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Patrolling was asinine.

Hydor had gathered rather quickly that the majority of auras he felt were far beyond his ability to properly handle. He was a relatively new senshi, and the auras he felt were almost always oppressive. He knew he was supposed to patrol, Faust would not let him get away with not doing so even if he was ******** dying that evening, but he also was not an idiot. He had no interest in dying any time soon.

For the moment.

On occasion, though, the oppressive auras he felt were not so much oppressive as they were simply warming. Sometimes too warming, honestly; the sensation bothered him and he usually steered away from those. The sensation he was feeling tonight, though, was not as such. It was just warmer than the aura he assumed he gave off.

Someone who was at least mildly more powerful than him, but not too much more powerful, may have some answers about this 'Order' side that others he had seen so far had not been willing to provide. He headed in the direction of the sensation.

He noticed the aura was not ... buzzing around, and so he figured they were staying in one place. That was good. Hydor was never not in the mood for chasing someone down today.

That seemed even more asinine than the patrol.

As he approached, the first thing he noticed about the woman in front of him was that she was casually drinking a... slushie? That was what it looked like when he squinted at it. He was not fond of slushies. They were simply ice with a bunch of flavored sugar dumped on them. If he wanted something cold and sweet, he might-as-well make a smoothie and dump some berries into it. Usually did the trick.

Hydor rarely wanted anything sweet, though.

The second thing he noticed was whatever bullshit she was wearing. Hydor quickly gathered she was a knight; her outfit made that much obvious. At least it was more obvious than a couple of the other knight outfits he had seen. What the hell was that symbol, though? He had googled the symbols for the planets, admittedly, gathering that if Mercury had knights, it was likely other planets did too. He had not seen that one, though.

His greeting was a simple, "What kind of knight are you, exactly?"

"Mm," was his only response to the comment that she was hurt.

She clearly was not. And even if she was, caring was not exactly his strong suit.

Hydor was thankful that his uniform was not as obviously strange as most of the uniforms he had seen. Sure, he could do without the collar; then he could argue he was wearing a simple suit, and perhaps conduct business in a guise he was guaranteed to be able to shed. He was glad he was not wearing whatever she was, though. It was armor, but she also was wearing a sweater or something? Eck.

Castor was not a name he was expecting to hear, though it explained the unfamiliarity of the symbol on her outfit. Interesting. That implied knights could truly be from any number of things. Were there any knights of Hydor? It seemed unlikely. He was not terribly interested in the idea. "I see. I have only run into knights of planets so far." He quirked a brow. She need not know that was just one knight. "What makes you different than, say, a Knight of Mercury?"

He paused, before adding, "Hydor," mostly because he did not want impoliteness to interfere with her answering his question.

For once, someone was saying something he could actually agree with.

Magical space bullshit was an accurate descriptor of almost everything he had been through in this godforsaken year, perhaps except for magical mirror bullshit, which seemed to be a subsector of magical space bullshit with a fantastic dimensional twist. That was even more bullshit. Going to space was at least, in theory, possible. Going into mirrors should absolutely have not been.

Until it ******** was.

He caught the way she fiddled with her bracer; he figured it was likely a fidget and disregarded it for the moment.

Hydor already knew what a wonder was, so he disregarded that portion of what she said though the confirmation was nice. The most interesting part of her comment was the comment that they had a living royal. Castor was a star like his own Hydor, so he made the assumption that Castor was also a senshi royal. It sounded like only a few knights had associated senshi royals. Did one need to become royal to have knights? Hm, that did not make sense. Then how were knights reborn? How did the planetary knights exist?

"Ganymede, Polaris, and Chronos are the other types of non-planetary knights, I presume?" He was taking a mental note of that. "What is it like having a royal? Are you expected to follow them?"

When he was told by Bernard that he did not have to follow the senshi royals, he believed him. Was it different for the knights? It seemed to be by default, if she had sworn life and loyalty to his homeworld.

Was she having fun just standing there and slurping that goddamn slushie?

