

At least he'd asked a question she could help with. Mistral liked it when people did that. "There's an oath," she said. "I pledge my life and loyalty to my wonder and my planet. I humbly request your aid, so in return I may give you mine. But saying that's not enough to get you there? You have to... focus. On the root of your power. And everything will feel very close? and then everything will feel very far away. And you'll feel it pulling you, and the words will be there, right on the tip of your tongue."

She laughed softly.

"So yes, it's some Jedi bullshit. Has new you seen Star Wars yet?"

Mistral's dog took Gevaudan's change of position as an invitation to flop into his lap, font paws resting on the knight's leg. "I guess he's decided you're not so bad," Mistral observed wryly. "He likes if you rub under his chin. There."

But anyway, back to business. "The words will be a bit different when they come to you," she clarified. "Customized. Try not to think about it too hard. It's magic - or technology so advanced that it looks like magic. I'm inclined to think it's the latter, but when you really get down to brass tacks it's not like that makes a difference." Either way, it was something she was still working on figuring out - but the mechanics of space travel were a project for much, much later. Right now, her immediate focus was on transcendence.

"There's six," she added. "Or, seven, almost. Only the original three are really worth watching, though that's numbers four through six. It's complicated. And not really necessary. Don't worry about it."

She rested her chin on her hands. "So, is this all there is to you? Prickly ex-Negaverser, loves dogs, instinctually distrusts floating magical constructs that keep their brains god-knows-where? Because I can get on board with that. I'd love to know where the Code's server stack is."