For a moment, he was tempted to smack the slushie out of her hand, but he decided against it after listening to his better judgement. His eyes wandered to the hand that was holding it before a moment, but he did not say anything, and his expression remained flat. His eyes shifted back to her face. He took a mental note of the symbols and descriptions of the other uniforms, categorizing them in his head as a separate group of knights. They were the same, perhaps, but the fact of the royal was quite different.

It did not sound functionally that different, though, considering they seemed able to live their own lives without their functional ruler. Anakeion sounded like she had minimal contact with Castor, though he did notice a mention of his stances. Was there something that made Castor fundamentally different than the other senshi royals?

He would need to ask.

"What are his stances, then?" Hydor crossed his arms, leaning back a bit. He tried to ignore her incessant slurping. "And what exactly do you mean by it getting loud?"

Purify or die sounded fairly similar to Faust's modus operandi, except maybe with a bit less of the purify and maybe a bit more of the die considering how fight-happy the guardian cat was. It was a perspective Hydor could understand, considering that those of Chaos appeared to be generally endorsing soul-eating.

(Except for those of the Dark Mirror, but they were a separate case altogether; they were one both too strange for his mind to fully tackle and too interesting for him to fully dismiss.)

He swore to whatever was out there that he was going to smack that slushie to the moon--

"That is not a hard perspective to understand, considering some of the bullshit the Negaverse especially is up to." Hydor shifted, again, clearly bothered by something. Considering the way his eyes jumped back to the slushie, it was likely that. "Those that choose to consume souls only deserve death, in my opinion. Extinguishing other beings permanently is disgusting."

Hydor was admittedly surprised to hear the reference to genius loci. His eyebrows shot up for a moment, the only perceptible twitch in his facial features so far, though they shot back down to their normal position fairly quickly. "That sounds irritating. I am going to presume you gave in to the chant at some point. What is its purpose?"

Tick.

"And can you stop goddamn slurping that godforsaken ******** slushie."

"You put up with a lot of s**t living in a dorm for almost four years," replied Hydor, flatly, and that was the end of that. Grating noises certainly got to him after a while, especially repetitive loud annoying noises that reminded him of nails on a chalkboard or noises of cold drinks attempting to make their way through a straw, but it was nothing like the continuous shouting and accidentally coming across shower coitus.

Finally able to focus entirely without the distraction of that horrific slurping noise, Hydor cleared his throat and continued, "I had some teenager try to justify it as necessary for the greater good, which is ******** up in its own right. Apparently they think we are some kind of outer space invaders." He snorted, remembering the odd descriptor Sylvite had used, "Or space pirates." He may have hated people in general, but he still did not endorse the idea of just snatching their everlasting soul out of their body and eating it as some kind of temporary snack. The very idea of that chilled him to the core.

His form seemed to relax a bit without the distraction, and perhaps it was helping that she actually seemed to hold a modicum of common sense. He thought this was a rarity among the people he ran into.

"So knights have some ******** chant just beamed to them from the cosmos. Interesting. That somehow makes more sense than being able to press a button on a phone for magical teleportation. What is your temple like, then, seeing as you have actually been there?"

The other knight he had talked to had not been to space.

The reincarnation nonsense was not exactly news to him, but it did not make it any less magical space bullshit. Considering they could infinitely reincarnate in theory, even in different locations in the universe, it only made what the Negaverse did even more evil, though. That was one of the elements that had easily stuck with him.

"I suppose you could make the argument our souls are invaders, but we were born here. I think a more apt comparison may be that we are refugees from whatever space war Chaos caused a thousand years ago."

The reaction that the Negaverse was taking to them fit the comparison, unfortunately.

Hydor shifted, crossing his arms back over his chest for the moment. He caught the reference to when, and figured it might have been a reference to the fact that their starseeds were indeed part of that death, but also noticed that it did not quite sync up with what he last said about his soul being used by some other Sailor Hydor. Curious. He kept track of it, but did not address it directly. "That sounds grand. It is good that you are taking the time to fix it, in case we ever need to flee."

It was the same reason why he thought that the Dark Mirror Senshi did not have a terrible idea.

"Castor is cold. It sounds like Mercury and Polaris are too. It is interesting that the cold carries, but not our inability to live on those planets."

Mercury was actually quite hot in places, but...